Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Family's Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time

176 Pages·2010·2.59 MB·English

by  Lisa Tracy

All my relations
Too much furniture in one’s living room
Too many pens in a stand
Too many children in a house
Too many words when men meet
Too many books in a bookcase there can never be…
KENKO (FOURTEENTH CENTURY)
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
, The Dry Salvages
T. S. ELIOT
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
chapter 1 The Beginning
chapter 2 The Canton Plates
chapter 3 At the Bins
chapter 4 The Spoils of War
chapter 5 New Jersey 2002: The Army Trunk
chapter 6 The Thread of Memory: On the
Trail of the Washington Chair
chapter 7 Almost Famous: The Pistols
and the Red Chair
chapter 8 Lexington 1960: Southern Charm
chapter 9 The Auction
chapter 10 MIA: Ghosts
chapter 11 Home
chapter 12 Mirrors and Salt
chapter 13 The Gathering
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
, whom I’ve known since high school,
I WAS IN THE OFFICE SUPPLY STORE TALKING TO BARBARA
and she asked what I was working on. Writing a book, I told her, about the
family furniture. “Like family baggage,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” said Barbara. “Only bigger.” We know, because this is
who we are. We’re Americans in the twenty-first century. We have more
stuff in storage bins and basements and attics and back rooms than we can
ever use in a lifetime. Or three.
And of all the things we probably should sort through and do something
about, the family furniture is in a class by itself. Anytime I tell someone
about my own family’s voyage through the storage bins and on to the
auction house and beyond, the story elicits winces of sympathy—and dread.
If they haven’t already wrestled with it, they know the time is coming.
The problem is compounded by the fact that we’re living in the
wealthiest country in the history of the world, and even as we know we
should be winnowing, we are wallowing. It’s hard to let go of objects
because they are full of stories: our stories, our families’ stories, or, if we’ve
been haunting the flea market or the antiques mall, other people’s stories.
They speak to us, as Yeats once said, of what is past and passing and to
come. They speak to us of the life we had, and lives we never knew.
I am sitting on a winter morning in the kitchen of a house my
grandparents built. I’m eating breakfast with my great-nephew, and behind
us on the counter is a plastic toy milk bottle that moos when you turn it
upside down. His toy, from six or seven years ago. He’s nine as I write. On
this particular morning, I’m moved to suggest that we might get rid of it.
Pass it on to someone else, someone younger, perhaps? Yes, he says
unthinkingly, then immediately reneges.
The milk bottle, he tells me, reminds him of when he and his dad were
living in the country. One night, his dad was making popcorn in a skillet,
and when he took it off the stove and opened the lid, the fluffed kernels
exploded all over the place. “And when the popcorn blew up, I was looking
at the milk bottle, and it put the remembering right in my head,” he
explains. The memory still makes him laugh uproariously. And this is why,
I see, we won’t be getting rid of this milk bottle anytime soon.
We can, in fact, never be free of our stuff until we have dealt with the
stories it carries. In the end, it does indeed tell us something about who we
are. It’s just stuff, our possessions. Family furniture. And it’s what we make
of it.
Chapter 1
THE BEGINNING
T
sorting family pictures and papers when the
HE DAY WE PACKED THE HOUSE, I WAS IN THE LIVING ROOM
movers came. One mover, to be precise: He was the advance guard, the packing
man.
It was a beautiful October day in 1992, still warm but with an edge in the air.
Fall had come to the mountains around the small Virginia town where I’d grown
up, but the flame-colored ridges weren’t what I’d come for. I was wrestling with
the contents of a chest of drawers where my mother had deposited a pile of
family papers. There were genealogy charts, military commendations, fragments
of biographies, letters from the War of 1812, a photocopy of a journal dating
from the 1840s, and what seemed like dozens of little framed daguerreotypes of
people whose identity was a complete mystery to me. All had to be sorted and
packed, because when my sister, Jeanne, came later that week, we’d be helping
our eighty-three-year-old mother move—not particularly willingly—to a
retirement home from the house she’d occupied for forty years. It had been her
parents’ house, then hers and Daddy’s.
She had been living alone for almost twenty-five years now, and people had
recently started calling us with worrisome anecdotes and dire predictions, all of
course veiled in polite concern, this being a small town where certain formalities
still obtained. She was making unexplained withdrawals from her bank account.
She would walk aimlessly, turning up at the church at unexpected times. Her
driving was atrocious, had been for years.
Mother had told us herself that she really didn’t think she should be living
alone, and for a while my nephew had lived at the house with her. We’d looked
for live-in help without much success. There weren’t many options. I’d found
only one candidate, a woman who didn’t drive and who smoked. We’re a small
family, just Jeanne and me in our generation, and we were both living hundreds
of miles away. What were we to do?
The only retirement home—we didn’t want a nursing home, just someplace
safe where she would have help—was the old hotel, a relic of an earlier time, as
the worn carpet and small, rather dark rooms reminded us when I went with her
to look at it. She agreed to the corner room overlooking the street all too close to
our house—her house—just a quick walk down to the corner, across the street,
and down the alley. Acceded with teeth clenched, a gracious face, and the steely
determination to fight again as soon as the opponent’s back was turned. We
thought she was adjusting remarkably well to the inevitable. She fooled us.
The men of the family—on both sides, Mother’s and Daddy’s—had been
high-ranking military officers, their wives gracious hostesses. The accumulated
social power of that household, reflected in all its furnishings and memorabilia,
made moving out quite a comedown. For Mother, leaving all that gentility
behind must have seemed like an admission of weakness, a failure, a defeat. She
was abandoning ship, and I think it broke her heart. But, as was typical of our
true-blue military family with its Victorian ways, she didn’t say, and we didn’t
ask, how she felt about it. She put on her stiffest upper lip and moved.
She would be dead within six months. But we didn’t know that then, of
course. On this mid-October day, the move and all that would follow were still
ahead of us, and I was on an archaeological dig, plowing through layers of
family possessions we’d managed to ignore for decades, or in some cases had
never seen before. And that’s when the man we would come to know as Roger
arrived.
“Where would you like me to start?” he asked, surveying the living room I’d
strewn with papers. Not here, I thought. The last thing I needed in the living
room at this point was helping hands. I took him to the dining room and showed
him the contents of the Hepplewhite cabinet that we used as a china closet,
which I figured would keep him busy for a while, even with his fancy shrink-
wrap.
But in less than an hour, he was back. “I’m finished with the china,” he said,
looking pretty pleased with himself. “What would you like me to do next?”
I was still excavating the bowfront chest of drawers—a homely thing with an
ashen-colored veneer and drawers that tended to jam. I was also probably
irritated that this guy was interrupting me again already; I was on a short leash,
with a demanding job and a preteen son six hours up the East Coast, and I had
just a few days here to get as much packed as possible. Mother—who was in no
real hurry to move anywhere—wasn’t helping. Now it was dawning on me that