Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  “Barbara, didn’t I tell you we had come for a short visit? I’m not packed yet.”

  “Oh my. And I haven’t even offered you anything.”

  “Another time,” Daisy said.

  Refusing liquid sustenance? Clearly Daisy was desperate to blow this Popsicle stand.

  “I’ll leave you the number where I’m staying in case—well, in case there’s any change with your grandmother.” Daisy rummaged around in her purse and came up with a pen but kept making impatient noises, mumbling about never finding what you need.

  “Here.” Rannie produced her S&S notepad for Daisy.

  “Oh, I see you work at Simon & Schuster. How interesting,” Bibi said to Rannie; then she was polite enough not to press the issue after Rannie’s terse reply of “No longer.”

  Moments later, back in the baroque rotunda, everyone slipped into coats and gloves again. As the massive front door opened, light was cast on two people sitting cross-legged on the balustrade. Even from the back, one looked familiar, and as they turned, Rannie saw why.

  It was Nate and Olivia.

  “Ma!” he said.

  “Mrs. Gaines!” Olivia said, addressing Bibi. She and Nate both jumped up and nervously tossed cigarettes into the street.

  Nate was smoking again! So much for her son swearing up and down that he’d quit, not because of Rannie’s nagging, he’d made sure to inform her, but because it was hurting his tennis game. It was such a believable lie. But she’d deal with that later.

  “My son, Nate,” Rannie said.

  “My good friend’s daughter,” Bibi countered. “Olivia Werner.”

  Rannie wasn’t all that surprised. Yes, the five boroughs of New York City contained nine million people; however, Manhattan, at least within a certain radius, was a tiny hamlet.

  “You told me the entry code, but I forgot it,” Olivia said sheepishly to Bibi and tapped her forehead as if nothing stayed in there for long. “I tried your cell. . . . I’m so sorry to bother you about the spare keys.”

  Okay, now the pieces were starting to fit together. Olivia didn’t have her house keys; Bibi Gaines had the extra set.

  “Honey, I’m the one who should be sorry, making you traipse all over. I was just so flustered after the nurse called. I had the keys in an envelope all ready to leave at the concierge desk.” Bibi turned. “I’ll be back in one second, sweetie.”

  In the interim, introductions were made all around.

  “Mrs. Satterthwaite and Nate’s grandmother are old friends of Mrs. Cummings, who lives here,” Rannie informed Olivia. “Nate and Olivia are in the same class at Chapel School,” Rannie added for the ladies’ benefit.

  “School friends. Why, that’s lovely,” Mary enthused for no apparent reason, then after Bibi returned with the keys for Olivia, Mary extended an invitation to one and all for dinner at her apartment.

  At the panicked look on Nate’s face, Rannie came to the rescue. “That’s so kind, Mary. But Nate was saying earlier that he has a test to study for. Isn’t that right, honey?”

  Manic nodding, after which Olivia and Nate bade quick adieus and made a getaway.

  More good-byes with Bibi. Then Rannie waved down a cab and helped the ladies into it. “Rannie dear, Daisy and I can’t thank you enough for walking us over,” Mary said through the window.

  “Nate and I will be over either Tuesday or Wednesday, I’ll let you know which night,” Rannie promised. Dinner at Mary’s was a weekly ritual, although the food that Mary’s devoted cook, Earla, whipped up was just shy of inedible. That there was never enough was actually a blessing.

  As Rannie checked her jacket pocket for her MetroCard and began walking toward the crosstown bus, she smiled at her kids’ long-standing joke. They referred to the tiny desiccated fowl their grandmother served at holiday time as “the Thanksgiving sparrow.”

  Chapter 8

  On the bus, Rannie whipped out her cell, longing to tell Ellen about seeing the real, barely alive Charlotte Cummings, but her phone was out of juice.

  Ellen, it turned out, had been trying to reach Rannie. At home, a message from Ellen was on the landline.

  “Okay, Rannie, so I’m a nut job but I’ve got a week of vacation left and I’m booked on a flight to Martinique tomorrow at one. I’ll be back Sunday and by then the cops better have the right guy in custody. My assistant’s expecting the manuscript from you; just remember she knows nothing except it’s BIG and SUPER SECRET. So don’t you dare even mention Ret’s name or gab about the murder.” Then just before she clicked off, Ellen added, “Think of me on a beach with a strawberry daiquiri and some cute cabana boy oiling me up.”

  Although Ellen was striving to keep her tone light, Rannie detected the undercurrent of anxiety in her voice, and when she tried Ellen’s number, it went immediately to a recorded message. “Ellen, it’s Rannie. I just came from Charlotte Cummings’s mansion! I saw her! What a creep show! I have a feeling you’re home, so please pick up.”

  But Ellen didn’t, perhaps worrying that either Rannie might scoff at Ellen’s nervousness (which she might) or else try to dissuade her from leaving (which Rannie definitely wouldn’t). A week in Martinique? Who could argue with that?

  Paid vacation. Now there was a concept that rated among the high watermarks of modern civilization. Rannie ambled into the living room, tossing her jacket on the sofa and surveying the premises with a hypercritical eye. When exactly had shabby chic crossed the border to just plain shabby? In the brief time since she’d set out for Charlotte Cummings’s palatial digs, her apartment seemed to have acquired an extra layer of dust, new patches of damp plaster had bloomed on the ceiling, and a mammoth water bug had gone belly up by the coffee table.

  Rannie plopped down on the couch, a hand-me-down from Mary, and ignored the fact that the chenille throw over the back was as worn as the rose toile upholstery underneath. A low-level funk descended: it wasn’t a question of not appreciating how fortunate she was compared to practically every other out-of-work single mother on the planet: child support from her ex came like clockwork worthy of the Swiss; Mary generously footed the tuition bills; and—touchingly—several checks had arrived recently with a note, penned in her mother’s graceful script, that the “enclosed is a little mad money.” But, dammit, what she wanted was a job, the beauty of a bimonthly check, direct deposit, 401(k) deductions, to tend to spindly office plants and have an in-box stacked with manuscripts, all labeled RUSH. Even rush hour—she’d almost come to miss that too. It meant you had somewhere to rush to; you had a place in the wider world.

  Then, cutting short her “woe is I” lament, Rannie forced herself off the couch and headed for the kitchen, the departed water bug shrouded in a Kleenex, bound for the trashcan. It was time to start dinner.

  While she was excavating in the pantry cabinets for olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and other stuff, Rannie’s thoughts turned again to Bibi, who one day soon would be phenomenally, absurdly, filthily rich. What would it be like to become chatelaine of a mansion on Fifth and never have to worry about upkeep? It wasn’t a question of jealousy; jealousy, Rannie decided, was for the attainable—a job like Ellen’s, a week of vacation in the sun. The kind of wealth the Cummingses owned was simply beyond fathom.

  Suddenly a picture of Brooke Astor’s oh-so-proper-looking son, heir and executor, popped to mind. At eighty-four, Anthony Marshall had been convicted of bilking his mother out of millions before her death. Was it possible that Ret had caught Bibi’s hand in the Cummings cookie jar, dipping into money that wasn’t rightfully hers yet? Rannie had spent all of an hour with Bibi. She hadn’t appeared to be tapping a foot impatiently waiting for Grammy to finally flatline, but you never knew.

  Of course, Rannie was assuming that Bibi was sole or chief beneficiary to the estate. And as Rannie’s seventh-grade English teacher loved to remind students, “The word ‘assume’ makes an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me.’ ” There might be siblings, half siblings, cousins, or fond old retainers also waiting
in line for their slice of the Cummings pie.

  Rannie persevered in the kitchen. Then as soon as the chicken breasts, awash in Peter Luger steak sauce the way Nate liked, were braising, the sweet potatoes were baking, and the salad was ready for dressing, Rannie sat down and unlocked the aluminum briefcase, determined to learn a little more about Barbara, aka Bibi, Gaines.

  Since the only disk for the book was in the hands of the police, Rannie had to resort to the more laborious route of leafing through the manuscript page by page, her eye on the lookout for “Barbara,” “Bibi,” “grandchildren,” “inheritance,” “will,” “heirs,” “executor,” and so on.

  All copy editors developed sharp, un-electronic “word search” skills, and in a few minutes Rannie had gleaned the following information: Barbara Beauchamp Gaines, now forty-eight, was the daughter of Charlotte’s only child, Madeline—the Madeline who had been Daisy’s good friend—and her husband, Frank Beauchamp, a charmer from a poor but old-line Lexington, Kentucky, clan. After divorcing Frank, Madeline traipsed down the aisle two more times but never had more children, making Bibi her grandmother’s only direct descendant.

  One little wrinkle: upon her grandmother’s death, it did not appear that Bibi would take up residence in the Fifth Avenue mansion. Ret devoted several paragraphs to the house’s history. Built by Charlotte’s steel-rich dad, the house was left to Charlotte upon her mother’s death. Unfortunately, Charlotte’s first husband frittered away most of her money as well as his on ill-fated, dawn of the Depression land deals, and Charlotte was forced to sell the family manse. For many years, it operated as a posh hospice facility. Charlotte did not return to the Fifth Avenue address until after her marriage to Silas Cummings.

  According to the spiel given by the walking-tour guide, Silas had bought back the mansion as an anniversary present for Charlotte. Ret said otherwise. And Rannie trusted Ret, who had a reputation for getting her facts straight. The manuscript said that Silas had only leased the mansion; the medical center that had run the hospice would reclaim it upon Charlotte’s death. In would come hospital beds and medical equipment and out would go the countless antiques and costly furnishings that Charlotte and Silas Cummings had snapped up over the years from cash-strapped castles and châteaus. All the costly furnishings were destined for the Met and other museums around the country.

  So Bibi Gaines was losing out on a hefty chunk of prime Manhattan real estate. Rannie couldn’t even begin to guess at its worth. One hundred million? Two? More? Nonetheless, on balance Rannie didn’t feel too sorry for Bibi. There was still Charlotte’s fabled jewelry collection, including the knockout canary diamonds Rannie had glimpsed at the comatose invalid’s throat. No doubt the bling would be Bibi’s.

  The tidbit of real estate trivia seemed like a good reason to call Tim and boast where she’d been.

  “Guess who just spent an hour at Charlotte Cummings’s house,” she gloated in a purposefully annoying singsong. “And our guide on the walking tour—little Miss Columbia know-it-all grad student—didn’t have all her facts straight. Silas didn’t buy back the family digs for his beloved wife. The place is a rental!”

  “Well, la di da . . . How’d you worm your way in there?” He sounded amused.

  “No worming! No worming at all.” She told him about Daisy and Mary.

  “So escorting tipsy old ladies around, that counts as a mitzvah?” Tim’s wife had been Jewish: he mock-prided himself on his knowledge of Yiddish, limited though it was and pronounced with an accent that owed far more to Irish Boston than to Eastern Europe. “The Cummings mansion.” He whistled softly. “I forget you hang with a swanky crowd.”

  Tim had yet to meet Mary. There was no reason for him to, not yet. Maybe not ever. And more to the point, Rannie knew Mary’s drinking would trouble Tim. That, in turn, would bring out his stern, tight-lipped side. End result: neither one would like the other.

  “Listen, I was about to call you,” he said. “You have any interest in hearing me qualify tonight? I’m speaking at an AA meeting at eight o’clock. It’s over on the East Side.”

  Traipse back across town again? No, truthfully she really didn’t want to. Tonight she wanted to bill hours on the manuscript. Nevertheless, Rannie’s response was an automatic yes. He’d told her what made him stop drinking fifteen years ago. Tim had been behind the wheel—“shit-faced,” he admitted—in the crash that killed his pregnant wife. Their son, Chris, was only three at the time. The first cops on the scene were buddies of Tim’s who covered for him so he could avoid conviction and raise Chris. Quid pro quo—he resigned from the force and entered rehab. But what had come before the fatal accident, he never discussed beyond alluding to his former self as “one sick angry fuck.” Asking Rannie to hear the story of his drinking was a significant offer, one she couldn’t turn down, although Rannie suspected there might be things that she’d just as soon not know.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven thirty,” he said.

  A minute later the arrival of Nate and Olivia brought the conversation to a close.

  “You honestly like Hostess CupCakes?” Rannie heard Olivia saying to Nate.

  “I didn’t say ‘like,’ O. What I said was, ‘There has never been a more delicious food experience than the Hostess CupCake.’ The second I heard the company went bust, I, like, went into every deli and supermarket on the West Side and bought them all up.”

  “That’s crazy. For me it was always about Ring Dings. The creamy part . . . Mmmm.”

  “But no chocolate icing with the squiggles. That’s key to the Hostess CupCake. You can peel it off whole and eat it separately.”

  Was this what passed for lively debate between Chapel School seniors—almost seventy percent of whom would wind up at top-tier colleges?

  Rannie, holding plates and cutlery, greeted them.

  “Hey, Ms. Bookman,” Olivia said, followed by Nate lugging a ridiculously large Louis Vuitton suitcase for a one-night stay.

  Exactly which room would their overnight guest stay in? Rannie quickly made an executive parental decision. “Just put the bag in the den.” Her rationale: let Olivia and Nate sneak around after she was asleep. “We’re going to eat in two minutes.”

  It was lovely having a girl at the dinner table. Such a change from Nate, who, even under duress, would part with no more than grunts or monosyllabic answers to all Rannie’s conversational gambits.

  Olivia was chatty without being a nonstop talker. She was hoping to enroll at FIT—the Fashion Institute of Technology—which was near the Garment District. “My great-grandfather came over from Odessa and was a tailor on the Lower East Side,” she informed Rannie. “I guess it’s in my genes. Our housekeeper taught me to sew when I was six.”

  Rannie nodded, smiling back around a forkful of chicken while noting to herself that in three generations, Olivia’s family had come a long way from Delancey Street. Her father was a hedge-fund something and her mother, she of the brittle, overly wide smile, worked at Sotheby’s.

  By dessert, the conversation worked its way around to the coincidence of meeting up at the Cummings mansion. “How funny that you know Mrs. Gaines,” Olivia said.

  “Actually I never met her before this evening.”

  “Oh. She’s one of my mom’s friends. When Grant was in bad shape, she helped get him in the place where he’s living now.”

  Rannie was aware that “the place” referred to was a rehab facility in New Haven. Olivia’s older brother had been expelled from Chaps his senior year for dealing cocaine on school grounds.

  Olivia was sitting beside Nate, the two of them directly across the table from Rannie; every once in a while Rannie stole a look at Nate stealing a look at Olivia. It was as if a thought balloon floated over his head. “You are a goddess,” it said.

  It made Rannie simultaneously happy—what was more pure and intense than love at seventeen?—and scared—what was more painful than getting your heart ripped to shreds at seventeen?

  It wasn’t fai
r. Nobody ever told you that being a parent meant living through the aches and disappointments of growing up all over again. And guess what? You didn’t acquire any perspective just because you were twenty years older and this time the hurt wasn’t actually happening to you; completely the opposite in fact: watching your child suffer was twice as painful. Rannie remembered times when a supposed best friend suddenly ganged up against Alice or Nate wasn’t invited to a birthday party that all his friends were going to. Rannie’s reaction: pure and simple, tear the offending child limb from limb. Anything less extreme meant you weren’t a devoted mother.

  After dinner, while Nate and Olivia cleared and did dishes, Rannie managed to squeeze in more pages of copyediting, ones on Silas Cummings’s art collection. Ret’s manuscript corroborated what Bibi Gaines had told Rannie earlier: the Metropolitan Museum of Art would place all the paintings of saints on permanent exhibition in order to win the prize—“The Master of the Agony alterpiece.” Rannie cringed at the misspelling and made the correction just as the intercom buzzed.

  Her recovering alcoholic was waiting.

  I was thirteen years old the first time I got drunk. I came to lying on the sidewalk with vomit all over me, my wallet gone, and a black eye, and I thought, ‘Wow! When can I do this again?’ ”

  The audience at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth Street, laughed, several men nodding in recognition. Rannie was sitting alone toward the back of the room. Fifty or so people had assembled on gray folding chairs in the church’s basement. It was a mixed crowd—there were many prosperous-looking men and women. There were just as many who looked down on their luck and seemed especially grateful for the cookies and hot coffee. It had touched Rannie that the “greeter” at the door—a man in his seventies from among the well heeled—knew everyone by name. Alcoholism was evidently a great social equalizer.

  Tim had been talking for five minutes. Posters on the wall behind him said, “Easy Does It,” “One Day at a Time,” and “Keep It Simple.” His “drunkologue” quickly filled in his stats—he was from an Irish Catholic family south of Boston outside Plymouth, Massachusetts, seven kids, all girls except for Tim, who by age six was sipping beer from his dad’s can of Schlitz.