The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Attention to her remarks was somewhat blunted, I think, by the distraction provided by Bertha Schanke. As the chair spoke, Ms. Schanke consumed a good number of the two dozen or so Dunkin’ Donuts heaped on a platter which, while centrally located on the circular table that takes up much of the Twitchell Room, appeared locked in the force field of Ms. Schanke’s scowl. I don’t think I was the only one who tried not to stare as the woman broke into pieces and ate, in rapid succession and with a cup of coffee, first the Old Fashioned, then the Frosted, and finally the Boston Kreme. (I admit a fondness myself for those vile concoctions as often, on Sunday mornings after church, I stop by the Dunkin’ Donuts on Linnaeus Avenue to indulge.)

  She was working on the Toasted Coconut when some of the other committee members ruffled up their feathers and made opening statements as well. Professor Athol said he wanted to make sure that the diorama did not become one more “white male fantasy.” (I have placed it in quotes in the official Log as well.) He then reached for the high ground with pronouncements such as “When we look at early humankind we look at ourselves …” and “We are not dealing just with models but with role models …”

  Ariel Dearth, who last year published his autobiography, Ariel Dearth by Ariel Dearth (by Ariel Dearth), had, surprisingly, little to say. Perhaps it was because he was sitting next to Ms. Schanke. She seemed to agitate him, especially when she picked up the Sugar Cruller and began, in a rather disturbing manner, to lick the end of it before biting it off and aggressively masticating it. Professor Dearth usually goes around with the pinched expression of someone who is smelling something foul. He seems to like the sound of his own voice and to be continually casting about, as though looking for the cameras. There was a considerable flap not long ago when Spike Manacle, a columnist who emotes regularly in the Bugle, referred to Dearth as the Von Beaut Professor of Situational Ethnics. Professor Dearth accused Manacle, who claimed it was a typo, of committing an ethnic slur.

  Father O’Gould, a tall, slender, handsome man who speaks in the lilting cadences of his native Cork, said he hoped there would be some outward sign that early man did not live by bread alone. “And,” he added in that shy, deferential way of his, “I am not referring only to diet.”

  Mr. Onoyoko, the founder of the pharmaceutical empire that bears his name, listened to the translations with much smiling and odd flares of mirth. I am frankly puzzled by his presence at the meeting. His company provides most of the support for the Onoyoko Institute, but that organization, as far as I know, has confined itself principally to underwriting research in the Genetics Lab.

  I very nearly protested when Ms. Schanke reached for the Blueberry Filled, which I could distinguish by the purple-stained smudge at one end. I watched covetously as she ate it with unusual relish, nibbling her way toward the violet blue, clotted, semiliquid center, tilting up her chins in an attempt to prevent the inevitable dribble.

  I might have said something, but just then Marlene Parkers was striking a most positive note, thanking Professor Pilty for taking time to meet with the committee. She praised the museum for being one of the more accessible parts of the university to the general public. Ms. Parkers stated that she simply wanted to make sure that access for the handicapped and provisions for the visually impaired would be considered in planning the diorama.

  Professor Pilty told Ms. Parkers that the visitor paths through the diorama would accommodate wheelchairs and that eventually there would be audio sources of information for use by both the sighted and the unsighted. Indeed, I must say that Professor Pilty comported himself at all times in a most gracious manner despite manifest provocations on the part of certain individuals on the committee. Indeed, I found his forbearance puzzling, not to say out of character. Like most people with a well-developed sense of their own importance, Thad Pilty is not known to suffer fools gladly.

  And yet, when the opening remarks concluded, he welcomed the committee members to the MOM and told them he would take their recommendations very seriously indeed. With the help of handouts and illustrations and much patience, he described for them “an interactive diorama of Neanderthal life set in a permanent encampment somewhere in Europe sixty thousand years ago, i.e., contemporaneous with Lucille.” Visitors would enter the camp through a darkened passage “to give the illusion of stepping back in time.” This passage would emerge at the mouth of a wide cave formed from the overhang on one side of the second-floor gallery. The diorama itself, taking up the entire floor of the atrium, would be enclosed in double-walled partitions painted in a continuous mural depicting a late Pleistocene landscape “with flora and fauna typical of that time.” From the near distance a small group of hunters would be seen approaching the camp, carrying on a pole the carcass of a deer. Before exiting through a doorway cleverly painted into the mural, the visitor would walk on a path among the twenty-five or so individuals “representing a cross section from the newborn to the very old,” who would be engaged in a variety of tasks, from “cooking and tanning hides to weaving baskets and making stone tools typical of the Mousterian culture.”

  Professor Murdleston interrupted briefly to mumble something about siting a “Late Stone Age latrine in the diorama.” (Murdleston is best if not particularly well known for his The Ethnocoprolithic Record: An Enduring Legacy, a work irreverent students have dubbed “The Origin of the Feces,”)

  Professor Pilty nodded politely at his colleague’s remarks and then went on to hand around sketches of the models that are being designed for the diorama by Humanation Syntectics of Orlando, Florida. He said the models would be of the “classic” Neanderthal type, with short, powerful bodies, large faces, and heavy brows. They would, he said, move “in situ” as they performed their various tasks. Special emphasis is planned for the “making of tools to make other tools based on our excavations in the Dordogne.” There are plans, apparently, to make the diorama interactive by giving the models the ability to simulate some kind of speech with which to answer questions about life in man’s early history.

  It was at this point in the professor’s presentation that Ms. Schanke, working on the Chocolate Frosted, spearing with wetted finger the bits of glaze that fell to the table, interrupted him. “Isn’t it true, Professor, that you’re only able to do this because the Neanderthals are powerless?”

  I should explain, perhaps, that Ms. Schanke is a familiar, nay, an unmistakable presence in the greater Seaboard area. A year or so ago, she received national attention when she led a successful campaign to have Wainscott set aside in classrooms, lecture halls, and so on seating six inches wider than standard to accommodate morphologically challenged persons. Ms. Schanke, in short, cuts, if that is the verb, quite a figure, what with the boot-camp haircut, earrings that look like handcuffs, a studded leather jacket, and army surplus trousers tucked into her combat boots. The undershirt she wore today was lettered WHY SO MANY MALES?

  Professor Pilty, after scratching the shaved part of his chin, responded with a condescending smile that Neanderthals were not just powerless they were extinct. He qualified his statement to the effect that some researchers have reported isolated groups of Australian aborigines that manifest cranial morphologies and dentition characteristic of European Neanderthals of fifty thousand years ago. He was about to qualify this qualification in the manner of an academic when Ms. Schanke accused him of “imperializing the past with white male sapienism.” Shaking his head, Professor Pilty allowed that she had “lost” him. Ms. Schanke snapped the French Cruller in half and retorted that she had lost him long ago. When Professor Pilty shrugged and said something about a lack of coherence — showing an edge of the Thad Pilty I’ve witnessed in other meetings — Ms. Schanke called coherence “just another white male power projection.” At this point, Dr. Gordon, in excusing herself from the meeting, turned to Ms. Schanke and said that to characterize sapienism and coherence as the domain of white males was to lose her cause before she even began. Undeterred, Ms. Schanke returned to her attack on Professo
r Pilty, saying that he would be extinct someday as well. Raising his eyebrows at that one, Izzy Landes turned to Ms. Schanke and said she sounded “awfully hopeful” about the prospect. At that point, the background buzz of Ms. Kushiro’s translation and Dr. Onoyoko’s amusement became quite apparent.

  Before Constance Brattle could bring down her verbal gavel, so to speak, Ariel Dearth, his voice squeaky and portentous at the same time, opined as to how there were precedents in law for defending groups in absentia. Well, that also got a rise out of Izzy, who said he doubted there were any “rich and famous” Neanderthals for Professor Dearth to represent in court. On the contrary, Professor Chard chimed in that facetious manner of his, the species is alive and well, and he mentioned Donald Trump and Mike Tyson. Clearly irked by this badinage, Ms. Schanke accused the museum “of making puppets of people who aren’t around to defend themselves.” She said it was another example of “the patriarchy seizing the past to control the present and the future.” Professor Pilty, with remarkable self-possession, I thought, replied that while he didn’t know in what sense Ms. Schanke was using the term patriarchy, they planned to leave the organization of the camp ambiguous because they didn’t know much about Neanderthal social life. They presumed, he added, that it followed the pattern of surviving hunter-gatherer groups. Scowling, her voice rising, Ms. Schanke said by patriarchy she meant the dweems, an apparent reference, I learned afterwards, to dead white European males, and “living white males who are messing up the planet for everyone else.” For some reason Mr. Onoyoko found this outburst particularly hilarious, provoking Ms. Schanke to rise angrily from her chair and all but scream, “Will someone tell that f—eking little Jap to shut up!”

  Constance Brattle finally did bring about order of sorts, and a rather tedious discussion ensued about whether white males were criminals because of nature or nurture and whether sapienism is a form of racism or sexism or both.

  Now, before I say what I am going to say, I would like it in the record, however unofficially, that I seldom have much sympathy for the causes that Ms. Schanke and her kind espouse. It strikes me that they have made disgruntlement into a profession and spend much time and energy searching for things to complain about. However, in this instance, Ms. Schanke may have a point: who are we to impose our ideas on how our forebears lived. Given such scanty evidence, is not any attempt to re-create the conditions of such a distant past doomed to be highly speculative at best? Think of what future archaeologists and anthropologists would make of our culture if they had so little to go on? They might think we worshiped soup cans. Finally, is it really the role of the MOM to indulge in such speculation? Paleoanthropology, after all, is a science and not, as some might have us think, a form of entertainment.

  There are other issues as well. I was sorely tempted to step out of character for a moment and point out to the committee a few other more tangible consequences of proceeding with the project: the occupation of the entire ground floor of the atrium by the Hominid Collections for this diorama would leave no room for temporary exhibits and would mean the end of the annual Curatorial Ball as we have known it. Of course, I said nothing, as I still think it highly inappropriate for the committee to be holding hearings on anything to do with the MOM, especially where the real issues are concerned.

  What afflicts me, though, as I sit here listening to the pithy littérateurs at play in their yard below, are persistent doubts about Thad Pilty. There was something about his demeanor today. I have never seen him so solicitous, so tolerant, especially in response to some of Ms. Schanke’s comments. It’s as though he would do anything to get his precious diorama. I certainly had not realized the extent of his conflict with Dean Fessing. I am not saying he had anything to do with what happened to Fessing. I am simply saying that I cannot rid myself of lingering … suspicions. But then, that’s the nature of suspicion, isn’t it? I mean, the way it lingers, like the smell of smoke.

  Well, I think I will go over to the Club. This business about donuts has given me quite an appetite.

  TUESDAY, MAY 12

  Well, small wonder Edo Onoyoko was in attendance at the Oversight Committee hearing. Small wonder Thad Pilty is allowing that body to meddle in the affairs of the museum: the Onoyoko Institute, I learned at lunch today with Marge and Esther, is funding the diorama! Or most of it, anyway. Marge told me that Thad had “pitched” his idea to the Japanese billionaire in January, emphasizing that the focus of the diorama would be man’s early development of technology. It seems Mr. Onoyoko liked the idea and agreed to underwrite the diorama provided a version of it could be installed in a museum in Tokyo and that it be done in a politic manner.

  The news gave me so many disquietudes I scarcely knew which one to entertain first. For a few moments I pondered the Onoyoko link between the Genetics Lab and Thad Pilty’s project and how it might relate to the Fessing case. But it made no sense except as coincidence. Any large funding source, after all, is bound to attract beneficiaries. To posit that Mr. Onoyoko, in league with Thad Pilty or through his minions, hired a gourmet anthropophage “hit man” to “take out” the dean to protect his investments borders, I think, on paranoia. But then, I am not schooled in creative suspicion. I am, frankly, more worried now that Thad Pilty will be quite willing to let the university have its way, to let them take the museum and demolish the rest of the exhibit space once he gets his own permanent exhibition.

  There are people, I know, who wonder why I remain adamant about the independence of the museum vis-à-vis the university, especially when it seems that nearly every other institution in the Seaboard area has succumbed to the collegial embraces of Wainscott. I’m sure there are those who think I simply want to keep my position, which, if consolidation were to occur, might be considered supererogatory. And I admit such an eventuality is a concern. No one wants to find oneself redundant, as the British so nicely put it. But my professional fortunes, frankly, are a distant second to a real danger: the complete submergence of the MOM within the Wainscott system would mean, essentially, its disappearance as we know it today. No one would plan it that way, of course. But bit by bit, room by room, floor by floor, the MOM would be turned into office space, which is just about what happened to the Humboldt Museum.

  When I was growing up in Seaboard, my good Aunt Agatha, who had no children of her own, would often walk me over to that venerable institution, long before it had been taken over by the university. It had several floors of stuffed animals, some of them, admittedly, rather moth-eaten. There was a silent, still aviary, and the fossil collection, to be honest, comprised mere leftovers compared with what other museums have. But the Humboldt had a charming old-fashioned diorama of wildlife in winter, with a cutaway showing, beneath leaf cover, deep snow, leafless trees, and a sky of dusty purple, various small animals in the blissful drowse of hibernation. All that is gone now, disposed of, God knows where, and replaced with fluorescent-lit offices peopled with perfectly nice people in nice clothes who drive in from West Seaboard and the South Shore to create, as far as I can discern, paperwork for one another. What’s left is a few bits and pieces, a truncated hall where they have on permanent display, believe it or not, pictures of the old spacious halls and their exhibitions. At the moment it’s occupied by some sort of beetle extravaganza, including a tank of dermestid beetles busily cleaning the flesh from the skeleton of some small animal or another.

  Short of consolidation, I happen to know there has been talk at Mr. Morin’s “executive committee” meetings of “renovations” that would, for instance, include taking the fifth-floor atrium space for offices, i.e., boarding over the skylight and mangling in one blow the whole exquisite design of the exhibition space.

  The thought of the MOM being vandalized in this manner depresses me beyond words. You see, I can scarcely describe the subdued, delicious shiver of revelation I experience when I linger alone among the collections. I love the orderliness of the objects in their cases of glass and polished mahogany and the manifest reassu
rance they provide of our slow and painful rise from brutishness to civilization. I stand enchanted when, say, the light pools in a certain way on the ebony smoothness of the great Haida raven. I very nearly start each time, which is daily, I confront among the African Collections the reliquary guardian figures carved from blackened wood. I perfectly understand that what’s represented here, of course, is a construction, in most cases a reconstruction, of our artfulness. (I have often thought the public would appreciate all this more if they could go into the various workshops to watch, as I have, conservators piecing back together the fragments of a black steatite rhyton more than three millennia old. It is like seeing the shattered past lovingly restored to something whole.) But reconstruction or not, everywhere I look in this sacred place I see a beauty that brims. And in this art I see and sense something deeper: that the spontaneous, gratuitous, and infinitely delighting human impulse to create beauty is nothing less than proof of our divinity. We are creators as well as creatures.

  I know, of course, that such sentiments would not go over very well with the administrators at an administrative hearing, replete with architects and their blueprints, gathered to consider a “reorganization plan to meet staffing requirements.” These are, with a few exceptions, people who cannot see the forest for the trees, who cannot even see the trees. Which reminds me, I must get to work on the history of the MOM before, like so much else, it is gone.