Dorothea Benton Frank - All Summer Long

In memory of our friend Pat

with great love

All that glitters is not gold;

Often you have heard it told:

Many a man his life has sold

But my outside to behold:

Gilded tombs do worms enfold

Had you been as wise as bold,

Young in limbs, in judgment old,

Your answer had not been inscrolld

Fare you well: your suit is cold. Cold, indeed, and labour lost:

Then, farewell, heat and welcome, frost!

The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene VII

William Shakespeare

Easter Monday, April 6, 2015

Manhattan

Whether the subject of change was partners, possessions, or places, some people had an easy time letting go. A fixture in the crown of Manhattans classic interior designers, Olivia Ritchie was not such a person.

Over the years she had enjoyed the privilege of observing the private and personal habits of the one percent through her work. She was surprised to discover that there were peoplemany of them, in factwhose closets werent jammed to capacity with twenty-year-old garments they thought would come back into vogue. Hers bulged with a kind of weird ferocity, as though the closets were populated by tiny, possessive museum demon docents that guarded the history of her style. These same people with the organized closets, whose clothing and accessories were usually spread over their other residences, which helped to explain why they were so neat, actually replaced the contents of their spice cabinets and pantries annually, and over-the-counter medicines were tossed out by their expiration dates, just because it seemed like a good idea. Actually, someone on their payroll did it for them. Olivia didnt do any of those things. To begin with, she had only one home. And only a part-time housekeeper.

Olivia Ritchie wasnt technically a hoarder, but she loved her collections and the precious possessions she had amassed over decades. She saved garments and linens simply because she loved the fabric or the workmanship. You could find them wrapped in acid-free paper and packed in acid-free cardboard boxes under the bed and stacked in the very top of the linen closet and armoires. There were scores of handbags and scarves and mountains of costume jewelry that had been out of style for a very long time. Sometimes she would use a detail from one of them to represent a motif in a custom wallpaper or fabric. Sometimes she used the object for color. She squirreled away all sorts of things because they could be an honest catalyst for inspiration. And if she truly tired of something, she managed to sell it to a client.

Olivia had dozens of objets dart and curiosities from all over the world, ranging from a sixteenth-century Italian saltcellar sometimes attributed to the school of Benvenuto Cellini to dozens of ivory Japanese netsukes. She had miniature cloisonn boxes that played sweet music, tiny French clocks that chimed assertively on the quarter hour, and dozens of hand-carved Chinese puzzle balls. The intricacies of the puzzle balls never ceased to amaze her. They seemed impossible to herimpossible to envision as an artist and impossible to render. All of these belongings, down to the most humble buttons in her button box, were poised to ignite her creative spark. These tools inspired Olivias magic. She made the dreams of other people come true. At least that was the pleasant rationale to keep them all.

But she couldnt keep her first husband, the philandering, financially irresponsible medical student she had married in her mid-twenties against the pleading of everyone she knew. Two years into it she came home one night to an empty apartment. All he left her was a note on the kitchen counter along with ten milligrams of Valium. The note read: Sorry. I cant do this anymore. Youre too demanding and controlling. You really ought to get some help.

He took every stick of furniture, the contents of the kitchen and linen closet, and needless to say, all the music. Oh, he left the wedding album on a windowsill in the living room, a choice that stung. She ripped the pictures into shreds and threw them off the balcony, watching as pieces of her dream floated down to 73rd Street. It took her a while to get over it.

Olivia buried herself in work and built her business, one gnarly client at a time. After being single and, she would admit, very lonely, Olivia achieved extreme success and married again, this time with the blessing of everyone she knew. But she vowed never to answer to anyone again. There would be no mingling of resources this time around. She was in charge of it all and the happiest she had ever been. People said she had dreamed Nick into her lifeOlivia was a lucid dreamer, something that drove her crazy because her dreams were so vivid it was hard to tell the difference between a dream and reality. Nick teased her without mercy about them, comparing her to a New Zealand tribe of indigenous people who confused them also.

Her safe and jovial (much older than her) second husbanddarling, poetic, professorial, and ever the perfect gentlemanNicholas Seymour, was a lifelong student and teacher, and he didnt particularly care about power. Well, he was happy to cede control of their money as long as things went well. For fourteen years of bliss they had been flush and pretty much able to do as they pleased because her business thrived.

Nick was like Olivia in that he also collected things. Nick had shelves upon shelves of gorgeous handmade leather-bound books whose spines were hand tooled in gold leaf. His small study that held these treasures had a tiny woodburning fireplace, a luxury in their type of building. The combination of the lingering ghosts of wood fires over the years and old leather laced with the occasional Montecristo smelled better than any perfume on this entire earth. And Nick had an army of tiny cast lead Confederate soldiers placed in battlefield dioramas on a few shelves, lit and protected by glass walls that looked like small aquariums. To his everlasting delight, the Union troops of General William Tecumseh Sherman did not and would never reflect actual history in his depictions.

Its a mighty powerful feeling for a modest man like me to be able to change the outcome of a war, he would say with a wink to a guest. May I offer you a measure of my oldest bourbon?

Who could refuse? He and his visitor, usually a colleague or a graduate student, would sink into Nicks well-worn and cracked leather armchairs and sip away into the evening telling stories about the South or European wars or just about the great beauty to be found in a line of Seamus Heaneys poetry.

Nick, who could have been the prototype for Oscar Madison, was a man of many interests. The walls and file drawers of his study were filled with ancient rare maps used by explorers in ages long gone. His favorites were classified as cartographic curiosa, a term that referred to maps with geographical inaccuracies such as misshapen continents or ones that showed places like California as an island.

Look at this, he said to Olivia one night, carefully lifting the brown paper away from a new acquisitiona seventeenth-century map detailing North America. This fellow de Lahontan was a French military officer stationed in Quebec. After he fought the Iroquois, he made this map.

Amazing! Olivia said. Gosh, honey, didnt you wear that shirt yesterday?

Yes. Is it a capital offense to wear a shirt a second day?

No, but its wearing yesterdays lunch. Olivia said and touched the rather large stain left by the drips and splatters of the red sauce from spaghetti Bolognese they had shared the prior day at a charming neighborhood restaurant.

Oh. Ill change it in a moment.

No, you wont. I know you. It would take an act of Congress.