Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  “So you defended yourself,” Grace said.

  “She was a very prominent citizen, and I was a criminal. She made my one small crime validate all her claims. You can guess the rest. If I’d cut her arm or something, I don’t think I would have even been arrested. She wouldn’t have risked the potential embarrassment. But the neck, you know. Can’t hide that.”

  “My God,” Grace said.

  “And that is why I don’t work in Copenhagen anymore.” Hanna folded her hands. “Now I’m fastidious in my restorations. No one could be more scrupulous. Every scrap of paper, every mote of dust is accounted for.”

  “Jacqueline knows? About the assault?”

  “I’ve told her no lies. I would be at a much better establishment if I didn’t have this mark.” She dabbed at her mouth with the corner of a napkin. “But Jacqueline will hire anybody.”

  Grace had come to Jacqueline with no references and no credentials, just wildly feigned confidence and an offer to work for free for two months, learning all she could, while Jacqueline judged her potential. Grace had been broke when she made the offer, but desperate with hope and determination. When Jacqueline said yes, Grace sold the only thing of value she still owned, an agate horse-cameo bracelet and Graham-family heirloom that Riley had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She had hung on to it all through Prague and Berlin as some kind of proof of her good intentions. When she dropped it into the palm of Mme Maxine Lachaille, a dealer in Saint Germain des Prés who sometimes referred work to Jacqueline, Grace had felt as though she were discarding her own handcuffs.

  “And what about you, Julie? Why aren’t you working somewhere better?”

  “You know,” Grace said. “Stray cat.”

  “But you want to stay in Paris?”

  Grace nodded. “I love it here.”

  “It’s so bizarre to me, you know? A lot of American girls want to live in Paris, but what we do is not what they have in mind. Sitting in a basement all day, in private crisis over a badly dried varnish. You don’t look like someone who should be in this line of work. More like one of those art gallery girls—someone smiling by the door.”

  “Oh, and would you want to do something like that?”

  “Not for five minutes.”

  They laughed.

  “But why Paris? You work late every night, and here you are today, alone, and you say you come every week. What about Paris do you love so much? If you have visa issues, why not go to New York and make sacks of money? Relatively speaking, of course.”

  Grace laughed again, but Hanna was waiting for an answer.

  “I hate Americans,” Grace said, thinking that answer would certainly suffice, but she was wrong, or she had taken a beat too long to answer. Now Hanna was not smiling. She was watching Grace carefully, like a piece of veneer she had glued down that was just waiting for her to look away before it sprang up again.

  Grace knew she needed to give Hanna more to satisfy her curiosity, but she also knew Hanna would not be easily assuaged now that her radar had picked something up.

  “My ex-boyfriend,” she said carefully. “He was just released from prison, and I don’t want him to find me. So I won’t go back.”

  Already she regretted it.

  Hanna raised her eyebrows. “Abusive?”

  Grace nodded, relieved at Hanna’s willing suggestion. “I’ll stay here all my life if it means I never see him again.”

  She had said enough. Hanna averted her eyes, suddenly respectful of Grace’s privacy, and called for the check.

  • • •

  When Grace got home that afternoon, she sat cross-legged on her bed and looked up Hanna Dunaj online. She found dozens of articles, all in Danish except for one in English from the Copenhagen Post. In 2003, Hanna Dunaj had been arrested for the assault of Antonia Houbraken, twenty-four, and subsequently charged with fraud. The photo with the article was not of Hanna but of Houbraken, leaving a building wearing a black leather jacket and a light blue scarf. She was tight-lipped, with long dark hair. She was the wife of a football player, FC Copenhagen forward Jakob Houbraken.

  Hanna Dunaj had been a furniture restoration specialist in Copenhagen and Kolding, the article said, who also sold restored antiques. “Houbraken suspected that a piece purchased from Dunaj was not the antique Dunaj had represented, but a forgery. Houbraken reported that when she confronted Dunaj in her studio, Dunaj attacked her with a utility knife.”

  Hanna was extradited to her native Poland, but the article did not say why, only that she would serve her sentence there and be barred from Denmark for a period of ten years.

  Grace read the article several times. She wouldn’t have thought Hanna capable of sudden violence. Her blood seemed to run too cool. Riley had been that way too, except about Grace. “I love you so much it scares me,” he’d told her more than once. When they were kids he’d said it with earnest bafflement, and she’d felt drunk on her own romantic power. But as they got a little older, he would sometimes mumble it into her ear as though she were hurting him.

  Grace slid the silver box gently out of her canvas bag and onto her lap. She lifted the lid and ran her fingertips gently along each of the inside corners, feeling for any hollowness, any give. A secret compartment would be close to proof that she had an authentic Mont, but she had not wanted to look in front of Hanna. Now she caught it with her fingernail: the thin rim of a hidden slip, a secret envelope. She slid her fingers inside, thrilling at the possibility of what might be waiting. But there was nothing. The compartment was empty.

  She’d first read about James Mont in an old issue of The Magazine Antiques, which she now excavated from the ziggurat of various back issues stacked by date against the wall under her window.

  James Mont was born Demetrios Pecintoglu, and he had come to America from Istanbul as a teenager in the 1920s. In his twenties, he got a rewiring job in a Brooklyn electrical supply shop, and began to sell lamps there that he had designed. One day, Frankie Yale, neighborhood crime boss, stopped in with a girlfriend. Mont charmed the pair up to their ears, and soon after, Yale asked Mont to decorate his house. Mont then decorated for Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano; he’d found the client base to delight in thick, glossy lacquers and metallic glitz. Grace, too, loved his ballsy juxtapositions of squat rectangles and sweeping curves. He made armrests out of carved and gilded Greek keys, repeated them along lamp bases and upholstery trim. Either he or his clients were obsessed with the motif. Grace remembered something she’d learned from Donald Mauce, her old boss in New York: The nouveau riche loved classical shit. To their eyes, nothing made new money look older than naked white statuary and a few plaster columns propping up the roof.

  Mont and his clients were completely uninterested in the round-spectacled efficiency of midcentury modernism that was springing up around them. In a Mont house, you blew smoke, fucked against the mantel, and drank gimlets until you passed out in the flared arms of a velvet chair. Modernism wasn’t Grace’s catnip either. Modernism had spawned the American suburb, its blank cul-de-sacs and houses with garages like snouts, square green lawns, and little clumps of impatiens. Grace had come to loathe the American lawn and all its flat propriety. She preferred Mont’s excess: a chair’s legs flaring insolently beneath a deep, plush seat; strong arms surrounding a narrow back that arched up and away. Every corner, every joint, and every inch of material seemed to announce his intentions.

  During Prohibition, Mont designed case goods with hidden compartments: bars that folded down into baby grand pianos, desks that held hidden gun drawers. He was a gambler who made big bets and had trouble covering his losses, and he had a fearsome temper that was only stoked by working for gangsters. In 1937, when Mont had graduated to Hollywood clientele, he married Helen Kim, an actress eight years his junior. Bob Hope attended the ceremony. Mont had achieved the kind of life he’d designed for others. Twenty-nine days later, Helen Kim was found dead in their apartment, an alleged suicide.

  Two years after that, Mont
asked a pretty young lampshade designer, Dorothy Burns, to his apartment to discuss a contract. When she resisted his advances, he beat her to within an inch of her life; she was hospitalized for two weeks. Burns was so humiliated by the attack, the trial, and the publicity that she hanged herself. Mont did five years in Sing Sing for the assault. He sat out the entire war there, and upon his release, he returned to eager clients, either forgiving or forgetful.

  The boys had been sentenced to eight, and they hadn’t attacked anyone.

  Grace’s Mont box must have come over to France long ago, perhaps with some starlet in the 1930s who used it for her jewels or pills. Some of the velvet along the bottom of the inside had come loose from its backing; the glue had deteriorated. One of the hinges had a dent Grace would have to bang out, and all of the hardware needed to be thoroughly cleaned, down to the screws. She would have to teach herself his gilding process in order to convincingly fill the chips and scratches. She relished every injury, running her fingers very lightly over them as if they were sensitive bruises. Each one was a chance. She would repair them all.

  7

  Grace was first to work on Monday morning. She spread the last batch of beads on linen towels to dry. What had been a pile of murky clods a few days ago was now a speckled rainbow made of thousands of bright, worthless jewels. She pulled a pair of cotton gloves from the clean laundry. Latex gloves protected their skin from turpentine, benzene, and toxins; at other times, the cotton gloves protected the work from their skin. Grace rolled two clothed fingers over the glass beads and then examined her fingertips up close, looking for any remaining residue. She felt sudden warmth at the nape of her neck.

  “You won’t find any dirt.”

  Grace wheeled around, colliding with Hanna. “You scared me.” She touched the back of her neck, calming the nerves there.

  “Now that we can see the beads clearly,” Hanna said, “I can source replacements from Kuznetsov for the cracked and broken ones. We’ll have to go over each color to distress it reasonably so it matches. But today I will continue with the figures.”

  She picked up the sheep she had begun on Friday.

  “Six sheep, two maidens, three swans, and an ox! It will take me days simply to gather the right materials! I need white wax, shell silver, gelatin, silvering solution, wooden dowels, gum arabic—did I tell you it’s private? A collector.”

  Dealers had profit margins to consider, and museums had budgets, not that Zanuso ever did museum work. A collector meant a maniac with money. Hanna wouldn’t have to cut a single corner.

  She was the same Hanna, Grace told herself. Nothing had changed except what Grace knew about her. But all day, the sound of Hanna’s chair grinding on the floor, the clip of her pliers, her quick exhalations of accomplishment—every noise from across the table seemed threatening. Hanna, her friend, beige and orderly, had slit a woman’s throat and gone to prison. Hanna had neither hidden her past nor flaunted it. Grace had simply misjudged her, just as she was meant to.

  Grace imagined shrugging over a sandwich and telling Hanna everything she’d done to end up in Jacqueline Zanuso’s basement. Impossible. Hanna had not needed to unravel any lies; she was only filling in blank spaces. Grace had crudely, hurriedly filled in her own blank spaces whenever they appeared, and never with the truth. She was like someone faking a crossword puzzle by socking in random letters so it would look finished from a distance.

  Grace started at the buzz of machinery and looked up to see Hanna with the keyboard vacuum. She had taken a break from the sheep to clean the field of wheat in the centerpiece’s summer quarter. She moved the nozzle in tiny circles among the stalks in a trance. Grace had been shaken by Hanna’s confession, but Hanna wasn’t unsettled at all.

  When Hanna went out for afternoon coffee, Grace went to the computer and checked the Albemarle Record—just once, quickly, crossing it off for the day—and then her e-mail. She used one address for work and another for her parents. Today there was an unwelcome e-mail from her mother.

  Grace,

  I saw Riley yesterday. He was at the hardware store with his father buying potting soil. I could hardly believe it, I practically fell on him hugging him, but I don’t think he wanted to see me. I can’t begin to imagine what he’s been through since I saw him.

  Here is the Graham’s address in case you want to send a letter.

  429 Heathcliff Ave

  Garland, TN 37729

  As if Grace didn’t know that address better than she knew her own name.

  Why did her mother send her these e-mails about Riley? Just to punish her? To gloat that Grace’s other family lay in shambles? Because she suspected that Grace was somehow responsible? Because she’d hoped that Grace and Riley would marry and make Grace’s family Graham-adjacent? Because she was pretending, now that Grace was half a world away, to be a different kind of mother?

  Riley was walking around Garland now. She could see him walking by their old college house on Orange Street and knowing that other people lived there now, boys the same age he’d been. She imagined the sun in his eyes, a car’s steering wheel in his hands, the way a grocery store would look when he hadn’t been inside one in so long, the newly sharp smell of the home that hadn’t been his home in years.

  • • •

  When Grace got home that evening, Mme Freindametz was at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea and doing a word search in a Polish magazine. Grace smiled quickly and put her pot of water on the stove to steam rice and green beans.

  “What are you going to put in your nice box?” Mme Freindametz asked.

  “My box?”

  “Yes, your new box, the silver one.” She smiled approvingly.

  At first Grace did not understand. She pointed to the tin breadbox she had bought a few months prior, which was yellow and had a picture of a topiary on it. “That? That box?”

  Freindametz shook her head. “No, the one in your bedroom, the new one!”

  “You were in my room?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The vent was clogged, the vent behind your desk.”

  “Why would you—” Grace began, but Freindametz jerked the handle of her teacup so that the tea sloshed against the side. Grace realized that she had raised her voice. “How did you know it was new?” She tried to keep her voice even, to stay calm or to sound calm. “Have you been in there before?”

  Freindametz opened her mouth but did not speak.

  “How often? Every week, every day?”

  Freindametz looked as if Grace had slapped her. “This is my house,” she finally said.

  “It’s just a pretty box,” Grace said slowly. “You don’t put anything in it.”

  She turned off the stove and emptied the simmering water from the pot into the sink. She set the pot back on the burner, where it hissed, and then she went up to her room and shut the door.

  • • •

  Hanna was working exclusively on the centerpiece, and Grace was to help her whenever Jacqueline didn’t have anything else for her. On Tuesday morning, all there was for Grace to do was fix a botched seam on a clumsy ceramic patch. They were often called upon to redo the shoddy guesswork of new clients who tried to repair their lesser antiques themselves and only worsened the damage. They brought these mutilated things to Zanuso et Filles, as helpless and embarrassed as people who have just tried to cut their own hair for the first time. When the beloved artifact was returned to them, they would run their fingers over the invisible repair, disbelieving. That moment often awoke some dissatisfaction, and they began to notice, in the antiques their families had passed down, flaws they’d lived with for decades. Suddenly, these marks of time were unbearable to them.

  But because restoration could hurt the value of some antiques, Hanna, Amaury, and Grace had to be good enough that their work was undetectable to the human eye. Their clients wanted it that way, of course. Grace wouldn’t ruin an Austrian compact with an American hinge, or gum up a two-hundred-year-old music box with an adhesive t
hat had not been invented until 1850. For private collectors, they restored antiques that needed to look perfect only within the safe space of the home; for dealers, they restored antiques that would be sold to the public with little fuss—an old bureau improved from very good to mint. Grace seldom knew exactly where the pieces went after she finished with them. As long as Jacqueline’s clients kept their valuables close, away from carbon dating and fluorescent spectroscopes, no one would be disappointed.

  Hanna was telling Grace something about the antique linen she’d found to re-create the shepherdesses’ dresses so they could convincingly herd the woolen sheep in the spring quarter of the centerpiece. Grace hadn’t been paying attention. Jacqueline was on the phone in her office, yelling already, at ten in the morning, and Grace strained to hear her over Hanna. Grace was worried: The little patch job, which had taken her an hour at the most and was now drying, was the only non-centerpiece work she’d had since she finished the birdcage. There had been slow periods before, but usually because pieces were held up in freight or customs—they knew the work was coming. Grace couldn’t think of anything coming.

  The trouble at work had started when their most frequent clients, a cluster of four dealers from Clignancourt, had closed their shops after an export tax scandal. Grace didn’t know how Jacqueline would make up the business. Grace had been at Zanuso the shortest time. She would be the first to go.

  “Julie, are you listening to me?” Hanna looked over her glasses. “I need you to start on the orchard, in the summer quarter. You have to make the peaches.” She held up a magnifier to one of her photographs. “These peaches are a little whimsical,” she said. “More pink than is natural, and with a deeper groove. There are only two that are salvageable.”

  Grace nodded. “You need how many more, nine?”

  “Eleven, and in different stages of ripeness.”

  Hanna handed Grace the photograph, a close-up of the peaches. Each was no larger than a pea, made from wax and painted in variegated shades of orange, yellow, and a rush of pink. Their stems were green-painted wire.