“You an angel?” a voice said. This voice was both low and near to laughing.
Sally looked around. A short woman with unrestrained white hair and a black wool turtleneck, tight across her middle, was looking at her from across the room. The room, she saw only now, was full of other miraculous objects: tables, cupboards, chairs.
“I’m sorry?” Sally managed. She wasn’t appreciating the interruption.
“An angel. That chair was made by someone who believed an angel might sit on it. Thomas Merton, don’t quote me.”
“I’m sorry?” Sally said again.
“Well, don’t be sorry. You’re the first Cornell student I’ve seen in here. We get antiques dealers, people up from the city. Shaker has fans, you know. This stuff is like the rock stars of the antiques world.” She seemed to consider. “You are a Cornell student, right?”
“Oh. Yes.” Sally nodded. Now she couldn’t take her eyes off the table, just behind the white-haired woman. It was red and very long and might have seated twenty, yet it rested on four of the simplest, most delicate legs, each narrowing lightly as it reached toward the floor. Again, it was elevated. Again, she desperately wanted to touch it.
“You like that?” the woman said.
Sally could only nod. “Like” was a pathetic shade of what she felt about the table, about the chair. And everything else—her eyes swept over it all. The word that sang from the objects was: ravishing.
“I found this, actually,” the woman said. To Sally’s horror she reached out and touched the tabletop, then tap-tapped it with her short fingers. No alarm sounded. “Down in Homer. In the backhouse of an old place on the village green. It was covered in boxes of eight-track tapes, and I kid you not, it had a dead cat under it. In a suitcase. Not recently dead,” she corrected, as if this were an important point.
Sally, mystified, looked again at the table. She couldn’t decide which of these degradations was worse: the dead cat or the eight-track tapes.
“What do you mean, you found it?”
“I went in looking for furniture. I’m a picker. You know what a picker is?”
No, Sally did not know. Luckily she didn’t have to say so.
“I go to people, ask them if they have any old stuff they want money for. Nine times out of ten they have nothing, it’s Ethan Allen or some junk made in China, but it’s old to them so they think it’s old. And sometimes they have real old, but it’s not the right kind of old. Like Victorian, which nobody wants right now. I like Victorian myself, but I’m not the one who counts. And sometimes they have the right kind of old, but they know what it should cost, so that’s no good. I have to walk away from that stuff sometimes, and it smarts, I can tell you. But sometimes they have it, and it’s the right kind, and they don’t know what someone could sell it for. And that’s what makes it all worthwhile. Like this.”
And again, she touched it. The tabletop. No alarms. No sirens. No one to wrestle her to the ground.
“Do you … work here?” Sally asked.
“Volunteer. I’d say it’s altruistic but it’s business. The people who come to see this, sometimes they turn into my customers. Dealers or collectors. It’s just smart.”
Sally looked at her. She had a face that seemed at once taut and wrinkled, like someone who had spent a whole lot of time outside, under a weak sun, getting blown around in the cold. Not a speck of makeup. Not a piece of jewelry. She was, in her way, as plain as the furniture.
“You mean, some of this belongs to you?” Sally heard a note of eagerness in her own voice. I could buy it, she was thinking. She had been born to wealth, raised in wealth, and yet she had never felt this way about an object. How much could it all cost? A table? A chair?