Settie spewed out all the horrid things she could think of to say to her and came to the end of her repertoire quite out of breath and red in the face. Bathy knew that she expected Bathy to run sobbing out of the room, but she wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction. Bathy simply looked at her and said, “You don’t have any children. Maybe it’s because your fronts are so big no man wants to stick his thing in you!” She raised her hand as if to strike her, but Bathy ducked and ran off. She was so happy to learn that she had not been foisted off on Settie that she wanted to whoop for joy that she had wound up with Hannah, where she belonged. Nothing really worried her after that. She knew who she was, and was happy where she was.
And if she told Hannah now what Settie had said to her that day, she knew what Hannah would say: “Settie said that? My beautiful swan said that?” It was best to say nothing to Hannah.
“Your beautiful swan had a mean and nasty streak,” she would have to tell her. And what would be accomplished by that?
And after that it didn’t take too much research to find out about George Noville—there was a little packet of old letters that Hannah sometimes took out to read. And she even found his name in the Manhattan telephone book, and considered calling him up and introducing herself. Wisely, she had resisted that brief impulse. There was no need to open up old wounds.
And now, sitting on the remains of a stone bench in the ruins of Grandmont, with their respective stories still untold, Bathy suddenly felt incredibly close to Hannah, and somehow she felt that a similar surge of feeling assailed Hannah just then. It was a signal and, obeying it, Bathy quickly reached out and covered Hannah’s hand with hers. “We’ve always been close, Hannah. As close as two women can ever be,” she said.
There was a quick sob. “Oh, Bathy!” she said. “Look at us. Two old women. What a waste it’s been … what a waste … all those years … where was love …?”
“It wasn’t a waste,” she said firmly. “Unless all of life is a waste.” She put her arm around her shoulders. “You are a Sachs,” she said. “I’m a Sachs. That’s enough. It’s enough for me. Isn’t it enough for you?”
“No! Sometimes it just isn’t.”
“Stand tall, woman! Stand tall! Remember the Tower of Pisa. It may lean a little. But it’ll never fall down.”
She quickly dried her eyes. “You’re right,” she said. “But there’s something I must tell you. I did a terrible thing—an awful thing—a thing I’m still ashamed of. Right after the—the accident, and after they arrested Carol and took her away and put her in that awful place—Riker’s Island—I went to see her there. I was so angry with her. Things were going so well, you see—everything was working out, everything was settled—for the company, for everybody. And then she had to go and reach for that gun—the gun I’d given her to protect herself! She told the police she was going to shoot herself, and the others were all struggling with her to get the gun away from her, and that was when it—happened. And all our plans went down the drain. And I was so angry with her that I thought to myself—Well, if she wants to kill herself, I’ll help her do it! I was in a rage! Dr. Arnstein gave me the prescription, enough to do it, he assured me. He didn’t ask me any questions. He just made me promise to take the druggist’s label off the bottle because it would have his name on it. But I did more than that. I emptied the pills into a handkerchief, threw the bottle into the incinerator, tied my hankie in a knot, and put the knotted hankie in my reticule. My plan was to press the knotted hankie into her palm when we shook hands good-bye, and say to her, ‘If you really want to kill yourself, Carol, here’s a painless way to do it. Under the circumstances, I think that would be best for all concerned.’ Can you understand my feelings, Bathy—right after it happened? Can you understand why I’d plan to do a thing like that?”
“Yes. I think I can.”
“But then, when they led her out into that room where you can talk, she took my hand, and practically the first words she said to me were, ‘Nana, I think you know I didn’t mean to have that bullet hit Noah. But I wouldn’t be telling you the truth if I didn’t tell you that there was a moment—oh, just a tiny, fleeting fragment of a moment while we were struggling for the gun—when I actually wanted to kill him for what he’d done.’ I thought that was very brave of her to say that to me. I thought it was a very courageous thing for her to say—don’t you agree?”
“Yes, it was. Very courageous.”
“She was standing tall when she said that. And I understood what she meant. I think I’d feel the same way myself in a similar circumstance. You see, she was trying to tell me that she really loved Noah very much. You have to love a person very much to feel such violent emotion when you discover he’s betrayed you. If you don’t love a person—well, then you don’t feel much of anything at all, I guess, except relief, as I did when—but never mind.”
“Yes,” Bathy said.
“And so the pills and the hankie stayed in my reticule. And I suddenly thought—this was all Melody’s fault! If she hadn’t come back to the apartment that night, none of this would have happened! Why did she come back?”
“Melody said she wanted to be an actress. Sometimes I think actors aren’t real people. They’re chameleons—always throwing themselves into roles. Looking for scripts with parts in them to play.”
“I think she realized that Noah would never leave Carol and run off with her. She knew she’d lost Noah. And so she wanted to make the loss as unpleasant for Noah as possible. I’m sure that’s it. And she certainly succeeded, didn’t she?”
“She wanted a confrontation scene for the second act. Actors should learn never to try to write their own lines.”
“And so now the company will be Noah’s. But it’s not the way I wanted it to be. Not the way I planned it.”
“Why not, Hannah?”
“I wanted Noah and Carol to run the company together—almost like a team. Carol’s got good business sense. And Noah’s always seemed to need—”
“A strong woman behind him?”
“Yes!”
“Like you, Hannah?”
“Yes! Or you. But now, without Carol, I can see Noah going flying off, like a kite without a tail. His Aesop thing, and—”
“Why do you say he’ll be without Carol, Hannah?”
“How could they possibly stay together after this? He hurt her terribly. No woman would stay with a husband who’s done that to her—with another woman, and so much younger.”
“You did,” Bathy said quietly.
She looked momentarily flustered. “Yes, but—but that was different. That was family, and—”
“Isn’t this? You see, I think Noah and Carol still love each other. You said it yourself. If she hadn’t loved him so much, she wouldn’t have reached for the gun. You said yourself that Noah would never have left Carol for Melody.”
“You mean you really think that if Carol’s acquitted—and after Anne’s testimony yesterday, I’m certain she will be—you really think the two of them can patch things up?”
“Look at it this way. Maybe it’s not just a question of patching things up. Right now Noah has an ugly scar across his left cheek to show for this. Perhaps that will fade in time. Later, he can claim it was a forceps scar. Or a dueling scar, if he wants to be romantic. But remember, Carol also has a scar—a deeper scar perhaps, and perhaps one that won’t go away so quickly. Maybe, in a way, the score is even between them now. Maybe those scars will complement each other, compensate for each other. Maybe those scars will remind them both of how much they owe each other. A tit for a tat.”
Hannah still looked dubious. “Well, I hope you’re right,” she said.
“All we can do is wait and see. But there’s one thing I can tell you. I’m not supposed to tell anyone because it’s—well, maybe it’s a little bit unethical, but I can tell you. Ida Kaminsky called me yesterday. She’s reached her verdict.”
“What is it?”
“That it was an accidental homic
ide. Carol will be released tomorrow morning. It will be ruled a tragic accident.”
“And my—my little buh-uhd?”
“One year’s probation. Reckless endangerment. Reckless use of a firearm. Something like that. It won’t affect her at school. Nobody up there will even need to know about it.”
“Well, I suppose that’s fair. Anne certainly was—reckless.”
“But she wasn’t reckless on the stand, was she? I thought she was very poised and clear about exactly what happened. When she said that she snatched the gun from Melody because she was afraid Melody might use it against her mother, that was all the judge needed to hear.”
Hannah hesitated. “Of course, I was terrified that something might come up about Noah’s—relationship—with that girl.”
“But that line of questioning was never pursued, was it?”
“I don’t suppose you had anything to do with that, Bathy. Did you?”
But Bathy’s smile committed her to nothing. “Let’s just say it’s over, Hannah,” she said.
“But why didn’t Ida hand down her verdict yesterday? Why is she making Carol spend two more nights in that awful place?”
“It’s part of our strategy to keep this out of the press as much as possible. No one from the media was in the courtroom when Anne testified yesterday, so no one in the media knows there’s a verdict to be announced tomorrow. With luck, nobody from the media will be in court tomorrow, either. By Wednesday it’ll be old news. And in a few weeks the whole thing will be forgotten. Or so we’re hoping.”
“I see. Miss Fix-It.”
“I’ve tried to do my best,” she said. “And Ida’s turned out to be a good friend.”
“Those Kaminskys always were nice.” Suddenly she slapped her thigh. “Wait a minute!” she cried. “I’ve just had a great idea! What if I made it a condition?”
“Made what a condition?”
“That I won’t turn over the company to Noah unless he and Carol promise me that they’ll stay together! Promise—in writing!”
“Oh, Hannah,” Bathy said. “Would you really do a thing like that? And go back on the promise you’ve already made to him?”
Hannah’s shoulders sagged. “Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe that isn’t such a good idea.”
Bathy said nothing. There were times, Bathy had learned over the years, when it was best to let Hannah have the last word. Dealing with Hannah, she’d often found, was a little like playing a game of checkers with a small child, where the trick was learning how to lose quickly.
Hannah stood up abruptly. “Well, I’ve had it with this place,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Bathy also rose, and the two women started walking slowly together back toward Hannah’s car. “Let Noah and Carol work their way through this by themselves,” Bathy said. “The way you and Jules did.”
“We did that with your help!”
“I’m glad it helped. That’s why I decided to become Jules’s mistress, because I thought it might help.” Bathy circled her mother’s waist with her right arm.
Hannah stopped short. In the middle of that barren, vacant, lunar-seeming landscape of unsold building lots where they all used to live, Hannah turned and stared at her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You say you decided? I thought I decided that!”
Bathy smiled. “Of course, that’s what I hoped you’d think. It made it easier at the time, if it seemed like your decision.”
“Your decision? You say it was your idea?”
“I knew your marriage was in trouble. The whole family was in trouble. I thought if I became Jules’s mistress, it might help things. And it did, for quite a few years, didn’t it?”
“You mean you weren’t in love with Jules?”
“Oh, no. Never. And he was never in love with me. I respected him and he respected me, and I think he needed me in a certain way. But that was all. That was why, after Noah walked in on us that morning, making our—well, making our loveless love—and it was clear that the situation wasn’t helping anything anymore—it was so easy for us to stop.”
Hannah continued to stare at her. “And all these years,” she said, “I thought Jules was the love of your life!”
“You are the love of my life,” she said.
Hannah’s eyes quickly withdrew, as though she had not heard that last comment. Suddenly she raised a gloved fingertip and pointed past an uneven row of tree stumps. “Look,” she said. “I think that’s where they were. My dahlia beds.”
Bathy’s eyes followed in the direction of the pointed finger. “You know something? I think you’re absolutely right,” she said. “Look, I think I can still see outlines of the little path that ran between the beds. We should have put up a sign along that path and named it Hannah’s Way.”
22
1995
From the New York Times:
Gift of Rare Porcelains
Comes to Met Museum
An anonymous gift of a pair of rare Chinese porcelain vases has been received by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was unveiled today.
“We are absolutely thrilled,” said Marcia Winburn, the Met’s Curator of Decorative Arts, explaining that the vases are from the early K’ang Hsi period (1662–1722), and are in a color known as Lang Yao red, or sang-de-boeuf (oxblood). “I hesitate to use the word unique,” Ms. Winburn said. “But I am forced to when describing these pieces.”
Ms. Winburn was reluctant to put a dollar value on the gift because, she said, no matched examples of pieces like these have ever come on the market. Asked to guess their value, she would only say, “In the high seven figures, if not even higher.”
The vases were originally a part of the extensive porcelain collection of the late Truxton Van Degan, a glass manufacturer. And how the vases came to the Museum is as much a mystery as the identity of their present donor.
Originally, Mr. Van Degan’s widow reported to police that the vases had been stolen from the couple’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Mrs. Van Degan accused members of the life squad who had transferred her husband to St. Luke’s hospital after the first of a series of heart attacks which eventually proved fatal.
While assisting her husband, Mrs. Van Degan claimed, the life squad team “had reason to suspect the worth” of the vases, and had managed to spirit the objects into their ambulance while she herself was “totally distraught with concern” over her husband’s condition. An insurance investigation was instituted to look into her claim, which was vigorously denied by the life squad team.
But Mr. Van Degan’s attorney, Stanley Kornblau, immediately stepped forward and explained that he had personally removed the pieces from the apartment, at the specific bidding of Mr. Van Degan, who had summoned the lawyer to his hospital bedside.
Mr. Kornblau produced signed documents attesting to these instructions, in which he was directed to turn the precious objects over to an unnamed third party. It is this third party, presumably, who is the anonymous donor of the two pieces to the museum.
The reason why it is so rare—indeed, unheard of—to find an identical signed pair of vases such as these, Ms. Winburn pointed out, is that, “According to the Taoist philosophy of the 16th and 17th centuries, the potters believed that one of each pair should be destroyed in order to preserve the immortality of the original design.” Therefore, how this pair managed to survive at all is still another mystery.
“Mr. Van Degan had a truly princely collection of Oriental porcelains,” Ms. Winburn told The Times. “But these two pieces were definitely the collection’s crown jewels.”
A Foretaste of More to Come?
The late Mr. Van Degan was president and CEO of Van Degan Glass, now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ingraham Corporation. And the current gift may prove to be just a foretaste of more that may come to the museum.
In his final will and testament, also executed from his hospital bed in the presence of Mr. Kornblau and other members of his firm, Mr. Van Degan bequeathed his entire porcelain co
llection to the museum. But this will is currently being contested by Mr. Van Degan’s heirs, who include his widow and two sons by former marriages. These three have also instituted lawsuits against each other. Mrs. Van Degan, a onetime Manhattan socialite, is said to be living in seclusion somewhere in the Midwest, and could not be reached for comment. Repeated telephone calls to the Van Degan sons were not returned.
Mr. Van Degan died just hours after executing his will. But, Mr. Kornblau told The Times, “Though he was obviously in considerable pain, Truxton Van Degan was completely lucid when he dictated the final terms of his will. He knew exactly what he was doing, and was very specific about how he wished things left. With the exception of the special designation of that one pair of vases, everything else in the collection was to go to the Metropolitan.”
“But,” Ms. Winburn said, “with the will in litigation, and with everybody suing everybody else, it may be years before the Van Degan estate is settled—if ever. In the meantime, we don’t even dare keep our fingers crossed about the outcome. We are definitely not counting our chickens now. We’re just grateful to have received as much as we have.”
As for the anonymous donor of the vases, Ms. Winburn said, “We have no idea who it might have been, and since this was clearly the donor’s desire, we have no intention of trying to find out.
“In fact, we rather enjoy not knowing the donor’s identity. The ceramicist who created these magnificent pieces believed that longevity and even immortality, in both art and life, can be attained through spiritual, and even magical means. In these beautifully preserved objects, it would seem that this belief has been sustained.”
“It’s a lovely story,” he says to her now, putting down the newspaper. “You handled it beautifully.”
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