Rare Objects

Angela put her hand over mine. “I just think if you stopped running around and got married you’d be better off,” she said gently.

I wanted to laugh, but couldn’t muster it. “Believe me, no one wants to marry me now!”

“Mickey did. Remember? Probably still does,” she added hopefully.

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.”