They Left Us Everything (20 page)

Just as I’d promised him in the garage all those years ago, Dad hadn’t gone into “one of those horrible places.” He hadn’t died in a sterile environment with a background noise of bleeping machines, having his veins pricked every few hours by a nurse needing to check his vital signs. Dad had a different definition of a vital sign: he died peacefully in his own bed, with the gentle sound of the waves rolling across the lake.

Just as his first-born son had done, sixteen years earlier.

After Dad died, so many people came up to me at his funeral to speak of his many kindnesses to them—events that didn’t surprise me, but of which I had known nothing. I discovered that he’d inherited some Other Daughters and Other Sons, too. Dad’s early deprivations might have hardened or destroyed most men, but they had served only to humble Dad. At his core he was firm and fair, always elegant and dignified, but he never took anything for granted.

He knew life was a crapshoot.

Appraisals

In April, the first appraiser I call is Mary McQueen from Whim Antiques. She’s a specialist in silverware and I’ve dealt with her for years. Mary drives out from Toronto and sets up her weigh scales on a long table in Mum’s bedroom where there’s lots of natural light. A slim, elegant woman with silver grey hair, delicate features, high cheekbones, and dancing eyes, she speaks with a lilting Irish brogue. Her specialty is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English, Scottish, and Irish silverware, but she’s brought extra reference books just in case. It takes her several days.

Throughout the first day, I bring Mary batches of silverware from the locked closet and lay it out on Mum’s bed. Mary is able to distinguish sterling silver from silver plate just by lifting an item and noting its lustre and patina. She shows me the difference: sterling has a delicacy and lightness to it. Some of the things I thought were sterling are only plated and vice versa. Mary examines each piece with her jeweller’s loupe, looking for hallmarks. Then she weighs it and
documents it in her notebook. At the end of each day, I lock it all back up again. There are some surprises: we always knew that most of the pieces were old, having been handed down for generations on both sides of the family, but there are rare pieces from the seventeenth century, and many hallmarked by Tiffany. When we come to a fitted leather box holding a pair of serving spoons, intricately carved with raised flowers and fruit on their bowls, it still has the identifying tag from when Mum inherited them during the dispersal at Rokeby. Mum felt they were too valuable to use, but Mary just shakes her head.

“They would have been valuable,” she says sadly, “if someone hadn’t embellished them with all these flowers. People did this in the Victorian era and immediately devalued an otherwise fine pair of plain seventeenth-century spoons by a well-known maker.”

It turns out Mum’s diamond, emerald, and sapphire rings aren’t worth very much, either—under the magnifying glass their stones are chipped and worn. Mum got good use out of them. I have a pang of regret when I see them. Why did I so callously reject them when Mum offered them to me? It’s true that I have more rings than I can wear, but I don’t have rings that remind me of Mum. I decide that I’ll try to bid on one of them at the dispersal.

By the time Mary is finished, she’s tired. She’s gone fulltilt, without taking breaks, for three days. She tells me that most of the value is in the meltdown—the gram weight of the silver or gold, with nothing added for its beauty. I can tell this grieves her.

“These days, nobody wants something they have to polish,” she says wistfully. “’Tis a pity.”

The furniture is a similar story. I hire a furniture appraiser to come out for the day. He’s a retired auctioneer from one of the well-known auction houses in the city, and we walk from room to room while I write down his estimates on my clipboard. He calls all of our mahogany and walnut antiques “brown furniture” and basically dismisses it with a wave of his hand as having no value at all.

“Nobody wants this stuff,” he says. “They all want Ikea.”

I can’t believe it. I follow him around like a bleating lamb.

“But this piece came from Mum’s family in Virginia … it might have belonged to Martha Dandridge—George Washington’s wife!”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s all the same—it’s brown.” He seems to have a favourite price in his head. “You might get $500, if you’re lucky.”

When he gets to Dad’s desk, I’m insulted. It’s a handsome, early-nineteenth-century mahogany Sheraton secretary with hand-blown glass in its upper bookcase; we have the original documented provenance from when it was shipped here from Dad’s family home in Portugal. It’s museum quality and in mint condition. When he gives it a value of $500, I know something’s not right—designer shoes cost more. He hasn’t looked at anything closely or even picked an object up and turned it over to look at its joints. I decide he’s nothing but a tired, disillusioned auctioneer who wants to go home to bed. Disappointed, I send him away and start a search for a new appraiser. This is taking longer than I thought. I consult Mary and she tells me about John Sewell, who writes a weekly column on antiques for the newspaper.

In mid-April, John Sewell arrives to give us a second opinion. Unlike the first appraiser, John is careful as he
moves from room to room with me. He lifts up the pieces and examines their dovetailed joints. He dates each piece and points out details I’d never noticed before—like the handsome flared feet on Mum’s Edwardian dresser. His values aren’t high, since condition is everything and our pieces are well used, but they’re significantly higher than the previous estimates. John acknowledges that old furniture, like silver, isn’t fully appreciated by younger consumers; they’d rather own cheap modular pieces that fit into tiny condos. He figures it will take another generation before antique furniture is once again appreciated. “It needs a generation that hasn’t seen it before,” he says.

I can’t believe people would rather have pressed sawdust and glue made with noxious chemicals instead of solid wood and square-headed nails, but without perceived value, it’s no wonder all this stuff ends up in the thrift stores. I mark down the values John gives me for the purposes of the sibling dispersal, upload the photos to my computer, and label each one. I figure this task will take several weeks to complete, but I’m doing a little each day. We’re planning to hold the dispersal right after Virginia’s wedding in early June, when the whole family is here.

All of Mum and Dad’s possessions—a lifetime of collecting and inheriting antiques—add up to $100,000. I spend another whole day at my computer, typing up the inventory. I add and double-check the numbers. It looks like we’ll each get $25,000 to bid with.

We know what Dad spent because he kept meticulous records; the poverty of his youth had forced on him a lifelong habit of careful budgeting. We’ve found his ledgers—one for every year here—in which he recorded every purchase, down
to the penny, and balanced his books each month. Moreover, the ledgers are written in his elegant, distinctive, cursive handwriting, which makes them works of art in themselves.

We find an old lesson book from his school days, with instructions for practising circular wrist movements. I remember watching him move his wrist rapidly with a flourish at the start of each sentence, before he even put pen to paper. And then we find Dad’s record of our weekly allowances—the homemade “Wowance Book.” There are fewer than twenty words to a page, nothing but a record of our childish signatures—nickled and dimed to death—but it’s so laden with memories that it’s worth its weight in gold.

Robin has been trying to interest second-hand dealers in the books but finds no serious bidders. Some of the ancient editions we possess are going for as much as $2000 each on AbeBooks, but the only bid we get is from a dealer who offers to take our whole collection for $200. When I Google “how to get rid of used books,” I find all kinds of chat rooms full of people with the same problem. Helpful suggestions include taking a band saw and turning them into flower vases or bolting them together to make into chairs. An artist in the U.K. is turning books into stylish jewellery, and an international architect has even built an entire staircase out of used books that seems to spiral upwards into infinity. Realistic suggestions include putting them out on the lawn with a
FREE
sign (just before garbage day), but another tells the bitter truth: “Forget it,” the blogger writes, “the best thing is to burn them—it’s cheaper than buying those fire logs.”

We look sadly at Mum’s prized leather-bound, twenty-threevolume set of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, published in 1834; her six-volume set of Boswell’s
Life of Johnson,
published in 1896; and the six-volume set of J.M. Barrie, circa 1900. The larger heavy volumes of
Century Dictionary & Cyclopedia
—that as children we were never allowed to touch—have now turned to sawdust, their gold-embossed, leather-tooled covers disintegrating in our hands. Books, it seems, are like our “brown furniture”: nobody wants them. However, given the fifteen hundred percent rise in sales in e-books from last year to this, perhaps it won’t be long before a generation comes along who’s never seen a book before. Robin decides to take the best ones back to Virginia and stuff them into his scriptorium. Chris and Victor drive out one day and help cart the rest to the church rummage sale.

I ask Victor to look at the dining-room ceiling—strange brown stains are appearing and I worry that the overhead pipes might be leaking. But he dismisses this with an irritated wave of his hand.

“Those stains have been there for years!” he says. “Mum always thought they were coming from her bathroom, but the plumber says no.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Can we get a second opinion? I don’t want the ceiling to cave in.”

“Look,” he says, exasperated, “I’m not about to investigate. If it’s lasted a hundred years, it’ll last another hundred—we’re selling the place, remember?”

I don’t need to be reminded. The longer I stay here, the more attached I’m becoming and the more I’m grieving
the sale. Years from now we’re going to wish we’d kept this house.

I have no sooner locked away our silver and china than I realize I can’t continue to live in this house if it’s denuded of knives and forks and cereal bowls. I need a second set of everything. So I hightail it over to the local thrift store to buy someone else’s cast-off flatware to put in the empty drawers. I make the thrift store a weekly pit stop, to “fluff” the house for the real estate agents. Gradually, things in the house relinquish their hold on me. The new thrift-store pieces don’t hold any memories—or, at least, the memories they hold aren’t mine.

Pelmo and Tashi have returned from Tibet, bearing gifts from their homeland and moved back into their apartment at the back of the house. But they’ve been home less than a month when the world gets news of a devastating 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Tibet. It’s the first such earthquake in the region in more than two thousand years, and the epicentre is where Tashi was born. It has devastated his village; he fears that more than ten thousand people have been killed. They hear that the orphanage Tashi’s brother operates in the village was flattened, but luckily the children were outside and escaped unharmed.

Tashi wants to take donations back to Tibet for the children, so he and Pelmo spend every day driving back and forth to the Chinese Consulate in Toronto, standing in line, trying to get a visa to go back, to take supplies of clothes and medicines—anything Tashi can scrounge from the community here. Finally, after several weeks, he’s successful, but Pelmo’s application has been rejected.

“They give only the visa if you born in village,” says Pelmo.
“Dalai Lama, he not permitted also. Tashi go. I stay here and pray.”

The devastating rubble on the other side of the world, with so many lives lost, makes me realize how insignificant our own rubble is here.

When the mail arrives, there’s a letter from a cousin in Virginia. She’s heard about my eulogy at Mum’s funeral when I quoted Mum’s story about the little gold pennies Grandfather handed out to train conductors, and she’s found one in the pile of stuff she inherited. She encloses it for me in the envelope.