The Last Blue Plate Special (15 page)

After the Mingei shop staff happily took my credit card, Brontë and I and the dashiki crossed the old park street to the art
museum.

“Of course,” said a uniformed guard who looked like Santa Claus without the beard. “Just wait here and I’ll get someone who
can answer your questions.”

The someone, an elegant gentleman whose name tag read
HUTTON PIERCE
materialized from behind a stone pillar and said, “Blue willow, of course!” He was wearing a three-piece suit and an expensive
toupee which sat an eighth of an inch askew above his gold-framed granny glasses. I was sure he wasn’t a day under eighty-five,
and his aqua-blue eyes flamed with intelligence.

“Anyone referencing a ‘blue plate’ is talking about blue willow,” he went on as if we were discussing one of the great verities.
“Please, follow me to the museum library.”

“You see,” he said after pulling a forty-five-pound book from a shelf and opening it reverently on an oak table, “here it
is, the most popular china pattern
in the world
!”

“In the world,” I repeated, trying to seem impressed as I looked at a picture of a plate.

“Absolutely! Look. Do you see the story? The pattern is always the same—a pagoda, a fence, three figures fleeing across a
bridge beneath a weeping willow, a mysterious boat in the distance, and two birds hovering above. The fleeing figures are
doomed lovers pursued by the girl’s father or else by the wealthy old man to whom her father had promised her in marriage,
depending on which version of the story you read. Captured and imprisoned in the pagoda by her father, the lovers become lost
in the maze beneath it and tragically die. But so great is their love that they’re transformed in death into the two birds
flying above the scene.

“The tale is Chinese, but an English potter named Thomas Turner was the first to create blue willow dishes in 1780. The design
was enormously popular, and as pottery began to be mass-produced in England, so did the design. It has since been reproduced
in almost every country and continues to be popular today.”

“But these plates aren’t entirely blue,” I insisted politely. “The design is blue, but the plate itself is white. Why are
they called ‘blue plate’?”

“I have explained,” Hutton Pierce said as if speaking to someone who would never actually get it, “that this pattern
is
what is meant by ‘blue plate.’ You see, for a period of some two decades in the United States, roughly 1925 to the end of
World War II in 1945, numerous manufacturers produced heavy porcelain plates in the blue willow pattern specifically for use
in restaurants. The plates were divided into sections like this,” he said, pointing to another illustration of a plate. This
one was divided into three sections like a child’s dish.

“There are minor variations in pattern depending on the manufacturer, of course. Some mistakenly included only
two
figures crossing the bridge. But such plates were quite commonly used in American restaurants from the 1920s through the
1950s,” he continued. “They gave rise to the phrase ‘blue plate special,’ a term used to denote an inexpensive meal in which
all courses are served together on one plate. The plate was this one, the divided blue willow. A collector’s item now.”

With that he snapped the book shut and returned it to the shelf. The gesture seemed definitive. Also final.

“Thank you,” I said, walking backward through the museum library’s double glass doors. I’ve seen people do this in movies
when leaving the presence of royalty. It seemed appropriate.

Outside, Brontë wagged her stub of a tail beneath the plaster frescoes adorning the museum’s facade.

“Somebody’s playing a game,” I told her as we walked to my truck. “And the pieces are blue plates.”

W
hen I got home I brought the framed photograph from the Aphid Gallery in and then went straight to the kitchen to look at
my plates. Misha, an earlier love, and I had bought them at a pottery shop in Laguna Beach one weekend years ago. One of those
weekends in the beginning of a love affair when you think something like dishes will make it last forever. Women are trained
to equate things-that-can-be-bought with everlasting love by an advertising industry which, unlike Sigmund Freud, knows exactly
what women want. Undying emotional and erotic bliss in a context of total security. Impossible. And for that reason a wish
easily manipulated, over and over. Got a warehouse full of hideous orange birdcages you want to unload? Find a way to associate
orange birdcages with enduring passion, and three out of twenty women will buy one. It’s just the way we are.

Misha and I had been in an earth-tone mood that day and had gone for spatterware in a cream background with cocoa-colored
spatters. I looked at the plates and tried to imagine attaching any significance to them beyond my memories of Misha. There
was none. Without the memories, they were just plates. Also coffee mugs and a few serving pieces. I still liked them and they
went well in my desert decor, but I never
thought
about them.

Somebody was thinking about blue plates, though. Or thinking about blue willow plates, if Hutton Pierce’s definition of “blue
plate” was correct. But why? And who? I remembered the wall of plates in the surgical waiting room at the Rainer Clinic. One
of them had been an antique blue willow design. Two women and three men comprised the medical staff at Rainer. Two women and
three men who might be assumed to possess sufficient medical savvy to cause cerebral hemorrhages in patients through the deliberate
manipulation of blood pressure. And if one of these five people really was a killer, it would be the one with a significant
psychological link to
plates.

I thought about that while holding the framed photograph against different areas on my living room walls. Beside the front
Dutch door the photo was obscured in shadow, and the same problem applied when I held it against the wall on both sides of
a picture window framing a desert corridor of broken hills. The photo needed its own wall and no textural competition. As
I rearranged furniture in order to hang it to dramatic advantage, I tried to think about plates and got nowhere.

They’re just there. Flat, round, slightly concave objects used for serving food. Descendants of the earlier
bowl,
I assumed. Somewhere I’d read that lead used in the manufacture of metal plates had probably contributed to the madness of
countless kings and others privileged to eat acidic foodstuffs from metal tableware. Peasants, mopping their gravy from wooden
plates throughout the ages, were presumably spared the inconvenience of lead poisoning. And so what? Mary Harriet Grossinger
and Dixie Ross hadn’t died from lead poisoning.

I don’t like artwork in an eye-level band around rooms. I like it in odd places that force you to look up or down or into
places you’d never look. The photograph of a light-blasted desert building looked best, I decided, below waist level. After
hauling in one shelf of an old set of stackable shelves from my storeroom, I pushed it against the wall and set a lamp on
it. The light from the lamp illuminated the photo perfectly after I’d fastened it to the wall.

The entire arrangement was at Brontë’s eye level, and she seemed to enjoy it. It occurred to me that nobody gives any thought
to the possible esthetic needs of domestic animals. Maybe the artless and ill-lit realm below our line of sight is a psychological
wasteland for our pets. After all, cats are always looking out windows, aren’t they? I decided to research an article on the
responses of animals to lighting and visual stimulation after this peculiar case was solved.
If
this peculiar case was solved, I reminded myself. Back to plates.

As a social psychologist I don’t analyze the subconscious motivations and personal symbol systems of individuals. Clinical
psychologists do that. A clinical psychologist can tell you what the American flag means to an individual. I can tell you
what the American flag is likely to mean to members of various social populations (Veterans of Foreign Wars members, for example,
as opposed to members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.) Additionally, I can predict flag-buying
and flag-displaying behaviors broken down any way you like. Want to know how many American flags are likely to be purchased
by Presbyterian Korean females between thirty-five and sixty-five in Seattle during August? No problem. What I can’t tell
you is why Sharon Li, a fifty-three-year-old Korean grandmother who teaches Sunday school at Seattle Community Presbyterian,
will buy that flag in August. Her personal motivations are not the concern of my discipline. And plates are more difficult
to track than flags.

But I was getting paid a lot to do this, so I booted up the computer and went for the current sales reports of five U.S. china
manufacturers who sell versions of the blue willow pattern. In half an hour I knew that sales of blue willow were evenly distributed
all over the country, with predictable peaks in areas saturated with mail-order catalogues featuring blue willow items. I
learned that a brisk mail-order business in blue willow accessories such as wall clocks, jewelry, table linen, and drawer
pulls resulted in annual profits in the six-figure range, spread over the five manufacturers.

Clicking on another link, I wound up at the Web site of a restaurant in Georgia called the Blue Willow Inn. This is the problem
with Internet research. It’s so easy to get sidetracked. But the Blue Willow Inn was willing to share its recipe for fried
green tomatoes, so I copied the page. I’d make fried green tomatoes for Rox, I decided. She’d never been in the South and
it would be a treat. Although where was I going to find green tomatoes in the middle of the California desert in October?
A challenge.

Clicking on another link, I found myself at the home page of a Phoenix car club. Old cars, lovingly restored and driven by
steely-eyed men in plaid shirts who stared proudly from a color photo of them and their cars. The photo had been taken in
front of a diner, and the Web page also noted that the Phoenix Crankshaft Club’s Ladies Auxiliary filled its time while the
men were retooling old combustion chambers by collecting blue willow china. Reading on, I learned that vintage car clubs across
the country often meet at diners as a tribute to the old days when these very cars would have graced the parking lots of now-almost-vanished
roadside Americana.

Out of desperation, it seemed, the wives of this particular club had decided to do something besides stand around pretending
to admire corroded distributor caps. If they had to hang out at old diners, then they’d find something interesting to
do
about old diners. Eureka! Blue willow china.

The president of Crankshaft’s ladies’ auxiliary was listed as “Mrs. Ed Lauer,” with a Phoenix phone number. I didn’t know
what I was looking for, but I called. Nothing ventured, etc. The woman who answered did not sound like somebody who hangs
out in parking lots, which is the problem with assumptions based on group membership rather than on the individual. The practices
of social psychology
never
work when applied to only one person.

Jackie Lauer, as she introduced herself, was sixty, had a Boston accent, and a Ph.D. in romance languages. She taught part-time
at the University of Arizona, she said, but spent most of her time doing interesting stuff with her husband, Ed, a Vietnam
vet who’d lost both feet to a land mine in 1968. Ed also suffered from depression, she mentioned, and fifteen years or so
ago things had gotten really bad. Ed was sullen, then suicidal, wound up in a psych hospital. She’d left him during the sullen
period, but went back during the hospitalization. They’d had to make some big changes. Medication for him, therapy and a different
attitude for her.

I had that ice-water-on-the-neck feeling I get when total strangers insist on telling me after one minute of acquaintance
things I would only tell my most intimate friend over a span of five years. This feeling approaches panic when the stranger
seems to be heading toward some conclusion involving spiritual growth. Jackie Lauer, however, stopped mercifully short of
that.

“What can I help you with?” she asked.

“I’m calling about blue willow plates,” I explained, and then for some reason told her the whole strange story. Tit for tat,
I thought.

“Wow,” she said when I’d finished, “that’s interesting. You know, I had my eyes done eight years ago, never regretted it.
I had these pouches. God, I looked like Winston Churchill. But they just snipped the sag and sucked out all that fat, and
I have to tell you I loved it! Went out and got contacts, had my hair styled. Ed said I looked twenty years younger and the
truth is, I did. So anyway, what can I tell you about blue willow? What is it you want to know?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “A link between these blue plates and somebody who hates women in positions of authority enough to
threaten them with death, maybe actually kill them. Somebody with the medical know-how to cause lethal fluctuations in blood
pressure. One of five people on the medical staff at a clinic specializing in cosmetic surgery.”

“Well,” Jackie Lauer said, “all I can talk about is the plates. The club’s been collecting and selling blue willow for years
and I’ve noticed that people love these plates for two reasons. And I’m talking both men and women here. The first is when
they get sort of drawn into the pattern. See, it’s a little world, a scene where there’s something happening, only it’s frozen
in time. It never changes. The little people are always running over the bridge, the birds are always flying above the pagoda,
the willow is always there. Usually the people who get sucked into the pattern are women, and they’ll buy anything just to
have it around, look at it.

“The other group of collectors is where you’ll find men as well as women. It’s a business thing. The old restaurant plates
haven’t been made for fifty years or so, the ones divided into sections. They’re prized as an investment. Leave-’em-to-the-grand-kids
sort of thing. In another fifty years they’ll be seriously rare. It’s like anything. Keep it long enough and it’s worth money.”