Twelve Rooms with a View. Theresa Rebeck
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Olivia is dead now. And these other people, what rights do they have?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know.” Pete trailed off, clearly wanting to get out of this hideous conversation. But she was a sharp one. And she was as completely fascinated as I was by what he had told her already.
“He didn’t even know them, he refused to meet them!” she told him. “He was afraid of just this scenario, that complete strangers would come after his property, that’s why he told her they were never to set foot in the building!”
“She told you that?”
“She did! I asked her one night. She had just come back in from having dinner with the rest of them, apparently. It was so rare that you ever saw either one of them leave the apartment, so when I saw her in the lobby I said, ’This is a treat! You and Bill don’t go out much, do you?’ and she said, ’I was having dinner with my daughters,’ and we rode up in the elevator together, and I said, ’Are we going to meet your daughters?’ and she said, ’Oh no, Bill prefers to keep me all to himself!’ And I said, ’Well, that hardly seems fair. You must miss them a lot.’ And she said she did, very much, and that she had tried to speak to him about it but he was very worried, these were her own words, he was worried that other people were after his property, and he had to protect it. Those were her exact words. And then I saw him one day, not long after that—I actually saw him, putting trash in the bin, which he never did—and I said, ’Why, Bill! There you are!’ He looked terrible, I don’t need to tell you that, he was sick for a long long time and I know he refused to see a doctor—”
“Yeah, but you said you talked to him?”
“I did. I took the opportunity. I said, ’Bill, Olivia tells me you’ve never even met her daughters. Aren’t you curious to even meet them? She’s your wife!’ I was reluctant to say anything to him at all, I couldn’t believe he brought another woman into your mother’s apartment. It was the Livingston mansion apartment, it is an historic property! He should have let it go, is my opinion, when your mother died. He should have sold it to someone who might take care of it, someone in the building who would appreciate it. He never appreciated it. She was the one.”
“But he said something? About these daughters?”
“He said, yes, he said they were trash. He said, ’Those daughters are trash and I’m not meeting them.’ That’s what he called them. Trash. And he wouldn’t meet them. All they wanted was his money.” At which point old Bill went back to being an alcoholic asshole, in my imagination.
Pete Drinan thought about this. It was not an uninteresting bit of information to him. “Was he drunk?” he finally asked.
“Well, I only saw him for a moment, so I couldn’t really say,” Mrs Westmoreland admitted. “I know he did like to drink.”
“Yes, he did.” Pete sighed, his hand curled around the beer bottle behind his back. “Listen, Mrs Westmoreland—would you be willing to talk about this? To our lawyer?”
“Oh, a lawyer…” She sighed, all worried, but excited too, like she was secretly happy to be asked. “You mean, officially?”
“Well, yeah,” said Pete. “It might make a difference—that you spoke to him directly and he told you that he didn’t want the property going out of the family. That that was his intent? That’s what she said, huh, that was his intent?”
“That was my understanding. But if this is an official situation—I don’t know. Do you want to come in, have a cup of tea? I want you and your brother to have your inheritance. But obviously I don’t want to get into some complicated legal mess. But I did love your mother. Maybe, do you want to come in and have a cup of tea?”
“Oh,” said Pete, his fingers twirling around the neck of that beer bottle. I started thinking about how that beer was probably getting all warm and flat, and then I thought, Well, if I’m thinking that I bet he is too. And sure enough he leaned back on his left leg, ready to edge away again. But she was not letting go. She actually had her fingers twisted in his jacket sleeve now. Her door had swung completely open by this point. What little you could see of her place from my vantage point was gorgeous.
“Your mother was my neighbor for thirty years. This whole story breaks my heart,” she explained, leaning up against the doorway.
“Mine too, Mrs Westmoreland.” He nodded, leaning back.
“Good heavens, Peter.” She sighed. “After all this time I think you could consider calling me Delia.”
“Yeah, well…”
“Come in, let me get you that tea. Or a drink! Maybe a whiskey. That sounds like a policeman’s drink!” she said with a smile.
He turned, to finally take a hit off that beer bottle, and stared me straight in the face. We looked at each other, through the crack in the door. He looked tired. And then he kind of remembered, I guess, what was going on, and he took a fast step in my direction, and I remembered too, and I slammed the door and slid the bolt back in place. I thought he was going to start pounding again, but he didn’t, he just waited. I could hear the woman from 8B start to gripe again, about how awful it all was; I couldn’t really hear the words but the tone of her voice was not complimentary. He didn’t say anything back to her. I stood at the door and listened, and he didn’t say anything at all. I wasn’t sure what was going on, if he was going to try and bust the door down with one of those sticks, or what. Finally the woman from 8B stopped talking, and things were really quiet. I thought maybe he was gone. And then a little white card slid under the door. At the last second, it kind of wafted, like he had pushed it. After another second I picked it up. It was a really plain business card, with the NYPD shield on one side, and his name, Detective Peter Drinan, right in the middle, and a cell number on it. I turned it over. On the back, written in ink, in teeny little block letters it said, CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE READY. I thought about that for a second, and I kept listening at the door. He was still out there; in fact, from the shadows it looked like he was sort of hovering down there near the floor to see if I had actually picked the card up. So I took the paper bag that they gave me at the hardware store, and I looked through my backpack, which was still right there where I had dumped it, and I found a pen, and I ripped a piece off the paper bag, and I wrote on it: OKAY. And then I shoved that through the door. And then I watched, through the crack, while he picked it up. And then I heard him laugh. The lady in the other apartment squawked some more questions at him, and he said something else to her, but then I heard the elevator ding, and the door close. And when I went out there, in the morning, he was gone.
Len’s greenhouse was so big it had rooms: the deciduous room, the desert room, the rainforest room, the heirloom plants from other centuries room, the plants that only grow on other plants room. Some of these rooms were apparently subsets or extensions of rooms, and some of the rooms overlapped before growing into new rooms—like the plants growing on other plants room turned into the orchid subset of a room, which evolved into the spectacularly gorgeous and weird plants room, which turned a corner before becoming the poisonous plants room—so that the whole place seemed actually to be growing, itself; it covered the roof and threatened to crawl down the side of the building, in some places. It was truly the only greenhouse I have ever seen that is big enough to get lost in. I told old Len that I thought it was pretty surprising he could get enough water up there to make a greenhouse that big—especially since it had a rainforest in it—but he couldn’t get enough water up there for a little bit of moss. He said, “I know, it is surprising, isn’t it? By which I knew he really was full of shit, and there was no reason that he had to stash the moss in my apartment, except for the fact that he had run out of room in his. That, and there really was quite a bit of sunlight. He got light on six sides up there. It was like being on Mount Olympus, with a whole bunch of plants.
As much fun as it had been to talk to Len about his moss, it was