Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  Grace had read of the robbery online the night it happened, on the home page of the Albemarle Record’s website: A young white male had entered the main house of the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate, in Garland, Tennessee, on Tuesday, June 2, between eight and ten in the morning, and locked the docent in an upstairs bedroom. The groundskeeper was found unconscious in the foyer; he was at Albemarle Hospital in critical condition.

  She had not heard from Riley since the day before, but she knew he had done it. Four days later, he, Alls, and Greg were arrested in Tennessee. Greg was first, alone at his parents’ cabin on Norris Lake. Hours later Alls and Riley were arrested at the boys’ rental house on Orange Street, where Grace also had lived, until she went to Prague at the end of May. She was sure that Greg had turned them in.

  She received just one call from the police, after the arrest. The front desk matron sent her son, a dull-eyed boy of about eleven, to knock on the door of Grace’s shared dorm room. She followed him downstairs, her heart beating so heavily that her chest cramped.

  The American detective asked if she knew why he was calling. She said she did. He asked her to tell him. She said that her boyfriend had been accused of robbing the Wynne House.

  “You mean your husband,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. She and Riley had never told anyone they had married.

  He asked when she had last communicated with Riley. “A few days ago,” she said. “Five days. He e-mailed me, very normal, nothing strange. He said he was going to his friend’s house, on Norris Lake. He couldn’t have robbed the Wynne House.”

  “How did you find out about the robbery?”

  “I read it in the paper,” she said. “Online.”

  “You’re reading the local paper while you’re in Prague?”

  “I’ve been homesick.”

  “You didn’t talk to your husband at all after you heard about the robbery?”

  She had not. She told the detective that she knew Riley wouldn’t e-mail her from the lake. They always started drinking before they unhitched the boat, and they only dried out when it was time to drive home. Grace herself had just taken a trip to Kutná Hora, to the bone church underground, where the bones of fifty thousand people had been strung into altars and chandeliers by a half-blind monk. The bones belonged to victims of the Black Death and the Hussite Wars. That some idiot had stolen Josephus Wynne’s old silverware didn’t seem very important, she told the detective.

  She shut up—too much.

  He asked her half a dozen more questions, but they weren’t difficult ones. Grace told him that he’d made a mistake, that Riley could not have done that. He has such a good life, she said. We’re happy. He doesn’t need money. His parents help him. And besides, she said, I would have known. He couldn’t have kept anything like that from me. He tells me everything. Everything.

  Perhaps the detective was a man whose own wife believed that he told her everything.

  What the detective did not tell Grace, what she learned days later in the news, was that Riley, Alls, and Greg had already confessed. The detective was crossing off his to-do list. He’d needed nothing from her.

  • • •

  This was how she imagined the robbery: Riley slipping a sweaty five-dollar bill into the recommended donation box and smiling at the tiny old docent on duty, following her through the downstairs rooms as she recited footnotes of Tennessee history. Riley had been through the house half a dozen times over the years; they all had. The Wynne House was the closest and cheapest school field trip. But on a summer Tuesday, the place was dead.

  He stopped hearing the docent’s voice clearly, as though he were underwater. He followed her upstairs. Her legs, ninety and blue and veiny in her whitish stockings, shook less than his did. At the top of the stairs she turned back and moved her mouth, looked at him expectantly. A question? She had asked him a question.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yes, ma’am.” He hoped it was the right answer.

  He followed her from room to room, nodding and scrawling gibberish in his notebook. Outside the door to the tiny windowless study, he rolled his notebook and stuck it and his pen in his baggy front pocket. She opened the door outward and he followed her inside. He pointed with a trembling finger at the tiny print over the toilet table.

  “Can you tell me who the artist is who made that?”

  “That one? I don’t remember. Let me get a better look.”

  She stepped forward and peered at the signature, which he already knew to be indecipherable. He held his breath and tried to back quietly out of the room. The edge of the rug caught under his heel and he stumbled.

  She turned around. “Are you all right, hon?”

  He jerked his foot free and made for the door, slamming it behind him. He grabbed the ladder-back chair that sat next to the door and wedged the top rung under the doorknob. He breathed.

  Now that she was safely penned, he could hear her voice leaking under the door. Not screaming. Asking. She was asking again, something; he didn’t know what—just the sensation of her tinny voice from far away, like a house cat trapped in a basement.

  He went downstairs and opened the front door. Alls and Greg came in quietly with scrunched-up nylon grocery bags and three pairs of gloves. They dispersed into the rooms, filling their bags with needlework samplers, old desk clocks, a silver-hilted hunting knife. They had a carefully made list of treasures: nothing large or cumbersome, nothing one of a kind. They did not expect the front door to open. A man they had never seen before stepped in with a garbage bag to empty the small wastebasket by the door. He was the groundskeeper, and he always came on Mondays, never Tuesdays. But here he was, seeing them.

  The groundskeeper, who was past seventy, fell to the floor.

  The boys grabbed the bags they had filled and fled.

  • • •

  Because the groundskeeper was too long returning to the mobile home that served as the Wynne House’s office, where he was supposed to leave his keys, the administrator who worked there came out looking for him. She found him sprawled on the foyer floor, and then she heard the warbling cries of the docent, still locked in the windowless upstairs study.

  The prosecutor later said that the boys had intended to fence the goods in New York, but they had not even left the state. Grace watched the headlines change from her concrete dorm room in Prague: NO SUSPECTS IN WYNNE HEIST; WITNESS SUFFERED STROKE AT SCENE; GROUNDSKEEPER’S CONDITION STILL CRITICAL. There was a police sketch from the docent’s nearsighted description, but Grace was relieved to see that the drawing looked nothing like Riley. It could have been anyone, really.

  Grace knew that Riley would worry about the groundskeeper. She could imagine him pacing, holding his fist against his mouth. That the man could die would have shaken Riley from his fantasy: the rakish glamour of a small-town antiques heist by a gang of wild boys, an intricate prank. But they had scared an old man to near-death. If he lived, he would surely identify them. But if he died, was that manslaughter? Could they call it murder, even? Grace imagined Riley’s spinning thoughts as though they were her own.

  She was right to be worried. When the police found a suspect in Gregory Kimbrough, twenty, of Garland, Greg’s parents said that was impossible because he had been at the family cabin on Norris Lake for the past several days. There was one cell phone with network activity on the Wynne property at the time, the police told them, and it’s yours.

  Grace hadn’t even known they could do that.

  He’d probably been checking a sports score or something.

  The police took the Kimbroughs into custody too, as the phone was technically theirs, and drove to the cabin with Greg’s parents in the backseat. Mr. Kimbrough was a criminal defense attorney. Greg wouldn’t have an opportunity to say anything without a lawyer present. At his parents’ urging, Greg rolled like a puppy. Alls and Riley were arrested hours later.

  Grace watched the Wynne case through the foggy pinhole of the Albemarle Record and its local corre
spondent’s maddeningly elliptical reporting. Cy Helmers had been three years ahead of the boys in school and four ahead of her. He’d gone to Garland College and become the county paper’s cub reporter when he graduated. He reported the Wynne heist as if he were above gossip, as if he couldn’t stand to make his old schoolmates look worse than they already did.

  The Czech front desk matron sent her son to fetch Grace twice more. No other student had received a phone call, and Grace felt conspicuous and exposed as she conducted these conversations, despite the fact that the woman spoke no English. There was a plastic window over the counter, through which students passing through the lobby could see her. Grace faced the wall.

  The second phone call was from Grace’s mother, whose very voice seemed to go pale when Grace said that no, she would not come back in time for the sentencing; no, she did not know when she would come back at all. Her mother, whose maternal passions were seldom if ever directed at Grace, now implored her: How could she just abandon Riley like this?

  “Abandon him?” Grace was incredulous on the line. “The person I built my life on, the last decade and my entire future, the one and only person I can call mine”—this was a dig—“just committed a whole parade of felonies with his idiot friends. And you think I should come home to support him?” She was shaking when she finished. Her mother had little to say after that.

  The third and last call was from Riley’s father.

  The boys had been released into their families’ custody, awaiting sentencing. It was evening in Prague, morning in Tennessee, and Dr. Graham was calling from his office at the college.

  “I think I understand,” he began, “why you would not want to come back for this.”

  Grace had nothing to say. It had not occurred to her that he would call. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said. A truth.

  “Us too. And him. He may be having the hardest time believing it.”

  “I don’t think he knew what he was really doing,” she said. “He couldn’t have. People make mistakes without realizing—one bad decision can just carry you away. And the three of them together. You know.”

  “We should have checked him more,” Dr. Graham said quietly. “I guess you seemed to keep him in line enough.” He laughed, a little drily. “Grace, you know we love you as our daughter.”

  They had said this for years: not like a daughter but as our daughter, and Grace had bloomed under those words and their power to make her one of them. But it was Dr. Graham calling her, not Mrs. Graham, and he was calling her from his office, not from their home.

  Grace remembered shooting skeet with the Grahams when she was fifteen, her first time. She had done well, as well as Riley and his brothers, and Dr. Graham had laughed with surprise and delight. “Goddammit, son,” he had said to Riley. “You’ll never do better.”

  “If there’s anything you know that could help him,” he said now, “anything at all—”

  “I’m sorry you’re going through this,” Grace said.

  • • •

  Grace did not call. She did not write. Just before they went to Lacombe, she received a single letter from Garland.

  Dear Grace,

  Love,

  Riley

  She never knew whether to read it as an indictment of her silence or a promise of his.

  What he must think of her, what his family must think of her—what they must say. She hated to think about it. She worried less about what Alls thought of her now. He had known long before Riley how bad Grace could really be.

  2

  Grace knew that a parolee had a keeper and a leash. They didn’t know where she was; they couldn’t. She knew these things, but that night, as she twisted under her sheet, her brain refused them. She took a sleeping pill at two but failed to submit. The night brain knew every trick.

  What did she think, that Riley would murder her? That he was tracking her so he could throw lye in her face? Hanna had told her that story, from New York half a century ago. A man, Burt Pugach, had hired hit men to throw lye into the face of Linda Riss, his girlfriend, after she told him she wouldn’t see him anymore. He told her, “If I can’t have you, no one else will have you, and when I get through with you, no one else will want you.” He went to prison for fourteen years, and he wrote her thousands of letters. He had blinded her in one eye. When he was released from prison, she married him.

  It was the happy ending that most troubled Grace.

  Tomorrow they’ll be out, the night brain taunted her. She took another pill at four and begged for defeat. She went down at six and slept through her alarm.

  When Grace got to work the next morning, Jacqueline was on the phone in her office, picking at her cuticles and blowing smoke from the side of her mouth, her door wide open. Amaury was already stooped in his dark corner, cooing at the pocket watch under his yellow lamplight. His table was as far as possible from the basement studio’s high windows and the meager sunlight they let in from the narrow street. As far as Grace could tell, he lived his life underground: in this basement, on the metro, and in his basement apartment in Montreuil. Grace had seen him getting off the metro in the morning, blinking unhappily in the sun.

  Hanna had tied a white smock over her clothes. She’d lined up Grace’s worktable end-to-end with the two extra tables that were left over from better times, when there had been more work and more staff. Grace counted ten bowls and containers arranged along the tables, largest to smallest.

  “Tu es en retard,” Hanna scolded her. Hanna was never late, and her hands were never still. Whenever she and Grace had lunch together, Hanna bobbed her knee as she ate, always impatient to get back to work. “Are you ready?”

  “As ever,” Grace said, tying a smock over her own clothes.

  “I didn’t want to start and then have to stop again to explain it to you.”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Grace said. “The train was late.”

  “We’re cleaning the beads. As you know, they’ve discolored from someone’s shortsighted application of oil to their surface. But, as with hair spray or nail polish, this has only damaged them.” She looked at Grace from the side, through the gap between her face and her eyeglasses, and Grace ran her thumb over her own clear-polished fingernails.

  She and Hanna seldom worked on a project together. Until recently, there had been enough to do so that they each stayed late, piecing parts back together and buffing out scratches in satisfying silence. But Grace hadn’t gotten anything after the birdcage, and she knew to worry. Jobs like this one were few and far between, and without a visa? She’d gotten lucky. If she were let go, she’d be a hotel maid again.

  Hanna raised her chin toward the repurposed chafing dish at the end of the table. “Container one,” she said. Hundreds of tiny dark beads were sunk in turpentine like coffee grounds, the dirty oil clouding around them. “Those have been soaking overnight.”

  “How late were you here?” Grace asked. Hanna’s eyes were as red rimmed as her own.

  “One, maybe half past,” Hanna said. “Use the ceramic spoon to stir them around a bit, very gently, not breaking a single one. Then you will gently sieve them out, about fifty at a time, into container two.” She pointed to the large metal mixing bowl next to the chafing dish. “Move the beads into the clean turpentine, clean the sieve, and begin again, moving the beads to container three. Four through six contain a castile soap solution, and seven through ten are water. There will be at least a dozen batches of beads like this to move through the system.”

  Hanna looked at Grace as though she were leaving her child in Grace’s care. “I know I don’t have to tell you how vital it is that you clean the sieve between each container, and especially between each solution.” Her pale eyes glowed brighter against the bloodshot. “Yes?”

  Jacqueline trusted Grace to regild and re-leaf holy relics. Once, she had called Grace her “little spider,” and Grace, disturbed by the comparison, turned to Hanna to laugh about it and found her pink with jealo
usy. It didn’t matter that neither Grace nor Hanna had any great respect for Jacqueline—Hanna still needed to be the best.

  “Yes,” Grace said now, smoothing her flyaways.

  “I’ll perform the hand cleaning,” Hanna said. Her own table was set with a paper-lined tray of paintbrushes and magnifiers arranged like dental tools. “I’ll begin when you make it to container seven. Until then, I will be constructing a sheep out of wool to replace this one with the cracked neck.” She gave a dainty smile, showing her small, square teeth, and opened her palm to reveal what looked like a balled-up tissue held in a sweaty hand for two hundred years. The sheep’s barely discernible ears were suggestions cut from felt, smashed flat. Only two legs remained, scabby sticks protruding from dirty gray stuffing.

  “Sad little fellow,” Hanna said, not concealing her glee. “No use rehabbing him. I’ll have to start from scratch!”

  Grace bent over the chafing dish of turpentine. The smell reminded her of Riley, but she hardly needed reminding. The Record had reported that he had been drawing some in prison, what Cy Helmers had called “charcoal lines and squiggles.” Grace had winced at “squiggles,” but Cy Helmers hadn’t meant to become an art critic. Grace wished that she could see the drawings herself; they would help her understand Riley’s state of mind. What kinds of squiggles? Anxious like Twombly’s, dancing and light like Hockney’s swimming pools, or lightless and grim like Fautrier’s? Grace didn’t know whether to blame herself or Riley for the fact that she could think of his artwork only in terms of copies, of either real artists or real objects or real life—what was the difference? But she blamed Cy Helmers for his poor descriptive abilities. “Squiggles” could mean anything.

  That the drawings were at all abstract was at first a wonder to Grace. Riley had always been an insistent realist, painting the historic buildings around town. His father used to refer to their house as the Garland Visitor’s Bureau. Grace had tried to push him toward abstraction, or at least pull him away from Garland, to no avail. Maybe he’d changed his style because in prison there were no historic homes to observe. More likely, he didn’t want to show off anymore.