An ISFP woman’s refusal comes with nothing underneath it to argue against, and from her it does not land as a position at all — it lands as feeling. Organizations argue with positions. Feelings they accommodate. Twenty-five years of being looked after is what an accommodation looks like from the inside.
There is a painted chest on Petra Kolb’s bench right now, and Marchbank wants it presentable for a sale six weeks out, and I have known since the day it came in what she is going to say about that.
She said it already, actually — the morning it came off the truck, before anybody asked her anything.
“That’s original.”
I said I could see that.
“Somebody’s going to want it brightened.”
I said we could take that up nearer the time, and she said all right, and went back to a card table she was doing for a woman in Bellemont.
Petra came to this shop in 1990. She was twenty-four, out of a conservation program and two years with a bookbinder, which is an odd road into furniture and is the reason her hands are the best in this building. She works standing. She keeps a bench so clean that people who visit assume she has just started. She does not talk while she works, and if you come and stand next to her she will finish the pass she is on before she looks up, every time, and she has been doing that to me for thirty-six years. When a piece comes in she puts her palm flat on the top and leaves it there for a few seconds before she does anything else, and I asked her about that once, early, and she said she was checking the wax, and I have never once believed that was all of it.
Fenno Restoration is fourteen people in a converted feed store on Route 9. My father Gustav opened it in 1968 doing chair repairs for two dealers and a hotel. We do conservation and restoration for private collectors, three museums that cannot afford their own labs, insurance work after floods and moves, and — since about 2002 — a great deal of pre-sale work for Marchbank Auctions, which is somewhere between fifty and sixty per cent of what comes through that door depending on the year.
I have run this shop since 1998. My father is dead and the sign still says his name and I have never once been asked to justify a decision to anybody except a bank.
Here is the sentence everybody in this building would give you about Petra Kolb, and I built it, and I have said it warmly, and I have said it in the one conversation where saying it decided something.
We let Petra do it her way. It’s the least we can do.
The other one, which is the same sentence with the sleeves rolled up, is what I said in a scheduling meeting in 2015.
“I wouldn’t put her on that one. It’d eat her up.”
Original Surface
The finish that has been on a piece since it was made is worth more than the piece.
That sounds like a slogan and it is arithmetic. A period chest with its original painted decoration — oxidized, worn through at the handles, crazed, dirty — is worth some multiple of the identical chest with the paint refreshed, and the multiple runs to five times, not ten per cent. And the surface is the one thing in the entire object that cannot be put back. You can replace a foot and disclose it. You can reglue a joint, patch a moulding, make a new brass and mark it. Nothing you do with a scraper in an afternoon can ever be undone, and there is no craftsman alive who can put two hundred years of oxidation back onto a board.
The trouble is that a refreshed piece photographs better. It looks like the picture in the catalogue of what the thing was supposed to look like. A buyer standing in front of it at a preview, who is not a specialist, likes the bright one. The person who pays the most likes the dirty one, and there are fewer of those every year.
What makes the arithmetic hard to hold on to is that the person paying for the work almost never sees it. A collector who owns one good piece looks at it across a room for thirty years. The buyer at the preview has nine minutes and a phone light. The only people on earth who can look at a top and tell you what has been done to it, and when, and by whom, are the eight or nine of us in this county who do this for a living, and we are not the ones writing the cheque.
Gustav kept a glue pot on the bench by the window and the rule in this shop was that the pot never goes cold during working hours, which is not actually necessary and never was. We still do it. There is a boy of twenty-two here now whose entire job on his first morning was learning that the pot does not go cold, and he asked why, and Bettye Sarcone told him because it doesn’t, and that settled it.
Cyrus Beitler has been bringing us the same Windsor chair since 1994. It is not a good chair. The arm has been off it five separate times, and every time we fix the arm he asks whether we could do something about the finish, and every time Petra says no, and every time he says all right and takes the chair home. He is eighty-one. He has told me twice, in the parking lot, that when he dies the chair is coming here, and I have not worked out whether that is a bequest or a threat. Petra has never charged him full rate for the arm and I have never once questioned an invoice of hers, which I used to think was trust.
Not That One
Petra does not have positions. She has findings, and a finding arrives complete, and there is nothing underneath it for anybody to take hold of.
She has never once said we should not refinish period pieces. In thirty-six years she has not made a single general statement about anything in this trade, and if you tried to get one out of her she would go quiet and then say something about the object on the bench. In 2007 I asked her, because a dealer had asked me, to write out a one-page policy on surface for our client letter. She worked on it for a week. What came back was three-quarters of a page about a specific desk we had in that summer and a sentence at the bottom that said it depends on the piece.
That is not evasion and it took me two decades to stop reading it as evasion. The finding is about that desk. It does not exist at the level a policy exists at. Ask her for the general version and you are asking her to produce something she does not have.
The one I would put in evidence is a tall clock case from 2018, a dealer’s consignment, and the dealer standing in the shop with his coat on.
He wanted the case waxed up and the door mouldings replaced. Two of the mouldings were later — 1880s, on an 1815 case — and they were ugly and they were wrong.
“They’re not original anyway,” he said. “So what’s the harm.”
“They’ve been on it a hundred and forty years.”
He said that was exactly his point.
She looked at the case. “Somebody put those on when the first ones went. That’s the clock’s life.” She put a finger near one without touching it. “You take those off, you’re not restoring it. You’re deciding it should have been a different clock.”
He said that was very interesting and asked whether we could get it done by the end of the quarter, and Ansel did the mouldings, and I signed the invoice, and the case sold well.
She is also not indiscriminate, which is the part people get wrong. She strips things. She has cut new feet, replaced a whole rear leg, made two drawers from scratch for a chest that came to us as a carcass and a story. She did a full refinish on a mahogany sideboard in 2013 that had been through a fire, and she did not blink, because there was nothing left on it to lose. In thirty-six years I have never once seen her say no just to be saying it.
What she will not do is make a piece look like something it isn’t and let it go out the door that way.
Ansel Prue came here in 1996 and does very good work and became my partner in 2016. Ansel has a line about surface too, and Ansel’s line is nearly identical to Petra’s, and Ansel says it in meetings, at trade dinners, and once on a panel at a regional conference where he described it as the hill he’d die on. It has done nothing but good for him. Dealers who have been irritated by Ansel repeat what he said about a Chippendale mirror in 2018 as though it were scripture. Nobody has ever repeated a thing Petra said, because when Petra says it the room does not hear a hill. It hears a person having a hard time. What a man collects for the identical refusal in this trade, and how quickly it turns into something he can bill against, gets counted up somewhere else.
Fourteen people. Nine benches. Two partners, both men. I have hired every one of them.
Ansel asked me at the time whether Petra would take it hard.
I said she’d be fine.
“Should somebody tell her before the announcement?”
I told him I would, and I did, in the hallway, inside ten seconds, and she said congratulations to him at the bench the same afternoon and meant it.
Looking After Her
The arrangement had a beginning and I can almost date it.
By about 2005 it had become understood in this shop that certain work did not go to Petra. Pre-sale for Marchbank, mostly. The jobs where the client’s instruction and the object’s interest were pointed in different directions. If it came in and it was one of those, it went to Ansel or to me or later to whoever, and if somebody new asked why, the answer was that Petra takes these hard and there’s no sense putting her through it.
Which was true. She did take them hard. In 2003 she sat in the van outside a client’s house for twenty minutes after we delivered a chest we had brightened, and I saw her do it, and I did not go out there, and I decided that afternoon that I was not going to make her do that again.
That is the whole of my crime and I want it stated in a way that does not let me off. I decided, out of what I would still call affection, that a thing she had said was a claim about a chest was actually a fact about her nervous system. And once you have decided that, everything follows and everything feels generous. You stop assigning the work. You stop mentioning the jobs at the bench. You stop bringing certain things up at all, because why upset her, and after a few years you have a person in your shop who is completely exempt from the compromises the shop is made of.
We were proud of it. That is the part I cannot get around. When people asked how we kept somebody that good in a shop this size, I said we let her do it her way, and they said that was decent of me, and it was decent of me, and it also cost me nothing whatever, because the work still went out the door — it just went out on somebody else’s bench.
Zola Fosse worked under her for six years and asked me about it once, in about 2019, in a way that I answered badly.
“Why isn’t Petra ever in the scheduling meeting?”
I said Petra hates meetings.
“Has anybody asked her?”
I said that Petra had been here twenty-nine years and that if she wanted to be in the meeting she’d be in the meeting, which is the single laziest sentence I have said out loud in this building, and Zola did the thing where a person your junior decides not to spend anything further on you, and went back to her bench.
Exempt is not the same as valuable, and I got that in about the last six weeks. An exemption is a settlement: made once, quietly, and then never revisited, and the person it was made about drops out of every conversation where the shop decides what it is. In 2016, when I made Ansel a partner, three people asked me afterward whether I had thought about Petra. What I said, and what I believed, was that Petra had never had to make a hard call in her life, which she had never had to make because I had spent a decade making sure she was not in the room when they came up.
The Sentence I Used
The 2015 job was a Pennsylvania dower chest with original decoration and a Marchbank sale date.
Deming Volk wanted it presentable. Not stripped — he is not a barbarian — but cleaned back, the decoration strengthened where it had worn, the whole thing brought up so it would read from across a preview room. It is the sort of instruction that is a paragraph in an email and nine thousand dollars of difference in the hammer price.
I wanted that job to go through without a fight. We had a lease coming up and Marchbank was sixty per cent of the book.
So at the scheduling meeting that week I said the sentence. I wouldn’t put her on that one. It’d eat her up. And Bettye wrote Ansel’s name in the slot, and two people at that table nodded in a way I can still see, and one of them said something kind about how Petra had enough on with the museum loan work.
Nobody argued with me because there was nothing to argue with. I had not made a claim about the chest. I had made a claim about a colleague’s feelings, and you cannot cross-examine a man about somebody else’s feelings without looking like a monster.
The chest went out brightened. It made money. Petra walked past it on the finishing rack four or five times over three weeks and did not say anything, and I took that as evidence the arrangement was working.
Then in the autumn she asked me for something, which she almost never does.
She asked whether she could be on the pre-sale rotation.
I said I’d thought she’d rather not. I said it kindly. I said something about how I knew that work was hard on her and that there was no reason she should have to do it, and I meant every word, and I remember feeling that I was being a good employer while I said it.
She said, “All right.”
She has not asked me for anything since. Ten years and some months, and I did not notice until this spring, because a person who stops asking makes no noise doing it.
Deming
We had a dinner in the spring with Marchbank — the annual thing, four of them and three of us, at the place with the trout.
Deming Volk has been their furniture specialist since 2001 and he is decent and he is not the villain of this. Somewhere in the second hour he was telling the table about a Newport piece and he turned to me and said, in the friendliest voice in the world:
“You never did put Petra on ours. I always appreciated that.”
I said something. Whatever it was, I have no memory of it.
“It was easier for everybody,” he said. “I know it was awkward that first time. I’ve always thought you handled it well.”
The first time was 2004. There was a walnut linen press, and she had gone with me to the preview to look at something else, and Deming had asked her a question and she had answered it, and what she said was that the piece had been over-restored and that the catalogue description was wrong about the feet. She said it once, quietly, to the specialist, standing in front of the piece, which is what a person who knows something does.
He called me the following week. He said he had no problem with her personally and he was sure she was excellent, and that his consignors were nervous people and he would rather have somebody on their material who understood the commercial side.
I said of course. That was all I said. Of course.
And then I went back to my shop, and over the next year or so I built a reason for it, and the reason was that she takes it hard, and I have been saying that reason out loud for twenty-two years and I believed it by about the third time I said it.
At the trout place I asked Deming, as evenly as I could, what she had actually said about the linen press.
He had to think.
“She said the feet were replaced,” he said. “They were. We amended the description.” He turned his glass around. “It was the right call. It just wasn’t the right week for it.”
The Handout
The regional trade association runs a business seminar every other year — running the shop, pricing, insurance, hiring. I went in 2011.
There was a session on the second morning called Knowing Your Bench, with a folded handout, the sixteen boxes on the inside. The exercise was a paired one: you fill it out for somebody on your staff, then you talk it through with a partner from another shop and work out what you have been getting wrong with that person.
The handout says so in the instructions. Complete this for a team member you would like to understand better. It is designed to be filled out about somebody who is not there.
I did Petra. I have the sheet. It is in the file with my seminar receipts because I am the kind of man who keeps receipts.
I put her at ISFP, and the paragraph under that box was about sensitivity, aesthetics, quiet conviction, and a preference for harmony over conflict, and I read it in a hotel meeting room in 2011 and thought, well, there she is. Then I went to lunch.
What I did not read, and what I read three weeks ago sitting in the office after the dinner with Deming, is the back page, where the association’s handout does the thing these documents almost always do somewhere nobody looks: it explains that the letters are not four traits but a compressed ranking, and that the entire content is which habit is doing the work and which ones are back at the end, which she can only reach by deciding to, slowly, at cost. The ranking for this one gets worked through where the type is handled on its own, taken from the sixteen the handout’s grid was printed off.
The one carrying the load is a standard she holds privately and does not derive from anybody. It returns a reading on whatever is under her hands — this is what the object is owed, this is a lie — and returns it whole, the way a palm returns a temperature. There are no steps in it anywhere. So it arrives with no reason attached to it, and a finding with no reason attached is worth nothing whatever in a room where reasons are the only money anybody takes.
The second habit works on the particular. This chest. This surface. Never surfaces in general. That is why the policy page in 2007 came back three-quarters full and about a desk, and why I have never in thirty-six years heard her make an argument that would apply to a second object.
The two habits at the tail of her ranking are the ones this business actually runs on. Assembling a case out of criteria — the kind you can march a room down step by step until it has to agree with you. And seeing forward: do this for Marchbank and we will be doing it for everybody inside three years, which is what happened, and which she never said, because that sentence comes out of a faculty she has very little of.
Now the part I have had six weeks to sit with. A person like that, in a business, presents you with a finding and no argument, and there are two things a shop can do with that. It can argue anyway, which is at least a way of treating what she said as a claim about the world. Or it can be kind. Kindness treats it as a condition — something about her rather than something about the chest — and a condition does not get answered, it gets accommodated, and an accommodation is permanent, and nobody ever has to look at it again.
I chose kindness for twenty-two years and it was cheaper than an argument every single time.
The plain thing, and I am the wrong man to say it, which is the reason it should come from me. If a client asks that a particular person not be assigned to their work, the reason for that goes in writing, and it gets looked at, because a client instruction the company is not allowed to accept does not stop being one because everybody in the room is being polite about it. And on the other side of it: if you are told that you are being protected from something, the question is from what, and the answer belongs in an email. There are people whose job that is — an employment lawyer, whoever takes complaints where you work. A handout from a trade seminar belongs nowhere near it, however accurate the handout happens to be.
The seminar leader’s closing line, which several of us wrote down, was that once you know what somebody is, you can stop asking them to be something else.
Printed on that same back page: the exercise is a way in, and no shop should be allocating work off it. Also that of people who fill it in a second time, a month after the first, something like a third end up somewhere else entirely, while the underlying measures sit still.
I had a paired partner for that exercise, a man who ran a shop two counties over. He filled his sheet out about his son.
Six Weeks
The chest is on her bench. Marchbank wants it presentable. The sale is in six weeks and the call is mine.
Two things reversed on me between the trout place and now.
The van, in 2003, first. Twenty minutes in the passenger seat outside a client’s house, which I have carried for twenty-three years as the moment I understood how much this work costs her. She was not sitting out there having a feeling about herself. We had just handed a woman a chest that we had made into a different object, and Petra had told me it was original, and I had said we could take it up nearer the time, and we never had. She sat in the van because the thing had happened and could not be unhappened, and the only person in that van who thought the subject was Petra was me.
Then the autumn of 2015, and can I be on the pre-sale rotation. I have told myself for ten years that I let her off something. She had watched a piece she called out go through the shop and out the door, and she had come and asked, once, in the only way she knows how to ask, to be put where the decisions get made — and I answered a request about work with a sentence about her feelings, warmly, and she said all right, and she has not asked me for anything in eleven years.
The parts the box had no room for: she is genuinely poor with money and has never once negotiated a raise in thirty-six years and I have given her every one of them unasked, which I used to think was decency; she will not fly, and turned down a conservation fellowship in Copenhagen in 2011 for that reason and gave a different reason at the time; and she is, outside this shop, apparently formidable. Zola Fosse, who trained under her and is at a museum in another state now, told me at a conference in the spring that half that department is afraid of Petra Kolb and the other half writes to her, and I stood there and did the arithmetic on the fact that I had employed the woman for thirty-six years and had never once heard her described that way in my own building.
She retires at the end of the year. She has told the shop it is because of her knees, and her knees are bad, and she has said nothing to anybody about anything else, and I have decided that I am not entitled to ask.
What I have not decided is whether I am going to tell Marchbank that the position on the chest is hers, or whether I am going to tell them it is mine, which would be a lie and which would work better, and which is exactly the shape of every decision I have made about her for twenty-two years.
I went out to the bench yesterday. She had the chest on its side on a padded rail and was working the back boards, which nobody will ever see and which is where she starts.
She finished the pass she was on and then looked up.
I told her the chest was hers if she wanted it, and that whatever she decided about the surface would go to Marchbank as our position, and that I would take the call.
She looked at the chest for a while.
“Six weeks is fine for the joinery,” she said. “You’ll want to tell Deming before the catalogue goes to print, not after.”
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.