Those were my computational and cleaning duties. Some were daily and some were weekly. Also I assisted Rennie at hostessing tasks. Forget Me Not is like the village well of colonial times, a period we studied last year. At the village well, news and gossip and advice were exchanged. Women went away from it with water and also with strength and self-esteem, though some did find pleasure in making others feel wrong or stupid. But of this unpleasant type there were only a few at Forget Me Not. I will mention a particular person later. Also we have many customers who come in just to chat and don’t buy anything. Some want a smattering of comfort, like the one whose daughter had gotten rolled over by Princeton,6 and others want a lot of solace, like the woman whose son had just died.7 I became able to tell the difference between the two and to make tea for the first type and for the second type to pour sherry without spilling any.
This takes me to the main part of my paper: What I Learned at Forget Me Not in addition to techniques of polishing metal and how to wheedle the credit card machine into working. I learned the distinguishing features of various jewelry styles: Victorian, art nouveau, art deco, and post — World War II until about 1950 (Rennie doesn’t carry anything later than 1950). Victorian is delicate and elaborate. Art nouveau is inspired by natural and mythological themes like dragonflies or enchanted women, set in sinuous designs. Art deco is geometric and employs motifs like ziggurats and lozenges. World War II introduced synthetic materials, and Rennie has some Bakelite slave bracelets that look like butterscotch silk. All this jewelry and estate silver and Chinese ceramics are the store’s bread and butter. Rennie’s particular specialties are pottery made by the Saturday Evening Girls and Victorian mourning jewelry.
The Saturday Evening Girls grew out of the arts and crafts movement in England of the 1870s, based on the reformist ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris. Those two important men advocated a return to hand craftsmanship, not just for aesthetic quality but also for the purpose of furthering social and educational goals.8 At the turn of the nineteenth century, in Boston’s crowded North End, just a few miles from Forget Me Not, a group of young Italian and Jewish immigrant women gathered on Saturday nights to make ceramics, guided by an altruistic socialite.9 She wanted the Girls to earn money and also work in a healthy and uplifting environment. But people didn’t buy the pottery, because its prices were higher than mass-produced wares. Now the dishes are prized and collectors pay a lot of money for them, often to Rennie. The pottery is simple and colorful and sometimes decorated with barnyard motifs; if you didn’t know it was urban, you might call it rustic. Either way it is pretty — Rennie and I both think so.
Victorian mourning jewelry is a horse from a different glue factory.10 Rennie and I don’t much care for it but it is all the rage today, and a few Goth girls of my acquaintance (not Caldicott students) wear gutta-percha hair ornaments decorated with death’s heads. Mourning jewelry was meant to be a souvenir to remember a loved one and also a reminder of the inevitability of death. Mourning rings reached the height of popularity in England after the death of Prince Albert, in December 1869.11 In England, rings were often inscribed with the name, age, and date of death of the lost person. Early rings were made of black enamel. Later ones were jet.
Since this is a research and observation paper, I have mostly kept anecdotes and speculations and digressions out of it or tucked them into footnotes that a reader can skip. Anyway, I am taking Journal Writing next semester. I did observe the operational details of a small retail business, so I will report on that. Rennie let me look at her ledger, which is of the pen-and-ink variety. Her accountant urged her to get a computer but finally said “Oh hell.”12 In Rennie’s handwriting, each letter and number slants at a 60-degree angle to the line. It’s more legible than many fonts.13 Rennie also took me with her on a few house calls. I saw how shrewd you have to be at sizing up the worth of individual items and also entire roomfuls of stuff. In one huge mansion the owner had just died14 and there was wonderful silver, as you would expect. But in a couple of awful apartments, Rennie found some unusual objets d’art. She always paid what they were worth, though of course not as much as she hoped to sell them for.
I also observed and attempted to emulate her various ways of dealing with customers beyond serving tea and/or sherry to the obviously unhappy ones. She shows patience to people who can’t make up their minds and also to those who need to think it over, which really means ask their husbands. She is firm with dealers who want a deep discount. She allows returns always. She puts up with a lot but doesn’t put up with everything. For instance, that unlikable woman referred to earlier came in frequently just to gab. The woman usually didn’t pay attention to me, but one day when Rennie was finishing up with somebody else she asked me to show her a jet mourning ring. I did, and told her that the finest jet was mined in Whitby, England. Whitby got used too much, and today it is illegal to mine there because the only jet left is in seams in the cliffs over the town. To remove it from the cliffs would cause them to tumble down. In this case, overmining led to undermining. In the middle of my mini-lecture, which I had practiced on other customers with good results (i.e., sales), she said, too sincerely, You have a beautiful voice. Then she said, Who are you? and I told her my name, first, middle, last. She said Salter I know your family your mother was a saint your stepmother is a slattern your father is a tyrant. Like that, with no punctuation. I’m surprised she didn’t say your brother is on the spectrum. Rennie hustled her out in thirty seconds, maybe less, mentioning untruthfully that we were going on a house call, and she actually turned on the alarm and locked the door with the three of us outside it for verisimilitude. We watched the woman go away.15 Then we went next door to the deli and had lunch, which Rennie paid for (usually I bring a Tupperware container of last night’s meat loaf, or macaroni with a little lettuce from the night before that, or creamed chipped beef from even earlier if it hasn’t gone bad). Over lunch Rennie gave me a recipe for All-Week-Long minestrone, a vegetable soup that lasts from Sunday through Saturday. I would have made it on the weekend but Tina came home and we went back to takeout, which Tollie prefers anyway. It was that lunchtime that I told Rennie that Tollie’s breakfast every day is a scoop of vanilla ice cream and half a cup of coffee. He won’t eat anything else. Very few people would have refrained from comment, but Rennie just nodded. Very few people have the discreetness to run a village well. I hope I can attain that quality, as I am thinking of the antique business as a career.
I will conclude with a discussion of old spectacles. Rennie acquired a small collection of them from a gentleman who was selling some clocks she really wanted. She asked me to make the glasses my project, so I numbered them and arranged them in large box which I lined with velvet, and I did some research and wrote its results on a placard in an elegant font (we still had a computer) as follows:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPECTACLES
The ancients used reading stones — single pieces of glass which magnified what was before them. The Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (1220–1292) determined that a convex (converging) lens could assist people with weak or aged eyes (presbyopia). In Florence, nineteenth-century glassmakers produced concave (diverging) lenses for nearsighted (myopic) persons. But all these aids were single lenses only. The earliest pictorial record of eyeglasses is Saint Jerome in His Study, by Ghirlandajo. This shows that eyeglasses were made not necessarily during the time of Saint Jerome (347–420) but definitely during the time of Ghirlandajo (1449–1494). They have been in use ever since, with frames of gold, copper, leather, bone, baleen, and tortoiseshell. Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals.