Lady in Waiting: A Novel (4 page)

My fascination with old things began the summer I was twelve. I spent ten days in Manhattan with Mom’s aunt Thea, at her invitation. She’d had the shop for a few years, opening it after her British husband had died and she’d returned to the States a moderately wealthy woman. She never had any children, and my mother was her only living relative. Thea let me poke around in the back of the store that summer, took me on buying trips, and thoroughly convinced me that every piece in Amsterdam Avenue Antiques had been a part of someone’s past—each piece could tell a story or two, if it could talk. That intrigued me—that the odds and ends of a person’s past could find their way to a new person’s present and everything would begin all over again. I think it pleased her that I had an interest in the things that she cared about. I spent another week with her the following summer.

In high school I took a job working weekends for a couple who owned an antique jewelry store near my parents’ home on Long Island. David and Lila Longmont were an odd sort of couple. They didn’t seem to get along very well, yet they couldn’t stand to be apart from each other. Both of them seemed off balance if the other was away from the store, even if just for a few minutes. David was an expert on antique stones and settings, almost arrogantly so, and Lila, who couldn’t say a kind word to David’s face, was ferocious in her defense of his expertise to dubious customers. I loved how every piece in their store—every necklace, every brooch, every ring—had been worn by someone. I used to make up stories about the previous owners on slow Saturdays. I imagined that Thea might be doing the same thing.

Much later, when Connor was a baby and I had stopped teaching to be at home with him, the attraction to old things returned. We were living in Connecticut then; Brad was in his residency, and Connor and I
spent a lot of time on our own, strolling streets and looking in shop windows. It’s impossible to live in New England and not sense a connection to the past. Even my mother feels this connection, though she won’t decorate with it. I began buying a few antiques here and there and going to auctions and estate sales, and by the time Connor was in junior high and we were living in Manhattan, I knew more about antiquities than some of the dealers I bought from. But I never imagined I’d go into retail. I always figured I’d go back to teaching when Connor graduated.

About the time Connor realized he could run faster and longer than just about anybody, I began spending my afternoons at cross-country and track meets, cheering for my son, hitting the Record button so that Brad could watch the meets later, and planning my return back to the classroom.

It was my mother’s idea that I take over managing the store instead of her when Thea’s health began to fail within a week of Connor’s leaving for Dartmouth. Not only did my mother quickly have my great-aunt’s blessing but also Thea’s insistence that if my mother wasn’t going to manage the store in her absence, it had to be me.

My mother came to my apartment the day she and Thea decided this, with the shop keys in her hand, effusing joy that the perfect solution for my empty nest had just presented itself, and I alone was Aunt Thea’s answer to prayer.

“But I was thinking I’d go back to teaching,” I’d said, staring at the keys she had placed in my palm.

“But you love antiques. And for heaven’s sake, you haven’t been in a classroom in eighteen years. Besides, Aunt Thea needs you.”

“I don’t know anything about running a business, Mom.”

“Thea didn’t either when she started. She’ll tell you everything. And you’ll have Wilson there to help you.” She flipped her sunglasses down onto her nose and reached for the front doorknob.

“You’re leaving?” She had been there less than ten minutes.

“I’m staging a house in Westchester. I have to go or I’ll get stuck in traffic. Talk it over with Brad. It’s the perfect solution.”

She opened the door and took a step out.

“Perfect solution for what?” I called after her.

My mother turned her head but kept walking. “For you, Jane. For everyone.”

Brad had come home tired and overworked that night. I told him over lasagna that I’d been asked by Mom and Thea to take over the management of the antique store.

“Do you want to do it?” he’d said.

“Thea’s kind of insistent that it be me.”

“But is it something you want to do? I thought you wanted to teach again.” He chewed slowly.

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” I asked.

He raised another forkful to his mouth. “I guess if it’s really what you want to do …”

I realized later that I never asked him if he thought I’d be good at it.

As we cleared the table, I told him I thought it might be good for me to take on a challenge like this one, since Connor was away at college and everything seemed so different at home. He had agreed with me.

Subconsciously, I guess I knew something was different.

Something wasn’t quite right.

I watched Brad pack the day he left for New Hampshire.

He’d suggested I take a walk so that I wouldn’t be in the apartment while he emptied his closet, but that’s not what I did.

As long as I was there, watching him fold his T-shirts and socks, it was like he was just packing for a long trip. It put him on edge, my sitting on
his side of the bed, arranging a shirt now and then so that it wouldn’t wrinkle. I could tell he didn’t know what to make of my wordless assistance.

When he was nearly finished, he pulled his ties off the pegs in his closet. They dangled like long, happy snakes. I had bought nearly every one of them at one time or another. He always said I knew how to pick out a stylish tie.

He folded the lengthy bundle in half and laid it on top of his robe and pajama pants. Brad had closed the lid on the suitcase, and the zipper made a harsh sound as he tugged it closed. He lifted the suitcase and set it next to two others that were already full. A garment bag lay over the top of one of the other suitcases, and next to that, a gym bag full of shoes.

Then he sat down on the bed next to me. “I’ll call you after I’ve talked with Connor.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t just tell him together?” I had blushed. It embarrassed me to picture Connor finding out that Brad and I were at odds. I felt childish. Like I was in trouble.

“I think it should be just me,” Brad replied. “He needs to know this has nothing to do with him.”

The heat on my face had intensified, but with frustration, not shame. “Of course this has to do with him. How can this not have anything to do with him? We’re his parents.”

“You know what I mean, Jane. I mean this is not his fault.”

“So whose fault is it?” I looked up at him. I really wanted to know the answer.

He looked at his suitcases. “I guess it’s mine.”

We sat there, quiet, for several moments.

I finally broke the silence. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do while I am waiting.”

“This is not about waiting,” he said slowly. “It’s about figuring out where we’re headed. And if it’s where we want to go.”

He stood and grabbed as many bags as he could to take down to the Jeep. I reached down to help him, and he simply said, “No.”

I’d sat in silence and watched him struggle with his load through the narrow doorway.

The woman bought the pocket watch emblazoned with Diderot’s quote. While Stacy completed the sale, I wrapped the watch in folds of tissue paper. A few feet away, the aroma of Emma’s boxes began to permeate the back corner of the shop.

I slipped the watch into a bag, handed it to Stacy, and moved away from the fragrance of age gone wrong.

T
he shop was empty of customers an hour after our lunch break, and both Stacy and Wilson headed to the back of the shop with me to open Emma’s boxes.

I’d met Emma at an antiques show in Boston the previous summer. She was visiting a sister, a woman who’d married an American years before, and she’d come to the show to check out hats and purses for her London costume shop. She was single, though was once married, in her late fifties, and had been involved with London theater since she was five. Emma hadn’t acted since she was in her twenties, but she told me she’d always been more captivated with the costume than the role. Emma’s shop was a trove of odd and unique accoutrements, and I had the impression the professional stage costumers didn’t take her very seriously. But yet they always came to her when they needed an off-color bowler hat or a chartreuse feather boa studded with rhinestones or a size zero flapper dress, because she usually had it. I’d only been to her store once. Last fall Brad let me have his frequent flier miles so that I could visit Emma and discuss our idea that she would seek out inventory for my store and I would do the same for her. I left her place four days after I arrived, confident she and I could help each other out. Over the past ten months, she had found nearly half of my jewelry, trinkets, and book inventory, and every set of antique darts and hat pins I carried. In turn I sent her Las Vegas showgirl headdresses, poodle skirts, and Texas wrangler chaps.

Wilson used a box cutter to slice through the packing tape while Stacy and I flung a sheet of plastic over a heavy oak table I use for acquisitions.

The first box revealed a 1920s era tea set, wrapped in sections of an old blanket—the source of the moldy smell—a pair of heavily tarnished candlesticks, a heart-shaped box filled with delicately embroidered handkerchiefs, and an enameled globe of the world depicting when Great Britain still controlled half of it. I asked Wilson to unwrap the tea set and take the blanket pieces outside to the Dumpster at once. He was happy to oblige.

The second box contained two broken vases—perhaps whole when Emma bought them—a lace tablecloth, eight intact Royal Doulton dessert plates covered in dust, a pair of spectacles in a leather case, a fireplace bellows that wouldn’t open but that Wilson said he could repair, and several framed photos of men and women in turn-of-the-century outfits. There was also a set of salt cellars and their tiny silver spoons.

As we began to open the last box, the front door jangled, and Stacy rose to assist the customer. The third box was smaller than the other two and heavier. Atop the packing material was a folded note from Emma:

Underneath her letter was a tumble of books, all of them smelling of age and neglect. The first one I drew out was a 1902 copy of
David Copperfield
with the title page missing. The next four were in better shape and slightly less aromatic. One was a book of poetry by John Keats, dated 1907. Another, a slim copy of Rudyard Kipling’s
Just So Stories
, and still another, Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
—the oldest one yet in the box, dated 1756. At the bottom of the box, wrapped in burlap, was a metal lockbox tarnished to a marbled, sooty green. It was no bigger than a toaster, with melted hinges turned gangrenous. It was locked. I shook it gently, and I could hear something moving inside. I reached into a drawer in my work desk where I had a key ring of tiny picks that Thea and Wilson had used to open many an old lock.