Trace Elements, page 12
“No, ma’am. Don’t worry. Same price.”
“One sixty-five a night, right?”
“Right,” he answered.
In the cream and gilt sitting room she settled onto the silk striped love seat that faced a Regency bench. Behind the bench was a rather magnificent stuffed pheasant. A nineteenth-century Chinese screen with water lilies and black irises dominated one wall. Both bedroom and sitting room had several well-selected English pieces, mostly Chippendale. There was some French Regency thrown in.
“When do we eat?” Charley asked.
“Soon. Just let me recover from the drive.”
She got up and went to the bedroom, opened her suitcase, and took out a small glass bottle that had once held Breck shampoo for normal hair and had been relabeled Hawker’s amontillado. It had been Calista’s experience when traveling that hotels, no matter how nice, never carried good dry sherry in their bars. She went into the bathroom and got a water glass and poured herself an inch of sherry.
“Let’s go to El Torito for dinner, Mom.” Charley was lying on the floor with his feet propped up on the silk Regency bench. He was reading something called the Washington Dossier.
“Take off your shoes, Charley, if you’re going to put your feet up.” Charley kicked off his shoes, still managing to keep his feet elevated. The sloth of a twelve-year-old was impressive, Calista thought. “You want to eat Mexican?” she said, and took a sip of her sherry. “Yeah. You can get a margarita.”
“And something else I presume.”
“Sure, listen to this.” He began to read aloud. “ ‘Before ordering catch a glimpse of somebody else’s plate: these entrees are huge so order appropriately. The quesadillas fill an entire plate and can be eaten as either a filling appetizer or a light meal in itself. The tacos and enchiladas are spicy giants.’ ”
In the cab over to Georgetown Park where the restaurant was, they argued over whether they should order two quesadillas and two spicy giants, Charley’s choice, or split one quesadilla and order two tacos, which was how Calista interpreted the guide’s suggestion of ordering appropriately. They compromised by ordering one quesadilla and three tacos.
Georgetown Park was a miniature version of Boston’s Quincy Market, a consortium of shops catering to nonbasic needs—a Godiva chocolate store, a stuffed animal “zoo-tique.” On the more serious side there was an Abercrombie and Fitch and a Garfinckel’s.
“So what’s the plan for tomorrow, Mom?”
Calista shook a few drops of hot sauce onto her taco. “Go over to the Smithsonian. See Baldwin.”
“Are you going to call first and make an appointment?”
“I’m not sure.” She had been wrestling with this question all day. It could have been a leftover reaction from her days of trotting around with her portfolio to art directors, but she had an instinctive loathing for making appointments through secretaries. She had a gut feeling in this instance that Baldwin’s secretary would say that he was unavailable. Ambush, she thought, would be the preferred strategy for her. “I think we’ll just go over. Direct approach is always the best in a town like this. We’ll try to reduce their opportunities to behave like bureaucrats.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. We better go to bed early, if tomorrow goes as hoped for.”
It was well after midnight. Calista took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes. She looked across the room at the stuffed pheasant. “Archibald W. Baldwin has certainly been a busy fellow the last twenty-five years or so,” she whispered. Charley was asleep in the bedroom but Calista had been reading various Xeroxed copies of articles by Baldwin she had found in Tozzer Library, the archaeological and ethnographic library of the Peabody Museum. It seemed as though, both figuratively and otherwise, Baldwin had not left a stone unturned in the Great Basin. He had scoured the Desert West and homed in on that central trough between the Rockies and the Sierras, the Great Basin. He had written copiously, as evidenced by the footnotes and list of additional articles and books at the end of the ones Calista had. His writings covered the prehistory, the geology, the climatic changes or lack thereof over the last eight thousand years as well as man’s history in this region. Excavation had been going on for years in the Desert West. Harvard, Yale, and the universities of Arizona and Utah had all funded digging at various sites. But it was Baldwin as a young graduate student in the early 1950s who arrived at the right time and with the right questions. Through his writing
Calista soon realized that he possessed an engaging modesty. “I had the singular advantage that my predecessors did not have prior to 1950,” he wrote in the beginning of a monograph on his excavation of Two Horn Cave, “and that is radiocarbon dating which provided me with absolute chronology.”
That he was inclined toward self-effacement was particularly evident in his less formal scholarly pieces. In addresses given at various archaeology and anthropology conferences or in articles written for popular and less esoteric journals Baldwin often referred to his “great luck” or the fortuitousness of being in the right place (the Desert West) at the right time (1950 and following). But the fact remained that he was there and asking the right questions. Where other archaeologists were so ecstatic with the new toy that they were radiocarbon dating everything they could get hold of, Baldwin was attempting to frame questions about an entire web of social and political relationships for people who had indeed lived three thousand years ago, about the interdependence between a society and its environment. It was one thing to be standing in a desert googly-eyed with your brand-new technology, but quite another thing to stand there and use it with vision. And he had done this. It was clear even to the uninitiated like Calista.
She pushed her glasses up on her forehead and dropped her head back on the couch. There was always a breakdown with—what did they call them now, she thought—the knowledge workers. There were the information types—the data gatherers—and then there were the wise old graybeards who could reflect elegantly on the past, archivists by nature. And then there were the visionaries who somehow reached over horizons and illuminated knowledge and how we think about what we know. The parallels between Baldwin and Tom were apparent.
There was one question, though, that in spite of the new technology had remained unanswered in the Desert West. It had not taken long for Calista to ferret out the question: was there a Paleo-Indian culture in the region? So far all the evidence of man had been confined to the archaic period. Man’s existence could be pushed back to 9500 B.C., but no hard-core evidence prior to this existed. To find such evidence would set that small corner of the academic world on fire. To find it would secure a reputation in the uppermost echelons and, most important, lifetime research money. The answer to the question was the plum, the Holy Grail of the field. Peter Gardiner had gone after it with all to gain and nothing to lose. Gone after it like a hound on a fox’s scent, and when the scent ran out he just couldn’t believe it. And Baldwin, firmly established as the leading authority in the archaeology of the Desert West, the man who had written the book but not answered the ultimate question, never believed there had been a true scent in the first place.
Calista went to bed. Toward morning she had a dream. Tom and Baldwin were both standing on a mound of rocks in the desert. They were both laughing hysterically. Tom had turned and spoken, as if directly to Calista, although she was not in the dream. He had laughed and pointed his thumb at Baldwin. “He thinks it’s dinner time. I’m just here for a midnight snack!”
“Mom! Mom! What are you laughing about?” Charley was shaking her shoulder.
“What? What? What is it?” Calista was sitting straight up in bed and still laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Charley asked. “You’ve been yucking it up for the last five minutes.”
“You mean while I was asleep?”
“Yeah. You were laughing. You’re still laughing.”
“I know.” Calista was laughing even harder now.
“Well, what’s so funny? What’s the joke?”
“I don’t know.” She nearly screamed and started laughing even harder. She reached for a glass of water but was laughing so hard she had to put it down to avoid spilling it.
“It must have been some funny dream,” Charley said.
“It must have been,” Calista said, wiping her eyes. “It’s so weird. I can’t remember anything at all, except there was laughing.” She began to laugh again.
“It must have been really funny if it makes you laugh and you can’t even remember it.”
“I guess so. Jesus! What time is it?”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Eight o’clock! We’ve got to hustle.”
A small area toward the rear of the lobby screened by potted palms and a four-part painted Chinese panel of water lilies was the breakfast area. There was a scattering of small round tables with white cloths. Calista and Charley were led to a table near a cart with lavish displays of croissants, muffins, and Danish.
“How many do they let you have?” Charley asked, gazing at the small mountains of freshly baked breads.
“As many as you want to pay for, I guess.”
“Can I have one croissant and two muffins?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Do you serve yourself?”
“I don’t think so.” At that moment a white-gloved waiter came with tongs and gently pinched two croissants onto a plate. “If you have white gloves you can serve yourself,” Calista whispered.
While Charley scrutinized the cart’s bounty, Calista looked at the other breakfast people. She decided all the men looked like Elliot Richardson and the women like television newspeople—coiffed, coordinated, and confident. She and Charley were indeed the odd couple. A black woman came up to their table. “Are you ready to order?” “Yes. I think so,” Calista said.
“What will Madame be having this morning?”
“Orange juice, grits, redeye gravy, and coffee, please.”
“What?” Charley’s eyes had flown open. “What are you ordering?”
“Grits. It’s on the menu.”
“What are grits?”
“Sort of like cream of wheat.”
“And what kind of gravy?”
“Redeye. It’s a southern dish.”
“Never heard of grits, young man?” the woman asked gently. “Never. We’re from the North,” he offered, as if to say the polar ice cap.
“They’re great. You should try them sometime.”
“Charley is not an adventurous eater.”
“I hate adventures in food,” Charley said to the lady.
“So does my son.” The woman laughed. “So what would you like for breakfast?”
“One croissant, one blueberry and one corn muffin. A glass of milk and some orange juice.”
“How about an egg, Charley, just to balance things out?” Calista asked.
“Okay. One scrambled egg.”
“Bacon, ham?” the woman asked.
“No, thank you.”
“All right. I’ll bring your juice right away.”
“She’s nice,” Charley said as the woman left. “Doesn’t seem like a waitress type.”
Calista had been thinking the same thing. She was the kind of black woman her mother had always appended the adjective “lovely” to thirty years ago, before people’s consciousnesses were raised. Of course, back then it was never a lovely black woman. It was a lovely colored woman. Calista could just hear her mother’s voice. She would lengthen the word lovely as if to make it lovelier. “The loveliest colored woman waited on me at Ayres today in Notions.” God forbid they would ever let one up into the French Room where her mother bought her Irene suits. When a colored woman was “lovely,” it meant that some inexplicable triumph had occurred which resulted in “pleasant” diction, well-coordinated clothes, and hair that had been set rather than oiled into submission. They often wore bifocals on chains, as Calista recalled. It was a kind of inverted bigotry. Had this lovely colored lady in her heather tweed skirt, crisp cream rayon blouse, and glasses resting on her bosom been born white, there but for the grace of God went Clare Booth Luce. That was the way people thought back then, the liberals that is, the ones who had voted for Adlai Stevenson.
“What do you think Baldwin will be like, Mom?” Charley asked after they had settled into a cab.
“Nice, I think. At least that’s what my instincts say.” Nice, but he did have a lot to lose, too, Calista reminded herself. The answer to the hottest question in North American archaeology had, after all, eluded its foremost scholar, and a young post-doc had been on the brink of zeroing in on it, or so it seemed. That might be enough to make a nice man not so nice.
“Look, there’s the White House, Mom!” Calista looked up. There it was, the home of the American Nice Guy. “Wonder if they’re home?” Charley said.
She fleetingly wondered what it was like to be First Lady. At this moment the First Lady was probably under the hair dryer trying to memorize one significant fact about each of her luncheon guests that day and come up with one quasi-intelligent question for each one to show that she was interested in them. To be the perfect helpmate to her husband and his career was her function in life. And one did it all through show. One made “shows” of interest, of attentiveness, of beauty, and nothing was ever real for a First Lady until her man got shot. Her entire life was an elaborate contrivance of grooming and manners. In this particular case the First Lady seemed almost a caricature in her propriety, her mincing gestures, her brittle smiles. She always appeared bejeweled, becoiffed, and slightly bewildered.
They swung around the White House and headed out Pennsylvania Avenue. Calista stopped thinking about First Ladies and started thinking about first questions for Baldwin. He would be surprised to know that she knew the real reason he had asked Tom to go out there. Two days ago the first question seemed obvious: When did you first suspect Peter Gardiner was seeding the site? Or, more directly, you called in Tom with the Time Slicer to see if Gardiner was seeding the site, didn’t you?
But now, after her previous night’s reading and knowing how much Baldwin stood to lose if someone came up with the elusive Paleo-Indian culture, she felt both of these questions played too directly into his hands. The ball after all was in her court. She knew the artifacts had been planted. She now knew the real reason for Tom’s trip and she knew what a fellow like Baldwin had to lose. It might be more telling to frame a general question about Paleo-Indian culture. Dr. Baldwin, do you believe there ever was a human being walking around out there in the Desert West, say, fifty thousand years ago? What would it take to prove it? On second thought, Calista felt that might be too artfully artless or artlessly artful. She was pondering this as they pulled up in front of the main entrance of the Natural History building.
“Look like you know just where we’re going and what we’re doing, Charley,” she said as they went up the steps of the entrance.
Calista had mentally donned her suit of mail in anticipation of the bureaucratic hurdles. She sailed up to the desk on the right-hand side of the rotunda behind which stood a woman volunteer. Putting on her most brittle First Lady smile, she announced herself. “Calista Jacobs from Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Ms. Goodfellow is expecting me. Still third floor no doubt.”
“Yes, just a second while I call.”
“If it makes you feel better fine, but I think I’ll just dash on up. Just got my period in the taxi. I’ll use Ruth’s john.”
The woman looked mortified. Calista sensed that talking in public institutions about menstrual cycles was not considered genteel this far south.
“Here’s your badge,” the woman said quickly, handing both Charley and Calista stick-on labels stamped visitor.
“What do you mean, Dr. Baldwin is not in?”
“He’s not,” Miss Goodfellow repeated, putting her glasses on her forehead and peering more intently with her nearly colorless eyes at Calista. She was English and imperturbable. “Mrs. Jacobs, I said I thought he would be back in a couple of days. Now he has decided to stay longer.”
“Decided to stay longer? Where is he?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“Don't know? What do you mean you don’t know?”
“Just that.”
“What happens if the Smithsonian burns down? His house? His papers? What happens if his wife dies?”
“He’s not married.”
“I don’t believe you don’t know.”
“That’s your choice.”
Calista rolled her eyes. “Where do they train you guys? This isn’t fair.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said it isn’t fair. I’m very upset. We’ve driven all the way from Boston.”
“You should have called first.”
“I did, remember?”
“I’m sorry you’re so upset.”
“No, you’re not. Don’t give me that shit.”
“Mrs. Jacobs!”
“But it’s the truth. You don’t know me. You don’t care. I’m sure you found it disturbing, maybe winced a bit at my husband’s death. It’s not a particularly nice way to go—fangs in the old femoral artery.” Miss Goodfellow had reached for her glasses and was cleaning them now with a tissue. “But what did you do about it? Order flowers, put a few calls through for Baldwin to me, moved your glasses around. You realize you’ve put them in about six different locations since I’ve been here. You’re very repressed, I think. I usually don’t go in for that kind of jargon.”
“Then why don’t you just not say it?”
This woman had a doctoral in snippiness. It was a state-of-the-art
stuff with her, Calista thought. She was ready to explode. “Okay, let me put it another way. When was the last time you got laid?” “Mrs. Jacobs!”
Calista could hardly believe that she had said it herself. She shut her eyes tight. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. I didn’t come here to insult you. I came here to ask Dr. Baldwin about my husband’s death. There’s something I must know.” A sob began to swell unbearably in her throat. She simply could not succumb. People were not supposed to cry in the Smithsonian. Most of all, she did not want to cry in front of Charley. She had already spoken abominably to this woman in front of him. Poor woman! Face the color of an unripened strawberry, her hair pale orange. Fifty years ago she would have been in India serving as a governess for some English family in the Punjab. She would have been called Goodie by the children, Miss Goodfellow in direct address by her employers, and in absentia referred to as Goodfellow by them at the Club or wherever.
