shelf. Suzanne went to help her.
“Feel the weight of this stuff. There must be a hundred ounces of silver here,” she marveled. “Worth a fortune.”
“I always keeps it locked up and out of sight.” Birdie flourished a rag and settled down to a day of polishing. “Go on and eat your breakfast.”
Suzanne brought her orange juice and sweet roll back to an unused corner of the dining room table, then ran upstairs for the card file. Virginia Lee kept a special section set aside for her silver, and the files had been heavily used. Obviously, she’d lavished her time on this area of her collection. Some yellowed cards held notations made in a firm, elegant hand with a blue-inked fountain pen, but most were on crisp, clean sheets scrawled in shaky black ballpoint. The newer cards seemed out of character for the mistress of Magnolia Hill, but then, Virginia’s last years had been spent dying slowly and painfully. Maybe, the fast scrawl represented her sense of time running out.
Suzanne fingered the first card, an old one for a sterling teething rattle, mother-of-pearl handle, Tiffany, circa 1895, valued at $50. Not wanting to bother Birdie who was warming up her hands and her voice with a little humming, she started with the small pieces in the long shallow drawer in the top of the sideboard. Once used for storing table linens, a modern cabinetmaker had inset the space with small cubicles lined in gray flannel. Each niche held an object of Victorian tableware that would have sent her mother into raving fits of ecstasy.
Virginia Lee had owned all the oddities of the era: grape shears with handles like twisted vines, asparagus tongs in Tiffany’s Chrysanthemum pattern, bacon forks, oyster ladles, berry spoons, a chipped-beef server, a set of ice cream forks, even an Unger Brothers food pusher used by children to pursue elusive peas around the plate. Item by item, they were worth no more than twenty to two hundred dollars each, but cumulatively several thousand in melt value, and much, much more to a collector because of the breadth of the collection. As dreary as Suzanne found some aspects of Victoriana, these absurd utensils delighted her.
Chortling over cheese scoops and lettuce forks, she pawed among them most of the morning while Birdie polished and sang under her breath to keep from disturbing her studies. Every item checked out against the cards, with the exception of the baby rattle. She asked Birdie about it.
“Oh, that ole thing was the first bit of silver Miss Virginia brought home for Georgie who hadn’t even been born yet. She was four months along and so slim you couldn’t tell. I said, ‘Now don’t you be tempting things to go wrong by buying all sorts of stuff for your baby, better to wait for the last month,’ but she just laughed and had me boil it, shine it up, and wrap it in flannel. When Georgie come, she give it to him and let him chew all over it. You could see his little tooth marks on it. That rattle is long gone down a crack or lost in the yard. Imagine giving a baby something fine to play with. They can teeth just as well on a frozen carrot.”
With her head bent over her work, Birdie scrubbed diligently at a bit of repousse work on the punchbowl.
“But I guess that was all right for her if it give her some pleasure. By nine months, Miss Virginia got no bigger than a muskmelon down there, not big and sloppy like some women get. She had all these clothes made up special to look nice, while most everybody else just stayed home and wore them big T-shirts or their own man’s shirts when they was breeding. It made no difference to Mr. Jacques. He went out tomcatting around before their first anniversary. Once he took off that uniform, turned out he was just a low-life person. I hate to say it of the dead, but a low-life person. Him too low and her too high with me stuck in the middle. Those were some bad years early on, but things took care of themselves later. Yes, they did.”
Suzanne
“Feel the weight of this stuff. There must be a hundred ounces of silver here,” she marveled. “Worth a fortune.”
“I always keeps it locked up and out of sight.” Birdie flourished a rag and settled down to a day of polishing. “Go on and eat your breakfast.”
Suzanne brought her orange juice and sweet roll back to an unused corner of the dining room table, then ran upstairs for the card file. Virginia Lee kept a special section set aside for her silver, and the files had been heavily used. Obviously, she’d lavished her time on this area of her collection. Some yellowed cards held notations made in a firm, elegant hand with a blue-inked fountain pen, but most were on crisp, clean sheets scrawled in shaky black ballpoint. The newer cards seemed out of character for the mistress of Magnolia Hill, but then, Virginia’s last years had been spent dying slowly and painfully. Maybe, the fast scrawl represented her sense of time running out.
Suzanne fingered the first card, an old one for a sterling teething rattle, mother-of-pearl handle, Tiffany, circa 1895, valued at $50. Not wanting to bother Birdie who was warming up her hands and her voice with a little humming, she started with the small pieces in the long shallow drawer in the top of the sideboard. Once used for storing table linens, a modern cabinetmaker had inset the space with small cubicles lined in gray flannel. Each niche held an object of Victorian tableware that would have sent her mother into raving fits of ecstasy.
Virginia Lee had owned all the oddities of the era: grape shears with handles like twisted vines, asparagus tongs in Tiffany’s Chrysanthemum pattern, bacon forks, oyster ladles, berry spoons, a chipped-beef server, a set of ice cream forks, even an Unger Brothers food pusher used by children to pursue elusive peas around the plate. Item by item, they were worth no more than twenty to two hundred dollars each, but cumulatively several thousand in melt value, and much, much more to a collector because of the breadth of the collection. As dreary as Suzanne found some aspects of Victoriana, these absurd utensils delighted her.
Chortling over cheese scoops and lettuce forks, she pawed among them most of the morning while Birdie polished and sang under her breath to keep from disturbing her studies. Every item checked out against the cards, with the exception of the baby rattle. She asked Birdie about it.
“Oh, that ole thing was the first bit of silver Miss Virginia brought home for Georgie who hadn’t even been born yet. She was four months along and so slim you couldn’t tell. I said, ‘Now don’t you be tempting things to go wrong by buying all sorts of stuff for your baby, better to wait for the last month,’ but she just laughed and had me boil it, shine it up, and wrap it in flannel. When Georgie come, she give it to him and let him chew all over it. You could see his little tooth marks on it. That rattle is long gone down a crack or lost in the yard. Imagine giving a baby something fine to play with. They can teeth just as well on a frozen carrot.”
With her head bent over her work, Birdie scrubbed diligently at a bit of repousse work on the punchbowl.
“But I guess that was all right for her if it give her some pleasure. By nine months, Miss Virginia got no bigger than a muskmelon down there, not big and sloppy like some women get. She had all these clothes made up special to look nice, while most everybody else just stayed home and wore them big T-shirts or their own man’s shirts when they was breeding. It made no difference to Mr. Jacques. He went out tomcatting around before their first anniversary. Once he took off that uniform, turned out he was just a low-life person. I hate to say it of the dead, but a low-life person. Him too low and her too high with me stuck in the middle. Those were some bad years early on, but things took care of themselves later. Yes, they did.”
Suzanne
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