The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 76: September 1

Today I stopped at an antiques store that I’ve passed many times but have never visited. A sign outside advertised HAND STICHED QUILTS. Three quilts hung from a clothesline; none of them looked antique. The wooden boat building industry in my town has a name for this new-old crafts pursuit. Boats based on old designs and built with new methods are called “Spirit of Tradition” boats. So maybe these were Spirit of Tradition quilts. In the spirit of tradition — honoring ye olde days — these quilts were “stiched,” not stitched.

The quilts should have been a warning sign: this was not my kind of antique store. Flanking the door were architectural ruins — the bases of giant pillars — already repurposed as planters. This store catered to people who pay others to find the promise in junk. I do not think less of these people; I just cannot afford to be one of them. I often buy things because they are cheap and because I hope they will jar my imagination at a later date and become a smart investment. They will prove useful for something. Those cast-iron boot removers, for example, that were once bolted to a barn wall, and into which a farmer once stuck his boot heel and levered out his foot. They’ve spent ten years on top of my woodstove; their use has not yet revealed itself to me. I trust in time that it will.

I went inside the antiques store. Indeed, the prices were too high. My desires recalibrate in such situations; I am open to liking whatever is simply within my price range. I found a box of old postcards, the long rectangular ones with the twin, side-by-side exposures, usually of national monuments or state parks. When I asked the prices, the man said offhandedly, as though these items were of little consequence to him, “Oh those, I just put those out. I haven’t had a chance to price them yet.”

But approximately, I asked him. I wanted to know if it would be worth my time to paw.

“Anywhere from $5 to $200, depending on the postcard,” he said.

I picked five postcards. The four Maine postcards were too expensive. The fifth — a waterfall in Minnesota, an unremarkable image of a place that meant nothing to me — was five dollars. I bought it.

I gave the man my credit card. He scrutinized my name. “The writer?” he asked. He said he liked my work, but I doubt he’d read any of it. He knew my name because his real trade was people. Antiques interested him because they were the former possessions of people. Our subsequent conversation confirmed my suspicion. I told him I was sad because I was soon returning to New York. He said, “Yes, all of the New Yorkers leave in August.” He sounded wistful. Most locals, by the end of a summer tourist season, do not respond wistfully to its conclusion.

The man dropped names of local summer people, some of whom I’d heard of, none of whom I knew. He told me about a thirty-years-dead real estate agent who was, as he put it, “a one-woman zoning committee.” (He also described her as a “prissy little woman.”) She had ideas about where each type of person (writer, artist, WASP, Irish Catholic) should live. I mentioned a snooty family in our town called the Winfrieds. (I’d been inside their house once because I knew their caretaker.) I told a story about Mrs. Winfried and how she’d snubbed my neighbor, a local woman who’d cleaned Mrs. Winfried’s house when she was a teenager.

“Ah,” he said. “You mean Mrs. Winston.”

He talked about how sweetly offensive these people could be without even knowing it. How they assume you’re one of them, just because you’ve made it to the party, so to speak. “They’re always talking about ‘us white people,’ in front of me,” he said, “without even realizing that I’m passing.”

Was he talking about passing as a summer person? Passing as a straight person? Passing as a straight summer person? Then he mentioned “passing” a second time. He referred to having longer, curlier hair, and much more of a beard. “And even then they didn’t know I was passing!” he said.

Now I was really confused. To my eye, this guy was white. I suspected, too, that he wanted me to ask him, “Wait, aren’t you white?”

I decided not to ask him.

As I was leaving, I saw a pair of pottery cups and saucers by a now defunct, once influential pottery studio. The old barn and workshop still existed in a town twelve miles from mine; my friend and I had snooped around the property a few weeks ago. The sign remained, and the studio appeared operational, full of dusty wheels and botched pots lining the windowsills, even though the place had been shut down for years. There were rumors (my friend had read somewhere) that you could tour the workshop and the barn. But we found no people and no signs. After trying all the doors, we left.

I told the man at the antiques store that I wanted to buy the two cups and saucers. He said, “They’re a very good price.”

Compared to the rest of his offerings, this was true.

“Do you know about that pottery?” he said.

I told him that I knew a little bit about it.

“And the woman who founded it,” he said, “she really was a remarkable woman.”

“She really was,” I agreed. I had no idea about this woman. I knew exactly not one thing about her. I’m sure hers was an interesting story, because these stories always are. This stretch of the coast attracts artists, lifestyle eccentrics, self-exilers.

I don’t know why I pretended I knew as much as he did when I knew nothing. I don’t know why I refused his offer. No doubt he’d met this woman, or knew her son, or could have provided excellent gossip about her odd habits, communicated through her old cleaning lady, whose daughter was now his cleaning lady, or some such connection. But I was late to get home. I figured I’d Google her later and learn for myself what made her so remarkable. I did this. I failed to learn much. Her name was Angelica Baker. The most informative was a piece written by the antiques dealer I’d just been talking to, but the article was more concerned with a modernist pavilion razed by a banker with traditional tastes. I clicked around and discovered that the antiques dealer kept a blog. (He’d written an article called “The Trouble with the Footmen: Servant Problems in Old Bar Harbor.”) I realized how much we had in common. He’s obsessed with mansions and wealth — his is the adult version of my kid obsession with Greenwich real estate — but he’s also struck mute by a simple white cape. I own a simple white cape that’s two hundred years old. Antique capes are modernist in their way, two or three cubes and rectangles stuttering across a field. The sight of one relaxes my whole body. On his blog he’d posted a picture of a white cape under a quote from Coco Chanel, “Elegance is refusal.” Was it a mark of elegance, my refusal to ask him about his background, my refusal to let him tell me a good story about a potter? Regardless, now I was far more curious about him. I vowed to stop by his antiques store more often next summer. I thought we’d get along.