on thread. Ticket stubs my mother saved from the pictures or the foil wrapper from a bar of chocolate that still smelled sweet if you pressed your nose into it. Nothing special.”
“And yet you kept it. See!” He smiled knowingly. “You are a collector! You collected for nostalgia, the most natural, instinctive thing in the world.”
“Nostalgia?”
“Sentimentality. You sought out little pieces of the world you wanted to live in—a world of chocolate and pretty buttons and picture shows—and you created that world as best you could.”
I thought about the old wooden box, the earthy, sweet smell of tobacco that remained from the cheap cigars. Mr. Russo had given it to me, much to Angela’s indignation, after a meeting of the San Rocco Society one evening when we were five. He was a very quiet man. It was unusual for him to say anything or show any affection. But I could remember how he’d swayed a little that night, unsteady on his feet from too much red wine as he bent down to hand it to me. “Here you go. Something for your secrets,” he said in his thick accent.
For a while I shared it with Angela, but she campaigned relentlessly until she got one of her own. Together we used to scour the streets for old chocolate wrappers—gold and silver foil peeking between the grates of gutters or sparkling in the dirt of empty lots. We pressed them flat with our fingers and stacked them in neat little piles, taking almost as much pleasure in smelling them as if we’d eaten the chocolate ourselves.
As I got older I kept other things in the box too, things I didn’t show to anyone else, not even Angela—a man’s black bow tie I’d stolen off a washing line when I was eight; a used train ticket I’d seen a stranger toss into a rubbish bin, stamped from Boston to New York. I’d pretended the bow tie belonged to Michael Fanning and that the ticket was his too—that he wasn’t really dead, he was only traveling and someday he’d be back. That’s when I began to hide the box under my bed, where no one could find it.
“Can you remember why you did it?” Mr. Kessler asked.
“I suppose it gave me comfort—the sense of having something only I knew about.”
“Anything else?” He pressed.
“Not that I can think of …”
“It gave you two things,” he elaborated, “purpose and hope. Think of the hours you spent looking for treasures—were they pleasant?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “They were.”
Patrolling the streets for discarded candy wrappers and ticket stubs had kept Angela and me happily occupied for most of a summer. And it had also given us, as Mr. Kessler pointed out, a tangible link to the movie-going, chocolate-eating world we longed to someday inhabit. They weren’t just wrappers—they were talismans, gathered in the faith that each one drew us nearer toward the fruition of our dreams.
“Of course not everyone collects out of sentimentality. Some only appreciate usefulness and market value; they want items with excellent craftsmanship and aesthetics—porcelain, glass, furniture, and clocks fall very much into this category. A brilliantly functioning timepiece is a triumph of engineering, as is an exquisitely turned Adam chair. These things consistently maintain their value and often prove to be wise investments. These customers are easy to please—quality and tradition are what they want. You have only to convince them of a piece’s merits and they’re sold. Then there are the true connoisseurs, in search of the distinctive, obscure, and unknown.”
“In what way obscure?”
“See these?” He pointed to three tiny silver containers in the jewelry case, each in the shape of a heart with a latched lid. “These are Danish hovedvandsaeg—extremely rare, made somewhere between 1780 and 1850. They hold sweet smelling spices and were popular as betrothal gifts. You can see their charm, can’t you?” He regarded them with affection. “I have a customer who collects them exclusively, but he won’t touch these because he believes them to be too pedestrian. I blame myself.” He seemed dismayed by his own lack of foresight. “It’s the heart design—too common for his taste. He wants something more unusual now. And yet only about three other people in the whole of Boston even know what a hovedvandsaeg is.”
Each container was over a hundred dollars. It wasn’t difficult to understand why someone would invest in something practical like a chair or a clock, but these? “How can anyone afford to spend so much on a tiny little trinket?”
“Well, we don’t sell as many as we did,” he allowed, “but for many serious clients, collecting isn’t a luxury but a necessity—like an addiction. I know people who will go without food or new shoes to buy just one more piece.”
“They would do that to their families?”
“Few of them have families; most are unmarried men, often professionals who have money to spare and no one to tell them how to spend it. In fact”—he peered at me over the tops of his glasses—“just the sort of people who might be swayed by a pretty blonde.”
“Yes, but I don’t seem to have much influence,” I reminded him. “If I haven’t got what the customers want, they’re out of the door before I can stop them.”
“That’s my point, though. These aren’t just customers, they’re pilgrims, searching for a holy grail. So ask them about the journey. Get them to tell you about the other pieces they have. Listen. And before you know it, you’ll be able to show them almost anything you like. But they like to feel they’ve discovered things for themselves. There’s something furtive about a real collector; it has to do with the thrill of the hunt. And then, of course,” he added, “there are the eccentrics.”
I had to laugh. “It gets more eccentric than eighteenth-century Dutch spice boxes?”
“Oh, yes! I have one man who only wants to buy rare porcelain that’s been repaired in some unusual way, long before the days of glue. Exquisite teapots with ugly twisted silver spoons for handles, platters held together by metal staples and twine, broken glassware with shattered bases replaced by hand-carved wooden animals. Actually, I have to admit, as an anthropologist, he’s one of my favorites.” He leaned against the counter. “You see, a well-curated collection always tells a story. His tells a tale of resourcefulness and industry; of people who had the foresight to salvage something even though it will never be pristine again. I like to think of it as the moment when aspiration meets reality.”
“You were an anthropologist?” It never occurred to me that he had been anything other than a shopkeeper.
“That’s right. I taught at the University of Pennsylvania.” He seemed to grow several inches as he said it. “But this is absorbing too, in its own way.” He cast an eye round the shop like a ruler surveying his kingdom. “It’s anthropology of another sort. You see, in its purest form, collecting is designing—selecting objects to create sense, order, and beauty. To us, we’re simply selling a serving dish or an ivory comb. But for the buyer, he’s fitting another intricate piece into a carefully curated world of his own construction. At its root is an ancient belief, a hope, in the magic of objects. No matter how sophisticated we think we are, we still search for alchemy.”
I thought of the cigar box, of the black bow tie and train ticket.
And then suddenly I remembered the gold pocket watch in New York; the thick chain and the solid, satisfying feel of it in my hand. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up; I knew why I’d taken it.
Some
