Pottery Royalty

On my third day in East Liverpool, I walked into an antique store on a narrow street that climbed gently up from the Ohio River.  Its neighbors were a boarded-up auto repair shop and a Christian bookstore, open but deserted. The sidewalks were empty, with grass growing in the cracks.

Pottery crowded the antique store’s display window. I spotted a place setting of brightly colored Fiesta, a few chunky brown replicas of Rockingham jugs and spittoons, and one elaborately decorated Lotus Ware pitcher. That was the limit of my ceramics expertise. A bell rang faintly as I walked in.

Two women stood behind a sales counter, one on either side of a huge brass cash register, talking to each other. One of them, tiny and grey-haired, blinked and smiled at me. The other didn’t seem to notice my arrival. She was younger—forty, maybe, a couple of years older than me if so—tall and dark-haired, wearing a long black dress.

“You’d be surprised what you can find in some of these places,” she was saying. “Like those Harker ABC plates, the ones with the birds? I found those in a basement in the East End.”

The older woman murmured something.

“Illegal? Not if the house is abandoned, I don’t think. The only thing you have to be careful about is, sometimes there are junkies squatting in them.” A ripple of laughter ran through the last phrase, as if junkies in basements were just an amusing inconvenience. “I’ll take you some time if you like.”

“Thanks, probably not my thing.” The older woman moved out from behind the counter and crossed the room to ask me if I needed help finding anything.

“Just browsing,” I said automatically, and then out of idle curiosity—or at least that’s all I was aware of. “Maybe the Harker plates with the birds?”

“Of course.” If it bothered her that I’d been eavesdropping, she didn’t show it.

“Right over here. Minerva’s stall.”

I followed her to a nook at the back of the store, and she unlocked a glass-fronted cabinet.  There were three of the plates, delicate white china with a thin blue band around the rim, the letters of the alphabet arranged in a circle inside that, and in the center of each plate a brightly painted bird—a barn swallow, a bluebird, and a robin.

“Early twentieth century,” the woman said. “Beautiful, yes?”

“They are.”

A neatly hand-written card read: $100 each. Set, $250. “A little pricey,” the woman said. “You could talk to Minerva. She might come down a little.”

We both looked over at the sales counter, but the woman in the black dress was gone.

~

Three generations of my mother’s ancestors had lived in East Liverpool, back in its glory days as the Crockery City, when it produced half of America’s ceramics. The potteries were all gone now, nothing left but empty lots with foundations hidden in the grass, here and there a kiln or a chimney slowly falling to pieces. The downtown streets were lined with massive dark brick buildings from the early 1900s, banks and office buildings and hotels, most of them now empty. The factory owners and society ladies from my family tree were long dead, not to mention the potters and masons and carpenters who worked for them.

As for me, I was born and raised in California, and this was my first time in Ohio. I had no living relatives in town, or anyhow none that I knew about. I was staying in a Days Inn, kitty-corner to a graveyard where one of my great-great-grandfathers was buried. I’d spent a lot of time in graveyards since I arrived—in that one, in the much larger Riverview Cemetery, in tiny rural churchyards all over Columbiana County. I’d spent an afternoon in the city’s Carnegie library, unearthing stray references to various twigs of my family tree; toured a couple of 19th-century mansions; visited a Methodist church where a stained-glass window was dedicated to a distant cousin of mine who’d been killed in the Civil War.

Not far from the library, in a sprawling Beaux-Arts building that had once been the town post office, was the Museum of Ceramics. The docent, a tall, fair-haired woman, reminded me of a sixth-grade teacher I’d had a crush on. She led me through the cool, gently lit rooms, pointing out the high spots among the enormous variety of plates, jugs, bowls, teapots, rolling pins, doorknobs, and figurines inside the glass cases. Speaking so softly that I had trouble hearing her, she told me about the early potters, entrepreneurs who sold rough yellow ware from boats up and down the Ohio; the big industrial potteries—Harker & Sons, Homer Laughlin, Knowles Taylor & Knowles—that made East Liverpool a boom town after the Civil War; the artisans who created Lotus Ware, a line of porcelain as delicate and ornate as the finest English china. Some of this I vaguely knew, some I didn’t, but either way, the history had a weight now that I hadn’t expected.

The tour ended at a minuscule gift shop. Behind the counter stood Minerva, still in black, but this time jeans and a turtleneck sweater.

“You again,” she said.

“Me again. You remembered.” Which seemed odd, because I’d have said she hadn’t noticed me the day before. “Moonlighting?”

“Whatever it takes.” She looked at me sideways, off-kilter. Her face had the kind of lines that come more from expressiveness than from age. “Enjoy the tour?”

“I did. She knows her stuff.”

“Karla’s a gem. Her ex, on the other hand, should be in a lunatic asylum. Sorry, inappropriate.” She smiled, not at all apologetically. “Ada said you almost bought my Harker birds.”

“I thought about it. Not sure if the abandoned house provenance is a plus or a minus.”

She laughed. “Like I said, whatever it takes. Are you a collector?”

“Just a tourist.”

“Really? We don’t get a lot of those.”

“Maybe not exactly a tourist.” It shouldn’t have been a difficult question, but I still hadn’t answered it for myself.  If there was something I was looking for here, I didn’t know what it was. “One side of my family lived here back in the 1800s. I’ve always been curious.”

“Interesting. Potters?”

“Some of them. Factory owners, even. Some Bennetts. Some Harkers.”

“Ooh, you’re pottery royalty.” If she was mocking me, it was done gently enough. “Of course, I am too, if you go back far enough. There’s not much

“Sorry to interrupt...” Karla leaned into the gift shop doorway, smiling hesitantly at me. “Quick question, Minerva.”

I turned to go. Minerva scribbled a number on one of the museum’s business cards and handed it to me. “Just in case you change your mind about the birds.”

~

I didn’t change my mind about the birds, not then anyway, but I called her the next day. We had coffee and cherry pie at a dimly lit cafeteria that evening—the only place open in downtown East Liverpool at seven o’clock on a weeknight. In our back corner booth, I couldn’t tell if her dress was dark blue, dark grey, dark purple, or just black once again. Her features, too, had a shifting quality—sometimes smoothly curved, almost bland, sometimes tangled in shadows and contrasts.

On the surface, we had a lot in common. I taught history at San Francisco State; she had a graduate degree in art history from Northwestern. Our respective lists of favorite authors overlapped to an almost alarming degree—George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Balzac, Edith Wharton. Similar story with music and movies. But unlike most of the educated people I’d met in East Liverpool, she didn’t seem to be yearning for the sophistication of the coasts, and she seemed to take her city’s problems in stride.

“That’s a depressing neighborhood, for sure,” she said when I told her about my afternoon. I’d walked up and down the steep streets east of the downtown, looking for an address where my great-grandparents had lived. Most of the street signs were missing, and for every lovingly maintained old Victorian, there was one falling to pieces or boarded up. My great-grandparents’ address turned out to be an empty lot enclosed by a cyclone fence. “On the bright side, rents are low.”

I knew the broad strokes of the story: cheap imports and high production costs had killed the city’s potteries in the mid-twentieth century. The population had dropped by 50%. A freeway had taken much of the downtown and riverfront. In the 2000s, drugs—meth, heroin, fentanyl—had replaced alcohol as the coping mechanism of choice.

“But you’re still here,” I said.

“Born and bred in Madison Township. My people go way back in the Scotch Settlement. I didn’t move to town until I got married.”

I didn’t need to look at her finger to know she wasn’t married now. She had a brittle cheerfulness that spoke of intelligence and disillusionment.

Apparently, I was giving off a vibe of my own, because she said, “Never been married?”

“No,” I said. “Close, though. Twice.”

“It’s overrated. We had a big house, that was nice. But he was all about his work. He’s a prosecutor for the county. Which really put a crimp in my heroin use.”

At the time, I thought she was joking, and maybe she was. “That’s kind of the definition of incompatible,” I said.

“Incompatible is my middle name. You say you were close to getting married twice?”

“Once for sure. A long time ago—we were grad students. The other one, I don’t know, maybe we weren’t that close to it.” I still didn’t have a formula for talking about Emma.

“This was recently?”

“Three months ago.”

“You know,” Minerva said, “this was an odd place to choose if you were looking to cheer yourself up. Don’t West Coast people go to Hawaii or Cabo for that?”

Odd comment at best. But her bluntness, so unlike Emma’s chilly reserve, almost made me smile, and I found myself saying more about the trip than I had to anyone else. “It’s all kind of tangled up. I only met Emma because my great-aunt Grace died—they were friends. And Grace was from here. Not East Liverpool, but right up the road in Lisbon. Like I said yesterday, I was always curious about Ohio. But it was only after Grace died that I started to think about actually coming here.”

“Tangled up is right.” She seemed to be on the verge of asking another question, and I might have answered that one too, but then she was off in another direction. “I have to tell you, I almost said no when you called.”

“Understandable. I could totally be a stalker.”          

“It’s not that,” she said. “I was planning on doing some treasure hunting tonight. I didn’t really want to put it off just for coffee. But then I thought, two’s company, right?”

“By ‘treasure hunting’ you mean burglary?”

“Some people would look at it that way. I just have this feeling you’re not one of them.”

Was I? Maybe, maybe not. But I knew I didn’t want her to mistake good sense for a failure of nerve.

                                                                        ~

“The woman’s ninety-two,” Minerva said as we drove along a dark two-lane highway somewhere outside East Liverpool. “Her son was supposed to be taking care of her, but he OD’ed. So, they dragged her off to hospice. The house has been standing empty for months. The county’s going to take it for back taxes.”

She drove too fast, which wasn’t a surprise. The road was laid out in long doglegs between pastures and clumps of young trees, the lights of farmhouses here and there. As we came up a sharp rise I saw a cemetery on the left-hand side, tall ornate headstones and monuments sinister in the moonlight. Then, a small brick church.

“Yellow Creek Presbyterian.” She let the car slow. “Last I counted, I have ten direct ancestors buried there. MacIntoshes, Davidsons, McQueens—they all came here from around Inverness. One of them witnessed the battle of Culloden as a young boy.”

“That’s a lot of history.”

“Like I always say—if you don’t like your future, live in your past.”

                                                                        ~

The house was at the end of a long gravel driveway. Two rusted-out cars stood in long grass. A sheet of plywood with the outline of a cat spray-painted on it covered the front doorway. Minerva pushed it aside with a nudge from a crowbar. The actual door was missing.

We might not be the first people to visit here,” she said.

Inside, it smelled of pine needles and dead mice. She switched on a flashlight and swept its beam around a living room crowded with threadbare couches and armchairs. A withered Christmas tree stood in one corner, with a litter of smashed ornaments around it.

“Well, it’s only April,” I said. “If you really love Christmas…”

“Yeah. Cozy.” She glided around the room, stroking the fabric on the couches, getting down on hands and knees to shine her flashlight on the underside of a table. “Some of these were nice pieces once. Maybe I should have brought my truck. Well, no matter. Let’s see what’s in the kitchen.”

I followed her. She paused and looked up. A sprig of plastic mistletoe dangled there in the doorway. A couple of seconds went by, and as she turned away again, I realized I’d been meant to kiss her.

“No shortage of crappy pottery here,” she said. The sink and counters were crowded with dirty dishes. Grease and mold and unidentifiable chunks of food had fossilized on a sad mix of chipped and faded crockery. “Maybe there’s something better in the cupboards.”

Pots and pans; broken coffee machines; canned food with faded labels, tuna and beef stew and chili; a pile of paper grocery bags clumped together by moisture; more cheap plates and bowls; a five-pound bag of birdseed; and so on.

“This is something.” She lifted out a blue and green teapot with a spray of flowers painted on the side, then turned it upside down. “KTK. 1910 or so. Tiny chip on the handle, but very nice.”

I carried it out to the car and set it carefully on the back seat. By the time I got back to the kitchen, she was slamming the door of the last cupboard. “Disappointing. I guess we can try the rest of the house.”

As we went back through the doorway to the living room, she stopped under the mistletoe again, turning to face me. This time, I put my hands on her upper arms and kissed her lightly. Then we stood there a few inches apart in a tangle of shadows from her flashlight.

“We’re still here,” she said. “How many kisses is that thing good for?”

I kissed her again, still lightly, but neither of us pulled back this time. Her breath was minty, with a trace of smoke.

“Hello?” A faint voice from the back of the house. “Trevor?”

“Holy fuck.” Minerva twisted out of my grasp and pointed her flashlight into the kitchen. There was another doorway back there, a short stretch of hallway visible.

“Trevor?” The voice was high-pitched but weak.

“Fuck, it’s her.” Minerva put a hand over her eyes.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.

“Trevor’s the son. The one who OD’d. It must have been bullshit about the hospice. Or they brought her back.”

“Let’s go,” I said again. “We were never here.”

“My mother knew this woman.”

“Then why are we breaking into her house?”

She ignored that. “Go wait in the car. I’ve got to check on her.”

I didn’t answer, just followed her back through the kitchen into the hallway. Closed door on the right, closed door on the left, open door on the left—Minerva’s flashlight picked out crumpled balls of Kleenex on the floor, a dresser littered with medicine bottles, a brass bedstead, a tangle of quilts and blankets. At one end of the pile was a withered face under a chaos of white hair. A smell like rancid hamburger hung in the air.

Her eyes were open, but she didn’t look at us. “Cold,” she croaked.

“Mrs. Fraser, it’s me, Minerva Forbes.”

“Cold.”

“See if you can find another blanket?” Minerva looked back at me. “Mrs. Fraser, I’m just going to check your vitals.”

I asked Minerva later if she’d ever been a nurse, and she told me it was just a persona she’d learned to assume. To people who were sick or drugged or addled, it was familiar, it was comforting, and they didn’t fight it. Whatever—I was happy enough to leave the stench of that room and search for blankets. When I came back with a ragged blue and white quilt, Minerva was already dialing 911.

~

“Not quite the excursion I had in mind,” she said as we drove away an hour later.

“Same here.”

“But you’ll admit it’s a lovely little teapot.” She smiled at me as though we hadn’t watched two EMTs haul Mrs. Fraser out to their ambulance.

“Days if not hours,” one of the EMTs had said to Minerva.

“I don’t doubt it,” she’d answered. “But she won’t be alone, at least.”

The EMT had shrugged at that.

“Mind if we stop at Yellow Creek?” she said now. “I want to show you something.”

“Your ten ancestors?”

“We’ll say hi as we walk past. But no, this is something else.”

She slowed as we came to the church, a squat red brick building with tall arched windows, then pulled to the shoulder just past it. The churchyard, a lawn studded with tombstones—pillars, slabs, tablets, obelisks—sloped up from the road in a gentle knoll.

She led me through the forest of stones, pausing here and there to read a name aloud. “Alexander McBean, Isobel McBean… Ann McQueen… Jennet McIntosh…”

 The graves nearest the road were the oldest, their inscriptions so worn I couldn’t read them. Farther up the slope, the stones were clean and sharp-edged, the dates within the last century. Past the top of the knoll, with the church itself well behind us now, an almost empty stretch of lawn ran down to a line of bare trees. Half a dozen stray markers bounced random scraps of moonlight up at us.

“Running out of room,” Minerva said. “All the rest of this space is spoken for.”

“Quite a success story if you look at it a certain way.”

“Only it’s a very fucked-up way?” She laughed. “My ex got the house and the Volvo. I got the Porsche and the cemetery plots. We’ll see who comes out ahead in the end.” She looked back at the church, drew a line in the air with her hand, then took half a dozen steps toward the trees. “My plots are right about here.” She beckoned me over, and I went.

“I was thinking pottery was going to be the theme tonight,” I said. “Instead, it’s dead people?”

“Sorry, just worked out that way. Mrs. Fraser kind of derailed us.”

“She did.”

“And I left the mistletoe behind. Is that a problem?” She laid a hand on my hip.

I pulled her close to me, one hand on each of her shoulders, and looked into her eyes from a few inches away. The irises were a smoky grey-green, I knew that, but they seemed entirely clear with the moon shining on them. Then my eyes closed as her face tilted up to mine and we kissed. Accidentally or otherwise, she tripped me. We fell onto the grass, with her on top.

I’d been wanting this, if not from the moment I first saw her, then at least from the moment she said you again in the museum. But I had expected it to happen in my room at the Days Inn, or maybe in some dark cluttered space, full of Lotus Ware and Impressionist reproductions, that she called home. Still, there was precious little chance of any living people seeing or hearing us, and I didn’t feel the least bit self-conscious as my hands found their way inside her dress.

She stayed on top as we made love. No surprise there. She was loud, and she wasn’t shy about telling me what she liked and what she didn’t. I did my best to follow instructions. She was so self-assured that there were none of those awkward first-time misunderstandings. It didn’t take long for us to thrash our way to satisfied torpor.

It was chilly—a spring night in eastern Ohio—and as we lay there with her sprawled on top of me, I felt her shiver.

“You OK?” I asked. “Not too cold?”

“I’m fine. You?”

“Good.”

“I would hope so,” she said.

“But being an academic, I have to ask about the symbolism.”

“Of fucking in a cemetery? I don’t know. Awful things will happen, but good ones will too? I think I stole that from some Presbyterian minister.”

“Appropriate, then.” I looked back toward the church.

“Or maybe from Rosanne Cash.”

I could see other kinds of symbolism too, something about the ancestors, about the ex; but maybe, I thought, it was better not to go there.

Silence for a bit, except for the creaking songs of frogs.

“Question for you,” she said.  

“Sure.” I closed my eyes.

“I’m glad you’re here . . . but why are you here? Not here here,” she said, patting the lawn in front of us,“but here in Columbiana County. I mean, sure, great-great-grandparents, pottery royalty, great-aunt Grace, you’ve told me all that. But what’s the point?”

“It’s a good question,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have a good answer. Curiosity. Distraction, maybe.”

“Distraction from what?”

“Everything. Work, breakup, getting old. The rest of my family—my mother, my sisters—they moved out east after my father died. Boston. They couldn’t care less about this, about the history. But I feel like these are roots I should know about.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Minerva said, “but the feeling I get is that you’re someone who’s never really been broken. True?”

Not a standard post-coital question, not in my experience anyhow, but I answered anyhow. “True, I guess. What would be the wrong way of taking it?”

“Some people might think it was a way of saying that you’ve missed something. And I’m not saying that.”

“You’ve been there, it sounds like.”

“I have, and it was awful. But it’s part of me now. And it just strikes me that maybe you’re a little too curious about it. That it has a kind of appeal for you.”

“Well, you have a kind of appeal for me. I don’t think it’s about anyone being broken or not.”

“No?”

“Granted, we’re different.”

“And you’re thinking maybe I’d be a good change of pace from what’s-her-name?”

“Emma,” I said softly. “No, it’s not that.”

Apparently, I didn’t sound convincing.         

“No is right,” Minerva said. “That’s not going to work.  I’m kind of like East Liverpool. Interesting place to visit, lots of history, classic architecture if I say so myself . . . but you wouldn’t want to live there. It’s a little run down, weather too extreme, living in the past, substance abuse issues . . . It’s sort of a grim picture.”

I didn’t think she wanted a direct answer to that. “Ever been to California?” I asked.

“No. Never.” She said it the way most people I know would say they’ve never been to East Liverpool.

“Like you said, kind of grim here—"

“It is. And not likely to change.”

“I was going to say, not much grim about you, though.”

“Please.” She rolled off me, and we lay side by side in the grass, our shoulders touching.  “I should try and fix you up with Karla. Lovely person—much more your speed. How long are you staying?”

“My flight out is tomorrow.”

“Well, so much for that idea. Nice knowing you, though.”

The delivery was comic, but after ten seconds of silence, I realized that the message wasn’t.

“That’s it?” I said. “Not going to work, bye?”

She seemed surprised that I was surprised. “What else?”

“I don’t know.” I was, apparently, supposed to have thought this through. “Something.”

“Wait till you’ve been back in San Francisco a few days. You’ll change your mind.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Yeah, well, you can text me if you don’t. But you will.”

~

Three years later, I used the frequent flyer miles that I’d saved all through the pandemic to book a flight to Pittsburgh. As the plane dropped out of the clouds, I saw the aimless curves of the Ohio, a smudge of grey that might have been East Liverpool, the orange and red and yellow patchwork of West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. At the airport, they gave me a Ford Taurus that smelled of weed, and in half an hour I was back in the antique shop where I’d first seen Minerva.

“Try the library.” Ada, the tiny grey-haired woman I’d briefly met before, was alone behind the counter. “She works there now. Archivist.”

“Right.” I knew this—Minerva and I had kept track of each other, warily at first but comfortably enough in the end, by email and text and the occasional phone call. I could easily have called or texted her when I got to town, but somehow I’d just hoped she’d be here.

“I remember you,” Ada said. “Been a while.”

“It has.”

“You bought her Harker birds.” She smiled.

“Right again.” The morning after my night with Minerva in the graveyard, I’d bought the plates from Ada on my way out of town.

“How’ve you been?”

“I’m OK,” I said. It hadn’t been the best three years. The pandemic hadn’t hit me hard, but my mother had died of an aneurysm; I’d failed to get tenure at SF State and worked in a bookstore now; I’d gotten back together with Emma only to be dumped by her all over again. “Here for the wedding.” 

“Social event of the season,” she said with a smile that hung somewhere between mischievous and mocking. “Minerva and Karla—who’d have thunk it?”

“No one,” I said as I headed for the door. “Probably not even them.”

~

If much of East Liverpool seemed to be falling apart, that certainly wasn’t true of its library—the first Carnegie library in Ohio, built in 1900, a massive fortress-like building in brown brick, surmounted by a hexagonal tower and a red tile dome. In the lobby, an island in time with its gleaming marble wainscoting and mosaic floor, I found Minerva waiting as if she’d known I was about to arrive.

She threw her arms around me; we touched cheeks.  “I guess this is really happening, if you came all the way from San Francisco.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Glad it’s legal even here.”

“Until the Supreme Court gets around to repealing Obergefell. When that happens, we might end up in California after all.” She led me past the circulation desk and up a flight of stairs to an office with photos of nineteenth-century East Liverpool eminences on the wall and a shelf of pottery including Mrs. Fraser’s KTK teapot. “No, seriously. People in town are either OK with it, or they don’t give a shit. Most of them gave up on me a long time ago.”

“Formula for a perfect wedding.”

“I hope so. How are you?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Glad to be back in my future hometown.” This was a running joke between us, that eventually I’d move to East Liverpool, but not as much of a joke as it had been originally.

“Did I tell you there’s a 1930s bungalow for rent down the street from us? We could be neighbors. Probably half what you’re paying now.”

“More than likely. Well, I’m around for a few days. I’ll take a look.”

“If you need something to sweeten the deal, I can let you have my plots at Yellow Creek for next to nothing. Karla thinks they’re bad karma since they came from my divorce.”

“Might be bad karma for me too,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“I can’t see why.”

A little late, I realized I shouldn’t have said it. “Not like either of us believes in karma anyway.”

She paused to consider that.

There was a barely audible knock on the door.

“Come in!” Minerva shouted.

The door opened a few inches. Karla looked in, smiling hesitantly, and I knew then who it was Minerva had been waiting for in the lobby.

She came in, did a double take, grabbed both my arms but didn’t hug me.

“Congratulations,” I said.

She murmured a thank you and smiled so brightly it made Minerva laugh.

The three of us made small talk for a few minutes, but with the wedding less than 48 hours away, they had a lot of logistics to go over. I didn’t want to get in the way. We made plans to have a drink together later, and I walked out of the library and down to the river.

At the foot of Broadway, there’s a small park, with a pier, a rocky stretch of beach, and raised wooden decks looking out across the water. Doubtless in the past steamboats and barges had stopped here to take on shipments of crockery, and doubtless Minerva or Karla could give me the details if I asked.

I sat on a picnic table and watched a flock of Canada geese paddle downstream. Boats were moored on the far shore, and beyond that rose the forested hills of West Virginia. A broad stretch of water, steep hills, streets lined with Victorians and Queen Annes . . . all that was familiar. It was not that San Francisco had stopped feeling like home, but it had stopped feeling like my only home.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.