Chapter 18 #2
“I think you should do it soon. Very soon. On September 15, if most of the mortgage isn’t paid, they’re not just gonna take the house, they’re gonna take everything in it too.”
“Oh my God,” Frances said.
But Mrs. Tartt stood up. “It’s alright, Frances.” She set a hand on the table to steady herself. “I’ll make some calls.”
The day had started out so civilized. When it was over, I wondered how it all had happened so fast. Just the day before, as we prepared for Mr. Fauster’s visit, Mrs. Tartt had listed all the reasons why she couldn’t possibly part with this or that.
“These little nesting tables were made from a cypress tree in my mother’s yard.
” “Henry bought me this carousel menagerie in Paris on our wedding anniversary.” I’d urged her to pick out a few more, and then a few more, “just to be safe.” In all, she’d selected about forty pieces, which she’d said were bound to bring three thousand dollars, maybe even closer to four.
At ten o’clock Thursday morning, Mrs. Tartt opened the door.
She’d dressed herself in crisp blue seersucker, her pearls, and sensible white shoes, ready for a perky game of tennis court.
“What a beautiful and special home you have here, ma’am,” Mr. Fauster said, his hat pressed to his chest. He was a short, fat, middle-aged man with a wide smile.
He’d brought a truck, and some colored men waited outside.
He complimented the dentil molding and high ceilings, the wide oak floors.
The entire house smelled like lemon oil.
Frances had swept and mopped while I’d polished and Charlie’d cut the grass.
When Mrs. Tartt had called for the appointment, she’d told him she was just doing some “redecorating.” As she showed him the pieces for sale, he listened patiently to the dull stories she had about each one.
For three dozen large pieces of furniture, four paintings, a mirror, two Persian rugs, and a set of Italian marble figurines, he said, “Give you two hundred dollars for the lot.”
“What?” Mrs. Tartt nearly fainted. So did I.
Smiling but not so nicely now, Mr. Fauster said, “Times’ve changed, ladies, case you hadn’t noticed.”
The next few passes of the house were like pulling teeth.
“But this clock carries perfect time!” “But Roosevelt loved this chair!” By one o’clock, we were only at six hundred dollars.
I whispered that this was not the time to be sentimental about who had sat on something.
Things started to go faster—the pair of huge mirrors, carpets in the library, the tête-à-tête, tables, lamps, marble busts, paintings, sideboards, the gun cabinet empty of its guns—and we were only at eleven hundred dollars.
She pulled the trigger on the grandfather clock, the guest bedroom set, everything worth anything in the library.
I couldn’t really remember the rest except as bursts of panic and numbers, hurrying to empty cabinets and drawers before the moving men simply dumped them out on the floor.
“Fourteen hundred fifty”—tallboys, wardrobes, tester beds, chests of drawers.
“Seventeen hundred”—their dressing tables while I swept powders and perfumes into a box, the dining room set, the chairs, what was left of the silver closet and china and crystal; Mrs. Tartt’s strand of pearls and the earrings she’d worn shopping on the last day she’d been rich.
Dust swirled everywhere and I sneezed over and over.
The front yard looked like a rummage sale. Mr. Fauster sent for three more trucks.
By four o’clock, Mrs. Tartt looked eighty if she looked a day.
Her smart seersucker dress had a long black smear on it as if she’d been walked over.
A rug was literally slid out from under her feet.
The floors were filthy under the carpets.
Mr. Fauster had no interest in the wired lights or the washer wringer or the stove or the electric icebox or the old gas one in the cellar.
“You’ll hold our things for us, won’t you?” Mrs. Tartt’d asked. “So we can buy them back when we’re on our feet?”
He’d smiled as he lied. “Of course.”
“He is a crook,” Charlie said to me and fixed him a glass of water, spitting in it first, and waited to watch him drink it all down at once.
I took Mrs. Tartt into the empty parlor. “We’re still two hundred twenty-five short.”
“What is there even left to …” She’d looked at her swollen pink hand. “Oh my … alright. Let me sit down.” But there was nowhere to sit. “I can do it—it’s just, it’s stuck.”
Charlie brought her some Crisco, and I went to find Frances.
When I told her what Mrs. Tartt was doing, she covered her left hand to protect it from me.
“But Rory gave me …” Her eyes filled with tears, and I watched her heart shatter into pieces.
In only a week and a half, she’d lost her husband, her things, her comfortable life. “I’m so sorry, Franny.”
“Do I have to? Think how bad it’ll look when people see me not wearing it!”
I hugged her tight and whispered in her ear, “But think how much worse it’d look if you kept it and Mrs. Tartt gave up hers.”
She cried and nodded. She wasn’t about to let people think she was less a victim than Mrs. Tartt was.
“If people ever find out about this, I swear I’ll shoot myself,” Frances said.
“Well, good luck,” I said. “Rory took all the guns.”
“Then I’ll just slit my wrists,” she said.
“Please do it outside so you don’t bloody up the last sofa.”
When the ring was off, I hugged her again. She felt thin and empty.
“Now, Birdie, I want you to make sure Pic and Polly get their pay out of this money,” Mrs. Tartt said. “They need their pay, you hear me?”
We were still a little over two hundred dollars short at the end of the day but I promised her I’d pay them.
When the trucks rolled off, but for our mattresses, the kitchen table and chairs, a portrait of Henry Tartt, and the odd piece here and there, the old suitcase of a house stood empty. Mrs. Tartt looked shattered.
At dusk, Charlie came into the kitchen and washed her hands while I smothered the fire.
She lit two of the red lanterns. The light was almost gone outside; we were down to just a heavy blue haze.
“I got the parlor pretty cleaned up and moved what I could in there,” she said.
We’d asked the men to move an old faded red sofa down from the attic into the parlor. It sat but it was lumpy.
While I cooked supper, Charlie set the kitchen table with Picador’s tin utensils and some blue-and-white china, pretty but chipped and cheap.
“Why we eating in—” Frances stopped in the doorway and shook her head as if to clear it out. She was exhausted, we were all exhausted. “That smells good, I’m starving.”
“Thank you and I agree.” I’d skillet-fried okra and green tomatoes in cornmeal along with the meaty side of the salt pork and boiled fresh butter beans for something that wouldn’t give us all the diabetes. I was finally getting the hang of cooking over the fire.
Mrs. Tartt, in her white nightgown, was arranging a jelly jar of blue salvia Charlie’d cut from the yard.
“Supper’s ready, let’s eat,” I said and served the blue-and-white plates from the hearth, passing them back to Charlie. At the fourth plate, she hesitated; it was hard to believe she hadn’t yet eaten with us at the table.
Mrs. Tartt said, “Sit down, everyone.” She nodded to Charlie. “I’ll say the blessing.” The four of us bowed our heads. “Heavenly Father, please bless this food to our use and us to thy service. Thank you that I still have my house. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.”
Amen. As we said it, a cool breeze slipped through the screen door, the likes of which we hadn’t felt in months.
“First thing tomorrow, I am going to the bank to get us more time,” I said. “And then I am going to get the electricity turned back on.”
The whole room exhaled. “And I’m getting my hair done,” Frances said.
I patted her hand and shook my head no. She didn’t even argue.
After the ladies limped up to bed, I told Charlie, “Leave ’em. I guarantee those dirty dishes will be right where we left them tomorrow.” I followed her out on the back porch—oh, the cool air. When we sank down on the top step, Charlie pulled a gold-and-white box out of her dress pocket.
“Looks like Mr. Fauster misplaced his expensive cigarettes,” she said. They were Chesterfields, pre-rolled, not even opened yet.
It was a dark night with only a fingernail of moon.
I’d never had a cigarette of my own before.
I’d never had one with a convicted criminal either.
I guess there’s a first for everything. Charlie lit mine, then hers, using the long box of kitchen matches, the flare bright and tall, and I leaned my back against the porch post.
Staring out at the shadowy backyard, Charlie said, “I am terrified of that woman, but I’d risk going back to jail to try and get Meg. I absolutely would.” This came out of nowhere. I knew Meg was always on her mind.
“I’m just glad she’s out of that place and somewhere safe.” I didn’t know this, but I hoped. “I’ll figure something out, soon as my head clears.”
“Would you?” she asked, still staring straight ahead. “Risk going to jail for somebody in your family?”
“Depends on who.” But then, because it was true, I said, “Of course I would.”