Chapter 24 Vivian
Vivian
Early February
On Saturday, the day after the masquerade ball, Peter sends a dozen single roses to Vivian’s apartment, each one arriving precisely an hour after the last. Each containing a single line that together spells out a complete note:
Dear Vivian,
Thank you for being my date last night.
I’m sorry I got caught up in that scuffle.
I should have paid attention to you.
I’m sorry (and regretful).
I’m new at this.
I want to see you again.
I’m leaving for London this morning for work, but I will be back on Tuesday.
Please be my date on Tuesday evening at 7:30 p.m. at the restaurant 1928 Beacon Hill.
Till then, I’ll be thinking of you.
Yours sincerely, Peter
P.S. You’re beautiful.
She’s usually not one for flowers. They are the exact opposite of antiques, dying much too quickly.
Vivian has trouble seeing the value of springing for them.
But she’s never been wooed in such a manner before, and the roses couldn’t feel more perfect.
As Vivian collects the final note and arranges them in order, she has the thought: I should save these.
Like they are an important memento—or will be, one day.
This thought terrifies her, edging her toward a vulnerability she has yet to experience in past relationships.
She knows the importance of antiques; it’s what she does for a living, after all.
But items of personal importance are another thing.
Vivian recalls when it was that she fell in love with antiques.
She grew up around them, of course, but her professional interest didn’t bloom until she went backpacking in Europe after graduating college.
Kat couldn’t afford to go, so Vivian decided to bring a little of Europe to her.
She collected small vintage objects during her travels that she mailed to Kat in Philadelphia.
She felt like she was speaking to her friend through these antiques, like they were handwritten letters.
She hoped Kat would also find them valuable, but the mere act of forwarding them to her ensured a continuation of their provenance.
Antiques, Vivian then determined, are migrating relics of time and place.
As Vivian collected oxidized brass candlesticks from London flea markets and tarnished silver jewelry boxes from the back stalls of Turkish bazaars, she considered that there might be a future in this.
It was an old doorknob she found at a street fair in the outskirts of Prague that solidified it for her.
The knob felt symbolic. Representative of an opening, a possibility.
If she found these objects valuable, if there were markets and stalls and shops across the world carrying these types of things, then Vivian, too, could create a space to sell them.
Suddenly, she could picture in her mind the antiques shop where all these precious items would sit, and this place—Storied Antiques—would be back in her hometown of Boston, specifically in Beacon Hill, home of the original antiques row.
Now, she gathers Peter’s notes and delicately tucks them into a vintage tin container that holds the Prague doorknob. It’s been a long time since she’s assigned personal importance to an item, antique or otherwise.
On Sunday morning, Vivian visits the hospital, where her mother has been transferred from the nursing home due to aspiration pneumonia.
As the nurse explains, it’s pneumonia that occurs when you forget how to eat and then you choke on your food.
Vivian stands at her mother’s bedside, watching the antibiotics infuse into her mother’s arm, bruised purple like a water stain from blood draws.
Suddenly, there’s a flicker of recognition in her mother’s eyes, and Vivian grows hopeful.
But it’s not for her daughter.
“Hilda! I told you to iron these sheets!” her mother admonishes.
Hilda was her mother’s maid for years. This reminds Vivian; she needs to cancel her biweekly cleaning service. Her own—not her mother’s.
Vivian stays a few minutes longer, growing increasingly angry as her mother continues her delirious rant.
When Vivian returns from the hospital, she tears off her clothes so quickly that she rips a hole in her silk blouse.
She wants it off, this stench of sickness.
She wants it off. She is angry at her mom for spending all the family money and for getting sick and for being someone who even in sickness is a bitch.
Mostly, though, Vivian is angry that her mother no longer knows who she is. But she doesn’t even know to whom she should direct this sense of injustice—her mom? Her mother’s bad genes? Life? Some higher being?
With a pang, Vivian remembers she still needs to take care of Lucy’s school tuition.
Christ. It’s probably now overdue. For this financial pickle, Vivian has no one to blame but herself.
After doing extensive research on Philadelphia schools, she’d urged Lucy’s dad to apply to Locust Prep.
It’s expensive, and he never would have considered it without Vivian’s insistence on covering the costs.
She opens the school’s payment portal, typing in her credit card information with short, sharp jabs.
She reluctantly clicks the box to accept the 3 percent transaction fee, and she’s so irritated by this that she sends an impromptu text to her accountant: I have some irons in the fire…
I may not need to close the Chestnut Hill store after all.
Let’s discuss. It’s bullshit, of course.
She has no irons, no game. Just an idea with a loose thread she’s twirling around her finger.
She now opens a new tab and types in a search: “missing schedule of beneficiaries Massachusetts.” She’s done this search already in the past few days, several times over.
She doesn’t know why she’s doing it again.
The results are the same. The first article that pops up reads: “Beware the Missing Schedule of Beneficiaries for Your Massachusetts Nominee Realty Trust.” Seems like she’s not the only one who this has happened to.
A schedule of beneficiaries, like her ancestor put in place in the 1800s for the trust that held the title to the Knox real estate, was not recorded at the registry of deeds.
Such documents, perhaps unsurprisingly, were easily misplaced or often went suspiciously missing.
Vivian snaps the laptop shut harder than she needs to.
She knows what’s also bothering her. Today is the day that the real estate agency has scheduled a few private showings at her mother’s house.
Michael L. Carucci of Gibson Sotheby’s is the best of the best, and this is part and parcel of listing one’s property.
But even though the house no longer resembles the one she grew up in, Vivian still feels uncomfortable with the thought of complete strangers traipsing through it.
It would be nice if she didn’t have to sell.
Glancing at the ripped silk blouse in a puddle at her feet, she gives a short, sarcastic laugh. Yet another thing she’ll need to offload: her blouse, at the thrift store. The hole is simply too big for repair.
Vivian meets Rachel for an early dinner at Sorellina, the upscale Back Bay restaurant. It’s not the type of place where one brings a baby, which is why Vivian chose it. She really needs her friend to pull a rabbit out of her genealogical hat. That—and a drink, after the day she had.
“Michael sounds interesting,” Rachel says, taking a bite of her steak tartare.
“Michael? Don’t you mean Peter?” Vivian says. They are sitting at the owner’s table, the coveted seating area. There are some undeniable perks, she must occasionally admit, to being her mother’s daughter.
“No, I mean Michael.”
“Oh.”
“Is he single?”
“How would I know?”
“Does he wear a wedding band?”
“No.”
“So, you noticed.”
Vivian takes a sip of her chardonnay. Her mother never liked chardonnay, felt it was a bad wine. No—her mother hated chardonnay. She didn’t dislike things; she hated them. Vivian has found herself drinking more and more chardonnay, which she happens to like very much, since her mother got sick.
“You got me. I noticed,” she says dryly.
“Look, maybe Michael can be your ally.”
“Why would I need an ally?” But as she says this, she recalls the grandfather clock stuck on 3:03.
The crowd. The drugs. The secret cigar room.
The fight. The warning that Xavier gave her.
The geomancy readings—which, as she looked up, are divination readings that traditionally use marks made on the earth.
There is a lot of drama at the Knox—and a lot of mystique.
“You’ll never guess who I ran into there,” Vivian adds.
“Who?”
“Xavier.”
“Xavier! Really? What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was with someone? I didn’t notice a new boyfriend, but then again, there were a lot of people…and a lot of people in costume. Funny enough, Xavier recognized me because of my pendant.” She gestures toward it.
“What did Xavier have to say for himself?”
“We didn’t really talk,” Vivian admits. She doesn’t know why, but she’s reluctant to tell Rachel about his warning.
The strange way he’d acted. The fact that at first, she thought he might’ve been drinking.
Maybe she doesn’t want Rachel to think the Knox is unsafe.
And why raise a red flag about the alcohol when Vivian doesn’t know what was in his glass?
“That’s too bad,” Rachel says. “I wonder how he’s doing.”
“Do we know whom Xavier might be dating at the moment?”
“You would know better than I. You’re the one who still sees him on a more regular basis.”
“Only when he stops by my store.”
“That’s still more than I see him.” Rachel knits her brow. “I could totally see Xavier being involved with someone from the Knox.”
“Why?”