The Last American Heiresses

by Stephen Greco

Genres: Biographical; Friendship

Synopsis

A dazzling novel that draws readers into the ultra-glamorous lives of legendary heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, the public rivalry that defined them, and the secret bond that sustained them both, from the author of the acclaimed Such Good Friends.

The press dubs them “the Gold Dust twins.” Born within a week of one another in Manhattan in 1912, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton both inherit unimaginable fortunes. By the time of their lavish
coming-out balls, they are two of the richest women in the world. Barbara, heiress to the Woolworth millions, amasses seven husbands over her lifetime. Doris, meanwhile, has a sophistication and financial savvy that Barbara tries endlessly to emulate.
 
When filmmaker Emma Radetsky begins researching her new documentary about prominent women and their jewelry collections, she’s familiar with the lore surrounding both Doris and Barbara—the couture gowns, exotic homes, and romantic interludes—including sequential marriages to the same notorious playboy. And of course, the priceless jewels they acquire as easily as candy.
 
Yet delving into their backgrounds with the help of one of Doris’s closest companions, Oliver Wendell Shaw, Emma encounters a deeper story—of a private game to manipulate the media, and a hidden, life-long kinship between two complex women who understood each other as no one else could.
 
Interweaving past and present, filled with sumptuous details from an age of excess, Stephen Greco’s novel is also a mesmerizing story about the nature of celebrity and the transformative power of friendship.

Release date: February 25, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 496

Sample

October 1928

They were the picture of young American aristocrats in the affluent 1920s: two sixteen-year-old girls dressed for a morning’s horseback ride in jodhpurs, hacking jackets, boots, and riding hats, looking sharp atop affable, retired thoroughbreds. One girl was notably taller and more athletic than the other, sitting assuredly on her horse and clearly at one with him. The other girl was a bit stiffer and more decorous in the saddle, though not exactly “ladylike,” since these were both decidedly modern girls, whose young adulthood was happily syncing with all the enticing new social opportunities presented by the unprecedentedly fast-moving decade. Given recent weather, the girls knew they were lucky to be able to go riding as they’d planned to do since spending a week together that summer at one of the girls’ country estates—called a farm—in New Jersey’s Raritan Valley. October had already brought two nasty nor’easters, the most recent of which had rained out several activities at both their schools, as well as, indeed, much of the daily business of New York and the rest of the tri-state area. But for two days now, the skies had been clear, and the trail, they found, was not especially mucky, so the ride had been nice enough, through the pretty Connecticut countryside—picturesque fields and meadows and forest whose brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges were just past the peak of autumn glory.

The ride was ending, and the girls were emerging from the woods and heading for the paddock and barn. There had been little conversation possible between them on the trail, as they galloped and cantered and trotted along, but now the horses were in a slow walk and knew where they were going.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” said Barbara in a mock whisper, with a squirm in her saddle.

“Sorry—what?” said Doris.

“Bathroom, Dodo! As soon as possible! All that tea we had.”

Doris adjusted the cuff of her glove, one corner of which had been pulled into an annoying fold by the leather rein.

“Tell me, Babbo,” she said, “do you do number one in the shower?”

“What do you mean... ?” said Barbara, surprised.

“Do you or don’t you?”

“In the shower? Of course I don’t. Do you?”

“You should try it,” said Doris, with teasing wickedness.

The field they were crossing, once farmland but now maintained as a wildflower meadow, was a swath of season-worn, wild rye grass sprinkled with violet aster and purple coneflower, edged by the narrow road to the school. A cool breeze was laced with the smell of a nearby farmer’s field fire. Beyond that, enclosed by a weathered rail fence and gate, was the stable complex, featuring a long, neat wooden barn painted white, with a gable roof and topped by a ventilation cupola—all quiet on this late-October morning, except for two stable hands, who were bringing bales of hay into the barn, and three horses in the paddock that had been let out for the day.

“Isn’t it . . . unsanitary?” said Barbara.

“Of course not.”

Barbara smirked.

“Maybe it’s a Southern thing,” she said sharply.

It was a running joke between them that previous generations of their families had been on different sides of the Civil War—notwithstanding that both families were now based in New York, a few blocks from each other, in substantial limestone mansions just off Fifth Avenue.

“I don’t know where I first heard about it,” said Doris. “Certainly not from Mother. Certainly not from Mademoiselle Renaud.”

“Perhaps from some mechanic or field hand?”

“I think it must have been one of the other Brearly girls. Anyway, it’s quite natural and relaxing.”

“Really, Dodo, I can’t imagine it,” said Barbara.

“Maybe I invented it,” said Doris, with immodesty that she often felt about many of her accomplishments and rarely bothered to hide. “Anyway, isn’t showering the only time when we’re really, really, really alone? Think about it, Babbo.”

“I guess so.”

Both girls, who had already lost one parent each, and whose extremely wealthy families had always ensured that they be supervised by nannies and governesses, were now usually protected, except for private, rural get-togethers like this, by retired policemen dressed in business suits—bodyguards. Each girl was the target of death and kidnapping threats, and desperate appeals from strangers for money. The fact that they were unsupervised for this ride at Barbara’s school, Miss Porter’s, was a condition that the girls themselves had engineered. Doris’s late father had left her not only money but significant control over major family assets and thus the terms of her life; she did as she pleased. Moreover, she was more enterprising than Barbara, and with the help of a new Duke employee, an assistant butler-cum-chauffeur named Henrik, she’d found it easy enough to devise a plan that assured their respective guardians that the other’s guardians would be responsible for them. And this scheme had already worked several times for small outings like this one, in so-called “safe” settings—meaning expensive and socially exclusive parts of rural Connecticut, New Jersey, and Long Island. Whether or not the girls could arrange to pull off this scheme in the city—say, for a museum visit or a Broadway show—was another story.

“Father always said how healthy showering was. He had showers installed in all our houses,” said Doris. “He encouraged me to shower when I wanted to—instead of that whole bathing ritual. When I am in the bathtub, Mademoiselle is usually right there beside me, being helpful. But who needs that kind of help? Anyway, even if she happens to be in the room when I’m showering, she hardly knows what’s going on under the streaming water, does she?”

Barbara shook her head, with a frowny smile.

“You’re terrible,” she said.

“I suppose I am,” said Doris.

Barbara was the more conventionally pretty of the two, with a face as sweet as a doll’s, a pert, composed demeanor, and short dark hair that was carefully styled twice a week by one of her family’s maids, who traveled to Farmington especially for the task, since the hairdresser from nearby Hartford who was brought in regularly by the school for the girls would not do for Miss Hutton. A creature of determined whimsy and originality, Barbara was not afraid to style her hair adventurously and frequently experimented with shades like gold and silver, in the manner of her favorite movie stars. Currently, her hair was a vibrant auburn, styled in a mophead-with-spit-curls look she had recently seen on Marion Davies in The Patsy. Doris’s attractiveness was less in her exotically angular facial features than in her engagingly animated spirit, which seemed to fuel an instant and detailed focus on any matter at hand and boundless curiosity about everything else. She kept her straw-colored, shoulder-length hair in such a plain style that it hardly looked styled at all—something for which her mother disparaged her constantly but could do nothing about.

They halted at the edge of the road, for an auto that was approaching from the direction of school—a small disturbance of the pastoral peace. The horses, both well-trained, remained perfectly calm.

“It’s Mr. and Mrs. Keep, the heads of school,” said Barbara, waving weakly as the auto drove past—a snazzy, new 1928 Auburn roadster in racing green, whose tan convertible top was down. The Keeps waved back, with a warbly “Hello, girls!” from Mrs. Keep barely audible over the puttering motor, the lady twisting slightly in their direction, apparently to get a better look.

“I didn’t tell them I had a guest,” said Barbara.

“Good thinking,” said Doris.

“If she knew it was you, she’d make a big fuss.”

“I know.”

The girls dismounted and led their horses past the paddock toward the barn. Miss Porter’s allowed girls to keep their horses there during the school year. Barbara had brought her ten-year-old bay mare, Reckless, there from her family’s Long Island estate, Winfield Hall, in Glen Cove; Doris had had Ten Grand, a seven-year-old chestnut gelding, one of her favorites, trailered over especially for the weekend from Duke Farms, in Hillsborough, New Jersey.

“You should be more comfortable with yourself, Babbo,” said Doris. “Your riding—it’s so proper. I’m surprised you’re not riding sidesaddle.”

“I did, once,” said Barbara. “I love the way it looks.”

“Have you ever ridden bareback?”

“Well, is that even safe?”

“So you haven’t.”

“Of course not. Have you?”

“All the time. My hack at the farm—Bluebell? Remember the very sweet one?—when I’m alone, we always ride that way. My father used to say how lucky we human beings were to have horses in our lives. He used to say how terrible it is that horses are passing out of everyday life. He made me promise to always have horses and keep them well.”

“I know you miss him.”

“I do,” said Doris.

As they approached the barn, leading their horses, Doris glanced out over the tidy stable grounds. Her own stables at the farm would soon be even nicer than this, she thought, since the renovations she’d ordered and helped plan were now underway. Her father had adored her and taught her about life and people and money and purpose, and though he had been dead now for three years, she still missed him achingly—his advice, his support. Her mother, on the other hand, had always resented her. A vain and brittle woman who adored no one and whom no one adored, Nanaline Duke was doing her best to live up to the term grande dame, resentful of the will that had granted so much of the family fortune and property exclusively to her daughter.

At the door to the barn, Barbara wordlessly handed the reins of her horse to a groom.

“You’re not going to wipe down the saddle or anything?” said Doris, loosening her saddle’s girth a bit and ready to walk her horse to a tie ring.

“He’ll do it,” said Barbara casually. “Let him take yours, too.”

Doris reluctantly complied, and the girls headed to the tack room, talking and occasionally laughing.

“Tiki would have a stroke if she ever saw me riding bareback. . .” said Barbara.

After handing their horses over to the groom, Doris and Barbara needed to stop in the tack room only for the toilet and to wash their hands. Henrik was waiting for them at the door of the stable with the car, to drive the girls first back to Barbara’s rooms on campus and then back to New York.

“Ladies,” said Henrik cheerfully with a bow. He was standing in uniform—double-breasted jacket with brass buttons emblazoned with the initial “D,” breeches, boots, and cap—next to the Dukes’ stately green-and-black Rolls-Royce Phantom Sedanca.

“He’s so handsome,” whispered Barbara, who had made the same comment the day before, when Doris arrived at Miss Porter’s.

“Everyone likes him, except maybe Weston,” said Doris, referring to the Duke household’s majordomo.

“French?”

“Swedish. But that accent is partly British. His last position was in London.”

“Dreamy.”

“Weston doesn’t trust him yet.”

“But your mother adores him, right?”

“Well, yes. But you know Nanaline. A few days ago, she made it a point to tell me that with my blond hair, I look more like Henrik than my father.”

Barbara grimaced in dismay.

“Bunk.”

“‘So tall and Scandinavian!’” said Doris, mocking her mother.

“What could she possibly mean by that? That she and Henrik. . . ?”

“Or someone like him, years ago. She’s obviously mad.”

“And rather mean, if you ask me.”

It was only a few weeks after he began working at the Duke Mansion on 78th Street that Henrik, who’d taken a liking to the smart and spirited little girl who was obviously the household’s true mistress, first quietly intimated to Doris that under his supervision, for certain outings, he might be able to arrange for her and a friend to go out safely without the encumbrance of bodyguards. It was Doris who was clever enough to do the actual arranging, though, and Henrik who followed her orders and saw to the details. This overnight visit to Barbara at Miss Porter’s was the first family-sanctioned outing under Henrik’s supervision. Two previous ones that Doris made on her own—to the Cloisters in Washington Heights and Coney Island in Brooklyn—went unsuspected by both Weston and Nanaline Duke. Doris was now cooking up the most elaborate adventure yet, for her and Barbara, despite the vigilance of Doris’s finishing governess, Mlle. Jenny Renaud, and Barbara’s governess, Tiki: a secret visit to a Broadway show.

After a stop at Barbara’s rooms to change clothing, they were on the road to New York. The drive was pleasant. In the privacy of the car’s passenger cabin, the girls tucked into a luncheon hamper that Henrik had placed on one of the fold-down seats across from them. As the Connecticut scenery sailed by, they nibbled on cold chicken, scotch eggs, chunks of crusty bread, Stilton cheese, and apple slices. They chattered away about school, French lessons, the books Barbara was reading and the poetry she was writing, and the private tutoring Doris was receiving in classical piano, jazz piano, ballet, and voice.

An exchange of family gossip prompted Doris to mention a trip she had taken recently to the Dukes’ home territory in Durham, North Carolina.

“It’s going to have six white columns in front—quite imposing. I’ve seen the drawings—I mean, I approved them last year,” said Doris. She had laid the cornerstone of the new student union at Duke University, of which her father had been a founding patron.

“Was it messy?” asked Barbara. “With mortar and a trowel and all that?”

“More like cutting a wedding cake. You hold the trowel and just touch the mortar and stone, and then someone takes the trowel from you and finishes laying the stone. It’s ceremonial. Then there’s champagne.”

“Ooh, I like that part.”

With their lunch, the girls were enjoying a bottle of Veuve Clicquot that Henrik had procured at Doris’s request.

“Technically, I’m the patron now that my father’s gone,” said Doris, “and I want to honor that commitment. But these people... ! Always asking for more money. Clearly, they think we’re not giving them enough.”

“Thank God I don’t have any of that,” said Barbara, with a laugh. “I don’t think I’d know how to do it anyway. You’re so clever with it all.”

“Well, I am my father’s daughter. He showed me everything he could about the business. ‘Make the most of what you have,’ he used to say.”

“I don’t know whose daughter I am,” said Barbara wistfully, precipitating an awkward moment that she dissipated with a sour smile. “Oh, wait—that came out wrong. I only meant . . .”

“I know,” said Doris. “It’s alright. You noodle.”

Barbara’s mother, Edna, a daughter of F.W. Woolworth, founder of the great chain of five-and-dime stores, had committed suicide at the age of thirty-three, when Barbara was only four. Edna, distraught over the philandering of her husband, Franklyn Laws Hutton, had decamped from the family mansion to the Plaza Hotel with her only child; and it was in their suite there, tragically, that Barbara had discovered her mother’s lifeless body. Franklyn took steps afterward to ensure Barbara’s well-being by sending her to live temporarily with relatives in San Francisco and elsewhere, and by hiring a young French woman, Mlle. Germaine “Tiki” Tocquet, to serve as nurse, governess, and surrogate mother. And soon it seemed to the Woolworth family that Barbara had not been too badly scarred by the horrible incident, except that she remained moody and sensitive and dramatic, insisting on wearing makeup, even at such an early age, and writing pages and pages of pensive verse.

Doris’s loss of her father, when she was thirteen, had a similarly bitter dimension. Doting always on his loving daughter, reinforcing her belief that no one would ever love her as much as he did, James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, founder of American Tobacco and Duke Energy, did his best to impart financial and other practical wisdom to her that had been part of his and his family’s fortune-building heritage. And Doris, always a quick study, had taken it all in eagerly, including the solid Tar Heel values, like respect for others, that Buck always said shaped his personal ethos. When Buck became ill with pernicious anemia, Nanaline, his second wife, a fading Southern belle who favored the rather dull son she had by her first husband over the bright, young daughter she had by her second, did little to slow his demise. Doris may have complained about the Duke University trustees asking for more money, but willingly and quite capably she was now, even as a student, overseeing the operation of all the Duke businesses, properties, and philanthropic enterprises, with the help of a squad of loyal family employees.

Buck Duke also imparted to his daughter what he always said was the most important thing to remember about personal wealth: it was “only the tip of our iceberg.” The other nine-tenths of us, he said, was the important part—the part that really influences life and other human beings, whether we ever see the results or not.

Doris had once mentioned this maxim to Barbara, who only sniggered.

“We’re such visible creatures, you and me,” mused Doris. “In the papers all the time. People say we’re so influential. But I wonder if nine-tenths of our influence, anyone’s influence, is invisible. I don’t think we can comprehend it.”

“Dream on,” said Barbara, dismissively.

A year and a half before the premiere at Christie’s, Emma had been anything but certain that the film would ever be completed the way she was hoping. A filmmaker in her early thirties with several prize-winning shorts to her credit, she had made a good start on the project with her friend Kelly, who was proving an effective conduit to several people within the auction house who could help connect Emma with the owners or sellers of important pieces of jewelry who’d be willing to consider participating. But it was still unclear how the project would be funded. So far, Emma was out of pocket, and she’d been turned down for several of the grants she applied for.

The project was thus only just getting underway when Emma emerged from the subway at 86th and Broadway one afternoon and found two messages on her phone. Before going up to her apartment, she stopped to listen at one of the garden benches in the landscaped courtyard of her building, the venerable Belnord. The first message was from her husband, Robert, from whom she was separated.

“Ems, I’m so sorry, but I just found out that one of my Singapore people is coming in for a meeting on the day of your doctor thing, and I have to do it. But you know I would if I could. Gimme a call, okay?”

Emma had agreed to let Robert, an IP attorney, accompany her to an appointment she had with a rheumatologist later in the week, ostensibly for moral support. Living apart for the past year, Emma and Robert had little acrimony between them, or indeed much of anything else now, except a residual physical attraction that a couples therapist had helped them see was not enough to ensure compatibility, let alone a continuing happy marriage. They had recently run into each other at a restaurant party and shared a drunken, ill-advised kiss in the passageway to the restrooms, and since then, improbably, Robert had been calling for . . . what, a date? He said he wanted to have coffee or a drink or something, “to see what our options are,” but Emma wasn’t sure she wanted any options at all in this regard, so she was partly relieved to hear that Robert was bailing on the doctor appointment. Did she need the sex enough? Did she need it with him, who was undoubtedly still enough of the dickhead he was when they separated? Would he ever value her work as an artist or what she felt was her accruing existential weight, as much as she thought necessary? Was she keeping him on the hook as a kind of hedge—and, if so, a hedge against what? Was divorce really the next step—the only one?

I liked him once. Maybe . . . I will grow back into him?

She could easily do the doctor appointment alone. The rheumatologist was going to look at the x-rays and probably tell her she had arthritis or something, as her regular doctor indicated could be possible. The ailment didn’t seem too dire—only a persistent ache in her elbow. Yet this was the first ache that she’d ever had that didn’t simply disappear on its own after a few days. Her regular doctor thought it made sense to refer her to a specialist, but Emma had been a little surprised at the doctor’s lack of alarm. Rather too philosophically, when Emma said she couldn’t remember injuring the elbow, the doctor offered the explanation that “sometimes these things just happen as we get older,” which Emma thought no explanation at all.

The other message was from an old friend of Emma’s family, Oliver Wendell Shaw, a distinguished gentleman of a certain age and then some. A retired columnist often described as a connoisseur, he was one of a vanishing breed of New York cognoscenti who knew something about everything, from Renaissance art to epic poetry, from antique timepieces to vintage automobiles, from the great doyennes of twentieth-century society to the promising young poets who were cut down in the trenches of World War I. For years, Ollie, as he was known, had written for the lavishly produced, now defunct monthly arts-and-culture magazine Nota Bene, of which Emma’s late father, Martin, had been the editor.

“Emma, Ollie Shaw here,” went the message. “It is so nice to hear from you. It’s been years, hasn’t it? Thank you so much for thinking of me. Of course, I’d be delighted to talk about helping you with your project, in any way I can—if I can. Please feel free to call me back, and we’ll set up a time to meet. I’ll be home this evening, if you’d care to call then. Tomorrow morning also works, any time before eleven-thirty. Then I’m off to the Morgan Library to see some autograph scores by Ravel.”

Emma smiled weakly and shook her head. The message contained more information than necessary—a generational thing, she thought—but also typical of Ollie’s mode of self-presentation: prolix, performative, mildly self-amused.

She had known him since childhood, as one of her father’s most eminent writers—someone who would often command the dinner table when invited to one of the salon-like, at-home get-togethers hosted by her parents: Martin, who years before had been named editor of his legendary publication as a relatively young man, and Janet, a painter now enjoying mid-career success with a prominent gallery. As a child and teenager, a bright student at the progressive St. Ann’s school in Brooklyn Heights, Emma felt lucky to be included as a kind of equal among the accomplished guests at these parties. Despite her young age, she often occupied a place at the dinner table and engaged in conversation with everyone. She’d liked Ollie well enough then, especially when he brought her gifts, like an antique fountain pen and an original Broadway playbill from Oklahoma!, but always found him “too fancy” in an old-fashioned way. And there was a darker side of her youthful antipathy. The man’s self-assurance as someone with an informative or at least charming word to say about anything may well have been justified by his intellect or his experience, but Emma saw this otherwise admirable quality in context with the embarrassing if not contemptible “discreetness” Ollie maintained about his sexual identity. Even as a kid, she well knew that his coyly semi-closeted demeanor had grown less and less common among New York’s intellectual class since the so-called Stonewall revolution of the late 1960s.

She simply assumed that Ollie was gay, and so what. Later Emma learned that there had once, during the ’90s, been some kind of affair between this older gentleman and her father, then a newly married man in his thirties—an affair that had led nowhere, and that she now understood, given the kind of men they were, may or may not have been very physical. That her father had a gay side was not particularly shocking. An otherwise devoted and loving family man, Martin was like several of the other St. Ann parents she knew: complicated individuals who made up their own pathways through life and created functional families in collaboration with partners who themselves were committed to highly individualized agendas. No, what Emma found embarrassing was the fact that her father, apparently always a bit naïve in the romance department, despite social revolutions, might have found Ollie’s old-fashioned brand of homosexuality appealing, or at least serviceable enough to emulate, and that this had led to a bad end. On a business trip to São Paulo a few years before, Martin had been murdered during the early morning hours while apparently cruising in a notoriously dangerous city park. Aside from sad, Martin’s secret life seemed unnecessarily sordid to Emma.

Upstairs, in her apartment, Emma made herself a cup of tea and settled at her desk in the book-lined library, which she was using as a base for her project: a documentary film about notable women of the twentieth century and the historic jewelry they collected. It was her first full-length project, and she was enormously excited about it. The idea of developing her thoughts about women, power, and identity through the stories of legendary socialites and their wearable treasures excited her as a way to create something that was as beautiful to look at and fun to watch as it was intellectually revealing. Though she had self-funded her previous films, which were smaller in scope— including Broadway Tiresias, an earnest encounter with a well-known, marginally housed Upper West Side nonconformist, and Passion for Paint, a sweet-and-sometimes-lovingly-sour portrait of her mother—she had been approaching all the usual foundations for support on this new one; and the months-long enterprise of application writing had been taking up at least as much time as research and planning for the film itself.

Emma remembered that Ollie had often spoken of his acquaintance with several of the women whom she was thinking about featuring in her film—including the Duchess of Windsor, whose jewelry collection was so extensive that it was sometimes referred to as “the alternative crown jewels”; heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, who once lost a twenty-one-carat emerald, previously owned by an Aztec king, at a Buckingham Palace soi-rée; Elizabeth Taylor, whose Bulgari love baubles from Richard Burton often made their way to the screen in the star’s movies on her neck, chest, or fingers; socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean, onetime owner of the supposedly cursed Hope Diamond, who said that “when I neglect to wear jewels, astute members of my family call in doctors because it is a sign I’m becoming ill.” Emma wanted to dive deeper into the stories of these women and their acquisitions, looking for strains of feminism, creativity, self-confidence, and autonomy, and she hoped to interview, if not the original owners, then the present owners of legendary pieces.

She remembered that Ollie had once spoken of visiting Hawaii with his “great friend” Barbara Hutton, and she knew that Hutton, on the day of her first wedding—of seven!—was wearing a string of pearls said to have been owned by Marie Antoinette. This was the spot where Emma wanted to start the next phase of her new film project.

And if the grand Mr. Shaw liked the project and was interested in supporting it with some funding of his own, so much the better.

Emma lived alone in the generously proportioned, four-bedroom apartment that her parents had bought back in the 1980s, when they were newlyweds and the only thing that allowed them to afford such spaciousness was the run-down state of the grand, old building. Emma had grown up in the art-and-antique–filled apartment, which was now, after a first-class renovation of the entire building, comfortable to the point of luxuriousness; and both she and her mother saw no reason for them to sell the place after Martin’s death. Janet was currently living in London with her new, much-younger boyfriend, but Emma, now separated from Robert, was happy to return to the Belnord. The main change was that Emma now lived there without the housekeeper, who had been with the family for years, and rescheduled the cleaning lady and her assistant to come twice a month rather than once a week.

Opening her laptop and checking her email, Emma found a message from her mother with some installation shots of an exhibition of her mother’s work that would be opening in London later in the week.

“They’re keeping one of the larger pieces for a private room, in back,” Janet wrote. “Normal people can see it only if they start talking with one of the staff and are invited. Collectors, of course, get pulled back there right away!”

Emma was disappointed not to be going to London for the opening, but the timing wasn’t right. There was all the grant application work that she wanted to stay on track with, and the doctor’s appointment, which she didn’t want to reschedule. She talked to her mother often, but not usually about things as trivial as aches and pains. They had never been that kind of family; Martin like