I heard Linda shout through the front door, and I felt every year of my life slide off my shoulders. “Theresa, hand me the right glove,” I said. She did. I turned it over in my fingers and felt the small hard lump at the tip of the ring finger. I did not open it. I held the glove against my chest, and I walked to the front door, and I unlocked it. “Linda, you may come in,” I said. “But you will not touch anything. Rick will stay on the porch. And Mr. Ross may sit in the dining room, where I can see him.” Linda looked at me as if I were a stranger.
They came in, the three of them, with a gust of cold air. Edward Ross, in his long wool coat, sat at the head of my dining room table with his leather briefcase on his knees. He tried to smile. “Mrs. Kaminski, I am only here to help,” he said smoothly. I took a chair at the other end, with the Marshall Field box on my lap and Theresa beside me. “Mr. Ross, I fitted gloves for forty years,” I said. “I can tell a man by his hands. Yours have never done a day of work, and they are shaking.” He put them under the table.
Linda sat down on the edge of the sofa and began to cry. “Ma, I am so sorry,” she said. “Rick told me you were losing your mind. He said you would need care, and that the house would cover it. He said the gloves were junk. I did not know there was a key.” Rick, still in the doorway, said, “Linda, shut up.” I raised one hand. “Rick, you may leave if you wish,” I said. “The police are coming. I called them from the kitchen. They will want to speak to you about a cousin at a bank.”
A glove on a bed, a doorbell on a Sunday, and a woman who fitted her last secret from the inside out.
Rick went gray. “What cousin?” he said weakly. “The one you sent to Continental Bank this afternoon,” I said, “with a forged letter and my name. Linda just shouted it through the door.” The telephone rang on the hall table. It was the manager of the Chase branch on North Avenue, which had swallowed Continental Bank in 1992. A man claiming to be my nephew, she said, had asked to open box 211, with a power of attorney. The boxes at that branch could only be opened with a key and a signature. She had refused him politely, and he had left, and she wanted to know if everything was all right.
I thanked her, and told her that I would be at her door in the morning with my identification and my key. When the police arrived, two young officers and a sergeant, I handed them the forged power of attorney and the text messages from Linda that Theresa had saved. Edward Ross was not a lawyer. His real name was Eddie Rossi, he was a salesman of used cars from Elmwood Park, and he had a record. Rick cousin turned up that night at a bar on Milwaukee Avenue and was arrested for impersonation. Rick himself was taken to the station for questions. Linda stayed.
In the morning I put on my good navy suit and took the CTA bus, since my husband Stan would have wanted me to. Theresa went with me, with Linda sitting in the back seat, quiet as a stone. At the Chase branch on North Avenue, the manager took me down to the vault, a small round room with brass doors, and slid out box 211. I opened the right glove with my sewing scissors. Out fell a little brass key, tarnished and tiny, no bigger than my thumbnail. I put it into the lock. It turned with a click, and I lifted the lid.
Inside lay a velvet pouch and a folded sheet of paper. I took out the pouch with both hands. In it, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, was a necklace of diamonds, the size of grapes, flashing under the bare light like a handful of frost. Theresa gasped. The manager put her hand over her mouth. The paper was a newspaper clipping, Chicago Tribune, dated March 1946: Famed Opera Patron Mrs. Harold Armour Robbed of Famous Diamond Necklace at the Lyric. A man named Sal Moretti had been blamed. The necklace had never been found.
My mother had worn those gloves to the Lyric on the opening night of Madama Butterfly. A young usher named Joseph Nowak, my father, had been paid by Moretti to steal the necklace from the patron box, and the thief had panicked in the crowd and pressed the jewels into my mother hand, a stranger, to hide in her glove. She had never told a soul. Seventy nine years later, I held the stolen necklace in a bank vault and wept for a girl of nineteen, alone in a velvet seat, with a fortune in her glove, falling in love.
The Chicago Police Department took the necklace into custody, and the Armour family, now a charitable foundation, was found within a week. Their lawyers drove out to my bungalow on Avondale Avenue with a thick envelope. The foundation had decided to give the necklace to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, to be displayed in the lobby, and to give me a finder reward of two hundred thousand dollars. I did not want it. I gave half to Theresa, who had driven two hours with a pair of gloves, and half to the Lyric, to fund a costume shop for young seamstresses.
On the opening night of the new season, the Lyric lobby was full of light. Under glass, on a velvet cushion, lay the Armour necklace, and beside it, in a smaller case, a pair of white kid opera gloves, elbow length, with twelve tiny pearl buttons at each wrist. A card in the case read, Gloves worn by Helen Kaminski, 1946. Donated by her daughter, Rose. I stood in front of them in my best black dress, with my own long white gloves on my hands, and Linda on my arm. “Ma, they look beautiful,” she whispered. I said I knew. Then the curtain bell rang, and we went in.
