Her Memories Outlast a Family Heirloom

With surgical precision, an appraiser last week examined Sharon Doyle’s shattered Oriental vase, its jigsaw-shaped pieces held together--barely--by tape.

Of all the objects broken in the June 28 earthquake, Doyle’s most beloved was this heirloom vase that once belonged to her grandmother in New Jersey.

The strictly business appraiser, an employee of Butterfield & Butterfield, an upscale auction and appraisal house on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, was not there to offer sympathy. Still, as she turned the vessel carefully to avoid cutting herself on its jagged lip, she did bemoan the absence of the vase’s top edge. If it were a prized Satsuma from Japan, she said, that’s where the identifying mark would be.

Doyle listened and watched attentively as she neared the end of her weeks-long mission to find out the vase’s dollar value.

Other objects had broken at the Doyle family’s Baldwin Avenue house during the quake: a neon sculpture Doyle gave her husband Bart for Christmas; a Mexican folk art candelabrum her son Andrew gave her as a birthday present, and Wedgwood crystal champagne glasses on dining room shelves.

“They rattled forward like little soldiers and fell to their death,” she said.

Her grandmother’s vase--the object with the greatest sentimental worth of all--met its fate as it tumbled from a kitchen shelf.

Eventually, housekeeper Elizabeth Menendez swept up the vase and dutifully placed it in the trash.

Doyle retrieved the pieces and took them to Christopher’s, a Sierra Madre antique store. Over the phone later, she learned the store could neither repair the vase nor offer an appraisal. But when she went to pick it up, she discovered that, out of curiosity, workers in the small store had “pieced it together like a puzzle.”

Though the vase is dead, it has given life to memories of Doyle’s childhood relationship with her paternal grandmother, Jennie Sauerbrunn.

Her earliest memories of the vase take her back to her grandparents’ house, a four-story, Victorian row house in Elizabeth, N.J.

Sometimes she would enter the parlor, normally off limits to children. It was a dark place with red velvet drapes, the family’s silver tea service, incense burners and The Vase.

It was red, black, gold and maroon on a cream background, 14 inches tall, and covered with scenes depicting two cherubic young boys bringing fans and shoes to three amused-looking sages.

“I thought it was preposterous. My grandmother was preposterous. She was a faith healer. I remember her praying over me when I had a headache, instead of giving me an aspirin.”

Still, “I’ve always felt ties with my grandmother,” she said, explaining they both have been religious seekers: “When I became a Quaker, my father said: ‘Oh, it’s your grandmother in you.’ ”

In 1960, when she was 12 years old, Doyle was allowed into the parlor to visit her ailing grandfather.

It was in that room, with the vase, that he told her he was going to die, and soon he did. Three months later, her grandmother died too.

Eventually the vase made its way to her parents’ house in Texas and then moved with them to Washington. In time, the vase migrated into her parents’ garage. Doyle, by then an adult, plucked it out and took it to her own house in Silver Spring, Md.

From there, it went with her to Northern California seven years ago and finally to Sierra Madre.

From house to house, state to state, the vase survived all the moves intact.

Originally on a dining room sideboard in the Baldwin Avenue house, the vase by June 28 had ended up in the kitchen. “It became one of the kitchen gods,” she said.

Back at Butterfield & Butterfield, the appraiser had finished her work. Regardless of the missing lip, she said, she could easily conclude the vase was not a valuable Satsuma, but was simply done in Satsuma style at the turn of the century.

The auction value, if it were whole, would be $150 to $250, she said. Cautioning that she was no authority on retail matters, she said such a vase might cost $500 in a store.

“Well, you came in higher than we thought,” Doyle told the vase as she patted it.

Now, she said, she must replace the icon. “I have to get another picture of my grandmother, another piece of her to have around.”