Throwing Shadows

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Then Bert and Ray went around the house and concentrated hard on putting the prices on a silver pitcher and a cut glass bowl and other stuff from the china closet. There was also a couple pieces of furniture, one sofa whose guts was pouring out, that he consulted about in some big book called Nutting. “I’ll just check Nutting,” he kept on saying. And Ma and me, we’d smile and nod and empty the drawers and closets and clean out the roach doo-doo. Ma and me have a plum good capacity for work, which neither of us inherited from Pa, I can tell you.

  It’s not hard to guess what Bert and Ray bought when they were the first allowed in on the sale. That big cut glass bowl was tucked under Ray’s armpit and the big silver pitcher was under Bert’s almost before the door was full open.

  The sale turned out real good. We cleared out that whole houseful of stuff, and the heirs were right pleased and so were Ma and me. We made two hundred forty-three dollars and thirty-eight cents for our work, and that was the start of our career managing house sales. The work turned out to be pretty good and a lot steadier than either of us would ever have guessed. When you think about it, though, people are always dying, and something has to be done with all their stuff. Even people like Pa and his National Geographics and his Jack Bean bottles. And house sales are most always weekend affairs so’s I could help Ma most all the time.

  Ma and me got so’s people would call us direct and not go through Bert and Ray, and we got so’s we could price things out pretty good ourselves. Just ask me what a pillowcase brings at an estate sale or what pie tins go for, and without even having to think about it, I can tell you fifty cents if not worn and twenty-five cents if not rusty.

  And there’s something else you learn right quick. People will buy most anything at an estate sale. Was a time once when Ma was having these bad cramps, and I was right worried about her, and I made her to take her medicine and tuck it into the bathroom cabinet while the sale was going on. Doncha know, some old lady come by and insisted on buying Ma’s cramp pills, and Ma sold them to her for twenty-five cents over what she had paid for them, and she had already swallowed three. I said to Ma, why did you sell them to her, why didn’t you tell her real forceful like that you needed them? And Ma answered me that the lady was giving her worser cramps just from insisting. But Ma’s like that, the giving-in type. How else can you explain her putting up with Pa all those years?

  And I want to say one more thing about Bert and Ray because fair is fair. They may have helped us to price some things that they were gonna be let in first to buy, but they never did anything real bad. Like if we had had some duck decoys again, they wouldn’t mark them only four dollars and then turn around and sell them for twenty-five. They would mark them just right, that is twelve dollars and a half apiece and then sell them for twenty-five. What I’m saying is this, they never gave theirselves the benefit of the doubt.

  Ma and me got so’s we could tell the antique dealers from the regular people, and the dealers all understood how it was with us and Bert and Ray, and we all got along pretty good because most dealers have someone who lets them in first. Ma and me got so’s we could make up the newspaper ads ourselves, and we had signs painted, little sandwich boards that said ESTATE SALE, real neat and professional, that we would set at the street corners and one on the sidewalk in front of the house itself.

  Ma and me even developed a little bit of a social life from our business of estate sales. We also got so’s we’d have Bert and Ray over to supper at least once every other week.

  They both had always loved antiques they said, but they had had other careers before. Bert was retired from the marines, and Ray was retired from the civil service; but Ma told me that you can retire from those things and still be young. I wouldn’t say that Bert and Ray were young. I’d say that they were middle-aged, about what the average TV father appears to be. Each one had different specialities in antiques, and they got along pretty good with each other, except sometimes when they’d be fighting before they got over to our house, and then Ma would consider it her duty to cheer them up with her good cooking and sweet ways.

  They had us over to tea about as often as we had them over to supper, and they and Ma talked on the phone a lot. Bert and Ray would tell Ma what good buys they got and what fantastic pieces they had bought or sold. As soon as something crossed the threshold of their shop, it became a fantastic piece. But I was glad that they found company with each other, and Bert and Ray provided Ma with some of the best gossip this side of People magazine, except all their gossip was local, not national.

  Ma and me came to see how getting in first was pretty important to an antique dealer. Because the thing of it is this—the hardest part about antiques is finding them and buying them at a good price. Selling them is pretty easy except for some things and those things aren’t necessarily the ugliest. Sometimes ugly sells real good. It depends on the style of ugly. After a while Ma got so’s she could price out the cut glass and the silver and the furniture, too. She had gathered together a little library of books, including the famous Nutting. She didn’t ever do the pricing if Bert and Ray were around and if they showed even by a quick look in their eyes that they wanted to keep in practice. Ma always let them because she told me she didn’t want to hurt their feelings none, and she didn’t want to give them the idea that she had forgot from whence all her new career had sprung.

  A lot of dealers came to Ma and promised her things if she would let them in first, but she never even thought about it twice. She was loyal, but seeing the way she had stuck with Pa way past normal endurance, anybody’d guess that.

  Meanwhile, Bert and Ray started going up North to some of them big antique shows in places like Philadelphia and Lexington. They got so they were considering taking out an ad in Antiques magazine, and considering the price of that magazine and how many colored pictures is in it, a person’s got to be pretty fancy to run an ad in there. But them and us never lost our relationship of buyer and seller, and Ma always swooned for them over their fantastic pieces.

  In the meantime while Bert and Ray were getting fancier, we were, too. Our house started changing, and for the better. We were upgrading, you could say. It started when Ma couldn’t sell a set of dining room chairs unless she’d of come way down on the price, and she just couldn’t. She knew they was worth what she was asking, so she decided, heck, we could use them as good as anyone, and then it happened with other things, too. We got a nice set of dishes the same way, and Ma got me a Polaroid, bought it outright at one of her sales. Surprised me with it for my birthday. We also got a Pontiac station wagon at a good price. It was left in a garage, and the lawyers said that it was to be sold as part of the contents of the estate.

  In our ads we always said “contents of the estate.” We never called them house sales anymore.

  One day when Ma and me were invited over to Bert’s and Ray’s for tea they had just come back from a buying trip up to Kentucky and some other horse country, I think. We no sooner got in the front door good when Ma spotted this piece of furniture leaning over by the wall to the left of the archway that leads to their parlor. Ma went on over to it and studied on it awhile and said, “I just love your panetière, Bert. Wherever did you find it?”

  “Panetière?” Bert said. “What panetière?”

  “That there cupboard,” Ma said, pointing to the piece of furniture leaning against the parlor wall.

  “This’n,” I said. “Ma called it a panetière.”

  Then Ma looked at the ticket and said, “I see that y’all made a good buy. A right good buy.”

  I glanced on down at the ticket and saw that they had paid UNNN for it which was forty dollars American, and they had marked it up to a hundred twenty-five.

  Ray came in from the kitchen just then, and Bert said to him, “It seems that we made a good buy on our panetière, Ray.”

  And Ray said, “Our what?”

  “Your panetière right there,” I said, pointing to that same cupboard leaning against the parlor wall
.

  Ray got real upset, and so did Bert, and they said that they didn’t think it was fair that we should know their code, and I asked them how did they expect us not to know, seeing’s how Ma always let them in first and knew whatever it was they had paid for whatever it was they had carried out under their respective armpits. They smiled, both of them did, but I could tell that they sorta hurried us through the tea. I peeked back in the door after we left, and I saw them pulling the tag off of that there panetière, which they didn’t even know they had until Ma called it to their attention.

  Next week Ma had Ben and Ray over to supper and Ray announced, “Bert and I sold our panetière for four hundred dollars to Mrs. Sinclair, the lady who just built that big house by the golf course. She’s doing everything in French, and we called her and told her that we had an authentic eighteenth century bread cupboard, and she didn’t even know it was a panetière until we told her. She bought it like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.

  “Fancy that,” I said, “a genuine eighteenth century panetière, and Mrs. Sinclair didn’t even know it.”

  Bert said, “Well, some of these people who have big houses need to be educated in good taste.”

  Ma just smiled and told them how glad she was for them that they had turned a nice profit. “Well,” Ray said, “it’s not hard to do if you buy right and know what you’re selling.” Ma gave me a look that said “hush,” and I didn’t say nothing about they never would have thought that they had nothing but a old kitchen cupboard if Ma hadn’t been reading a whole lot of books besides Nutting.

  Bert and Ray were in Philadelphia doing one of their fancy shows when the call came that they would like Ma to come handle the Birchfield estate. Mrs. Birchfield was the widow of one of the richest men in town. At one time, half the town owed her money, and the other half were her relatives. Ma said that she’d be most willing to handle that estate, and we went there, the two of us, full of high hopes, expecting to find treasure like in the palace of an OPEC shah of an oil producing country.

  What we found was the same old grease pool in the kitchen and the same old roaches in the cupboards, none of which were panetières, I can tell you. The towels and the sheets were such that Ma thought she best sell them direct to the rag man. And save! That Mrs. Birchfield had so many peanut butter jars that it was hard to believe that Peter Pan never did get old.

  Ma said, “Some people just don’t know how to live.”

  The furniture was mostly good. Ma knew that. If you recovered it, it would be right pretty. Some ancestor of Mrs. Birchfield had knowed quality and had bought it. Besides the furniture, there was a nice silver coffee urn and a brass clock that chimed and some big old china tureens and bowls that must have been what the family ate off of before Mrs. Birchfield discovered jelly glasses and peanut butter jars. Ma knew that there was some fine stuff in there even if it was all tarnished, and she was glad that Bert and Ray would be back from Philadelphia in time for her to let them in first.

  Ray was in a bad mood when they got to the sale, and Ma knew it, and she tried to cheer him up by showing him the very best things first, and he bought the brass clock and a coupla tureens. Then Ma saw that he was being more cheery and she showed him this big Chinese screen that was made in four panels. Ma had found it wrapped in a old bedspread in the back of Mrs. Birchfield’s bedroom walk-in closet. “I put a hundred twenty-five on this, Ray,” she said.

  Ray looked at it and laughed. “I wouldn’t have that thing if you gave it to me. It’s a piece of junk.”

  Ma looked at it real good and said, “I think it’s something good, Ray.”

  Then Ray called Bert over, and they both said that they wouldn’t have it even if Ma gave it to them, that they both thought it was a piece of junk. Bert added that when he was in the marines, every other sailor that hit the port of Hong Kong bought at least two of these things for his wife. After they both spoke on about how junky that screen was, they didn’t seem so mad at each other anymore, and Ma looked glad that she had at least helped them to make peace with each other by agreeing over disagreeing with her.

  Ma couldn’t sell that screen the whole time we had the Birchfield estate sale, and when it was over, she deducted the full amount of one hundred twenty-five dollars from her commission, and she carried it on home with her and set it up in the corner of our dining room where, since our dining room was not even room-sized, she could not open it all the way.

  The next day after school we carried it into the parlor and there we spread it out in front of the sofa. There were four panels, and each panel told part of a story of some Chinese ladies washing clothes and doing other dainty things. Ma said that the women were washing silk. She sure had been doing a lot of reading since Pa died and we had started in the estate sale business.

  She asked me to leave the screen up, right there in our parlor, blocking our sofa. The next day when I came home from school, she was sitting on a little stool in front of that there screen contemplating it some more. “William,” she said, “I got a feeling in my bones that this is something really good. The next weekend we don’t have a estate sale, we’re gonna carry this downstate and see if them fancy dealers down there don’t want it.”

  “What you gonna ask for it, Ma?”

  “Gonna ask five hundred dollars for it, William,” she answered.

  I didn’t do nothing but swallow.

  The next weekend we carried the screen, wrapped in a bed of old bedspreads from Mrs. Birchfield’s, to four different shops and didn’t anyone want it.

  Come the following Monday, Ma got herself over to the library and began some more reading that didn’t stop until Saturday, at which time she was more convinced than ever that what she had was something real good. So the weekend after that, we loaded the thing back onto its bed of Birchfield bedspreads and headed North this time. We visited five antique shops and one interior decorator’s, but didn’t anyone want it.

  Had it not come up spring vacation for the sixth grade, I don’t know if I would’ve done the next thing. Spring vacation in the sixth grade means a bus trip to our nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., and Ma was real proud that we had some money to send me. I took some pictures of that China silk screen with my Polaroid. I remembered that Ma had told me that in her researching at the library she had seen pictures of some screens like ours at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. She said, though, that ours was prettier, and she thought that it might could be older.

  In my research I found out that the Freer Gallery was part of the Smithsonian and that the Smithsonian was part of our student tour of Washington, D.C. The whole Freer Gallery was China and other Oriental art.

  There was a couple of things about the Smithsonian that I didn’t know, and the main one of them was that it’s so big, and it’s not just one building, and the third one I didn’t know was that they don’t ever take a sixth grade student tour to the Freer Gallery part. I don’t think they ever even took a sixth grade student tour there where the school was all Chinese and Oriental. The Freer is a whole quiet building that hardly anyone goes to.

  We didn’t.

  We went to Aeronautics and Space, and we had a buddy system. The buddy system in our school means that each person has to hold on to one other person going into and going out of places so that the chaper-ones had only half as much to keep track of. Now, in the buddy system at our school, they usually have a girl-boy arrangement because things stay quieter that way.

  It’s hard to break away from the buddy system, and much as I didn’t want to cause no trouble on my first field trip ever, I felt more for Ma and how bad she wanted to know about that China silk screen. So I told my buddy Carita that I had to answer a call of nature, and she blushed, even though I said it to her gentlemanly the way I did, and I left Aeronautics and Space and dodged school buses and school groups and made my way over to the Freer.

  As busy and noisy as Aeronautics and Space was, that’s about how quiet the Freer was. Was about like the wa
y you’d figure it’d be in downtown Mars.

  Was a lady right up front at a desk and I told her that I had some business with the person who studied on China silk screens, and the lady smiled at me, like the smile would have been a pat on the head had she knowed me better. She asked me, “Now, what business would you be having with the curator of Chinese art?”

  I told her, “I got one.”

  She pretended that she was looking for it in front of and in back of me, and said, “Where?”

  She gave me that smile again, and I could see that she was mighty unlikely to do business with me, so I took the Polaroids out of my pants pocket. I had put them between two pieces of cardboard so’s they wouldn’t get mashed on the bus trip. I spread them out in front of her on top of the desk there and said, “I might be interested in selling, and I think you might be interested in buying.”

  She looked at my Polaroids, and I could tell that she didn’t know what it was that she was seeing, and I was beginning to lose patience. They were about to miss me at Aeronautics and Space. “Listen, ma’am,” I said, knowing full well how ladies liked to be called ma’am by a accent like mine. “Listen, ma’am,” I repeated, “I don’t have a right awful amount of time, and I would like to talk to someone in charge of these here Chinese silk screens.”

  “Our curatorial staff is really quite busy,” she said.

  And I said, “Back to home, we have a expression, ma’am.”