The Curator, page 3
“I’m not the fellow Mother and Father would like me to be, D. I don’t want to work in a bank, or be husband to someone who’d want to marry a banker. I’m not like them.” Ambrose had winked at her from the shadow beneath his gray cap’s bill.
“What are you like?” D asked.
“I’m interesting,” he said.
“Am I interesting?” She couldn’t imagine being interesting like her brother was interesting, but maybe there were gradations.
“Do you know interesting people?”
“You,” she said.
“Well,” said her brother, “there you have it. You are. Or you will be, because it rubs off. I made friends with one interesting person, one thing led to another, and now I’m part of a whole set of interesting people, and we’re going to save the world. I hope you’ll want to join us eventually. Now, what do you say? Can you be my spotter and run quick if Nurse is ill?”
D had said she could. At the same time, she’d wondered, Save the world from what?
Before she left the house, D tucked a pillow under Nurse’s head where she had gone to sleep on the bathroom floor. Just as Ambrose had told her, she took the tram for two stops, got off, and walked to the corner where the street sign read Great Heritage Street in one direction and Legate Avenue in the other. From there, she continued along Legate a block farther to the street sign that read Little Heritage Street. On Little Heritage, just as her brother had described, the second building from the corner was made of bright brick and had two tall, skinny trees in front.
She hurried across the street and up the path to the red door inlaid with a silver triangle, and knocked.
* * *
A doorman took her brother’s name, welcomed her to the Society for Psykical Research, and ushered her inside. He brought her through a tiled lobby to a curtained entranceway. This led through to what the doorman pronounced “the Grand Hall, miss.” He instructed her to abide there while he went to retrieve the young gentleman from his studies, and marched away to a second curtained doorway at the far end of the long room.
D was glad to abide right where she stood. Her family circumstances were more than comfortable and she had never wanted for food or clothes or shelter, but the distinctly adult majesty of the room in which she had been deposited was overwhelming. She felt that her commitment to her brother had brought her as far as could reasonably be expected. She also bitterly regretted neglecting to bring Baby for support.
Bookshelves stretched the Hall’s great length, and rose to its high ceiling, where a constellation of colored balls—planets, she realized—was strung, suspended by a spidery apparatus of bent silver wires. In the center of the apparatus was the largest ball, the yellow-painted sun. The whole construction moved slowly clockwise, and as it did, peels of light skimmed the curves of the planets.
Quiet, intent activity was taking place throughout the room. In the middle of what seemed like acres of gold-patterned red carpet, there was a woman at a writing desk with a ledger. A lavish touring hat sewn with pearls and flowers was tilted at her crown, screening her face, and she used a measuring instrument to draw lines in the book. At the top of a ladder attached to the wall perched a man examining the titles on the highest shelf. Off in a corner, a small group stood drinking from cups and saucers and chatting. Two identical women—twins!—in high-collared gowns were in consultation over a globe on a bronze stand.
Not too far from D, in a leather armchair by the marble fireplace, slumped an older man in tweed breeches. Even he, in his slumber, seemed happily occupied: his hands were clamped under his armpits, his sleeping mouth was lifted in a thoughtful smile, and there were blooms on his cheeks from the heat.
The Hall smelled wonderful, like cedar and woodsmoke and leather and polish and wax.
D balanced on the vast rug’s lip, the toes of her shoes sunken into the pile of the burgundy-colored carpet—checkered with triangles like the one on the Society’s door but gold instead of silver—and her heels on the threshold. The fabric of the curtain grazed her back. How had her brother ever found the courage to move beyond this spot?
She stared up at the planets, strategizing that if she focused all her attention on something, she would blend in, and no one would bother with her. Beneath the breeze of whispered conversation, the gently turning wire apparatus made a high, thin hum.
“Welcome, welcome! It’s the blood of the new members that keeps our operation fresh and sprightly.” The man from the armchair beside the fireplace had appeared in front of her. He was still smiling now that he was awake and his hands were still tucked under his armpits as if he had chilly fingers. His hair was the white-gray of factory smoke and hung around his face in loose curls. The vest under his tweed jacket was a shimmering gold. D had not known you could have a vest that color. She thought he must be very esteemed.
“I’m not a member, sir. I’m only waiting for my brother, Ambrose,” D said. She stepped off the lip of the rug and retreated into the curtain. If she was in trouble, she could duck underneath and make a dash for it through the lobby.
“Ambrose, marvelous. Ah, so you’re a guest. And a lovely, lovely girl. Well, I hope you do decide to join. As you can see, we have several female members.”
His kind manner, and the way he held back his hands, reassured her. D felt it was safe enough to step forward from the curtain. “I had to leave my nurse on the floor in the bathroom. She’s had too much medicine.”
“A common problem. You know the solution, don’t you?”
D shook her head.
“The solution is more medicine. Remember that.”
“I will, sir.”
“Good. What do you think of the place?”
“I like it,” D said.
“Have you noticed the planets?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you worry that one might break from the hanger and drop on your skull and kill you on your spot?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. It has never happened. The wires are tightly fastened. Has anyone given you a tour?”
“No, sir. I was told to abide here.”
“That’s no way to treat a potential member. Let’s see something. Would you accompany me on a short stroll?” With his hands stored under his armpits for safekeeping, the friendly old fellow indicated the direction across the room he wanted to go by tipping his head.
“Yes, sir.”
He guided her on a route between the writing tables and seating areas. D kept her eyes on the heels of his slippers as she trailed him. She resisted a powerful urge to step only on the embroidered gold triangles. No one spared her a glance.
“Now, take a look at this, my dear, a good, good look, and tell me what you make of it.”
They had come to a platform that extended from between two of the massive bookshelves. On the platform stood a side table and a deep, tall rectangular box with red velvet sides and a red door—a closet. The door of the closet was covered in smaller versions of the silver triangle that was inlaid on the building’s front door. On the table were a black bowler hat, a black baton, a pack of fanned cards, and a silver egg.
“Well?”
He peered at her humorously, one eye held as wide as could be and the other nearly shut. He was such a friendly man; he made D feel confident enough to give an honest answer, instead of just saying that she didn’t know.
“Is it to play a story game? You might take all those things there on the table into that closet, put on the hat, and then come out again with the other things and use them to tell a story?” This was exactly how she thought she would use the array on the stage. She used her own closet at home as a dressing room for performances of fairy tales that she put on for Nurse.
“Close enough,” the cheerful man said. “What a smart girl!” He snorted a chuckle and rubbed his nose against his shoulder. “This is a conjurer’s stage, and these were the instruments of a particular conjurer, a valued member of our little club, in fact. I don’t know what you know about conjuring. But it’s like storytelling. Is storytelling, really. The conjurer tells you an impossible tale and then gives you proof it’s true. Canny, canny business. Like thievery, but what a conjurer steals is faith, and the man who made tricks on this stage was the most wonderful, wonderful criminal you can imagine.”
The National Museum of the Worker
No gardens or ornamental bushes edged the stone block foundation of the massive structure at the corner of Legate and Little Heritage. There was no room for them. The great gray building sat flush to the street. Its walls flew straight and wide, interrupted only by the five belts of scabbed green window shutters that marked each level. D thought it had existed in her childhood, but its enormity was nondescript, and in her memory, by contrast to the cheery Society building with its fresh brick façade, the hulk’s presence was faint and uncertain. It didn’t appear to have been built; it looked as if it had settled, like a boulder in a field.
Brass letters bolted above the tall front doors announced the building’s name and purpose:
THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE WORKER: “TO HONOR THE NAMELESS BUILDERS”
The metal doors were the height of a horse. A smaller plaque on the wall beside the doors informed visitors that they were cast from melted-down tools. Identifiable fragments of hammerheads and ball-peens and anvil horns bubbled from the doors’ surfaces like shapes under a sheet.
Robert pressed the latch on the right-hand door, and it clicked—the museum had been left unlocked. D could tell that her lieutenant didn’t like it. There was no way to know if they would be the first to enter since the fall of the Crown’s government.
“I can find something else to do. It doesn’t matter,” D said. It really didn’t. There were other places, other tasks.
“But it all matters now,” he said, brushing aside the excuse she’d offered. “It’s the public’s property.”
Robert held the door while D found an iron stop on the floor inside and jammed it into the gap.
Daylight spiked from the opening of the propped door and fell across the wide stairs leading to the first-floor gallery. Robert said he ought to go first—“just in case there are any holdouts bunkered down in here”—and trotted up the short flight from the foyer. But D followed him without waiting.
At the head of the stairs a ticket booth stood to one side. Ahead of them the first-floor gallery lay in a hazy brown gloom, the light filtered by the slats of the closed shutters lining the walls. D smelled dust, iron, and the tang of the smoke from the Society’s ruins next door.
“Hello! Is anybody here? I’m a lieutenant of the Volunteer Civil Defense and I have documentation from the Provisional Government which grants me entry and command over these premises.” Her lieutenant had taken his pistol from its holster. “There won’t be any trouble—just put down anything you’ve taken, come out empty-handed, and I’ll let you go on your way.” His words echoed, chasing each other before they faded.
Robert looked to her with a twist at the corner of his mouth. She could tell he was anxious, asking with his expression if he should be ready to shoot someone, and more than that, if she believed he could.
Six months earlier, when they met, he had been a student at the university. In the forty-eight hours of skirmishing that had taken place mostly around the Government District, Robert had not seen any action. He’d been stationed at the west end of the South Fair Bridge with a handsaw, ready if the order came to cut the telegraph wires. He’d joked to D about the anticlimax of the experience. To pass the time, he’d read graffiti scratched on and around the lamp standards, and split the bread he’d brought with a Lees beggar girl. “I don’t want to say that I found the battle relaxing,” Robert had said to D, “but I did get some very educational reading done. Were you aware that the beer at the Still Crossing is mostly river water, but mixed with a little piss and vinegar so it’s safe to drink?”
D didn’t know if Robert was a coward or not. How could she? He didn’t know yet himself. She would be glad if he never needed to find out.
She adjusted the green armband knotted above his biceps. “If there were looters here, Lieutenant, I think they’ve left.”
“Agreed,” he said. He took a deep breath and carefully holstered the gun, buttoning it down.
D kissed his cheek.
He made a noise in his throat while his hand slid up the side of her dress, pressing against her ribs.
D swiveled away. She walked to the nearest pair of shutters, folded them back, and continued along the hall, briskly opening one after another.
The shutters clattered and the gallery’s hardwood floors unrolled in strips of dusty sunshine. The first exhibit to resolve itself was a model of oversized, interlocking gears that stood in the middle of the floor. A placard that dangled from the ceiling read MACHINES AND THEIR OPERATORS. Everything on this first floor concerned a mechanical invention: the printing press, the sawmill, the steam engine, the timepiece, the bicycle—and the engineers and operators who worked them. The larger exhibits were interspersed with smaller glass-topped display cases set on wooden podiums.
Opened to the daylight, the windows on the building’s left side faced out onto Legate; while the windows on the right side, silted with ash from the fire, looked on the Society building’s wreckage. The windows at the rear wall held views of the imperialists’ embassy and its rear courtyard.
The museum was not wired for electricity. Tarnished gas lamps were fixed to the walls. D opened the tap on one and heard it hiss. She closed it.
Robert called her to the gears. It was an interactive exhibit. There were three gears, each as tall as the lieutenant. He pushed against the top gear, which turned its brother in the middle, which spun and bit the third gear, which caused the whole, slightly raised circular floor of the exhibit to slowly revolve. The gears clunked against each other and the rotation of the platform produced a gritty mumble. “Needs oil,” he said.
Wax-figure workers populated several of the displays. A printer in gartered sleeves examined a long paper that unfurled from the printing press. At the sawmill a woodsman with a pipe in his grimacing mouth stood with his hands on his hips, observing the operation. Two wax men in long leather gloves and leather aprons busied themselves at their steam engine, cheeks painted pink and mottled with whitish drips as they sweated in the combustion heat. A young mechanic poked a screwdriver at a wheel bolt on the bicycle while its full-skirted female rider helpfully held it upright by the handlebars. Every figure was distinct; like the real population of the city itself, these wax figures bore different skin tones, and were formed in a range of body types.
A stairwell at the back of the gallery brought them to the second floor, which was dedicated to HAND WORK. Here, D opened the shutters to expose exhibitions on such professions as bricklaying, hunting and skinning, rug making, rope making, sewing, pottery making, vending, and baking.
From her oven the baker lifted a tray with several loaves of wooden bread, touched nearly white from handling. Robert removed one from the tray, weighed it, and set it back with a clunk. “It’s stale,” he said to the wax woman, who had a pained, drawn face. D thought she might be justifiably tired from holding the tray for however many years, and from hearing people laugh about her wooden bread. Dust coated her eyes.
The ropemaker—immediately familiar-looking somehow—sat in a nest of tangled hemp strands, her lined cheeks puffed in a jolly way. Pieces of white string had been threaded through the bricklayers’ belt loops to keep their dungarees from falling down. D guessed that someone must have taken their belts. Dust covered these figures’ eyes too. Several of the potter’s bowls and vases had clearly been broken and cemented together.
The third floor was titled THE RAILS, ROADWAYS, AND OCEANS. In this gallery, wax conductors manned sections of trains and trams, liverymen drove carriages, and a crew of sailors performed duties on a whaler’s half-deck that was braced above the floor with scaffolding.
Throughout the museum, many of the wax figures, though impressively detailed and lifelike, showed bare patches on their scalps where hair had fallen out or been torn out. A few had suffered more severe damage: lost fingers, skin gouged, eyes cracked or missing altogether. Like the bricklayers, other figures seemed to have been robbed of their proper accoutrements—instead of a bucket, for instance, the clamdigger carried a coal scuttle. Most of the demonstration machines were broken. Of the half dozen train whistles set on a table for children to test, only the smallest responded when its button was thumbed, releasing a wounded moan; and no water poured from the pump that was supposed to feed the sawmill’s wheel. The jury-rigged attempts at upkeep—the bricklayers’ string, the coal scuttle—seemed opportunistic, the vague maintenance of a disinterested hand.
There were plaques to mark the gifts made by museum benefactors on benches and the walls beside some of the exhibits. Tellingly, the most recent of these was dated to twenty years earlier. D doubted that the National Museum of the Worker was in much danger of looting—or, in the case of the belts of the bricklayers and the clamdigger’s bucket, further looting. It seemed to have been a long while since it had been of interest to visitors at all, and there were far richer pickings these days.
The fourth floor was home to COMMUNICATORS AND CUSTODIANS OF KNOWLEDGE, and the top floor to OF STONE AND SOIL: MINES, FARMS, AND FORESTS.
* * *
Near the back right corner of the fifth-floor hall, an ersatz prospector’s shack hunched by a stream made of thick glass. Below the stream’s transparent surface ceramic minnows hung from loops of wire. The wax prospector was encased up to his ankles in the middle of the glass water, panning. Closer to the shack, his wife draped rags on a clothesline.
Robert seated himself on one of the cane chairs in front of the shack. He put his hands on his knees. “Shall I tell you what I think? I think this is remarkably illustrative, Dora. This entire place.”
