64 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
within reach of this “it” girl. Her back-
bone might’ve been cruelly bowed, but
her deep-set eyes gleamed my way, briar-
sharp. Theodosia seemed one of those
maimed or homely people who—feel-
ing themselves unimprovable—make a
militant point of glaring you down.
Seated on high, she flaunted her un-
assets as a form of deficit flirting.
At that age, I still likely looked my
best. (I remained ignorant of my face
value, even while trading on the bargains
it brought. You really notice
your looks only once you’ve
lost them.) Now barging to-
ward the poorest-lit corner
of her two-room shop, I felt
“it,” hiding. Ballroom chairs
stacked to the ceiling. Nar-
row pathways corkscrewed
tributes to her bent spine.
Theodosia offered no chat,
none of the usual jolly pry-
ing: “So, where’d you folks
say you’re from? You with the Depression-
glass convention in Moline, betcha.”
Nothing but her alum gaze, her arms
crossed over six pounds of locket clocks.
Things here did look finer than in
most shops out this way. And—a good
sign—her place smelled not of euphem-
izing potpourri but of the proper musk
peculiar to some dry attic’s last few cen-
turies. And yet the major Gothic grand-
father clock lacked one finial; three beau-
tiful nineteenth-century pumpkin-colored
paisley shawls had been moth dessert de-
cades back. Nothing displayed justified
her full snootiness. I did stop before a
pile of Harper’s Weekly magazines from
the eighteen-sixties. Hating knowing that
she knew, I stood scouting for Winslow
Homer’s war illustrations. Nothing.
Her voice scratched me from a room
away. “The toys are in that half-timbered
neo-Tudor sideboard to your right.”
I asked the stale air before me, “How’d
you know?”
“I’ve got it pretty much down to a sys-
tem. Can identify all you migrating birds,
boy-o. I get three of you a day in here.”
“Thanks,” I said, for spite.
Theodosia’s toys proved overpriced,
missing wheels, made in Munich or New
York circa 1915, just before war claimed
all such metal. I found nothing local,
handmade, or heartfelt enough for my
advanced urban taste.
Last thing, as I headed for the Jeep,
feeling as irked as stubborn, I squatted
before the clear vitrine in front of her
stool. Four minutes of silence hadn’t
thawed her. She still emitted the nun-
nish hauteur of some impoverished old
countess out of Chekhov.
Sunset, gold as egg yolk, now scored
with value many otherwise half-worth-
less things. Pot lids, cufflinks, rims of
chipped Venetian claret glasses.
“Hope I’m not holding up your eve-
ning plans, right here at six and all, ma’am,”
so ran me in faux-farmboy
mode. No reply. With brooch
clocks dragging down her
blouse, she just sat ticking
like a knitting class.
Only now—as I squat-
ted before the glass, peer-
ing over Grover Cleveland
campaign buttons and crys-
tal bulldog inkwells—I felt
observed from floor level.
Beside her white shin, a
face—a force—stared back at me. A
head-and-shoulders portrait rested on
the floor. The man depicted must’ve
been about my age. Dark eyes above a
beginner’s goatee—he’d posed fastened
in a black tie and a high starched collar.
His face was handsome, if both blank
and sad, hound-earnest.
“So what’d be his story?” My index
finger touched cold glass. I felt then, in
the knots of my stiff neck and impres-
sionable groin, a collector’s sense that
he might be today’s it.
Silent, she studied her fingernails.
Sales technique? Orneriness? Both?
“I asked, Can you tell me about this
sweet guy in the painting near your left
foot?” Why did her not answering mount
up so? Unlike in the last three shops,
there was no radio playing Cham-
paign-Urbana’s classical FM. No noise
out here but wind crossing her roof or
the odd twist of carved wood popping
in her far room. I felt foolish at the din
my voice made.
But I kept staring through the glass
box at this young gent’s melancholy mes-
sage of a face. Maybe he looked a bit like
me and—being painted actual size, given
the glass between us—became some sort
of mirror? Maybe all bright young men,
seriously questing, look a bit alike.
The picture tipped half out of its eigh-
teen-fifties rosewood frame. The canvas
showed its age. The oil-paint executionseemed able, even affectionate, if con-
ventional; the background, solid black.
But what held me was the boy’s expres-
sion. Not just an invitation, almost a plea
for help. I felt first approached, then nearly
summoned. Didn’t understand quite what
I’d found, but, seeing him, I recognized
some calibre of longing or emergency.
“Just want information, lady! But,
why’m I even bothering you? As if you
knew the slightest thing about him!” This
is how one avid story “picker,” holding
only twenty bucks, challenges another.
She snorted finally: amused at any-
body’s thinking Theodosia might not
keep total narrative lock on every cellu-
loid buttonhook in her place. (Since she
belonged to my grandmother’s flapper
generation, I’d maybe gauged her partly
right: such ladies were most charming
when provoked.) When Theodosia’s
voice at last emerged, it sounded ade-
noidal, dry, so “local” I felt disappointed.
“You look to be one of those ones I
get in here from the grad school over
to Iowa City. Printmaking department’s
pretty good, they say. But why would
anybody waste time doing prints when
you could just paint? Yeah, real artistes,
you kids! You all look alike. Come out
here huntin’ somethin’ for nothin’. From
the parking lot, I knew ye. Expensive
haircut wanting to play like it just grew
wild that way. Wearing clothes the peo-
ple in New York City wore three years
back. Nosing out this far from Moline,
hoping and trick us natives. You’d prob-
ably make a funny story out of me, my
shop, this poor boy painted here.”
Now some test would be required.
Proof that I was not just another trust-
fund tinhorn, condescending.
And, as I leaned nearer the glass, I
could “read” her bony torso. Most of the
watches clamped there told roughly the
same time (within fifty minutes). But,
when I scouted from left to right, four
lines, top to bottom, her system started
becoming clearer: the rows began with
austere Federal design, chaste and “clas-
sical,” until Ionic geometry blossomed,
enlarging to certain manufactured over-
elaborations of the eighteen-fifties,
sprouting roses and leaves and fat gilt
tendrils of prosperity toward a silver
Nouveau calla lily, then onward to a
watch mitred with onyx swallows and
the chopped fan lines of the Eastlake
moment, slimming again into industrial