Objects of Our Affection : Uncovering My Family's Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time

Book by Tracy Lisa

Chapter One
The Beginning

The day we packed the house, i was in the living room sorting family pictures and papers when the movers came. One mover, to be precise: He was the advance guard, the packing man.

It was a beautiful October day in 1992, still warm but with an edge in the air. Fall had come to the mountains around the small Virginia town where I’d grown up, but the flame-colored ridges weren’t what I’d come for. I was wrestling with the contents of a chest of drawers where my mother had deposited a pile of family papers. There were genealogy charts, military commendations, fragments of biographies, letters from the War of 1812, a photocopy of a journal dating from the 1840s, and what seemed like dozens of little framed daguerreotypes of people whose identity was a complete mystery to me. All had to be sorted and packed, because when my sister, Jeanne, came later that week, we’d be helping our eighty-three-year-old mother move—not particularly willingly—to a retirement home from the house she’d occupied for forty years. It had been her parents’ house, then hers and Daddy’s.

She had been living alone for almost twenty-five years now, and people had recently started calling us with worrisome anecdotes and dire predictions, all of course veiled in polite concern, this being a small town where certain formalities still obtained. She was making unexplained withdrawals from her bank account. She would walk aimlessly, turning up at the church at unexpected times. Her driving was atrocious, had been for years.

Mother had told us herself that she really didn’t think she should be living alone, and for a while my nephew had lived at the house with her. We’d looked for live-in help without much success. There weren’t many options. I’d found only one candidate, a woman who didn’t drive and who smoked. We’re a small family, just Jeanne and me in our generation, and we were both living hundreds of miles away. What were we to do?

The only retirement home—we didn’t want a nursing home, just someplace safe where she would have help—was the old hotel, a relic of an earlier time, as the worn carpet and small, rather dark rooms reminded us when I went with her to look at it. She agreed to the corner room overlooking the street all too close to our house—her house—just a quick walk down to the corner, across the street, and down the alley. Acceded with teeth clenched, a gracious face, and the steely determination to fight again as soon as the opponent’s back was turned. We thought she was adjusting remarkably well to the inevitable. She fooled us.

The men of the family—on both sides, Mother’s and Daddy’s—had been high-ranking military officers, their wives gracious hostesses. The accumulated social power of that household, reflected in all its furnishings and memorabilia, made moving out quite a comedown. For Mother, leaving all that gentility behind must have seemed like an admission of weakness, a failure, a defeat. She was abandoning ship, and I think it broke her heart. But, as was typical of our true-blue military family with its Victorian ways, she didn’t say, and we didn’t ask, how she felt about it. She put on her stiffest upper lip and moved.

She would be dead within six months. But we didn’t know that then, of course. On this mid-October day, the move and all that would follow were still ahead of us, and I was on an archaeological dig, plowing through layers of family possessions we’d managed to ignore for decades, or in some cases had never seen before. And that’s when the man we would come to know as Roger arrived.

“Where would you like me to start?” he asked, surveying the living room I’d strewn with papers. Not here, I thought. The last thing I needed in the living room at this point was helping hands. I took him to the dining room and showed him the contents of the Hepplewhite cabinet that we used as a china closet, which I figured would keep him busy for a while, even with his fancy shrink-wrap.

But in less than an hour, he was back. “I’m finished with the china,” he said, looking pretty pleased with himself. “What would you like me to do next?”

I was still excavating the bowfront chest of drawers—a homely thing with an ashen-colored veneer and drawers that tended to jam. I was also probably irritated that this guy was interrupting me again already; I was on a short leash, with a demanding job and a teenage son six hours up the East Coast, and I had just a few days here to get as much packed as possible. Mother—who was in no real hurry to move anywhere—wasn’t helping. Now it was dawning on me that movers required supervision. What, they didn’t come with a floor plan of your house and telepathic powers?

I took Roger to the kitchen and opened the cabinets where the daily china lived: parts of a set of Noritake, badly faded from the dishwasher; all the glassware; the Italian faience creamers and sugar bowls; the remnants of blue-and-white Canton my grandmother had used for breakfast dishes, and we after her; the tea sets and coffee cups.

He looked a little crestfallen, but rallied and got on with some more shrink-wrapping. After about another hour, he reemerged, grim but triumphant. “All right,” he said evenly. “I’m done with the china. What’s next?”

Here he was again. I really wanted to get all these papers into a box I would recognize next time I saw it—in the storage bin or wherever—in case we needed it in a hurry. And I wanted to get it done before Mother came back from whatever errand she’d gone out on, so we wouldn’t have to discuss the whole business: the unwelcome move and the odious packing, much less the papers and photos and all the family history they might represent, which we definitely didn’t have time to go into right now. Yes, Roger would have to be kept occupied until I’d at least dispatched the contents of these drawers.

I led him to the basement, to the walk-in closet that had held my grandmother’s preserves. Now it was a repository for Christmas decorations, broken lamps, bric-a-brac, and glassware. In the middle of the center shelves stood stacks of plates. One hundred thirty rose medallion Canton luncheon plates, to be exact. I gestured to them apologetically. Roger shot me a dirty look.

“Right,” he muttered. I left him there and went back to the papers in the living room. If he thought we had a lot of stuff, well, he’d only had to deal so far with the china. It was quite a while before I saw him again, but meanwhile I had begun to wonder. Granted, our family had quite an assortment of china, from years, I supposed, of entertaining, to say nothing of inheriting from forebears. But what exactly were we doing with a hundred-some luncheon plates of any kind, much less Canton?

Chapter Two
The Canton Plates

The china, as much as anything, exemplifies the difficulty of dismissing the family furniture—or trying to. For me, it represents my grandmother Bess, the woman we called Granny.

Elizabeth “Bess” Egbert was born in 1872 into an Army family stationed at a remote outpost in California. Camp Independence, in Paiute territory at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, was far from the civilized world. In 1872, Thomas Edison had just earned $40,000—an astonishing sum—for improvements to the stock market’s ticker and was establishing his first real laboratory. A confederation of German states had stunned the world by trouncing France and invading Paris. But here in the Owens Valley of California’s high desert country, the earthshaking event was an 8.1 quake that tore a rift in the valley floor. Amazingly, it killed only a handful of people at the only settlement of any note in the area, Lone Pine, where they died in their beds under falling adobe bricks.

At Camp Independence, an Army post just up the road from Lone Pine, Capt. Harry Egbert and his wife, Nelly, were among those who shook in their beds that night but lived to tell the tale of how they’d escaped the quake. Nine months later, a few days after Christmas of that year, little Elizabeth—Bess, or Bessie, as they would call her—was born, the Egberts’ second child and their first daughter.

Bess would have little memory of the post or of the towering Sierra Nevada that loomed in the near distance. By the time she was six, her father had been transferred through at least seven assignments, including a trip to Washington escorting what his service papers describe simply as “an insane soldier,” and campaigns in Indian territory in Idaho. For longer postings, the family typically moved with him. It was probably with some road-weariness, then, that they arrived at Fort Verde, near the rich bottomland of Arizona’s aptly named Verde River. It was 1878, just before Bess’s sixth birthday. They might well have taken a steamboat up the Colorado River as far as Fort Yuma, a route favored by the Army. Nelly later recounted how they left Fort Yuma to cross the for-bidding Mojave Desert through Apache territory in Army ambulances— covered wagons with benches in the back that could convert into bunks— carrying all of their drinking water with them. They stayed for a full four years in Arizona, where Bess’s father—a Civil War veteran, and by now one of the Army’s more senior line officers—at one point served a term as the territory’s judge advocate.

In the course of dealing with the furniture after Mother died, I’d started looking for information to better understand who this woman, my grandmother, was. And when I did, I found Harry Egbert on the Web. Harry, it turned out, had led a sufficiently flamboyant life to show up more than once. Th...