Part 3 — Pearls in Nashville
Walt did not answer. He stood by the staircase with his hands in his pockets, and every eye in that room moved from the glass strand on the neck of Paige to the face of my husband, and then back again. Vivian was still holding the clasp up to the chandelier like a surgeon with an instrument she did not want to use.
“Mrs. Joyce,” she said gently, “may I ask a question that I would ask any customer? In March, did anyone besides you have access to your dresser?” I said that Paige had stayed with us for a week. I said that Walt had been home all that week with his back, while I worked. Vivian nodded as if I had confirmed something she already knew.
She excused herself and stepped into the hall with her phone. She is the kind of woman who knows every dealer between Louisville and Nashville, because estate jewelry travels, and a strand of real pearls with a shell clasp does not travel quietly. I stood with the photograph of my mother in my hand and waited. Forty people waited with me, not one of them touching a drink.
She was gone eleven minutes. When she came back, her face had settled into the calm that a person puts on to deliver difficult news. “Mr. Feld in Nashville buys estate pieces,” she said. “He remembers a strand with a shell clasp. He bought it on the fourteenth of March for forty-two hundred dollars. The seller showed a Kentucky driver license. Mr. Feld keeps copies.” She looked at me. “The name on the license was that of your husband.”
Paige made a small sound. Walt closed his eyes. I did not say a word, because there are moments when a woman has learned that silence is the loudest thing in the room. I had just heard that the man who held my hand at the funeral of my mother had carried her pearls to Nashville in his coat and sold them across a glass counter for the price of a used truck.
It came out of him in pieces, which is how truth comes out of a man who has hidden it for months. Paige had called him in February, frightened. She owed nine thousand dollars to a man she had once dated, who had begun to telephone her workplace. She begged Walt not to tell me. He said he had no money. She said, There are the pearls in the drawer of Joyce, and nobody ever wears them.
He had told himself he would buy them back before I ever missed them. He ordered a copy in glass from a jeweler in Evansville, with a new clasp because the old one could not be matched, and he left it in the drawer. Paige wore the copy tonight because it was the only way to have a strand for the party. She did not know the clasp was new until Vivian pointed it out. She had never even looked.
I did what I learned in twenty-nine years as a church secretary, where money is handled in public and honesty is not a feeling but a ledger. I asked Vivian for the number of Mr. Feld. I called him from the porch, with the photograph of my mother beside the phone. I told him the pearls had been given to me by my late mother and were never the property of my husband to sell. I gave him the date of the photograph, 1984, and the name of the jeweler who had restrung them in 1996.
Mr. Feld listened. He is an honest man, I could hear it. He said he had a rule about estate pieces: he holds any strand from a seller who cannot show a receipt of purchase for thirty days before he lists it. The pearls were in his safe. He had not sold them, and he would not, as long as I came with the paperwork on Monday.
On Monday I drove to Nashville with the photograph, a letter from my lawyer, and a cashier check for forty-two hundred dollars drawn on the savings of Walt. He had signed it at the kitchen table without a word. Mr. Feld opened his safe. He laid the strand across a velvet cloth, and I knew it by the weight before I touched it, the way you know the hand of your mother in the dark.
Paige came to the house on Sunday evening. She did not ask for forgiveness. She asked what she could do, and I told her. She would repay her brother every dollar by the end of the year, with a written note. She would tell her fiancé the whole truth, and she would tell the man she owed to stop calling her workplace, and I gave her the number of a lawyer who writes letters for that kind of thing. She cried. She wrote down every word.
Pearls are only small treasures from the sea, but the hands that wore them make them worth keeping.
Walt slept in the guest room for a season, and he cooked, and he did not complain. We went to counseling at the church. I will not tell you that it is all repaired, because trust is a strand and not a stone, and it has to be restrung one pearl at a time. On Easter Sunday I wore them to church, as my mother did, the little gold shell clasp at the nape of my neck. After the service a girl of six in a yellow dress looked up at me and said they were the prettiest she had ever seen. I told her they were very old, and very real, and that they were meant to be worn.
