Twelve Rooms with a View

For Jess Lynn

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for Theresa Rebeck:

Also by Theresa Rebeck

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

I was actually standing on the edge of my mother’s open grave when I heard about the house. Some idiot with tattoos and a shovel had tossed a huge wad of dirt at me. I think he was more or less perturbed that everyone else had taken off the way they’re supposed to and then there I was just standing there like someone had brained me with a frying pan. It’s not like I was making a scene. But I couldn’t go. The service in the little chapel had totally blown, all that little deacon or whatever he was talked about was God and his mercy and utter unredeemable nonsense that had nothing to do with her so I was just standing there and thinking maybe there was something else that could be said while they put her in the earth, something simple but hopefully specific. Which is when Lucy came up and yanked at my arm.

“Come on,” she said. “We have to talk about the house.”

And I’m thinking, what house?

So Lucy drags me off to talk about this house, which she and Daniel and Alison clearly had already been deep in conversation about for a while, even though I had never heard of it. Which maybe I might resent? Especially as Daniel obviously has an interest but no real rights, as he is only Alison’s husband? But I’m way too busy trying to catch up and get something resembling a shred of information out of them all while we crawl to Manhattan from Hoboken through the Holland Tunnel.

This is what the conversation is like, in the crummy old beige Honda that Daniel insists on driving because even though the thing is ugly it still works:

“The lawyer says that it’s completely unencumbered. She died intestate, and that means it’s ours, that’s what the lawyer says.” This from Lucy.

“What lawyer?” I ask.

“Mom’s lawyer,” she says.

“I have a hard time believing that that is true,” Daniel says.

“Why would he lie?” Lucy shoots back at him.

“Why would a lawyer lie? I’m sorry, did you just say—”

“Yes I did. He’s our lawyer. Why would he lie?”

“You just said he was Mom’s lawyer,” I point out.

“It’s the same thing,” she tells me.

“Really?” I say. “I’ve never even heard of this guy, and I don’t know his name, and he’s my lawyer?”

“Bill left her his house,” Lucy tells me again, staying on point. “And since she died without a will that means it’s ours. Mom has left us a house.”

This entire chain of events seems strangely impossible to me. I’m always so chronically broke and lost in a kind of underworld of trouble that a stroke of luck like an actual house dropping on my head could only be true if it were literally true, and I was about to find myself like the Wicked Witch of the East squashed to death under somebody else’s house. Surely this cannot actually mean that. To get to the bottom of it all I continue to repeat things people previously said. “Bill left her his house?”

“Yes! He left her everything!” Lucy snaps.

“Didn’t he have kids?”

“Yes, in fact, he did,” Daniel pipes up. “He had two sons, two grown sons.”

“Well, didn’t he leave them something?”

“No, he didn’t,” Lucy says, firm. Daniel snorts. “What? It’s true! He didn’t leave them anything!”

“The lawyer said it wouldn’t matter whether or not they agreed to the terms of their father’s will,” Alison notes, looking at Daniel, trying to be hopeful in the face of his inexplicable pessimism about the fact that somebody left us all a house.

“If the lawyer said that, he’s a complete moron,” Daniel informs her. “I called Ira, he’s going to take a look at the documentation and let us know what kind of a mess we’re in.”

“It’s not a mess, it’s a house,” Lucy notes, sort of under her breath, kind of peevish. She doesn’t like Daniel. She thinks he’s too bossy. Which he is, considering that we didn’t all marry him, just Alison.

So we take a left out of the cemetery and go straight to the lawyer’s. There was no brunch with distant relatives and people standing around saying trivial mournful things. Which I didn’t mind being spared and I don’t know that we would have been able to find anybody who knew Mom anyway, but truly I did think that at least the four of us were planning to stop at a diner and have some eggs or a bagel. But not the Finns. We get right down to business. Before noon there we were, squashed around a really small table in a really small conference room in the saddest Manhattan office you ever saw. The walls were a nasty yellow and only half plastered together; seriously, you could see the dents where the Sheetrock was screwed into the uprights. The tabletop was that kind of Formica that vaguely looks like wood, in somebody else’s imagination. Honestly, I was thinking, this is a lawyer’s office? What kind of lawyer? There was an overweight receptionist who wore a pale green sloppy shirt which unfortunately made her look even fatter than she was, and she kept poking her head in, the first time to ask us if we wanted any coffee, and then a couple more times to tell us that Mr Long would be right with us. Then he showed up. His name was Stuart Long, and he looked like an egg. Seriously, the guy had a really handsome face, with a good head of brown hair, and then the rest of him looked like an egg. For a moment it was all I could concentrate on so I was not, frankly, paying full attention when Alison interrupted him in mid-sentence and said, “Can you tell us about the house?”

She’s not usually that aggressive, that’s more Lucy’s turf, but she was so nervous she couldn’t stop herself, apparently. “I think we all would just love to hear about the house,” she explained, immediately apologetic for having been so tentatively forceful. Daniel put his hand on hers and smiled like he forgave her.

“The house?” said the lawyer, seriously confused for a second. And I thought, Of course, they got it wrong, of course there is no house.

“Bill’s house. The message you left on our machine said Bill left Mom his house, and that the house would be part of the settlement. You left this, didn’t you leave this—”

“Well, I certainly would not have left any details about the settlement on a machine—I spoke to your husband, several times actually. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, we spoke, and you talked to me about the house,” Daniel interrupted, all snotty and impatient, like these details were really beneath him. I could see Lucy kind of stiffen up, because Daniel clearly had told her and Alison that he got “a message”, when in fact he had been having long conversations with this lawyer which he had no right to have, much less lie about.

“You mean the apartment,” Egg Man insisted.

“Yes, the apartment.” Daniel was still acting all above it all, like he was the one who had the right to be annoyed.

“So it’s not a house,” I said.

“No, it’s an apartment. Olivia had been living there. Up until her recent death.”

“Recent death, that’s an understatement,” I said.

“Yes, yes, this is I’m sure overwhelming for you,” the lawyer said, kind of nicely. He had very good manners, compared to everyone else in the room. “But I take it from your questions that you’ve never actually seen the apartment?”

“Bill didn’t like us,” I said. “So we weren’t allowed to come over.”

“He was reclusive,” Alison corrected me. “As I’m sure Mr Long is aware.”

“Mom told me he didn’t want us to come over, because Bill didn’t like us,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Alison.

“Could we get back to the point?” Lucy said. “What about this house—this apartment? We’re inheriting this place, right?”

“Yes, well—the apartment was directly willed to your mother,” Egg Man agreed. “Because her death came so close upon her husband’s the title was never officially transferred, but that will most likely be considered a technicality.”

“But it was her house,” Daniel reminded him. He was really stuck on this idea that it was a house.

“Technically it is, as I said, specifically included in the estate,” our round lawyer repeated. “Why don’t you let me walk you through this?”

“Why don’t you just tell us how much the place is worth?” Lucy threw in.

Mr Long blinked, but otherwise ignored her poor manners. “Obviously it’s not possible to be specific about the worth of the property until we have a professional evaluation,” he informed the room.

“You really don’t know?” Lucy persisted. “Like, it could be worth ten dollars or ten thousand dollars, or it could be worth a million dollars, but you don’t know?”

Before Egg Guy could answer, Daniel tried to rip control of the meeting back to his side of the table. “She’s just a little impatient,” he explained. “Sweetie, maybe we should let Mr Long—”

Lucy actually rolled her eyes at this. “Just a ballpark, Daniel sweetie,” she shot back.

Mr Long cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “Well, I guess I could—”

“Yes, why don’t you,” I said, trying to be nice because frankly I was starting to feel a little embarrassed that they were acting like this. Also, like everyone else in the room, I really wanted him to give up a number. “Just a ballpark,” I said, smiling with as much adorable charm as I could muster under the circumstances. I thought Lucy was going to gag, but it did the trick.

“A ballpark. A ballpark,” he said, smiling back at me. “I don’t know. Eleven million?”

There was a big fat silence at this.

“Eleven million?” I said. “Eleven million what?” I swear I know that sounds stupid, but what on earth was he talking about? Eleven million pesos?

“Eleven million dollars,” he clarified. “That is of course almost a random number, there’s no way really of knowing. But it is twelve rooms, with a view of Central Park, on a very good block. I think eleven million would be considered conservative. In terms of estimates.”

So then there was a lot more talk, yelling even, people getting quite heated and worried over things that hadn’t happened and might not be happening but maybe were happening and had happened already, and the solution, apparently, to all these things that no one understood was for me, Tina, to move into that big old eleven million dollar apartment, like right away, like that very day.

So it was complicated, how that happened? But that’s where I ended up.

CHAPTER ONE

This is the thing you have to understand about these big old apartments in NewYork City: they are more completely astonishing than you ever thought they might be, even in your wildest hopes. When you walk by them, like, just walking along the edge of Central Park at sunset, and you look up at the little golden windows blazing and you think Oh My God those apartments must be mind-blowing, who on earth could possibly be so lucky that they get to live in one of those apartments? My mother and her husband were two of those people, and they lived in an apartment so huge and beautiful it was beyond imagining. Ceilings so high they made you feel like you were in a cathedral, or a forest. Light fixtures so big and far away and strangely shaped that they looked like bugs were crawling out of them. Mirrors in crumbling gilt frames that had little cherubs falling off the top; clocks from three different centuries, none of which worked. So many turns in the hallways, leading to so many different dark rooms, that you thought maybe you had stumbled into a dwarf’s diamond mine. The place was also, quite frankly, covered in mustard-colored wall-to-wall shag carpet, and the walls in one of the bathrooms were papered with some sort of inexplicable silver-spotted stuff that you couldn’t figure out where that shit even came from, plus there was actual moss growing on the fixtures in the kitchen, no kidding, moss. But none of that was in any way relevant. The place was fantastic.

There was nobody there to let us in—we had to let ourselves in, with the keys that the nice round lawyer handed over, telling us about six different times that he didn’t think it was “necessary” that we take immediate ownership. Seriously, he was so worried about the whole idea—that I would just up and move into this huge old empty apartment where my mother had died—that he kept repeating himself, in a sort of sad murmur, “There’s no need to rush into anything. Really. You must all be overwhelmed. Let me walk you through this.”

“But you said there might be some question, about the will,” Daniel reminded him.

“No, no question—well, no question about Mr Drinan’s will. Your mother, as you know, does not seem to have left a will,” he pointed out, trying to drag us all back into this nonsense. But now that the words “eleven million” had come out of his mouth, none of us were listening.

“We’d really like to just get a look at the place,” Daniel announced.

“Before we lose the light,” Lucy said.

Sometimes I am amazed when she pulls out lines like that. She just says this stuff like she really means it even though she already said maybe a second ago that we needed to get over there and get Tina moved in so that it was clear right away that we were taking ownership because if there was going to be any contention or cloud on the title we would need to have already established a proprietary right to the property. She’s not even a lawyer; that’s just the way her brain works. She figures out the meanest truth, gets it out there, deals with it, and then a second later pretends that really what is worrying her is some weird thing about the light. It’s spectacularly nervy and impressive. And maybe Daniel doesn’t like it, because Alison is the oldest, which means in his imagination that they should be calling the shots? But as I already noted, he just married into this situation, and there is no way around how smart Lucy is.

I, meanwhile, am the problem child who doesn’t get a vote. This is the reason, I guess, they don’t explain anything to me. Why bother? She’s caused too many problems; she doesn’t get a vote anymore. Even when it comes down to the question of where is Tina going to live, Tina doesn’t get to vote. I didn’t care. The truth is I didn’t have anything better to do anyway than let my sisters move me into my dead mom’s gigantic apartment on Central Park West. At the time, I was living in a trailer park, for God’s sake, cleaning rich people’s houses out by the Delaware Water Gap. I didn’t even have a bank account because I couldn’t afford the monthly fees and I had to borrow the fifty bucks for the bus to the funeral from my stupid ex-boyfriend Darren whose bright idea it was to move out there to that lousy trailer park in the first place. Oh well, the less said about the whole Delaware Water Gap fiasco the better, as it was not my smartest or most shining hour. So when Lucy leaned back in her chair and said, “We probably should take ownership right away, just to be safe. Tina can stay there,” I wasn’t about to put up a fight. Move into a palace—why not?

So we got the keys, crawled through traffic to the Upper West Side, actually found a meter four blocks away from the promised land, and there we were, before the light was gone, while the sun was setting and making those windows glow. The building itself was huge, a kind of murky dark brown with the occasional purple brick stuck in the mix. Above, strange and gloomy gargoyles snarled at everyone from the cornices three stories up. Two gargoyles guarded the entryway as well, on either side, serious-minded eagles with the tails of lions. While they didn’t look like they were kidding around they also didn’t look like they intended to eat you or spit molten lava at you, with the ones higher up, you were not quite so sure. Plus there were actual gas lamps, the old Victorian ones, burning by the heads of the eagle lions, and another one of those gas lamps, a really mammoth one, hung dead center over the door, right above a huge word in Gothic type that said EDGEWOOD. In fact all of the windows on the first two floors had additional scrollwork and carving and additional inexplicable Latin words inscribed over them. It all added up into a kind of castle-type Victorian abode that was quite friendly while simultaneously seeming like the kind of place you’d never come out of alive.

The foyer of this place was predictably spectacular. Marble floors, dotted with some kind of black stone tiles for effect, vaulted ceilings and the biggest crystal chandelier you’ve ever seen in your life. A huge black chair which I later found out was carved out of pure ebony sat right in front of an equally enormous fireplace, and improbably, the chair actually had wings. Two more of the giant eagle-like lions stood on either side of the fireplace, which was filled with an enormous sort of greenery arrangement I later found out was plastic but which was convincing and impressive nonetheless. The doorman’s station, a nice little brass stand piled with FedEx packages and a couple of manila envelopes piled on top of it, was empty. And then behind that there was a tiny bank of two elevators.

“Wow,” I said. “Check out the chair with wings.”

“We’ll have time for that later,” Lucy told me, giving me a little shove toward the elevators.

“We should wait for the doorman, shouldn’t we?” I said, looking around. The place was deserted.

“Why? We live here,” Lucy announced, pushing the elevator button, pressing her lips together, like don’t mess with me. She kept tapping at that stupid button, as impatient as Moses whacking the rock, like that might hurry up God instead of just pissing him off.

“Seriously, we can’t just go up there,” I said. The whole situation suddenly seemed so dicey to me. Alison started pushing the elevator button too, pressing it really hard. Both of them were in such a rush, like rushing through all this would be what made it okay; it was just like Darren and the whole Delaware Water Gap Story—things happen too fast and you end up stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a complete shithead and a shitload of trouble. I was just about to hopelessly attempt to explain this to my two sisters when the elevator dinged and Daniel swung open the outer door.

“You guys, come on,” I said. “We should wait for the doorman.”

“Who knows where he is?” Daniel said. “We’re not waiting.”

And since no one showed up to stop us, I got in.

According to the set of keys the egglike lawyer had given us, Mom’s apartment was number 8A so we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where it disgorged us on a tiny, horrible little landing. Green fluorescent lighting flickered from an old strip light and didn’t make anyone look good, and the speckled linoleum tiles on the floor and Venetian blinds were so old and cracked and dusty even a hapless loser such as myself would have to find it offensive. The door to 8A was triple locked, so it took Lucy a long minute to figure out how to work all the keys. I was in a little bit of a bad mood by this time. I really did think we should have waited to at least tell the stupid doorman we were there, and I was worried about what might happen if a total stranger showed up and said, “Hey! What are you doing?” There was one other door, just behind the two elevators, which had been painted a kind of sad brown maybe a hundred years ago, and next to it another door, painted a gorgeous pearly grey, with heavy brass fixings which announced “8B”. The 8A on our door was just a couple of those gold and black letters that you buy in the hardware store that have sticky stuff on the back. It made you wonder all of a sudden: Eleven million dollars? For this dump? Which in fact had not even crossed my mind, up to this point.

And then Lucy figured out the locks, and there was a little click, and then a sort of a breeze, and the door to the apartment swung open.

You couldn’t tell how big that place was right away. The blinds were drawn and obviously nobody knew where the switches were, so we all stepped tentatively into the gloom. It smelled, too, a sort of funny old people smell, not like someone died in there, but more like camphor, and dried paper, and mothballs. And then somewhere far off, in with the mothballs, there was something else that smelled like old flowers, and jewelry, and France.

“Hey, Mom’s perfume,” I said.

“What?” said Lucy, who had wandered into the next room, looking for a light switch in there.

“Don’t you smell Mom’s perfume?” I asked. It seemed unmistakable to me that that’s what it was, even though she hardly ever wore the stuff because it was so ridiculously expensive. My dad gave it to her on their wedding night, and they could never afford it again so she only wore it once every three years or so when he had an actual job and they got to go to some cocktail party, and we would watch her put her one black dress on, and the clip-on earrings with the sparkles, and the smallest little bit of the most expensive perfume in the world. Who knows if it really was the most expensive in the world, I rather doubt it, but that’s what she told us. Anyway there it was, way back in that huge apartment, lost in with a bunch of mothballs, the smell of my mother when she was happy.

“It’s that perfume. What was the name of that stuff?” I asked, taking another step in. I loved that apartment already, so dark and big and strange, with my mother’s perfume hiding in it like a secret. “Don’t you smell it?”

“No,” said Alison, running her hand up the wall, like a blind person looking for a doorway. “I don’t.”

Maybe I was making it up. There were a lot of smells in there, in the dark. Mostly I think it smelled like time had just stopped. And then Daniel found the light switch, and turned it on, and there was the smallest golden glow from high up near the ceiling, you could barely see anything because the room was so big, but what you could see was, of course, that time actually had stopped there. Somewhere between 1857 and 1960, things had happened and then just somehow stopped happening. The ceiling was high and far away with sealike coves around the corners, and right in the middle of this enormous lake of a ceiling there was the strangest of old chandeliers, glued together out of what looked like iron filings, with things dripping and crawling out of it. It seemed to have been poorly wired, because it only had three working fake-candle 15-watt bulbs, which is why it gave off so little light. And then on the floor there was this mustard-colored shag carpeting, which I believe I have mentioned before, and then there was like one chair, in the corner. It was a pretty big chair, but seriously, it was one chair.