But all of the treasure in it! Our Russian antiques and objets d’art. The Fabergé pieces, the Romanov dishes, the imperial jewels, the priceless paintings. I’d found them and I’d bought them. Joe had never had the eye—or the funds—to amass a collection on the scale of what we now had. But he did not see it that way. “Oh, that’s rich, Marjorie. You only got the stuff because I was the ambassador,” Joe said smugly, staring at me across the table at one of our dreaded and interminable legal face-offs. I knew the holes in all of what he said. He did as well; he remembered all those afternoons I’d spent plodding through warehouses, scouring the tarp-covered piles to pluck out those treasures. He’d never seen what I’d seen. But now, to spite me, he’d claim it all as his own.
“I just want to be done,” I said to my team of lawyers that afternoon, after four hours of rancorous haggling had proven fruitless in reaching any sort of settlement. Further days spent like that would make me sick; I could no longer bear to be in a room with him.
“If you want it over and done with, Mrs. Post,” my attorney, a man named Charles Littlefield, said, staring at me with an expression equal parts sympathy and cool pragmatism, “then the solution is to just split it all.”
I crossed my arms and frowned as I considered this, eventually asking Mr. Littlefield: “How would we do it?”
“Right down the middle.” He dropped his hand as if it were a blade slicing the air. “We don’t haggle over every piece. Who knows how long that would take? We just draw a line through it, and you each get a side.”
I sighed, staring toward the door. On the other side, Joe sat with his team. After a long pause, my heartbeat clamoring in my ears, I squared my shoulders and looked at Mr. Littlefield, saying: “Fine. We’ll split it. Only let’s get it over with.”
It did go quicker, but it was far from the perfect arrangement. As a result of this legalistic compromise, Joe got some of my most cherished pieces; the sourest pill to swallow was when he marched smugly off with my massive oil painting of Russia’s most beloved tsarina, Catherine the Great, a priceless piece that I’d delighted in since the moment I’d found it.
But I got my peace. And so, in the end, it was a price I was willing to pay.
* * *
I retreated to Sun Valley for several months while the news broke across the capital. And goodness, was that the right decision—I saw just how right a decision it was as I stared at my morning’s copy of The New York Times and read the words:
Extreme Mental Cruelty
Those relentless reporters had, somehow, gotten hold of our divorce papers, and they were sharing with the entire world the cause I’d submitted to the court in my suit. Extreme mental cruelty. It was true. But I’d been trying to keep that one away from the scavengers and the gossips. Not even entirely for Joe and our families, but for myself as well.
Well, I’d failed.
What followed was more headlines—weeks of salacious gossip and breathless speculation. Nothing in our lives was sacred. Had he cheated? Had I cheated? They wrote of Joe’s temper. Of his feuds with my daughters. Had I lost interest because Joe had lost his glamorous political influence? They wrote of my lavish lifestyle and how a man couldn’t help but feel like my pet, albeit one kept in the finest of golden muzzles. Some writers jabbed that Joe had been given his just deserts for abandoning Emlen all those years ago. Other vicious people called me a “Serial Cereal Bride,” naming me as “Mrs. Close-Hutton-Davies,” just in case anyone had forgotten that this was my third marriage to end in divorce.
I looked at all of these articles through eyes needled by tears, sensing the gloating that was so evident behind much of the ink, and I knew that people were speaking about me back at home. Home. Joe had our house, which meant that I no longer had a home to return to.
When I felt that I could not possibly feel any lower, I got a phone call. I heard the brassy voice, and immediately my entire body perked up, drawing strength from the steel in my old friend’s words: “My dear, it’s Alice. How the hell are you?”
“Hi, Alice, it’s good to hear from you.” I sighed. “I’ve been better.”
“But you’ve been worse, too. So let’s remember that.”
“I suppose that’s true.” I stared out the window, at the stunning jut of mountains under the western bluebird sky. Just then a hawk was drawing a slow loop in and out of my view.
“Quite frankly,” Alice went on, “I wondered what took you so long.”