The Curator, page 18
In the fourth-floor gallery the tourists were drawn to the cedarwood cabinet with the eyepiece that had produced the moving pictures. “Now, what’s this?” the wife asked D.
“I was hoping you might be able to tell me, ma’am,” she replied, and they all laughed once more.
Later, D found a folded note protruding from the slot of a donation box. It had been left by the couple. The paper said that they were glad to have someplace to go and it was commendable, given the circumstances, that the museum was being kept open. However, it was sad that only one uneducated little maid seemed to be on duty, and annoying that she followed them around everywhere. They understood that the curator couldn’t be there to greet every visitor, but someone official ought to be on duty. And it must be said that the condition of many of the exhibits is terribly shabby. In particular, several of the figures are missing eyes and appear quite sinister!
Around the galleries the husband’s boots had left muddy tracks on the polished floor. Once D had washed up after him, she went to the curator’s office and wrote a note of her own to put outside:
PLEASE SCRAPE YOUR FUCKING SHOES BEFORE ENTERING THE MUSEUM
She hurtled through the building and out to the plot of grass in the back and drank some water straight from the pump. Black night was soaking into the blue of the sky. The reek of rotten eggs from the direction of the former embassy had thickened.
She returned inside and sat again at the desk. She tore up the first note, and wrote a second:
PLEASE SCRAPE YOUR SHOES BEFORE ENTERING THE MUSEUM
* * *
But there was no way to hang her note on the museum’s wavy, lumpen steel door and no way to hang it on the cement wall beside the door. D considered the problem.
She walked from the museum, down the sidewalk to the ruins of the Society.
In her pique, she ignored the three cats—orange-striped, chocolate brown, patched—spilled around on the lawn in leisurely poses, and the now familiar sight of the Society’s red door plunged into the turf. Untended, the grass had grown tall, and the spindly blades licked around the sill of the door and its bottom panel. Through the empty doorway, D could see into the shell all the way to the scorched frame of the magician’s closet, “the Vestibule,” huddled beneath the few remaining planks of the second floor. Shadows filled the scorched rectangular box. Here was another cat, fluffy and white. It sat beside the closet and sharpened its claws on the blackened wood. The sight tickled at her, but D brushed it off—not now. She needed to get the note down, to get this one rule straight.
D spotted a ball-shaped chunk of burnt masonry in the lengthening grass. She went and picked it up, and turned back to the museum.
Bet was waiting at the bottom of the steps.
The gangly woman held a covered basket at her side and her expression at spotting D was one of slapped disgust. Her free hand found her throat, as if to settle a rising gorge.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” D said. “We’re shut for the day.” She moved past to set the paper on the steps to the left of the door, and put the fragment on top of it to keep it from being blown away in a breeze.
“Ma’am? You know who I am. And I know you, Dora, and I certainly know what you are. I won’t say it, but I know it. Everyone knows. It stinks off of you.”
D met the other woman’s gaze. Bet appeared even frailer than usual, her narrow slouching shoulders and her bowed torso seeming to be barely held together, as if by rusty clips like the ones that kept the museum figures’ heads attached.
But she glared at D like D was something that ought to be covered with a shovelful of dirt before someone ruined their shoe in it. She glared at D like she’d forgotten entirely that it was D who had stopped Pauline and the rest of them teasing about her Gid sleeping with the dogs.
“I am,” D said, “the temporary curator of the National Museum for the Worker. Who are you?”
Bet keened. The sound swooped from one end of the avenue to another, and D thought she could sense the windows of the buildings clenching in their frames, and all the quiet hiders inside the buildings clenching too.
“Is my husband in there?” Bet stepped closer. She was visibly quivering and the contents of her basket clinked metallically. “Have you got my Gid in there? Have you had him all this time?”
D met Bet’s gaze. “What? No. I’ve not seen him.”
“You’re a liar!”
“What are you talking about? Why are you here, Bet?”
“Because the soldier told me!” Bet began to weep and her words were half-spat. “I talked to a soldier and told him my husband kept dogs and he told me that he remembered Gid! ‘Oh, the dog man,’ he said! ‘How could I forget,’ he said!
“And he said he sent Gid to an address around the corner over there and that was the last he saw of him!” Bet swung her clinking basket in the direction of the embassy that had belonged to the imperialist ally of the former government, but now had a different purpose. “I was just walking there to ask, and who do I spy down this street? You, Dora, you! What have you done with my Gid? Doesn’t he miss me? Doesn’t he miss his pups?”
“Stop shouting.”
“That fool librarian told everyone that he saw Gid on the quad, climbing into a boat in the sky! I don’t believe it! I believe it has something to do with you, Dora!”
D grabbed Bet’s thin wrist. “Bet, you have to stop shouting.”
“I know you know where he is!” Bet reached her other hand under the cloth that covered the basket and clasped a knife by its handle and started to draw it out, but D caught this wrist too. She pushed it down, forcing the knife back into the basket.
D wanted to shove her away, but it was mercy that made her draw Bet close and whisper the truth in her ear: “If he went into that building around the corner, he’s gone. No one who goes in there leaves on their feet. Ever. The people who go into that building are sent there by the new government to be tortured and murdered, and the man who does it for them makes no exceptions. Unless you want him to hurt you, Bet, you should go from this place, and from this street. You should go and you should never come back.”
The Metropole: The Lieutenant
In his capacity as the temporary Volunteer Leader of the Health and Welfare Committee, Lieutenant Barnes was asked to take the floor and report to the leaders of the Provisional Government at a conference being held in the fourth-floor lounge of the luxurious Hotel Metropole. General Crossley was present, but not seated behind the billiards table at the end of the room with the civilian authorities, Mosi and Lionel and Lumm. Silent unless addressed, stiff-backed in a chair against the right wall, he peered straight ahead and, in Robert’s opinion, made for a presence that was only slightly more lifelike than the waxworks at Dora’s abandoned museum.
Rows of chairs filled the lounge’s opposite end, occupied by the meeting’s other attendees, various high-ranking soldiers from Crossley’s Auxiliary and Volunteer Leaders. In accordance with the Metropole’s reputation as the most “artistic” of the three great hotels, the paintings on the walls were of theater and opera scenes, framed flyers for famous productions were propped at intervals on the shelves, and busts of muses with garlanded hair and long, creamy necks were mounted on Doric plinths in the corners. Chardonnay-colored drapes tied back from the windows allowed a view of one of the hotel’s competitors, the Lear, which stood directly across the street.
To make his statement, Robert went to stand beside the billiards table. The lieutenant recounted the initial steps that the Volunteers in his command had taken to secure and record the contents of various warehouses of dry goods; and next, to take possession of the properties of the larders, greenhouses, and root cellars attached to the old elite’s estates in the city hills and make a similar account. As for the livestock shortage, he shared the opinion that they’d been too slow; common thieves and black marketeers had stolen the animals within a few days of the takeover. Thus far the populace had responded relatively well to the rationed distributions of flour and vegetables, but plainly it wasn’t a long-term solution.
“Plainly,” Mosi repeated after Robert. The dockman sat at the left corner of the table idly turning a red billiard ball on the felt surface.
“Let him finish, Jonas,” Lionel, in the middle chair, said.
In the third chair, at the table’s other corner, Lumm had dozed off during Robert’s account of the seizure of the warehouses. He snorted in his sleep.
Mosi barked, “I apologize! By all means, go the fuck ahead, Lieutenant Barnes.” The dockman pushed the red ball gently down the table.
Robert hesitated.
Lumm continued to sleep.
Lionel propped his elbow on the table and rested his cheek in his hand. “You heard my colleague.”
The two conscious directors had been going on like this all afternoon. Robert had the thought that someday there might be a museum to the revolution, and in it the two men’s wax figures would be consigned to share an exhibit for eternity. He made a note to himself to share this observation with Dora. Robert owed her a visit; he had been too busy to see her recently, distracted by the obligations of his position, and also—and he felt guilty about this, though he really had no reason to—by the attentions of a patriotic young woman who worked in the kitchen of the very hotel where they were meeting. Willa was lovely, but he missed his clever maid. He also had the troubling—ridiculous—thought that Dora might not miss him.
Robert went on: “My reading is that there’s a general dissatisfaction. People aren’t sure what life is going to be like. The papers we’ve printed tell them, and we tell them face-to-face at every opportunity that we’ll help them form committees among themselves to elect representatives. And they like the sound of that, of having a say in their own lives for once. At the same time, from their perspective, it hasn’t amounted to much, because we’re in this in-between period. Four weeks have passed. The committees have formed, and the representatives have been voted in, but they don’t have anything to do.”
The basic problem had been alluded to by the other Volunteer Directors who had already reported. The city was closed: the dockworkers had nothing to load or unload; there was no wheat for the breweries; all construction had halted because there was no one to pay for it; and so on. Some people had money, but with each passing day there was less to spend it on. Assertions that the old regime’s force on the Great Highway was on the verge of surrendering were given short shrift—shorter with every day that passed without a clear handover of power that would reopen trade and allow the economy to start up again. There was a pervasive suspicion that the revolution was less than secure.
* * *
Though Robert did not mention it, he’d been struck by an interaction the previous day with a woman in a breadline in one of the westside wards of the Lees.
A small group of seven or eight had been listening as Robert described the framework of local committees that would oversee the neighborhoods and, eventually, piece together a shared government with directly elected national representatives. They had been at a corner of a street of knocked-together boardinghouses. The afternoon was hot, and dust floated, fizz-like, over the hungry line that stretched two or three blocks long, and over Robert’s tired-eyed audience.
He gave them his usual speech, which he was still proud of, and which he still believed in. It was a variation on what he’d heard Lionel Woodstock say at the first underground meeting he’d attended at the university months before. Lionel had talked about how wealth stagnated, about how a few people got so much of it, by the accident of their birth and the success of some ancestor. The wealth accumulated more wealth, more than they knew what to do with, while the majority had to scrape for their pennies. These circumstances seemed settled, as if some higher power had made them so; but they weren’t. If men wanted it another way—so that everyone received a share in goods and property that reflected the wealth that they added to the economy, with humane allowances made for the incapable and the infirm—if they wanted there to be an economy that functioned for the betterment of all people, they could make that so.
While Lionel had captured Robert’s imagination with his talk, Robert’s experience among the men at his father’s estate had led him to ground his own pitch in terms that were more specific.
He finished by asking his listeners to imagine a whole staff of people, maids and carpenters, laundresses and woodsmen. “These men and women, they take care of a lovely house and rich fields. They know exactly how to do everything, change the curtains, clean the windows, prune the garden, replace the rotted shingles, whatever arises. They go to bed when it’s dark and they get up when it’s dark and they go back to work.
“At the end of the day, they go home to their rooms. Six, seven, eight to a room. More. They’re so tired they can sleep even though it’s stifling from all the bodies and loud from all the breathing. And I bet some of you good folks here, you’d give a lot to have a regular situation like that, wouldn’t you?
“And these maids and carpenters and the rest, as they’re sleeping, what’s happening at the lovely house? Nothing. The halls are empty. The rooms are empty. The blankets are tucked in tight. There’s not a soul except for the house cat. Why?
“Because the lord of the place is at one of his other lovely houses. Do you see the shame of it, my friends?”
Except for a few coughs, the group before him was silent, and the little burst of adrenaline he usually felt as he came to the part about the vacant manor quickly dissipated. Over the heads of his audience, Robert saw a man in a yellowed union suit emerge from a structure across the street. The man stopped at the top of the steps and lit a pipe, and as he puffed, he stuck his hand through the flap of his underwear and rearranged his balls.
Robert trailed off lamely, telling his listeners that soon life was going to be much less difficult for everyone, and the main thing to bear in mind was that they would all need to do their part, like the gears of a factory works. “But you won’t be treated like gears anymore. You’ll be able to take pride in what you do, in the part you play.”
He took notice of a woman who stood below his left shoulder. Her face was scorched with dirt and grime, her body layered in rags. She did not seem elderly; she seemed beyond age. Her eyes were unnervingly fixed in her mask of filth, and they bored into Robert.
The lieutenant waited for a few seconds, calmly meeting her gaze, expecting the glaring woman to say something in opposition; he wished, in fact, that she would. If they expressed their concerns, he could explain to them what they were failing to see. The poor weren’t bad, not in the slightest; they were just uneducated.
The line shuffled ahead and his audience went with it, sidling politely, so that even as they moved, they continued to face Robert.
He felt the push of desperation, and asked the staring woman, “Doesn’t that make you glad to hear, ma’am?”
“Oh, yes, very glad,” the woman said. “I love a story. I’ll dream on my room in that lovely house for the rest of my life. I’ll dress it all up in my head and feel very glad.”
Robert suspected he heard amusement in her voice and it irritated him. He was trying to help her. They were trying to help all of them, lift them up, improve their lives, improve society by helping people who would themselves in turn help people.
(It was the same idea that he’d been attempting to get across in the letter to his parents, the letter he kept beginning and throwing out, and that he wouldn’t be able to send to them until the Great Highway was cleared, anyway.… And after that, well, there was the question of which of their properties they were staying at. They might have gone farther north at the news of the upheaval.…)
He wanted to insist, “It’s not a dream, it’s true,” but he didn’t want to sound like a child, begging for the grubby ageless woman to believe him.
“But every day’s a glad day in the Lees,” she said, and then he knew for certain she was mocking him. “No limits to the gladness. Thank you, sir. Good luck to you, sir. I hope a cat smiles on you, sir.”
She and the others shuffled away in the line. Robert managed a perfunctory tip of his hat, even as he stared blankly ahead, trying to figure out what it was that he’d said wrong, where he had lost his audience.
“D’ya have a problem?” the ball handler hollered, for it appeared that the lieutenant was staring at him.
Robert shook his head and looked away.
Two urchins, a boy and a girl—the latter wearing an absurdly gaudy blue hat that went over her ears like a helmet—sat at the base of a nearby wall. Each had their own pile of rocks. As Robert watched, the children compared their treasures with grave seriousness, weighing them, testing them with short drops, and conducted a series of trades, stone for stone.
* * *
“No one is more impatient to resolve the standoff than I am. But we have an opportunity to avoid bloodshed, Your Honors,” General Crossley said. “Those were the orders I was given by this Provisional Government: avoid bloodshed. Were they not?” He slipped out a wrinkled piece of paper from the sleeve of his uniform jacket and checked it, as if the aforesaid orders were, indeed, written there.
But Robert, standing near the general, could see that the scrap was covered not in words but in tiny, red-inked symbols—moons, stars, triangles. Military code, he assumed. Robert remembered the general checking red-inked notes at the interview with Westhover. Whatever else, there was no doubting the man’s thoroughness—or his preferred ink color.
