The Caretaker Read online

  The Caretaker

  Copyright © 2020 Doon Arbus

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  First published clothbound by New Directions in 2020

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Arbus, Doon, author.

  Title: The caretaker / Doon Arbus.

  Description: First edition. | New York : A New Directions Book, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020021803 | ISBN 9780811229494 (cloth ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780811229500 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Museums—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.R37 C37 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021803

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  The Caretaker

  It was the last of its kind, saved from extinction, not by any intrinsic Darwinian attribute, but by the whims of chance. It had survived the sudden recent influx of bulldozers and cranes and construction crews that had done away with its original neighbors, leaving in their wake a motley assortment of competing ambitions: faceted tiers of glass in the shape of a defunct wedding cake reflecting fragments of cloud back at the sky, windowless concrete bunkers for exhibiting art, a rose-colored ziggurat, and a pair of leaning towers, as yet unoccupied. This bombastically revitalized environment imposed upon the lone survivor — an unprepossessing three-story red brick building — a look of baffled stoicism. In the absence of any noteworthy architectural feature to justify its continued existence in the face of all this change, it squatted there stubbornly on its bit of turf, a dwarfed, defiant anachronism.

  At certain times of day, in certain bright or fading light — a wintry afternoon glare, or at dusk before the intrusion of the streetlights — the raised lettering on the brass plaque beside the front door was easily misread as ORGAN FOUNDATION, which is what the locals took to calling it. “Meet you across from the Organ,” they’d say with the breezy nonchalance of the initiate. This nickname — conjuring up a medical lab harvesting body parts or an obsolete musical instrument factory — derived from the fact that the plaque’s initial capital M had lost its sharp edges (possibly due to an error at the foundry or excessive polishing) and had begun to recede into the background, managing at times to achieve invisibility. The plaque’s subtitle however identified the building as the home of The Society for the Preservation of the Legacy of Dr. Charles alexander Morgan — a Morgan unrelated to, and not to be confused with, the renowned financier of the same name with his eponymous well-endowed uptown Library, although such confusion frequently occurred, invariably to the benefit of the former residence of Dr. Charles, about one third of whose visitors came because they had mistaken it for that other, more notable venue. This is not to say that Dr. Charles Morgan did not have his own legitimate coterie of devotees determined to compensate for his relative lack of fame by the intensity of their allegiance. Many of them, along with members of the Society and invited guests, meet at the Foundation twice a year to celebrate the anniversaries of their hero’s birth (August 29) and death (January 11) with refreshments, readings, and spirited discussions.

  Twice a day, six days a week, the caretaker conducts tours of the premises and its collections. If you happened to be curious enough to pay a visit on a Saturday morning, for instance — a Saturday similar to so many that have come and gone since the fall of 1989 when, with little fanfare, the Morgan Foundation declared itself open to the public — you might find other would-be visitors meandering down the block. They come singly; they come by twos or threes. Those venturing up the stoop will usually discover the front door slightly ajar, but since this seems less an invitation than an oversight, they hesitate for fear of trespassing. Peering inside does little to reassure them. They find no one there to greet them, just other uneasy, waiting visitors gathered in a makeshift vestibule, a room awkwardly truncated by the addition of a pair of mahogany sliding doors, currently closed.

  The size of the group that assembles here — which, even in the Foundation’s heyday just after Morgan’s death, numbered less than twenty — has been steadily shrinking. There are still, from time to time, the small enclaves of foreign sightseers who speak scarcely any English but are nonetheless resigned to being led around and lectured to. There are the women, likely members of a cultural club on one of their regular excursions, helping themselves to the free leaflets on display. There is the occasional couple, young or not so young, hoping for an unorthodox romantic adventure, lured by the dim lighting and an anticipated atmosphere of reverence. There is the single parent with a reluctant teenager in tow; someone killing time between appointments in the neighborhood; the student doing research. Each new arrival is subjected by his predecessors to a surreptitious appraisal, a look verging on the xenophobic that seems to say: If you have chosen to come here, I must be in the wrong place.

  By the time the caretaker makes his entrance — always punctual, never early — to rescue the room’s occupants from themselves and one another, the waiting period has lulled them beyond impatience into resignation, a state just short of somnambulism, out of which the sliding doors’ low reluctant groan startles them; they turn as one toward the sound. The figure in the doorway, an angular, somewhat off-kilter silhouette, greets them, cheerlessly, by rote. “Good morning all,” he says, addressing no one in particular as he slides the doors shut behind him and proceeds to a table at the east wall.

  He is a monochromatic man. Dust is his color. It envelops every aspect of his person, hair, skin, eyes, clothing, softening all distinctions. The furrows in his otherwise unspoiled face suggest an outdoor life, weathered by sun and wind, but his current pallor makes recent exposure to the elements unlikely. “Welcome to the home of Dr. Charles Alexander Morgan,” he continues as he stations himself behind the table, absentmindedly realigning the cashbox, the stack of leaflets, and the portable credit card processor; fingering a roll of red tickets (the generic kind, available in any stationery store), and the leather-bound horizontal ledger serving as a guestbook. “I’m the caretaker. I’m here to be your guide.” He pauses and with a sigh, as if this next disclosure were more a confession than a point of information, introduces himself by name.

  Once the preliminaries have been dispensed with (admission fees in exchange for tickets — cash preferred, exact change if possible — and the ritual signing of the guestbook, address required, to facilitate future solicitation of funds), the caretaker will slide the door open once again and lead the way into the room beyond, pausing on the other side to supervise entry. One by one, as demanded by his staging, members of the group pass single file through the opening. They sidle past him obediently, heads lowered, as he stands to one side, rhythmically clicking the counter in his left hand, totting up the numbers (6, 7, 8 . . . ) to check and recheck as they move through the house, lest someone linger behind, disobeying the rules, secreting themselves in a dark corner, touching or rearranging the treasures of the place, or, worse still, pocketing something small. As they commence the tour, visitors find themselves in a wide windowless hallway, its walls adorned from floor to ceiling with an eclectic mass of artifacts, punctuated by the occasional glass cabinet, spotlit from above to theatrical effe
ct, which nonetheless does little to improve the visibility of its contents. A long waist-level double-sided vitrine bisects the room, making navigation difficult.

  At first glance the display looks not so much haphazard as deliberately organized to confound comprehension. Ordinary domestic items (a wire hanger, a chewing-gum wrapper, locks with and without their keys, a broken hinge, a watch without a watchband, a toilet plunger, a plastic coffee lid) vie for position with a smattering of gilt-framed eighteenth-century oil portraits, a large multifaceted jewel, an African mask of teak and straw, a pair of pearl-handled dueling pistols aimed at one another. Nature has its place here, too: seashells, dried leaves, driftwood, lumps of coal, a human skull. Objects are fastened to the walls or occupy small specially designed shelves. It is almost possible to decipher the small numbers stenciled near each item, suggesting some sort of identification system. With no instruction, the newcomers begin to reassemble themselves shoulder to shoulder as if by instinct just inside the room, forming a squashed horseshoe. All along the dark plank floor, at a distance from the walls of about a foot, a strip of black tape symbolizes a barrier, the only obstacle between the curious and the many tantalizingly unprotected things confronting them. Some crane their necks to see. Others bend forward precariously, hands on knees. There is usually at least one unwitting transgressor, who obliges the caretaker to remonstrate.

  “Keep your distance, please,” he warns in an undertone all the more imposing for its lack of volume. “Mind the barrier. Touching is forbidden.”

  If you were raised on the classics and have come to believe in fate, you might say that the caretaker’s fate embraced him twenty-five years earlier on a chilly winter evening in a rooming house in Prague when, bending over a stack of discarded English-language newspapers waiting to be crumpled into fuel, he chanced upon the following headline: Dr. Charles A. Morgan, Chemist, Author, Philosopher & Collector, Dies at 66. As the caretaker later recounted the event to the hiring committee, he fixated on these words for several minutes, reading and rereading them in a futile attempt to amend the stated facts. News of the death of an intimate could not have been more shattering to his sense of equilibrium. In his student days, he had encountered his intellectual lodestar in Morgan’s seminal volume, Stuff, an experience that marked him forever. He discovered in the book many of his own inchoate thoughts expressed in the words of a kindred spirit. In fact, such an affinity existed between the writer’s psyche and his own that it often seemed as if a sentence on the page and its echo in his mind had sprung into being simultaneously, leaving him incapable of distinguishing the conjurer from the conjured. The book had become, in a sense, his bible; it accompanied him everywhere. Although his relationship to its author was, of course, entirely one-sided, it remained nonetheless solely responsible for his feeling less alone in the world.

  After recovering from his initial shock at the news — which was at that point over four months old — he continued reading. The obituary went on to pronounce its subject “the last renaissance man of his generation,” a tribute hovering deliberately somewhere between praise and condemnation, qualified in advance (as superlatives usually are in responsible publications) by a one-word disclaimer (“arguably”) that rendered the statement toothless. It reported that while on an expedition to Karachi in pursuit of a coveted artifact for his collection, Dr. Morgan — who was said to have been in excellent health — had collapsed on a crowded sidewalk and been rushed to a local hospital, where he died within hours, a ruptured brain aneurysm cited as the cause.

  In the established style of such announcements, a description of the deceased followed: “Although small in stature, Dr. Morgan was a formidable presence, with a leonine head of white hair and the scrupulously maintained muscular physique of a one-time amateur boxer. A millionaire (self-made, unmade, and made again) in an era when the word was still synonymous with extreme wealth, his attendance at a social gathering or a cultural event, where he could be found sporting one of his distinctive custom-made three-piece English suits and colorful tie, surrounded by admirers, was in and of itself enough to sanction the event’s importance. Thanks to his virtually insatiable curiosity about almost any topic, he proved to be a discerning listener as well as a celebrated raconteur with an inexhaustible repertoire of stories. His refusal to mince words, however, often left even his most loyal colleagues and closest friends disenchanted. Few had managed to escape the sting of his mordant wit. Although unabashed in the pursuit of his various passions, Dr. Morgan nonetheless simultaneously continued performing his many anonymous acts of spontaneous philanthropy.”

  The next three paragraphs summarized Morgan’s life; a fourth debated the relative importance of his achievements in various fields, enumerating the awards he’d won in each capacity, and supporting each opinion with carefully selected quotations from colleagues and critics. It suggested that, although any attempt to assess the ultimate significance of the Morgan collection would probably be premature at this stage, the influence of Stuff, his book on the subject — subtitled “A Meditation on the Charisma of Things” — would be “impossible to exaggerate”: political theorists had embraced his “disquisition on individuality and its dependence on the group for context” as a philosophical underpinning of democracy; libraries and museums had revised their cataloging systems in accordance with his new typological principles; psychologists had coined the word “Morganism” to identify the neurotic fear of insubstantiality afflicting the obsessive collector. Finally, to sum matters up, the obituary stated that Dr. Morgan, being childless, with no siblings, and parents long since dead, “is survived by his wife of forty-three years, the former Helen Clay, who has been appointed director of the Society for the Preservation of the Legacy of Dr. Charles Morgan and president of his Foundation.”

  Within a month of perusing these facts, the man destined to become caretaker of the Foundation had mailed to Morgan’s widow, in care of the Foundation, a personal letter two pages long, with his handwritten résumé enclosed, offering his services in any capacity she might determine he could be of use.

  Despite having remained his wife in name and status (dutifully performing the role long enough to become his widow), many years had passed since Mrs. Morgan, the former Helen Clay, had actually lived with the man she called her husband. Encouraged by her physicians, she had removed herself from the premises decades earlier, finding the three-story building itself — not to mention its primary resident, presiding over it as both his private museum and his home — too cold and demanding for someone in her delicate physical condition to endure. Her multiple ailments, if not life-threatening, proved to be chronically debilitating, despite the absence of satisfactory diagnoses. “A cracked pot never breaks,” Morgan was fond of saying whenever his wife invoked her beleaguered health as an intimation of imminent mortality, adding as reassurance that he was certain to predecease her. In the early stages of their physical and psychic schism, the couple had agreed that a divorce would be both unnecessary and politically unwise, so they continued to function as a unit in their areas of mutual influence, providing each other with companionship in public and, on rare occasions, in private as well.

  Dr. Morgan, being no fool, had of course resigned himself to the fact that he — like everyone else, including others similarly convinced of their own greatness — would eventually die. In recognition of this lamentable inevitability, he had set about attempting to ensure that his posthumous existence — what you might call, in a purely practical sense, his afterlife — would conform as strictly as possible to his vision of it. In short, about three years before his death, he made a Will.

  The attorney, who drew up the twenty-four-page document, and in whose safe it resided until Morgan’s death, was reputed to be the most prominent practitioner in his specialized field of expertise, boasting a glittering clientele (both living and dead) of celebrities, artists, financiers, and power mongers, whose concerns for their own mortality had propelled his care
er. Morgan’s Last Will and Testament — with its requisite boilerplate, its seven sonorous prefatory Whereases, its multiple Articles and Recitations, its subtended Schedules and Appendices — made the usual futile attempt to mount on behalf of the deceased’s wishes an impenetrable defense against whatever unforeseen assaults the future would inevitably bring. Even a cursory reading of the Will revealed where Dr. Morgan’s allegiances lay, demonstrating that he cared more for the fate of his building and its contents — to which he had devoted himself for nearly half a century — than for any living creature. Aside from certain specific bequests to his wife, to a few friends, and to fewer charities, the bulk of his estate endowed in perpetuity his Foundation, the Society, and the preservation of his collection as a private museum.

  Although he died unexpectedly, alone and far from home among strangers whose language he neither spoke nor understood, Dr. Morgan died prepared. In choosing his wife to preside over his legacy, he had chosen well. His death had an immediate salutary effect upon his new widow’s regard and affection for him, reviving in her feelings that had been quashed by her exposure to the harsh daily realities of his nature. As a memory, he achieved absolution in her eyes. The metamorphosis enabled her to forgive his transgressions and to regard even his most abrasive habits as mere harmless eccentricities. His absence healed the rift.

  Wearing her widowhood proudly and seeking to wield her power as his anointed primary representative on earth, she set about interpreting his desires, both expressed and unexpressed, concerning everything he had left behind. When it came to the building and its contents, it was she who insisted that the objects to be enshrined were not limited to the items in Morgan’s collection, but included anything he might have touched, worn, used, sat upon, or gazed at before leaving home for the last time. In this regard, she found herself at odds with several of the other six Board members appointed by Morgan in his Will, who lodged objections both practical and philosophical: they protested that treating Morgan’s personal commonplaces with the same reverence accorded the collection’s artifacts would be to make a mockery of his life’s work; they argued that doing so would place an additional, unwarranted burden on the endowment funds.