by Doon Arbus
Of course, the widow and the Board members had already engaged in lengthy discussions amongst themselves about what they delicately referred to as “the problem” or simply — in an undertone usually reserved for obscenities — “the book,” as if to name it would be to further sanction its reality. They had soon agreed that any attempt at refutation would have to be exhaustive, since concentrating only on the most egregious allegations was in danger of confirming, by omission, the veracity of those left unrebutted. A further impediment to action lay in the fear that threatening lawsuits or issuing vociferous denials (no matter how eloquent, no matter how persuasive) would only lead to counterarguments from the other side, thereby keeping the whole question alive before the public in a way that served the author’s interests rather than their own. In the end, after consulting legal experts, they unhappily concluded that silence, unsatisfactory though it might be, remained their best available weapon — and neither the title of the book nor the name of its author had since been mentioned in their presence until now. The candidate’s pronouncement had abruptly broken the spell.
The chairman, invoking the authority of the widow’s presence for the first time with a subtle tilt of his head in her direction, took it upon himself to explain the Foundation’s official position to the would-be defender of the faith and to impress upon him how unwelcome they would find his well-intentioned efforts at vindication. The candidate, studying his knees as he listened, was nodding silently. “I understand,” he said at last. “Of course it’s your decision. I’m sure you know best and, naturally, I have no choice but to respect your wishes.” Clutching the satchel to his chest like a symbol of his transgression, he rose from his chair as he had almost done several minutes earlier, but remained standing there before them, evidently at a loss for what his next move might be. “Well,” he murmured, in a feeble attempt to mimic protocol and lose himself inside it: “Thank you for taking the time to see me.” The familiar refrain led them to thank him in return and to mutter almost in unison their perfunctory goodbyes. And still he lingered. “But is there really nothing to be done? Can any coward with a little time on his hands tear down with impunity a reputation more sterling than his own simply because the one who earned it can no longer defend himself? Christ, isn’t death itself insult enough?”
“For all we know it may be only the beginning.” These words, uttered in a low voice issuing from the widow’s corner — a voice resonant with suppressed irony — were accompanied by a stirring rustling sound betokening movement. With her special assistant at the ready by her elbow overseeing her efforts while scrupulously refraining from providing any unwanted help, the widow got to her feet, slowly, deliberately, like someone monitoring the status of a familiar, recurrent pain, and emerged from the shadows, moving around the table toward the reluctantly departing visitor with both her hands extended. “On behalf of the Doctor and myself,” she said — she had always called her husband Doctor, substituting the title like a term of endearment for his given name — “I want you to know how much we appreciate your coming all this way.” She took his hand, sandwiching it ever so briefly between both of hers, as if she were surreptitiously passing on a secret note. “We’ll be in touch with you quite soon,” she said, while her assistant, animated perhaps by some psychic signal, approached the visitor and, in a replay of their initial encounter, maneuvered him toward the door, peremptorily offering to see him out.
When he first accepted the position as the Morgan Foundation’s caretaker-in-residence and promised them five years, he may have envisioned it as little more than the latest in a continuing series of respites from his own life. He must have relished the prospect of inhabiting this sanctuary — one he had never even anticipated visiting other than in his imagination — a sanctuary, however temporary, in which to polish someone else’s silver, to house rare manuscripts in plastic sleeves, to rehabilitate a broken stool or damaged artifact, to replace labels for displays, to wrest order from disorder, and to share with strangers, to whatever degree his eloquence permitted, his hard-won understanding of the meaning of Dr. Morgan’s singular achievement. On several occasions in the course of the ensuing twenty-four years, he had tendered his resignation only to be persuaded to withdraw it each time, inadvertently securing in the process salary increases to which he remained indifferent, and binding himself in exchange to additional ever-lengthening terms of commitment. His departure has been eradicated as an option by his repeated failed attempts to effectuate it. He got the job. Now the job has him. A trap, partially of his own making, is closing round him, holding him fast.
And so today, like yesterday, and like so many other yesterdays that he has lost count and even forgotten when it was he lost it, he once more leads a steadily dwindling little band of visitors up the staircase he first climbed as an innocent applicant for a position that is now the very essence of his identity. He is the caretaker of the Foundation, Dr. Morgan’s man, a hired hand of sorts, so safely ensconced within his role that his capacity to excel at anything else has ceased to be a threat. He is here solely to make the dead man come alive. It has become a consuming preoccupation. His work is never done.
In the early days, immediately following the opening of the Foundation to the public as a museum, the caretaker had enjoyed the assistance of a part-time volunteer archivist, as well as a series of summer interns looking to enhance their résumés, who helped him research and catalogue objects in the collection and keep the files in order. Three times a week, a cleaning woman would come with a small crew to erase the signs of trespass, polish that which could be made to shine, and keep the place free of dust. For a brief period, there had also been an annex where the public could purchase miniature replicas of selected objects, as well as assorted novelty items: the red brick building as an eraser, notepaper adorned with the Morgan insignia, or refrigerator magnets picturing an installation wall. Popular as the store and its merchandise had proven to be with shoppers — garnering on occasion more traffic than the museum itself — it nonetheless failed to turn a profit. The Board had long since decided in a vote of five to four that the endowment could not sustain the cost of manufacturing the products, nor the salary of a sales clerk, and had reluctantly shut the annex down.
All those employees had been the caretaker’s colleagues. He had monitored their comings and goings, exchanging small talk on a regular basis. Other than a few clerks in the neighborhood hardware stores and groceries, a couple of waitresses and bartenders and regular patrons of a local eatery, and the occasional visit by a friend from overseas who happened to be passing through, they comprised his entire social community. In recent years, though — due in part to financial constraints — he’s been largely on his own. The Foundation Board, long since satisfied with the adequacy of its caretaker’s performance, had relaxed its supervisory role, confining itself to semiannual assessments of the written progress reports he was required to submit and the occasional unannounced inspection by appointed members assigned to monitor his conduct on the tour.
Whatever passion the Foundation’s professed mission had once ignited in its original Board members abated with the passage of time, quenched by the frustrations, both political and practical, inherent in attempting to perpetuate the interests of a dead, and almost forgotten, man. Aside from the widow, all but two of the original six members have either resigned or died. Their replacements — on average about fifteen years younger than their predecessors and twice as ambitious and energetic — had been chosen for their administrative or business skills and were determined to make the entity financially self-sustaining, if not actually profitable, even at the cost of betraying certain principles explicitly stated in the Will. New members had on more than one occasion voted to sell off a few of the collection’s most valuable objects to replenish shrinking coffers. They had the advantage of ignorance on their side. None of them had been acquainted with Dr. Morgan, nor had they more than the most superficial knowledge of, or interest in
, his work. His name meant little to them beyond its function as the title of a foundation. Inevitably, the reconfigured Board, uninhibited by any residual loyalty to the founder’s wishes, began reconfiguring its mandate.
The widow lingered on but her power as a chastening influence had been vanquished by her condition. Suffering from dementia and confined to a nursing home, she spent her days in a reality from which experience of the present and memories of the recent past had been largely obliterated. In their stead, pockmarked visions of her girlhood forced themselves upon her, peopled by figments of deceased friends and relatives — her husband included — who taunted her with their ephemeral presence and ensnared her in old quarrels, many of which had never actually occurred. For years she had subsisted on memories. They harbored everything she valued most in her adult life. Now, like a traveler without a passport precluded by a failure to produce it from returning home, she was denied access to the remnants of her past, now imprisoned somewhere in an impenetrable corner of her own mind. Every so often, she would emerge from her blighted state to endure a brief glimpse of what she’d lost, which only made things worse, leaving her forlorn, desolate, beached on a strange shore. The disease that had left her identity in tatters, depriving her of the pleasures and achievements of her own unique history, offered her in exchange no compensatory eradication of suffering. The dementia was, however, kind enough to spare her any knowledge of the impending assault on her late husband’s legacy, which she was now helpless to prevent.
Among the many plans of which the widow remained blessedly unaware was a capital improvement project, currently stalled — but only temporarily — by an ongoing dispute between the Foundation Board and the Landmarks Commission, a dispute from which the latter was unlikely to emerge victorious. The Commission — having survived over the years by contenting itself with a series of pyrrhic victories and by cultivating a willingness to compromise virtually indistinguishable from an appetite for defeat — could not be expected to alter its long-standing practices by suddenly trying to make a real fight of it in the Morgan Foundation case.
The Board’s proposal, as presently conceived, entailed the construction of a fifteen-story steel and glass office tower that would rise imposingly above the site of the Foundation to vie with its neighbors for its own fragment of sky. Furthermore, in deference to the historic importance of the Morgan Foundation as an antiquated structure (housing what some now believed to be an equally antiquated concept), the original red brick building was to remain intact and functional — at least for the foreseeable future — encased in glass at the base of the modern tower, a mere curiosity as impotent and baffling as a ship in a bottle. The architectural firm hired by the Board to draw up the construction plans and implement the design submitted its self-congratulatory proposal endorsing the proposed edifice as “an homage to the very principles espoused by Dr. Charles Alexander Morgan” and calling it “an exquisite embodiment of the creative tension between — and interdependence of — past and present within a structure that honors them both.” This proclamation was perfectly in keeping with the current strategy: to embrace Morgan’s little privately funded museum and incorporate it into the new agenda — thereby deflecting any possible charge of breach of trust — and to drag it into the twenty-first century, where it would ultimately wither away on the shoals of its own demonstrable irrelevance.
Given the powerlessness of the widow and the two surviving original Board members — the latter a weary minority resigned to being outvoted in any seriously contentious matter — the caretaker, with his faculties more or less intact and his heart still in the right place, began to see himself, if only by default, as Dr. Morgan’s sole defender and last remaining hope for posthumous survival. Although he wielded no political clout, he had inadvertently gained a significant territorial advantage. The Board’s absorption in more important matters and its indifference to the museum’s fate had effectively ceded to the caretaker sole dominion over the building’s day-to-day operations. While he could not have hoped to succeed in his mission by any overt maneuver, his role as an autonomous insider left him free to use his natural subversive ingenuity. During the past year or two, objects had begun to move from one room to another. Others occasionally disappeared from their displays, replaced by something new but almost indistinguishable from the original. No one missed them. No one even noticed. No one was left to care.
On the surface, the caretaker betrays scarcely any awareness of an impending threat. He has cultivated a willful blindness to the ongoing machinations concerning the museum’s uncertain future — and, by extension, his own — performing his duties as diligently as if nothing had changed, as if, in the face of his calm persistence, nothing ever would. Had there been a witness to take note of his demeanor when he mounted a step stool in the library, dust cloth in hand, to minister to the books that lined the top shelf, or sat at the workbench in his room copying out the text from one of Morgan’s ledgers onto three-by-five cards in his studious penmanship, or set about dismantling an installation untouched for decades, one subject at a time — the green beetles, for example, or the tarnished silver spoons — to make way for a new installation unavailable to visitors until now, his fixed trance-like smile, the tilt of his head, the pursed lips through which a tuneless song escaped might have implied a peculiar serenity, a serenity reserved exclusively for those who, having waged a long futile battle against despair, have finally befriended it and, with a sigh verging on relief, abandoned their last vestiges of hope. The Board could not be blamed for failing to recognize in this dutiful, mild-mannered employee the dangerously single-minded enemy it was harboring unwittingly within the Foundation walls.
This morning when the caretaker arrived to greet his assembled visitors — he counted nine of them, two more than on the previous day — he had forsaken his customary deliberately casual attire (the well-laundered workshirt, fraying a little at the collar, the grey cable-knit sweater with leather patches at the elbows, the pair of ample corduroys cushioning his bony knees), which had almost become a uniform by now. This habitual choice of clothing had long served a dual purpose. From a practical point of view, it protected him from the perpetual chill inside — a carefully monitored archival mandate aiming to prolong the life of the museum’s fragile objects — which set the prescribed temperature at sixty-four degrees. Additionally, his slightly shabby informality was meant as a signal to visitors that their guide — unlike the docents and scholars they may have grown accustomed to in visiting most cultural institutions — did not purport to be an expert imparting knowledge to the uninformed strangers temporarily in his care, but rather a uniquely fortunate insider, an impassioned acolyte, willing to share with them something of what he happened to have discovered along the way.
This at least was the first impression he wanted to create, hoping to suggest to his audience, as a kind of corollary, that the building they were now privileged to enter and explore — with its ostensibly indiscriminate curatorial embrace and haphazard installations — would bear no resemblance to the usual stuffy public institution. On the contrary, despite the absence of the original host, it stubbornly remained what it had always been: a private, if admittedly eccentric, residence permeated by the intimate, unstudied atmosphere characteristic of a place where someone lived, and it deserved to be approached in that spirit, with the instinctive deference of an uninvited guest gaining admittance to a stranger’s house when the unsuspecting owner happened to be away.
Such, however, is not precisely the strategic first impression the caretaker is striving for on this occasion. This morning will be different. This morning he has something else in mind. Instead of his regular uniform, he wears today an ill-fitting houndstooth three-piece suit — its padded shoulders extending a couple of inches beyond his own, its sleeves stopping just short of his wrists, its trousers exposing below the cuff of each leg as he walks a glimpse of silky chartreuse sock — which he means to employ as a dramatic featu
re of the day’s tour. Only the shoes, an old pair of thick-soled highly polished brown brogues, can legitimately claim to be his own. The awkwardness with which this borrowed ensemble adapts itself to his body — hanging limp or drooping where it should have effortlessly hugged his frame, stretched tight where it had originally been intended to be generous, and magnifying with each such minor divergence the hopeless disparity between his own physiognomy and that of the man for whom the suit originally had been made — fails to disconcert him in the least. He wears it as impassively as a turtle wears its shell. The visitors, who might otherwise have found the spectacle of their oddly misattired guide unnerving, are evidently blinded to it by the power of his masterful nonchalance. In a triumph of self-effacement verging on a magician’s vanishing act, he manages to orchestrate the preliminary transactions and usher his charges into the first room — the room he calls the Overture because Dr. Morgan had called it that — without ever precisely registering on them as a presence. He is biding his time, waiting for his moment. He prides himself on being a very patient man.