MELODIE BRYANT, a New York City composer, never wanted the portrait of her Uncle Ivins.
There were many things she did want, when her mother moved from an elegant 2,500-square-foot apartment in Los Angeles to a far smaller place in Manhattan, but plenty of others that she didn’t, though she ended up with them anyway: the mirrored Victorian vanity with tiny drawers that replaced a sturdy bureau with room for her socks, underwear and sweaters; the little armchair, mild as a timid 19th-century housemaid in a faded dress, that had survived the San Francisco earthquake but was too small to serve as a comfortable reading chair.
Once that was in her Chelsea apartment, “there was no room for a reading chair,” says Ms. Bryant, who is 59 and looks like the can-do, bandana-wearing women in World War II posters. “It’s like a Chinese puzzle in my house — you have to think three steps ahead.”
Then there was Uncle Ivins (who was actually a great-great-great-uncle, Ms. Bryant says).
“This guy has all the family traits,” Ms. Bryant says. “He’s got the big honker, he’s got the baby-fine hair. Nobody else wanted Ivins. I didn’t want him either. But I could not let him go to some estate sale. I took him home and I was very, very careful when I placed him in the truck. I didn’t want to pull some passive-aggressive move.”
Nonetheless, an accident occurred; the arm of a rocker ripped through the canvas.
“It cost me $3,000,” Ms. Bryant says. Why so much money on something she hated?
“He’s a relative,” Ms. Bryant says. “He’s family.”
Here is the problem with family furnishings: they are never simply stuff. As hard as it may be to dispose of a piece of furniture you bought with the fellow who turned out to be your ex-husband, it is far more difficult to get rid of a piece bequeathed to you by a member of a previous generation, which carries with it not only your memories, but his or hers as well.
Even today, when so many people favor simple, modern décor, turning your back on a grandmother’s tea set or ornate settee can feel like betrayal. Admit to your family you’re thinking of getting rid of such a piece and you’re likely to kick off a family opera, with crescendoing wails of “How could you?” Quite likely, you’ll be torturing yourself with the same question.
Ambivalence and guilt, it seems, are central elements of furniture inheritance, the anchoring pieces around which everything is organized, like the sofa in a living room. Barry Lubetkin, a psychologist and the director of the Institute for Behavior Therapy in Manhattan, has observed this in a number of patients living with inherited furniture they hate. It’s an unhealthy setup, in which people become “slaves to inanimate objects,” he says. “Once you’re defining it as something you can’t get rid of, you’re not in control of your life or your home.”
There are many reasons it happens, he adds, including simple nostalgia. But it is also often connected to a primal anxiety: the fear of disappointing one’s parents.
Sell the Armoire, Break Mom’s Heart
Bonnie Barrett Stretch, 67, a contributing editor to ARTnews magazine who lives in Brooklyn, felt burdened by pieces of her dead mother’s high-quality furniture.
“I felt responsible for them — my mother had taken such good care of them, so naturally I had to, or I wouldn’t be a good daughter,” she says. “I guess my relationship with the furniture was something like my relationship with her; I was never sure that I was good enough.”
Not that holding on to inherited things against your better judgment is always about guilt. For many people, holding on to the furnishings they grew up with creates a soothing sense of continuum — a connection that can become even more powerful after a death. Sometimes an inheritor will go so far as to recreate an original tableau from childhood.
Courtney Monroe, 42, a homemaker in Clayton, Del., has a massive mahogany sideboard in her dining room. On top of it are a silver tea set and silver candlesticks, set up in exactly the same way they were when they belonged to her grandmother and later her father, now both dead.
“I don’t even like the tea set,” Mrs. Monroe says, “but it goes with the sideboard, because that’s where it was when I grew up.”
Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/garden/26inheritance.html?8dpc
