The quilt on the four poster bed in the master bedroom of the house on Jones Street in Savannah was the Double Wedding Ring quilt that my grandmother had sewn in 1931, with the little red heart stitched into the corner, and I knew it the moment I walked through the door of the open house. I am Lillian Crowder, seventy seven years old, of Pooler, and I stood in the doorway with my cane and my pocketbook, looking at my own china cabinet, my own clock, and the portrait of my mother over the mantel. A sign on the lawn read: Offered at one million, eight hundred thousand dollars.
My son in law Todd had moved me out of that house in May, with a smile and a promise. He had said it was for my safety, that the stairs were too steep, that a nice apartment in Pooler would be easier. He had taken my signature on a stack of papers, one at a time, and I had signed where he pointed, because he was a banker, and he was always so patient. My daughter Amy had cried at the door of the new apartment. I had thought she cried for me. Now I was not sure.
The real estate agent, a pleasant young woman named Brooke, came across the room with a tray of cookies, and she smiled until she saw my face. Then she looked at the quilt and back at me. “Madam,” she said slowly, “the owner told us that this was a staged home, and that the furnishings were purchased from an estate.” I laid my hand on the little red heart. I felt the fingers of my grandmother in the stitches. I took out my telephone, and I called my daughter, and when she answered, I said only, “Amy, I am standing on Jones Street.”
A quilt in a real estate listing gave one grandmother the length of an open house to bring her son in law back to the truth in Savannah.
I gave my terms in the front hall of that house, to the two of them, when Amy and Todd arrived within ten minutes, white faced, in two separate cars. “Todd, I will be sitting on that sofa for the next hour, and you will be sitting across from me, and Brooke will be present as a witness. You will tell me what happened to my house, and what happened to the money, and where you have put it. Amy, you will sit by my side. I love you, and I want you to hear every word of what your husband says.”
Todd stood in the middle of the Persian rug, a handsome man of fifty with a banker haircut, and for once he had no easy smile. “Lillian, I sold the house in September, to a company I control,” he said hoarsely. “The power of attorney you signed gave me the right. I owed three hundred thousand dollars to investors in a restaurant group that failed. I intended to sell the house for a profit and repay them and tell you in the spring. I told Amy you wanted to move. I told you it was the best thing for you.” Amy sat very still, and then she began to cry.
Todd looked around the room, at the agent, at his wife, at the old woman on the sofa, and then he lunged for the coffee table. He snatched the folder with the power of attorney and the deed to the company, the papers that proved the sale, and he ran down the front steps of the house, meaning to get into his car and drive to the courthouse to change the records before the day was out. The agent screamed. The cookies flew. And on the sidewalk, a pair of moving men carrying a sofa blocked the walk.
Todd stopped on the front walk with the folder clutched in both hands, the two moving men with the sofa in front of him, and the agent and my daughter standing in the doorway above. The older of the movers, a gray bearded man named Floyd, grinned. “Sir, the old lady in the doorway telephoned my boss ten minutes ago and said you might be in a hurry.” Todd turned to look at me. I stood at the top of the steps, small and straight, my cane planted on the wood. He lowered the folder, and Floyd took it from his hands, as gently as a man taking a baby.
The consequences were methodical and, in the end, just. A judge in Chatham County voided the sale, found the power of attorney to have been obtained by fraud, and returned the house on Jones Street to my name. Todd was charged and lost his license to work as a banker, and he repaid the investors with his own savings. Amy moved out of their house, and into mine. We sat in the kitchen for hours that first week, and she asked my forgiveness a hundred times, and I gave it a hundred and one.
In the name of my grandmother Clara, who passed in 1974, I started the Clara Mobley Fund. It pays for the restoration of quilts and family heirlooms and for legal help for older homeowners pressured into signing powers of attorney, in Chatham, Effingham and Bryan counties. In the first year we restored one hundred and sixteen heirlooms and helped seventy four homeowners keep their homes. One was an eighty year old woman from Garden City who held her recovered wedding quilt to her face and told the volunteers that it still smelled like her mother.
On a golden afternoon in April, I sat in the sun room of my house on Jones Street in Savannah, with my feet on a stool and the Double Wedding Ring quilt across my knees, folded to show the little red heart. Amy brought me a glass of sweet tea and sat on the arm of my chair. Outside, the live oaks dripped with Spanish moss, and a carriage rolled by with its tourists. “Mama,” she said, “tell me again about Grandma Clara.” So I did, and I touched the stitches one by one.
