Free The Auerbach Will by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

Farrell slips quietly into the room and places a typewritten note on the table by Essie’s chair. Josh glances at it and reads:
    Mrs. Burton St. George (Daisy Stevens)
    Gramercy Park Hotel
    52 Gramercy Park North
    New York, N.Y. 10010
    475-4320
    â€œNow, Mother,” he says with some annoyance, “why are you getting involved with her again?”
    â€œNever mind. I have my reasons,” Essie says.
    â€œAnyway, it’s important that you be there,” he says. “Right up on the platform—Jake Auerbach’s widow. It’s a symbol.”
    â€œI don’t want to be a symbol. They’d ask me to make a speech. I’m terrible at making speeches.”
    â€œJust a few words, Mother. It doesn’t have to be a speech. Anyway, it’s nearly a year away. Will you at least think about it?”
    â€œA year from now—who knows? I’ll probably be planted under a tree at Salem fields.”
    â€œNow, Mother, don’t talk like that.”
    â€œIt’s true.”
    â€œNonsense. You’ve never been in better health.”
    â€œWell,” she says, hesitating. “What does Charles say?”
    â€œCharles feels very strongly that you should be there, just as I do.”
    â€œWell,” she says, “as you say, there’s lots of time. Let me think about it, Josh.” Then, trying to be less irritable, she says, “I’ll try to think about it in a positive light. Now give me a kiss, dear.”
    It is easy to remember The Bluff in terms of the parties or, as Mr. Duveen used to call them, the grand entertainments. But when Essie Auerbach thinks of the house in Chicago, she prefers to remember the quiet times, when she was alone there. The garden—or, as some people had begun to call it, the park—had been her bailiwick. Cattle had once been fielded there, and the trails they had carved across the hillside behind the house became the pattern for her landscape design of tan-bark walks and bridle paths for the children’s horses. She had left most of the standing growth—the birches, tamarisks and hemlocks—as it was, and had supervised the planting of smaller trees and shrubs—azaleas and dogwood—at points which seemed to demand a burst of spring color. She had overseen the planting of hundreds of wildflowers—trillium, arbutus, lady’s slipper, jack-in-the-pulpit, anemones, ferns and mosses, columbine, yellow and purple violets. Natural rocks were rearranged, just slightly, to set off clumps of spring bulbs, tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths. The garden came to its full glory in May and early June, when a tent was often raised over the tennis court for a party, but Essie’s best moments were the solitary ones, walking through her woods with one of her children by the hand, thinking: this is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks. Her beautiful house might have been the creature of Joseph Duveen, but her beautiful garden was her own. “How can I have had such a vision?” she would ask herself, years later, when it was time to say goodbye to The Bluff forever. Where did it come from? From some lost ancestor in the Ukraine who had looked at a forest and imagined a wild garden? Who knew? Who knew where the notion had come from of damming a stream with a few rocks and creating a pond for carp and water lilies? Or the labyrinth of paths that led to secret grottoes and sudden surprises of open spaces? There had even been a fairy ring circled by flat stones where elves and gnomes could sit when they assembled in the moonlight. “Let’s go exploring in the garden, Mother,” Prince would say to her.
    Exploring. That had been his word for it—their firstborn, Jacob Junior, whom they had nicknamed Prince. It is hard to remember now, after everything that happened, so many years after he was banished from the memory of all of them forever, that he was once a very real, living and