Chapter 18 #2
Wren gave it to her, taking care to make sure their fingers didn’t accidentally brush against each other.
She felt every bit of the eighteen inches of warm air between them, though.
Then Cordelia looked up at her. It lasted only a second, and it wasn’t the usual look Cordelia gave her in the office.
It was something else, the same expression Cordelia had given her in bed.
Wren couldn't breathe for a second. She wanted to put her hand flat on Cordelia's bare back.
She wanted to say, you're doing fine, only a speech and then you can sit down.
She wanted to be the person who was allowed to truly be there for Cordelia the way she needed in these types of rooms. But Wren knew her place and tried to communicate it all with her eyes instead.
"Thank you," Cordelia said, in her professional voice, and walked away.
Wren went back to the staff station and stood there, reaching for the nearest thing on the table that would give her something to do with her eyes.
It was one of the printed programs. She opened it.
The order of the evening’s events ran down the right-hand page.
Wren had created it with Constance and sent it to the printers on Wednesday.
Her eyes roved down the list, then stopped at the sixth.
Announcement of the Eleanor Dalisay Acquisitions Fund. Remarks, C. Ahearn. Recognition of Cordelia Hale, trustee.
Wren had run enough of these evenings to know what recognition meant. It was a spotlight where Cordelia's name was read out. Cordelia would stand up while a room full of donors clapped for her dead wife.
It wasn't in the schedule she'd sent, which meant somebody had put it in after Wednesday and added it to the final version without consulting her about it.
She read the line twice, then checked her watch.
Eight-nineteen. Dinner would be served at eight-forty.
She tucked the clipboard under her arm and went to find Constance Ahearn.
After less than a minute of searching, she found her, up at the dais with Cordelia, going through the speech with a pen. Wren stopped ten feet short and waited.
It took four minutes. Cordelia had the program in her hand the whole time and never once looked down at it. Wren put it down to nerves, which was ridiculous. She'd watched Cordelia walk into worse rooms than this one without flinching.
When Cordelia went back out onto the floor, Wren stepped in. "I need to talk with you."
Constance checked her watch. "You've got about four."
"Not here."
Constance looked at her for a second. Then she turned and walked into the south gallery, and Wren followed her in.
It was dark. They'd taken the overheads down to a quarter for the evening, and the noise of the room dropped away as soon as they were through the doorway. A dozen or so pieces hung along the long wall. There was a glass case at the far end with its light still on inside. Wren held out the program.
Constance pulled her reading glasses down out of her hair. "Yes?"
She pointed to the sixth line. "This wasn't in the schedule I sent to the printer on Wednesday."
"No. The board voted Thursday morning, and I had eleven hours to get it to press.
" Constance handed it back. "I know. I should have called you.
You've been up until eleven every night for a week and I switched up the schedule at the last minute and didn't say a word about it. I'll apologize properly on Monday”—she fidgeted—”when I'm not standing here in these shoes. "
"I don't want an apology. I want you to take it out."
Constance's eyebrows went up.
"Keep the announcement," Wren said. "Announce the fund, say her name. Just don't put a spotlight on Ms. Hale."
"Why not?"
Because I've seen her kitchen at midnight with the lights off. That was the true answer, and Wren had no right to say it, not here. She gave the other one.
"Because she'll do it," she said. "She'll stand up and perform, and she'll be lovely about it. And then she'll have two more hours of the event to get through. She won't ask you to take it out. She'll never mention it to you. That's why I'm asking."
Behind them a chair went over and a woman laughed.
"Sit down a minute," Constance said.
"I don't have—"
"Neither do I. Sit down."
There was a bench in the middle of the floor. Wren sat on one end of it with the clipboard across her knees, and Constance sat on the other. Neither of them said anything for a second.
"Do you know what that fund is actually for?"
"Acquisitions."
"That's what it says on the paperwork." Constance looked at the wall across from them. "You'd have liked her, I think. Eleanor. She was very calm and completely immovable, which is a terrible combination in a meeting."
"No one's ever told me what she was like at work."
"No, you wouldn't have." Constance let that sit.
"In 2011, a collector down in Salem died and her whole estate went to auction.
There was a little bronze statue in it. A woman putting her boot on.
Not pretty either. She's got her mouth open, and she's about to fall over.
Eleanor stood in front of it for an hour just staring, then she came back here and asked the board for eleven thousand dollars to buy it.
They told her no, saying it wasn't up to the collection's standard.
What they meant was that none of them had heard of the sculptor and two of them thought it was unattractive. "
"I’m guessing she didn’t let it go?"
"No.” Constance turned her glasses over in her hands and smiled.
“She asked twice more, and they declined every time. It’s now sitting on my auction table tonight, actually.
Somebody else bought it at that sale, and it came back here at a hundred and forty thousand dollars.
So what the fund actually does is make sure that the next time a curator in this building sees something and knows what it is, she doesn't have to stand in front of nine women who don't know anything about art and ask permission. "
Wren didn't move. She'd been in Cordelia's house, in her bed.
She recognized the twitch Cordelia's mouth did when she was about to say something she'd regret, and she knew the sound Cordelia made when she was falling asleep.
Cordelia had talked about Eleanor at the coast, but that was Cordelia's Eleanor, the one who lived in that house.
But nobody told her about the other sides of the woman.
She sat on the bench and wanted this stranger to keep going. That was the shameful part for Wren.
"It isn't a memorial," Constance said. "I hate memorials. I'm not naming a garden bench after her." She put her hands on her knees. "I'm putting her name on the one thing that would have stopped it happening to her. And I wanted her wife recognized while I did it."
"I understand that."
"Do you? I've had fourteen months of board meetings to get this through, and I'd quite like to enjoy myself tonight."
"You can still enjoy it," Wren said. "Just… don't make her stand up and perform for these people."
Constance turned her head and looked at her properly for the first time all evening. Wren didn't look away and didn't let her face reveal anything.
"How long have you worked for her?"
"Since April."
Constance's eyebrows went up a little. "Hm." She stood. "All right, then."
"All right?"
"I'll cut it. I'll say her name and I'll say the fund and then I'll move on." She folded her glasses. "She's already approved the whole thing, if that's what you were worried about. I wrote to her in April. She wrote back confirming it and asked me to keep the amount off the program, which I did."
Wren was still sitting on the bench. "April," she said.
"The fifteenth, thereabouts. It's in the file." Constance was already at the door. "She's known this was coming since the spring. She's a very hard woman to do anything nice for." She stopped with her hand on the frame. "I'll tell her you caught it, since I clearly wasn't going to."
"Don't."
Constance turned around.
"Don't tell her," Wren said, her voice softer now.
Constance looked at her a little longer than was comfortable. "Fine," she said. "Twelve minutes til dinner."