Free The View From Penthouse B by Elinor Lipman

necessity of eliminating sessions with her therapist, Margot is encouraged by me to obsess aloud about Mrs. Pierrepont. I contribute because I know and resent Lenore myself. She came to my wedding, and we had Thanksgiving dinners together at Margot’s table for twenty-plus years, but she neither attended Edwin’s funeral nor sent condolences in any form.
    We are quite sure that Lenore’s companion, Teddy, who is estranged from his own children due to their alleged financial wrong turns, eggs her on. Margot says Lenore was always obsessed with money, perhaps the fault of her living through the Great Depression, and our own recession is bringing it back into focus. Some of what I’ve learned in my widows’ group applies to Margot and her ex-mother-in-law—that daughters-in-law are not to be trusted. Daughters-in-law are suspect. Money earned inside a marriage belongs to the son alone, no matter his crimes or who did the breadwinning.
    Discussing Margot’s mother-in-law problems leads me to posthumous appreciation of my own in-laws, Edwin’s lovely parents, who died before I could meet them. They married late, had Edwin in their forties to their great delight. He was adored but not spoiled; they gave him not just piano lessons but also pipe organ lessons and daily chores to promote responsibility and neatness. They let him have a succession of canaries, a dog, and two cats despite their own allergies. Their wedding portrait had a place of honor on our bureau throughout our marriage, and only recently did I replace it with our own.
    Betsy is a great ally on the topic of Lenore at our semimonthly dinners—tonight around the corner at Elephant & Castle, where the three of us share two entrées (sliced steak and salmon en papillote) and each of us orders a wedge of iceberg with blue cheese and bacon, which Margot and I pledge to make at home.
    Our banker baby sister is unsentimental and unsympathetic to exactly the right degree in dispensing advice re Lenore. “Hang up on her,” Betsy instructs Margot. “Or, better yet, don’t answer.”
    “Then she writes letters,” I say.
    “Threaten to sue her for harassment, or whatever would get her to stop.”
    “I could,” Margot muses. “I throw made-up legal terms at her all the time. I don’t think she’d run any threat by a lawyer, because she’d have to pay him.”
    “Do we think she’s fronting for Charles?” Betsy asks. “I mean is he the one who wants the pearls and the money?”
    Margot says, “He has plenty of money. You’ll remember I only got half. And he can’t spend a cent of it at Otisville.”
    “Maybe it’s not the money,” I say. “Maybe it’s the pearls themselves. Maybe he has a girlfriend he wants to propose to. Men in prison, especially the famous ones, always attract girlfriends. I think there are even websites for women who want to meet the incarcerated.”
    “All a moot point,” says Margot. “I’ll never see those pearls again.”
    Betsy asks how much Margot got for them.
    “I don’t even know. It was a lump sum for what he called the lot—three pins, some bracelets, an old locket, and my engagement ring.”
    “I hope you got a second opinion,” said Betsy.
    When Margot only sips her martini, Betsy asks again, “Did you shop the stuff around?”
    “I didn’t. The guy seemed honest and his ad said ‘No higher prices paid.’”
    I could read Betsy’s expression. It was saying I wish you’d come to us. I’d have bought them. You’d know where they were and you could even buy them back as if I were your own private pawnbroker.
    I change the subject because I know that the pearls are a symbol for all that has gone wrong financially and romantically for Margot. I wish I too had stepped in to save them, had figured out in some nineteenth-century way—Marry a robber baron? Sell my hair?—to have been the safety net beneath Margot’s jewelry box.
    I bring up one of our favorite topics, our own parents, and we three smile