When I came home on Thursday the lowboy was there, and it was in the garage. Richard called in the middle of dinner to see if it had arrived, and spoke revealingly, from the depths of his peculiar feelings.
“Of course you’ll let me have the lowboy?” he asked.
“I don’t understand.”
“You won’t keep it?”
What was at the bottom of this? I wondered. Why should he endure jealousy as well as love for a stick of wood? I said that I would deliver it to him on Sunday, but he didn’t trust me. He would drive up with Wilma, his small wife, on Sunday morning, and accompany me back.
On Saturday my oldest son helped me carry the thing from the garage into the hall, and I had a good look at it. Cousin Mathilda had cared for it tenderly and the ruddy veneer had a polish of great depth, but on the top was a dark ring—it gleamed through the polish like something seen under water—where, for as long as I could remember, an old silver pitcher had stood, filled with apple blossoms or peonies or roses or, as the summer ended, chrysanthemums and colored leaves. I remembered the contents of the drawers, gathered there like a precipitate of our lives: the dog leashes, the ribbons for the Christmas wreaths, golf balls and playing cards, the German angel, the paper knife with which Cousin Timothy had stabbed himself, the crystal inkwell, and the keys to many forgotten doors. It was a powerful souvenir.
Richard and Wilma came on Sunday, bringing a pile of soft blankets to protect the varnish from the crudities of my station wagon. Richard and the lowboy were united like true lovers, and, considering the possibilities of magnificence and pathos in love, it seemed tragic that he should have become infatuated with a chest of drawers. He must have had the same recollections as I when he saw the dark ring gleaming below the polish and looked into the ink-stained drawers. I have seen gardeners attached to their lawns, violinists to their instruments, gamblers to their good-luck pieces, and old ladies to their lace, and it was in this realm of emotion, as unsparing as love, that Richard found himself. He anxiously watched my son and me carry the thing out to the station wagon, wrapped in blankets. It was a little too big. The carved claw feet extended a few inches beyond the tail gate. Richard wrung his hands, but he had no alternative. When the lowboy was tucked in, we started off. He did not urge me to drive carefully, but I knew this was on his mind.
When the accident occurred, I could have been blamed in spirit but not in fact. I don’t see how I could have avoided it. We were stopped at a toll station, where I was waiting for my change, when a convertible, full of adolescents, collided with the back of my car and splintered one of the bowed legs.
“Oh, you crazy fools!” Richard howled. “You crazy, thoughtless criminals!” He got out of the car, waving his hands and swearing. The damage did not look too great to me, but Richard was inconsolable. With tears in his eyes, he lectured the bewildered adolescents. The lowboy was of inestimable value. It was over two hundred years old. No amount of money, no amount of insurance could compensate for the damage. Something rare and beautiful had been lost to the world. While he raved, cars piled up behind us, horns began to blow, and the toll collector told us to move. “This is serious,” Richard said to him. When we had got the name and the registration of the criminal in the driver’s seat, we went along, but he was terribly shaken. At his house we carried the injured antique tenderly into the dining room and put it on the floor in its wrappings. His shock seemed to have given way now to a glimmer of hope, and when he fingered the splintered leg you could see that he had begun to think of a future in which the leg would be repaired. He gave me a correct drink, and talked about his garden, as any well-mannered man in the face of a personal tragedy will carry on, but you could feel that his heart was with the victim in the next room.
RICHARD AND I do not see much of one another, and we did not meet for a month or so, and when we did meet it was over dinner in the Boston airport, where we both chanced to be waiting for planes. It was summer—midsummer, I guess, because I was on the way to Nantucket. It was hot. It was getting dark. There was a special menu that night involving flaming swords. The cooked food—shish kebab or calves’ liver or half a broiler—was brought to a side table and impaled on a small sword. Then a waiter would put what looked like cotton wool on the tip of the sword, ignite this, and serve the food in a blaze of fire and chivalry. I mention this not because it seemed comical or vulgar but because it was affecting to see, in the summer dusk, how delighted the good and modest people of Boston were with this show. While the flaming swords went to and fro, Richard talked about the lowboy.
What an adventure! What a story! First he had checked all the cabinetmakers in the neighborhood and found a man in Westport who could be relied upon to repair the leg, but when the cabinetmaker saw the lowboy he, too, fell in love. He wanted to buy it, and when Richard refused he wanted to know its history. When the thing was repaired, they had it photographed and sent the picture to an authority on eighteenth-century furniture. It was famous, it was notorious, it was the Barstow lowboy, made by the celebrated Sturbridge cabinetmaker in 1780 and thought to have been lost in a fire. It had belonged to the Pooles (our great-great-grandmother was a Poole) and appeared in their inventories until 1840, when their house was destroyed, but only the knowledge of its whereabouts had been lost. The piece itself had come down, safely enough, to us. And now it had been reclaimed, like a prodigal, by the most high-minded antiquarians. A curator at the Metropolitan had urged Richard to let the Museum have it on loan. A collector had offered him ten thousand dollars. He was enjoying the delicious experience of discovering that what he adored and possessed was adored by most of mankind.
I flinched when he mentioned the ten thousand dollars—after all, I could have kept the thing—but I did not want it, I had never really wanted it, and I sensed in the airport dining room that Richard was in some kind of danger. We said goodbye then and flew off in different directions. He called me in the autumn about some business, and he mentioned the lowboy again. Did I remember the rug on which it had stood at home? I did. It was an old Turkey carpet, multicolored and scattered with arcane symbols. Well, he had found very nearly the same rug at a New York dealer’s, and now the claw feet rested on the same geometric fields of brown and yellow. You could see that he was putting things together—he was completing the puzzle—and while he never told me what happened next, I could imagine it easily enough. He bought a silver pitcher and filled it with leaves and sat there alone one autumn evening drinking whiskey and admiring his creation.
IT WOULD have been raining on the night I imagined; no other sound transports Richard with such velocity backward in time. At last everything was perfect—the pitcher, the polish on the heavy brasses, the carpet. The chest of drawers would seem not to have been lifted into the present but to have moved the past with it into the room. Wasn’t that what he wanted? He would admire the dark ring in the varnish and the fragrance of the empty drawers, and under the influence of two liquids—rain and whiskey—the hands of those who had touched the lowboy, polished it, left their drinks on it, arranged the flowers in the pitcher and stuffed odds and ends of string into the drawers would seem to reach out of the dark. As he watched, their dull fingerprints clustered on the polish, as if this were their means of clinging to life. By recalling them, by going a step further, he evoked them, and they came down impetuously into the room—they flew—as if they had been waiting in pain and impatience all those years for his invitation.