"Why do we have to sit out here?" I asked. "Couldn't we go in the house?"
"No," Jean said. "You're not getting in my house. I don't want it. I don't trust you anymore."
"How about my car?" I asked.
"Why should I trust your car?" she asked.
"I mean how about getting in it. It's warm."
"You'd think it was below zero," she said. "If I leave the house one of the girls might wake up. And anyway I don't want to sit in a car with you."
She didn't seem quite so mad.
"Let's hear about the woman in Miami," she said. "I assume this was your glamorous friend."
"Yes," I admitted.
"Why was it so important that you go see her in Miami?"
"She was in trouble. At least she thought she was. It turned out she wasn't."
"The plot thickens," Jean said. "He likes women who appear to be in trouble but actually aren't. If they appear to be in trouble then you can appear to come to the rescue."
I didn't say anything.
"That's one of the worst syndromes," Jean said. "It's revolting it's so sexist."
"Maybe I can outgrow it," I said.
"No, I have a feeling you need to feel you're coming to the rescue," she said. "Otherwise why did you follow me out of the auction that day when I was crying. It's probably an unbreakable pattern with you—coming to the rescue."
I didn't argue. For all I knew she was right.
"I don't need rescuing," she said. "You're dishonest and you can't stay put."
We sat for a bit.
"Finish the story," Jean said. "How come the glamorous friend in Miami got out of trouble so quick?"
"A very important man fell in love with her," I said. "I'll probably never see her again."
"Unless the very important man falls out of love with her," Jean said. "In that case she'll really need you. You can really come to the rescue."
She looked at me for a minute, a little disgusted. I think she was mostly disgusted with herself for letting the conversation continue for so long.
"I don't think she'll need me again," I said. "They've bought a six-million-dollar horse farm already."
Jean stood up. "Six million, huh?" she said.
I nodded.
"Well, so what?" she said. "I had a guy that rich once. Jimmy could buy a horse farm if he wanted to. Catching a rich guy is not an impossible feat."
"You don't have to compete with her," I said. "That's over."
"Just until she needs rescuing," Jean said. "That gives her an edge, in my book. I certainly don't intend to get in a position where I need rescuing by the likes of you. And if I do I won't tell you."
"I'm going to come back and show you the boots I got," I said. "Sometime when you've got shoes on."
Jean looked over her shoulder, but didn't say anything. She didn't seem to be softening much. She went in, and the lights in the downstairs went off, one by one. Then the light over the stairs went off. But the light in her bedroom was still on when I drove away.
Chapter X
I didn't even consider sleeping. I was far too frustrated. Generally women soften, no matter how badly you've treated them, if they see you more or less mean well and that it was mere human frailty that made you treat them badly.
But Jean had been adamant. Not totally hostile, just adamant. There was a chance, but it was going to take work.
I knew if I checked into a motel I wouldn't sleep. I was on a kind of driving high, and my thoughts were spinning. When your thoughts are spinning it's horrible to he in bed.
So I hit the Beltway and headed for Baltimore. It's a deeply decayed city, but the very fact that it was decayed made it perfect for the mood I was in. Many people in Baltimore are so far gone into urban neurosis that they make no distinction between night and day. They drag themselves around at all hours of the night, doing odd things and looking depressed.
The reason I decided on Baltimore was because I knew an antique collector there named Benny the Ghost, a name he acquired because of the habit he has of materializing out of nowhere at country auctions only a few seconds before the best lot is being sold. You never see Benny until just after he has bought something you wanted, and then, almost at once, he melts away. Very few people have ever spoken to him, including auctioneers whose sales he has frequented for years. Benny the Ghost keeps his own council.
I was one of the privileged few who actually knew Benny, whose real last name was Higgins. The way I got to know him was by outbidding him for an Isnik dish. It was a wonderful dish; God knows what it was doing in Pennsylvania, where the auction was held.
Benny has money and usually gets whatever it is he wants at auctions—his reputation takes the competitive spirit right out of most bidders. It's not that he has obvious auction macho—he looks like a men's room attendant in a second-rate hotel—but he does persist. However, I really wanted the Isnik dish, so I ignored him and kept bidding.
I think Benny was startled—he's not used to being strongly challenged—and I got the dish for $950. It was an extraordinary dish, and while I was paying for it Benny came over and stood looking at me sorrowfully. Like many Baltimoreans, he looked like he had a headache, a toothache, and sinus trouble. He did not look happy, and seemed stunned by the fact that he had lost the dish.
"That dish was the only thing I came for," he said to me, looking like a dog who has just been unjustly kicked. "I drove sixty miles."
"Benny, you should have kept bidding," I said.
"But the next bid would have been a thousand dollars," he said. "Isnik dishes don't cost a thousand dollars."
"This one did, nearly," I said.
"It's very reckless," he said. "Paying that much for an Isnik dish."
"It's beautiful though, isn't it?" I said.
Benny just looked gloomy. He had a long heavy face that could hold a lot of gloom, too. He didn't want to admit that the dish was beautiful, since if he did his regret over losing it would just deepen. His regret was already pretty deep.
"I wonder if I have anything you'd like to trade for it," he said. The words obviously cost him an effort. I was intrigued. No one I knew had ever heard Benny the Ghost offer to trade for anything. No dealer that I knew had even the faintest idea of what the nature or scope of his collections were. He bought almost exclusively at auction, almost never from dealers. But his territory was wide. He mostly hit country auctions in the Baltimore-Washington-Philadelphia area, but he had been known to strike as far north as New Hampshire, and as far south as Florence, South Carolina.
No one knew when or where he might appear, but everyone knew what his habits were, the principal one being that he only bid on a single item at each auction—almost always the best item, although many an auctioneer hadn't realized he was selling his best item until Benny had bought it.
"Sure, we might trade," I said. "What sort of things do you have?"
"Well, I just have odds and ends," Benny said. "I’ve never traded anything. But I hate to lose that dish."
"It's for sale," I assured him. "I didn't buy it to keep. I'll trade if you have something I like better."
"It's hard to say," Benny said. "I just have odds and ends."
While I was writing out a check for the dish, Benny dematerialized. He just vanished. Nobody had seen him leave, but he definitely wasn't there, and I didn't see him again for over a year. I was at an estate auction near Richmond and I sensed a gloomy presence at my elbow. There stood Benny, wearing the old khaki shirt and faded green slacks that he wore everywhere.
"Have you still got that Isnik dish?" he asked.
"I sure do," I said.
In fact I had held on to it solely in the hope of someday running into Benny the Ghost again.
"I liked that dish," he said gloomily.
"We can still trade," I said softly. I know how shy certain eccentrics are around their collections. They approach the thought of showing them as cautiously as deer approach a waterhole.
"I guess y
ou could come and look," Benny said, hopelessly. "I live in Baltimore."
He gave me a phone number and two days later I called it. I was in Baltimore at the time.
"I guess you could come and look," he said, even more hopelessly. It turned out I was only two blocks from where he lived, which was in a narrow, five-story building in a decaying block of North Howard Street.
When I knocked on Benny's door I had no idea that I was about to walk into one of the greatest hoards in America: Hoard was the only word for it. All five floors of the building were shelved floor to ceiling with green library shelving, and every shelf on every floor was crammed absolutely full of antiques.
When the shelving along the walls of the five floors had been filled, Benny had simply extended rows of shelves at angles out into the rooms, creating in miniature an effect like that of the tangled streets of certain old cities like Boston. Shelves wound through the large rooms with no rhyme or reason, all of them stuffed full of antiques. Piles had begun to build up in front of the shelves, antiques in almost unimaginable profusion and variety: everything from crocks to buttons to frakturs to silver, gold, brass, bronze, pewter, copper, jade, ironware, paintings, porcelain, tools, stuffed animals, barometers, rifles, carvings, pots, baskets, toys, lamps, etc.
I have seen some hoards, but never anything to equal what Benny the Ghost had crammed into the house in Baltimore. There may have been twenty or thirty thousand antiques in it, all of them good. Some were tiny and some were huge—he had an iron pot you could have cooked a hippopotamus in—but very few were mediocre.
The only light in the building came from plumbers' lamps, which hung everywhere, thirty or forty to each floor.
Benny lived in the house, apparently. In time I toured each of the five floors but saw no evidence of a bed, a TV set, a couch, or any of the other things that normally go in a home. Doubtless these things had gone long ago, judged inessential and jettisoned to make room for more antiques. There was what once had been a kitchen—I could tell that by the sink in it—but it had no stove and there was not so much as a hot plate, that I could see. Benny took his meals out, if indeed he had not dispensed with the need for meals. The sink was piled with Zuni pottery and a tiny bathroom on the second floor was almost full of Eskimo bows, arrows, and harpoons. If a seal had suddenly appeared in the John it would have been easy to get.
Living as I do in a world of goods, I thought that I had long since grown jaded to objects in the mass, but Benny the Ghost's secret hoard taught me better. I had never seen such an exciting gathering of antiques. Generally hoarders on Benny's scale get one good item out of every one hundred things they buy, and the good idea items are soon obscured by piles of junk. Benny's case was just the reverse: Out of every hundred he bought there was one that was merely good. The rest were exceptional. Many were great, and five or six on each floor were supreme. He had the greatest star
Kazan I had ever seen, and a George I teapot that any silver dealer in America would have given a quarter of a million dollars for. It was surrounded by perhaps three hundred other silver teapots, each worthy of prolonged attention. An even tinier bathroom on the fourth floor was filled with Kiseru-zutso, the wonderful delicately decorated Japanese pipe cases.
The hoard was so staggering that on my first visit I never got above the first floor—and there were five floors. There were so many fine things that my eyes couldn't take them in, or distinguish between them properly.
When I walked in with the Isnik dish Benny was twitching and looking extremely gloomy. I knew why. He might have twenty thousand objects, but Benny was a collector, not a dealer or a trader. The thought of having to part with any one of them made him extremely unhappy.
"Well, I just have odds and ends," he said. "I don't know what I could trade."
I immediately put his mind at ease by selling him the Isnik dish at my cost, plus 10 percent, a very fair price. Isnik crafts had nearly doubled in value in the year that I had owned the dish, and Benny knew it.
When he learned that he could have the dish and not have to give up anything he looked almost happy for a few minutes. His collection need not be violated. He wandered off" down the long rows of shelves, dodging the hanging plumbers' lights, and in a minute was back with the cash, precisely $ 1,045 of it.
"I'll put it on the fifth floor," he said. "I've got my Isnik things up there."
Then, to my relief, Benny the Ghost gradually became friendly. In all the years that he had been collecting, I may have been the first one to see the collection. He had been its sole appreciator all along, and when he discovered that I knew things about some of his pieces a tentative opening process began. We spent the whole night on one section of shelves on the lower floor, while Benny lectured me on the objects in it, most of them pewter. Once he started talking I was trapped: The knowledge he had been storing up for his whole life began to pour out.
From then on, whenever I was in the vicinity of Baltimore, I made a point of stopping by, so Benny could lecture me about his antiques for a few hours. Usually I sold him something good, at a reasonable price. He always paid in cash, and pretty soon he began to expect my visits. I came to realize that Benny was a kind of frustrated professor* He should have opened an Academy of Antiques somewhere and shared his knowledge with eager students. With the knowledge he carried in his head he could have trained an army of scouts and sent them to pick America even cleaner than it has been picked already.
There was no need to call ahead when visiting Benny at night: He was always there, and always up.
I knew Benny looked terrible, but when I rang and he worked his way down to the door, through the maze of his shelving, it was always a shock to see how terrible. The circles under his eyes might have been painted with charcoal. He had only a few teeth left, most of them in his upper jaw. He rarely shaved but his salt-and-pepper stubble wasn't long enough to be thought of as a beard.
"Hi, Benny," I said, when he peeped suspiciously out of his peephole. "I was in Washington and happened to have something I thought you might want."
It was an American Indian carving of a bear—I had bought it in Chicago. I knew Benny loved Indian woodcraft, and had bought it with him in mind. It was a peculiar piece, almost abstract, and very beautiful.
"Oh yes, Pequot," Benny said, glancing at it. "I have several in this style but I don't think I have a bear. We better go see, though. I might have a bear. The others are on the top floor."
All five flights of stairs were piled with things that wouldn't fit in the shelves. One landing held a brass diving helmet and some weighted brass shoes.
We found the Pequot carvings way at the back, on a high shelf.
"I was right," Benny said. "I don't have a bear."
I agreed to let him have it for $800 and while he was going to get the cash I poked around a little. While I was wandering along a long section of shelving containing lighting devices, lamps mostly, I noticed a door I hadn't seen before.
When Benny came back with the cash I nodded toward the door.
"What's in there?" I asked.
"Oh, I keep my unicums in there," he said. "I have forty-seven now."
A unicum, of course, is a unique thing: not a freak, but the only surviving example of its class.
Assiduous collectors—usually the dominant collectors in their fields—will occasionally secure a unicum. A collector of American prints, if he's lucky enough, might get a unique example of a print by some obscure artist. Most unicums, in fact, are paper items: stamps or broadsides that exist but in a single copy.
"I didn't know you have a unicum collection, Benny," I said.
Benny looked modest. "It's just some unicums I picked up," he said. "Someday I'll show them to you."
While we were looking at the Pequot carvings the doorbell rang. I think I was more surprised than Benny. It had never rung before during my visits, and I had taken to making the lax assumption that I was the only person admitted to Benny's house.
"That must b
e August," Benny said.
We worked our way laboriously downstairs. The thing that worried me most about Benny's collection was that he might get trapped in it. It is not unheard of for elderly collectors to fall victim to their own collections. A magazine collector I knew slightly had met his death that way. He had a largish house in St. Louis, but it was filled with magazines, heaped in towering stacks in every room, with only a narrow path between the stacks, like the paths between Bryan Ponder's bird nests. One day the old man had dislodged a stack, that stack had struck another stack, and he had been buried beneath an avalanche of magazines. Since, like many collectors, he was a recluse, he was not found for nearly a month.
Indeed, I knew many stories of collections turning on their collectors. A man in Fort Smith, Arkansas, who collected tractors, was killed when his latest acquisition reared up and fell on him.
Something like that could happen to Benny. There was only one exit to his house: the front door. All the windows had long since been covered with shelving. The front door itself was getting harder to open, as Benny carelessly piled more and more things in the front hall until he could get time to sort them. Eventually, if he wasn't careful, he was going to wall himself in. If there was a fire, or if he simply pulled some shelving over on himself, he would be in big trouble. Nobody would be likely to miss him, since nobody ever saw him anyway.
The doorbell rang steadily, as we worked our way downstairs.
"August must think I'm deaf," Benny observed mildly.
When he opened the door August still had his finger on the doorbell. He was a short man, as broad as he was tall, dressed in old overalls and a grimy red baseball cap. He was about Benny's age, but so thick that he could have made three of Benny. One unusual aspect of his appearance was that his white chest hair extended upward to his jaw line. It was thick, white, and curly. August looked like a primate, but not exactly like a man. More disconcerting than the chest hair was the fact that his eyes were not in synch. One looked straight at us—the other pointed off toward the left.