Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  All this started shortly after the 1909 decorative arts show I mention, with the museum’s first acquisition of a partial American room in the form of a paneled fireplace and attached wall obtained from a mid-eighteenth-century house on Long Island. It was the 1910 gift of one Evelyn Johnson de Woody, wife of the secretary of the museum’s board of directors and niece of the museum’s first president, who was in some sense assisting in the “decoration” of her husband’s clubhouse. The next year an additional section of paneling was harvested from a large farmhouse in Hampton, New Hampshire, by Secretary de Woody himself, who took long antiquing vacations in the Northeast and was evidently not one to be shown up by his better half.

  Then Wallace Wynne Johns, a blond man with a very round face who, as his portrait in the Trustees’ Dining Room attests, bore a passing resemblance to Pac-Man, was made curator shortly after the creation of the Department of American Objects in 1907. Johns then hired a talented younger man, Jonah Durr Weiss, as his assistant. Weiss, incidentally the museum’s first Jewish curator, in turn obtained in 1912 two rooms that had been removed from a federal house in Harvard, Massachusetts, after which Weiss wrote in a letter to his mother that “this Museum possesses the makings of a definitive series of American paneled, or partially paneled, rooms, and I sincerely hope that no one shall stand in our way as we aim to one day have the whole house!” He later complained of having spent a bile-freezing winter scavenging through the thirteen original colonies for Colonial carved wall panels, which “are not released from their settings with ease!”

  Weiss’s major successes were a complete ballroom, “then used as a chicken run,” removed in 1917 from Colby’s Tavern in Providence, and an upstairs parlor, “then a storage for casks,” obtained in 1918 from the Bundt House in Philadelphia. In subsequent years, Weiss and his successors found better luck below the Mason-Dixon, where impoverished white landholders were more easily convinced than the doughty Yanks to sell off magnificent papered salons, elaborate frescoes, mantels, and whatever other decorative elements could be scraped from the walls of their plantation manors and liquidated in order to forestall foreclosure.

  These, then, were the artifacts that gave form to most of the American Wing. The domestic spaces were clean, frozen in time, sumptuous, and not particularly spectral. They presented a sort of silent sitcom set of the past, minus, of course, stories of labor and race—which is to say, they were a person-size dollhouse reflecting the aspirations of a very select group of émigrés from Western Europe.

  However, this was not where I was going. I made a sharp left and entered, up a small set of steps, a dimly lit room. Though this space is open to the public, it is one of the least visited parts of the museum. We call it our department’s “visible storage.” It affords the visitor passage among numerous floor-to-ceiling glass cases containing mediocre likenesses of socialites and decorative items of questionable interest and rarity. Really, it is the place we keep works of art that were accepted into our department’s collection with the stipulation that if they were not regularly and/or constantly put on display, they would need to be returned to the families of origin. Of course, we don’t allow these sorts of stipulations to be written into gift contracts anymore, and we have indeed allowed a certain number of objets d’art to fall out of the collection through violation of these very rules. But there are works that, mainly for reasons of history, we would prefer not to lose, and as we cannot fit them into the period rooms (already implausibly stuffed with ornamental accents) or into the meager additional gallery space that pertains to us, we stow them here, arranged in stacks or hanging from particleboard.

  I knew where I was headed. I had to work from memory, so it took me a few minutes walking through the aisles, scanning the cases up and down. I was seeking an item whose value was almost entirely anecdotal or historical in nature, an object that had been donated between the wars by a Manhattan-bred heiress, Alice Gaypoole Wynne, whom I have always remembered for her distinctly horsey look, her shocked, melancholic white face and aggressively pomaded cap of dark hair, as memorialized in a 1920 portrait by Kees van Dongen, a Dutch-French Fauvist turned realist. This portrait hangs in a side gallery of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and I saw it there years ago before making the connection one day at my desk. (This was when I was still trying to “familiarize” myself with the sum total of the collection, a project I’ve since abandoned for personal sanity.) CeMArt seems to possess no corresponding likeness of Alice Gaypoole Wynne, or just plain “Alice,” as I call her. However, we maintain Alice’s gift in visible storage in perpetuity. Her offering was a familial commonplace book (essentially a glorified scrapbook) kept from the late 1830s all the way into the 1870s by Wynne’s great-grandmother, Brunhilda Wunsch Gaypoole, who was a well-known women’s and immigrants’ rights advocate back in the day. I have never seen an image of Brunhilda, née Wunsch, but one may assume she was less concerned about her hair than her excessively marcelled great-granddaughter, Alice. Brunhilda is renowned not just for 1859’s Women and Poverty, her extended essay on women’s right to work, but for her early efforts in the organization of aid societies to help educate and organize the dramatically increasing immigrant populations in New York beginning in the final years of the 1830s. We understand that her husband, Gilbert Gaypoole, was either an extremely liberal or an extremely negligent man.

  This, by the way, was how I now interpreted the phrase of my dream: bande d’aide = “group of aid” = “aid society.”

  This synonymy, or punning translation, had popped into my head while Frederick Lu and I were shooting the shit. It was a sort of rebus, the dream tying an intuitive knot. The Gaypoole commonplace book is, I should add, one of the few explicitly feminist—or female-authored—items in American Objects. I mean, there are some artisanal quilts and loomed rugs, but most everything else the museum has collected over the years was designed and constructed by male master craftsmen, if not industrially produced. I like Brunhilda’s scrapbook because it is something that the museum would never collect today, having, behind it, far more story than market value. It’s also basically composed of trash. In this sense, it is a relic in more ways than one.

  I should mention, too, that I don’t always feel this way about my dreams, as if they contain significant messages or flags, but there was something about the dream in question, that here Whit was sailing away from me on his ancient roller skates, never, in spite of the fact that I was earnestly chasing after him, to return. Perhaps he was about to skate all the way into the Hudson River and sink in those very heavy historical booties! A girl could hope.

  It seemed to me that in the past ten hours my brain had been working overtime and behind the scenes. I tried to recall if Paul had ever explicitly mentioned the Gaypoole commonplace book to me, or whether it was that I had at some point seen him in the visible storage staring at it. A specific memory was not coming to me. Yet the thought of this object was magnetic, it sang to me with my weird pun, bande d’aide, bande d’aide, and now I saw it, there it was: the commonplace book, on a bottom shelf, near the floor. It was leather bound, with warped and wrinkled pages onto which clippings of magazine mezzotints had been pasted, along with texts from articles and poems, sometimes written in by hand. The book was propped up on a plastic support with small feet and bracing arms. It was unlikely that this position was very good for it; the mode of presentation indicated, if not neglect, then curatorial agnosticism regarding the book’s fate. I tried to recall the last time I had come here to stare at it. It could very well have been months ago, even a year. Yet I knew which clipping the Gaypoole commonplace book was open to. Because it usually showed an engraved image of the lighthouse lamp that sat atop Barnum’s American Museum, a massive beacon announcing P. T. Barnum’s intent to astound Americans by means of readymade and/or relatively commonplace objects, recontextualized via his bizarre rhetoric. There was something about the way in which the illumination of this industrial-strength lamp was described by t
he engraver, jumping spikily out into the obscurity surrounding it, a little like frayed pieces of lightning, that made the image particularly memorable. Though the text of the article was missing, I did happen to know that Barnum’s hall of exhibition, located on Ann Street in Lower Manhattan, had been purchased by the showman and revamped in 1841. In it he displayed a loom run by a dog, the trunk of a tree under which Jesus sat, along with the Feejee mermaid and various maudlin taxidermy displays and effigies in wax. All this was eventually destroyed by an 1865 fire.

  But today the commonplace book showed an alternate image, what looked to be a wood engraving of a certain daguerreotype made famous (to Americanist art historians, at least) by a trial in which the photographer was accused of fraud. The clipping showed a bearded man in a long coat, vest, and pants seated at a writing desk, his hands covering a square of paper to which he is applying a pen, even as a third spectral hand, larger than his and attached to a giant, insubstantial arm, reaches down to guide his writing. In the background, a second spirit stands by, with a vague smiling face, wrapped in a sheet. Brunhilda, or someone else, had inscribed the page next to this extract, “After Mr. William H. Mumler’s Picture of a Medium Guided by Spirit Hand and Spirit Child.”

  I stood staring at this transformation. A page had turned. There was no denying it, the commonplace book had been adjusted.

  I reversed course and walked briskly back to my desk. My forehead was hot and I kept clenching and unclenching my own tiny, feminine hands. A notion was irrepressibly presenting itself: It wasn’t the commonplace book itself that interested me so much as the family out of which it had emerged.

  —

  IN MY OFFICE, I sat down to an exceedingly curt email from Caro. The subject read “First floral display, East Side.” This was very like her. The sole bodily content was a cell phone photo depicting an anemic violet cone, an unseasonably early showing by the lilac bushes surrounding the park’s Alexandrian obelisk. The email was intended to acknowledge, simply, that Caro and I had once again managed to speak to one another and that, in mostly unrelated news, the world continued to support forms of beauty acceptable to social conservatives. It also indicated that Caro continued on in her belief that she and I had a relationship that could reasonably be characterized as “normal” and “fulfilling.” I archived reflexively and turned to a long, halting message from Bonnie that informed the department of recent developments regarding Paul. Bonnie let everyone know that the museum would soon be sending flowers and that a card had been purchased and placed in a corner of the study room in order that we inscribe it with personal messages.

  I sat there for a moment, considering this, Paul. This was how it could go. I could feel the smug presence of my own relief at simply not being dead like he was. I was alive, and thus there was some chance that in the intervening time before my own demise I might extricate myself from my affiliation with an existence not merely insignificant but also slightly embarrassing. I envisioned the gentle things I would put into my own message on the card, to whomever it was, the sister. I did have plenty of nice things to say about Paul. But mostly I was considering the fact that I did not want to die this way—which is to say, I did not want to die in this present, with my life what it currently was.

  Anyway, this was not my life. It didn’t feel like my life. It was something that had happened to me. It did not feel like the product of my actions.

  I knew that I couldn’t really go on holding such beliefs. I was living here, in this, so I had somehow “done” it. Maybe it was more accurate to describe my situation as one in which I had done things without knowing. In some cases, I might have looked the other way; in others, I possessed the kind of agency that derives from allowing things to simply go on, without demanding of oneself some sort of reckoning, i.e., I had the kind of agency that belongs to fools and also to certain victims—or, if I were somewhat less generous with myself, persons in comas.

  [ 15 ]

  I was in the museum’s database. The Gaypoole commonplace book had been inducted into the collection in winter of 1930, just as I’d remembered, the gift of Alice, she of overweening affection for hair lacquer, great-granddaughter of Brunhilda, mildly famous feminist, and immigrant rights activist. There was a note appended to the digital entry that let me know that the “gift” had been made “for the preservation and posterity of her great-grandmother’s work.” There was no mention of any sort of rider requiring that the book be displayed in perpetuity.

  I needed to see the thing up close, to hold it in my hands. I knew where the keys to the case were located. These were kept in a box on the wall in the repair and study suite, which was really just a room adjoining visible storage. Standard procedure was to go to the registrar, meaning Paul, and schedule a time to have him go into the case and bring the object in question into the suite for closer inspection. This could be done just before or after normal museum hours. As there was now no Paul, I was unsure what I should do. I could go to Bonnie, but to be honest I didn’t really much feel like explaining to her why I needed to view a part of the collection that was totally unrelated to my own area of expertise. After our recent conversation concerning my difficulties with saving face where men were concerned, and now the fairly shocking disruption that was Paul’s death, I didn’t feel so much like rocking the boat. Besides, there wasn’t really a need to.

  I remembered that on Monday morning of this week, when I had borrowed Paul’s office and computer, I had also been adroit enough to take with me a souvenir in addition to his map and files. I had his keys! Now, I did not know at this moment whether or not I had the correct keys, whether one of them would in fact allow me into the repair and study suite, thus allowing me access to the locked box, the groan-worthy combination to which, I happened to know, was 1-7-7-6. I did not know, but I could try, and as far as I knew, as long as nothing went missing, it would be unlikely that any security footage of me making my consultation would be cause for upset. The cases themselves were not outfitted with motion-sensitive alarms. If someone in security did decide to file an inquiry about my actions, I could hope that it would be processed after I had figured out why this book was worthy of Paul’s attention.

  There was also the possibility of foul play. I have to admit that I didn’t relish so much the fact that Paul was, well, dead. I mean, as I went into my bag and felt around, I was feeling for the keys of a dead man. I really don’t like touching dead people’s keys.

  The better to distract myself from such ideations, I went online and searched until I found a biography of Alice Gaypoole Wynne. It had been out of print for nearly a decade and had the not exactly encouraging title Will to Beauty: The Untold Story of Alice Gaypoole Wynne. I paid forty-nine cents for it and then demanded that it be sent to my house by early the next morning, which cost an arm and a leg.

  Then I did some inane email tasks for the next two hours. Around me, the department maintained sepulchral hush. Perhaps other staff of longer standing were so moved that they were electing not to come in. Bonnie had said as much in her email. One had permission.

  It was just after five P.M., then, when I again exited my office. I padded over to visible storage and, after looking first left and then right, began trying Paul’s keys in the doorknob of the repair and study room door. The second one slipped neatly in, displaced bolts. I therefore entered and helped myself to keys to the visible storage cases as well as a pair of art handler’s gloves.

  I reflected that I might now, at this very moment, be doing something that could get me fired. Oddly, this notion stirred me not at all. What felt good, no, sublime, was to be actually doing something, to be acting instead of not acting, to be walking upright instead of lying on my pale belly. I could, I reflected, always depend on this quality in myself, even if I burned through all the romantic loves that were granted to me in this world without settling happily on a single partner. Even if I never attained the exalted status of valid human in Caro’s (inexplicably beautiful) eyes, I could be this b
eing, this agent, who was convinced of what she must do and who, in turn, did it.

  So I unlocked the case and took out the book. I stood, relocked, made my way back to the atelier.

  The commonplace book was as heavy as it looked. In a sort of parody of what could by any standard be considered proper study room protocol, I laid out a sheet of near-to-hand paper towels before plopping the book down on the central table. I next went and hunted around the cabinets for some foam blocks to rest my artifact on. When these weren’t forthcoming, I removed a pair of L-shaped metal bookends from a shelf of titles on the history of American furniture joining, placing these on the table corners up and covering them with a generous layer of more paper towels. I put the commonplace book on top of this shoddy altar.

  I wanted to begin at the very beginning of the commonplace book, but the book seemed to have been held pinned open in such a way, for such an extended period of time, that it was no easy matter to crack into the initial pages. It was possible, then, that the museum’s stewardship of this item was doing it somewhat more harm than good. What surprised me was that at a certain early place in the codex, the pages had indeed been cracked, which is to say, separated from one another. And it was to this place that I was now turning.