The Caretaker Read online

  The chairman bristled. “Forgive me, my friend, but this is not about your mission. It’s about ours.”

  “Precisely. Sure it is. They just might turn out to be one and the same.” The applicant risked another smile probably intended to disarm, although it might have struck the chairman as more insolent than genial. At the same moment, coincidentally or not, the widow stirred in her upright chair and rustled. In the absence of a word or any other sign from her, this small, inarticulate movement assumed the power of a commentary, and the chairman, interpreting it as a rebuke, relinquished the questioning with a nod of his head to the woman on his right, who had begun tapping her pencil on the pad in front of her, awaiting her turn.

  A former secretary to Dr. Morgan — though not the most recent one — she still clung to a proprietary interest in how his collection, not to mention certain of his possessions and correspondence, were organized and maintained. She still believed she knew where the skeletons were buried and still felt bound to safeguard what she knew, but keeping secrets was not one of her strengths. The strain of residual loyalty, of self-imposed discretion running counter to her expansive nature, had left its mark, overtaxing the muscles around her mouth and marring her otherwise cherubic face. None of the accoutrements of her distant girlhood (the ruby lipstick, the blonde curls, the splashy floral blouse with flounces at the throat and wrists), which she retained in spite of warnings in the mirror, succeeded in softening the severity of the overall effect.

  She viewed the new candidate, like all his predecessors, as her potential successor and, in that capacity, as a threat to everything she had jealously protected for so many years — someone bound to critique, revise, undo, and destroy everything she had managed to achieve in the Morgan world. Only a perfect clone could have adhered to her standards. Confronting the man who now faced her across the table, she widened her large blue eyes in a habitual expression of feigned innocence and inquired about his views on the Baconian method of classification and how he thought it related to Dr. Morgan’s philosophy. This question was soon followed by a litany of arcane phrases only an archivist like herself with a doctorate in library science would have had any reason to know, and yet seeing him flounder in response reassured her, at least momentarily, that she had discharged her responsibility and exposed his inadequacy to her colleagues.

  The third member of the committee, swiping a finger across his tongue for moist traction as he leafed through his sheaf of papers in search of a particular document he deemed relevant, interjected himself into the proceedings. In spite of his embattled role as Dr. Morgan’s financial advisor — which had demanded constant and largely futile efforts to restrain his client’s profligate impulses — their friendship had flourished in several arenas: as regular opponents on the squash court or across a chessboard, and as intellectual sparring partners, bound by a shared appetite for argument as sport. Perhaps it was in this dispassionately combative spirit that, with scarcely a glance at the candidate, the third committee member pointed out that an essential feature of the job would be introducing Morgan’s concepts to a largely ignorant public and wondered what experience, other than that brief stint teaching — what was it, again? teaching foreigners how to speak the English language? — he could claim to have had as an educator. Peering over the top of his rimless glasses and smiling with prosecutorial zeal, spurred on by the silence from across the table, he added: “And after all, could anyone rationally deny the value of experience?”

  “If only one knows what to make of it,” the candidate murmured cryptically, pressing his palms and fingers together in what might have been mistaken for the gesture of a saint in prayer and plunging that edifice between his knees to keep it out of trouble.

  Bolstered by the brief, diffident response to this line of inquiry, the questioner drove his point home by suggesting, somewhat more cynically, that driving a truck or grooming horses or tending bar or clearing away dead trees was hardly appropriate training for such a challenging curatorial position, but when this too failed to get a rise out of the interviewee, he ventured an appeal on economic grounds. In light of the fact that living on the premises as caretaker in residence and unofficial guard was one of the requirements of the job, the Foundation, much as it regretted this necessity, would be obliged to deduct the value of the living quarters it provided from the employee’s salary, thereby significantly reducing the anticipated compensation to an amount one would have to admit was scarcely adequate to support a frugal existence.

  The candidate looked back at him, squinting against the lamplight. This involuntary narrowing of the eyes intensified a complex pattern of intersecting furrows, like desiccated riverbeds of tears not shed cascading down his cheekbones into the hollows below, mapping the topography of his literate face. “Whatever you consider the job is worth,” came his tactical answer, as if he were responding to a riddle or maneuvering inside a fairy tale with a kingdom as the prize.

  The former secretary now rejoined the exchange, noting that, upon Morgan’s death, significant areas of the collection still remained unexplored and uncategorized, and inquiring as to how the candidate proposed, were he hired, to address such issues given his lack of any relevant background or credentials, whether as curator, educator, archivist, conservator, librarian, restorer, or document analyst.

  The ritual of question and answer proceeded in this vein, with the candidate shifting his attention, from one to the other like a spectator at a Ping-Pong match as they took turns lobbing obstacles at him. He sat patiently listening, generally without rebuttal, as they pointed out his shortcomings and his lack of resources to deal with all the pitfalls awaiting him. Paradoxically, the fervor with which the triumvirate marshaled itself against him endowed him with a power he’d never imagined he possessed; seeing them treat him as a threat, he began to realize he might actually be one. Throughout the ordeal, he kept his answers as short as possible to avoid getting into deeper water, and favored the equivocal and provisional over the definitive reply. At last the chairman, convinced that they had succeeded in decimating his chances, inquired perfunctorily, as a prelude to dismissal, “Is there anything else you think we ought to know?” He had not anticipated an affirmative answer, but he got one.

  “Surely there are people out there better qualified than I am, at least on paper, people with whom I couldn’t hope to compete on that level and wouldn’t attempt to try,” the candidate began with the deliberation of someone picking out individual words from a poorly organized display. “And please don’t confuse this with some flabby attempt at modesty. I’m just stating facts. If we can agree on anything, it’s that my many invaluable attributes, whatever they may be,” his mouth flickered into a lopsided stillborn smile, “include no university degrees, no certificates of merit, no single-minded training in any of the disciplines you’d find reassuring in a potential employee. But at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think an iconoclast like Dr. Morgan deserves better, better than some well-trained servant obediently treading in the footprints of established methodology. What I have to offer obviously precludes anything of the kind. I haven’t lived a sufficiently cloistered life. I’ve been busy getting my hands dirty, inviting the world to tempt me with what it has to offer and buffet me about at will. I’m only asking you to consider the possibility that this may be an asset, something you ought to entertain the possibility of embracing. There are worse apprenticeships for a paper conservator than learning how to salvage a dying tree.”

  As he spoke, one hand had been gliding like a predator along the surface of the table toward the base of the lamp and now, having contacted it, without pausing for a moment or diverting his attention from those he was addressing, his fingertips edged the offending object a few inches further to his left, preventing its light from troubling him any longer. The action — decisive and sly, like the movement of a snake’s tongue in slow motion — loosened something in him.

  “Look, I understand the g
ravity of the decision confronting you here. If I were in your position faced by someone like myself, I suspect I’d be equally wary.” At this point, the widow — whose natural stoicism coupled with her desire to feign absence while remaining present had so far prevented her from making any discernible movement — suddenly bowed her head. She might have been stifling amusement. She might have merely dozed off. She might have been trying to listen for something only audible in the absence of sight. “Besides,” the candidate continued, undeterred by this minor distraction emanating from the dark corner, which he evidently took as a sign of encouragement, “Any one of you, of course, given your experience and the singular advantage of your individual relationship with the man — how I envy you, how I envy you your memories — but all that’s beside the point, isn’t it? If any one of you were willing and able to serve, I wouldn’t be sitting here, would I? So it is not a question any longer of my ability to do a better job than you could, but of the sort of job I might be uniquely able to do if given half a chance.” He had attained the crest of his argument. He paused there, contemplating the precipitous descent that lay ahead.

  “I may not have known Dr. Morgan, but at least as far as this job is concerned, I have come to know something more important. I have come to know the workings of his mind, maybe as well as anyone alive, if paying scrupulous attention to the evidence counts for anything. It has been the greatest challenge of my life — and its greatest pleasure — to immerse myself in his life’s work.” The longer he spoke the more pronounced an unidentifiable accent — so imperceptible as to be nonexistent during the first part of the interview — became. It was as if his mastery of English had only been achieved by way of another language, which now, under the pressure of his current excitement and sudden uncharacteristic volubility, returned to haunt his words with an invasion of foreign gutturals, or rolling R’s, or suppressed consonants, with Swedish lilts, questioning inflections, the hint of an upper class Briton’s lisp (more affectation than impediment), or the extended, multisyllabic vowel of a Southern drawl. To the untrained ear this hodgepodge of accents might have sounded impressive, a sign of a Continental sophistication; to the linguist, it would have suggested a poseur desperate to fit in everywhere, whose attempts to do so only betrayed the depths of his estrangement.

  Following a brief account of what he called “the uncanny set of circumstances” that had first brought him into contact with singular philosophy of Stuff and of his state of mind several months earlier when he chanced upon the Morgan obituary — all of which induced the three members of his audience to fidget about uneasily in their chairs and exchange anxious, surreptitious glances, fearing this monologue would never end — he continued to make his case: “For many years I have been — and regardless of the outcome of this interview I will continue to be — an avid, devoted, attentive, constantly probing student of everything Dr. Morgan wrote about his intentions and achievements, not just the exquisitely nuanced arguments themselves, you understand, but of the apparent internal contradictions as well, and how even these are part of the ultimate cohesiveness of what he has to say. I’ve probably read his work more often and more rigorously than the author himself. It’s almost metaphysical, the process, as much an act of submission as an act of will, letting the words take hold of your mind the way they do, bending it in their direction. All the same, I have not become so blindly indoctrinated as to have lost my empathy for those encountering his collection for the first time, with no prior knowledge of his work. I vividly remember what it’s like to come upon him as an innocent. In many respects, I still am one. I’m still animated by that incurable skepticism which is the mark of the true believer.” He paused. “Look, I know I’m not the person you want. But I am here . . . Fate or happenstance or luck or whatever you choose to call it brought me. It’s just possible I’m what you need.”

  At the conclusion of this speech, the applicant, slightly flushed, trailed off as disconsolately as an erupting garden hose abruptly deprived of its water supply. He lowered his eyes, convinced he’d gone too far. “Of course, there are no certainties,” he said. “In the end, you’ll simply have to take a chance on me . . . And if not me, on someone else. I may be your best bet.”

  The chairman seized this long-awaited opportunity to end the proceedings. “I think we have what we need,” he said with undisguised haste, turning to each of his fellow committee members for confirmation and making an aborted attempt to rise to his feet as an indication that the meeting was over. It remained unclear as to whether what they needed was the candidate himself or merely the information they’d elicited from him, whether the chairman’s statement actually signaled ultimate acceptance or dismissal. The applicant reached down for the satchel at his feet and made as if to leave, but paused in his chair instead, with the satchel perched portentously on his knees, and offered his first wholly unsolicited remark.

  “Excuse me for mentioning this, but I thought you ought to know. I’ve been reading the Collingwood memoir,” he said, fingering the satchel’s unopened leather flap. “I’m preparing a response. Not necessarily for publication, you understand — purely for my own sake. I just need to do something. I don’t think I can endure such allegations and remain completely silent.”

  These words had a paralyzing effect on the room, as if its occupants regarded motionlessness itself as a defense, as if they believed that remaining very still and ceasing to breathe could magically expunge what had just been said and eliminate the necessity to respond.

  Dr. Morgan’s scrupulous plans for his posthumous reputation had failed in at least one regard: he had neglected to name an authorized biographer, some distinguished advocate with unimpeachable credentials to tell the story as he wanted it told, thereby cementing, at least for a time, his own version of himself. Presumably, he had been unable to find anyone he considered up to the task. At any rate, given this omission, it was hardly surprising that, absent the inhibiting force of his personality, nothing remained to prevent the jackals from feeding on the spoils.

  Within weeks of his obituary — and several months before the publication of The Man Unmasked, an exposé by a disgruntled former friend and colleague — rumors began sprouting like weeds in the cracks of Dr. Morgan’s once unassailable reputation, rumors kept at bay by the subject’s actual existence. Suspicions soon gave way to stentorian whispers that hardened briefly into accepted fact, but then, as rapidly as they had sprung up, promised to evaporate in the face of public apathy about the subject (hardly a household name) and the distractions offered by fresh victims with undefended reputations waiting to be dismantled. The Man Unmasked and its attendant publicity breathed new life into them. The book — subtitled A Reluctant Memoir — published so soon after Morgan’s death, must have been completed years earlier, and had simply been lying in wait to have its say in a timely fashion without fear of retribution, legal or otherwise.

  In spite of the author’s professed reluctance to expose “the true nature” of the man he claimed to have once “admired above all men,” in spite of his regret over what his “allegiance to truth” demanded of him, in spite of his persistent struggle to sound judicious, venom tipped the scales. Epithets ranging from the minor character flaw to the criminal littered the book’s pages. The subject was variously depicted as arrogant, vain, cowardly, duplicitous, intellectually dishonest, morally bankrupt, sadistic, and vengeful, each adjective supported by several paragraphs of anecdotes presumably constituting proof. Morgan was accused by the memoir’s author — a retired chemist and former colleague, whose standing in the scientific community had mysteriously plummeted in recent years — of plagiarism, theft, fraud, and forgery, impugning not only the validity of his subject’s achievements in science but also the provenance and authenticity of many of the most important objects in his collection, as well as the legitimacy of his authorship of Stuff, the work that had secured his reputation as an innovative thinker. Nonetheless, Dr. Morgan might eventually
have risen above this fairly exhaustive attack were it not for the more pernicious allusion to an incident, or incidents, of pederasty. To those with very long memories and an appetite for chewing on salacious tidbits, the allegations may have sounded vaguely familiar, echoing rumors briefly bandied about in the distant past.

  The Man Unmasked resurrected the forgotten question, which, once posed anew, could no longer be confidently answered in the negative. To imagine the possible was instantly to render it probable. The story was at least thirty years old at this point — divorced from its origins, altered, embellished and truncated by time — and of no real consequence to anyone but the participants themselves, both of whom were dead. The aggrieved Collingwood, however, nursing his own sense of betrayal by the man he had once been proud to call his closest friend, managed to parlay it into a parallel narrative of his own victimhood. Was Dr. Morgan, or was he not, guilty of seducing — to use the romantic and possibly euphemistic word rather than the legal term with its violent implications — the adolescent son of his archival assistant one summer when the boy had come to serve an extended internship while his father and only surviving parent was vacationing in Spain. Collingwood dramatized the episode, rendering it more plausible for his readers by introducing vivid, if admittedly hypothetical, details, setting the scene in Morgan’s study (the very room in which the applicant’s interview was taking place), inventing dialogue for his characters, and providing his own probing insights into the psyches of both victim and perpetrator. In circular fashion, he theorized that if Morgan proved guilty in this instance, the episode could not conceivably have been unique; given the nature of pedophilia, it must in fact have had its antecedents and successors, like so many dependent clauses, each with its own nameless young casualty to be pitied and avenged. Had Morgan managed to muzzle them all with money, Collingwood inquired rhetorically, with promises, with influence, with threats?