Chapter 6 - Clearing the Gallery
The first thing I did as the official director of the estate was close the main house for three months. It wasn't an act of mourning; it was an act of purification.
We hired a local team to deep-clean every room, opening windows that had been locked for decades to let the scent of lemon oil and old dust escape. But the biggest change happened in the grand portrait gallery—a long, drafty hallway lined with oil paintings of stern-faced ancestors looking down their noses at anyone who walked by.
Lily and I walked through it with a clipboard.
"What are we doing with these, Mom?" she asked, tilting her head at a massive painting of my great-great-grandfather, a man known for his ruthless shipping monopolies and his complete lack of charity.
"We're keeping the ones that have historical value for the local archive," I said. "But the rest? The ones that were put up just to make people feel small? We’re taking them down."
We stopped in front of a recently commissioned portrait of my parents. They looked regal, untouchable, and completely devoid of warmth.
"Do you want this one?" I asked Lily.
She looked at it for a long time, then shook her head. "No. It looks like they were already gone when it was painted."
We had it moved to the basement storage. In its place, on the center wall of the gallery where the light hit perfectly at noon, we hung a new frame. It wasn't an oil painting. It was a large, high-quality photograph of Lily from her eighth birthday, laughing in a muddy field after trying to catch frogs, her hair wild and her smile radiant.
Underneath, on a small brass plaque, I had the installers engrave the words my grandfather had written: “Family is not found in the blood; it is found in the shelter we build for one another.”
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The house staff, many of whom had worked under my mother’s rigid, unforgiving regime for years, began to change too. Mrs. Gable, the head housekeeper who had always spoken in a terrified whisper, started bringing her homemade cinnamon rolls to the kitchen. She even taught Lily how to bake them on Saturday mornings, the kitchen filling with the sound of laughter and the smell of yeast and sugar—sounds that had been outlawed in Eleanor Vance’s house.
We were turning a mausoleum into a home.
