The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  In the humdrum present she told me that she and her family were now living in a suburb of Philadelphia. Strange, I said, I was to fly to Philadelphia in about two weeks on family business. (An old uncle, Ivan E. Abbott, after whom I was very nearly named, had died, leaving a small estate of which I had been appointed executor and colegatee.) Well, she said, you must come over for dinner. She scribbled her number on a scrap of paper she took out of the jaws of her crocodile purse (the details we remember!) and handed it to me. I took it, thanked her, and walked on with the shaky step and gauzy pain of someone who has been resurrected from the grave, only to be told he is going to die again.

  I don’t think I slept an entire night for the next two weeks. I was torn between calling her before I arrived to arrange for the promised dinner or simply letting it lie. I can’t help thinking sometimes that the past is as full of hazards as the future. Perhaps that is why we have museums: to organize, label, and tame the past, lest it rear up and devour us. On the other hand, I thought it might be purgative simply to go to dinner, meet her family, acknowledge her actual existence, and get on with my own life, such as it was. Besides all that, I admit to having had a nearly morbid curiosity. What kind of life had she distilled for herself from the alembics of time and chance? What had I missed?

  So a few days before I left for Philadelphia, I called the number she had given me. A young girl answered, and at my request bawled out, “Mawww!” I perhaps should have hung up then, but I don’t think I’ve hung up on anyone in my life. The arrangements went forward. Carrying a rather expensive bottle of Château Latour and a bouquet of yellow roses, I took a taxi to a prosperous suburb of the city and a mock-Tudor house with quarreled windows, steep roof, and sloping lawn.

  I am not sure, in retrospect, whether I felt, in the course of the evening, more sad than disappointed. Actually, I was quite appalled. The two children, a boy and a girl as far as I could discern, had scarcely the rudiments of civility. They squabbled loudly the entire time I was there, fussing and whining and interrupting without the least censure from either parent. Winslow Lowe turned out to be the most ordinary of mortals, a plump, sallow man with a rather obvious toupee who served up the conversational banalities of someone who is bored with life and may not realize it. He was of a piece with the house, the relentless Tudor details of which (mostly fake, I’m sure) jarred with the wall-to-wall carpeting of a uniformly bright colorlessness that flowed down the staircase to spread evenly throughout the place. There was, I remember, a television set in nearly every room, even the bathroom off the kitchen, where a telephone hung on the wall next to the toilet. But I could find no piano, no lieder! There was a wall of fancy electronic equipment, but most of the discs, as far as I could tell, were show tunes, pops favorites, the kind of stuff rich lawyers listen to. There were scarcely any books in evidence. I forget what adorned their walls, if anything.

  After cocktails, cheese and crackers, small talk — mostly about “good old Seaboard,” as Elsbeth laughingly dismissed it (as though Philadelphia and its environs constitute the epitome of high culture) — we sat in a dining room furnished down to the last tittle with a matching set of reproduction Hepplewhite complete with a bowl of wax fruit. Without the continual disruption of the children, I’m not sure we would have gotten through a truly awful meal: an overdone lamb roast on which my excellent Bordeaux was wasted, accompanied by chemically vivid peas and slightly burned scalloped potatoes that also came out of a package.

  Elsbeth seemed terribly flustered and very much under the heel of her husband, who alternated between fake smiles and inexplicable frowns as he directed her with stares and sharp, disapproving nods, his conversational contributions coming in awkward bursts of pomposity. Disparagement of Seaboard and Wainscott provided only so many conversational gambits. The children refused to eat any of the meal, and when Elsbeth voiced the smallest reprove, she received one of her husband’s glances. They were finally excused to go watch television. Silence congealed with the lamb fat and the industrial cheese on the potatoes. The brownie à la mode was excellent, I must admit, and we managed to talk about that for nearly five minutes. With feigned affability, for I could tell he was something of a domestic tyrant, Mr. Lowe excused himself, saying he had work to do. He has an office over the garage, where he works on his stocks, Elsbeth explained to me with such evident embarrassment I wanted to reassure her that I didn’t mind.

  We lingered at the table a bit more, and God knows I tried to break through the facetiousness with which she dissembled her shame. I can’t believe I made her nervous. We were finally reduced, when the silences positively boomed, to the living room, an enormous television set, and a police drama involving lantern-jawed men with extraordinary teeth, young women wearing skirts that barely covered their pronounced rumps, and much chasing around the hilly streets of a West Coast city in screaming cars. At least the children, dabbing on the carpet at fish fingers and french fries Elsbeth had heated for them, were quiet.

  So there was no tête-à-tête about the old days, no perspectives on the trajectory of life that you might get at a class reunion or when you meet an old friend. Elsbeth knocked back a sizable brandy or two and got a little tipsy, I thought. When she yawned at the end of the television drama, I took it as a signal to leave. The taxi came mercifully soon after I had called it, and there was minimal time, what with good-byes to the children — “Say good night to Mr. Ratour” — who scarcely responded, and the usual pleasantries — “It was so good to see you again …” “Yes, likewise …” — to say anything else. I felt keenly for her plight, and it may only have been my imagination, but I thought I detected more than a hint of pleading in the final look she gave me. Or was it apology, an admission of a mistake? As the taxi pulled away, she was still in the peaked doorway, and I felt a deep, deep pity for her and for her life, which to me, in its personal and philistine dimensions, seemed a vision of hell.

  Still, when I got back to the office the following Monday, I took that scrap of paper from the haphazard archives of my life (we should all take more time to curate our collections), and carefully filed it away. Despite everything, I was still very much in love with her. And as I sit here enjoying what may be a small moment of triumph, I feel like calling her and telling her. Because through all these years she has remained for me a kind of internal audience, even if it has meant that, all along, I have been playing to an empty house.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 18

  It turns out I won’t have anything to report to Elsbeth after all: the second twin has an ironclad alibi. Between 4:15 and 5:30 P.M. of the afternoon Dean Scrabbe was abducted, Francis Snyders was in the Northside substation of the Seaboard Police Department. His car, apparently, had broken down nearby, and he needed to make phone calls and wait for a towing service. Lieutenant Tracy told me it’s in the logbook in black and white, and the desk sergeant on duty remembers the incident very well. I still can’t help feeling there’s something decidedly fishy going on with those twins. It’s all too neat, somehow.

  Nonetheless, there is significant other news to report. The Board of Governors has finally met and taken action, but I find myself in as great a quandary as ever. The members have asked me to be acting Administrative Director pending a thorough evaluation and overhaul of the present management structure. Naturally, I was surprised and somewhat flattered, and I told the Board I appreciated their confidence in me. I said, however, I would need time to consider their request.

  I don’t think they were quite expecting that response. Indeed, they became openly craven in their pleading, embarrassingly so, especially old Dexter McFarquar, who once asked me, while I was taking the minutes, what I did at the museum. I hid successfully, I think, the strange mixture of trepidation and vindication that agitated me when they pressed me as to my hesitations. They said there would be a commensurate increase in salary. They said I would play an important part in any restructuring. Robert Remick, scion of the Remicks of Remsdale and as always the worldly gentleman,
told me that he spoke unofficially but for the other members of the Board in telling me that they were all very grateful for the indispensable services I was performing during a very trying period and that I had in fact already assumed many of the duties of the post they were offering me. I didn’t really know what to say. I managed some platitudes about needing time to think through the conditions necessary for me or anyone else to fill effectively the “managerial” gap left at the museum by Mr. Morin’s incarceration.

  They decided right then and there to meet again in September, the first time in the history of the museum, I believe, that the Board has ever held two meetings so close together. I am to get back to all of them individually before that meeting and let them know what I have decided. If I decide not to take the position, then I am to try to find candidates they might consider worthy, which makes me, whether I want to be or not, responsible.

  As I sit here now, I am nearly tempted to write them all a letter saying that I categorically will not serve as acting anything. For one thing, I am opposed in principle to the very position they want me to assume. If the museum had an effective Director, it would not need an Administrative Director and the panoply of special assistants, make-work, and general bureaucratic aggrandizement that inevitably attend such redundancies. I feel like telling them that what they need to do is simply face the unpleasant reality of informing Dr. Commer that it is time he retired. Then they should start an immediate search for a Director who will direct. That is their responsibility. They are the Board of Governors. They are supposed to govern. But really, is it my role to tell them what their responsibilities are? I suppose I might try to have lunch with Robert Remick, if he’s available. I’m afraid, though, that Dr. Commer is sacrosanct precisely because he is one of them — a geriatric case, to be blunt about it.

  And really, what would they expect me to do as “acting” Administrative Director? Why not Director? Acting Administrative Director? The very term smacks of responsibility without power, of obligations without resources. But I am sure they would want me to make the Malachy Morin scandal disappear, find Dean Fessing’s murderer, locate Dean Scrabbe, keep Wainscott from swallowing us whole, prevent Damon Drex from making a spectacle of us before the world, send the Oversight Committee packing, rein in whatever mischief Professor Gottling and his cohorts are up to, and balance the budget. It is not just a matter, as some of them seem to think, of improving relations with the press.

  Besides all that, who will take over as Recording Secretary? The one time I have been sick for more than a few days — I had my appendix out in 1969, the weekend of the first moon landing — the person they brought in made a complete mess of the records. It took me nearly a month to straighten everything out. And what about the history of the MOM I am determined to write? It will take thousands of hours just to research it properly. I am not about to waste my time doing one of those “official” histories that no one ever reads. The Museum of Man deserves better. I am, indeed, tempted to inform them of my feeling now, but then I did tell them I would think it over, and think it over I will.

  The possibility, by the way, of Damon Drex making a spectacle of himself and the museum is very real. I received a transmission from his office in my e-mail this afternoon that left me dizzy. Not content, apparently, with claiming to prove that old saw about monkeys, time, and typewriters, he would now have us believe that one of his apes has climbed Parnassus. His assistant requests in a prefatory memorandum that I set a date for a press conference and send over to him a list of all “the print and electronic media” to be invited. The communication included, in addition to “a short lyric” purportedly written by that veritable beast Royd, the text of a press release and “an appreciation” by one Professor Reader of the English Department, all of which is to be part of a “press packet” to be distributed at a press conference. The final draft is to be printed on “Pan House” stationery, and I am to get back to them with suggestions or changes. Drex himself appended a note:

  Dear Norman:

  You will from papers see we have succeed on the other side of day light dreams. Royd that you meet at our jolly hour has made poem. I know how enthusiasm you have for our program. Now together we tell world. It will be bannered day for Museum of Man and Chimpanzees (my little joker) and for us.

  Well, I am going to can the whole thing. The press release claims “a major breakthrough in interspecific communication,” and “[t]he first recognizably literary production from a nonhuman source.” The quotation in the press release from a Fergus McFergus: “It’s obvious that these mere ‘animals’ have established a new level of writing, one that could well be emulated by the far more numerous ‘higher’ primates writing today. The simplicity and clarity of the syntax, the unadorned and powerful diction, the sparseness of sentiment, and the hypnotic cadences of the words impart to this short piece a nearly quadrupedal surefootedness.… We could do worse than to heed what might be called the sense of pongid urgency that this short work achieves with such convincing effect.”

  The release goes on to say that Professor Jack D. Reader (I’ve never heard of him) has generously contributed “a more formal appreciation of the poem, placing its significance within the framework of contemporary literary theory.” (I know, kind reader, that you think I am making this up, but I am not. As incredible, as fantastic as it may seem, I have it right here on my video screen, as real as the cursor pulsing with a perfect beat.) Ecco Simius:

  Chimp Champ

  by Hemmingroyd

  Me chimp champ

  You chimp chump

  Chimp champ

  Chomp chomp

  Chimp chump

  It gets worse. It gets awful. I tried twice to read what Professor Reader wrote, but I have to confess, I can scarcely make head or tail of it. (Why is so much that is written about writing unreadable?) At the same time I feel constrained to place Reader’s remarks in this journal as part of the record, not, frankly, that I can imagine anyone, even a historian, wanting to read it.

  Paleonymics and Hierarchical Reversals

  in the Pongid Realm

  by Jack D. Reader

  Though not the first pongid utterance of record, this short lyric constitutes the first record of a consciously “literary” expression by a species other than Homo sapiens. This fact alone, on its surface (surface), foregrounds the necessity of reconsiderations of interpretive strategies now in place for more conventional textual artifacts. Hemmingroyd’s ostensible project posits in a closed structure a paradigmatic scheme of intraspecific relations very nearly Foucaultian in its effects. And while the formal program of the piece appears simple, perhaps even simplistic, a close analysis of the tensions and contradictions underlying the binary oppositions will disclose, in the matrix of a rudimentary language (langue), the grit of words (parole) around which the empowered reader (lecteur envoulant) may accrete the layered pearls of his own miscomprehensions, setting the stage, so to speak, for a reversal of hierarchies. The missing copula, for instance, in the first two lines not only heightens the effects of recursive intonationality but foregrounds questions that are anything but stark. While the provided lack of any form of the verb “to be” in traditional analysis might be interpreted as an “apeing” of cigar store “Indian talk” (parler de peau-rouge de magasin de tabac), raising the possibility that Hemmingroyd is employing a self-parodic mode not to parody Amerindian speech but to align himself with a marginalized group, thus politicizing this utterance with an economy little short of breathtaking. (As a member of Pan troglodytes, Hemmingroyd, by definition, is absolved of both the Europhallogocentrism that has marked so much of the received canon and the anthropocentrism typical of literary production generally.)

  However recondite, such an approach provides a mere sniff (odeur) of the interpretive plenitude to be gleaned from the cracks and crevices of this seemingly seamless text. Whatever its other possible sociopolitico stratagems, the forgone copula in the first line establishes for the reader of Indo-E
uropean copulated languages an ontological uncertainty that is repeated, affirmed, and deepened in the second line, where the introduction of the I-thou configuration escalates what can only be called the epistemological risk. At the same time, the problematics of the missing copulas is attenuated if not obviated by the use of the objective case in the predicate, the ambiguity of the you notwithstanding. Is, in short, this small but in no way trivial jump (salter), this Nietzschean escape from grammar if not language, this objectification of the first person that fuses it with and transforms the nominal predicate nominative, even as the formal elements of speech remain graphically separate on the page (page), rendering the nonexistent copula into the active voice, i.e., being as existence rather than as equation, a move to fuse and therefore eliminate the subject-object dichotomy? Or is it simply that the dropped copulas (copules lachées) represent a deliberate creation of places of indeterminacy (Unbestimmt-heitsstellen), into which the aroused reader (lecteur amoureux) is invited to supply his own copulation?