Thread Herrings

by Lea Wait

  “I’ll look at the jewelry,” I mused. “You once told me jewelry can go below appraised value, and I only have one or two pieces that aren’t costume jewelry. It would be fun to dream.”

  “Exactly what auctions are for,” Sarah confirmed.

  The van was heating up, or maybe I was, after the coffee. “Sorry to have been so grumpy when you picked me up,” I said. “I’m looking forward to this. My first auction! It’s like a treasure hunt.”

  “You never know what you might find,” Sarah agreed. “Just make sure to look carefully at anything you might bid on, so you don’t have any surprises after you get it home.”

  Chapter 2

  “We have nearly, if not quite, lost the art of embroidering in wool, in which our grandmothers so excelled. Tokens of their labor and skill remain in many an old country house, where coarse twilled calico, or perhaps a flimsy neutral fabric of neutral tint, has been transformed into a priceless heirloom, covered diagonally by foliage and birds in worsted embroidery.”

  —From Peterson’s Magazine (an American magazine for women), April 1874.

  The auction house parking lot was full. Most of the spots between piles of plowed snow were filled by trucks or vans; the occasional car was an exception. And, despite the month and weather, license plates were not only from Maine but also from New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and even North Carolina.

  “Dealers,” Sarah pointed out. “The brochure was designed to be enticing. Two old families, items from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and possibly before. That’s catnip to an antique dealer.”

  We lined up at the registration desk. The other bidders ranged in age from twenties to, I suspected, eighties. Many seemed to know one another. Sarah gave the auctioneer’s wife, who was registering bidders, her Maine resale certificate. All I had to do was fill out my contact information and a credit card number. (“There’s a surcharge if you use the credit card. Paying by cash or check is preferred. The credit card is just backup,” Sarah whispered.) Or, I figured, to be used if I took whatever I’d bought and headed out without paying. I was glad I’d brought my checkbook.

  Sarah was number sixty-three, and I was sixty-four. Lucky numbers? I hoped.

  My adrenaline (or was it the caffeine?) was flowing as we hung our coats on two seats in the third row, on an aisle.

  “So we can get out easily if we want to buy coffee or use the ladies’ room,” Sarah explained. “From the third row we can see the items as well as anyone, but the runners won’t be stepping on our feet.”

  “Runners?”

  “The men and women who get the items from the display room, bring them to the auctioneer, and then walk them around to display them while the bidding is going on. If the items are small, the runner will then deliver them to the highest bidder.”

  I nodded, fascinated. This world had its own vocabulary.

  The display room of the auction house was about the size of a high school basketball court, but with a lower ceiling. Paintings, prints, quilts, wall clocks, mounted deer, moose, and bear heads, and an assortment of household items like bed warmers, farm tools, and copper pans were hung on one wall. Rows of furniture, from potty chairs to beds to bureaus, dining room tables, desks, rocking horses, and butter churns, stood in rows in the middle of the room. Glass cases of jewelry, china, old guns, and small decorative items were along the back wall. Carpets and rugs filled one corner. The rest of the items, from kitchen tools to snuff boxes to dollhouses to writing boxes, were arranged on tables.

  “See the boxes under the tables?” Sarah pointed as we wove our way through the crowd to the wall where the needlepointed items were hanging. “Those are box lots: books and kitchenware and tools and miscellaneous household items, none of which are too valuable. The boxes are sold as individual lots—you get whatever’s in them. If you’re lucky, a couple of good items are in each box. And sometimes a treasure escapes the auctioneer’s eyes. That’s why you’ll see people going through the boxes carefully.”

  Everything in the room was tagged with a lot number.

  All around us, people were examining the items. Some stood, looking slowly and carefully at lots they were interested in. Others were checking tape measures or magnifying glasses or reference books on antiques. Tables were being overturned, pictures removed from the walls, and catalogs checked. No one talked much, or, if they did, they spoke softly to a friend or partner.

  “You don’t want to advertise what you might be bidding on,” Sarah explained quietly. “Dealers watch other dealers. If they know, for example, that Mrs. Jacques is an expert on porcelain, and that she’s going to bid on, say, lot 454, they figure that lot must be good. They might bid against her because they trust her judgment. So she’ll make a note in her catalog to remind herself to bid. After all, there may be six hundred lots in an auction, and she may only be interested in, say, forty-two. She may not even make that note until she’s looking at another lot.”

  “Wow. I had no idea so much was involved in bidding.”

  “Dealers are competitive,” Sarah assured me. “After all, this is how we make our living.”

  We’d almost gotten to the wall of framed paintings, prints, photographs, and, yes, needlework.

  Five pieces were tagged to be sold as separate lots. Sarah took one off the wall and turned it over. “The frame looks original,” she said, pointing to the shading on the back and the four-sided nails that secured the backing. “It’s a traditional Maine sampler, dated and signed.”

  Charity Providence, age eight, had stitched it. Her work was neat, but faded. The linen backing was tan, and, although, looking carefully, it appeared that she’d stitched her three alphabets in shades of blue, the threads were now grayed with age. Charity hadn’t stitched a verse, but she’d included her location (Hallowell, Maine), the year (1800), a two-story house surrounded by what might be pine trees, and a border of strawberries.

  “Nice,” said Sarah. “A little too faded, unfortunately, for most collectors, but the stitching has held. Silk threads in samplers as old as this one have often rotted and broken. I suspect her family framed this shortly after she finished it, but in those days they didn’t have glass that blocked the sun’s rays. It might even have been hung near a window.”

  The sampler next to Charity’s was a memorial sampler, stitched primarily in black threads, showing a man, a woman, two children, and a dog, all with bowed heads, mourning at a gravestone beneath a weeping willow tree. The two names on the gravestone were hard to read, but the last name was Providence.

  “Is all the needlework from the Providence family?” I asked.

  “I’d guess so,” said Sarah. “Remember, everything in the auction is from two families. I don’t know what the current name of the family is; the Providences may have daughtered out, but Providence was a family name in late eighteenth-century Maine.”

  I stopped. “‘Daughtered out?’”

  “A generation that had no sons, only daughters. When the daughters married they took their husband’s names, or they died single. In either case, the original family name ended. So whoever put these pieces up at auction may not have the last name Providence.”

  Daughtered out? I was the only child in my generation. If I married and took my husband’s name, the Curtis name in our branch of the family would disappear. I decided on the spot that if I married I’d keep my last name.

  The third piece on the wall was a genealogy piece. Not a family tree; more a listing, like recorded dates in a family Bible. Name, date of birth, and date of death. I counted twelve members of the Providence family, the last of whom died in 1838. “It looks as though several people worked on that piece, at different times,” I said. Some names were stitched more neatly than others, and the threads marking the dates of death didn’t match those of the birth dates.

  “You’re right,” Sarah agreed. “The linen might have been kept in a drawer or desk, and taken out and added to when there was a birth or a death. See?”
She pointed. “There’s no way of knowing what the relationships of these people are other than by guessing based on their dates.”

  “Four children died before they were three,” I added, looking closely at the dates.

  “And see the listing for Verity? A child was born the day before she died. Probably she died in childbirth,” Sarah said.

  “Sad.”

  The fourth sampler was a more conventional one, very elaborate, with a verse, alphabets, numbers, a rural scene with sheep and dogs, and urns of flowers in each corner. The colors were brighter than those in the other samplers. “This one will go high,” Sarah predicted, softly. “It’s dated, 1802; it’s from Maine, again: Hallowell. And it’s well preserved.”

  It had been stitched by ten-year-old Amity Providence. Charity’s younger sister? If we’d had more time I would have looked at the genealogical sampler again.

  But there was a room full of other lots to check out.

  “What about this one?” I asked, passing several oil paintings and pointing to another large needlework. “It looks like a coat of arms.”

  “It does. Although about a third of the stitching is gone. I wonder if it was done here, or in England? Stitching coats of arms was more common there. Americans didn’t have family crests or coats of arms.”

  The coat of arms was in poor condition. The glass protecting it was cracked, and dirt had sifted onto the embroidery. Threads were broken or missing in several places, so only part of the crest was clear, and the linen backing was torn in several places. Still, it fascinated me. “Is that an eagle?” I said, trying to make sense of what might have been part of a bird on the crest.

  Sarah shook her head. “I’m not interested in it. No one wants someone else’s coat of arms, and that one isn’t in good enough condition to sell, anyway.”

  “It could be repaired,” I suggested. “Gram is pretty good at that.” I kept looking at the crest, wondering who’d stitched it, and when. Who’d been proud of a heritage that included a coat of arms? The other embroideries were from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I wasn’t an expert on American history, but I knew not a lot of Americans had bragged about their connections to nobility—especially English nobility—right after the American Revolution.

  Or maybe the coat of arms was from another country? I didn’t know enough to guess.

  “Why bother trying to repair it?” Sarah asked. “It’s not beautiful. It’s in poor condition. Its only value might have been to the person it represented, and, if it’s here, no one in his family wanted it.”

  “But don’t coats of arms belong to families?” I asked.

  “They were awarded to individuals, not families,” Sarah corrected. “Embroidered coats of arms originally were worn over armor, so knights could be identified when they were in competitions or battles.” She glanced at the embroidery in front of us. “I don’t see any identifying name, either of the owner or the woman who stitched it. In any case, I need to look at the other lots.” She made a couple of notes on her catalog. “I’ll bid on the four other samplers,” she said softly to me. “I’ll have to think about how high to go. That last sampler may be a budget-killer.”

  “You go ahead. I’m going to wander and see what else is here,” I said.

  Sarah headed for the cases of china, which had no interest for me.

  I took one more look at the coat of arms. I couldn’t say exactly why, but it fascinated me. Was it cast aside as an embarrassment, which might explain its condition? And when had that been? Shortly after it was stitched? A hundred years ago? Two hundred?

  Other prospective bidders were standing near me, waiting for me to move on. A middle-aged woman with short brown hair highlighted with blond took my place next to the coat of arms. “What about the samplers?” she said to the bearded man with her.

  He shook his head. “Just old stuff. Where would you hang them? I’d rather we used our share of the money to buy some good mahogany furniture, or maybe a gold-framed mirror.”

  “Josie’s going to want the dining room table and chairs,” she answered. “She’s always wanted them. We don’t want to try to outbid her on those. What about Grandmother’s wedding ring china?”

  “I don’t care about china. You can’t put that old stuff in the dishwasher anyway. What about the clock?” He pointed at a grandfather’s clock nearby.

  “It never kept the right time. Drove me crazy.”

  They moved on.

  I didn’t know who they were, but they must be connected to one of the families who’d owned these furnishings. If they, or Josie, whoever she was, had wanted them, why were they being auctioned off?

  A small mystery, but not one that concerned me.

  I walked past several watercolored seascapes, a large oil portrait of a ringleted little girl in a blue dress holding a doll by its arm, and several framed World War I posters. Three men were looking through a box of pictures—prints?—in a corner.

  Who’d owned all these things? The parents or grandparents of that woman I’d heard talking about “Grandmother’s china”?

  Once, each of these things now lined up to be sold had been chosen, had taken its place in a household, valued, and thought of with sentiment. Now, sadly, they were filling spaces in a large auction-house showroom, destined for antique shops, and, I hoped, for other homes where they’d be valued.

  I almost laughed at myself for being so sentimental.

  These were things, not people.

  The farther I walked through the preview room the more I realized how little I knew about antiques, or about what people valued. One man was carefully examining a box of old photographs. If they weren’t relatives, why would he be interested? Sarah would know. I didn’t.

  I admired an old, framed, Maine state flag that, the catalog said, had been flown over the statehouse in Augusta during World War II.

  I didn’t need any furniture, but I walked along the rows of pine, mahogany, cherry, and oak tables, bureaus, and desks. I liked the cherry pieces best, but, according to the auction catalog estimates, they’d all go too high for me. I tried to imagine eighteenth- or nineteenth-century men and women dining at the tables, or writing at the desks. I shivered, wondering who they’d been, and what their lives had been like. How they’d feel if they saw their possessions being auctioned off to strangers.

  The vintage jewelry didn’t interest me as much as I’d hoped. “Would you like to see any of the pieces up close?” asked the auction house employee standing in back of the glass showcase.

  I touched the gold angel I wore on a chain around my neck. Mama had given it to me for my first Communion, and it reminded me of her. It was only valuable to me.

  I moved on to the earrings. “We have a number of small earrings in this sale,” she pointed out. “What’s your birthstone?”

  “I was born in April,” I said, knowing that probably prohibited my buying birthstone earrings.

  “Diamond,” said the woman, hovering over the earrings. “We have two pairs of diamond earrings.” She picked them up and handed them to me.

  “Is this silver?” I asked, looking at the tiny studs in my hand.

  “Platinum,” she corrected me.

  The slightly larger pair of earrings was set in gold. The stones weren’t large, but the gold reflected them. “I like these,” I said. “But they’re clip-ons. I have pierced ears.”

  “Any jeweler can change them for you,” she assured me. “I suspect that pair was owned by a young woman. Older women tend to prefer larger stones.”

  I nodded, as though that made sense, and handed them back to her. “Thank you for showing them to me.”

  She turned to the next potential bidder. I marked the lot number of the diamonds set in gold in my catalog. They were appraised at $4,000. Too high for me. And I didn’t exactly live a diamond-earring lifestyle. But if I’d had more money I’d have been tempted.

  China, crystal, hand-painted porcelain. Vases, teapots. A display case of sword
s, pistols, and rifles that I couldn’t even get close to because of the crowd. A lot of people were interested in antique weapons.

  Other things were fun to look at, but I didn’t need a nineteenth-century dollhouse, or a cuckoo clock, or a mahogany writing case, or French marionettes. Who would want these things?

  Part of the fun of the auction would be seeing who bought what, and for how much.

  I drifted back to the wall where the embroideries were hung. Two women were looking closely at the sampler Sarah had predicted would go high. No one was paying attention to the coat of arms and family crest. I was pretty sure that was an eagle, or at least part of one. And a flag, although so many threads were missing I had no idea what country it represented.

  Where was Sarah? I headed for the refreshment table and bought another cup of coffee. This was going to be an interesting day, but a long one.

  Chapter 3

  Epitaph inscribed upon a tablet in the Cloisters in Westminster Abbey, in London, England: “She was excellent with her needle.”

  —From The Dictionary of Needlework: An Encyclopaedia of Artistic, Plain and Fancy Needlework by Sophia Frances Anne Caulfeild and Blanche C. Saward, London: L. Upcott Gill, 1882.

  “See anything you want to bid on?” Sarah asked as she sat next to me. I’d stopped looking fifteen minutes before, and was sipping coffee and watching other people finding their seats, consulting handwritten lists or auction catalogs, and sometimes checking what I assumed were notebooks listing either items they were looking for, or those they already had in stock.

  “I saw a couple of possibilities,” I said, not ready to admit anything. “It’ll all depend on what they go for.”

  Sarah nodded. “Always. And then, there are moments when something you hadn’t even considered bidding on is going for such a low price you can’t resist it.”