The Hollow Inheritance: Margot on Division Street

The canvas was the first thing Maren saw.

It stood on a heavy oak easel near the center of the loft, turned three-quarters toward the clerestory windows where the afternoon light fell in pale, dusty shafts. Half of the canvas was bare primed linen. The other half held a man's face, rendered in oil with the careful, almost obsessive layering of someone who had spent months on a single feature. The jaw was finished, the line of it precise and strong, the shadow along the chin blended to a softness that caught the light. The cheekbone was nearly complete. But the eye was still a sketch, charcoal lines under a thin wash of raw umber, and the rest of the face dissolved into the blank linen like a sentence interrupted mid-word.

The loft smelled of linseed oil and turpentine, the sharp chemical sweetness undercut by the staleness of a room that had not been aired in days. A coffee cup sat on a paint-spattered stool, the surface of the coffee gone cold and skinned over. Tubes of paint, some squeezed flat, some still fat and crimped at the tips, lay scattered across a wooden table beneath a row of brushes standing bristle-up in a stoneware jar.

"Whoever you are," a voice said from behind the canvas, "you are early by a decade."

Maren stopped. Her shoes, the practical low-heeled leather she wore to walk the neighborhood's uneven sidewalks, had made no sound on the bare wooden stairs. She had been careful of the third step, which she knew from her last visit creaked. But Margot Enderly had heard her anyway, the way a woman who has spent her life listening for the right footsteps hears a footstep wrong.

The voice was smooth and unhurried, the consonants rounded in the Boston manner that had not softened with forty years away from Back Bay. Maren could picture the face that went with it, even before the canvas moved.

The canvas swung aside on its easel, and Margot Enderly stood in the full light of the studio's north-facing windows, the gray afternoon falling across her like a wash of watercolor. She was tall for a woman of her age, which was somewhere past seventy though she would have offered a number fifteen years younger if asked and expected it to be accepted without question. Her hair was the color of pewter, swept back from her forehead and pinned at the nape in a chignon that looked effortless and was not. She wore a black turtleneck, a long strand of pale amber beads, and trousers that had been pressed that morning by someone who was not her. The hand that held the brush was steady. The hand at her side, the one without the brush, was not.

"Maren Holloway," she said, and the name came out warm, almost fond, the way a woman greets an old adversary at a party and pretends she is glad. "I had a feeling it would be you."

She set the brush down in the jar with the others, bristles up, and moved toward a small kitchen alcove at the far end of the loft where a kettle sat on a cold burner. She did not invite Maren to sit. She did not need to. The room had only one proper chair, a wingback covered in faded chintz, and it was already occupied by a stack of unopened mail and what appeared to be a tax document with a red corner sticker.

"I should have called ahead," Maren said.

"You should have," Margot agreed, still moving. She filled the kettle from the tap, and the sound of the water was thin and ordinary in the large cold room. "But you never do. You never have. You prefer the surprise, the unannounced arrival, the little drama of pushing open a door someone thought was closed. It is your one vice, Maren. Other than the obvious one."

She said obvious one the way a woman lays a card on a table, face up, and waits to see if the other player will pick it up.

Maren did not pick it up. She stood near the door and let her eyes move across the room the way a person reads a room they have already decided is a crime scene. The coffee cup with its skinned surface. The cold tubes of paint. The portrait on the easel, half-finished, the unfinished eye looking out of the canvas like a question someone had stopped asking.

"Beautiful work," Maren said, though she meant: who is it.

"Thank you," Margot said, though she meant: don't ask.

The kettle went on. Margot turned and leaned against the counter, arms folded, the amber beads clicking softly against each other. She studied Maren the way a woman studies a fabric she is considering for a chair she has not yet bought. Maren, in her dark coat, her hair cut short and practical, her hands in her pockets, looked like a woman who had come to ask a question. Margot looked like a woman who had decided, years ago, what the answer would be.

"Sit if you can find a surface," Margot said. "I am not hosting. I am painting."

"I can stand."

"You can. You always could."

The kettle began to hiss, a low sound that climbed into a whistle. Margot turned and lifted it off the burner, poured the water into a tall ceramic pot, and the smell of the tea that came out was smoky and dark, something imported, something that had cost more than a reasonable person would admit to paying. The loft, which had smelled of linseed and turpentine, now smelled of two things at once, neither of them willing to give way to the other.

"Cyrus," Maren said.

"Cyrus," Margot agreed. She set two cups on the counter and poured. "Which Cyrus? The Cyrus of last Tuesday, or the Cyrus of six days before he died, or the Cyrus of the will, or the Cyrus of the will he was about to rewrite. There are so many Cyruses now. The lawyers have made a small industry of them."

She lifted a cup and held it out toward Maren without stepping closer. Maren crossed the room and took it. Their fingers did not touch. The tea was too hot to drink, and Margot held her own cup as though she had no intention of drinking it either. A prop. A prop for the performance of hospitality.

"Six days," Maren said.

"Six days," Margot said. "A Thursday. I remember because the gallery had just sent over the new photographs of the late Renoir acquisition and I had been cross about the lighting in two of them, and Cyrus had called me at four in the afternoon to come over because he said he wanted to talk to someone who would not weep. He said that exactly. Someone who would not weep. He knew my talents."

She smiled, and the smile was the kind of smile that has been practiced so often it has become the face itself. Maren had seen that smile across dinner tables, across boardrooms, across the pews at Trinity on the Sundays when Vera could not bring herself to go and sent Margot in her place with a note for the rector.

"What did he tell you?"

"He told me," Margot said, "that he was going to leave Vera."

The words landed in the room the way a glass lands on a marble floor. There was no sound yet. There was only the shape of the impact.

Maren did not move. Her face did not change. Her hand on the teacup did not tighten. She had spent thirty years in rooms where women said things that rearranged the furniture, and she had learned that the worst thing a woman could do in such a room was show that she had heard.

"I see," she said, which meant nothing.

"I don't think you do," Margot said. "Not yet. Sit down, Maren. Please. The floor is filthy and your coat is not."

She gestured toward the wingback. The mail moved an inch. Margot did not move the mail. She waited. Maren sat, and the chair exhaled around her, the old chintz sighing, and somewhere beneath the cushions something crinkled, perhaps another tax document, perhaps a letter, perhaps nothing at all.

"He had been thinking about it for a long time," Margot said. She remained standing. She was better standing. She had always been better standing. "Years. Since the children were grown. Since the house on Marlborough Street became too large for the two of them and too small for what they had become. He said it the way a man says something he has been saying to himself in the shower for a decade. Calmly. Almost relieved. As though the worst were behind him."

She said almost relieved the way an actress delivers a line she has been rehearsing. As though almost were a word she had underlined.

"The worst," Maren said.

"The marriage," Margot said. "He used the word. He said, The worst is behind me, Margot. He said, I have made my decision. He said, I am going to tell her on Monday. It was a Thursday. He said he wanted the weekend to think it through one more time, because he was that kind of man, that careful, that thorough, that unable to enter a room without rehearsing what he would say in it. He had a speech prepared. I saw it. He had written it out, the points, the order of them, in a small black notebook he kept in the breast pocket of his jacket. He showed me."

"You saw the speech."

"He showed me the speech. I told him it was too kind. I told him that if he was going to leave a woman after forty years he ought at least to be cruel about it, because kindness at that hour is a cruelty of its own. He laughed. He had a good laugh. You forget that. Everyone forgets that. He had a good laugh and he was not afraid to use it."

She paused. She lifted the teacup to her lips and did not drink. She set it down again.

"On Monday he did not tell her," Maren said.

"On Monday he was dead," Margot said. "The worst was not behind him. The worst was on Tuesday, in the hospital, when she held his hand and the monitors did what monitors do. The worst was her. The worst was always her. But he had thought, for one weekend, that he had escaped her. He had thought it. That is what I have to live with. That he thought it and did not get to keep the thought."

The room was quiet. The portrait on the easel looked out of its unfinished eye. The kettle ticked as it cooled. Outside, somewhere below, a car door closed and a dog barked and the city went on being the city, indifferent to the small rearrangements that happened in studios above print shops.

"The will," Maren said.

"Yes," Margot said. "The will. He had been to see Judge Pembry. I do not say this lightly. The Judge is not a man one visits for coffee. Cyrus sat in that leather room on the second floor of the courthouse and he told the Judge what he intended, and the Judge, who has known the family since before Vera was born, who was at their wedding, who has signed more of their documents than I care to count, the Judge listened and the Judge did not blink. The Judge said he would draw something up. The Judge said bring me the names. The Judge said come back on Monday."

She crossed to a low bureau against the far wall, a piece of dark wood that had clearly been in her family for a long time. She opened a drawer and took out a photograph in a silver frame, the kind of frame that has a small easel back. She set it on the counter between them, the photograph facing Maren.

"That was taken in the spring," she said. "At the Judge's birthday. You can see Cyrus in the back, beside the railing. The Judge is in the center, the white hair, the cuffs. Cyrus looks happy. That is not a word people use about him often enough. He was happy that afternoon. He had decided."

Maren looked at the photograph. The Judge was a heavyset man with a careful face, the kind of face that gives nothing away in court and even less away at a birthday. Cyrus was slight beside him. There was a woman between them whose face Maren could not quite see. There were glasses raised. There was the suggestion of a toast. The silver frame was warm from the drawer.

"Who is in the will," Maren said. "The new will. The one the Judge was drawing up."

Margot looked at her. The smooth, polished face did not change, but something behind it shifted, the way a curtain shifts behind a window when the wind changes direction.

"Me," she said. "Primary heir. To the art collection. All of it. The Renoir, the two early Hockneys he would never let anyone photograph, the small Goya he bought at auction and told no one about, the drawings, the studies, the boxes of correspondence he kept in the back of the closet at the office. All of it. To me. Because he said, and I am quoting, because Vera would not know what to do with them. Because she would put them in a room and close the door and forget them. Because they are mine in any case, Margot. They have been mine for years. I have only been waiting for him to admit it."

She smiled again. The practiced smile. The face itself.

"He did not get to sign it," Maren said.

"He did not get to sign it," Margot agreed. "The Judge tells me the unsigned draft is still in his safe. The Judge tells me he does not know what to do with an unsigned draft that names a woman who is not the wife. The Judge tells me he has been losing sleep. The Judge is a man who has never lost sleep over a document in his life."

She lifted her teacup. This time she drank. The cup made a small sound against her lip, and she set it down with a quiet click of porcelain on the counter.

"And so," she said, "here we are."

Margot rose from the counter stool and crossed to the cabinet against the far wall. Her movement was unhurried, almost ceremonial, the way she had crossed every threshold Maren had ever seen her cross, as though the rooms themselves were audience to her entrance and she owed each one the dignity of a deliberate walk. The hem of her linen dress whispered against her calves. The pearl studs at her ears caught the gray light from the window above the sink and threw two small coins of brightness onto the side of her neck.

"You have not eaten," she said without turning around. "There is bread. There is butter. There are those little radishes Cyrus liked, the French ones with the green tops. I bought them yesterday at the market on the square. I will put them out. You will eat something. We will not have you fainting in my kitchen over a piece of paper that may not be signed by morning."

She opened the cabinet. From the second shelf she lifted a small mahogany box, no larger than a cigar box, its surface darkened by age and the oils of many hands. The brass clasp had been polished to a dull shine. She carried it back to the counter and set it down between them with the careful precision of a jeweler laying out stones.

"These," she said, "are not what you think they are."

Maren said nothing.

"These are not, for instance, evidence of anything illegal. They are not love letters in disguise. They are not coded messages between conspirators. They are photographs. Three of them. They were taken at a fundraiser for a state senate candidate whose name I will not trouble you to remember, because the man is dead now and the campaign was a disaster and the only thing of consequence that occurred that evening was that Cyrus Caldicott, at the age of twenty-four, stood in a ballroom at the Parker House in Boston and allowed himself to be photographed with two men who would, between them, shape the next forty years of his professional and personal life."

She unclasped the box. The brass hinge made a small sound, almost a syllable. Inside, nested in a velvet lining the color of dried blood, lay three photographs, each roughly five by seven, their edges softened by time, their corners rounded by years of being slid in and out of the box and passed from hand to hand.

Margot lifted the first one and held it up for Maren to see.

The ballroom was gilded. That was the first thing. Gilded ceilings, gilded sconces, the soft smeared glow of chandeliers that had been turned down to accommodate the photographer's flash. Tables in the background held half-drunk glasses of wine, programs folded into fans, plates of canapés no one had finished. The men wore tuxedos with the stiff, slightly proud posture of men who did not wear tuxedos often and wished the world to know it. The women wore sequins and shoulders.

Cyrus stood near the center of the frame. He was twenty-four. Maren had never seen him at twenty-four. The face in the photograph was the face she knew, but the body around it was not. The jaw was sharper, the cheekbones higher, the shoulders narrower, as though the years had thickened him into the man he became. His hair was darker then, almost black, combed back from his forehead in a way that would have looked theatrical on a man of fifty but looked, at twenty-four, merely certain of itself. He wore a tuxedo that fit him too well. He was smiling. The smile was the smile she had seen at the funeral, the smile of a man who knew exactly how his face was meant to be read, but at twenty-four it had not yet hardened into an instrument. It was still, beneath the polish, almost shy.

"This one I keep because he looked like that," Margot said. "Only once. I have known him forty-six years. He looked like that only once. Look at his hands. You can see the hands of a man who has not yet decided what they will do. By thirty they will have decided. By forty they will be the hands of a man who signs things and never wonders what he has signed. But here. Look."

She set the first photograph aside, face up on the counter, and lifted the second.

"The fundraiser," she said. "The candidate was a man named Wendell Pryce. District attorney of Suffolk County at the time, running for the state senate on a platform of, I believe, prisons and prayer. He won the primary. He lost the general. Within eighteen months he was dead of a heart attack in a restaurant in the North End. None of this matters. What matters is who came to his fundraiser, and who wanted to be seen coming to his fundraiser, and who Cyrus stood beside while the camera clicked."

Maren leaned forward. The second photograph was taken from a slightly different angle, perhaps ten minutes later. The chandeliers had not been touched, but the crowd behind had shifted, and a bandstand was now visible in the upper left corner, a man adjusting a microphone. Cyrus was still in the frame. Beside him, on his left, stood a younger man Maren did not at first recognize, and then did, with the slow cold certainty of a key turning in a lock she had not known was there.

The man on Cyrus's left was Oscar Pembry. But not the Oscar Pembry she had seen behind the bench at the courthouse, not the Oscar Pembry who had presided over the matter of the trust with the gray, judicial patience of a man performing a duty he found beneath him. This Oscar Pembry was perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine. His hair was thick and brown, combed to one side in the fashion of the time. He wore a tuxedo that fit him less well than Cyrus's, the shoulders a fraction too wide, the trousers breaking slightly at the ankle. He was smiling too, but his smile was the smile of a man who is smiling because the camera is pointed at him and because he has been taught, early, that cameras should not be wasted. He had one arm around Cyrus's shoulders. Cyrus had one arm around his. The gesture was collegiate, brotherly, the easy physical vocabulary of two young men who had recently been on the same side of something and were not yet tired of the camaraderie it produced.

He was, Maren understood, then a young assistant state's attorney. The caption beneath the photograph in the box, written in a hand she did not recognize, in violet ink that had faded to a dusty lavender, read simply: Oscar Pembry, as a, Suffolk County, '87.

"The Judge was twenty-nine in this photograph," Margot said. "Cyrus was twenty-four. They had known each other, I believe, for two years at this point. Cyrus had just finished at the law school. The Judge had been at the DA's office for less than a year. They were, in the parlance of the time, on the make. They were both on the make."

She did not lift the third photograph. She rested her fingertips on the edge of the box and looked at Maren across the mahogany and the velvet and the years.

"Before I show you the third one," she said, "I want you to understand what I am about to tell you. I am not going to tell you who the man in the third photograph is. I am going to let you look at it for as long as you need. And then I am going to ask you a question. And you are going to answer it honestly, because you are Maren Holloway and you have never in your life told me a dishonest answer, not even once, not even when the honest one would have served you better. I have known you for nineteen years. I have watched you lie to other people. I have never watched you lie to me. Do not begin now."

Maren nodded.

Margot lifted the third photograph.

The ballroom again. The same chandeliers, the same gilded ceiling, the same smear of light across the marble floor. But this photograph was taken lower, almost at table height, and the composition was different. The three men were arranged in a triangle. Cyrus stood on the left. Oscar Pembry stood on the right. And in the center, seated in a wheelchair, was a man Maren had never seen before.

He was older than the other two. Perhaps fifty. Perhaps fifty-five. He was not large, but he had the dense, compacted look of a man who had once been larger and had shrunk into a shape the chair could hold. His hair was iron gray, cropped close. His face was the kind of face that looked as though it had been built to hold expression, the bones high and clear, the mouth wide, the eyes set deep enough to give whatever they looked at the impression of being weighed. He wore a dinner jacket. The bow tie was slightly askew, as though someone had tied it for him and done it imperfectly, and he had not bothered to correct it. His hands rested on the arms of the wheelchair. The hands were thick, the knuckles swollen, the fingers slightly curled. He was smiling, but the smile was different from the smiles of the two young men on either side of him. It was not the smile of a man performing. It was the smile of a man permitting.

Cyrus had one hand on the back of the wheelchair. Oscar Pembry had one hand on the man's shoulder. Both of them leaned inward, slightly, the way one leans inward toward a fire.

"Take your time," Margot said.

Maren looked. The man in the wheelchair had a face she did not recognize. The face was not famous to her. It was not, as far as she could tell, the face of any public man she had ever seen in the papers or on the evening news. It was simply a face, set in a body that had failed it, photographed in a ballroom at the Parker House in 1987, with two young men on either side of him whose careers had not yet begun and whose names she was only now beginning to understand.

She did not recognize him.

"I don't know who that is," she said.

"No," Margot said. "You don't."

She set the third photograph down beside the first two. The three of them lay on the counter now, face up, side by side, like three windows into a single evening that had happened forty years ago and had not, Maren understood, entirely ended.

Margot closed the lid of the mahogany box. The brass clasp clicked shut.

"Now," she said. "The question. When you went to see Cyrus in his office last Tuesday, before any of this, before the will, before the Judge, before any of it. Did he say anything to you about a man named Luca Castellan?"

The name meant nothing to Maren. It meant nothing to her in the way that a door means nothing to you when you have never seen the room behind it. She shook her head.

"He did not mention that name."

Margot looked at her for a long time. The smooth face did not change. The curtain behind the window did not move. The teacup on the counter had gone cold. The radishes sat on their plate, untouched, their green tops curling at the edges.

"Then we will start there," she said. "We will start with the man in the wheelchair. And you will need to eat something before we do, because what I am about to tell you is not a small thing, and I will not have you faint on my floor."

She rose, opened the refrigerator, and took out the butter. The kitchen filled with the small domestic sounds of a woman laying out food for someone she intended to keep in the room for some time. The clock above the stove ticked. The light through the window above the sink had shifted from gray to the thin gold of late afternoon, and the three photographs lay on the counter between them, waiting, as they had waited for forty years, to be read.