Lady Loverly's Chats Read online

conspiracy against God's sacred dog-eat-dog design for life, he had to comply with them or risk having an even larger portion of his wealth siphoned off to the commonwealth. But compliance need not involve capitulation, not for anyone who could afford to buy the kind of legal services Rudolph Loverly employed. The law firm the Loverly family has long retained is surfeit with partners who had once held public office. It has more ex-mayors, ex-governors, ex-judges, ex-et cetera than it has stenographers. And with all these exes comes intimate knowledge of how laws are interpreted and enforced. Whatever there are of deceitful, devious, dishonest ways to work around the tax and inheritance laws, this partnership of deceitful, devious, dishonest lawyers knows and knows how to use. A principal way of reducing taxes is by adroit charity giving. Rudolph IV considered this equivalent to the technique of fighting fire with fire. And one of the Loverly lawyers' tax avoiding charity schemes caused Lady Loverly to leave the city and make the estate her permanent residence for the latter part of her life.

  III

  The Loverlys' lawyers accomplished their tax dodge charity scam with the help of some of the city's best people. These self anointed elite had long aspired to have a city art museum. Three times they had managed to get a referendum on the ballot, a small sales tax increase dedicated to building such museum. And three times the city voters had overwhelmingly rejected it. Anyone who wanted to look at pictures, the citizens seemed to feel, should either get a calendar or turn on the TV. The Loverlys' lawyers took advantage of this situation to get rid of the family mansion and save millions in taxes in the bargain.

  The mansion had always been oversized. But even allowing for the kind of extravagance members of this family expected and were accustomed to, at the end of the Loverlys' tenure it was immensely too large for one dyspeptic and decrepit old octogenarian and his spinster daughter. Moreover, across a lifespan of more than a century and a half the building which hadn't been particularly architecturally graced when new become even less so, an overage degenerating relic of another time. In plain, inescapable fact, the mansion was a white elephant situate in a long since bypassed part of town. The land it sat on was no longer worth what it would cost to tear the building down. Nor did city regulations (more of that atheist socialism Rudolph IV so often and vehemently railed against) permit the building to be sold in its present condition. Before title could be conveyed, city statutes required either provision being made for, or the actual accomplishment of, not only the reconstruction and reinforcing of the building's many crumbling parts, but also for bringing its archaic plumbing, heating and electrical services up to code. If the Loverlys were willing to live in a monstrous and monstrously dangerous antiquated building liable at any moment to collapse or burn down, that was their right. But to allow good faith buyers to end up in the same risky circumstances was, again because of atheistic socialism, something the city would not allow.

  To any honest naive observer, the Loverly mansion seemed to be much worse than a total loss. But the Loverly lawyers were neither honest nor naive. They turned this million dollar liability into a multimillion dollar tax write-off. First, with the aid of the art museum devotees they successfully worked to have the mansion declared an Historical Preservation Site. To the naive this seemed a stupid mistake, for now the mansion could not be razed. Nor could it even be restored and modernized without the approval of the Historical Preservation Committee, an approval that would undoubtedly require vastly more than minimally necessary costly repairs. Moreover, as an official Historical Preservation Site the mansion's appraised value increased, thus raising its property taxes. Not only this, but with an act which the naive and honest, had they known about it, would have considered stupendous stupidity, the lawyers conspired under the table with the appraisal firms to get a substantially higher than justified appraisal for the broken down white elephant.

  But then the lawyers pulled the ace out of their sleeve. They had Rudolph IV donate the mansion, including its antique furniture, Loverly family portraits and all the building's large inventory of kitschy so-called artwork (all of which, like the building itself, the law partnership had covertly conspired to have appraised at many times its actual value) to the city to be an art museum. Since the Historical Preservation Committee was composed mainly of the very people who had been yearning for an art museum, there was no possibility the committee wouldn't approve whatever remodeling might be needed. Moreover, as a gift to the municipality the statutory prohibition against a transfer of title before renovation did not apply. The city, if it accepted the gift, was financially responsible for the building's repair and updating.

  But most importantly, no citizens' vote was needed for the city to accept a gift. Acceptance only required approval by the mayor and city council, a council containing an absolute majority of the mayor's political party. Given His Honor's desire to become, after completing his term of office, a partner in the Loverlys' law firm, such approval was as certain as sunrise. Of course, the renovation and remodeling necessary to make the old mansion safe and suitable to be an art museum was costly. Experienced building contractors reckoned the resultant expenditures to have been double to triple what it would have cost to build a new museum. But these funds came out of the city's maintenance budget. And though this had the disadvantage of leaving the city's street repair fund depleted for a decade, it had the advantage of not requiring a vote of the people.

  In the end the city got little more than a newly painted old building. It is considered by art curators to be poorly suited to its mission, and considered by architects to be without artistic or creative merit. However, it does have one redeeming architectural feature, but only for lovers of the past. At least it isn't a modern monstrosity such as the art museums in Bilbao, Los Angeles and Denver. Rather, it is conventionally ugly, a traditional monstrosity. The city boosters who had long labored and fought for an art museum knew all of this. But they also knew it was the only way they would ever get their picture gallery, given the inveterate opposition of the city's voters. Therefore, they willingly, indeed, eagerly participated in the fraud.

  Thus, for the last year or so of Rudolph IV's life, the two surviving Loverlys resided in two adjacent large and luxurious suits in the city's best hotel. Though it is the city's best, Lady Loverly never liked this hotel. At one time or another she had been a guest in every one of the world's truly great hotels, and she considered this one to be provincial, even primitive, by comparison. She only stayed in it in order to be with and to direct the care of her father. So upon his death she left the hotel and made the Loverly estate her full time permanent residence. And because of numerous tax machinations like the mansion-museum fraud, she did so in sole possession of an undiminished Loverly fortune.

  IV

  For the first several years after Lady Loverly made the estate her only residence it would have been difficult for anyone to know it was her residence, for she was almost never in residence at her residence. In her younger days she had always been an avid international traveler. She had friends and acquaintances all over the earth. In the last years of her father's life, however, she had felt obliged to discontinue her globe trotting in order to keep him company and to be available to direct his care. But with his passing she could again indulge her peripatetic passion, and that's exactly what she did. She seldom returned to the estate, and then only long enough to consult with the law firm watching over her many business affairs in order to assure herself everything was in order and her prosperity was continuing unabated. Since it always was, she would soon be off again.

  She continued this lifestyle for about a decade and a half till an unfortunate accident led her to retire to the estate. At the time this accident occurred Lady Loverly was a petite, septuagenarian, Caucasian female who never in her life had had occasion to subject her bones to significant amounts of load bearing stress. Though on her many trips she always carried excessive luggage and baggage, excessively heavy luggage and ba
ggage, the actual act of carrying them was not something she ever personally did. This description, as any orthopedic physician will tell you, is the description of a person at high risk for osteoporosis or brittle bone disease. One day while walking across the lobby of the Hong Kong airport on her way to board a flight to Singapore, she tripped. It was a complete mystery why she had tripped. No obstacle which might have caused the accident was ever found. But there was no mystery about the consequences of her fall. Any physician would have predicted that, if a person of her description fell, she was liable to suffer severe bone fractures. It is a natural peril of human physiology against which prosperity provides no protection. Lady Loverly broke her hip.

  Of course she received the best care available anywhere. For the first part of her treatment she stayed at the world's foremost orthopedic hospital. During the remainder of her convalescence she stayed at the estate under the continuous care of an in-residence nurse. In about a year she recovered, at least she recovered to the extent recovery is possible in