know if his father had followed his wife and son to the coast, or if he had ever made any effort to save the marriage. If so, it hadn’t worked.
A divorce, handled by the family lawyer, had ended Claudia’s “Adolescent Rebellion,” and she had never strayed again. Her second marriage, when Terence was four, had been to Merrill, an investment banker and eminently respectable son of friends of her parents. He supposed that they were happy as a couple. He had no complaints about the courteous but distant Merrill as a stepfather, and if the man was dull, he was also reliable and prosperous. Perhaps Claudia had experienced enough drama in her year as a sergeant’s wife to last her a lifetime.
Around him, the sonorous words of the funeral oration droned on.
Terence kept his head bowed in what he hoped was a respectful pose for a next-of-kin, but his mind would not focus on the service. He kept thinking a dozen other thoughts: that he could have worn his Armani after all and not looked out of place among the other mourners; that the minister did not look or sound like a television evangelist; that the flowers were all real; and that the apple-blossomed hillside looked like a nice place to spend eternity.
Now that he considered it, the decal on the coffin had not really surprised him. It was exactly the sort of thing he had been expecting at the funeral for the father he never knew. It was the only thing that had lived up-or down- to his expectations of the burial of the man his mother always spoke of as “the hog farmer.” He hadn’t seen any hogs, either, come to think of it, which was a pity, because Terence was fond of animals. He had never been allowed to have a pet when he was growing up, but lately he had been thinking of getting, perhaps, a cat. He didn’t think he could manage a dog in a small Manhattan apartment.
“A pet is a lot of work,” his secretary remarked when he’d mentioned the idea to her.
At last the minister finished his homily and invited those present to share their reminiscences of the deceased. Terence felt a moment of panic, envisioning all eyes turning to him, but that had not happened.
Instead, Vance Howard stepped forward and nodded to the assembled mourners. “If Tom is listening to all this somewhere, then he’ll probably laugh when I say how much I’m going to miss him. We’re all going to miss him. He was an original.”
When the services ended, most of the people lingered for a few more minutes in the spring sunshine, talking quietly among themselves. Then they shook hands with Terence and walked back down the hill to their cars. A few stragglers accompanied him back to the house. A few minutes earlier, Mrs. Nash had touched his arm and whispered that she was going back to the house to set out the food. Before he could whisper his thanks, she had hurried away.
The white frame farm house sat in a grove of old oak trees in the shelter of the hill. Two stories high with a pitched roof, its columns supported a square, covered porch above the front door. The sunny kitchen, a one-story addition at the back of the house, had obviously been added many years after the original structure had been built. Terence supposed that this was the Palmer family homestead, but he knew nothing about that half of his heritage.
On a starched linen tablecloth, Mrs. Nash had set out plates of fried chicken and bowls of potato salad, sliced tomatoes, deviled eggs, and a glass pitcher of iced tea. Now she was stacking plain dark earthenware plates at one end of the table next to a tray of silverware. Beside it was an assortment of glassware-none of it plastic, he noted.
“This is really kind of you,” said Terence, nodding toward the laden table. “It looks lovely. Did you bring the plates and silver from home?”
Sarah Nash gave him an appraising look. “All this belonged to your father,” she said. “So you can tell your mother he didn’t eat off paper plates.”
The shot hit home, for he had been thinking exactly that. “The others will be along soon, I guess,” he told her. “They stopped to talk to that older gentleman in the black suit. Mr. Johnson. Who is he, anyhow? A senator? Everyone else seemed awed by him, so I didn’t like to ask.”
Mrs. Nash smiled. “That was Junior Johnson,” she said. “Now, why don’t you look around a bit? He left everything to you, you know.”
Terence nodded. He had been wondering what on earth to do with all of it. The furniture looked old, comfortable, and well-made, in keeping with the style of the house, but he could hardly turn his tiny Manhattan apartment into a set for
Sarah Nash smiled. “That was him. I didn’t think you’d know who he was.”
“Of course I know who he is. He’s in the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Cadillac Ranch,’ for heaven’s sake.
Sarah Nash’s expression did not change but there was a twinkle of pleasure in her eyes. “Well, he lives around here,” she said.
“And I guess I expected him to look like Jeff Bridges. You know, the movie.
Sarah Nash was still studying him, as if she were trying to guess his thoughts. Finally she said, “Well, you own it now. There’s a copy in the den. It was Tom’s favorite movie, too. All of this is yours now.”
He nodded. “I’m not sure what to do about that,” he said.
“I don’t think it matters what you do, as long as you do it intelligently.”
“What do you mean?”
She considered it. “Would you know what a David Hockney painting looks like?”
“A Hockney?” Terence blinked. “I think so. Well, in a museum, I would. And if it had a swimming pool in the foreground. Maybe not if I found one unframed in an attic.”
She gave him a tight smile, and went back to rearranging the covered dishes. “Well, don’t worry about that. You won’t find one here, nor a Rembrandt nor a Faberge egg. Your father was an art collector all the same, though, and some of his things are more valuable than you might suppose. I don’t believe you’d recognize the sort of art he went in for, so I thought I’d mention it to you before you start giving museum pieces to Goodwill.”
Terence looked around, seeing now not a shabby old farmhouse, but a carefully arranged set piece of American primitives. He thought the furniture must be Stickley. He had seen pieces in the apartments of some of his artsy colleagues. Of course! It was made in North Carolina. The old man must have bought it years ago, probably for a song. Terence wondered if his father had known how much the pieces would go for today. He probably did.
The pottery was more of a problem, though. He didn’t recognize it at all. There was a display of ceramics in the china cabinet behind the table, but one shelf display in particular looked so amateurish that he might have supposed his father had taken beginning ceramics classes for a hobby. More importantly, he wondered if Mrs. Nash had assumed that he had only come for the pickings, rather than out of duty. Perhaps she was testing him.
“I have a trust fund,” he said at last. “And a job on Wall Street.”
The tight smile again. “Well, I didn’t suppose you needed the proceeds from a yard sale, Terence, and I doubt if any of this is to your taste. I can’t say much of it is to mine. I just think it would be a shame if you went away not understanding what you saw. Like these.” She nodded toward the shelf of blue and green pottery decorated with white figures. At first glance he had taken them for Wedgwood: he was familiar with the graceful white classical figures that decorated the English cameo ware of Josiah Wedgwood and Company, but these vases-and sugar bowls and tea pots and coffee mugs-were different both in theme and in execution. The rendering of the puppet-like figures suggested that the artisan had never mastered proportion. Instead of the elegant Grecian themes of Wedgwood landscapes, the clumsy beings on this pottery inhabited a world of log cabins, tepees, and covered wagons. Had his father or one of his friends been attempting to imitate Wedgwood in some American idiom?
“That’s Pisgah Forest pottery,” said Sarah Nash. “Made near Asheville in the first half of the twentieth century by a man named W. B. Stephen. I wouldn’t expect you to know it, but piece for piece it sells for more than Wedgwood, and rightly so, because each piece is the work of just one man instead of a mass-produced factory item.”
Terence peered at a brown coffee mug depicting an Indian on horseback in pursuit of a buffalo.
“I suppose you recognized the Stickley pieces. That desk over there is American chestnut, which was wiped out back in the Thirties, so the desk is irreplaceable. And those five-gallon jugs with jack o’lantern faces on them belong in a museum.”
