Like T.R. Needed their help later to bring in the rare ones. After they passed the laws . . . back when I used to go over there, wasn’t any of that. At the beginning, the soirees were nothing much. No girls, you see. The ladies weren’t much interested in that. But later they came. Yes they did. The wives, the girlfriends. When he gave out the awards, and so forth. He would throw these . . .”
He started to cough and shook his head.
“Here you go,” said the nurse, and handed him water and pills.
“I went for the parties, mostly,” he said, after he’d swallowed the pills and taken a sip. “A bachelor back then, you see. I didn’t go so often after I married.”
“My uncle was always single. Wasn’t he?”
“Never found the right special lady.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, do you have any old pictures? Pictures of him? My family, we weren’t close. And I haven’t been able to find anything in the house.”
He got up with difficulty, leaning hard on her arm, and made his way slowly to a bookshelf. She gazed around the room: shelves with framed pictures on them, a philodendron, tourist posters of Greece and Hong Kong, an old map. Finally he pulled out a thick ochre-colored album but it seemed too heavy for him, balancing on the edge of the shelf, half out and half in, as he stood helplessly with a feeble hand on the spine. She rose quickly before he could drop it.
“Oh here, let me . . . thanks, thank you so much,” she said, and sat down with it.
“Might be one of Buddy near the beginning. Long time ago, you know. My wife marked everything.”
The photographs were elaborately annotated in a spidery, awkward hand, words standing on the gluey ridges of the paper. She sat with the scrapbook open on her knees as he puttered over to a cabinet in the corner, which had an old turntable on top, likely of seventies vintage: fake wood-grain on the sides of the platform. It took him some time to remove a record from its sleeve, so long that she considered offering to help but then reconsidered in case it might give offense. Instead she paged through the heavy leaves looking for her uncle’s name. They were all black-and-white at the beginning, then sepia-toned; there were color Polaroids throughout the 1960s.
It seemed the wife had even gone back and archived Chip’s photos from before they met, since one caption, under a black-and-white of Chip and a young blonde in evening dress, read Chip and his girlfriend Lettie “Lulabelle” Mae, May 1953.
Finally she hit paydirt with a caption that read Chip with, l–r, Arnie Sayles, Lou Redmond, Frank Davis-Mendez and Albert “Bud” Halveston. Spring Banquet, 1959. It was a row of middle-aged men in white dinner jackets, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Her uncle, at the end, was thin and angular with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a wave of shining hair standing up over his forehead.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember him like that. She had been thirteen years old; she would have known him then.
Still nothing but the croquet and the player piano.
Chip’s record was opera—a mournful aria. When he sat down again he was less lucid, rambling about the ancient festivities as she paged through his album. Once there had been famous people, he said. Bud was well known for lavish cocktail parties, catered dinners, fancy-dress balls . . . he remembered women with tall feather headdresses, feathers and sparkling beads, the fund-raising events for charity, the hunting expos and sportsmen’s banquets. The Reagans were there once, and Henry Kissinger. Zsa Zsa Gabor one time when she was between husbands. Ice statues in the swimming pool.
“Charity,” said Susan, clutching at straws. “So what were his charities?”
“Oh the club, freedom to hunt, like that,” and he flapped a hand wearily. A moment ago he had been eager but suddenly he was tired. She wondered if she should call the nurse.
The opera played behind them, suddenly more subdued.
“I’m trying to figure out what he would have wanted,” she went on. “What his wishes would have been, for the house and the collection. My instructions, more or less. I don’t know who he was, is my problem.”
“Of course his pet project was the legacy,” said Chip, nodding.
“The legacy?”
He bent forward, coughing, and the nurse was back beside them with another glass of water.
“So what was the