How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (3 page)

“I know. You can barely see it.”

“A cocker spaniel, looks like. And a bit of writing. Seems to spell
Flush
.”

“A subsequent owner’s idea of a joke,” I say. “Whoever bought it must have added it. Rather anachronistic when you consider the function…”

He shakes his head. He flicks a couple of fingers against the side and makes a resounding ping.

“I could probably dig up a couple of drumsticks and a washboard,” I joke. “We could have ourselves a party.” I am thinking of the glass flute. Of the party in my own place of business that excluded me.

“If I weren’t an honest dealer…” he begins.

“Come on.” I remember when he showed me how to make new mirror glass black and smoky, to rub a table leg just so to exhibit age, to distress a clockface, to soak a white linen cloth in tea. Not to mention those “nineteenth-century” pairs of sconces, their cupids clutching arrows at the exact same angle while rolling off a twenty-first-century assembly line somewhere in the third world. Would I myself have been tempted to pass off the reproduction Currier & Ives as the real thing? No. Not Abigail Elizabeth Randolph, who, without a (metaphorical) pot to piss in, still has her integrity.

“If I didn’t like you so much…Didn’t feel sorry for you, that good-for-nothing just up and taking a powder with that decorator type…”

“Yes?” I ask. I’ve got all morning. I’ve got all day.

“Abby, this doesn’t say
Made in Portugal
. It says
From the Portuguese
—and seems to be scribbled in by hand, not a china maker’s mark…”

“So?”

“Come take a gander,” he orders.

I push myself up out of my wallflower’s chair. I follow his pink-tipped finger. Manicure? I trace my own ragged nails framed by bitten cuticles (it’s hard being left for an object even if the leaver is not necessarily the object of your desire). Gus is right. The blue letters, smudged and faded, spell out
From the Portuguese
. The porcelain is discolored—from age and—well—you know from what; the design, blue and yellow flowers, seems sweet but uninteresting. Underneath the crude, faint drawing of a spaniel, I can indeed make out some scratched letters spelling
Flush
. Funny how I hadn’t noticed that before. Funny how I hadn’t noticed lots of things. “It’s a mistake,” I suggest. “Someone who didn’t have the benefit of English as a second language must have mixed up
Made
with
From
. And later”—I stroke my chin in my best Sherlock Holmes impersonation—“probably a pet lover sketched his dog. No paper handy. Then scratched in
Flush
as a joke, being ironic. In place of the usual
Please keep me clean so I won’t tell what I have seen
.”

Gus shakes his head. He sets the chamber pot back on the floor with an unexpected tenderness.

“Take it from me,” he says.

“Isn’t it already mine?” I ask.

“I’m not joking,” he says. “Let me give you a piece of advice.”

I smile nicely, trying to hide my well-warranted distrust of Gus’s advice. Even his restaurant and movie suggestions left a lot to be desired. Elaborate presentations that tasted lousy. Gorgeous settings with no story line. As for the mechanic he recommended, Tom and Ray themselves would have been at a loss for words over that “rebuilt” carburetor.

“If I were you, I’d take this little ole chamber pot onto
Antiques Roadshow
. I’ve got a connection to get you a ticket. I just have a feeling you might be harboring a treasure here.”

T
wo

I
get to the Hynes Auditorium at 7
A.M.
Gus has told me I’d be smart to arrive before dawn. The line starts forming even when it’s still dark, he explained. I meant to take his advice, I really did. But, well, February mornings in Cambridge are—well, February mornings. The way my radiators were hissing and clanking with so much rah-rah-rah, only a masochist would crawl out from under the burrow of my three (nineteenth-century Amish) piled quilts.

At six-thirty, I took the T. I had sold my mother’s car when I realized how much it would cost me to park it, to register it, to get the snow tires taken on and off. Besides, cars in the city make no sense. When I need to lug stuff or go out of town, I’ve got my choice of dozens of
SAVE THE WHALES
–bannered station wagons from the Rent-A-Wreck around the corner. Otherwise, we have a broad public transportation system.

Which doesn’t always act great, but this morning did. I got to the station just as the train pulled up. I snagged a seat right away, two, in fact, since the chamber pot is padded in so much Bubble Wrap it’s more than double its size. Gus had devised a cat’s cradle of rope with handles on each side so that when I got to the Hynes stop I could just about carry it up the steps. Surprise, surprise, the escalator was broken; it’s never worked in my lifetime or anybody else’s. Halfway up, I was out of breath and struggling (note to myself: Raid petty cash, join gym) when this guy behind me tapped my shoulder.

“Need help with that?” he asked.

I turned around. He looked about twenty, with pinchable cheeks and cowlicks you just wanted to reach out and tame.

I’d like to think he tapped me on the shoulder because he felt the same about me. But from the back, what could he tell? A woman, older, huffing and puffing because she didn’t go to the gym, hefting this huge bundle in front of her stomach as if she were pregnant with twins. Should I accept his offer? I was pretty sure such gallantry came not from the automatic pi lot for flirting turned on by the opposite sex, but from the imprinted good manners of someone who’d been taught to help little old ladies across the street. Little old ladies with unwieldy packages.

Still, looks deceive, as I’ve learned only too well. I clutched my package tighter. All I needed was this baby-faced Nelson sweet-talking me. You know the rest. The minute I put that bundle into his hands, he’d vault the frozen escalator with one jump of those well-muscled legs so sexily bursting his jeans. And that would mean the end of my maybe valuable, probably not, chamber pot.

“I can manage just fine,” I lied.

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Excuse me.” He brushed by, jostling my hip, and cleared those stairs like a gold medalist in the triathlon.

By the time I got to the top and struggled out the door and across two streets to the auditorium, I started to regret my lack of trust. Was it something innate? Behavior learned in my childhood? The old nature-versus-nurture conundrum. Maybe it was something formed by too many betrayals. Or by one in particular. God knows I could never do those exercises where you fall backward through space confident that your fellow camper will be there to catch you. I’d start to lean, then jerk upright like I’d received an electric shock. Even when I heard a voice assure me, “Let go, I’m right here,” I still couldn’t help it. It was downright Pavlovian.

When I finally make it inside the door, the line is so long and packed so tight the crowd would hold you up even if you wanted to fall.

I take my place at the end. Yellow police tape holds back the throngs. The din of a thousand voices chatting rises to the rafters. Across from the line, huge partitions mark off appraisal areas and production sets. Excitement sparks the air. By comparison, the hand-clapping, hip-swiveling, feet-stomping crowd at a Pearl Jam concert seems subdued. That time I went—lover number three—I was nearly flattened to death in the stampede of fans toward the stage just as Eddie Vedder grabbed the mike. But if there is this kind of fan base for collectibles, I can only congratulate myself (and thank Gus) on a smart career move.

“Sorry, miss.” A man with a lopsided dolly bumps my shins. He is having trouble steering this two-wheeler, especially hampered by the enormous carousel horse strapped with bungee cords to its planked platform. “When I borrowed this here thingamajig, I didn’t think I’d need a course in drivers’ ed.”

“It’s okay,” I say, though I can already sense the black-and-blue marks colonizing my legs. “Some horse,” I add. It
is
impressive. Nearly my height with a spiral barber pole and lots of bright gold paint. A bit too bright, I think, but don’t point that out. Carousel horses don’t fall under my sphere of expertise.

“Isn’t it a beaut? I found it at a flea market. A steal. I did the research off the Internet. Good ones can go for seventy thousand dollars and up.”

W
OW
. Imagine what I could do with even seven thousand dollars. I think of my limited wardrobe, my needs-work apartment, my shabby booth. I think of the flea markets of Paris and Rome. I think of Sotheby’s auction halls. I think of antiquing through the coastal towns of California, stopping for R & R in inns with hot tubs and Pacific views, signing up for wine-tasting trips to Napa in the company of laid-back wine-loving men. I think of Ca rib be an islands, piña coladas, bikinis in winter, the gym membership to fit those bikinis all four seasons of the year.

“So, what have you got there?” asks the man with the horse. He points to my globe of Bubble Wrap.

“A chamber pot.”

He pinches his nose with fingers thick as fish sticks. “Pee-ew.” He smirks. “You’re kidding, right?”

I pat my package like it’s an underachiever with Ivy League potential. “I was told on very good authority—an expert in the field—that it might be something quite valuable.”

He guffaws. “What field might that be?” He snorts. “Water closets? Urinals? Toiletology?” He slaps his thigh. “Not worth a pot to piss in, if you pardon my French. See them by the dozens at Brimfield. Dealers can’t get rid of them. Maybe a little old lady might buy one for her Boston fern. Some decorator to fill with magazines. If you ask me, you’re wasting your time waiting in this crowd.”

I look around. The line behind us now hits the door and curls back into a figure eight. People are carrying, pushing, lugging, dollying, trolleying, shopping-cart-wheeling, red-wagon-yanking the most amazing things. Toys, paintings, armoires, mirrors, stuffed animals. One man drags a fireplace mantel with trompe l’oeil marbling; another leans on a black potbellied stove. There’s even a quilt hanging over someone’s walker, and what must be a dozen Barbie dolls in their boxes crammed into an old-fashioned English perambulator.

“Thanks for the advice. Since I’ve invested this much time and effort, though, I might as well stay.”

He shrugs.

“Plus you never know,” I say, my voice with a brightness as faux as the marble on that mantelpiece.

“Suit yourself.” He turns to the man beside him, who is carrying a box of polka-dotted Easter eggs.

I study the hall. People are talking to each other. Everyone but me, that is, now that my neighbor has found a better conversationalist. Me who didn’t get asked to the party. Me who got left. Me with the dysfunctional family and dysfunctional social life. The people just in front of him, a family, mom and dad in go sox! scarves, are arguing with their two sullen teenage daughters in matching cargo pants. “Grandpa’s pipes may pay for college,” the mother placates.

“As if,” one daughter says.

“This sucks,” the other daughter chimes.

I am almost starting to agree when there’s a big commotion. The hall goes quiet with a sudden communal intake of breath, then starts to buzz again. The line begins to move. At the same time, the partitions vibrate as important-looking people with name tags and clipboards come out from behind them and head toward us huddled masses inside our yellow-police-taped barricades. We could be an army of immigrants dragging, kicking, pulling, wheeling our goods and chattels forward waiting to be offered—what?—a job, a bunk in a displaced persons camp, a crust of bread from a soup kitchen? But at least we’re not the downtrodden masses. We—some of us anyway—laugh, smile, chat. Full of high spirits, we reach for the brass ring, our Horatio Alger pot of gold, our American dream.

A dream that’s instantly dashed for the man with the horse behind me. “Sorry,” says a woman with a name tag—
ERNESTINE EVERETT
—clipped to her lapel and a magnifying glass hanging from a chain around her neck. “It’s a rather inexpensive copy, not wood, but resin.” She runs a crimson nail fashionably squared off over the ridged horse’s tail. “Not real gold leaf either. Too bright. Too thick.”

“Are you sure?”

She nods. She’s got I-feel-your-pain eyes. She manages a chin-up smile. “I’m sure your children will enjoy it whether or not it’s an antique.”

“Don’t have them,” he grunts, then sideswipes my ankle as he rolls his rejected, cheap, resin, not-real-gold-leaf carousel horse out of the line of the happy possibles and into the sad, dashed-hopes trek home.

Meanwhile I am unwinding the Bubble Wrap shrouding my chamber pot. I’m thinking how my mother used to peel an orange, in one smooth graceful motion, producing at the end of her knife a single continuous spiraling rind. The sudden sharp stab of missing her comes at me sideways. Unprepared, I reel. The fact of her death hits at odd times, in unlikely places. How could she not be here? How could she die? My picture of her flashes like a hologram. Just as I start to see her face, she turns into Uncle Sam, then a logo for MasterCard. I can’t grab hold of her. Everything I once thought fixed now shifts. I had a certain kind of Cambridge childhood. She was a certain kind of Cambridge academic wife. She should have died of old age in her mahogany four-poster attended by me and her creaky friends from her bluestocking lunch-and-earnest-conversation clubs. She should be lying in the family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery surrounded by the head-stones of Winslow Homer, Nathaniel Bowditch, and Fanny Farmer, not to mention her Brattle Street neighbor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

How could someone so sensible, so competent, so conventionally Cambridge fall so dramatically and unconventionally in love? And at such an unlikely age? How could she have died so unnaturally? So far away from home? So far away from me? What of her is in me? Not her competence, I realize now, as I wrangle with an inert piece of plastic. Her romanticism, her passion, lay just under the surface, unseen by me, unnoticed by my brilliant Epworth-chair-holding father, a man who can excavate from the densest text the most deeply buried splinter of clarity but for whom family members tiptoeing past his study, those seen-not-heard souls at his dinner table, remain an enigma hardly worth deciphering. Who would have thought that the real beating heart of Emily Granby Randolph would be heard only by mousy-haired, quiet Henrietta Potter—the last person on earth you’d ever imagine sharing the sunset over the Taj Mahal with.