Gotham Diary:
Buckingham & Lettuce
18 April 2012
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but perhaps you can chalk that up to vino. As I was drying the forks and spoons after dinner last night, I thought that it might be fun to write about our patterns, and the story of how they came into our lives. Yes — definitely the wine. Yet, even as I sat down in the seasonably cool morning and tasted the folly of my scheme, I stuck with the headline, because, hey, there is was. And there it will remain until and unless I think of something else.
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When I was young — up to about three years ago — I dreamed of owning Audubon, a Tiffany silver pattern that seems designed for hands even larger than my own. The pieces have unusually broad handles that swell out to make room for little reliefs of Audubon’s birds. It is very 1880s, and very serious without being beholden to the baroque fantasies that prevail in the land of heavy silver. When I was young — 30 years ago — a teaspoon in the pattern cost about $200. I dreamed of buying a piece a month. And that is all I did. I never actually bought anything.
Dreams of Audubon wilted for many reasons. First, of course, one simply grew up. But no, it’s not that; if our lives had branched out toward an increase in entertaining, instead of toward less, the embers of my longing might not have been allowed to go cold. Third (in any case), we inherited Kathleen’s mother’s silver, which is Buckingham, a Gorham pattern that Kathleen always liked because she grew up with it, “not that it’s my favorite pattern ever.” So you might have thought that when we got married, she’d register for that.
[Historical note: In 1981, when Kathleen and I were married, brides still registered at nice shops for china, crystal, and silver, and grooms never appeared in wedding notices in the Times.]
But no, she thought it was too expensive, and that therefore we wouldn’t get any, so she chose instead the Towle pattern Queen Elizabeth, which is a bona fide knockoff, meaning that you have only to look at it to see that it’s the less-nice version of something else. It was Queen Elizabeth that fanned my ardor for Audubon. And something might have come of that if a lot of things had worked out differently, such as not buying a country house &c, but also I was calmed by the inheritance of my mother’s silver, in about 1987, after my father died. Also a Towle pattern, Silver Plumes was what I had grown up with, and I liked it not only for that reason but also because it wasn’t elaborate. But it also wasn’t very substantial — it was almost children’s silver. Also it had been degraded a bit by the primitive dishwasher detergents that, in the early postwar period, worked like sandblasters. Nevertheless: country house and all that. And when the country house chapter came to an end, the Internet chapter began. And now we finally have the Buckingham that Kathleen always wanted. End of story.
Not. A few months ago, while I was sipping a glass of wine at Ray Soleil’s, he said that he wanted to show me something. He opened his hall closet, which contains many more treasures than Ali Baba’s cave, and extracted what I think was a shopping bag. In the shopping bag were sealed plastic bags containing place settings of ravishing stainless steel. The handles were bent and folded in a way that simulated, at least to my eye, the way a plain piece of flatware would waver in outline if it were lying at the bottom of a limpid mountain brook. I had never seen anything quite so magical. Why the Pottery Barn, which introduced the pattern and sold it for a short time. Ray bought it then but never used it. I had to have it. Not Ray’s, of course. I had to go to Replacements, and buy a few pieces every month. $200 might buy three or even four pieces.