A Pinchbeck Bride (8 page)
Authors: Stephen Anable
Tags: #FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General
Rudy Schmitz called a meeting of the Mingo House board of trustees “in light of the tragedy about poor Nadia Gulbenkian,” as he put it in his slightly saccharine e-mail. He scheduled the meeting at Mingo House at eight in the morning, instead of at the customary evening hour. He came bearing gifts, éclairs, Neapolitans, and biscotti from a bakery in the North End. Jon Kim was helping him serve—using the raspberry-pink, gilt-edged Mingo family china.
“Aren’t these, well, museum pieces?” Sam Ahearn wondered.
Rudy ignored him. “There’s a superb pastry shop in Portofino that I love, but this bakery on Hanover Street is a close second.” When Rudy had said the word “love,” he had gazed pointedly at Jon Kim, whose custom-tailored suits seemed to be getting tighter and sexier.
“How is poor Nadia?” Sam Ahearn asked Rudy.
“She’s holding her own.” Rudy bit into an éclair and consumed a draught of coffee from one of the brittle teacups. “She seems to be in stable but critical condition. So we can only pray.”
I almost asked Rudy how to spell that last verb.
“It could go either way.” Jon Kim opened his Darth Vader-black laptop. “I spoke to my cousin. He’s a neurosurgeon in New York. He said she could remain comatose for…weeks.”
Sam Ahearn, his bald pate glowing, was scorning the coffee and pastries. “Nadia is so passionate about this place, about everything. Do you know she was instrumental in moving that lighthouse down in Brewster, when it was threatened by erosion? She used her connections at
National Geographic
to get them to do an article about it, and then she helped raise funds to move the thing. And she was pressuring the Turkish government to acknowledge the Armenian genocide—”
“Yes, yes, we all have our Nadia stories.” Rudy crumpled the paper doily that had escorted the éclair to his plate. “She is greatly missed. There is only one Nadia. But it is our duty to carry on as thoroughly and enthusiastically as she would have.”
“Are we bound to elect an interim trustee?” Sam Ahearn asked.
“We are not,” Rudy stated. “We are, however, certainly in a kind of limbo when it comes to the future of Mingo House. Unsure, literally, about the roof over our heads, and of the funds to sustain us. I think this is a time to take stock. To do an accounting of what we have in our collection.” He seemed to nod toward the alleged Millet of the peasants in their wooden shoes in the autumnal field. “We need our collection appraised, from top to bottom. We need to close up shop, temporarily, and sort through our treasures.”
“For what purpose?” asked Sam Ahearn.
“Simply to know where we stand.”
“Are you proposing bringing Sotheby’s in?” Sam asked Rudy.
“Absolutely not. Nothing as definitive or expensive as that. We can use a fellow we’ve worked with in the past. He’s very qualified but a lot less brutal on the wallet. Bryce Rossi.”
I could now ask a question I’d been pondering: “Who is this guy?”
“Bryce Rossi, Ph.D., is a superb collector who specializes in Italian art. He’s an expert on the nineteenth-century painters of classical subjects that Corinth One collected. He’s worked with museums in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Denver. He’s erudite, charming, and reasonably priced.”
And up to his neck in Genevieve Courson’s life, and, possibly, her death, I almost blurted.
“You’re not proposing we sell anything from the Mingo House collection?” Sam Ahearn tilted forward, as if about to rise from his metal chair and physically challenge Rudy. “Because I can’t imagine Nadia permitting something like that. Nor would I.”
“We are simply taking stock.” Rudy closed an empty pastry box and began winding the broken bakery string around his slender fingers, making a web or cat’s cradle.
Jon Kim, tapping away on his laptop, told the group, “Getting an estimate, an appraisal, of what we have in the collection could help us, should we wish to apply for a loan or make more informed decisions in the future.” When Jon stroked his hair, which he was letting grow longer, I noticed that he had jettisoned his wedding ring. Perhaps he had been boiling Rudy’s egg—and then some—when I’d called.
“How would the police feel about this?” When I asked the question, both Rudy and Jon Kim blanched, as though I’d singled them out. “I mean, this was a crime scene, a murder did occur here.”
“Mark, the police swept the whole place for clues. Do you realize they even discovered a stay from one of Clara Mingo’s corsets wedged behind the wainscoting in the pantry? And a planchete she used in her séances, in a coal scuttle in the basement? We immediately catalogued both. Because we want a total record of everything here…Do you know that when the National Trust restored Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s house in Surrey, they even saved the cigarette ends from the fireplace? We’re every bit as meticulous.”
“How much will this appraisal cost?” Sam asked.
Jon Kim answered. “Bryce Rossi agreed to go through the entire house and give us a piece-by-piece estimate for five-hundred dollars.”
“That’s extraordinarily cheap, isn’t it?” Sam said.
“We are always cognizant of the bottom line,” Rudy said. “And Bryce Rossi has special feelings for Mingo House.”
That I already knew. Questions swarmed through my brain about Rudy Schmitz’s motives and his surprise connection to Bryce Rossi. Rudy could have met Bryce through Genevieve, at Mingo House, when Bryce called on her to explore the thrift shops. Bryce was mourning the baby he’d supposedly fathered but was also obsessed by the Mingo legend of the royal monstrance of King Charles I. But if Rudy knew Bryce beyond the brownstone walls of Mingo House, had he known Genevieve Courson as well?
As Rudy licked the éclair frosting from his slender, nicotine-stained fingers, I wondered, could Genevieve have been strangled because she knew something that jeopardized Bryce—or Rudy? And Jon Kim was a bigger player, in all senses of the word, than I’d first gauged. Was he taking minutes on his laptop? That had been Nadia’s duty.
We discussed the fundraiser in August. The invitations had already gone out. Of special interest were the moneyed people we could recruit as trustees, who’d bring their wallets, contacts, and enthusiasm to the cause. “We need fresh blood, a massive transfusion,” Rudy said. “And I’m pleased to report that Dorothea Jakes has agreed to fund the restoration of Clara Mingo’s harp. It will be ready in time for the party, to provide music. And I’ve found a young student who’s a musical prodigy who will be playing it.”
As the meeting began breaking up, the conversation veered off into chit-chat about the exceptionally rainy summer, the Red Sox pitching, and the discovery of mosquitoes bearing West Nile virus in Brookline. (Could Nadia be sick with West Nile virus? No, they would have diagnosed that by now.) The other trustees left for their workday worlds, but my instinct suggested I linger to thank Rudy for not betraying my confidence that Nadia had been stricken where I was performing. “Rudy, thanks for keeping mum about the particulars about Nadia. Being at the Soong Dynasty and so on.”
“Certainly.” Rudy was still peeved about my reluctance to subscribe to his notion that Mingo House was not sustainable.
He scurried to the kitchen, laden with china. I trailed along. Jon Kim was rinsing dishes in the sink, as, held hostage by his sudsy hands, he was forced to submit to Rudy’s kissing his nape. Then Jon got aggressive, nibbling the older man’s mouth with erotic hunger.
“You’ll make me drop the china.”
“Screw the china.”
“Don’t you dare. I’m the jealous type, buddy.”
They knew I was watching them; it stoked their libidos. Either Jon Kim had been lying before, or their relationship had evolved from platonic to intimate since our clandestine chat on Beacon Hill. Rudy allowed his stack of china to clatter onto the counter with a racket that would have made most curators cringe.
“I think that what you’re proposing makes absolute sense.” I needed all of my Stanislavski training to sound sincere. “We can’t go forward without knowing where we are. I’m pretty much of a novice at all of this, Rudy. I’ve always approached history from an academic or populist point of view.” Then I dared to mention her: “Sometimes I think I know less than Genevieve.”
Would he rise to the bait and comment on her?…No.
Jon Kim dried his hands on a scroll of paper towel. “It makes sense to create a database of the collection. To put it all online. I promised I’d help Rudy with the grunt work.”
“Hey, count me in.”
But who were these people, the once celebrated and now extinct Mingoes? Arms dealers and spiritualists, and perhaps regicides and thieves of royal silver. Both Genevieve Courson and Bryce Rossi had researched their stories and become ensnared in the history.
They were:
Corinth Hollis Mingo (Corinth One): (1820–1895)
Clara Whicher Mingo: (1823–1904)
Corinth Hollis Mingo II (Corinth Two): (1863–1954)
Aginesse Whicher Mingo, Alva Whicher Mingo, Araminta Whicher Mingo: (1861–1874)
They had risen fast and fallen gradually, as nouveau-riche war profiteers who had played a major role in extinguishing the Confederacy but who had never been embraced by Boston’s bluebloods.
Their family papers, such as they were, were kept in Corinth One’s library on the third floor of Mingo House. Corinth Two had supposedly burnt his parents’ diaries and much of their correspondence, an odd gesture from one of Boston’s pioneer preservationists, who had enabled his home to be reborn as a museum and had endowed it generously by the standards of his time.
When Dorothea Jakes showed me the papers, I was stunned. They were crammed into a dented, Hoover-era filing cabinet, a mass of manila folders and dog-eared envelopes, stuck here and there with scotch tape and paperclips, soiled with raspberry jam, coffee stains, and worse. “Who filed these? Genghis Khan?”
“They’re in much better shape than before Genevieve got to them. Everything was all mixed together, the bills and checks and newspaper clippings. And those bugs that eat paper. Silverfish? They were having a grand time. Rudy told her to just…toss some of them.” She sympathized, I could tell. “But Genevieve ignored him, I think.”
The files transported me to a Boston that was at once decorous yet raw, lit by gaslight, a warren of cobblestone streets thick with carriages and begging urchins, with men with wiry mutton chop whiskers and women in jet mourning jewelry (the Civil War was still a gangrenous wound in the nation’s soul). In photographs, Corinth One was a stern-looking man, with agate-bright eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles and the beard of an Amish patriarch. He had a great, fleshy mole next to his nose and a belly that strained his elaborate vest. Clara’s face was smooth and broad, with not a bit of distinction or hauteur; she could have been a mill girl or a farm wife, running a loom or coaxing a frozen pump. The doomed triplets—Aginesse, Alva, and Araminta—had been flattered by the artist who had done their posthumous portrait. They were frankly homely, with buck teeth and prominent chins. Corinth Two “broke the mold” by being tall and handsome, with a look eventually appropriated by Leyendecker for the “Arrow collar man.” He was pictured by the papier-mâché boulders of photographers’ studios; gloating over a bison he had shot out west; strolling aboard the pre-torpedo
Lusitania
. He was photographed with a bland-faced woman an inscription revealed was Isabella Stewart Gardner, and, in his last and only color photo, driving a friend’s aqua Packard. According to his obituary, he died of chicken pox during hurricane Carol on August 31, 1954. I could imagine him expiring, ending the Mingo line, while the storm outside rinsed his windowpanes.
Most of the files contained bills, for paraffin and corn starch, washboards and spats, laxatives and brandy, but Corinth Two had also left a very brief “memoir,” written in his sprawling hand, apparently when he was justifying to his lawyers why he was establishing his house-museum.
I am often asked about my memories of my family, about what it was like to grow up in the household of the patriot Corinth Hollis Mingo and the medium, Clara Whicher Mingo, in an age that seems irrevocably lost, as vanished as the songs of Minoan shepherds. The most vivid presence in this house were my sisters—Aginesse, Alva, and Araminta. Though their portrait—done by Phoebe Choate Whitman, the celebrated painter of still life and the deceased—captures their physical features, it fails utterly in conveying their personalities. Their pink, sad countenances, the lace and velvet of their dresses, the lamb doll and their prim button shoes show nothing of their energy, their spirit, their raucousness as they thundered through the house—running, shouting, their flaxen hair streaming behind them, clamoring up the stairs, sliding down the banisters, pelting each other with cake and coal, shooting marbles beneath the feet of passers-by on Beacon Street. They once constructed a small but potent bomb out of a jar, a rag, and some kerosene, which they threw beneath the horses pulling the carriage of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
In all of their exploits, Alva and Araminta followed the lead of Aginesse, except when Alva played a particularly crude trick on poor, patient Rocket, our white-and-tan mutt, by tying to his tail a sleigh bell nearly big as a baseball, terrifying the animal so thoroughly that he stayed whimpering under Father’s bed for two whole days. Aginesse was apt to use me as the butt of her temper, which could be ferocious. On one occasion she struck me in the temple with a musket our ancestor, Nathan Coit Mingo, had carried at the Battle of Bunker Hill. This raised a terrible lump on my skull, enough to interest Casper Newhall, of Harvard Medical School, the great debunker of phrenologists, who commented, jokingly, that perhaps my sister had permanently altered my character.
Alva was the only one of my sisters who cared at all for reading, and I can see her now, although she has lain in her grave at Forest Hills Cemetery nearly eighty years, holding a volume of Grimm’s fairy tales and biting, alternately, her lip and a black whip of licorice, lost in the world of cursed castles, glass mountains, and magical gnomes. She also enjoyed spinning her small wooden top or teasing Harry, the chimney sweep’s son. Once, she plunged fully clothed into the pond the swan boats ply, ruining a new pinafore and pair of shoes. (She was yearning to explore the islet that tempts all children, located in the lagoon in the Public Garden nearest Beacon Street.)
Araminta was the sole sister who appreciated the standard passions of little girls of that day: dolls, miniature tea sets, ribbons, and the like. She cherished her stuffed lamb and the ring Father brought her from New York set with a small garnet that she said glowed like Rocket’s eyes in the dark.
My mother, the link between this existence and the next, was, frankly, a somewhat remote presence. She felt the weight of the world on her frail shoulders, vis-à-vis our family’s role in the recent war. She felt responsible, somehow, for every bullet fired, for every cannonball discharged, whether cast in our factories or not. Reading the casualty lists, she would crumple to the floor upon seeing the name of a friend or acquaintance, and, upon being revived, retreat to her room for hours of prayer and meditation. At these times she developed the curious habit of crying and kissing her own hands. This, she would do repeatedly, especially after the deepest tragedy that was to come our way in 1874.
Then, after the war, she began in earnest her business of being a spirit guide. Business, I say, meaning hers was a serious and solemn undertaking, done with dedication and perseverance but involving no commercial exchange whatsoever. She charged not one cent for her services but gave as would a saint or prophet. My mother was not a conventionally beautiful woman, being plain but with a high patrician forehead, but she possessed the loveliest hands I have ever beheld. And I have met the great beauties of her day and mine: Lola Montez, Otero, Mary Pickford. Father commissioned sculptures of her hands, in whitest Cararra marble, and sculptures of my sisters’ hands as well.
My sisters regarded my mother’s work with the Other World as a joke, as a kind of parlor game. “Mother is summoning,” they would say, or, actually, Aginesse would say, she was ever the ringleader, with her face smudged with dirt, peppermint, or chocolate pudding. Then, after a count of three (not with numbers but with their names: “Aginesse, Alva, Araminta!”), they would shriek in unison at the top of their lungs, a shrill cry that went speeding through our house. The girls would then dissolve in laughter, rolling on the floor in virtual fits, until Polly, the maid, came scolding in desperation, or Father would tell us, half in jest, “Be quiet, girls. You’ll frighten away the ghosts. Someday, because of you, we may miss our chance to meet Julius Caesar.” And my sisters would convulse still further, but with their hands clamped firmly across their mouths so that their glee became a quiet and private thing.
For us, paradoxically, Father was the more kind and friendly figure in the family, feared and respected though he was in the arenas of commerce and war. He would let us tug on his beard and try on his best hats and shoes. Father liked roast beef, swimming in strong currents, the Old Testament, the classics in Latin, blizzards, lawn tennis, bread pudding, and a cologne with a bracing fragrance, supposedly once used by Napoleon. On the beach at Nahant, he would join us in hunting for gaudy pebbles, branches of driftwood, and, once, lumps of ambergris. He laughed uproariously, when, at a party for one of the austere Homans girls, Aginesse toppled the lemonade well and Alva spoilt half the cake by allowing a feral cat to lick it. Father could cut silhouettes, Valentines, dragons, and monsters from sheets of paper, teach Rocket to dance on his hind legs, juggle a cluster of India rubber balls, and “find” a gold piece “hidden” in our ears. He told wonderful tales about Barnabas Mingo, the first of our family to come to these shores from Norfolk, England, in 1657.
It is said Barnabas played a role in Oliver Cromwell’s revolution, not, it should be emphasized, in the military overthrow of the Crown, but in maintaining order in its aftermath, and, by doing this, limiting further bloodshed. It is said he was given certain state silver and charged with its safekeeping for the duration of his earthly life. It was agreed upon, even by his enemies, that he kept this pledge, this oath, religiously.
Our lives changed forever the day my sisters’ ended. It was October 1874, one of those strange days of Indian summer that bring bright foliage and a quasi-tropical torpor, as though August had been resurrected in all of its melancholy and languor. We had spent the weekend at Nahant, and Father had enjoyed swimming at Forty Steps, among the picturesque crags and crashing breakers. Mother abhorred the sea, it being, she maintained, “too vast and unmanageable, like the sin and violence of mankind.” She had warned the girls not to be reckless and frequent the chowder house at Bass Point, which she loathed but they loved, playing pranks and doing deviltry, stealing, in one afternoon, a bag of peanuts, a straw monkey, three raw oysters, and a tin whistle. There, my sisters came into contact with people from what Mother called “the venal classes,” referring not to their deprivation of money but to their deprivation of character. There were in the town that weekend a contingent of naval men who caused a certain amount of undue rowdiness, quarreling with a streetcar conductor and disturbing the peace by trampling the topiary at the Orcutt estate.
We returned home on Sunday, having closed the Nahant house for the winter. It was on Monday morning that Mother received a telegram that Percival Hoskins, aged 19, had drowned rowing on the Hudson at Tappan Zee. He was a fine, manly, broad-shouldered fellow who excelled at skeet shooting and mimicking bird calls. He could, invariably, summon a passenger pigeon or wren by using only his breath, teeth, and fingers.
Percival’s mother was a highly strung woman, the wife of the eminent manufacturer of pianos, and a neighbor of ours in the Back Bay, so she requested Mother’s services immediately, and Mother rushed to aid her. In the turmoil, our household centered on the Hoskins’ grief, as, gradually, like humidity steadily and stealthily clotting the air, my sisters sickened. By Tuesday morning, my youngest sister, Araminta, felt feverish, followed by Alva, and then, Aginesse, who threw Alva’s wooden top and kicked at Rocket at the suggestion that she take to bed.
Dr. Hadley Austin was summoned as the girls’ temperatures crept higher and they slept more, moaning softly, their golden hair damp and disheveled on the heaped up pillows. That night, the weather changed, as cold superseded the warmth we had so welcomed. Over and over, Mother and the Hoskins kept trying to rouse Percival Hoskins’ shade but he remained elusive, to the distress of everyone. Father was away on business in Montreal, occupied with some sort of contract involving a foundry or factory, and, later, delayed by the washout of the railroad bridge at Colchester.
The girls rallied Wednesday morning, then, that afternoon, began their precipitous decline. Mother and the physicians kept vigil at their bedside. I slept dreamlessly, fitfully, until I awoke when the night was rent by a shrill cry—my sisters, I first thought, shrieking to tease Mother during one of her séances. Tragically, I was half-right. It was Mother’s cry when the doctors set aside their stethoscopes and told her my sisters were dead.
It was six months afterward that Mother resumed her career as a medium. Eventually, she the made the mistake of conversing with the ghost of the esteemed clergyman, Reverend Asa Lawrence Fowle. This generated an outcry that resulted in our family being ostracized in both Boston and Nahant. As our calling card tray gathered nothing but dust, Mother brooded in her room, kissing the marble likenesses of my sisters’ dead hands and kissing her own living ones. Once, she took an overdose of morphine, accidentally, Father insisted, but alarming nonetheless.
Mother never broached the Spirit World again, in either séance or conversation. When I mentioned my sisters as surely dwelling in Heaven—which I pictured as a celestial Jerusalem, of golden adobe somewhat like a Zuni pueblo—she seized a ruler and thrashed my hand until we both broke into hot and prodigious tears. “It is this house!” she cried. “Its walls contain pestilence. They are built of blood and gunpowder!”
Father spent his remaining years in the library. That winter, the house in Nahant burnt, stuck by lightning during a freakish storm. The story circulated that the fire’s cause was arson, set by a groom who was paid by Mother. This is fiction, balderdash, rot.
Sometimes, on winter nights such as this, when the sleet taps its needles upon the windows and the wind howls down the chimney in the voice of a banshee cursing my very hearth, I walk through the hall to Mother’s bedroom to hold those marble hands in mine—the closest I can get to my dear lost family, now melded into Heaven, Hell, or Nothingness.
