A woman polishes a silver tea service at the Silverwork Exhibition at the Goldsmith's Hall in London on June 29, 1951.Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Katherine Ashenburg’s latest novel is Margaret’s New Look.
Tastes change, and for years, I have said jokingly that no one under the age of 30 should be allowed to name a child or choose a silver pattern. I did both, but it’s the second part that’s on my mind now. More than a half century after choosing a pattern, and at least 30 years after I fell out of love with it, I have finally sold my silver.
Although my daughters consider it a bizarre custom, about as useful as assembling a collection of horse-drawn carriages, when I married in the mid-sixties it was usual for a middle-class bride to choose a silver pattern. My mother’s silver, in a florid, old-fashioned design, came out for formal occasions like birthdays, graduations, Christmas and Thanksgiving. Most of the year we ate with stainless steel flatware, and the silver lived muffled in a wooden box lined with a magical maroon flannel believed to inhibit tarnishing.
My mother influenced me less in my teenage years than Seventeen magazine, which I studied every month as the omniscient guide to beauty, fashion, popularity and my future as a wife. It was the ads rather than the articles that urged me to feather my marital nest, and by the sixties the ads were increasingly at variance with a broadminded editorial stance that included articles about politics, educational issues and the necessity of being your own person. While Seventeen discouraged marriage for teenagers, the ads for dishes, crystal, engagement rings (“the perfect symbol for the love you share”) and silver promoted early marriage and the possessions that made playing house even more irresistible.
The symbolic centre of all this future planning, designed to hold your goods and chattels as they accumulated, was a hope chest by Lane. I never wanted a hope chest, but I pored over Lane’s full-page, colour ads, occasionally whimsical or witty. A likeable example from 1963 shows a chic young woman apparently camping out in her walnut chest, crowded between a mixer, a toaster and a lamp. Holding a rolled-up rug, her fiancé balances a leg on the chest and leans toward her, while she pours him a cup of coffee from a tall Scandinavian-looking coffee pot. The copy promises, “When he gives you a Lane Sweetheart Chest to fill, you know he’s ready for marriage, for sharing a home, for helping you pick out the tables, bedroom and dining room furniture you’ll want by Lane.” I had a sixth sense that my fiancé, a graduate student in physics, was not going to throw himself into home décor but I enjoyed the fantasy of happily-ever-after-with-stuff.
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The only stuff I gathered in the end was my parents’ wedding present of eight place settings of sterling silver. I chose the Royal Danish pattern because it was modern but not too modern, the simple shaft ending in a double scroll. The knives in particular had a satisfying, brawny heft. Brought out by International Sterling in 1939, it was a knock-off, lighter and more American, of Georg Jensen’s Danish Acorn pattern from 1915.
Like Seventeen with its mixture of progressive editorial content and traditional-minded ads, I too was Janus-faced. Looking backward, I expected to live out the 1950s dream of the perfect wife and mother, happily cleaning and cooking, including the occasional silver-studded dinner party. Looking forward, I started a PhD in English three months after the wedding. It was a hinge moment for women, but I thought I could have both sides. Not surprisingly, things didn’t go according to plan.
I honestly cannot remember which came first – the end of my marriage or the end of my liking Royal Danish. The latter was gradual and undramatic, but by my 40s I had begun buying silver-plated fiddle-back forks in flea markets and mixing them with African spoons made of wood and shells. The eclectic table felt more like me, even for special events, and the Royal Danish lay sleeping in its sacramental box.
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Once my daughters grew up and categorically refused to take an interest in sterling, I muttered for years about selling it but did nothing. Then, within the last year, the price of silver rose more than 200 per cent, a fact that escaped me until I was alerted by a friend. I’m always late to the party, so by the time I was ready to act, the price had started dropping again. In spite of advice to the contrary, I didn’t want to wait until it began to rise again, if it ever did: I knew it was now or never.
In the days that followed, I searched out Toronto businesses that bought silver, became familiar with the current price (which could change hourly) of a gram of silver and fought down feelings of anxiety and guilt. I felt sure that I would be cheated ignominiously in whatever hole and corner shop I chose for this unsavoury transaction. And why did the words, “thirty pieces of silver,” the price Judas accepted for his betrayal of Jesus, keep running in my head?
The night before I planned to sell, I dumped the silver into a plastic bag. Teaspoons and salad forks mingled promiscuously with perforated serving spoons and butter spreaders. It was sad to see it robbed of its dignity and I had the urge to apologize to it. I knew, but I hoped the silver did not know, that it would be melted down with no thought of its restrained elegance or semi-Danish origins. I only kept one piece, a robust cake server – partly for old time’s sake, and partly because I didn’t have one.
This cake knife is the lone remaining piece kept by author Katherine Ashenburg from set of sterling silver flatware.Katherine Ashenburg
But I still had work to do. Not having a scale that measured grams, I put the plastic bag on my Ikea bathroom scale, where it measured something between eight and nine pounds. When I changed that into grams and multiplied it by the last available rate, my eyes widened at the sum.
As it turned out, the den of iniquity I feared turned out to be a brightly lit, friendly shop in the heart of affluent Yorkville. The woman who dealt with my silver offered coffee and we chatted while she took one piece of each type – soup spoon, dinner fork – and put it in a small machine like a microwave that assessed its purity. The only pieces that failed the sterling test were my favourites, the chunky dinner knives. To give their handles the necessary strength, a steel rod was surrounded with porcelain, then covered with silver plate. This considerably diminished my dreams of avarice, but the remainder was still a healthy four-figure number.
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In spite of the money, I feel a tinge of melancholy. I’m trying not to think too much about my late parents and their characteristically generous gift. They were pragmatic and I’m fairly confident I could explain the sale to them, but I’m glad I don’t have to. I’m going to give half the proceeds to a women’s shelter and keep the other half as their last gift to me. Mom and Dad, thank you again.
It’s melodramatic to see this as the last nail in the marital coffin, and I am decades past mourning my marriage. Maybe it’s really about the death of the 1950s ideal in which my mother’s life, centred on home and family, was respected and honoured. Maybe it’s even more about the end of my 1960s hybrid dream of having absorbing work of my own along with a side hustle as a domestic goddess. An absurdly challenging dream, but one with undeniable power.
Now all I have to do is find someone who wants a wooden box lined with maroon flannel.