drilled certain manners into me. At the heart of them was the erasure of one’s own leanings wherever another held in high regard was concerned.
Just as the children of a sea captain instinctively understand the sea, Yoav and Leah had a natural sense for furniture, for its origins, age, and worth, and a sensitivity to its peculiar beauty. Not that they made much use of this gift, or were so persuaded to treat such furniture with special care. They simply took note of it, as one might remark on a nice view, and carried on doing whatever they had been doing, exactly as they pleased. I began to learn from their casual observations. Wanting to be more like them, I made a point of asking Yoav questions about the various pieces that came in and out of the house. He answered in a disinterested way, without looking up from whatever it was he was doing. Once I asked him if he ever felt there was anything sad about furniture left behind after the lives it serviced had scattered or disintegrated, all of those objects that had no power of memory themselves, just standing and gathering dust. But he only shrugged and chose not to answer. No matter how much I came to know, I could never master the grace and ease with which Yoav and Leah moved among all of those antiques, nor their strange combination of sensitivity and indifference.
Growing up in New York, I had never gone without, but my family wasn’t rich either. As I child I’d always had the feeling that what we did have couldn’t be relied on and might crumble from under us at any moment, as if we lived in an adobe house built in the wrong climate. I sometimes overheard my parents discussing whether or not they should sell two Moses Soyer paintings that hung in the hallway. They were moody, foreboding paintings that spooked me in the dark, but the idea of my parents being forced to part with them for money worried me. Had I known that the likes of George Weisz existed he would have haunted my sleep, as would the idea of the family furniture being carted off one piece at a time. In reality, we lived in an apartment in a white brick building on York Avenue that my grandparents had helped my parents to buy, but we always shopped for clothes at discount stores, and I was often scolded for forgetting to turn off the lights because of the price of electricity. Once I overheard my father yelling at my mother that every time she flushed the toilet it was a dollar down the drain. After that, I acquired the habit of letting waste collect in the bowl over the course of the day until it reached a critical mass. When my mother’s threats prevented this, I trained myself to hold it for as long as possible. If I had an accident, I bore my humiliation and my mother’s anger with thoughts of the money I’d saved my parents. All the same, I could never quite work out the incongruity between the wide, murky East River that ran endlessly outside our window and the preciousness of the water in the toilet.
What furniture we did have was generally of high quality, including some antiques bestowed on us by my grandfather. The surfaces of these were fitted with pieces of glass that rested on clear rubber circles placed at each corner. Even so, I was not to rest my glass on them or play too close. These valuable things produced in us a feeling of intimidation. We knew that no matter how far we got in life, we would never really be meant for such fineness, that the few expensive antiques we did have had fallen to us from a higher life and now condescended to live among us. We were always afraid that we would inflict some damage on them, and so I was raised to move carefully around the furniture, not so much to live with it as to live alongside it, at a respectful distance. When I first began to spend time in Belsize Park it made me queasy to see how carelessly Yoav and Leah treated the furniture that passed through their house, which constituted their father’s, and their own, livelihood. They rested their bare feet and glasses of wine on Biedermeier coffee tables, left fingerprints on the vitrines, napped on the settees, ate off