between my mother's town house in Pennsylvania and the warehouse of the dealer in New York who had just purchased it.
My mother had recently died, my father had passed away years earlier, and my three sisters and I had just sold the table. But I was having issues separating from the piece that my parents, in a burst of optimism, had commissioned more than four decades before.
It was the spring of 1967. They were young and adventurous, two Brooklyn-born, Syracuse-educated liberals who had moved into a 1920s house on the outskirts of Philadelphia because my father, an industrial designer, had a job nearby. But my parents never really fit the suburban mold. They steered our red-and-white VW minibus to art galleries and folk concerts, and Sunday mornings my siblings and I raked leaves while our neighborhood pals went to church in patent-leather Mary Janes.
At some point my parents heard about George Nakashima, a Japanese-American architect who had been interned during World War II and had set up a studio in New Hope, Pa., where he made furniture that celebrated the natural beauty of wood. They made a pilgrimage to ask him to build us a table.
With Mr. Nakashima, they picked out a vividly grained piece of American walnut from the raw slabs of wood lined up in his workshop like giant pieces of toast. They watched as he sketched out a table whose top would consist of two book-matched planks with undulating edges, the pieces held together with three rosewood butterfly joints.
My parents would keep the six-by-eight-inch scrap of paper in their safe deposit box. The table itself — once Mr. Nakashima had completed it and my parents had paid him $550, an extravagant sum for them at the time — became the centerpiece of our home.
Other houses in the neighborhood tended toward Lemon Pledged colonial reproductions. But our table went with our Hans Wegner lounge chair and ebony African figurines; architectural etchings by my father's father, a W.P.A. artist; and Kathe Kollwitz's lithograph of the 16th-century German peasant uprising, spears raised in the air. As a child, I envied the nondescript décor (and cushy chairs) of my friends' homes. But I now realize that my parents' design choices were their way of carving out an alternative universe in a place they didn't quite belong.
Both were Jewish, neither religious. If my father worshiped anyone, it was Mr. Nakashima — never referred to in our house as George, as dealers do today. And he cared for our table in a way that seemed like a ritual of devotion. Periodically, he would remove the woven place mats that protected it from mealtime spatters, tipping a tall cylindrical container of oil onto it. Then, with a clean rag, he would anoint the wood, sweeping his arm back and forth. The table, still so natural looking, still so much a tree, drank it up like a living thing.
It was at this table that we gathered to eat all our meals and slice into birthday cakes. It was at this table that my father pounded his fist in frustration with a career that he ultimately found unfulfilling and a marriage that was coming apart.
And it was at this table, in the town house my mother moved to after the divorce and the sale of the family home, that my sisters and I gathered to regroup after her death. Here we mourned, planned her memorial, sorted through her finances and discussed what to do with her possessions.
There was an abundance of art and Danish Modern furniture, once again trendy. And there were a number of pieces by Nakashima, whose work had gained widespread recognition with an American Craft Museum retrospective in 1989, a year before his death. My mother had acquired four Nakashima chairs to go around the table, plus a Nakashima bench, ottoman and rocker, all of which she had saved for out of her schoolteacher's salary.
It would have been nice if one of us could have kept it all, or at least the table my siblings and I had grown up around. But we had to empty her place of valuables so we could paint and put it on the market. Some members of the family needed immediate cash. One sister is more into traditional decorating.
I like modern design. But my husband and I live with our children in a New York apartment and already had furniture from my childhood home. And the Nakashima table was too big — 72 by 56 inches — to slip into a fully furnished room.
Besides, my mother had contemplated selling the furniture herself, in the last year of her life, to save my sisters and me the trouble after she was gone.
I called two dealers who specialized in Nakashima furniture, and both agreed to take a look. I had no qualms when the first carried off the ottoman and the second the bench, purchases my mother had made after my sisters and I had left home. The dealers passed on the rocker, completed after Mr. Nakashima's death and therefore not signed by him, but they would gladly have taken the dining chairs, which they deemed very salable.
The table was a trickier proposition. The dealers admired the piece, but worried it was too wide for most dining rooms. It might languish in inventory for years, they told me, before the right buyer came along. Their offers were so far below what my mother had thought it was worth that it was easy for me to decline. When they left, I had two checks in hand, and my heart was still light.
But over the next couple of months, the table weighed on my mind. It seemed wrong to sell a piece that felt like a member of the family, only to have it end up in a storeroom until it was packed off to some decorator's client in, say, South Korea, where Nakashima, I had learned, was suddenly hot. My hope was that we would not only find the table a buyer, we'd find it a loving home.
Briefly, I thought we had found such a home. A friend who is a modernism dealer introduced me to a gentle-voiced collector with a wife and two young children. He loved the story of my parents' commissioning the table, the little sketch. His offer was slightly lower than what dealers might ultimately have paid, but I thought my mother would have liked the idea of the table going to a nice family.
In the end, though, the sale fell through; the collector wanted a table even larger than ours. So when the modernism dealer decided he was interested in the table and chairs (he had a client ready to buy the chairs), we let the set go.
When the shipper finally arrived, he pronounced the table, which I had come to think of as monumental, "light." He wrapped it, flipped it on its side and slid it to the doorway. The table was too wide to fit inside his van, so with the help of a neighbor he heaved it onto the roof. In the last rushed moments, I handed the cherished sketch to him before he drove off.
I tried to get used to the idea of not knowing the end of the table's story. But idly poking around online one day, I clicked on a couple of links and chanced on the Web site of a Chicago auction house where, astonishingly, the table was listed for sale. (I knew it was ours because our name and hometown were given under "Provenance.")
I suppressed the urge to fly out for the auction. Instead, the day of the sale I lurked online, watching the streamed proceedings from my laptop. The auctioneer, standing before a screen on which a photo of the table appeared, opened the bidding at $14,000.
No one made an offer. I have no idea where my dealer friend — or whoever owned the table at that point — took it next.
I could have called the auction house to try to chase after the piece. But I felt I had dithered over the table long enough. It was time to let go.
The table is just a couple of planks of wood on a pedestal that I have freighted with significance beyond reason. For me, it represents my plucky parents and the golden age of my childhood, when my mother and father were still together and all six of us were under one roof.
Above all, it represents my mother, who lived with it longer than any of us. Just as the table grounded our family, my mother grounded me. Giving up the table has been so hard because it's been so hard giving up my mother.
Still, it would be nice to see it one more time, and to know it is in good hands. Next time I sell a Nakashima table, I'm adding a visitation clause.
NYT
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