Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

After the funeral, we all went back to Uncle Owen’s house. Dalton had done his best, laid out Scotch and sherry, cheese straws and scallop-stuffed pastry shells, homemade angelfood cake. But no one was comfortable. No one in my family seemed to know what Dalton was doing there. They thought of him — they wanted to think of him — as someone who had worked for Uncle Owen and no more. My mother asked him point-blank what he was doing there.

‘I live here,’ Dalton said, and then his kind face crumpled. He was thirty-five then but looked ten years younger.

‘You used to,’ my mother said. ‘I mean, live-in help is one thing, but …’

I wrapped my arm around Dalton’s waist and watched as my mother moved away and toured the living room, fingering the heavy drapes and the jade animals and the celadon bowls and jars and the lovely old rugs. ‘All this stuff,’ she said, almost to herself. Dalton and I looked at each other and winced when she picked up a willowy porcelain figurine. ‘And then all that stuff in the shop …’

We knew what she was thinking. My father was Uncle Owen’s only nephew, and my mother had every reasonable expectation that all this — the house, the shop, the furnishings — would fall to my father and her. Finally she’d be able to live the way she thought she’d always been meant to. Finally, my father was going to come through.

I don’t think my father even thought about it. He’d been as dry-eyed as my mother and Toby throughout the funeral, but his face was creased with grief and I knew he was mourning the end of his real family. Mumu gone, now Owen; me as distant as if I’d married an Arab and moved to Abu Dhabi. Him in that house in Westfield with only his bitter wife for company, and once each weekend a visit from Toby and Linda and the kids. He sat heavily in a green Victorian chair much too small for him, and while the sun set he stared out the window and ate cheese straws absently.

I wouldn’t have minded if everything had gone to him, but Uncle Owen surprised us one last time. Months later, when the estate was settled, we found out that Uncle Owen had left ten thousand dollars to my father and an equal amount to Toby. The rest, the bulk of the estate, he’d split between Dalton and me.

Dalton got the house,

in which I hope you live (Uncle Owen had written), long, happily, with the companion of your choice. May you be as lucky as me.

Dalton also got the shop and all its contents. I got everything stored in the warehouse in Natick — all the pieces Uncle Owen had accumulated over the years, which he’d used to restock the shop whenever he ran low — and a fair bit of money he’d salted away.

I would invest the money (he’d written to me). Although of course you may do as you wish. But I hope you invest it wisely, in your own name, not Walter’s, and that you use the proceeds to get on your feet. Consider a visit to China — I have always regretted not returning. You would be happy there. If you go, visit the Forbidden City for me.

Keep the antiques if you can — you know which ones are good, and their value will only increase. Remember that I have always loved you.

‘He meant that,’ Dalton told me, when I made my last visit to him. ‘You were always his favorite.’

‘But I never did anything,’ I said. ‘I only got to college because he sent me, and I made a mess of that — and then Randy, and Walter, and look at me now … I never know what it is I want to do.’

‘You’re a late bloomer,’ Dalton said. ‘Owen used to tell me how he’d been the same way, thrashing around for years before he finally figured out who he was.’

‘I wish I’d known him then.’

‘He always had faith in you.’ Dalton smiled and touched my hair. ‘There’s something here in the house I know he wanted you to have.’ He went into the living room and returned with a big glass bowl I’d always admired. Narrow-mouthed, melon-shaped, with a filigree silver rim; Uncle Owen had always kept flowers in it.

‘It’s a fish bowl, really,’ Dalton said. ‘He picked it up in Hong Kong years ago. It was meant to house one prize goldfish, but we were laughing together one night after you’d told us about your first aquarium, and Owen said we ought to give you this. It’s older than the three of us put together.’

I drove home with the precious bowl cradled in styrofoam and the lawyer’s list of my inheritance in my purse. The bowl was thick and slightly uneven and rested on a carved rosewood base, and when I walked in the door with it, Walter’s mouth dropped open.

‘That’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘That must be worth a fortune.’

‘It’s for my fish,’ I said. I filled the bowl with distilled water and scooped my flock of neon tetras from my ugly aquarium into it. Immediately the fish looked serene and proud.

‘What a nice thing for him to leave you,’ Walter said. And he meant that, I think; there was no greed in him. He’d always been proud of his ability to provide for us.

‘Wait,’ I said. I showed him the lawyer’s papers. Those sums of money, invested here and there; the catalog of rugs and screens and vases and bowls and dainty figurines, all labeled and numbered and waiting for me in Natick.

‘I want to invest the money,’ I said. ‘That’s what Uncle Owen asked me to do. I want to move the antiques here.’

‘ Here? ’ Walter said.

I looked around and saw for the first time that we might have a problem. The house was full of his and Eileen’s things. We had room to add a bowl of fish, but hardly more than that.

‘We’ll get rid of some things,’ I said firmly. ‘ Make room. I want Uncle Owen’s stuff near me.’

Walter puffed up. ‘This is my house,’ he started, but then he backed down when he saw my face. ‘I mean, it’s our house, but you know — we’re all settled here. We don’t need anything. We’re comfortable.’

We argued long into the night and all the next day, and when we got nowhere we retreated into our customary silences. Walter won, in the end: he refused to have the house cluttered up with what he referred to as ‘all that Oriental stuff.’

I smiled at him when he said that, because I’d already hatched a plan. ‘Fine,’ I told him. ‘If that’s what you want.’ I took the money Uncle Owen had left me, and I bought another house.

A Light Like a Laser

My house was run-down, almost falling down, with a leaky roof and a crumbling chimney and ancient wiring. But it sat on a ridge overlooking the river, and it was clean and cheap and spacious and had pleasant lines and a dry basement. It couldn’t be lived in right away, but I didn’t care; I never had any intention of living there. The house was for my furnishings, not for me, and at first I only meant to use it as storage space.

I had all Uncle Owen’s treasures shipped there from the warehouse in Natick, and as the men carried the crates to the basement I checked them off against my list. The rugs were rolled in brown paper, the screens were boxed, the fragile porcelains and vases were double-crated, and the furniture was draped with white canvas. I couldn’t see what anything was and could only match the numbers on the parcels to the numbers on my list. I’d started the day in a hum of exhilaration, but as the parcels vanished into the basement, their contents unseen and unappreciated, I began to wonder what the point of this had been. That night, when I returned home, I was depressed.

Walter was already furious — he hated the house, and hated that I’d gone and bought it without him. He hated the time I’d spent arranging the closing, seeing lawyers, passing papers. His book was due at the publisher’s that summer, and I’d been less and less able to help him; and when I came home that night and said, ‘This isn’t what I wanted at all. I can’t even see what I’ve got,’ he blew up.