Boston, Cheers, and Antique Shops

Today my dad and I took a bus tour of Boston and Cambridge. The tour guides/bus drivers were all quite amusing and informative.

The first stop on our tour of Boston was the Cheers bar. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood full of—you guessed it—really old buildings. Years ago my dad had said that Aunt Barbara owned an antique store next door to or around the corner from the Cheers bar, and many of her “customers” were people asking where the bar was located. However, carrying a business card we found at Aunt Barbara’s condo, we discovered that the antique store was located around the corner and down the street several blocks—it wasn’t as close as we had pictured it.

 The Cheers Bar, around the corner from Aunt Barbara's former antique shop

Interior of Cheers Bar, in the basement; the restaurant is upstairs.

We came to the address for what was formerly Mayfield Antiques, and it’s now a real estate agent’s office. It looked like nothing but a door in a narrow space—other shops appeared to be on either side of the door, so perhaps the office was upstairs. The agent, probably in his thirties and wearing a suit, happened to be on the doorstep while we stood looking up at the door and the black paneled number “49” above it. He talked with us (my dad, a retired newspaper reporter, can talk to everyone except my mother). He suggested we visit an antique store up the street named White and Crane (I think that was the name), because they had been in business forever and might remember Aunt Barbara and her shop.

We wandered further up the street—lined with beautiful old buildings with lots of paneling and brick and dormer windows and mansard roofs. Many of the shops were antique stores, so the competition must have been fierce when Aunt Barbara had her shop here twenty years ago. We came to the antique shop that had been in business a very long time (two hundred years, by the look of it), but it was closed for a long lunch break. The front was very dark paneled wood with big many-paneled windows displaying an impressive array of antiques.

One of the antique shops had, displayed in its front window, a large wooden cabinet, perhaps a sideboard, which contained among other things several sets of Stafford dogs. Another had a white china cat in the window, and another had a black china dog.

We backtracked to a Tibetan shop I had spotted and drooled over a block away, on the same side of the street as Aunt Barbara’s former shop. The Tibetan shop was in the basement, with its front window visible a few feet above ground. We stepped down into the shop, and I admired embroidered clothing and pillows and a good selection of books, particularly on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. The owner was a guy probably in his thirties who not only looked Tibetan but was carrying on a phone conversation in what sounded like Tibetan. I picked out three books about Tibetan women and begged my dad to get them for me, which he did. He chatted with the store owner and told him I’d been to Tibet, so we talked about that a little. I also looked around at other fabric items while my dad used the restroom. We returned to the tour bus stop, having decided we’d wait and have lunch someplace other than the Cheers bar because this had been only our first stop in Boston.

Getting to Know Aunt Barbara

I just looked through Aunt Barbara’s two passports. She went to Guadalupe and Jamaica in 1981, and she went to France and Montreal, Canada in the 1980s. She was in Montreal in 1982 (March 25); on the same page, strangely, is a very faded stamp that appears to say “Maryland” and has the date of February 4, 1986. Surely she didn’t live in Montreal, Canada for four years—I just talked with my dad about it, and it looks like she visited that particular part of Canada more than once. She was in France in 1986, when she was thirty-nine. She also had an International Driving Permit, to drive in France.

It looks like she arrived in France on 13 Aout (August?), 1986; she has France stamps for Sept 20, 1986 and Sept 30, 1986. She returned to Logan Airport in Boston on Sept 30, 1986. On a separate page is a French stamp for Sept 2, 1986; I’m guessing she had to get her passport stamped in different parts of France, while she drove around. She returned to France in November (18^th, apparently), 1986. Then again, maybe she was still there. The same passport page has “Sept 16” and Sept 20” stamps. One of the French stamps is for “17 Feurier 1987” which probably translates as February and is perhaps when she left France for Boston. Another stamp is dated “26 November 1986” and like all the other French stamps has the name Charles de Gaulle on it, perhaps the name of the airport. In the back of the passport are some stamps that are hard to read. One is an orange stamp, and the place name looks like “Wepenetse.”

On the next page are two purple stamps that appear to say “Warsaw,” with the date of 30.01.93 (January 30, 1993), so I’m guessing she visited the site of the Warsaw ghetto in Poland; this would be appropriate, since some of our ancestors were from there. The date for these stamps is 22.01.93. Under one of them is a faded red stamp for 23APR1986.

The older passport was issued August 21, 1981 and expired Aug 20, 1986. The other passport was issued on Feb 21, 1986, and it expired on Feb 20, 1996.

We also have three copies of her birth certificate, one issued in 1962 and the other two issued in 1971. She was born in the county of Allegheny, in Pittsburgh, PA, on 8/27/1947. Her full name was Barbara Lynn Wiget. My grandparents’ names were Francis Xavier Wiget and Edith Lucille Band (maiden name). Until I read this, I had only known my grandmother’s name as Lucy.

Aunt Barbara had many neatly organized files. They include files of stock dividend information. My dad said she was a combination of charitable and greedy, and I pointed out that in order to make donations, you have to have money. However, she did have an American Express card and an Amazon.com card (and many receipts or some sort of paperwork from Amazon), and she had a Costco membership. She drove a fancy sports car (part of a history of driving fancy sports cars). She lived in a fine old condo full of antiques (but according to my dad, her TV was from the seventies). It seems she had a relatively posh lifestyle, but having stock and getting money from her mother made it possible for her to not only have that lifestyle but also support charitable organizations. Her choice of what to do with her estate is definitely humanitarian and so much bigger than leaving money to relatives. A combination, indeed.

My dad hit the nail on the head when he said, “Her world centered around tennis.” She seems to have had many tennis buddies, and her apartment is decorated with tennis stuff—in particular a collection of tennis rackets hanging on the walls in her study.

Aunt Barbara's Will

I just read Aunt Barbara’s will, and it turns out that she names a couple lawyers as the executors of her estate, which means they have to deal with all this stuff instead of my dad. That makes things so much easier! She wants her entire estate (all her possessions) to go to “the President and Fellows of Harvard College, a Massachusetts educational, charitable corporation, to establish the Barbara Lynn Wiget Endowed Research Fund at Harvard Medical School.

When I read this to my dad, he said that maybe she had paranoid schizophrenia. I thought she was just manic depressive, but it’s possible. I found in her files at least one article on schizophrenia that someone had sent her with a letter. However, I also found papers—including the autopsy report—about the boyfriend of hers who suicided in 1983. I have a theory that he was the one who had paranoid schizophrenia, but I could be wrong.

In her will, she specifies what she wants done with her body: she wants it cremated (that’s already been done, since her body was found almost a week after she died) and the ashes buried in her niche at Mt. Auburn Cemetery (which we passed on the way from the funeral home). Interesting, she also says that the ashes of Richard (the suicidal boyfriend) are at her condo in a brass urn, and she wants her executor (the lawyers) to “cast the remains” into the Atlantic Ocean.

Here is an excerpt from the will:

ARTICLE FOURTH: I give, bequeath all of my household furniture and furnishings, clothing, personal effects, jewelry, and vehicles, and all other articles of tangible personal property of whatever name or nature owned by me, not otherwise disposed of by this will and not including bank accounts, securities, cash or other intangible personal property, in accordance with any written instructions which I may leave. Any articles of tangible personal property not disposed of by my said written instructions shall be sold and the proceeds thereof disposed according to the provisions of Article Fifth.

ARTICLE FIFTH: I give, devise, bequeath and appoint all the rest, residue and remainder of my estate, both real, personal and mixed, of whatever kind or nature and wherever situated (hereafter called my “residuary estate”) of which I die seized aor possessed or over or to which I may have or own at the time of my death any power of disposition, control or appointment, to the President and Fellows of Harvard College, a Massachusetts educational, charitable corporation, to establish the Barbara Lynn Wiget Endowed Research Fund at Harvard Medical School.

I further direct that the income only from this fund be utilized by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine to support research pertaining to the understanding of severe psychiatric disorders with special emphasis on the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia.

It’s such a relief to have found and read this will—that makes things so simple. The lawyers have to do all that stuff.

Aunt Barbara's Condo

The funeral home housing Aunt Barbara's ashes

Today my dad and I went to the funeral home and got Aunt Barbara's death certificate (and met two guys with strong Boston accents, but I didn't laugh). Afterwards we walked to my aunt's condo, met the building manager, Leroy, and looked around. It's a beautiful 1920s building with hardwood floors and paneling, and her apartment is full of beautiful antiques. Leroy recognized my dad’s voice from the telephone, but he somewhat belatedly—after we had already entered the apartment and started to look around—asked to see proof of identity, so my dad showed him his driver’s license and the death certificate.

 Front entrance to the building in which my Aunt Barbara lived

Front hallway to the building, with the staircase leading to her condo

 The condo smelled musty from having been closed up with no open windows.

The front room is a hallway with a few pieces of antique furniture, including a mirror; there’s a fake fountain attached to the wall (it would look rather more appealing if it weren’t for the unplugged electrical cord). To the right is a small room that was originally a servant’s bedroom, and beyond it is a bathroom. Also attached to the front hall is the large living room, full of antiques and with a large bay window overlooking the Charles River. The condo also has a kitchen that is somewhat larger than a kitchenette (particularly longer) and has a white door leading to a back stairway. Otherwise, there’s a small hallway with a closet, Aunt Barbara’s bedroom, a bathroom, and the study. It’s altogether significantly larger than my one-bedroom apartment, and if you wanted you could have a roommate or a guest bedroom in a condo like that.

 But let me back up a bit. In the room that was originally a servant’s bedroom, some of the top layer of floorboards had been pulled up. Leroy explained that this was where the body was. Apparently the body was…attached to the floorboards. I stared at the floor, where the boards were missing and the underlying boards were a slightly lighter color than the rest of the floor. I imagined Aunt Barbara lying there. She must have been in this room, standing up, when suddenly her heart gave away and she fell to the floor.

The living room was tidy, if somewhat dusty. The exception to the tidiness was some stacks of boxes, in particular wine boxes. Leroy explained that those had to be removed in order to get to the body. So Aunt Barbara had been using the servant’s room as a storage room. Actually, it did have some furniture: a small table and chair and a large, ornate cabinet with a padlock. Leroy explained that something important might be in that cabinet, but he didn’t know where the key was. So my dad pointed out that an old-fashioned key was another thing to hopefully find.

 Leroy showed us the two small desks in the dining room, both possible locations for important papers, and he showed us the library at the back of the condo. It had one wall completely covered with a dark wood bookcase full of books; two tall windows; a computer desk with both a big old computer from perhaps the 1990s and a very small MacBook, in addition to a printer; some other furniture here and there, and a collection of tennis racks decorating the walls. Leroy explained that this was where Aunt Barbara spent a lot of time.

My dad decided to search the living room desks, and I agreed to search the library. Alone in the room, I looked around and opened the windows before I got to work. It was easy to be distracted, especially by all the books on the bookcase and by thoughts of Aunt Barbara living and dying in this condo. I felt mildly disturbed. I turned to the computer desk vicinity and noticed a tall dark file cabinet, so I decided to tackle that first. I found a binder and some papers on top of it, and these at least partially contained printed e-mails, something I hadn’t seen in a long time.

I set aside one of these papers because of the supposed friend who had sent it and whose contact information was on it; this could be someone who would want to participate in the memorial service and could tell us more about Aunt Barbara. That was a concern, in addition to finding a will: my dad wanted to find contact information for friends and colleagues of Aunt Barbara. They could attend the memorial service and would know more about Aunt Barbara so that, if she didn’t have a will, maybe they could help us figure out what to do with Aunt Barbara’s estate.

I opened the top drawer of the tall file cabinet and started to look through it. All the files I glanced at were research, either left over from Aunt Barbara’s PhD work or research that she did more recently. I looked at the desk and then at a wooden box-like piece of furniture on the other side of the desk. I decided to search it for now and closed the file cabinet.

I found a large stack of poetry, mostly limericks, that Aunt Barbara wrote, and I decided I wanted to not only read them but also type them up.

I easily opened this file box by flipping the hinged top out of the way. At the front was a file containing papers related to my grandmother’s death, including her will, and including information on a lawsuit that Barbara went through. She hadn’t gotten along with her mother and had thought she was being cheated, getting less money than my dad; she didn’t take into consideration that my dad had a spouse and three children, while Aunt Barbara herself was single and had no children. However, my dad no doubt pointed this out to her. She still took legal action—but it was against Bank of America, which cheated both her and my dad of thousands of dollars; I don’t remember the details, but it was related to the estate. My dad has hated Bank of America ever since. Another file contained information on stock, and another file contained Aunt Barbara’s two passports, an international driving permit, and three copies of her birth certificate. I took those out and set them aside with the small stack of papers I had picked out to take. As I went through this file box, I came to the conclusion that Aunt Barbara was extremely organized.

And then I found her will. It was in this file box, about halfway back, and in duplicate, with a cover letter from her lawyer, Michael S. Rosen. Thrilled as if I were Indiana Jones discovering a Bastet statue in a cave, I called, “I found the will!” We had only been in the condo for about half an hour. My dad and Leroy came into the room, and we discussed it. I noticed the stamp date of 1991 on the will (I later discovered she wrote the will in 1989), and my dad said there might be a more recent will, so we continued searching the condo.

Leroy was responsible for over ninety condos and had to go do work elsewhere. He said to call if we wanted to look at Aunt Barbara’s car; it was still parked on the September. 

I continued searching the library/study. The room had a closet completely filled with bank boxes full of research on economics and such. Two of the bank boxes contained papers from banks and the like, and I began to look through those. On an antique chair across the room from the computer desk was a pair of  bright red cloth shopping bags—the kind typically for groceries—advertising one of Aunt Barbara’s banks. Inside was a matching thermos.

In the hallway, I opened the closet door, and what caught my eye was the top shelf: a row of large stuffed toy animals, two of which were penguins. The rest of the closet was less interesting—sheets and such.

Out of curiosity, I wandered into the bedroom. In the center was a large, dark wooden antique bed, and above it hung a painting of Adam and Eve that’s shaped like the underside of a bowl. Facing the foot of the bed is a large old chest of drawers with a few items on top of it, particularly a small wooden multi-drawer jewelry box that resembled a little chest of drawers. My dad had already looked around this room and said, “Barbara had a lot more rings than you, about a hundred.”

 One of the dolls I made as a teen and sent Aunt Barbara

I opened a top drawer and sure enough, it was filled with silver and gold finger rings in a variety of designs. The drawer next to it contained a variety of jewelry, and the drawers below that contained even more rings and other miscellaneous jewelry, some of which was certainly vintage. A necklace that particularly caught my eye was small and filigree-like, with small square red stones; it looked potentially a hundred years old. On the chest of drawers was a rectangular whitish stone box, about an inch by an inch and a half in dimension, with a little lid. Inside are finger rings handmade of seed beads. I tried at least two of them on.

Aunt Barbara had even more finger rings than I, and she was a cat person like me. She hasn't had live cats for a few years, but I noticed a big art book on cats, cat bookplates, and a couple of cat brooches (reminiscent of Doctor Who).

When I saw a tall, narrow shelving unit next to the bedroom door, I gasped. On each shelf was a one-of-a-kind cloth doll that I made when I was a teenager and that I mailed to my aunt when I was about twenty years old. It was one of my attempts to reach out to her. I decided that, since I made those dolls, I was entitled to take them. My dad was filling a sort of casual briefcase—one he found in the living room—with significant papers, and it didn’t have enough space for the dolls. I put them in one of the two bright red cloth grocery bags. Next to one of the dolls was an old black and white photo framed with an assemblage of beads and other little things. The photo was of a little boy between a young woman and a young man. I picked up the picture and took it to my dad. “Is this you?” I asked. Yes: this was my dad and my grandparents! I have no memory of ever seeing my grandfather, who died of a heart attack when he was only fifty years old, years before I was born.

On the other side of the bed stood a very large—about three feet tall—carved wooden African statue, probably a deity or (appropriately) an ancestor figure, since I recall that some African statue are tied in with ancestor worship. In the far corner of the room was a cabinet topped by a glass display case containing two carved wooden African statues, approximately eight inches or so tall each.

Even the kitchen contained antiques, in the forms of rectangular carved wooden molds and kitchen and dining items. A large iron object, some sort of tool, hung on the far wall next to a window. The kitchen seemed spare and spotless to me, and I suspect Aunt Barbara may not have been into cooking. The fridge was practically empty; I was glad my dad checked it, because I was afraid of aromatic science experiments. A few ready-made items were in the freezer.

The capacious living room was a treasure trove of antiques. In front of a rather narrow sofa stood a carved wooden coffee table that looked like it came from India and was topped by a protective layer of glass. On top were art books (including one on cats and one on Japanese paintings), some antique knickknacks, and three porcelain Asian fish, in blue, soft green, and orange. In addition to various antique chairs around the room, there was a long table under the bay window and various items decorated the table. My dad later said that the TV was really old, like one we had in the seventies or eighties. I was particularly fascinated by a very large old cabinet and the various objects displayed on it, especially a pair of old cloth black dolls.

 Living room

The dining room had a beautiful and predominantly red rug centered on the hardwood floor. Over it was a table with charming seats, two of which were actually benches vaguely resembling two chairs put together. The small top-lifting antique desks were in this room, as was a china cabinet filled mostly with blue and white porcelain. Along one wall was the head and foot of a bed probably from the early twentieth century; it would have been a good addition to the servant’s bedroom.

My dad said that he found medical records—he turned away from them and didn’t want to see the details—and it looks like Aunt Barbara had a lot of health issues. They both inherited money around 2005, and my dad retired and has had a tendency to drive around the United States a lot since then. Over the past few years, he has repeatedly asked Aunt Barbara to accompany him on his travels, and every single time she’d have the excuse of a health problem or another. It happened so many times that he didn’t take her seriously. But it looks like she wasn’t making it up: her health problems were too real.

My dad and I stayed in the condo for about two hours. When we were leaving, he noticed the chain lock was broken and figured out that Leroy must have unlocked the front door when he figured out something was amiss, and when he opened the door, the corpse stench must have been overwhelming. He must have broken the chain to get in. What a horrible way to die—alone and forgotten.

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Charles River, view while driving down Memorial Drive

In front of Aunt Barbara’s condo, my dad asked a guy who was loading his baby into his car which way MIT is. We knew it was up Memorial Drive, this very same street, but weren’t sure in which direction. The guy told us, finished putting the baby in the car, and offered to drive us up there. So we got in his car. It turned out that he was a school teacher. We told him where the administrative building was—that’s where my dad believed we needed to go in order to talk about having a memorial service at MIT. So the guy dropped us off there, and we thanked him profusely before going into the building. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the wrong place: the guy behind the counter gave us a bigger and better map of MIT and told us where we needed to go.

 This is a fascinating building we walked past on the campus of MIT

 This castle-like structure is probably the oldest building at MIT, from what we saw. Most look like they're from the 1960s.

The place was, oddly, an office in the student center, which was a 1960s building crawling with students and occupied by fast food joints. We walked to this building and took an elevator to the office in question. The two students at the front desk didn’t have a lot of information, other than this was the place to go to schedule an event on campus. They directed us to the office across the hall, where we talked with a much more helpful woman who had worked there for years. She asked us what department Aunt Barbara worked in, and my dad wasn’t sure. She found out that it was the Department of Urban Planning and Development, and she told us how to get there.

 Toto, I don't think we're in London anymore. This was inside the student center at MIT.

The building where Aunt Barbara would have worked, but she didn't actually work there.

We crossed the street to a museum-like building: most of the buildings on campus were modern, but this one looked about a hundred years old and neoclassical, with large ionic columns and Roman lettering. We eventually found the right department, on the third floor. Nobody sat at the front desk. We could see someone getting an interview in a glass room, and we noticed someone sitting at a desk down the aisle, so we approached her. While we spoke with her, she directed us to a tall woman who came out of an office. She explained what Aunt Barbara’s real association was with MIT—not remotely what we thought.

Aunt Barbara was a research affiliate of that particular department. She wasn’t actually an employee and didn’t actually work in the department on campus but rather at home on her little Mac book. Mel King (with whom my dad had spoken on the phone quite a bit) was a friend of hers who got her this research work, which gave her health care through MIT, but she didn’t get a paycheck. She did research for him, and he was a Professor Emeritus rather than a regular employee. Unlike her, he didn’t have a PhD. This was surprising, since I remember my dad repeatedly saying that she worked at MIT part time for $10 an hour; we were both under the impression that she was doing this for years.

Although Aunt Barbara was for some time active with the tennis program at MIT, my dad decided it would make more sense to have the memorial service at Harvard than at MIT, since Aunt Barbara’s PhD came from Harvard. Besides Mel King, the people most interested in having a memorial service were tennis friends from MIT. But I agreed with my dad—Harvard was the more appropriate location for a memorial service.

Bad News

On August 18 at a little after 5:30 pm, my dad called. I hadn’t started getting ready to go to a party scheduled to start at 7 pm, and a part of me hoped he wouldn’t talk too long and another part of me wondered what happened.

I picked up the phone and found out: Aunt Barbara was found lying in her condo five or six days after she died. I felt shocked and dismayed at hearing this, even though I never got to know her well—tears welled up in a matter of minutes and I struggled to suppress them. My dad invited me to go to Cambridge, Massachusetts with me in order to do such things as find my aunt’s will if she had one and figure out what to do with her possessions if she didn’t. He said she had spoken of making a will, but he wasn’t sure she had ever gotten around to doing it.

My dad had been on the phone a lot because he was in touch with a bunch of people in Massachusetts: Aunt Barbara’s last boyfriend, Al; the director of a funeral home; the building manager for the condo; and at least one or two friends/colleagues of Aunt Barbara’s. He said he’d call me back for updates and reimburse me for the flight to either Chicago or to South Bend, Indiana (because he lives in northwest Indiana and would meet up with me there).

He called twice the following day, and I went to a local travel agent. I had already gotten my suitcase out of my storage space and started packing.

For Wednesday August 24, I have an 8:45 am flight. I think I'll take Trimet rather than ask someone to drive me to the airport really early in the morning--I'd like to be there probably by 6:45. And I want to leave my car at my apartment.