Rare Objects (25 page)

“I'm not attacking you, Maeve!”

I looked up. “Do you honestly think anyone wants to spend the night at a club with a girl who's teetotal? Think about it. Sitting across from some shabby little upstart who's looking down her nose at everyone?”

“You're not shabby!” She straightened, chin in the air. “Not by any means!”

I had to laugh. “Oh, yes I am! By
their
standards? Oh, Ma!
They were wearing furs and diamonds, and I had newspaper stuffed in my shoes!”

She suddenly seemed uncertain, pushing her fingers into her forehead as if she meant to press the wrinkles away. “That's not true. You looked fine. . . . You looked elegant.”

“Oh,
please
! I looked like what I am! A dumb Mick out with a bunch of Rockefellers, making a fool out of myself! And are you going to begrudge me a little whiskey to take the edge off my shame?”

Her eyes widened with indignation, and something else, something I'd always known was there—fear. “You have nothing to be ashamed of! You're worth twice any of them!”

It was over now. She was defending me.

I took a deep breath, held my hands up. “Well, make up your mind, Ma. If you want me to make new friends, then I'll wear my skirt on my head if you tell me to. But I'm not going to be ripped to shreds every time an evening runs late.” Then I opened my purse, took out a five-dollar bill, and put it on the table in front of her. “Here. You can have this back. Like I said, the Van der Laars paid.”

She stared down at the money. Worn out after waiting up all night, she no longer had the energy or mental dexterity to combat my arguments. But she was stubborn and would hold a little longer, just for the sake of her pride.

I watched the men in the street below, gathering around Contadino's chestnut stove, and waited.

I'd considered sending the money back; had some pleasant daydreams imagining James Van der Laar's face when he opened the envelope and read my reply:

“Thank you, but no thank you. I'll make my own destiny.”

How stunned would he be then?

But it was fifty dollars, after all. And I was broke again.

Fifty dollars meant bread for breakfast, cream in coffee, real cuts of meat without bone and gristle, plenty of coins for the gas meter. Most of all, it was a new dress—a real store-bought one, right off the rail, and a pair of evening shoes that fit.

Pride was a luxury I couldn't afford. Not yet.

Tomorrow I would go downtown and find the most fashionable outfit Boston had to offer—and not at Filene's, either. I just had to find a way of keeping Ma from being suspicious. Tell her I got commission, after all.

“I just don't want you ruining your chances,” she said at last. “They don't come along very often. When you're young, you think you'll always have another opportunity, but it's not true.” She was bewildered, second-guessing herself, which didn't come easy. “I only want what's best for you, Maeve.”

I continued to stare out of the window, to think about where I was going to buy shoes. “Well, maybe it's about time you left that up to me.”

Dear Miss Fanning,

The precise location of the cradle of civilization is a fiercely debated question, running the gamut of locations from Egypt and Mesopotamia to deepest South America, the South Pacific Islands, China, and even the Siberian Arctic. Apparently there's a thriving hotbed of preternatural progress nearly everywhere you turn, so who knows? Boston might turn out to be said cradle after all. For my part, I'm less concerned with the birthplace than those rare clues as to what it means to be civilized in the first place, and I have always suspected it has more to do with clay spoons than ancient monuments.

As for the mermaids of Boston Harbor, it's been a while since
I've heard their song, but if I'm not mistaken there's a sinister, slightly aquatic tone to your letters that's deeply suspect. Are you trying to drown honest men, Miss Fanning, with your imperious prose?

And yes, I have a vast collection of secondhand women's vanity cases, and am not ashamed to admit it.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Yours, with Utmost Sincerity,

B. Winshaw

Then one day I realized the obvious: Mr. Kessler and Mr. Winshaw were collectors too; the entire shop was their collection. Everything in it revealed their personal preferences and interests, as well as hidden obsessions. Sometimes during quiet hours I tried to work out precisely who had chosen what. I discovered that Mr. Kessler had a soft spot for rather sentimental Victorian morality paintings with titles like
All Is Lost
, depicting the demise of a fallen woman on a moonless night, or
An Anxious Hour
, with a young physician watching with concern over a pale, sick child. At the same time he had an almost libertine appreciation for comfort, pomposity, and ostentatious ornamentation. All the French Empire, English Regency, and German Baroque furniture had been selected by him.

Mr. Winshaw remained more enigmatic; his contributions were haphazard, often challenging, and considerably less aesthetically pleasing. In fact, very little of his inventory ever seemed destined to sell—the squat African figures were his, along with the stiff-backed English chairs and a rather alarming bronze
Rape of the Sabine Women
that no one could possibly display in
their home. He also had a fascination for scientific miscellanea—Georgian compasses, the brass dull and worn from centuries of use; a pair of deceptively elegant retractable seventeenth-century telescopes, gleaned from a violent shipwreck off the Irish coast; calculagraphs and ancient slide rules, as well as two very fine, remarkably complex Etruscan abacuses. He appreciated exploration and the practical objects of enterprise. But he also had a detailed eye for storytelling that occasionally surprised me. For example, two silver spoons sat next to each other in the glass display case. One day I made the mistake of separating them. Mr. Kessler was quick to set me straight. “You see,” he said, “they go together. Both are English, and Mr. Winshaw likes them to remain side by side.”

“Why?”

“Well, the older one is a rare York memento mori spoon from 1670. See?” He held it up. “It's engraved with a skull, and on the reverse a coat of arms. And along the stele are the words ‘Live to Die / Die to Live.'”

“That's a bit grim for cutlery, isn't it?”

“Well, it reflects a very understandable preoccupation the Jacobeans had with death. After all, 1670 was only five years after the Black Death struck London. Now, in contrast, this one”—he indicated the spoon next to it—“has a fairly common motif for the time, featuring a bird sitting on top of its cage with the slogan ‘I Love Liberty' beneath. That's a reference to John Wilkes, the English statesman, radical, and famous supporter of the American Revolution.” Mr. Kessler's dark eyes had that particular gleam they got when he was teaching me something new. “There are only a hundred years between these two spoons, but note the change these years brought; from a dour puritanical obsession with death and loss to an optimistic Enlightened expectation of
freedom. That's why Mr. Winshaw likes them side by side, to remind us.”

“Of what, precisely?”

“That things change, Miss Fanning, and often in the most unexpected ways.”

I took the opportunity to find out more about Mr. Kessler's own obsessions.

“Of all the things here, Mr. Kessler, what would you be most sad to part with?”

“Most sad? None of it!” he insisted. “I hope to part with all of it someday!”

“But which do you like best?” I pressed. “Which is your favorite?”

He stroked his beard, considering. Finally he pointed to a cherry Biedermeier pedestal table. “This is an exceptional piece.”

His choice surprised me. It was relatively simple and restrained compared to his other selections.

“It reminds me of Vienna,” he said. “The place where I was happiest, and the most refined city on earth.”

“Then why did you leave?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It's a long story.”

“We have nothing but time, Mr. Kessler. Go on,” I coaxed.

“Where to begin?” Taking off his glasses, he rubbed them thoughtfully with his handkerchief before putting them back on.

“From the beginning, of course.” I settled into the corner of a chaise longue.

He shrugged, resigned to the task ahead. “I will remind you that you asked to hear this when you are paralyzed with boredom,” he said, sitting down. “You see, I came from a small Jewish village, in Yiddish a shtetl, in Galicia. My father was a cobbler and, for want of a better word, a handyman. Anything that needed
to be repaired, he attended to it. Or at least he tried. I'm not saying he was talented in his field. In fact, he was rather clumsy. But that's what he did because that's what his father did, and his father before him. He was also a very religious, highly passionate believer. I think he would've liked to have studied Torah, but of course that wasn't possible. We were Hasidic.” He looked across at me. “Do you know what that is?”

“I think so.”

There was a single Jewish deli left at the end of Salem Street called Moe's, a remnant from another era when the whole neighborhood was Jewish. Now it was famous for being the only shop open on a Sunday. Most of the Jews had moved to Roxbury, where Jewish shops and businesses lined both sides of Blue Hill Avenue. I'd only been there a few times with Ma, who claimed they sold the best-quality fabric, provided you didn't mind dark colors. She said they were remarkable tailors. But in truth the place unsettled me. Mysterious, sullen men in shiny black coats and long beards conducted business in a strange guttural language. Their wives dressed in long sleeves even in summer, and little boys with skullcaps and curls longer than their sisters' played on the sidewalk, prayer shawls flapping behind them as they ran. They didn't mix. That was the most important thing I knew about them. No one knew what they were saying but they didn't want to be understood. And when you spoke to one of them, especially one of the men, they glared at you as if you were a troublemaker.

“Well,” Mr. Kessler continued, “it was a small village. All the families were related through marriage. And the rabbi, everyone believed him to be a zaddik, a truly righteous man. Certainly my father did. The rabbi was like a Messiah to my father—he believed every word the rabbi spoke came directly from God.
There was always a trail of men following in his wake, day and night, hanging upon each syllable, hoping that being close to him would give them answers. But we were all very poor. The Poles hated us. They rode through every few months, bringing death and mayhem. With no one to stop them, they used to treat us like a drunk treats a stray dog, to be kicked and beaten at will without reason or regret. When I was young, I felt like I was suffocating in that village. I hated the heat in the summer, the terrible cold in the winter, the endless prayers and gossip and watchful eyes. I couldn't wait to leave. And I didn't believe the way my father believed; it didn't make sense to me, especially when things were so bad. So when I was fourteen, I left.”

“Where did you go?”

“To Lemberg. I got a position in a printing house as a typesetter. There I was able to read anything I wanted, spend nights in cafés with socialists and Zionists and Bolsheviks. And there was a university there that took Jews. I slept on the printing press floor on reams of paper, worked all day, and went to school at night. When I graduated, I was lucky enough to get a position at the Austrian Museum of Natural History. In Vienna,” he added with a smile. “I had never seen a place so beautiful, so refined. Everything about it was civilized and pleasing to the eye, from the golden-domed cupolas to the wide boulevards and grand public parks filled with scented flowers and exquisite young women.”

It was difficult to imagine Mr. Kessler as a young man, eyeing up pretty girls.

“So it was the women,” I teased, “that made Vienna enchanting.”

“And the music and art and culture,” he added quickly. “In my village, everything was gray, black, and brown. Even Lemberg
was a dirty, crowded, ugly city by comparison. But in Vienna, even rain was romantic. It was the only place I'd ever been where I wasn't just a Jew. Here I was allowed to be an intellectual. A scholar, if I wanted. Such an age!” He paused, inhaling the memory of it, closing his eyes for a moment to savor the flavor of those forgotten days. “I advanced in my field, became a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I wrote papers and had a black mustache the likes of which no one will ever see again!” He smiled. “And a young wife named Anya.” His voice softened. “A Catholic girl.”

“Catholic? What did your family say?”

“They disowned me. But in truth, I had disowned them first. I couldn't bear the oppression of my father's faith. I thought of myself as modern, cultivated, and educated. Too smart to be chanting prayers, rocking back and forth in a trance. I sent money back home, but I didn't bother, after a while, to include letters.” His face darkened. “I thought I was right, you see. I was right, and he was wrong. That my father was foolish to believe as he did, weak.”

He took a deep breath. “Anya died in childbirth. And then the pogroms began, spread throughout the region like a foul, unchecked disease, from Odessa to Minsk.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Pogrom. A Russian word for massacre. Attacks on Jewish households. Raids lasting several days, murders, beheadings, children torn limb from limb.”

I was horrified. “But why?”

“Because.” He shrugged. “We're Jews.”

“What about your family?”

He was quiet a moment, looking out of the window at the
empty street outside. “The whole village hid in the temple. The marauders sealed the doors and windows and burnt the place to the ground. I'm told it took days.”