The Caretaker Read online

  Pending the resolution of these and other related machinations, the manila envelope postmarked Prague and addressed in a cramped, studied penmanship to Mrs. Charles (Helen) Morgan had lain unopened for weeks in the widow’s inbox at the Foundation, along with other accumulating mail. By the time the Board issued its press release announcing late September as the scheduled opening date of the Morgan Foundation, only four months remained in which to hire and train the required staff to deal with both the daunting conservation issues and the anticipated influx of visiting public. No ads had been placed, no applicants had as yet come forward when the widow finally turned her attention to the waiting envelope. In the absence of any other candidates for the position of caretaker, she viewed its contents as a singularly providential, if unsolicited, application for the job and, as such, enthusiastically shared the letter and accompanying résumé with the Board, which responded with skepticism.

  Everyone admitted that the letter itself contained some well-chosen phrases, demonstrating — as far as was possible in a two-page note from a stranger to a recent widow — a commendable sensitivity to the recipient’s state of mind, while simultaneously conveying an appreciation of the intentions and achievements of her husband’s work that wisely stopped short of idolatry. The writer had begun by apologizing for intruding on the widow’s “unimaginable solitary grief” by succumbing to a selfish need to express to someone close to the deceased his own “singular desolation over the loss.” He spoke of “a first encounter with the uncompromising mind of Dr. Morgan” and its transformational effect on the rest of his life, calling the experience “a revelation” that had forced him to recognize the indispensable value of classification to anyone committed to the pursuit of meaning. He said that, “in memory of such a man,” he would be “proud to be of service in any capacity.”

  But while most Board members found the letter impressive enough, the résumé left them troubled. If acquisitiveness in some form had been Morgan’s weakness, the individual currently under consideration was his antipode. The résumé they were in the process of considering inadvertently detailed a downward trajectory from success toward failure, from achievement toward renunciation, a process of divestiture that bore a disconcerting resemblance to flight. The virtues it encapsulated included a wide spectrum of experience in varied fields of endeavor, but the experiences were disconcertingly brief — a disjointed series of aborted beginnings — as if intended to fend off progress. Although the candidate had undoubtedly showed considerable promise in his youth, the diversity of his gifts nullified one another, inhibiting his ability to excel at anything.

  While still a boy he had won a coveted music scholarship on the basis of his talent as a pianist but after a single semester had withdrawn from the program and thereupon abandoned the instrument forever. His innate physical grace (which he bore almost as an affliction and took great pains to conceal) proved useless in the realm of competitive sports since he lacked the competitive spirit. In college, while majoring in Art, he gained some recognition as a draftsman in the eyes of his professors and, with their help and encouragement, managed to get his work included in a few local group exhibitions where it garnered a modicum of critical praise, but in the end his facility at rendering made him lazy and contemptuous of his own accomplishments. He was a good mimic and extemporaneous speaker and enjoyed momentary stardom as a member of the debating team until one night when he suddenly suffered a failure of nerve and became inarticulate. He might eventually have turned into a proficient poet had he not condemned his initial efforts as derivative and all those who failed to perceive their obvious flaws as ignorant or lacking in discrimination. History intrigued him, although he remained constantly suspicious of the alleged facts, and only managed to pursue it as a study of rumors, lies, and competing fictions. The Physical Sciences, with their promise of provable theorems, attracted him more, chemistry and physiology in particular. His natural fascination with how things worked made him a tireless, even obsessive, researcher, but once satisfied that he’d grasped an animating mechanism, his interest promptly evaporated and he succumbed to the first available distraction. Over and over again, the drone in his nature saved him, but idealism continued to be an obstacle.

  Toward the end of his senior year of college, after being accepted to medical school (envisioning a modest future as a hospital pathologist) he came upon the work of Dr. Charles Alexander Morgan, which revolutionized his thinking, spurring him to change course and opt for graduate school instead. Morgan’s book, with its method for deciphering hidden relationships between things in a world apparently bereft of meaning, offered him a lifeline; he declared himself a disciple. The book did not, however, cure his restive spirit. His doctoral thesis — in which Dr. Morgan’s work as chemist and theoretician was to have played a marginal role — remained less than halfway to completion when, hungering for a taste of the real world, he temporarily abandoned it to enlist for a two-year stint in the navy. It was peacetime, though; he saw no action. As it turned out, the intended hiatus never ended. Whether he was driven by a fear of failure, or by a lack of ambition, or a confidence in his own superiority that no actual achievement could ever match, at the conclusion of his military service and in the grand tradition of self-exiles, he began hiring himself out as an English teacher in countries whose languages he scarcely knew. The period customarily intended to enable a young person to find his way had, paradoxically, caused this particular one to lose his.

  At this juncture in his life, just shy of middle age, he had visited more than a dozen different countries and found employment in nearly all of them. He had picked up a smattering of words and phrases in as many languages — from the bare essentials to the epithets and handy colloquialisms embraced by expatriates — and managed to feign a bit of fluency in two or three. He had lived and worked at home and abroad in noisy, overcrowded cities both exotic and mundane, in barren sparsely populated rural wastelands, and small towns. In addition to teaching English to foreign students overseas, he had been — though not necessarily in this order — a truck driver, a clerk in a second-hand bookstore, a deckhand on a ferry, a mortuary attendant, a gardener, a typesetter at a printing plant, a short order cook, a groom at a riding academy, an assistant librarian, a handyman, a gas station attendant, a telephone lineman, a lab technician, a tree surgeon, an encyclopedia salesman, part of a construction crew, a bartender, a farmhand, a writer for the English language newspaper in Athens, and currently for one in Prague.

  Had he been wiser in the ways of the world or more sensitive to the concerns of a prospective employer, he would probably have omitted the majority of these experiences, colorful though they may have been, from his résumé. Such a checkered history, quite desirable in a dinner guest, could hardly have been so in a potential employee whose qualifications might logically be expected to include not only certain specialized skills but a high degree of loyalty, dependability, and dedication: in and of themselves, his former jobs, in their sheer number and variety, threatened to disqualify him for the position.

  Once again, the widow and the Board members found themselves on opposite sides, and once again the majority acceded to her wishes in an effort to simulate common ground. In spite of their reservations, they issued the applicant an invitation — regarding it as a challenge in disguise — to present himself in three weeks at the Foundation at an appointed hour for a formal interview, and promised a prompt decision. It was a long way to go for a job interview and they were probably hoping he would not show up, but for a man so accustomed to turning his back on the present in favor of an unknown future, the possibility of professionally allying himself with a figure he held in such esteem must have struck him as well worth the risk. He wrote in reply that they should expect him. In the interim, the Board set about meeting with other candidates for the position, but the widow successfully vetoed every choice in anticipation of the first applicant’s upcoming interview.

  On a rainy, windy aft
ernoon in early August, at the appointed hour of the appointed day, a bedraggled man in a dripping Macintosh and wide-brimmed leather hat presented himself on the Morgan Foundation’s doorstep for his examination. He paused there and leaned forward, studying the inscription on the shiny brass plaque beside the entrance, touching the raised letters, tracing the shapes with his finger in a kind of benediction before pressing the buzzer. Moments later the intercom erupted with some bursts of static in answer to which he ventured what he imagined to be the desired reply by offering his name and adding, “I’m here for the interview,” with an inflection that made a question of it. The door unlocked with a click, admitting him. Once across the threshold, having shut the door behind him, he removed his hat, laid down the satchel he’d been sheltering under his coat, and shook himself like a drenched dog before looking around to get his bearings.

  The newly installed sliding doors stood wide open, affording a largely unobstructed view of the dim interior that extended to the rear of the building some hundred feet away. All at once, as if awakened by his arrival, lights came on in the far room. Someone was striding forward to greet him, a powerful-looking young man with a blond crew cut — savagely trimmed, as if the mere existence of hair betrayed a lack of discipline that had to be expunged — and the brusque, vaguely threatening aspect of a bouncer or a bodyguard, who introduced himself as Mrs. Morgan’s special assistant. “They’re ready for you. You can leave your wet things here,” he said, gesturing toward an old-fashioned wooden coat tree by the front door. The visitor did as he was told, while his escort watched, making no move to assist. “Right this way,” he said at last, jerking his head in the direction from which he’d come. “Follow me. It’s upstairs.” He led the way with the visitor trailing behind, holding the satchel against his chest, marveling at his surroundings and emitting the occasional odd, inadvertent gasp or groan of appreciation as he went. He did not get far before curiosity overwhelmed obedience.

  He had fixated on a framed portrait of a woman, her half-averted face rendered in shades of black against a background of green paper, that hung on the wall about a foot higher than the top of his head amid a cluster of various small household objects. “Might I have just a moment, please,” he said, and without waiting for a reply, drew a pair of glasses from the breast pocket of his jacket, positioned them just above the tip of his nose, and approached the picture, craning his neck to make out the details in the half light. Although the woman’s face was depicted as only fractionally more than a profile, her wry, ineluctable, sidelong gaze managed to fix itself on the viewer, permitting no escape, regardless of how he might shift his position to avoid it. The visitor almost smiled. “Ah, the Dürer,” he murmured under his breath. He would have lingered longer, but his escort had returned to his side to say, “Come on, we mustn’t keep them waiting,” and, bringing up the rear, no longer trusting his charge to follow, ushered him along, as if shooing away a pigeon.

  In this reconfigured formation, they headed up the staircase. Here, too, the wall was encrusted with things to admire, although in contrast to the first installation, which accentuated dissonance, these objects were grouped thematically, some half-dozen to a set: writing implements, pinioned horseflies, doorknockers, wishbones, a cluster of daguerreotypes. The visitor, conscious of the impatient man at his heels, surveyed it all surreptitiously in passing, soaking up whatever he could without slackening his pace. As he climbed the stairs, his open palm slid along the banister, caressing it like a blind man, as if to absorb the subliminal information deposited on its surface while he breathed in the stale, Freon-tainted, antiseptic odor peculiar to a well-maintained, air conditioned, but uninhabited house whose windows have remained unopened for too long.

  When they reached the second floor landing with yet another flight of stairs to go, the visitor — feigning unsteadiness as an excuse — continued his sensory explorations, laying his hand against the cool irregular plaster of an unadorned expanse of wall, stroking a bit of fluted molding, brushing the edge of a deep-set windowsill with his fingertips, as if testing for dust. Everything visible in the course of this perfunctory, incidental tour revealed a building architecturally at odds with itself. While significant portions of the interior had been made over, simulating the spare, white, uninflected lineaments popularized by contemporary design — the advance guard of a style that would eventually overtake the entire neighborhood — the adjoining areas remained steadfastly committed to their original nineteenth-century features. These contradictory impulses abutted one another, clashing to odd effect and leaving the whole bereft of its identity. What might conceivably have become a triumph of eclecticism resembled instead the product of a doomed genetic engineering experiment, which, in its determination to salvage the best of everything, only created a monstrous amalgam, inevitably marring the virtues of its parts.

  At the next landing, his escort pushed ahead, showing the way to Morgan’s third floor study — recently appropriated by the Foundation Board as its temporary headquarters — which lay behind one of several identical doors. Grasping the knob, he knocked twice (clearly a signal rather than a request for admission), and without waiting for a reply, opened the door and stood aside, silently inviting the visitor to enter. The room was dimly lit by a chandelier of colored glass grapes and by many small lamps nestled within the bookshelves or placed on the end tables or on the floor, creating little pools of light that only accentuated the depth of the surrounding shadows.

  For the present purpose the six-member Board had been whittled down to three — two men and a woman, each of whom had enjoyed a prior association with Dr. Morgan — who had volunteered to serve on the hiring committee. They sat side by side facing the door behind a refectory table at the far end of the room, each with a neat stack of papers and a blank legal pad. Looking up at the new arrival as he entered, they wore the grateful expression of people whose long-awaited moment has finally materialized. They welcomed him, thanked him unconvincingly for coming, introduced themselves in a chorus that drowned out each name in the succeeding one, and invited him to sit down. An oak armchair on his side of the table was the only unoccupied seat available, and he obediently made use of it. A banker’s lamp on the table, its green shade tilted in his direction, obscured his view of the committee members and gave the event the atmosphere of an interrogation.

  Meanwhile his former escort, Mrs. Morgan’s special assistant, had followed him inside and taken up a position behind the triumvirate, leaning back against one of the tall, rain-spattered windows, his arms folded across his chest, reinforcing his resemblance to a bodyguard. His attitude drew the visitor’s attention to a seated figure beside him, a figure whose stillness, dark clothing, and imperious posture in an imperious straight-backed chair, he had initially mistaken for yet another inanimate object in the shadowy overfurnished room. Once he noticed this immobile creature of indeterminate age, the visitor may have started to suspect he was in the presence of Dr. Morgan’s widow. She was wearing black, although whether this represented an act of mourning or merely a carefully considered fashion choice was impossible to determine, and her hair, pulled severely back from her forehead, mimicked both the sheen and color of patent leather with an effect so uniform that nature could have played no part in its achievement. The somber afternoon cast flickering highlights of agitated raindrops around her head and shoulders as well as those of the man standing by her side. No one introduced her or even acknowledged her presence and the visitor, bowing to protocol, followed their example and averted his eyes, pretending she didn’t exist.

  Directly across the table from him, seated between the other two committee members, a man who had identified himself as Dr. Morgan’s former attorney and chairman of the hiring committee — whose weighty demeanor suggested both the burden and the privilege of leadership — heaved a sigh indicating he was about to speak and, with no further preamble, did so. “To be frank,” he said, “your employment history is of grave concern to us
.” As if convinced this statement constituted a question, he fixed his gaze on the applicant before him and waited, but no reply was forthcoming. The applicant, who had shifted his position to avoid the glare of the lamp and gain a better view of his questioner, was leaning slightly forward with his elbows resting on the arms of his chair. He looked steadily back at the chairman with an attentive, untroubled expression, awaiting further enlightenment. The standoff lasted a few moments before the applicant relented.

  “Why?” he asked mildly. “In what sense, exactly.”

  The chairman amplified. “We have, of course, received some fairly enthusiastic recommendations from a few of your previous employers,” he said, wiping his high glistening forehead with a folded handkerchief. “They say you’re a quick learner. They commend your diligence, your ready grasp of the fundamentals of what you’re engaged in. On the other hand, they do acknowledge finding themselves left in the lurch when you unexpectedly decided you were moving on. We’ve been obliged to seriously question whether your character suits our requirements. You don’t appear to be the sort of person we could rely on to uphold a commitment on any long-term basis. We simply cannot afford to invest in someone who is likely to abandon the position months or even years later, compelling us to begin all over again.”

  “Ah, yes,” replied the applicant. “I see.” A muscle in his jaw was working as he mulled over the issue, like someone sampling a challenging foreign delicacy, testing his ability to swallow it without betraying his distaste. “You do understand — don’t you — that what you are referring to as ‘my employment history’ were jobs I took, not a failed attempt to chart a career path. Sometimes a man needs to seize whatever opportunities he can find to keep body and mind together . . .” He darted a glance in the direction of the widow but was unable to ascertain whether he had succeeded in catching her eye. “While he’s waiting,” he added pointedly, with the hint of a conspiratorial smile for her benefit, before turning back to the chairman. “I’ve never had a mission before. I’ve never had something I believed I could legitimately devote my life to.”