He passes two trucks on the right and cuts in front.
The driver honks.
“Your mother, too,” Todd shouts. Then, nodding to me, appends, “Pardon my French.”
I think of my family’s every-ten-years turnover of stately Volvo wagons. “The safest car, studies show,” my father would claim, driving at his funeral-procession pace. He once got stopped by a trooper for going below the highway minimum. “I’m a Harvard professor,” he announced, to my mortification and my mother’s tsking disapproval.
The trooper shoved the citation through the window’s one-inch-open slit. “Buddy, I don’t care if you’re Einstein.”
“Einstein couldn’t drive worth a damn,” my father lectured him.
I’m sure by now my father owns a sports car that he races at terrifying speeds, though never with his children. No doubt Kiki will mention this in her next Christmas letter: Professor R. Griffin Randolph treated his midlife crisis to a bright red sports car. The boys and I give it a wide berth. It’s Daddy’s toy, I explain. And truth to tell, he looks so adorable in it and is having such a good time I can’t begrudge my darling this particular mistress (initials MG!). Enclosed is a photograph…
Now Todd weaves across three lanes, his hand on the horn. “There’s nothing like a dog to spice up your life,” Todd goes on. “I can totally understand Elizabeth’s devotion to Flush. Do you know there’s a dating service called Date My Pet dot-com?”
“To fix up dogs?”
He laughs. “For pet owners to meet people who share their love of cocker spaniels, for instance.” He flips down the sun visor. He flicks his hair out of his face. “But mostly it’s to make sure the person you date is approved of by your pet.”
“Have you tried Date My Pet dot-com?”
“No way. Personally, I’d never use a dating service.”
“I didn’t mean to imply…” I stammer.
“Not that I wouldn’t, if I ever felt that was the only method of meeting someone suitable. So far the old-fashioned technique works just fine.” He switches his eyes from the road to wink at me. “I just brought this up to point out, in a rather convoluted manner, that Wordsworth would quite approve of you.”
I shake my head. I know this type. A man who flirts with women the way others salivate at a side of fries. Still, I turn my face to the window so he won’t glimpse my silly pleasure at this remark. When I look out, I see a green roadside sign. ST. BARNABY’S CHAPEL, EXIT8, I read. All pleasure disappears. My chin drops. My shoulders sink.
Todd swerves to avoid a fallen-off hubcap straddling two lanes. I bump my head against the glass. Which seems to knock some sense into me. My despair passes. Besides, the St. Barnaby’s sign, like my sadness, I remind myself, is now half a mile behind me. A dot in the dust. A symbol of a fading memory. Put it behind you is the mantra of the twenty-first century, meaning scandal, war, misdeeds, bad choices, lost love.
“We’ll be there soon,” Todd says now. “I’m sure you’re relieved that I haven’t continued our interview in the car. It seemed unfair. Captive prisoner and all. Plus I couldn’t exactly take down your answers in my trusty notebook.”
“I’m glad for a break.”
“Enjoy it now. I’ll have a million questions once we get to Kerry, once I see you in action.” He pauses. He reaches for the radio dial. “Would you like to listen to the radio?”
“Sure.”
But when he switches it on, I don’t hear the familiar tones of Renée Montaigne, Scott Simon, Bob Edwards, or Terry Gross on NPR. No The Connection, no BBC World Service, no Fresh Air, no Boston Symphony, no cutting-edge jazz, no left-of-the-dial alternative rock. It’s an FM Lite station, oozing the kind of music that bombards you in supermarkets, elevators, beauty salons, and dentists’ offices. Everywhere but Harvard Square, that is.
For the rest of the ride, Todd Tucker’s clear tenor rings out—word-perfect, pitch-perfect—tripping lightly through the lyrics of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Misty,” “When You Walk Through a Storm.”
And “Memories.”
A number of vans, pickup trucks, SUVs, and cars toting roof racks and pulling trailers are already parked in haphazard zigzags on the farmer’s field when we get there at exactly five of ten. The minute I step out of the car onto the patches of mud, tufts of grass, dried bristles of hay, I tremble with the frisson of excitement I always feel right before the chase. My hunter-gatherer instinct is on full alert. I am cavewoman with club, calculator, and magnifying glass. At flea markets, auctions, tag sales, all things are possible (even romance, cf Clyde). Buried treasure lurks under the junk. Somewhere one particular item will speak to me and change my life. It has already happened of course. But that time it was my mother’s sharp eye (perhaps a bit of Henrietta’s, too) that deserved full credit for the chamber pot. This time I’ll flaunt my own discernment, my own professional expertise to Todd Tucker, to the readers of the Boston Globe, to my colleagues in the antiques field, to my father who insisted I couldn’t set foot in the world without a Ph.D., to my lawyer, to my legal adversaries. And to one adversary in particular. Let the world know that the treasure-tapping gene has been passed down in my DNA. Not that, to be fair, one could ever overlook the element of luck.
“Are you feeling lucky, Abby?” Todd asks. He’s got on a tattered straw hat a scarecrow might sport. His notebook and pen stick out of his shirt pocket. I notice his pen has leaked. A black amoeba-shaped blob marks his heart. I think of The Wizard of Oz. The missing heart. Yet it wasn’t the heart the Scarecrow lacked, I correct, but a brain. There’s nothing wrong with Todd’s brain, however. Proved by a man who’s both a poet and a reporter, yin and yang, a man who loves the Brownings, who knows Flush, whose dog is called Wordsworth, a man who reads E. E. Cummings in bed. “You’ve got that dog-on-the-scent look,” he declares.
I laugh. Since what matters is context, I’m more than happy to be compared to a dog. “And you…” I begin.
He snaps up a stick of hay. He jabs it into the side of his mouth. He chews on it.
“And you,” I repeat. “Agricolae poetae sunt.”
For a second I hear Ned’s voice: Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est. I picture his face in the Thayers’ living room. He’s smiling. He’s balancing a glass of sherry on his knee. He’s holding a bowl of toasted almonds. I listen to my own voice quote Amo, amas, amat. I love. You love. He loves. So long ago. Another place. Another me. Once upon a time when those words meant everything.
“Come again?” Todd asks.
“It’s Latin.”
“Which is all Greek to me.”
“It means farmers are poets.” I stop. “You never studied Latin?”
He shakes his head. Clumps of straw fall off his hat. “But now I will.” He bangs his hand over his ink-stained heart. “I swear on it.”
Picnic tables heaped with glass, china, yellowing linens, headless, armless dolls, rusted nails, broken clocks—a community’s discards—ring the barn. Furniture, orphaned and forlorn, dots the grass: chairs missing a leg or a seat, chairs whose ripped and unraveled caning hangs in shreds like the torn hem of a skirt. Over there lies a toppled washstand minus its basin. Here, a chest of drawers, knobs Scotch-taped to its bowed front. A row of small porcelain sinks bolted together might have arrived intact from a grammar school. In fact, two old-fashioned school desks, with holes for inkwells and entwined initials carved into its scarred oak, stand ready for girls in smocked pinafores and boys in short pants to open their composition books. I spot a box of toasters, entrails spilling out. Another, of ancient radios. A man is carrying away a sled and a rusted rake. “I’m not sure about this,” Todd ventures.
“First appearances don’t count,” I lecture. “It takes a practiced eye to appreciate the beauty that lies beneath an unlovely surface.” I’m back to Ned again, my childhood idol. I look at Todd. “And sometimes it’s vice versa. What’s beautiful turns out to be worthless.” I hold up a pedagogical finger. “Le
sson number one. Write it down. First impressions are irrelevant.” I pause. “In antiques, if not in life,” I amend.
“That I’ll remember. No need to take notes.” He grabs a child’s tricycle marked $5. It has streamers attached to the handlebars and a shiny silver bell. “This isn’t bad,” he says.
“Do you have a kid in mind?”
He puts the bike down. “Not really.” He takes a few steps back. He twists around. “Over there.” He points. “Chamber pots.”
We walk across the patch of dried mud to where five chamber pots have been laid out on a frayed quilt. “Aren’t you proud of me?” Todd asks. “I can now identify the real thing—not as the washbowls or planters I would once have taken them for.”
“If I had a gold star, I’d paste it on your forehead right here and now.”
He chuckles. “You needn’t go to extremes.” He picks up one of the pots by its rim. He holds it away from his body. As if it’s something nasty. As if it’s about to bite.
“It won’t bite,” says a plump woman sitting on a stool and waving a tattered Reader’s Digest back and forth in front of her red face. She balances a pad of receipts on her lap. A fanny pack clipped with an elastic extension ties around her waist. This holds change, which rattles as she flaps her arm. Dollar bills stick up from the half-closed zipper like a clot of snared cloth.
Todd sets the pot back on the quilt. He pulls out his notebook. “Can you tell me the history of this particular object?” he asks.
“Sat under the bed before indoor plumbing. Could’ve been used by some founding father for all we know.” She laughs. “George Washington pissed here.” She slaps her Reader’s Digest against her massive thigh. “Folks use ’em for planters these days. I’ve even seen them set out at church suppers filled with molded salads or franks and beans.”
She must notice Todd shudder because she stops in mid-fan. “They’ve been cleaned out, dear,” she soothes. “Scrubbed and sterilized. Not to worry. I’ll sell you the one you just had in your hands for twenty-five bucks.”
“Thank you. I’ll think about it.” He turns to me. “Anything, Abby, that catches your eye?”
I study the chamber pots. Porcelain. Tin. Ironstone. Flowered. Plain. Inside a pale blue-sprigged vessel, curlicued script limns a proverbial Please keep me clean so I won’t tell what I have seen. For a minute I linger over that one. I picture it in my booth. A classic example of the genre. After all, as the high-profile chamber-pot lady, don’t I need it for a talisman? But when I turn it over, I see a large chip. I point at it. “This decreases the value,” I enlighten Todd. “Signs of age, crazing, fading, discoloring, are good. But actual chips and cracks lower the worth.”
“Ten dollars,” says the woman on the stool to a lady who has come up behind me.
Arpège wafts around her blond pageboy. She’s wearing a pantsuit with double rows of brass buttons and inappropriate little heels that dig into the dirt. Thanks to my vast experience of the species, right away I nail her as a decorator, the kind whose silver sang its siren song to Clyde. She pulls ten dollars out of a black quilted purse swinging from a double gold chain.
“I’ll take it,” she says. “Isn’t it sweet? It’s perfect for my client’s new laundry facility. I can just picture it filled with tulips. Or fat pink peonies.”
“Wait one minute,” orders Todd. He places his hands on his hips. He stomps his feet apart. He looks like one of those G.I. Joes lined up on a shelf at Irving’s, the toy soldiers all the boys in the neighborhood craved and all their peace-marching parents forbade. Here’s a little plastic Buddha, a mother might coax. Or how about this darling action figure of Martin Luther King Jr.?
Todd turns to the woman, who is already cradling the chamber pot, now swathed in old newspapers. “We were here first,” he warns.
I touch his elbow. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “We don’t want any of these. Elizabeth’s is one in a million. What are the odds of getting lucky a second time?” I nudge him forward. “Let’s see what’s inside the barn.”
He relents. “I’m just trying to make sure you get what you want, Abby,” he says. “I’d hate you to miss out on anything because you’re too polite to stand up for yourself.”
“Believe me, I don’t feel I’m missing out on anything.” I stop. “When it’s something I really want, I’m perfectly capable of going after it,” I stress. What I don’t tell him—because I’m leaving the realm of antiques here—is that I don’t always know what I really want. I don’t always know what I should want either. Or what’s worth fighting for.
But in the realm of antiques, inside the barn, I hit pay dirt. Within ten minutes, I have filled a New Hampshire discount liquor store box—kindly provided to customers—with a creamware platter, coin silver spoons, candy molds, crocheted place mats, a corncob doll, old postcards of New England factories, a gravy boat, and three corkscrews, their handles made from twisted olive wood.
Todd himself has picked up a cribbage set, a distinguished service medal from the Korean War, a penknife initialed T, a silver loving cup awarded to the winner of a country club croquet tournament, and a copy of Longfellow’s Evangeline. Heady with success, Todd goes to the corner of the barn to interview a specialist in mechanical banks.
I rummage through a table marked—lowercase—ODDS AND ENDS. I check out a carton of small farm implements. $15 FOR THR LOT is scribbled across its dangling tag. I turn over a weeder, a small shovel, a horse shoe (good luck!), a branding iron, a wrench, three bolts, a copper whistle, and a mysterious gadget in blackened metal shaped like a coffee grinder. I pick it up. Nebraska in raised letters runs down one side. Numbers stamp the bottom, then, scratched underneath, I read: WC-EL. I turn the crank; a spiked disk on the top moves. While farm implements are hardly my area of expertise, I’m intrigued. Their rustic quality. The reasonable price. The good omen of a horse shoe.
Though the objects aren’t beautiful, I decide to take my own first-appearances-don’t-matter advice. Besides, there’s a bit of American history in the box. Maybe the man who deals in old tools and farm implements and blacksmith memorabilia at Objects of Desire might be persuaded to fork over fifty dollars for such an assortment. I bought a print from him of a spreading chestnut tree for my father and Kiki’s wedding present. One of a kind, he promised. Gus said I overpaid. Wildly overpaid. Kiki didn’t get the Longfellow reference. In her thank-you note, she admitted she was partial to palms but hoped to branch out (haha!) and see a lot of spreading chestnuts when she came East. If she could tear my father away from his backyard swimming pool.
I turn the coffee grinder wheel again. Perhaps I can recoup a little of that spreading chestnut money. The day after I bought the print, an identical one was hanging back on the same wall. Identical down to its distressed, worm-holed frame and spotted mat. I run a finger along the raised Nebraska.
“That’s a corn sheller,” a man’s voice edifies.
I look up. He’s standing across the table straightening out a row of hammers. A large man with a gray beard and hair caught into a ponytail. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and denim overalls. He’s the spitting image of a farmer. But you never know, considering these days of Ivy Leaguers in camouflage pants and Army/Navy-store dog tags, couch potatoes in running gear, holders of academic chairs in Hawaiian shirts. “Herbert Morgan. This here’s my barn.”
“Then you’re a dealer?”
He shakes his head. “Insurance. Retired. The wife inherited the property. We lend it out. This is the last year, though. Bought ourselves an RV and are heading down to Florida.” He stops to pump the hand of a six-foot-five man he calls Tiny. “Though I learned plenty of lessons from all these swindlers and junk pickers over the years.”
This prompts laughs from Tiny and a cluster of his equally untiny friends. Who move away in a single file, each slapping Herbert on the back like the losing team in a football match.
I hold up the utensil. “What is a corn sheller?” I ask.
“Take a guess
, kid.”
I shake my head.
“Give it a stab. You don’t need a college degree.”
I blush. I’m tempted to boast of three and a half semesters at Harvard, but I stem the urge. “I don’t mean what is it,” I defend myself. “I mean how does it work?”
He takes it out of my hands. His hands are huge, the skin red and coarse, farmer’s hands even if they’re used for filling out actuarial reports. He turns the wheel. “See, you put the cob in this here gizmo, the kernels fall to the bottom—you’d stick a container under here to catch them—and then”—he points to another opening—“the cob comes out sideways through this hole.”
“Pretty ingenious,” I marvel.
He nods. “These New Hampshire folks knew a thing or two.”
“But this one says ‘Nebraska.’”
“I’ll be…” He examines it. “Funny,” he says. “Wonder how it got all the way up here?”
I point to the letters. WC-EL. “Do you know what they stand for?”
“Can’t say that I do. They don’t look like they’ve been etched into the metal by any machine. Got to be homemade. Somebody scratched them on.” He winks. “Maybe a couple of lovebirds, is what I’d guess.”
I spin the disk. “It’s hard to believe someone would give a loved one a gift of this.”
“For you and me maybe. But for a couple of farmers this might be more appreciated than your average say-it-with-flowers boo-kay.”
“Perhaps,” I concede, still skeptical. Lovebirds. Nebraska. WC. EL. Lovebirds. Nebraska. WC. EL. These reel through my head like the revolving disk now in my hand. Somewhere in my not-fully-educated brain, a lightbulb starts to pop. The wattage increasing with every spin of the disk, with every repetition of WC-EL. Could it possibly be? I wonder. Is there a chance? I ask myself. My excitement is mounting so fast it takes every bit of my will not to let it show. The evidence is irrefutable. All the pieces add up. “Well, maybe I’ll buy this lot.” I sigh, assuming my most casual, can’t-be-bothered voice. “The horse shoe’s the big selling point.”
How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life Page 14
