Golden Country by Jennifer Gilmore

Author:Jennifer Gilmore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Seven days after the Terrier’s trial, Pauline Brodsky and her son vanished. Into thin air, the Post reported. Many women left New York and changed their names to avoid gangster ties, the Post said. They became Donovan or Dickens and disappeared into the straight world. Perhaps this was what Mrs. Terrier had done. “Has the Terrier’s Bitch Fled the Kennel?” the headline read.

For days the papers reported how repossession men were stripping the house of everything: the furniture, the fine china, the cars and tennis rackets. The papers ran photos of many of these items—fine Chinese vases, silver tea services, solid gold statuettes.

“Would you look at this?” Frances said over breakfast one morning with her husband. She stood up from her chair and went to Vladimir, seated across from her. She punched the paper open for him. “Just look!”

“I see it, Frances,” he said, delicately tapping his spoon at his soft-boiled egg.

She had to laugh at the idea, more her fantasy, of all of Solomon’s possessions—a pharaoh’s riches—being taken away to be buried with him. “I really should go up there.”

Vladimir lopped off the tip of his egg, and Frances gasped. It was as if he had chopped off the top of her thumb. Bits of yolk dribbled down the shell and the silver egg holder, then slowly began to pool in the little saucer she had brought him moments before with such care.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “It’s a crime scene. Do you realize this? It’s the scene of a crime.”

Frances looked over at her husband. He had a permanent red welt on his nose from working so late in his spectacles, and she looked at it now as he put down his spoon and rubbed his eyes. “Come on. It’s not really a crime scene. I just want to know what’s happened to everything. There might be some of my mother’s stuff, you know.”

And just what were they doing with all those books? Frances wondered. She remembered Solomon’s pride in his library. Yes, he loved all his possessions, but he had been particularly proud of having so many books.

“No, I won’t allow it, I’m sorry,” Vladimir said wearily. “Enough is enough, Frances.”

Frances felt like she would cry. “But I must go up there!” she shrieked.

The more hysterical she became, the calmer her husband got. “Nope,” he said.

Frances stormed out of the kitchen and into the bedroom, where she threw herself on the bed. She considered defying Vladimir as she had her parents when Pauline had gotten married.

Frances could hear the tinkling of Vladimir’s spoon as he resumed eating as serenely as he’d been before she’d stomped out of the kitchen. She could hear him turning the pages of the paper in a slow and measured fashion, and this infuriated her.

She wished she was back at her parents’ flat on South Fifth, listening to her mother’s cleaning, her father’s ceaseless talking, as she waited for Pauline to crawl into bed with her. Where had her sister gone?

For one moment Frances

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