Every so often, my mother would venture downtown of the city I grew up in to shop in one of the major department stores for clothes and other items the family needed that could not be found elsewhere. I usually went along, since my presence was needed to try on clothes and help carry parcels. It was a precisely choreographed ritual: shopping first, then lunch at the store’s paddle wheel-themed restaurant, then a tour of the furniture department. Until I grew “too old,” (translation became a teenager) traipsing beside her looking at furnishings was my favorite mother-daughter outing.
Don’t laugh. She made it fun. She had great style and fashion sense. She’d share little comments about what she liked and didn’t like. She had sense of humor I didn’t appreciate until much later in life, but on these excursions, that is what I remember the most—laughing with my mom against a backdrop of bedroom, living room and dining room furniture groupings.
It was on just such an excursion that I fell in love. We had worked our way through the adult bedroom section and had turned a corner into the children’s area and there it was. My mother, who erroneously thought she still had my attention, continued chatting. On display was a complete French Provincial bedroom set in a creamy white finish with gold edging: a twin four poster bed with a pink, white and gold canopy, two nightstands, a double dresser, a chest of drawers, a writing desk with matching chair and a seat cushion in the same pattern as the canopy and a toy box/padded bench in pebbled white and gold material. I wanted it—all of it—the whole thing. It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen.
Mother had looked at the display and had already moved on. When she realized that I had grown roots and wasn’t budging, she backtracked. Until now, the largest thing I had ever asked for was a bike. After I had stated my request, she laughed…gently and then reminded me that: a) you’d need a very large room to fit all of the pieces on display into one place; b) I had a sister; and c) I shared a room with aforementioned sister.
I didn’t care. I wanted what I had seen. It was so beautiful I just knew that if I had a room that looked like that, it would change my life. I would be a different person; the world would be a better place.
With the single-minded intensity children possess at that age (I was nine), I embarked on a campaign of persuasion—the
Christmas Eve arrived. At bedtime, I was told that I had to sleep on the spare cot in my parents’ room since my sister seemed to be running a slight fever and my mother didn’t want me to getting sick too. I didn’t think anything of it—who can you trust if you can’t trust your mother?
On Christmas Day, before any presents were opened, it became quite clear to me that none of them were big enough to hold an entire bedroom suite, French Provincial or otherwise. And although, technically I hadn’t got what I most wanted, I received some pretty neat things. I didn’t say a word about canopy beds. When the living room had been tidied up, I was sent off to my room to get ready to go to my grandmother’s house.
I opened the bedroom door. And screamed. In the place of my old bed was a white four poster bed. No accompanying pieces of furniture; no canopy; no gold edging. I’m a fast learner—I asked for A and got B. End of story. Still, it was a bed of my own and in its own right, it was pretty impressive. It was Victorian, had pineapple tops, turned posts and bun feet. Actually, it was quite beautiful and comfortable. But secretly I harbored an unspoken grudge.
I grew up, I moved out, I moved on, but the bed always followed me. Over the course of several years, it became harder to reconcile a twin size white bed in a full grown woman’s bedroom. When I voiced this opinion to my mother, she said I could always have it restored to its original color. What? Its original color was white. Wasn’t it?
And that’s when the real story of the four poster bed was revealed. At nine, it never occurred to me that my parents simply didn’t have the money for a new bedroom set. They did the next best thing. They found a second hand four poster through a friend of a friend, whose mother was moving out of the home she had shared with her husband and into a small apartment. My bed had been brought from the Old Country by the senior woman’s parents, and my father told me, by his reckoning, must be just over a hundred years old. Made of solid mahogany, my father also mentioned that it broke his heart when he painted it white.
Eventually though, I did take my mother’s suggestion and had it stripped and restored to its original color, a golden coffee color with “light” in it. I had it professionally done and the restorer, after returning it to me in its refinished glory, offered me a great deal of money for it.
At last! I could get my revenge on this Victorian interpretation of a French Provincial dream. But I just couldn’t do it. The four poster bed, in some strange way, was still a connection, after all these years, to my mother, to her ingenuity, creativity and sense of humor. And that, I just couldn’t part with.
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