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 lie 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 Iznik 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 Iznik 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. “Iznik dishes don’t cost a thousand dollars.”
“This one did, nearly,” I said.
“It’s very reckless,” he said. “Paying that much for an Iznik 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 Iznik 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 you 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 plumber’s 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 than 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 Kiseruzutso, 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 Iznik 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 Iznik dish at my cost, plus 10 percent, a very fair price. Iznik 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 plumber’s 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 Iznik 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 be 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.
“Hello, August,” Benny said.
“Got a nice gong,” August said.
“Oh well,” Benny said. “I’ve got quite a few gongs. About forty. What kind of gong is it?”
“Dinner gong,” August said. “Got a turtle shell with a picture on it.”
“What?” Benny asked, perking up a little.
“Big turtle shell,” August said. “Picture ain’t too good though.”
Through the door I could see an old black pickup parked at the curb. It had wooden sideboards, but whatever it may once have boasted in the way of springs had long since had the spring crushed out of them. The pickup sagged far to one side with the weight of goods piled in it.
On the sidewalk near the pickup were two thin men dressed as August was. They were watching a dusty-looking mongrel relieve itself against the rear tire of the pickup.
“I better take a look at that shell,” Benny said.
August took no interest in me at all. He led us out to the pickup, lowered the much-dented tailgate, and began to dig objects out of the clutter of goods the rear end contained. To my surprise, the objects were good. The dinner gong was silver, with a nice little felt mallet. The two thin men and the dusty mongrel came over and stood silently as we inspected it.
“Hello, Sept,” Benny said. “Hello, Octo.”
The two men nodded shyly, but didn’t speak.
“How’s your dog?” Benny asked. The dog was scratching at a tick. The two thin men looked down at it, embarrassed by Benny’s politeness.
Nice as the gong was, it was a trifle compared to the turtle shell with the picture in it. The shell was the size of a washbasin, the shell of a sea turtle, obviously. The picture, on the inside of the shell, was a primitive showing two little black children with flowers in their hair. It was painted on the scraped surface of the sea turtle’s shell. I had never seen such a painting, never heard of such a technique. It was a wonderful thing, but I carefully muted my interest. After all, it was Benny’s buy, and the qualities of the painting were not lost on him either.
“My goodness,” he said. “My goodness. Where’d you find this, August?”
“Down Carolina,” August said.
“Well my goodness,” Benny said. “Did they have any more?”
“Only one,” August said.
“What would a man have to give for a thing like that?” Benny wondered.
August looked unhappy. Having to think up prices for oddities like a turtle shell with a picture on it was wearisome work. He fixed his one good eye on the two thin men, but they were carefully noncommittal. They kept their eyes on the dog.
“Only one they had,” August said. “Would you pay seventy-five?”
Benny didn’t have to think that one over long.
“I’ll go get the money,” he said. “I don’t really need the gong. I have quite a few nice gongs as it is.”
He went in the house to get the money and silence fell. The three men were not very talkative. The dog, more animated than the rest of us, jumped up in the back of the pickup and crawled over the miscellaneous heap of goods to where it had a bed.
I was wondering if I ought to buy the gong, simply as a means of breaking the ice. It was obvious that I had stumbled on a little family of American traders, men who got around. The pickup had an Ohio license plate.
“My name’s Jack,” I said. “How much do you want for the gong?”
August looked unhappy. Some people are as shy about selling as others are about sex. Although he probably spent his whole life buying and selling, the making of prices did not come easy, particularly if the customer was a stranger.
“Silver gong,” he said finally.
Then I noticed the end of a trunk, wedged beneath a pile of quilts. I could barely see it, but it looked like an interesting trunk. It looked very old, and it didn’t look American.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I see that trunk? I need a trunk.”
The two tall men blinked. My erratic behavior made them nervous.
August was not so volatile. He was thinking about the gong and did not allow himself to be distracted. His left eye gazed off into Baltimore, while his right studied me.
“Like to get a hunnert an’ twenty-five,” he said.
I immediately handed it over.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s a good price. What about the trunk?”
“It’s under them quilts,” August said, after a moment. Having $125 materialize in his hand startled him, and he waddled off around the pickup and put it in a safe place.
“I sure would like to see that trunk,” I said, when he came back.
Benny arrived with $75 and took the turtle shell with the beautiful primitive on it.
“He wants that trunk,” August said. “You want it?”
A true trader, he was sticking to protocol. He had come to see Benny, therefore Benny had first refusal on everything that was for sale.
“My goodness,” Benny said. “I don’t think so. I have over two hundred trunks.”
It was true. Benny’s house had trunks everywhere, most of them serving as storage bins for medals, seals, coins, watches, paperweights, netsuke, or other small objects.
August looked at the trunk thoughtfully.
“Take it out I won’t be able to get it back in,” he said, to test my seriousness. Removing the trunk would disrupt the balance of his load, which in his mind possessed an order not visible to the casual eye.
“I’ll probably buy it,” I said.
Looking resigned, he extracted the trunk, while his companions stood by like two nervous birds, watching his every move but not daring to offer any assistance. August was clearly the boss.
The trunk, when it finally emerged, was wonderful. I couldn’t immediately place the wood, but it was not American. From the leather and brass work I thought it was probably seventeenth century, though it might have been sixteenth. There was a crest stamped into the leather and the inside was lined with an ancient purplish velvet, dried to the thinness of Kleenex, but velvet still. Probably the trunk was Spanish, possibly Portuguese.
“Do you know this crest, Benny?” I asked. If it was a royal, as opposed to a ducal, crest, the chest might be worth thousands.
Benny was no help. Like many collectors, he is completely indifferent to objects he is not interested in buying.
“It’s not familiar to me,” he said rather formally. He had got what he wanted—an astonishing primitive—and a Spanish trunk could not interest him less.
August’s good eye watched me unblinkingly as I studied the trunk.
“Gosh, I like it,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”
“Over’t Pensacola,” August said.
“What would you take for it?”
“Two hunnert,” August said. His expression didn’t change at all, but the figure caused his companions to blink several times. I had a feeling August thought he was shooting for the moon this time.
“Fine,” I said, paying him as quickly as I had paid for the gong.
My rapid acceptance caused a slight look of worry to cross his broad face. He had meant to overprice the trunk, but the fact that I hadn’t even bothered to bargain could only mean that he had underpriced it after all.
Nonetheless, the deed was done. No doubt it would be discussed endlessly, as the three men rode up the road. They might debate the sale for weeks, and even persuade themselves eventually that they could have got an unheard-of sum, like three hundred, for the trunk.
In the meantime they closed the tailgate and got ready to leave for the next stop up the road, having just made four hundred dollars—not bad for Baltimore in the middle of the night. The tires of the old truck were so treadless they were shiny.
Watching it creak away up the bumpy street, the sideboards swaying with the weight of goods piled in it, I felt better for a moment. The three strange traders had made me feel that I was in touch with my vocation again. It was warming to think that all over America at this hour people were loading pickups and vans and setting off for flea markets and swap-meets. It was a peculiar solution to life, perhaps, but a surprisingly effective one. The treasure hunt must never stop, even if most of the folks who pursued it were only able to offer humble treasures.
“Who were the thin guys?” I asked Benny.
“Sept and Octo,” he said. “Octo’s the youngest. That’s as far as the old man got.”
I looked puzzled.
“Named his kids after the months,” Benny said. “He was hoping to get twelve but the old lady died after Octo.”
“Were there any girls?” I asked.
“Why yes,” Benny said. “April, May, and June. They run a nice flea market outside of Cleveland. You ought to stop and see them if you’re up that way.”
“I’ll do that, Benny,” I said.