“Nice things only go so far, I think. The people in our lives are what’s important.” An author’s days wading in the world of valuable antiques highlights the idea that sometimes the things we own, can own us…
by: Nadja Maril
Light pours into the room and I stare at our reflections. We are similarly dressed in blue jeans and white tennis shoes, but a generation apart. The top of her gray head barely meets my shoulder. She speaks in short crisp sentences, peppering me with questions.
I am the appraiser. She is the client. Her inquiries remind me of all the other women who have sought my advice concerning the disposition of their antiques. Barely on speaking terms with their children, they console themselves with the money their possessions might bring.
“I should never have promised her this mirror,” she says, pacing back and forth across the faded oriental carpet in the hallway. I gaze at the Japanese woodcut print mounted above the silvered glass, thinking it is a handsome piece. Beneath it is an exquisitely carved side table. She points to the supporting columns of the table. “They were once part of an antique piano,” she says. “Both table and mirror belonged to my parents. I should have never have said she could have them.”
The “she” my client is referring to is her daughter. Since I have entered the five-bedroom home, furnished with a mix of family heirlooms and items acquired over decades of international travel, the daughter has been mentioned several times.
I try to tune out my client’s anxious ramblings. In her voice I hear my mother’s.
As this client continues to talk, telling me she once lived in New York, my thoughts remain to my mother. Like this client, my mother often dangles the ownership of family heirlooms as reward for obedience. I think of the items I’ve inquired about that suddenly become unavailable. The bracelet I wanted, what did she do with it? Is this what this woman is doing? Seeking to show her control over something, her possessions, she’s considering selling some of the items her daughter wants.
I have been hired for a limited time, one hour. I tell myself to narrow my gaze, to not start thinking about her family problems or my own. Just look at the furniture, the items she has questions on. Otherwise, I’ll be here all day.
“I don’t know that I will move,” my client says. “Yes, I’ve put a deposit down on an apartment in a retirement community, but my bedroom is on the first floor. It’s not so hard to live here. Maybe I’ll stay.”
She points to a tilt top table in the corner of the living room. “Is this an original? That’s why I called you. I’ve seen them on Antiques Roadshow worth thousands of dollars.”
One look at the pad feet and pedestal base and my thoughts jump to memories of an older colleague, the famous “furniture doctor” George Grotz.
George was a successful antiques dealer when I was just starting out. One night at a party, after several shots of Scotch, he talked about building his own tilt top tables, copies of the Queen Anne candle stand form. Initially, he’d built one table to understand the craftsmanship process. Then he consigned it to an auction house as an “experiment,” to see if it would pass as an original, and it sold as if it were an antique.
It sold for a lot of money and George justified his actions by noting the table was never described as antique. It was the buyer who decided with their wallet that the table was authentic, he told me. The buyer saw what they wanted to see.
Whenever George needed cash, he built another table, and I was in on the secret. His actions opened my eyes to the reality that many of the fine antiques people treasured were not authentic. In addition to outright copies, many prized heirlooms were only partially antique. Worn out components were often replaced and became what is known in the business as a marriage. The upper bookshelves from one desk become attached to the bottom of another desk. The graceful legs on a table, might be newer legs, made to resemble old ones because the originals broke. Reproductions, marriages, and mongrels, he informed me, were everywhere.
The table I’m examining is larger than any George would have wanted to copy, almost three feet in diameter, large enough for a tea service. I reach into what is known as the birdcage, to flip the table’s position from vertical to horizontal and imagine fragile porcelain, set out on its surface. In the eighteenth century they would be cups without handles. Deep saucers. A piece of finely embroidered linen.
The details of the table’s edges look wrong. I stroke the underside of the wood and detect the signs of factory production work. “Late nineteenth century,” I say and imagine a thick doily and a large pressed glass pitcher filled with cold lemonade. My mouth is getting dry and I’m feeling tired. My client said she was going to bring me a cold drink. I consider getting a glass of water, but I want to finish talking about the table. “Still, a nice solid piece of mahogany,” I say.
“You mean it’s a fraud. Well, in that case maybe I’ll give the tilt top table to my son’s daughter. She’s about sixteen,” she says.
This is the first time she’s mentioned a son. What teenager would want an antique table? “What else would you like to show me?” I ask.
She gestures to a mid-century modern coffee table designed by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and a Miller furniture recliner, designed by Charles Eames, both museum pieces. I jot down some notes, and reach in my bag for my camera to take photographs.
“Oh no, don’t bother. They’re already promised to my daughter.”
For a moment I’m angry she’d wasting my time before I register the smug expression on her face.
“You have some very fine things,” I say.
Her mouth opens in a broad smile.
She pulls a battered yearbook off the bookshelf in the living room and shows me her husband’s graduation photo from the Air Force Academy. “Wasn’t he so handsome?” she says.
I look at his picture and see a high forehead exposed by the requisite crew cut, and white teeth. After his stint as a jet pilot, she tells me, he worked in private industry.
“My son died several years ago. His wife remarried,” she says.
Earlier on the phone she told me about her husband’s battle with Parkinson’s disease and his death a year earlier.
I picture her nursing him, picture me with my own dying husband thirteen years earlier. I’ve re-assembled my life, remarried and had another child, but that doesn’t stop me from reliving my losses each time I hear of someone else who has lost someone close. Nice things only go so far, I think. The people in our lives are what’s important. I need to be more patient with my widowed mother, I tell myself. More patient with everyone.
I return to the present and hear my client talking. “Maybe I should sell one or two antiques. Maybe a painting. I just don’t know,” she says.
“Take your time,” I respond, “Talk to your family.”
Nineteenth century oil paintings fill the walls, seascapes, flower arrangements, a portrait of her father, and an interior of a kitchen with a pot bellied stove. I study the canvases. The colors are vibrant and they all bear the same signature. The previous week in our conversation she’d told me her mother was an artist, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute. Her daughter, who lives in New York, is also an artist. Before marriage, my client was an aspiring actress.
On the ornate sideboard, photographs of her grandchildren, her daughter’s son and daughter, show big smiles on charming faces. The little girl dances. The boy does theater.
“Then they take after you,” I say.
Her voice becomes shrill. “They get nothing from me. I barely see them.”
I feel sad for this woman. She hired me to examine a few pieces of furniture and decorative accessories, but seems to be looking for companionship. I had not intended to examine her life, yet I examine my own life every day, choosing what door I wish to walk through, how I choose to live each hour. I need to do better. I look at my wristwatch. “It’s been over two hours,” I say.
“You told me you’d charge me for an hour, that you wouldn’t need longer than an hour,” she says, clenching her small hands. “Living on a fixed income, I really don’t have more in my budget, particularly since that tilt top table is a fraud and I can’t sell it.”
I look around the room and say okay as I hand her the duplicate copy of my printed notes. I know I should charge more for my research and the time I’ve spent at the house, but I just want to leave. Standing my ground and asking for full payment for my time feels too demeaning. Maybe, I tell myself, she really is strapped for money. I take the check she hands me, as she takes her final bow.
“Oh, just one more thing,” she says while opening the door in her kitchen that leads down to her garage. She shows me a small touring car with wicker seats, “Circa 1950,” she says. “Bought in Italy. Isn’t it adorable?”
Parked beside it is a new VW Passat and a Mercedes luxury sedan easily worth over one hundred thousand dollars. My heart is racing, but I contain my emotions. I’m running late to get over to the high school to watch my younger son’s track meet and I missed lunch. I think of George Grotz and his table story. I need to stop appraising antiques.
Nadja Maril’s prose and poetry has been published in literary magazines that include, Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Review, and The Compressed Journal of Creative Arts. Her chapbook of poems and memoir, Recipes from My Garden, was recently published by Old Scratch Press (September 2024). A former journalist and magazine editor, Nadja has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine and is the author of two reference books on 19th and 20th century American lighting and hundreds of columns on antiques that ran in magazines and newspapers. To read more of her work and follow her weekly blog posts, visit: Nadjamaril.com https://nadjamaril.com/
