THE LOWBOY
Oh I hate small men and I will write about them no more but in passing I would like to say that’s what my brother Richard is: small. He has small hands, small feet, a small waist, small children, a small wife, and when he comes to our cocktail parties he sits in a small chair. If you pick up a book of his, you will find his name, “Richard Norton,” on the flyleaf in his very small handwriting. He emanates, in my opinion, a disgusting aura of smallness. He is also spoiled, and when you go to his house you eat his food from his china with his silver, and if you observe his capricious and vulgar house rules you may be lucky enough to get some of his brandy, just as thirty years ago one went into his room to play with his toys at his pleasure and to be rewarded with a glass of his ginger ale. Some people make less of an adventure than a performance of their passions. They do not seem to fall in love and make friends but to cast, with men, women, children, and dogs, some stirring drama that they were committed to producing at the moment of their birth. This is especially noticeable on the part of those whose casting is limited by a slender emotional budget. The clumsy performances draw our attention to the play. The ingenue is much too old. So is the leading lady. The dog is the wrong breed, the furniture is ill-matched, the costumes are threadbare, and when the coffee is poured there seems to be nothing in the pot. But the drama goes on with as much terror and pity as it does in more magnificent productions. Watching my brother, I feel that he has marshaled a second-rate cast and that he is performing, perhaps for eternity, the role of a spoiled child.
It is traditional in our family to display our greatest emotional powers over heirlooms?to appropriate sets of dishes before the will can be probated, to have tugs-of-war with carpets, and to rupture blood relationships over the subject of a rickety chair. Stories and tales that dwell on some wayward attachment to an object?a soup tureen or a lowboy?seem to narrow down to the texture of the object itself, the glaze on the china or the finish on the wood, and to generate those feelings of frustration that I, for one, experience when I hear harpsichord music. My last encounter with my brother involved a lowboy. Because our mother died unexpectedly and there was an ambiguous clause in her will, certain of the family heirlooms were seized by Cousin Mathilda. No one felt strong enough at the time to contest her claims. She is now in her nineties, and age seems to have cured her rapacity. She wrote to Richard and me saying that if she had anything we wanted she would be happy to let us have it. I wrote to say that I would like the lowboy. I remembered it as a graceful, bowlegged piece of furniture with heavy brasses and a highly polished veneer the color of cordovan. My request was half-hearted. I did not really care, but it seemed that my brother did. Cousin Mathilda wrote him that she was giving the lowboy to me, and he telephoned to say that he wanted it?that he wanted it so much more than I did that there was no point in even discussing it. He asked if he could visit me on Sunday?we live about fifty miles apart?and, of course, I invited him.
It was not his house or his whiskey that day, but it was his charm that he was dispensing and in which I was entitled to bask, and, noticing some roses in the garden that he had given my wife many years back, he said, “I see my roses are doing well.” We drank in the garden. It was a spring day?one of those green-gold Sundays that excite our incredulity. Everything was blooming, opening, burgeoning. There was more than one could see?prismatic lights, prismatic smells, something that set one’s teeth on edge with pleasure?but it was the shadow that was most mysterious and exciting, the light one could not define. We sat under a big maple, its leaves not yet fully formed but formed enough to hold the light, and it was astounding in its beauty, and seemed not like a single tree but one of a million, a link in a long chain of leafy trees beginning in childhood.
“What about the lowboy?” Richard asked.
“What about it? Cousin Mathilda wrote to ask if I wanted anything, and it was the only thing I wanted.”
“You’ve never cared about those things.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“But it’s my lowboy!”
“Everything has always been yours, Richard.”
“Don’t quarrel,” my wife said, and she was quite right. I had spoken foolishly.
“I’ll be happy to buy the lowboy from you,” Richard said.
“I don’t want your money.”
“What do you want?”
“I would like to know why you want the lowboy so much.”
“It’s hard to say, but I do want it, and I want it terribly!” He spoke with unusual candor and feeling. This seemed more than his well-known possessiveness. “I’m not sure why. I feel that it was the center of our house, the center of our life before Mother died. If I had one solid piece of furniture, one object I could point to, that would remind me of how happy we all were, of how we used to live.”
I understood him (who wouldn’t?), but I suspected his motives. The lowboy was an elegant piece of furniture, and I wondered if he didn’t want it for cachet, as a kind of family crest, something that would vouch for the richness of his past and authenticate his descent from the most aristocratic of the seventeenth-century settlers. I could see him standing proudly beside it with a drink in his hand. My lowboy. It would appear in the background of their Christmas card, for it was one of those pieces of cabinetwork that seem to have a countenance of the most exquisite breeding. It would be the final piece in the puzzle of respectability that he had made of his life. We had shared a checkered, troubled, and sometimes sorrowful past, and Richard had risen from this chaos into a dazzling and resplendent respectability, but perhaps this image of himself would be improved by the lowboy; perhaps the image would not be complete without it.
I said that he could have it, then, and his thanks were intense. I wrote to Mathilda, and Mathilda
