Maude Taft was clutching her daughter, Millicent, by the green silk shoulder of her blouse. Having lost her husband a year ago, and now Kitty, she was too aware of her own mortality and upon arrival had told Elise she wouldn’t be speaking.
Maude had been the well-respected gossip columnist for the Los Angeles Times for forty years until her granddaughter, also named Millicent, converted the brand into a Web entity. She now stood arm in arm with Giovanni, glaring at Elise. The two had met in middle school and bonded over a bottle of Wildroot; the creamy hair lotion Giovanni used to smooth her hair into a ponytail was a miracle for Millicent’s frizzy-curly blond hair. Millicent, to this day, credited Giovanni with helping to restore her confidence.
Elise’s arrival came with inquiries from Millicent about where Aaron was and a bid for an interview.
Can you find out how the news of our inheritance got leaked? Elise had pressed. That’s the story, isn’t it? How our private business got put out into the news? And how we’re forced to then comment about something that wasn’t anyone’s business to begin with?
Giovanni had appeared from nowhere to pull Elise away.
Behind them stood Lucy Schmitt, wearing a pink, beaded floor-length gown akin to a packet of sprinkles. Her husband, white-haired and bearded, was in a black tux. They were always the overdressed but fly White couple; they were into “soul” music and had had Lakers season tickets ever since you could. Lucy had done the character makeup and costuming for almost every Telescope production anyone cared about. She and her husband, a retired senator, were each ninety years old and still in good health; she’d visited Kitty every so often in recent years, by way of a car service.
Lucy gave Elise a thumbs-up now to encourage her to continue speaking.
She had arrived first, leading Elise down the hall to where Kitty’s pictures sat on small easels.
“Put a sold sticker or something on this one.” Lucy pointed to a framed photo of her, Kitty, and the rest of the Golden Girls in evening gowns of the fifties.
“This is the first time your Kitty came out with us. I haven’t seen this photo in years.”
In her younger days, Lucy could have been a doppelganger for Ashley Olsen, but Kitty, always the prettiest, stood out on the end of the photo. One of her slender thighs jutted out of the slit of her long dress. Even in black and white, Elise could tell it sparkled.
“Do you remember where you guys were going?”
Lucy gave her a little wink and nudge with her arm. “Oh, out somewhere; you know.” Neither Kitty nor her friends ever missed a chance to remind someone just how it they had been.
Elise indulged her. “You guys were cute!” She pointed to the woman in the middle, whose long hair was draped over each shoulder like a shawl. “She reminds me of Cher.” Her hair in the photo was ink black, darker even than the car they stood in front of.
Lucy looked surprised that Elise asked. “Cora Rivers? She was once the biggest thing at Telescope—before your Kitty came along, of course.”
Now that Lucy said it, Elise remembered Kitty talking about Cora in the past tense. She and Lucy had been among the first people Kitty met at Telescope. “She died, right?”
“Cora is not dead.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met her.”
“I don’t know if you have or not.” Lucy got a far-off look on her face as she touched the face of the woman next to Kitty, short-haired and flinging her arm in the air. “This is Nina. It’s probably the only picture we have of her.” Lucy looked down the line at the next couple of photographs. “She drowned. She was only twenty-four.”
Elise put her hand up. “Spare me the details.”
“Acknowledging death helps us celebrate life, child. Kitty led an exemplary one, and it ended because her work was done.”
Elise could only settle with half of that notion.
“I know you miss her, honey, but she’ll always be with you.”
Billie Long came in next, ahead of her family, having coordinated her arrival time with Lucy to secure first dibs at the auction. The songwriter had four children and three times as many number one hits. She and her husband, a retired judge, lived at the top of a cliff in Malibu. They had three daughters and a son, all lawyers now, who sat steps from her in the window seat.
The Golden Girls mostly hadn’t seen Kitty in years, but that didn’t lessen their loss. “Kitty used to have us over every quarter without fail,” Billie said. She always held her eyes wide, as if she’d seen a ghost.
“Why’d she stop?”
“You know how life goes.”
Lucy had quickly claimed another ten photographs to sticker as sold before she and Billie left her to greet others Elise didn’t recognize. Elise found Rebecca pawing Kitty’s trinkets on a table in the hallway.
“Remember this?” She pointed to a small brass compact mirror with a wistful smile. They exchanged a smirk, remembering how Rebecca had stolen the mirror from Kitty’s bathroom in the fifth grade and then gotten it confiscated for whipping it out every ten minutes to apply her Dr Pepper Lip Smacker.
“She’d want you to have it.” Elise touched what used to be a rose adorning its top. The lacquer was chipped now, and only the metal imprint remained intact.
Rebecca took a picture of its bid number.
Had things gone Kitty’s way, Elise wouldn’t have had to speak; the memorial would have been over already. There would have been thirty people (including the St. Johns) from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm for lox, bagels, cake, and a champagne toast to the “good life.” But Sarah had switched the time to 6:00 pm and the menu to sushi, which meant no one was leaving before midnight. Kitty had planned every detail of her desired memorial, yet Sarah had still felt the need to make alterations.
Elise had pushed back: evening would make it difficult to see the auction items. Sarah hired a lighting crew and a videographer—and a deejay. Elise was working hard to give her mother the benefit of the doubt, but her ignoring Kitty’s last wishes felt spiteful. Worse, Elise didn’t appreciate her own forced complicity, having to now share her private memories about a private person in front of people who didn’t know Kitty personally.
But this wasn’t why she kept the trigger line in her speech. Mostly, it felt disloyal to Kitty to exclude it.
“Kitty was a friend to me, and now that she’s gone, I realize I’ve lost the closest thing that I had to a mother.”
Elise saw the flinch of her mother’s cheek, always the first indicator of a simmering eruption, out of the corner of her left eye. Her mother had scurried to her side before her first words tumbled out, as if the speech was hers, too, and left with the same disruptive commitment. Alison trailed after her, leaving her own mother, Mrs. Pew, whose eyes were still fixated on the floor as if she couldn’t stand to look at Kitty’s things. Though she was blameless, Elise wondered how the old lady felt being the heiress of the biggest tobacco company in the world, at the funeral of someone who had died from cancer after years of smoking. Elise knew such things bothered Rebecca, who, like her grandmother, had never smoked—anything.
Elise scanned the room for someone to take the floor, avoiding her sisters and Rebecca, who would defend Sarah to keep the peace.
The voice of her savior came from beyond the crowd. Dr. David King, Kitty’s beau, came from the sitting room across the hall, where Kitty’s jewels had been partitioned off until the auction began. A fit senior man, his olive-toned skin had retained most of its elasticity, and except for his entirely gray, but full, head of hair and beard, he could have passed for a man in his sixties.
Elise stepped away from the fireplace and went to paw the guest book on the entry table. The night’s event was part memorial, part auction, and anyone who wanted to speak could, but from the lengthy passages on the pages, it seemed that most wanted to write. She didn’t see the point—who were these messages for, exactly?