Museum House
Aging mansions are scattered across Southeast Michigan, built by the founding families of the automotive industry in the early 20th Century. Many have been turned into house museums: Cranbrook House, Meadow Brook Hall, the Edsel Ford Houses. The museum house in this story is nothing like any of those mentioned above.
Published November 2022. The Viriginia Writers Club Golden Nib / Teen Nib Anthology 2022. ISBN 9798358750098. https://virginiawritersclub.org/Publications
Marina had given no small amount of thought as to where to hide Gus’s duffle bag. Though they were explicitly instructed otherwise, tourists had a tendency to open drawers and closets as if the mansion’s former occupants might have left something private and revealing behind. Marina entered the master bedroom and began turning on lamps, setting the pink and white wallpaper aglow, the velveteen drapes, the plump settee, the rose-patterned Berber carpet. Mrs. Rutherford had redecorated the entire suite upon Mr. Rutherford’s death. She knelt beside the twin bed nearest the window and slid Gus’s bag underneath, adjusting the dust ruffle before she stood. In the grand hall below, the 18th Century Hermelink clock struck the half hour. The others would be arriving.
Marina smoothed her skirt over her hips and retraced her steps, exiting the bedroom through Mrs. Rutherford’s small sitting room, descending the staircase to the landing where the gilt-framed James Montgomery Flagg charcoals of Clement and Catherine Rutherford hung side by side. Their expressions were solemn, severe even, as was required of the wealthy in 1932. His face was sharp-featured, with high cheekbones and a narrow forehead; his mouth, generous and full-lipped, seemed out of place. She was moonfaced with a nondescript nose and protuberant eyes that missed nothing. Marina met Mrs. Rutherford’s gaze for a moment then turned and continued down the stairs. The expanse of burgundy carpet unfurled the length of the hall, thick and buoyant beneath her good black pumps. The swish of her support hose kept time with the ticking clock as she entered the dining room. In the kitchen she stopped. She rushed when she was nervous. She pressed her palms down on the cool marble countertop and took three deep breaths, letting each out slowly.
Gus, as it turned out, had toured the house at three different times, on three different days, with three different docents, carefully avoiding any of Marina’s shifts. He hadn’t mentioned his visits to Marina until he presented her with the list last night.
This morning, he had driven her to work, to the Tudor-style mansion on the bluff above the river. Clouds lingered from the storm as Gus turned in at the gravel service drive. The staff parking lot was still empty, thank goodness. Gus popped the hatchback of the aging Subaru and removed the duffle bag he had prepared then opened Marina’s door and reached for her hand. The car was low to the ground and a graceful exit required concentration. When she was standing beside him under the dripping trees, he lifted her hand to his mouth. His warm lips and the teasing whiskers of his thick mustache brushed her knuckles. “You’re my girl,” he said as he handed her the bag.
He was manipulating her. She knew that. Reminding her of the way he had caressed her unlovely body the night before. Plump as Botticelli’s Venus, he’d said, and afterward prepared succulent veal piccata with lemon, capers, and parsley butter sauce and served it to her on a tray in bed. The list had been hidden, shy as a love note, beneath the plate.
“You’ve said it yourself, they don’t appreciate what they have.” Gus removed the tray to the floor and lifted her feet into his lap.
“I could be fired.” Marina imagined their mug shots printed side by side in the newspaper. “Or worse.”
“I would never let anything happen to you. If we were found out, I would go to the guillotine for the both of us.” He dug his thumb deep into the fleshy mound at the base of her big toe. “But we won’t be.”
Still she withheld her answer.
“We’ll start small. You can see from the list no one would notice their absence. We’ll grow bolder together.”
“I’ll think about it,” she had said, playing the coquette. It was a new and deeply satisfying role, to have something a man wanted.
By this morning she still had not given her answer though the list was tucked deep in the pocket of her cardigan. She took the bag from Gus and followed the path that led to the staff entrance. Wind and rain had plastered leaves to the concrete stoop like great wet handprints. She wiped her feet, unlocked the door and punched in the alarm code.
Marina met Gus when she brought a silver sugar bowl to his stall at the Wagon Wheel Antiques Barn out on Old Post Road. It was part of a tea set her mother had always insisted was an authentic Paul Revere. When her mother had her first stroke, Marina had accepted the early retirement her school district was offering and moved out from the city – there was nothing and no one to keep her there – to be her mother’s full-time caretaker. While cooking bland meals of poached chicken and steamed vegetables, shuttling her mother to doctor appointments, and responding to the little silver bell her mother rang when she needed to be helped to the bathroom or to the sun porch or to her chair padded with pillows in front of the television, Marina spun a future where she redecorated the bungalow in crisp striped linens and nautical prints, took the train into the city for exhibitions, joined the local library board or historical society.
Her mother had hung on for three years, the medical bills whittling down the life insurance Marina’s father had left to an insignificant nugget. All that remained in the end was the small bungalow, its contents, and some treasury bonds. With only a partial pension, Marina’s financial situation grew tighter when she received a higher-than-expected property tax bill. Though the village dangled from the tail end of the commuter rail line, property values even this far out were beginning to rise.
The ad Gus placed in the Yellow Pages said that he had earned a Ph.D. in early American history – none of the other antique dealers bothered to claim such credentials – though Gus had confessed to her later that he never finished his dissertation. He had been encouraging about the sugar bowl’s authenticity but asked to keep it a day or two to do more research. He called the next day to say he’d completed the research on her sugar bowl and invited her to stop by so he could give her a more in-depth lesson on the history of her piece. “Some of my customers care about nothing but price,” he said. “But I sensed you were a more discerning individual.”
She had gone to his “shop” as he called it, in reality only a doublewide stall at the back of the antiques barn. He had added a corduroy sport coat and splash of Old English Leather to the plaid shirt and blue jeans he’d been wearing the day before. Reaching for both of her hands, he raised them to his lips. He had the physique of an aging linebacker and she felt almost petite in his presence.
“I’m so happy to see you again.” His smile was broad and his teeth white, nested as they were within his salt-and-pepper mustache and beard. He led her to a lace-covered table, pulled out a chair and offered her Darjeeling in a gold-rimmed Royal Albert teacup.
“I know we should have had the set appraised after Father died. I’m a little ashamed but with my students and then Mother’s illness…”
“You’re a teacher?” That seemed to please him.
“Librarian, retired.”
“Ah, a woman who knows something about research.” He pulled a stack of books toward him. “Now, let me show you what I’ve found.”
And one at a time he placed the reference books and catalogs with marked pages in her lap, explaining the research that had led him to his conclusion.
“I must admit my heart went pitter pat when I saw this piece. Even an expert would be fooled at first glance. It is an exceptionally good reproduction of a Paul Revere sugar bowl circa 1787. So, few lay people know that he was a silversmith as well as a patriot. It is rare to see reproductions of this quality.”
Marina blinked her disappointment.
“Oh, my dear,” Gus said taking her hand. “It’s still sterling silver you know. That makes it worth nearly four hundred dollars. And if you have the complete set, that could bring as much as two thousand.”
It was a weak moment and she had ended up spilling all her financial woes out on the table. He shared some of his own mishaps in turn, so from the beginning she knew about the forgery charge that had been set aside thanks to the intervention of a clever lady lawyer. He waggled his eyebrows at her and she tamped down a fizz of jealousy.
He locked up his shop and took her to dinner that first night. They attended estate sales together and she helped him research new pieces and commiserated that a Green Lantern comic book from 1940 was worth more than a Wedgewood Shepherdess circa 1890. They went for walks along the river and shared the Sunday Times at the coffee shop in town – her, the arts and leisure; him, the obituaries and estate sales. Three months later, Gus had shown her the ad for the docent position at the museum house.
From the moment she arrived for docent training, Marina felt a kinship with Mrs. Rutherford. On slow days, Marina slipped on white cotton gloves and paged through one of Mrs. Rutherford’s oxblood leather journals. There were entries on the management of the children, the house and eventually, her fortune. Mr. Rutherford had died a painful death at the age of forty-five in the grip of a mysterious illness that liquefied his bowels. When Mrs. Rutherford contemplated her future as a widow, sitting at the delicate French Provincial writing desk in her sitting room, had she foreseen that she would spend the next forty years alone? Had she turned away suitors, and a chance at happiness, suspicious that any man whose wealth did not equal hers would have both eyes fixed firmly on her money? Had she understood that her children would leave home one by one, returning only when they needed to suck at the teat of the fortune their mother controlled? Perhaps that had been the bargain she struck, a life of solitude in exchange for provenance over the treasures she had gathered under the sheltering wings of her house.
Now, Marina took another breath and glanced around the kitchen. No one had replaced the roses laid out on the counter in the little alcove Mrs. Rutherford called her cutting room. The flowers were staged, some on the counter and some in the crystal vase as if Mrs. Rutherford had just stepped out to the garden to snip more. Today, the pink and white petals were rimmed with brown. She picked up a rose, careful of the thorns and carried it through the swinging door to the butler’s pantry beyond the kitchen.
Bonnie, the head docent, and the girl who worked in the gift shop were laughing together as Marina entered. Bonnie was in her sixties at least, a beauty-parlor redhead with a laugh like a blue jay and unfortunately large teeth. Marina waggled the stem at Bonnie, then dropped it meaningfully in the trash. “I noticed the curator changed the China pattern in the dining room,” she said, consulting the notes posted on the docents’ bulletin board. “I don’t see that updated here.”
Bonnie shrugged. “I didn’t get to it yet. It’s not like people are going to know the difference between Royal Doulton and Wedgewood.”
Gus would have. “It’s the Minton Blue Willow,” said Marina and turned to see Bonnie rolling her eyes.
Mrs. Rutherford had sixteen sets of China for dinner service and another dozen for luncheons and teas but none of it had made it onto Gus’s list.
“Nothing breakable and nothing too large or obvious,” he had said.
Bonnie grabbed the silver dinner bell off her shelf and brushed past Marina on her way out the door. “Let’s go, ladies. Time to make the donuts.”
Out in the hall, Bonnie rang the bell calling the visitors to gather for the first tour.
“This place is barely older than I am,” said an elderly woman on Marina’s ten-thirty tour, the three-pronged foot of her metal cane leaving indentations like fingerprints on the grand hall’s carpet.
Marina explained that though the house was completed in 1926, making it a mere eighty-nine years old, upon her death Mrs. Rutherford had left instructions and a small endowment to have her home turned into a museum of good taste and propriety, a showplace for the art and artifacts she collected on her travels.
Next, Marina led them to the gallery where she pointed out the stone mantels above the fireplaces on either end of the room and the carved mahogany paneling Mr. Rutherford had imported from an estate in England that had fallen on hard times.
The elderly woman’s daughter spoke up. “You mean he just took apart a castle that had been there for hundreds of years?” There was more than a hint of outrage in her voice.
“By the turn of the century, many of England’s oldest families could no longer keep up their ancestral homes. Should craftsmanship like this be lost due to financial mismanagement and neglect?” Marina said in her most soothing voice. “He brought them here to be preserved and remembered.” She refused to acknowledge the woman’s raised hand for the rest of the tour.
All through the day, in each room she entered, the artifacts on Gus’s list seemed to throb with anticipation. The bronze Head of Victory on the bookshelves in the gallery, a French bisque-head doll on the bed in the oldest daughter’s room, the first edition Robert Frost in the governess’ room, the silver Meisterstuck fountain pen in Mr. Rutherford’s study and the Paul Revere sterling silver sugar bowl on the sideboard in the dining room – fraternal twin to her mother’s reproduction. Each item had its doppelganger waiting in the duffle bag. Gus was an artist when it came to adjusting a maker’s initials here, a watermark or artist’s signature there. His shop was full of pieces that had come up in the world thanks to his skill. She had seen the before and after. The aging curator and the inattentive docents would never notice the switch.
Having completed her four-thirty tour and sent the group on to the gift shop, Marina was stationed at the welcome table in the main hall when Bonnie waved the eight souls in the last group of the day into Mr. Rutherford’s study as if she were docking a 747. This would be the last tour of the day. Marina stepped into the study and stood just inside the door.
Here Bonnie explained more about Mr. Rutherford’s business – how he’d inherited his fortune from his father who’d invested in oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania. Mrs. Rutherford, née Newmont, brought her own wealth to the union in the form of shares in Australian and South Africa mining concerns. It was these investments in precious metals and gems that cushioned the family fortune from the worst of the stock market crash in 1929. From this study, as well as from a pied-á-terre in the city, Mr. Rutherford had managed the family’s wealth.
“But that’s not all Mr. Rutherford did in his study. This room has a secret,” Bonnie paused for effect. “A hidden door. Can anyone see it?”
The tourists squinted at the paneled walls, leaned in for a closer look at the bookshelves.
Bonnie pressed on a wall panel and a section swung out, revealing a sparsely furnished chamber with a single bed.
“The official word is that if Mr. Rutherford had been working late in his study he would retire here rather than disturb Mrs. Rutherford with nocturnal comings and goings.” Bonnie lowered her voice to a near whisper. “But keep in mind that it was Mr. Rutherford who hired all those pretty young governesses and Mrs. Rutherford who was constantly firing them.”
Marina hated that Bonnie insisted on telling that story. Mrs. Rutherford had been humiliated enough in life; there was no cause to do so now that all the afflicted parties were dead. “There is absolutely no proof of a dalliance between Mr. Rutherford and any of the governesses,” Marina said.
“The family had eight governesses in six years and it wasn’t because the children were holy terrors. You have to admit, the family ran through governesses like nobody’s business.” Bonnie winked at her tour group.
Heads swiveled back to Marina for the next volley. Ordinarily she would say something in Mrs. Rutherford’s defense but tonight the words didn’t form.
The final governess had arrived the same summer Mr. Rutherford’s illness appeared. She had continued in the family’s employ until the youngest Rutherford child departed for boarding school. Mrs. Rutherford’s journal from that year contained nothing about Mr. Rutherford’s illness but copious notes about the varietals of Oleander on the rear terrace overlooking the river. Rather than burn them on the rubbish heap when the weather turned too cold, she had asked the gardeners to bring them into the solarium for the winter and added a reminder to tell the governess that the children were not to touch the ornamental trees as even the sap could be poisonous.
“We’ve finished our tour but you won’t want to miss the gift shop. It’s right this way.” Bonnie’s voice faded down the hall. “Our Rutherford House Christmas ornaments are back in stock. They make great gifts.”
Marina hurried back through the kitchen to the butler’s pantry where she shrugged on her raincoat. There would be a lull before Bonnie flushed her tour through the gift shop and the gift shop girl closed up the register. Marina punched out, opened the exterior door, and then let it close again without exiting. She waited a beat and then slipped out to the hall and up the stairs, avoiding Mrs. Rutherford’s gaze on the landing.
From the dormer window in the boys’ bedroom, she could see over the privet hedge to the staff parking lot. The clouds had cleared, the sun was sliding below the tree line on the far side of the river. Another ten minutes passed before Bonnie and the gift shop girl drove away. Marina watched their progress down the winding drive until their taillights winked out. The house felt vulnerable in the silence. Then the grandfather clock in the hall began to strike, its deep vibrato tickling the fine hairs in her ears, setting nerves alight across the nape of her neck.
Marina retrieved the duffel bag from under the bed in Mrs. Rutherford’s bedroom and crossed into the sitting room. She was to wait half an hour then collect the items on the list and pack them carefully in the bag.
The floodlights fixed to the eaves outside clicked on, turning the dusky pink carpet a rusted orange that Mrs. Rutherford would have hated. Marina approached the Queen Anne desk, sat down on the chintz-covered chair. She placed the duffel bag on the floor by her feet and unzipped the main compartment. There, nestled among the bubble-wrapped imposters, were her walking shoes and a pair of warm socks. Gus had thought of everything, even her poor aching feet.
She slipped her hand into her pocket and felt for the list with the tips of her fingers but did not draw it out. The list, and the future it heralded, offered an alternate ending to the one she thought had been ordained for her by circumstance.
Marina bent to change her shoes. Only the doors and windows had sensors, so there were no tripwires to be avoided as she moved through the house. She was to turn off the alarm, wait thirty seconds, rearm it and then exit. Gus would be waiting for her at the scenic overlook half a mile north along the bluff. She would begin, soon.
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