• • •
After a late New York breakfast of coffee and toast she went to Bonwit Teller, to Saks and Bergdorf’s. She bought two Norell silk shirtwaist dresses. She tried on suits, even a pants suit, not liking the effect. On her last day she thought again about the position she had conjured up on the plane, rushed out to Henri Bendel and daringly tried on two Coco Chanel suits. Both horribly expensive, they were right for her, and damning the cost she bought them. They were what she imagined an ultrafashionable businesswoman would wear. And the position she was shaping in her mind meant stylized business rituals and the right costumes; Chanel suits were correct.
• • •
It amazed her how much alike were her husband and brother. They were almost interchangeable. She saw herself as the family intellectual; she took Book-of-the-Month Club selections and often read at least the first chapters of the books that arrived. She liked history and habitually skimmed the newspaper columns by “Old Timer” or “Pioneer Jack.” Dieter had been on the Board of the Chicago Public Library from the time after the Great Fire when Chicagoans were emotionally moved by the stooping gesture of the English intelligentsia who donated boxes of books for a new library. Dieter had continued to donate money to the library, first to get it out of that water tower, and then as a Good Work. This memory gave her the idea. If Dieter were still alive he certainly would give her the position and office she wanted.
It took her the entire return flight to write out the job description. The woman in the adjacent seat noticed her writing and said admiringly, “You must be a busy career woman!”
Sophia said, “Yes. Just returning from a business trip to Boca. Boca Raton. In Florida.”
She sent the page to her brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher, President of Breitsprecher-Duke, rather than give it to Andrew, who might conveniently lose it. Or laugh meanly. Her brother would see the value. Then she waited.
• • •
Andrew met James Bardawulf for lunch at the members’ club they both frequented. James smiled broadly and said, “That was easy enough. We can give her the job.”
“What job?”
“Sophia. The position she wanted. I got her letter this morning. It will suit her and keep her out of business deals.”
“What the hell? She didn’t send me any letter.”
“Maybe she wanted it to be a surprise. Don’t worry, she only wants to be the company historian. She wants to write a history of Breitsprecher-Duke. She wants all the old journals and letters, copies of wires and telegraphs, whatever papers didn’t get burned or thrown out. There are boxes of that stuff in one of the storage rooms. She calls all that junk ‘the Breitsprecher-Duke archives.’ I’m happy to have a door painted with her name and ‘Archival Research’—which is what she wants.”
“Knock me over. She said nothing to me. Is there anything to write about?”
“Oh yes. Dieter, of course, and Lavinia — working back to old Charles Duke, who started the company — Charles Duke — Canada, Holland. All over. Yes, there’s a lot back there we don’t know. Have to say I’m interested myself to see if she turns up anything useful. There could be some nice publicity that we could work into ads — you know, ‘Venerable Old Company. Leader in wood products for over two centuries.’ ”
“Oh boy,” said Andrew.
• • •
There were several unused rooms in the building, any one of which could be cleared out to become Sophia’s office. She looked them over. Four dusty conjoined rooms, once the kingdom of Lawyer Flense, with a view of the lake would do very well — an anteroom for her secretary, her inner sanctum, two meeting rooms. They would have to be cleared, cleaned, repainted. She telephoned her son, Robert, who had recently opened his office, Harkiss Interiors.
“Robert, I need your help. Are you very busy?” Robert, who had had only a single commission — the guest room in the apartment of Mrs. Grainley Wiley, with whom he was having an affair — was sick with worry over his upcoming office rent. He needed another commission. He made the usual noises of “let me see” and “I think I can squeeze you in” before he agreed.
“This is rather good, Mother, a very workable space. Your renovation ideas are not bad but I would suggest opening out this wall”—he pointed at the separation between the two meeting rooms—“and giving yourself a really large office. Make that room you had picked for your office a meeting room. And we can put in carpet. You’ll be amazed how much carpet softens the atmosphere.”
“I haven’t been living under a stone for the past fifty years, Robert. I have actually heard about carpet.” But she liked the idea of a larger office. Together they shopped for Danish modern office furniture in oil-rubbed teak, beige wool carpet, a big leather Eames chair.
• • •
The day came when Sophia, installed in her new office, began reading through pages and pages of crabbed handwriting and atrocious spelling, trying to sort out mysterious characters whose connections to the family were unclear. She hired a secretary, a potato-faced blonde named Debra Strong (niece of Mrs. Garfield, the company secretary), who said her last job had been at a women’s magazine. Debra sorted the papers into rough time periods, put them into neatly labeled folders. Sophia’s plan was to tell of the early travails of a pioneer enterprise that became successful through hard work, and went on to enjoy the fame and fortune of being one of the oldest and most successful logging companies in the nation.
Obscurity, and French, like thick blankets, befogged the papers. Was Charles Duke the same person as Charles Duquet, whose name appeared on what might be a promissory note signed by someone named Dred-Peacock; it was signed with an X indicating Charles Duquet was illiterate — or was it Dred-Peacock? Later correspondence was clearly signed by Charles Duke. So she was sure Dred-Peacock, whoever he was, was the illiterate. There was too much French for her. She hired a student to translate the difficult pages but found the lists of old deals and accounts tedious and put them aside as immaterial.
After a year of scratching through the papers a story began to take shape. Charles Duke, a poor French boy, set out for the New World to escape a harsh life on a French farm. Once in North America he began to make his way by hard work and eventually, with the money he earned, bought timberland and opened a sawmill. The correspondence with Dred-Peacock ended abruptly, though in the next batch of material there were nearly forty letters to his sons. These made tiresome reading as they were loaded with advice and maxims and shed no light on Charles Duke’s character beyond commanding his sons to do what he told them to do. He seemed a serious fellow, but one who doted on his children. She skipped over James Duke, a dull stick. Lavinia, alas, had left behind hundreds of boxes of business correspondence and notes on the lumber industry. Sophia did not understand most of Dieter’s first wife’s descriptions of inventions, meetings, numbers of board feet taken from various forests and shipped to distant destinations. It was enough to say she was a highly respected businesswoman. And, thought Sophia, an insanely busy scribbler.
She came on a folder that Debra Strong had labeled “Genealogy?” containing some torn and yellowed pages. This, she thought, might be useful. She matched the torn pieces together. A letter from R. R. Tetrazinni in Philadelphia said only that the investigation was complete to the point set out in his report and that if Lavinia Duke Breitsprecher wished to follow up with further investigation of the names and addresses of the heirs she should contact him as soon as practicable as he had other work to hand. The report puzzled Sophia. What heirs?
She telephoned James Bardawulf. “I’ve come on something that I don’t quite understand. It’s a report from a private investigator to Dieter’s first wife, Lavinia Duke. I wish you would take a look at it. I think it says there are some unknown heirs. But I don’t know who they are or what they have inherited.”