The Sun King
by Nathaniel Berry
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
It’s crowded in Daniel’s house. There’s a line of cars outside, parked along the street in the slush and gravel, more people coming and more people going. There’s a folding table set up inside, by the door, where two women sit with the cashbox and a list of the rare and expensive items. There are half a dozen people in Carhartt jackets and sweatshirts and winter boots paying cash for Daniel’s silverware, his stand mixer, his old faux-wood General Electric Radio. On the gilt and marble table by the window are three busts: Marie Antoinette, her husband, and the Sun King, Louis XIV. They are life-sized, arranged in a semi-circle, wearing an expression of polite disappointment as though a conversation had been interrupted and they were waiting, pointedly, for us all to leave. The busts are three-thousand dollars apiece — genuine marble, a woman at the cash-box tells me, from Switzerland.
It’s the estate sale for Daniel Vincent, a man who the Adrian Daily Telegram tells me was cremated, in private, at his request. The sale and disbursement of his effects will be his only wake.
Daniel Vincent was born in 1948, and he graduated from Adrian High School in 1966. He’s been dead for a month by the time we enter his house. He worked as a chemical engineer—probably at Martin’s company, but Martin’s never heard of him. His ranch house in the Airport Section is as anonymous as his neighbors’: one-story, tan, vinyl siding, cement driveway; long bare lawn leading down to the suburban street. Within, beside the busts of Bourbon Royalty, is a gold-plated fireplace and fireplace tools made of gold, and a gold and crystal chandelier, and a table in gold leaf with matching chairs, upholstered white linen embroidered with the fleur-de-lis. Each wall has a painting of a French Monarch—painted reproductions of antique portraits each in a gilt frame. His bedroom holds an oak bed inlaid with gold; a crown of golden laurels is set above his pillow. A man is removing sconces in the form of naked cherubs, also gold, from the wall with a DeWalt power drill.
Every hand picks through Daniel’s possessions for something useful to buy. Every face has the expression can you believe this fucking place?, but nobody says it, because this is Michigan, and silent is the kindest we can sometimes think to be. In Daniel’s bedroom is a model guillotine and a book on the French revolution, so I at least get the sense that Daniel knows how this whole Bourbon-dynasty thing plays out. The guillotine is twenty dollars, so I don’t buy it. I’m mostly stunned, friends as I am with the Robspierres of the world, that anyone would find anything to like about the dead Kings of the Ancien Régime.
I return with Mom the next day—it’s the last day, half-price day. Mom whispers, Can you believe this fucking place? I go to the garage to find something to buy; it’s half-off day, and Daniel Vincent has an old faux-wood GE Radio. In the basement, an Italian porcelain nativity is being carefully tucked into plastic wrap. Mom is carrying Daniel’s XXXL Carhartt jacket and Menard sweatshirt, I’ll take them for the people at the shelter, Mom says, we always need large coats. Oh, you found a radio. The jackets are so plain and tattered, and nothing like his neat and gaudy rooms—dressed like this, Daniel could have crossed my path a hundred times at Meijer in the past thirty years, and I never would have guessed at anything about him.
Daniel’s basement is lined with folding tables, filled with crock-ware and posters of Ancien Régime France that never made it to the walls. And there’s more paintings down here, too—the Louises in their silks and furs, staring coldly out at Daniel’s neighbors from behind their golden frames. There are more books down here, in a box beneath a table, and I’m trying to find something good—there’s some maps in a brown leatherette folder and two books of eighties vintage on surviving America as a gay man. If Adrian is a safe place to be gay now, it wasn’t when I was growing up.
From one of the ladies at the cash-box table, I buy his map book for five dollars. I love maps. Daniel wrote his name on the cover of his folio; inside is a roadside map of France and a walking map of Paris. From the ticket stubs, he traveled to Paris in December of 1970; he would have been twenty-two. He went to the Tomb of the Emperor, to the Louvre, the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur; he converted his dollars to francs through the Union de Banques at 22, Place de Madeline. He rode the autobus and seemed to save many tickets. I like to think he found love there, that he was free. I like to picture him at the Seine with with some long-haired french boy in a bright Cafe-racer, smoking Gaulioses at a little table, watching the city lit up for Christmas. I think to think they went to Versailles together on a fast motorcycle, and I like to imagine it was summer, even though I know it wasn’t. And did he come back to Adrian, buy a quiet house, live a quiet life with this secret glowing in his heart? Did these treasures—authentic, expensive, painstakingly curated—make Daniel Vincent feel, in the solitary moments in his little brown ranch house, as bright and imperishable as the sun?
