“Who was it that Mom modeled for?” she asks.
“Come again?”
“Who was it that Mom modeled for? The local designer? Iwondered if maybe they were still around. If they had a storefront or something.”
“Oh…I don’t really remember, T.J. I’m sorry. It’s been so long.” He sounds pained.
“It’s okay, Dad,” she’s quick to say. “I keep…keep seeing women here who remind me of her. These glamorous women.” Taylor takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. “Women who wear the most stylish clothes…and who have beautiful shiny brown hair, like she had. And red lipstick…and red nails…and Chanel N°5…” Her eyes flutter open as she realizes she’s conjured Vivian.
“That sounds like your mom. She was the most beautiful woman. I used to tell her…” His voice cracks, and he clears his throat. “I used to tell her that she sucked the air out of any room she walked in. And one time she thought I said ‘waltzed,’ not ‘walked,’ and then it became a joke between us. She’d come by the restaurant and waltz in like she was dancing in a ballroom.”
A memory triggers in Taylor. “I…think I remember that.”
Her dad gives a short laugh. “Yeah, she had a great sense of humor. Sometimes, when you’re so good-looking, you’re not funny. But she was funny. She was so funny.” Then he says, in a more somber tone, “I’m sorry you’re missing her, T.J. Don’t forget who you are. And you got Aunt Gigi there, if you need her. Don’t let Boston get the best of you. You do you, you hear me? You do you.”
Don’t let Boston get the best of you?
“Okay, Dad. And Boston is fine, don’t worry. I’m doing fine. Of course I’m thinking of her here, but Ialwaysthink of Mom.”
“I know you do, T.J. So do I.”
They sit on the phone quietly, and the silence feels so familiar. It’s been the two of them for so long. This is the first time she’slived on her own; even through community college and the three years she worked at the orthopedic center, she lived at home, saving money. On the weekends, she’d crash at her boyfriend’s but come Monday return to sleep in her childhood bedroom. When Taylor spotted the listing for the Boston apartment, she put down her dad as a reference. She didn’t have any previous rental history, but she figured since she’d waitressed at her dad’s restaurant from the time she was twelve, he could attest to her work ethic and potential as a renter. Anna, her landlord, had indeed called her father, and they’d chatted for a good long while. Whatever her dad said to Anna worked. Sam told Taylor she was lucky to land the apartment; Anna rented only to select people.
When Taylor hangs up the phone, she picks up the key, turning it over in her hands. She suddenly wonders:Is Vivian funny? Does she have a sense of humor like my mom did? Or is she serious? Haughty, even?
Taylor knows what she is thinking of doing with this key could jeopardize the life she’s trying to set up for herself. But now that the idea’s taken hold, she can’t shake it.
The Knox
Early February
The society’s annual masquerade ball is upcoming, and I simply can’t wait. It’s been far too boring for far too long. Just dinners and dinners and cocktail hours and dinners. Boring, boring, boring. I need another dinner like I need a hole in my headhouse. All my esteemed rooms with their valuable furniture and priceless artwork, and hardly anyone to enjoy them. I’ve begun to grow dust in my corners, though Rose does an admirable job of keeping up.
There was a time, in the early nineteenth century, when the society held many parties and gatherings. That is, of course, why I was built. The Brahmins neededsomewhereto discuss their international business dealings in the opium trade, so they decided they might as well do it in style. The gentlemen had much to coordinate: sailing ships to Smyrna to purchase the precious raw opium, then smuggling their illicit wares into China to sell them for profit or to trade them for silks, teas, porcelain, and furniture. (Some of these acquisitions still sit in my disappointingly empty rooms.) The sea merchants made, quite literally, a killing. By 1838, while newly minted Boston millionaires toastedwith champagne in my parlor, a third of China’s population had become addicted to opium.
We’ve had our own respectable number of deaths here at the society through the years: overdoses, murders, suicides. Double murders. Staged suicides. The most delightful and ingenious murder methods have been carried out, from bondage-gear choke holds to frozen-steak bludgeonings to castor bean poisonings (disguised in a salad). Knox members have dabbled in the, ahem,aftermathas well; who can forget the delectable autopsies that Dr.Thurgood performed on stolen cadavers in my basement?
It’s hardly surprising, really. I’ve existed for more than two hundred years in Beacon Hill, with the wealthiest of wealthy members. Sometimes things simply need to be taken care of—or rather,disposed of.
It’s the way things are done. It’s the way things have always been done.
But things have changed so much in Boston that William Knox would be turning over in his grave! So much more riffraff, even here, in exclusive Beacon Hill. It’s a shame.
The issue, it must be said, lies at least partly with the educational system: Schools simply don’t teach the proper subject matter these days. But they cannot carry the blame alone. The city itself has buried its fascinating and lurid past. Few Bostonians today realize that the city was built in no small part due to opium.
All the venerated institutions that were funded by this drug trade—well, they’d rather you not know. Perkins School for the Blind? Supported generously by its namesake Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a merchant—and slave trader—whose opium dealings made him one of the wealthiest men in America at the time. Or how about Mass General Hospital and the Boston Athenaeum, which also raked in significant monies from the Perkins brothers? Harvard University, McLean Hospital, the Bunker HillMonument, and the Forbes House Museum, to name a few, inhaled opium riches, too. So many of Boston’s elite were participants in this glorious and sordid trade: the Cabots, Cushings, Lowells, Forbeses, Kirklands, Delanos, Welds, and, of course, William Knox. But ever the good patricians, these leading philanthropists funded opium winnings into building mills, railroads, steamships, mines. And let’s not forget the robust tax revenue generated from all this that paid for our state police and fire departments; it allowed for the construction and repair of our roads, our courthouses, our schools.
Put simply, our fair city on a hill would not be what it is today were it not for that, ahem, smoke. And my illustrious and well-appointed rooms where these wealthy men gathered.
Now, may I ask, where isall thisin the history curriculum? Why, I heard some Boston schools don’t even use physical textbooks these days. My word.
But I digress.
All I know is this: At the Knox, we make no pretense of what we are.
Vivian
Early February
