The man with the white mustache came in on a Monday. He was tall and somewhat awkward, but his suit was expensive. The tanned skin around his eyes was puckered and pleated, so that the eyes seemed on display.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m staying at Devlin’s Hotel — they recommended your shop.”
“Good morning,” Rennie said.
His blue gaze traveled around on a preliminary excursion. It landed briefly on Puck. “That’s a nice piece.”
“Would you like a closer look?”
“No, thank you.” And then he took his mild self around the store, looking at this and that. Eventually he chose one of the millefiori paperweights — for his sister, he said. He paid cash — his wallet delightfully bulged — and dropped the glass weight into his jacket pocket. “You have wonderful taste,” he said, like everybody else. “I’m in town for the rest of the week, on business. I’ll drop in again.”
He didn’t come on Tuesday — at least, Rennie didn’t think he did. The store was particularly busy, and people often glided in and out without speaking. Cathy Lovell the artist did come in. Her sneakers, her jeans, her smock, and her hair were noticeably spattered with paint, as if she’d decorated herself before leaving her studio. As usual she tried on all the art nouveau jewelry. She bought a Lalique pin. She’d return it in a few days, again as usual. Yuri the fix-it man came in hunting for old radios; he wanted to scavenge their insides. Mr. Brown, who had a high, freckled dome, came in to buy a bracelet for a beautiful girlfriend and a similar but less expensive bracelet for a less favored one. Rennie suspected that neither of these women existed. Many of her customers were subject to harmless delusions. She wondered what Mr. Brown did with the jewelry he frequently bought — maybe sold it to a dealer at a loss. Mr. and Mrs. Yamamoto…Ophelia came in.
Ophelia had at last ended her period of mourning. She was wearing a red checked skirt, an orange dotted blouse, and her signature earrings. On Ophelia, hodgepodge looked like a style worth copying: every woman should go out and bedeck herself from the nearest dumpster. She settled on the love seat, and Rennie, helping the Yamamotos, felt her spirits rise several notches.
“Hello, Rennie,” said Ophelia when the Yamamotos had gone. She raised her eyes above Rennie’s head. “Hello, Puck.” She picked up a paperweight from the table beside the love seat…one of the paperweights that the man with the white mustache hadn’t bought. “He was king of the fairies, you know.”
“Uncle Henry?”
“Oh, Uncle Henry was indeed gay, gay before being gay was even mentionable in polite circles. But Henry didn’t give a damn for polite circles. He was a tender guardian. He liked Lew. He gave me away at my wedding.” A tear traveled down her cheek. “Henry liked the other one too. The man I shared the pillows with, in the parlor.”
And who was he? But Rennie didn’t ask. She never had to ask. She just sat on her high stool behind her jewelry, her brow wide, her jaws wide, her red hair scraped into a topknot, her shoulders square in the inevitable jacket (she owned them in dozens of colors), her lapel adorned with a single splendid pin. She had none of the softness of a therapist, none of the forgivingness of a clergyperson, none of the piled-up wisdom of an old family friend. Still, calmed by her inexpressive face, people talked. She nodded, never commenting, never making suggestions, never breaking cardinal rule two. But they left comforted.
“Who was he?” said Ophelia, echoing the question Rennie hadn’t asked. “Oh, not one of your sparkling personalities. Deep, didn’t say much. Geology was his passion. He was getting an advanced degree in it. And then he was going out west…some desert in Colorado. So very far from New York. Lew, now, he came along later, he belonged to Uncle Henry’s world — funny, irreverent.” She paused. “The soul of a gentleman,” she said, and Rennie knew she was referring to the other man.
Ophelia sighed, and slumped; and for a moment she was a wretched old woman in tatters. Then she collected herself and gazed up again at the statue. “Puck was king of the fairies, as I was saying. He put love potions in people’s eyes. Brought about misalliances. A mischievous sprite. I have to go now, Rennie. Today is my grandson’s ballet recital.”
The man with the mustache came in again on Wednesday. This time he was interested in silver. His daughter-in-law collected pillboxes, he said. “In that way, she wards off illness.” He was attracted not to the most expensive item in Rennie’s collection but to the finest — Georgian, chased, with a tiny painted shepherdess enclosed in a glass oval. The pillbox had a little slide that revealed a hidden compartment. “What do you suppose that’s for?” he wondered.
“Love potions.”
“Oh, no, love potions, that’s his business,” said the man, raising his face to exchange a stare with Puck. “I’ll buy this mysterious pillbox.” Again he paid in cash, a wad of hundreds.
She watched him leave, as she watched everybody if she had the leisure. He wore a long brown suede trench coat. Hair as white as the mustache grazed the coat’s collar. He had an outdoorsy stride for all that he appreciated indoor things like paperweights and pillboxes. He had purchased presents for a sister and a daughter-in-law, not a wife. Of course, he might have bought his wife a mink downtown. But Rennie didn’t think so.
“A baby gift,” Ophelia said breathlessly, on Thursday. “A very special baby, my next-door neighbor’s granddaughter, four pounds and some ounces. In our day they didn’t live at that weight. Now they grow up to play third base and the trumpet. Have you got a silver mug?”
Rennie had a silver mug; it lay on the very shelf in the cabinet where the pillbox had rested. Which reminded her: “Somebody’s been admiring Puck,” she recklessly revealed. “You might consider this tiny spoon,” she said in a hurry; and together they bent their heads over an exquisite and useless utensil.
“I’ll take them both,” Ophelia said. She wrote a check, backed away with her purchases, gave Puck a little salute. “The arm holding the mirror,” she said. “I used to hang my clothes on that. He hung his clothes on the spear.” She was at the door now, but she didn’t leave. “I had a necklace made out of campaign buttons—Madly for Adlai, each one said. He wore an I Like Ike hatband. Nineteen fifty-six.”
It was a hard-fought election, the Stevenson-Eisenhower presidential race. Once at a flea market Rennie had found a cigarette case enameled with the message Stevenson for President. She sold it to a collector. The case now resided in a university library.
“Politics…politics drove us apart,” Ophelia said. A pair of customers came in, sidling around her.
“Well,” Rennie said.
And then Ophelia was gone, and someone wanted to examine the strange-looking Turkish lamp that had been part of an estate sale. “Does it work?”
“I’ve never tried it,” Rennie confessed.
A dreadfully dirty old woman bought a diamond and emerald ring. She paid with a money order. Mr. Rodriguez the piano tuner, installing his bulk on the love seat, complained at length about his son, who wanted to become a mechanic instead of going to Harvard. Mr. Rodriguez, taking first one point of view and then another, finally talked himself into letting the boy apprentice himself to a machine shop for a year, to see how things worked out. “Thanks for the advice,” Mr. Rodriguez said to Rennie, who hadn’t said a word. Cathy Lovell came in to return the Lalique pin.