The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (21 page)

Behind him someone called out, “David, it’s your shot.”

“Look, Jane, do what you have to do, but leave me out of it,” he said. “She’s already mad at me about Mikki and the baby. I don’t want to rock the boat anymore.”

“David, this is important,” I told him. “For all we know, she could be doing this just to see if you still are interested in her. To make sure that your new family isn’t going to take up all your attention.”

“Well, honestly,” he said, “they
are
taking all my attention.
I can’t really talk now. I’ve got to get off the phone. You just do what you want to do, Jane. That always works out best anyway.”

With David’s hasty goodbye, the phone went dead. I had no better idea of what I should do than before I called him.

I might have fretted over the problem even more than I did, but other life dilemmas began to take over. I was having some genuine trouble with my career.

A rising interest rate didn’t help the mortgage market, of course. And my contacts among the people of the club having been curtailed, I found myself suddenly off the realty fast track. I probably could have weathered the upheaval—I’d seen tough times in my career before. But somehow I no longer cared all that much about it.

My colleagues probably said that I’d lost my edge. I think a better description is to say that I had lost my killer instinct. I realized that what had really made me so successful was pushing the margin. Getting the buyer to go for just a little bit more, getting the seller to offer that minuscule extra. It was that small percentage that set me above the rest. And I had loved doing it. I had loved how it made me feel.

I just didn’t feel that way anymore. I got no thrill out of the push. Now I worried about the buyer’s finances. I worried about the seller’s equity. I was up front and honest with both. I was sure I was doing good. Such frankness, however, made me the least liked agent at my brokerage. My old clients didn’t want me and new clients thought they could do better.

Real estate agents don’t get fired. At least they don’t in independent agencies like the one the Brandts owned. But if you don’t generate sales, you don’t make money for the agency. And if you don’t make money for the agency, why should they waste
their office space on you when someone else could make them money? Millie and Frank were very patient, I think. They were grateful to me for their entrance into the club, but since Tookie and Joel had taken them under their wing, socially, they didn’t really need me at all. Still, they were loyal. They believed the change in my sales performance was only temporary, having to do with a post-divorce malaise.

Still, as weeks turned into months, winter turned into spring, and I was still not selling, listing or even showing, they became concerned. But there was that big Victorian on a prime piece of property on the edge of Park Square. Before Christmas I’d convinced Barb Jarman to sell the place and relocate her ancient mother-in-law into assisted living.

I called upon old friends to facilitate the paperwork to get the old place rezoned as multifamily. And I’d lined up a developer to turn the corner into twenty high-end condos to be listed for seven hundred thousand per.

Such a sweet sale, lucrative with a capital
L.

The commission would have been close to two million dollars to the brokerage. Most of that would have been mine, but nearly a million would go to Frank and Millie. That’s a lot more than coffee cash. And the deal was as secure as money in the bank.

That is until I went to talk to old Mrs. Jarman. The faded widow was eighty-one, wheelchair-bound, and suffered occasional bouts of dementia. Part of my agreement with Barb was that I find her a nice little place where she’d have round-the-clock care and a little garden to sit in and enjoy the sunshine.

As a four-point score on my doing good tally, I took this part of the deal as seriously as the more profitable end. I did my homework, which wasn’t that difficult. I talked to some of the professionals at Bluebonnet Assisted Living when I went
to visit Chester. They gave me names and phone numbers of people in the industry, and ultimately an introduction to a wonderful new community being built for seniors. I checked the place out completely and was very excited when I discussed it with Barb, who became completely sold on the idea.

Enthusiastically, I went to see Mrs. Jarman. Barb had told me that, as far as the condo project was concerned, the fewer details her mother-in-law had to understand the better. That made sense. The picturesque old house had been her home for a long time. Families no longer wanted that kind of floorplan, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be fond of the place and sad to see it go.

So I loaded up my portfolio with big glossy photographs of the little garden home, complete with shady bench and bright pink bougainvillea, and went to see her.

She met with me in her drawing room, both were pristine and quaint. As an antique lover I was practically sighing aloud over the beautiful old chairs, the fainting couch, the beaded lampshades. The portrait over the mantel was of a portly gentleman with a thick, curling mustache, who could have been Grover Cleveland, but I wasn’t positive.

We sat at a little parlor table as the tiny woman served me English tea from a set of Belleek porcelain decorated with little yellow butterflies. She listened intently as I told her all about the place I’d found, and she even
oohed
and
aahed
appropriately when I brought out the photos. I thought she might take some convincing. I was wrong about that. She may have lived a lot of years, but she was the kind of person open to change and new experiences.

“Oh, it all sounds lovely, lovely, dear,” she assured me.

“I do think you’ll like it, Mrs. Jarman,” I said.

“Oh, call me Miss Heloise, everybody does.”

She was a tiny, sprightly little lady with features worn enough to be ancient yet small enough to be a child’s. Her bright eyes looked out on the world with an excitement and anticipation that belied her ill health and dependent situation.

I suppose my relationship with Chester had made me more accustomed to older people. I was genuinely enjoying my afternoon with her and had to stop and remind myself a couple of times that this was not a coffee klatch. I was here on business.

Still, Miss Heloise elicited from me a genuine regard and concern for her ultimate welfare.

“I hope you are not anxious about the move,” I said.

“Oh, not at all,” she assured me. “How exciting at my age to be going into a new home.”

Her attitude was delightful, hopeful, refreshing.

“I suppose you’ve lived here in this house a long time,” I said.

She giggled like a girl. “I’ve always lived here,” she said. “I was born in the front bedroom.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “My grandfather built this house.” She indicated the Grover Cleveland guy in the portrait. “He was the last governor, you know.”

I frowned. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. The last governor, as in the governor before the current one, was half this woman’s age and had left office to take a seat in the U.S. Senate. I thought perhaps that this was an example of old-age confusion.

“What do you mean, the
last
governor?” I asked.

“Oh,” she answered. “He was the last of the Hattenbachers to go into politics.”

“Hattenbacher?”

The name was well-known, synonymous with state history.
The family had been one of the first to settle in the territory. A Hattenbacher had written the state constitution, and a half-dozen members of the family had pursued elected office.

“You’re related to
those
Hattenbachers?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’m one of the last. We used to be thick upon the ground in this state, but now there are not enough of us to make a table of bridge. My father was the rector at Saint Michael’s and later head of the college. I was his only daughter, the former Heloise Hattenbacher.”

Her bright eyes widened and she giggled delightedly.

“My goodness! I haven’t said that name in a very long time.” She shook her head. “I always thought it was a very big name for a rather little person. Don’t you think so?”

Her humor was infectious. I couldn’t help smiling at her.

“It’s long, but has very nice alliteration.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“So, this man was governor,” I said.

She nodded. “He served one term and wasn’t reelected. He was a fair and honest fellow, they tell me. Which made him an enemy to both the railroad barons and the Grangers.”

Miss Heloise gave me a brief explanation of the local political intrigues of the late nineteenth century.

“So, he left political circles and came to the city to start his life over,” she said. “He donated the family home near the Capitol to be the Governor’s Mansion. Times were hard back then and he thought it was a great location for the chief executive to live.” She leaned forward and lowered her tone slightly as if revealing a secret. “My father once said that the governor knew there were men who could have afforded to buy that house, but he didn’t want a one of them living that close to the seat of power.”

I laughed.

“Either way, it was a fine, good thing our family did for the state,” she said.

“It certainly was,” I agreed.

“I don’t think he ever regretted it,” Miss Heloise said. “But he surely did miss the place. This house is an exact replica of that one. Built with the same materials from the same plans.”

“Really?” I glanced around, surprised.

She nodded. “Of course, you couldn’t tell it now,” she said. “They’ve done so many updates and renovations on the Governor’s Mansion, it’s hardly recognizable.”

She was right. David and I had been there to a campaign dinner. It resembled nothing more than an elaborately furnished brick box. It had none of the grace and charm of Miss Heloise’s old Victorian.

“The Governor’s Mansion originally looked like this?”

She nodded. “He had it duplicated to the last detail and we’ve always kept it just that way.”

I looked around the room with the strange sense of viewing history.

“And you loved it so much you never left?”

Miss Heloise shook her head. “It was no grand decision,” she assured me. “Circumstances just turned out that way. I stayed home until I married. The war was on and my husband shipped out two weeks after the wedding. So I simply stayed with my parents. When he returned, there was such a housing shortage that he just moved in here as well, and we never left.”

“But you’re leaving now.”

She shrugged, unconcerned. “It’s the kind of house that should be shared,” she said. “I’ve had a glorious stint of living here. Now it’s someone else’s turn.”

I looked into that old woman’s bright blue eyes and swal
lowed hard. I couldn’t lie to her. But how could I tell Miss Heloise that I was having the place leveled?

I didn’t even wait to get back to the office to start making calls. I contacted the historical society, the State Parks Department, the National Registry. It wasn’t that hard to make a case for protecting the property. Bureaucrats seemed a good deal more in tune with the concept of protecting heritage sites than they had ever been in my previous dealings when trying to make old properties marketable.

Stumbling blocks, of course, occurred. Barb was one. Though the property was technically that of her mother-in-law, she’d more or less already planned where the money was going to go. None of my assurances about the advantages of an ongoing, continuous tax write-off sounded nearly as appealing as the cold hard cash she’d hoped to make. These difficulties were compounded when I explained to Miss Heloise the full story of what was going on. The old lady immediately protested the sale and decided to change her will—to create a foundation to care for the house.

The influential Jarman family went on a public attack. Barb’s brother was publisher of the daily newspaper. Though the press was typically in favor of conservation and restoration, in this particular instance personal property apparently trumped public preservation.

Attempts at compromise were not particularly substantial. The Jarmans’ lawyer proposed naming the condo development Hattenbacher Hall. Miss Heloise clearly was not as concerned about the prominence of her family name as she was of the survival of the heritage the house represented.

News articles portrayed the aged woman as a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist. On kinder days it was slyly suggested that somehow I had deceived and manipulated a mentally frail old
lady. A local columnist, whom I had met numerous times during my years with the Junior League, went even further, playing up my former gold-digger status. Openly questioning the motives of a woman who clawed her way to the top of the heap by way of other people’s money. She never pointed out that I was losing big on the deal. And any assumption of altruism on my part was too far-fetched to even mention.

Dear little Miss Heloise, fragile and disappointed in her offspring, had to stand alone against her children. At one point, a competency hearing for her was threatened, but withdrawn. The Hattenbachers might not be plentiful enough to make up a bridge table, but they were still formidable enemies to anyone who crossed them. And the tiny little lady had apparently inherited a good measure of the determination and backbone that had helped her family forge a state.

I spent a lot of hours making contacts and shoring up the details with the appropriate government agencies. But then, I had plenty of time to do so after I’d lost my job.

Millie and Frank were beside themselves, furious at what they saw as a stab in the back from a trusted friend. After a couple of attempts to “reason with me” I was formally given notice to vacate my office. A personal note was attached from Millie suggesting that she was certain that the events of the last year had “unhinged” me, and that it would be thoughtless of her not to urge me to continue therapy.

Chester chuckled when I read the note to him.

“One thing I’ve learned,” he told me. “If people think you’re crazy, then you’re usually on the right track.”