Pansy drags her into a ramshackle bedroom across the hall. “You’re giving stuff away now?”
Nell reminds herself that in a time of upheaval it’s best to give people the opportunity to adjust. “It’s just some odds and ends, nothing either of us want. I thought it’d be a nice gesture. Sentimental.”
“So this is—what? You’re starting already as the one in charge?” Nell’s sure the women in the bedroom can hear them. She sees a few of them come out into the hallway and head back downstairs.
“I was trying—” Nell fades off, realizing how it’s going to sound.
“To be generous?”
“To be accommodating, I guess.”
Pansy’s tone shifts. “I understand this is new to you. And I want you to know that I’m here to help. So you might want to ask first. That’s pretty basic, right?” With that prim reprimand, Pansy heads back into her grandmother’s bedroom, and Nell can hear her mutter, “I don’t know how this is going to work.”
Tension is palpable as Nell crosses the hall. The awkwardness when she enters the room is nearly unbearable. And to make a gesture, to relieve some pressure, to prove she’s not out of line, Nell picks up the necklace before she can think it through. “Here,” she says handing it to Pansy. “Get a load of this. Crazy, isn’t it?” The room is silent, watching them.
“Is this the . . . ?”
“I think so,” Nell says. “Try it on.”
“It’s yours,” Pansy says, pushing it back to her.
“I think it’d look best on you.” She pushes it, a little forcefully, into Pansy’s hands. “You’re the jewelry girl, right? You should have it.” There is a desire to please, a desperate wanting, yes, but it’s edged with just a bit of “fuck you.” “You think this is all so wonderful? Watch me give it away,” she wants to say, letting her actions speak for her.
Pansy takes it, with a snatch, into the dressing room, holding it in front of her chest. It winks in the light. With her height almost anything looks good on her.
“You could definitely pull it off.” Being generous with Pansy makes Nell feel less like a gate-crasher, a little bulletproof, even.
“You think?” Pansy asks, raising and lowering the necklace against her sternum, and Nell feels a slight panic at the thought of Pansy actually calling her bluff, actually taking the necklace. Nell, you groveling idiot, she thinks. What have you done? She only wanted to have offered. With everyone watching, it’ll be incredibly awkward to backpedal now.
“Yeah, I mean, it would make more sense, right?” Nell says, a bit weakly.
Pansy walks back into the bedroom and tosses the necklace onto the bed. “I’d never wear it.” The unspoken being that it’s gaudy, tacky, clearly costume.
Pansy picks up the Chanel handbag and swoops it over her shoulder. “But this. Vintage 2.55? Don’t make ’em in this type of leather anymore.” And with Pansy having made her choice, the others feel more comfortable diving in.
Scarves are unfurled and chosen. The elder O’Brennan in the pearls goes for a twill Hermès in a pattern of lilacs. The alligator bags go fast. The new Van Alstyne cousin by marriage looks pained as the Cavanaugh golfer insistently encourages her to select something. The new bride finally picks up a canvas tote bag that has “Shop Till You Drop” printed on it in blue script. Well played, thinks Nell as the young wife heads downstairs with her irreproachable choice.
In the end almost everything is gone except the rhinestone brooches from the fifties, tarnished and out of fashion, and the hefty Crown Royal necklace, as Nell has taken to calling it.
“Guess it’s yours after all, much as you tried to wash your hands of it,” Pansy says, tossing it lightly toward Nell’s side of the bed, and Nell checks the twist Pansy’s put on her attempted generosity.
Since Pansy’s passed on it, Nell doesn’t feel illicit slipping it over her head. Before she heads back downstairs, she catches a glimpse in the dressing table mirror, an outsize sparkle against her plain black clothes, making them look almost chic.
And in the vein of her illustrious forefathers, she does what generations of Quincys have done to gain courage and to gird themselves, to shore themselves up in the face of good news and bad. She heads downstairs to fix a drink.
THE JEWELRY BOX
Walking into his father’s house, the smell of wool rugs and lemon furniture polish convinced Ambrose he was home. Israel Quincy’s heavily gabled and turreted house loomed three stories above the street that the locals referred to as “Millionaire’s Row,” which made Ambrose cringe. Israel’s house was draped in cornices like a wedding cake groaning under a layer of butter and sugar. The family insisted it was “Italianate” in style. But now, having seen much of Italy, Ambrose could only think of it as American—garish and gaudy, with a domed glass observatory on top of the mansard roof and an ornamental portico over the front door.
He’d stayed at the Union Club in New York for two weeks. Increasingly frequent letters and telegrams from his father only made him linger in the city. He’d spent his time wandering the park alone or sitting in the club’s silent reading room smoking and staring into space. The quiet of the place, men enjoying the solitude of their newspapers and their cigars, was all he could stand after traveling alone for so long.
In the end it was a letter from May that motivated him to take the train.
She’d been short; terse, really. She’d said she was happy, that he couldn’t stay away forever, and that they were family now. She didn’t apologize. He supposed that was correct. She shouldn’t apologize for marrying his brother.
He reread one part of the letter so often that he had it memorized, though he’s sure May didn’t give it nearly as much thought when she wrote it, likely tossing it off without realizing how much she was revealing. “I’ve been thinking that life shows us who we are, our actions wrap us up in the end like nothing else. Everything is how it should be.”
It was her tone mostly, her familiar directness echoing his own thoughts; this convinced him. Because what would he do, really? Never go home again? Never talk to them? Make some big dramatic statement? As appealing as those options were, they had the whiff of something else—of defeat, of acknowledgment that he was brokenhearted. And in the spirit of getting a dreaded deed over with, he bought his train ticket.
He’d forgotten what it was like to stand in the front hall of his father’s pile, where the windows were covered by crewel curtains to keep out the soot from the steel yards miles away. But Ambrose carried the ease of the world traveler now; he was a man of perspective and broad horizons.