“It’s quite all right,” I said quickly. I was surprised to find myself smiling at him. I liked him, bony face, self-absorption, and all.
He put out his hand. “I’m Jerry Elliot.”
I took it. “Sheila Ramsay.”
We walked out of the auditorium and down the hall together as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“I did a study once, on amulets,” he offered.
“Did you?”
“Yes. They serve several functions, many of a magico-religious nature.”
“Is that so?”
“In this particular tribe, in the interior of Peru, there is an especial fondness for small, bright metal objects.” He grinned and it was a surprisingly attractive grin that creased his bony face into unexpectedly pleasant lines.
I laughed and somehow found myself telling him all about the battered little sixpence.
“It belonged to my mother and she truly believed it was lucky. You see, she was at the Café de Paris the night it was bombed. . . .”
It turned out, of course, that he had never heard of the Café de Paris, so I told him about the London nightclub and how excited my mother had been to be asked there that Saturday night in 1941. She was nineteen and fresh to London from a country vicarage. Newly joined up in the WAAFs, she had just received her orders and this would be her last night in London. The music was bright and gay, the latest swing. Everywhere there were uniforms, but many of the girls wore chiffon and satin. Costume jewelry sparkled in the spotlights.
There was no warning.
She was dancing with an RAF lieutenant and she always remembered the song “Oh Johnny, Oh!” Her partner was a vigorous dancer who loped around the small floor. They had been right in front of the bandstand one moment and the next they were at the back of the floor, which was crowded with dancers. As her partner swung her about, she saw something glitter bright as a star on the floor. They stopped and she reached down.
She could never, later, remember that actual moment of blast but is must have been just then for, when she next could see, it was smoky gray everywhere and there was a choking smell of cordite in the air and someone very near her screamed and screamed. She was looking up at her partner. He had not bent down and shards from the mirrored walls were lodged in his throat. Blood spurted everywhere and he was quite dead. As she watched, he fell slowly to the littered floor. In her hand she was clutching the bent little sixpence that had glittered on the floor.
“I believe I’d carry it, too,” Jerry agreed. “I’m only surprised that she’s let go—”
We were up from the basement of that branch of the Smithsonian and pushing out a side door into the heavy hot air of Washington, DC, on an August noon. He was holding the door and we were on the sidewalk when his words cut off sharply. He knew from my face that Mother was dead. She had given me the sixpence two years before when she knew her time was almost gone. I’ve always been bitter that her doctor didn’t tell me the truth, that he connived with her to keep me in ignorance. Because there were weekends I had not come home from college to see her, and I would have come if only I had known.
I blinked against the bright Washington sunlight and reached out impulsively to touch his hand. “It’s all right. She laughed when she gave it to me and said it was my turn to have a talisman, that it had only failed her once.” It was my turn to break off. I wasn’t going to tell this bony-faced stranger everything in my life this hot summer day. Not that the little sixpence had fallen from her purse once at an airfield and a young American had helped her find it, the young man who would be my father and who would fly until the day nine years later when his plane slammed into a North Korean mountainside. After his death, Mother put away the sixpence and only brought it out years later to give to me.
I knew in my heart that she had not actually believed it had magical properties—though there was a strain of Irish in my mother’s blood—but it had saved her once and brought her my father, and it was something real she could give me and there was little enough of that. Something to remember her by, to remember her gay blue eyes and the courage and good humor that never failed her, even when my father was killed.
She once told me, “If you survived the Blitz, you can survive anything.”
So I smiled up at the straw-haired young man. “It’s just a coin, really.” I dropped the sixpence into my purse and stepped back a pace from him, showing that I was making no claim on his time, that this pleasant interlude was over. “Thanks so much for helping find it. How do they put it? It has great sentimental value.” I held out my hand to him.
He ignored it, tugged at my elbow, and pulled me along with him. “You haven’t had lunch.”
Since his lecture had started at ten, obviously I hadn’t lunched. “No.”
“Let’s go eat.”
I don’t remember what we ate or where. It was a small café. He discovered before we had half finished our sandwiches that this was my first trip to Washington and I hadn’t had time to see more than the White House and two branches of the Smithsonian. So we downed our iced tea in a gulp and he took me on a tour of Washington.
We walked for miles. It was hot, as only that beautiful city can be hot in August, but the sky was vividly blue, the buildings a gleaming, shining white. He knew his Washington so I saw it not only as it is today but as it was when it first began. Then the White House sat in a naked field overlooking the Potomac and the half-built Capitol was visible a mile and a half away across a swamp. We tramped all the way from the Capitol to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue (it was still a dirt road in Lincoln’s day), and Jerry explained why the Treasury Building butted into the famous street, preventing the clear view from Capitol Hill to the White House that had been L’Enfant’s intent. President Andrew Jackson was so irritated about the wrangling over the department’s site that, when badgered while out waking one day, he had banged down his sword cane and said, “Right here!” and that’s where the Treasury now stands.
We ended up in Georgetown and along the way I learned quite a bit about Jerry Elliot: “. . . came to Georgetown on a scholarship. I’m the sixth of seven in a long line of scholarly but poor Elliots. My dad teaches at Western Reserve and . . .”
He showed me many of the famous beautiful houses of the small and elegant district, the Dumbarton House on Q Street, where Dolley Madison sought refuge, clutching state papers and a portrait of Washington, when the British burned the White House in 1814, and the townhouse on N Street where John Kennedy and his young family lived when he started his presidential campaign.
“. . . always spot the early Federal architecture by the fanlight over the front door and the long lintel stones above the windows. The brick is bright red and the shutters . . .”
I managed to keep up with his long strides and his swiftly paced, eager descriptions. It was a hot, exhausting, but exciting afternoon.
It ended as abruptly as it had begun.
We were standing outside a Georgetown bookstore, looking through the rack of old dusty ten-cents-each books, because, of course, you never know, when he looked through the shop window, saw a clock, and exclaimed, “Oh, good grief!”
He glanced up at the sky and the late-afternoon sun confirmed the time. “Hey, Sheila, I’m sorry; I’ve got to rush. I’m supposed to make a presentation to an old professor of mine and I’m almost late.”
A cab was stopping two doors down and he hurried toward it, calling back over his shoulder, “I’ll look for you at the banquet tonight.”
I waved after him.
Tonight I would be on the train to New York.
But I didn’t mind his abrupt leave-taking. I wandered slowly out of Georgetown, tired but smiling. It had been a marvelous afternoon.
It was a long way from the sharp sound of shots and blood seeping into the rich green grass of the jungle. It was a world away from murder.
Chapter 2
That should have been the end of it. In my neat and tidy fashion, that week was catalogued as past
, done, finished. But, at odd moments, I would see his face so vividly that I almost felt if I were to look around he would be standing there. Once, in fact, the feeling that he was near was so intense that I deserted a group I was leading through the first gallery with its Old Kingdom exhibits, tossing a hurried “Excuse me, please” over my shoulder and chasing around a model of the Sphinx to catch up with a slender, bony man who turned in surprise at my hand on his sleeve—and of course, it wasn’t Jerry at all. I had hurried back to my patient group, my face flushed with embarrassment, and tried to pick up my spiel where I’d dropped it. As I led them through the galleries, answering questions, describing art and customs and manners, I was amused at myself. What is up, Sheila?
I managed for a full week to squelch any light-minded memories of Washington, dwelling instead on other sessions I had attended there. I finished my report on the conference and made no mention of Dr. Elliot and his topic. I had myself well in hand.
Then I received my quarterly copy of Expedition and there he was, or at least a thumbnail picture of him, with an article on “Plunder and the Art Trade.” I studied the small biographical sketch. It didn’t tell much about him, only his degrees, his publications, and his formal title with the museum in Mexico City.
Mexico City.
It might as well be Bangkok or Calcutta. That was the first thought that came into my mind and a very revealing one.
I had never in my life deliberately set out to place myself within the ambit of any man, and here I was, admitting that I would like to go to Mexico City to see him again. On the strength of what? An afternoon.
There was no danger on my following through on that wild inclination, however. I didn’t have an extra penny. Literally. I could write an article on “Penury and the Museum Game.” There are a lot more willing workers than jobs. To the delight of most museums, there are hordes (I see them in my mind, exquisitely dressed, artistically coifed) of well-educated, well-to-do women who are delighted to volunteer their time. This practice, of course, cuts down on the number of paying jobs. The jobs that offer a salary pay the least possible amount because most museum directors are much more interested in beefing up their exhibits than in fattening their staff.
Ideally, to work for a museum and live, you also need to teach, have a working spouse or independent means, or write for money.
I don’t qualify so I’m genteelly poor, which means that every cent of my income is allocated to meet expenses—rent, food, insurance, et cetera. There isn’t any give. Anywhere.
In this swinging age, it is possible to fly now and pay later, but my mother, in addition to a trace of Irish, had a broad stripe of Scot, and I learned early that it is immoral to spend money you don’t have. As for borrowing, that is the work of the Devil.
So I settled down to work and stopped mooning about. I had plenty to do. There is always plenty to do in a big museum. I was working up an exhibit to be trucked around the state to high schools, trying to refine a radio script into an allotted five minutes, and, in my spare time, making an item-by-item inventory of a storeroom, which is much more complicated than it sounds. Also, since I was the low woman on the totem pole, I was the natural recipient of all stray tasks bucked downward by my superiors—that is, entertain generous donors, prod suppliers into delivering the new shipment of acrylics, compile a weekly summary of scholarly publications, train volunteer guides, block out the basic copy for a new guidebook, and on and on.
Every day there was something new and unexpected and challenging. But the trip to Washington, DC, did make a difference in my life in the museum and it was to be a profound one.
I began to visit the pre-Columbian wing. I won’t go so far as to say I haunted the place, but I went often enough to meet my opposite number in that section, Timothy Simmons. It was fun to have a new friend, to hear gossip about august section chairmen, to be a little scandalized by Timothy’s irreverence.
All innocent fun, and, too, I was learning something about Jerry Elliot’s field, beginning to understand some of the Mesoamerican cultures.
It never occurred to me when I first walked up the stairs to the Mesoamerican floor, my sandals slapping lightly on the worn marble steps, that the entire direction of my life would be affected by those visits, by the manner in which that section’s secretary sorted the morning mail, and by the readiness of one member of that staff to seize on a particular set of circumstances, betting his future and my life, on a wild, inside-straight, one-card-draw kind of gamble.
One morning late in November, I wandered slowly through the Olmec room. That was when I met Timothy.
“Lost a sarcophagus?”
I had thought the room empty so I jumped a little, then smiled into friendly brown eyes. Before I could answer, he held out his hand. “I’m Timothy Simmons, and you’re the new girl among the wonders of the Nile. Right?”
That was the start of our friendship. Soon, I would hurry up the stairs or he would come down my way at least once a day and we would share our lowly assistants’ view of our world. Timothy was, no doubt about it, a bad influence, but it’s possible to take a job too seriously and I knew I had been a little intense about this one. I was feminine enough, careful enough, never to forget that a malicious coffee-break companion is not one to be trusted with any words you wouldn’t want repeated.
Timothy accused me of as much one day. “Sheila, you must break out of the mold or the visitors won’t be able to tell you from the mummies.”
I laughed. “I’m not that old and desiccated yet, Timothy.”
“No, but you are too deadly damn serious and reverent about all of it. You know as well as I do that Hadley’s barely better than a hack and Lassiter’s a pompous ass.”
I covered his mouth with a hand. “Hush, Timothy, they may not be much but they are senior staff.” Then I was suddenly serious. “And that’s not true about Dr. Hadley. Or Dr. Lassiter, either.” I put my head on one side and studied Timothy’s darkly frowning face. “Do you know, Tim, I don’t understand you. Why did you work hard enough to get a museum job if you don’t like it? I mean, what do you want out of it all?”
He stared at me and his brown eyes were, for the moment, neither malicious nor sardonic but blazingly alive and hungry and angry.
“What do I want?” He wasn’t looking at me, wasn’t seeing me at all. “I want to find a fantastic ruin like Stephenson or Thompson.” He took a deep, hard breath. “But that takes more money or influence than I’ll ever have.”
“Your chance will come in time.”
His mouth curled in a smile that wasn’t a smile at all.
I reached across the table to touch his hand. “I mean it. You’re good. I’m sure you are. You’ll win recognition, be asked to head an expedition.”
He jammed a hand through his thick black hair. “When? Twenty years from now? Thirty? When I’m an old man? I ought to have an expedition now.”
So that was what made Timothy run. It explained his bitter humor and sharp criticisms. He was too impatient to inch his way up a rung at a time, an article here, an outstanding display there, a book eventually—the steady accomplishments that would win acclaim. I wanted to urge him to be patient and respectful, to do what he needed to do. But I didn’t because his eyes were too dark, too hungry, too angry.
We were better friends after that and sometime he dropped his mocking manner and patiently explained a new display to me. I began to gain an appreciation of the multifaceted cultures of Mexico. I always felt a little uncomfortable among the brooding inhuman sculptures of the Toltecs, but I loved the beauty and skill of the Mixtec jewelry. I even admitted the Aztec feathered headdresses were magnificent, though I didn’t tell Timothy how loathsome I found the Aztec blood and death cult.
He liked to tease me.
“Do you know about the Flower Wars?”
“Flower Wars,” I repeated, thinking, of course, of flowers. His eyes glinted with amusement as he explained how the finest warriors, the flower of manhood, would be
captured to be sacrificed to the insatiable bloodthirst of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec war god.
I knew that the Aztecs were Johnnies-come-lately to the central plateau of Mexico and that it was they who had subverted human sacrifice into a monstrous bloodletting. It shocked me that the Aztecs were, of all the tribes, Timothy’s favorite.
I asked him once, “Timothy, why do you like the Aztecs so well? Their temples actually smelled of blood.”
His answer came slowly and once again I glimpsed the true Timothy, the mind that hid itself behind jibes and jokes.
“It’s the very perfection, the full circle of their culture that fascinates me, Sheila. It was so simple to them. The more sacrifices, the more blood they offered to the gods, the more they prospered. Until the Spaniards came, they never doubted that those sacrificed hearts were cause and effect. It is fascinating to see how a people’s entire rationale can be reasonable and yet wrong. It proves, you see, that instinct can’t be trusted, that empirical judgments can be absolutely wrong.” Then he laughed and asked slyly, “Now, tell me, doesn’t it make you question even a little bit some of our verities?”
I wondered what Jerry Elliot would think of this appraisal.
But Jerry was becoming a little dimmer in my memory with each day that passed. I had no positive idea what his response would be because I didn’t know the man. I just thought I might like to know him.
I didn’t actually pay too much attention to all that Timothy and I talked about. So much of it was frivolous, unimportant.
Later, when it became important to remember everything he had told me about his department, I only remembered snatches, odd bits of fact or fancy, not nearly enough to help when it mattered.
Later, I would try hard to recall exactly what he had said about the nut mail. I remember being chagrined when I discovered that he, unlike I, did not have to handle all of it for his department.
Nut mail. All museums receive it. Practically every day. You know the kind of thing—the writer knows the hiding place of a treasure to rival Tutankhamen’s or has a map that will prove the Vikings reached Texas.
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