Imagine, on your four-day vacation to Miami, you make your new boyfriend—your first after your marriage—drive two hours to Palm Beach just to go to a thrift shop you’ve heard about: The Church Mouse. Because you could be Marie Antoinette, who famously only wore anything once. You know intimately the pleasure of seeking, and the high of finding. The fantasy. The escape. The curating of self, and space. The transcendence of beauty. The joy of collecting…more silver boxes, or cloisonné vases, or embroidered pillowcases, or butterflies in frames. The, well, optimism.
Imagine it’s amazing.
Yards of cashmere. Bolts of toile. A leather library fit for a judge. Treasures posing provocatively behind glass. Chanel, Valentino, Lilly Pulitzer, St. John, Oscar de la Renta, The Row, Manolo Blahnik, Stubbs & Wootton, Gucci, Hermès, Cartier, Polo Ralph Lauren, you name it. Fat satin labels that read, Couture. Bergdorf Goodman. The childhood dollhouse of your dreams, even, the color of cake with cotton-candy-blue shutters.
Imagine you find an elegant snow-colored floor-length mohair evening coat that looks as if it hasn’t been worn since its creation in the 1960s, its rhinestone buttons, the size of Elizabeth’s Krupp Diamond, dazzling in the shop lights. Imagine you are very excited. But it is hot in Miami. So, it’s not until you take the coat home, several states north, that you find in its pocket a small card of undeniable quality from the Palm Beach Society of the Four Arts. It is a placement card embossed with the name of its former owner. The ink has faded. You lay a piece of paper over it and pencil a rubbing like Nancy Drew.
Imagine you Google the woman and read her obituary from a few months prior. It is perfect: full of tennis and travel, bridge games and painting, family, philanthropy. A Palm Beach native who loved to close out her late-night parties with a drumming session, a hobby she’d taken up in her seventies. A wife, who was, after the death of her husband of 40 years, companion to a man (a lawyer who loved flowers and opera) for two decades, until his death some 10 years ago. And imagine you think about this man’s name, and then about his initials. You look at the pristine crimson T. Anthony suitcase you made your boyfriend purchase at The Church Mouse in order to fly home the white mohair coat you bought; you look at its monogram and find it striking that it matches the initials of the man you just read about.
To be continued in PALMER Vol. 9. To read the full story, click here to purchase the issue.
