Rare Objects (10 page)

A year ago, no one thought my old boyfriend Mickey Finn was good enough. Now he was an opportunity.

She lowered her voice. “He doesn't know what you got up to in New York, does he? So don't tell him. Any man is better than no man, Mae.”

I stared at her. We were so different now. Tapping my ash into the ashtray, I brushed the tears away with my fingertips. “It doesn't matter. I'm sorry I'm weepy. So”—I changed the subject—“how's the rest of your family?”

Frowning, Angela ran her finger along the milky-white porcelain edge of the willow-pattern teacup. It was so delicate, so fragile you could almost see the light through it.

“That's not everything that happened, is it? You're not going to tell me, are you?”

She knew me well enough to know I was deliberately shutting her out. I stared down at the uneaten
zaletti
.

She took a deep breath. “You're better now, though? Right?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “It's all in the past.” Outside the window, the evening sky softened, and the men standing round the chestnut stove below were reduced to shadowy outlines, the ends of their cigars glowing and bobbing in the air as they spoke. “It's good to be back.”

Winshaw and Kessler was quiet. Not just quiet but holding its breath, waiting. After the constant jostling and hustle in New York City, it was strange to walk down an almost empty street each morning, unlock the door, and step into a world dominated not by people but by things. There was a sense of solemnity and guardianship, like being in a library or a church. And like a church, the shop had a muted, remote quality, as if it were somehow both part of and yet simultaneously removed from the present day. The essence of aged wood, silver polish, furniture oil, and the infinitesimal dust of other lives and other countries hung
in the air. I could feel its weight around me, and its flavor lingered on my tongue. Time tasted musty, metallic, and faintly exotic.

Almost everywhere else, time was an enemy; the thief that rendered food rotten, dulled the bloom of youth, made fashions passé. But here it was the precious ingredient that transformed an ordinary object into a valuable artifact—from paintings to thimbles.

I'd never been around such extraordinary things. I was content to sit and hold the carved cameo shell for half an hour at a time, running my finger over its variegated, translucent surface, wondering at the imagination that brought the Three Graces to life. The regular clientele, however, were not so easily mesmerized. Most, in fact, were disconcertingly focused.

“Do you by any chance sell eighteenth-century naval maps?”

“You haven't any Murano glass, have you? Nothing common, mind you. No red earth tones. I want something
special
. Do you have anything blue? Perhaps influenced by Chinese porcelain?”

They weren't casually browsing, but on an unending quest for very specific prizes. And they would accept no substitutions.

“I can't even get them to
look
at anything else!” I complained to Mr. Kessler one afternoon.

He took off his glasses, rubbed them clean with his pocket hankie. “Perhaps it's better if you don't even try.”

He didn't make sense. “But how am I meant to sell anything?”

Instead of answering he asked, “Are you by any chance a collector, Miss Fanning?”

“
Me
?” I laughed. “I haven't got that kind of money!”

He gave me a reproachful look. “It's not about money. You know that. Tell me, did you ever save anything when you were a little girl?”

“Well”—I paused a moment—“I had a cigar box that I kept under the bed.”

“And what was inside?”

“Just junk. Kid's stuff. Maybe a clothes-peg doll or some buttons strung together on thread. Ticket stubs my mother saved from the pictures or the foil wrapper from a bar of chocolate that still smelled sweet if you pressed your nose into it. Nothing special.”

“And yet you kept it. See!” He smiled knowingly. “You
are
a collector! You collected for nostalgia, the most natural, instinctive thing in the world.”

“Nostalgia?”

“Sentimentality. You sought out little pieces of the world you wanted to live in—a world of chocolate and pretty buttons and picture shows—and you created that world as best you could.”

I thought about the old wooden box, the earthy, sweet smell of tobacco that remained from the cheap cigars. Mr. Russo had given it to me, much to Angela's indignation, after a meeting of the San Rocco Society one evening when we were five. He was a very quiet man. It was unusual for him to say anything or show any affection. But I could remember how he'd swayed a little that night, unsteady on his feet from too much red wine as he bent down to hand it to me. “Here you go. Something for your secrets,” he said in his thick accent.

For a while I shared it with Angela, but she campaigned relentlessly until she got one of her own. Together we used to scour the streets for old chocolate wrappers—gold and silver foil peeking between the grates of gutters or sparkling in the dirt of empty lots. We pressed them flat with our fingers and stacked them in neat little piles, taking almost as much pleasure in smelling them as if we'd eaten the chocolate ourselves.

As I got older I kept other things in the box too, things I didn't show to anyone else, not even Angela—a man's black bow
tie I'd stolen off a washing line when I was eight; a used train ticket I'd seen a stranger toss into a rubbish bin, stamped from Boston to New York. I'd pretended the bow tie belonged to Michael Fanning and that the ticket was his too—that he wasn't really dead, he was only traveling and someday he'd be back. That's when I began to hide the box under my bed, where no one could find it.

“Can you remember why you did it?” Mr. Kessler asked.

“I suppose it gave me comfort—the sense of having something only I knew about.”

“Anything else?” He pressed.

“Not that I can think of . . .”

“It gave you two things,” he elaborated, “purpose and hope. Think of the hours you spent looking for treasures—were they pleasant?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “They were.”

Patrolling the streets for discarded candy wrappers and ticket stubs had kept Angela and me happily occupied for most of a summer. And it had also given us, as Mr. Kessler pointed out, a tangible link to the movie-going, chocolate-eating world we longed to someday inhabit. They weren't just wrappers—they were talismans, gathered in the faith that each one drew us nearer toward the fruition of our dreams.

“Of course not everyone collects out of sentimentality. Some only appreciate usefulness and market value; they want items with excellent craftsmanship and aesthetics—porcelain, glass, furniture, and clocks fall very much into this category. A brilliantly functioning timepiece is a triumph of engineering, as is an exquisitely turned Adam chair. These things consistently maintain their value and often prove to be wise investments. These
customers are easy to please—quality and tradition are what they want. You have only to convince them of a piece's merits and they're sold. Then there are the true connoisseurs, in search of the distinctive, obscure, and unknown.”

“In what way obscure?”

“See these?” He pointed to three tiny silver containers in the jewelry case, each in the shape of a heart with a latched lid. “These are Danish
hovedvandsaeg
—extremely rare, made somewhere between 1780 and 1850. They hold sweet smelling spices and were popular as betrothal gifts. You can see their charm, can't you?” He regarded them with affection. “I have a customer who collects them exclusively, but he won't touch these because he believes them to be too pedestrian. I blame myself.” He seemed dismayed by his own lack of foresight. “It's the heart design—too common for his taste. He wants something more unusual now. And yet only about three other people in the whole of Boston even know what a
hovedvandsaeg
is.”

Each container was over a hundred dollars. It wasn't difficult to understand why someone would invest in something practical like a chair or a clock, but these? “How can anyone afford to spend so much on a tiny little trinket?”

“Well, we don't sell as many as we did,” he allowed, “but for many serious clients, collecting isn't a luxury but a necessity—like an addiction. I know people who will go without food or new shoes to buy just one more piece.”

“They would do that to their families?”

“Few of them have families; most are unmarried men, often professionals who have money to spare and no one to tell them how to spend it. In fact”—he peered at me over the tops of his glasses—“just the sort of people who might be swayed by a pretty blonde.”

“Yes, but I don't seem to have much influence,” I reminded him. “If I haven't got what the customers want, they're out of the door before I can stop them.”

“That's my point, though. These aren't just customers, they're pilgrims, searching for a holy grail. So ask them about the journey. Get them to tell you about the other pieces they have.
Listen.
And before you know it, you'll be able to show them almost anything you like. But they like to feel they've discovered things for themselves. There's something furtive about a real collector; it has to do with the thrill of the hunt. And then, of course,” he added, “there are the eccentrics.”

I had to laugh. “It gets
more
eccentric than eighteenth-century Dutch spice boxes?”

“Oh, yes! I have one man who only wants to buy rare porcelain that's been repaired in some unusual way, long before the days of glue. Exquisite teapots with ugly twisted silver spoons for handles, platters held together by metal staples and twine, broken glassware with shattered bases replaced by hand-carved wooden animals. Actually, I have to admit, as an anthropologist, he's one of my favorites.” He leaned against the counter. “You see, a well-curated collection always tells a story. His tells a tale of resourcefulness and industry; of people who had the foresight to salvage something even though it will never be pristine again. I like to think of it as the moment when aspiration meets reality.”

“You were an anthropologist?” It never occurred to me that he had been anything other than a shopkeeper.

“That's right. I taught at the University of Pennsylvania.” He seemed to grow several inches as he said it. “But this is absorbing too, in its own way.” He cast an eye round the shop like a ruler surveying his kingdom. “It's anthropology of another sort. You see, in
its purest form, collecting is designing—selecting objects to create sense, order, and beauty. To us, we're simply selling a serving dish or an ivory comb. But for the buyer, he's fitting another intricate piece into a carefully curated world of his own construction. At its root is an ancient belief, a hope, in the magic of objects. No matter how sophisticated we think we are, we still search for alchemy.”

I thought of the cigar box, of the black bow tie and train ticket.

And then suddenly I remembered the gold pocket watch in New York; the thick chain and the solid, satisfying feel of it in my hand. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up; I knew why I'd taken it.

Some distant part of me knew it belonged in the box under my bed, too.

Even with Mr. Kessler's expert sales advice, business at Winshaw and Kessler continued to be slow. Every day Mr. Kessler put three bills into the cash register in the morning and took them out again, often unsupplemented, in the evening. It didn't bode well. But he remained unfazed. “We're hunting for bears, Miss Fanning,” he told me. “You don't need to catch one every day, just a few a season.”

The last thing I wanted was to be out of work again. I liked having heat in the mornings and the luxury of being able to afford new stockings rather than darning and redarning the same pair until they were more cotton thread than silk.

So I made work for myself. Each morning I went in determined to prove myself indispensable by rearranging displays, cataloguing inventory, polishing, and cleaning. And I enjoyed it. After the bleak emptiness of the hospital, the shop was a feast for not only
the senses but the imagination too. While dusting the furniture, I found myself pretending this was my drawing room filled with fine antiques. Or as I polished silver, I mulled over which pieces might give the most favorable impression of excellent taste. (The plain English serving dishes were elegant without being ostentatious.) Sometimes when Mr. Kessler was out, I took all the jewelry from the cases and tried it on in different combinations, mixing Victorian opals with strings of red coral beads and Art Nouveau cloisonné bangles. I was playing dress-up, like a child—pretending to be a woman of means and charmingly eclectic sensibility.

Mr. Kessler seemed more bemused by my industry than anything else. I asked a thousand questions, wanting to know when and how and even why things were made, their worth, how long they'd been there. He was used to being alone, and while he enjoyed teaching me things, he perhaps wasn't quite prepared for the way I set about rehanging all the paintings by “mood” rather than period or displaying the glassware in rows of color instead of style. Some of my methods were more successful than others. It turns out china collectors, for example, are extremely particular about mixing patterns and makers and they wasted no time setting me straight.

But gradually, in spite of my overzealousness, a precarious order began to prevail. There was only one place that remained impervious to all my improving efforts.

Even though he'd been away a long time, nothing had been touched in Mr. Winshaw's office; the drawers were bulging with letters and receipts; books and piles of old newspapers and journals were stacked high, all just as he'd left it. A fat tabby called Persia slept curled up on the old red velvet seat cushion
of his chair. Stubbornly territorial, he guarded the place like a sentinel. I was allowed to use the office for paperwork and to take my lunch sitting at Mr. Winshaw's massive Victorian desk, amid this spectacular monument to disarray. At first it was maddening; I had to physically restrain myself from throwing things out. But there was also something intriguing about being privy to the intimate belongings of a complete stranger. Scientific journals, volumes of world mythologies, old playbills, and overdue library books formed unstable, teetering towers around me as I unwrapped my daily meal of two hard-boiled eggs from waxed paper and peeled them. Atlases from different corners of the globe and translation dictionaries for half a dozen languages bore cracked spines from excessive use. Correspondence from countries like Australia, Cuba, and India remained tantalizingly unopened, crammed into cubbies.