“Welty had no obligation to put his foot in but he was an affectionate man, without family, and he liked children. He invited Juliet here for a holiday when she was six years old, or ‘JuleeAnn’ as she was then—”
“Here? In this house?”
“Yes, here. And when the summer was over and it was time to send her back and she was crying about having to leave and the mother wasn’t answering her telephone, he cancelled the plane tickets and phoned around to see about enrolling her in first grade. It was never an official arrangement—he was afraid to rock the boat, as they say—but most people assumed she was his child without inquiring too deeply. He was in his mid-thirties, plenty old enough to be her father. Which, in all the essential respects, he was.
“But, no matter,” he said, looking up, in an altered tone. “You said you wanted to look around the workshop. Would you like to go down?”
“Please,” I said. “That would be great.” When I’d found him down there working on his up-ended chair, he’d stood and stretched and said he was ready for a break but I hadn’t wanted to come upstairs at all, the workshop was so rich and magical: a treasure cave, bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, with the light filtering down from the high windows, fretwork and filigree, mysterious tools I didn’t know the names of, and the sharp, intriguing smells of varnish and beeswax. Even the chair he’d been working on—which had goat’s legs in front, with cloven hooves—had seemed less like a piece of furniture than a creature under enchantment, like it might up-end itself and hop down from his work bench and trot away down the street.
Hobie reached for his smock and put it back on. For all his gentleness, his quiet manner, he was built like a man who moved refrigerators or loaded trucks for a living.
“So,” he said, leading me downstairs. “The shop-behind-the-shop.”
“Sorry?”
He laughed. “The arrière-boutique. What the customers see is a stage set—the face that’s displayed to the public—but down here is where the important work happens.”
“Right,” I said, looking down at the labyrinth at the foot of the stairs, blond wood like honey, dark wood like poured molasses, gleams of brass and gilt and silver in the weak light. As with the Noah’s Ark, each species of furniture was ranked with its own kind: chairs with chairs, settees with settees; clocks with clocks, desks and cabinets and highboys standing in stiff ranks opposite. Dining tables, in the middle, formed narrow, mazelike paths to be edged around. At the back of the room a wall of tarnished old mirrors, hung frame to frame, glowed with the silvered light of old ballrooms and candlelit salons.
Hobie looked back at me. He could see how pleased I was. “You like old things?”
I nodded—it was true, I did like old things, though it was something I’d never realized about myself before.
“It must be interesting for you at the Barbours’, then. I expect that some of their Queen Anne and Chippendale is as good as anything you’ll see in a museum.”
“Yes,” I said, hesitantly. “But here it’s different. Nicer,” I added, in case he didn’t understand.
“How so?”
“I mean—” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to collect my thoughts—“down here, it’s great, so many chairs with so many other chairs… you see the different personalities, you know? I mean, that one’s kind of—” I didn’t know the word—“well, silly almost, but in a good way—a comfortable way. And that one’s more nervous sort of, with those long spindly legs—”
“You have a good eye for furniture.”
“Well—” compliments threw me, I was never sure how to respond except to act like I hadn’t heard—“when they’re lined up together you see how they’re made. At the Barbours’—” I wasn’t sure how to explain it—“I don’t know, it’s more like those scenes with the taxidermy animals at the Natural History Museum.”
When he laughed, his air of gloom and anxiety evaporated; you could feel his good-nature, it radiated off him.
“No, I mean it,” I said, determined to plow on and make my point. “The way she has it set up, a table on its own with a light on it, and all the stuff arranged so you’re not supposed to touch it—it’s like those dioramas they place around the yak or whatever, to show its habitat. It’s nice, but I mean—” I gestured at the chair backs lined against the wall. “That one’s a harp, that one’s like a spoon, that one—” I imitated the sweep with my hand.