The woman in the camel coat was named Eleanor Voss, and she was the vice president of design at the holiday decor company, and she had driven from Pittsburgh that morning to see the dining room hutch where I painted. She had a leather portfolio under one arm and the cardinal in her gloved hand, and she stood on the porch steps with a quiet, unhurried dignity, as though she were at a museum. “Mrs. Lowery,” she said to Tiffany, who had gone the color of the paper plates. “I am Eleanor Voss. We purchased the designs of Mrs. Winifred Wells on Friday. Four million, two hundred thousand dollars. I would like to understand the fifty cents.”
Tiffany tried to smile. She is forty seven, a thin, bright woman with frosted hair and the quick, shallow laugh of a person who is always on stage, and she said, “Oh, my goodness, I think there has been a mix up. This is just our garage sale.” “It is a very large mix up,” said Eleanor Voss, pleasantly. “There are three hundred ornaments on this table. A hundred and twelve designs. The signed ones are worth, at auction, between forty and four hundred dollars each.” She looked at the plastic grocery bag at the feet of a woman at the end of the driveway. “That woman has two hundred dollars of my property in a Kroger sack.”
The woman with the bag dropped it as though it had caught fire. Scott came out of the garage, then, wiping his hands on a rag. He is my son, fifty years old, a quiet man who repairs air conditioners and loves a ball game, and he had been under the hood of the truck the whole time, with the radio on. He took one look at the porch, at the designer, at his wife, at me, and the rag fell out of his hand. “Mom,” he said. “What is going on?” I held out the receipt from the antiques shop on Baltimore Street. “Lot fifty two,” I said, “the tea set of my mother. Three thousand, six hundred dollars. Purchased from Tiffany.”
A silver tea service vanished from a dining room hutch while a sale went on in the driveway and gave one ornament painter the afternoon to bring her daughter in law back to the brush.
Scott read it twice, the way a man reads a diagnosis. He did not look at his wife. He looked at the receipt, and then at me, and then at the hutch through the window, where the empty shelf stood in the afternoon light. “She told me you gave it to her,” he said. “She said you wanted her to have it. For our daughter.” His voice was strange and tight. “She said you were not using it.” I shook my head. “I have never given Tiffany a single piece of that set,” I said gently. “My mother carried it from Hagerstown in a hatbox. It was all she owned on her wedding day.” Scott turned, finally, to his wife.
Tiffany had begun to cry, the angry, hiccuping tears of a woman who has been found out and intends to blame the finder. “Scott, we needed the money. You know we did. The mortgage, the roof, the braces of Madison. I was thinking of the family.” Her voice rose. “Winnie never uses anything! It sits there in the dark! It is selfish!” Scott raised a hand. It was not a threat. It was the gesture of a man asking for a moment, and she stopped. He was breathing hard. In the street, a coal train rumbled through the valley, long and slow, and the whole house shook very faintly.
“Tiffany,” he said, “my mother has painted ornaments at that kitchen table every December since before I was born. I have gone to sleep under that sound for fifty years. The brush against the glass.” His voice cracked. “You have called it junk. You have called it a hobby. And you sold the tea set of her mother, and you put the rest in a grocery sack.” He swallowed. “I stood in the garage and did not hear any of it. I did not ask. I let you.” He turned to me, and tears ran straight down his face. “Mom, I did not hear any of it, and that is the same as doing it.”
I put my hand on his arm. I am a small woman, and I have to reach up to do it. “Scott,” I said, “it is not the same. But it is close, and you know it.” He nodded. I looked at Eleanor Voss, who was waiting with great patience, and she gave me the smallest of smiles. “Here is what we will do,” I said, to all of them, to the neighbors and the driveway and the empty folding tables. “The ornaments go back inside tonight, every one, in the boxes. The tea set comes home on Monday. Tiffany will pay for it herself, out of her wages, and she will apologize to the dealer on Baltimore Street.”
Tiffany stood in the middle of the driveway, small and rigid, with her hands twisted together. “And what else?” she said. “Nothing else,” I said. “Except that I would like you to learn to paint.” She stared. “I have a gift for it, and a stubborn one, and I would like to pass it to someone who will not call it a hobby.” I took the cardinal from Eleanor Voss, very gently, and held it out. “This is a cardinal. They mate for life. Do you know that? They feed each other, beak to beak. You paint one eye, and then the other, and you do not hurry.”
She came on Tuesday. She was terrible. Her cardinals looked like angry tomatoes, and her pine branches resembled spiders, and the gold W she tried to paint on the bottom of the first ball ran like a tear. I told her it was lovely. She knew I was lying.
By Christmas, she had learned to hold the brush, and by the following spring she had painted a covered bridge so handsome that I framed it. Eleanor Voss sends us a box of the finished ornaments every December. They hang on a small tree in the dining room, in front of the hutch, beside the silver tea set, which gleams. On the bottom of one, quite crooked, is a small gold T.