The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Working at the Met could be a lot of fun. It certainly had its rewarding moments. And, a not unimportant consideration, it was the kind of work that pleased her mother-in-law to see her do, and that pleased Noah. “It’s just the kind of community service work you should be doing as Noah’s wife,” Hannah often said to her approvingly, even though it had sometimes seemed to Carol like the kind of community work that used to be endorsed by her mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal.

  She had started her museum work not long after Anne was born, as a lowly volunteer, selling art books, gifts, and postcards in the museum’s shop two afternoons a week. But having minored in art history at college, she soon found herself being given tasks with greater responsibilities. By 1986 Anne had successfully weathered the transition to Brearley’s Middle School, and didn’t seem to require that much mothering anymore. Noah was still expecting his mother to turn over the reins to the company at any moment, and was working very hard with that in mind, and Carol had been given the official title of the Met’s head of volunteers. She had also been given the unofficial title of museum archivist.

  Being head of volunteers for the museum was not without its moments of frustration. A good deal of paperwork was entailed, arranging and rearranging schedules for her volunteer staff, most of whom were well-to-do women who really didn’t want to work very hard. She began to see herself as a kind of glorified dispatcher for a radio cab company. And Carol—feeling young, impatient, overqualified, and underused—had already begun mentally casting about for something else to do. She had no idea what. But she decided before quitting her job at the Met, and moving on to whatever it was that might lie ahead for her, she was going to make some sort of contribution to the museum that would be significant enough for Carol Dugan Liebling to be remembered for it. When she quit, it was going to be on a note of triumph, not defeat. And it was in her secondary capacity as archivist that she felt she had found what she was looking for.

  For two years prior to that forgettable year of 1988, she had been spending most of her time on a project she had named “Uncovered Treasures.”

  It had all started when, poking around in the museum’s basement storage rooms, and in various warehouses around the city where the Met stored items from its collections, Carol turned over a canvas which she immediately recognized as an early Velazquez painting of St. John in the Wilderness. Looking through catalogues of early exhibitions, she could find no evidence that this painting had ever been shown. This Velazquez did not appear anywhere in the museum’s inventories. Her only conclusion was that this was an important piece that the museum did not even know it owned.

  Wondering whether “her” Velazquez was simply an isolated oversight, she rummaged in the museum’s vaults some more. She soon discovered that it was not. Within months she had compiled a list of twenty-six works that had never been catalogued, inventoried, or exhibited, including a Delacroix, an El Greco, two Matisses, a Picasso mother and child, and a second Velazquez. With help from her volunteer staff, she was certain that she would discover even more. That was when she took her idea for “Uncovered Treasures” to the museum’s director.

  “Think of it,” she said. “A special exhibit of pieces from the museum’s treasury that the museum didn’t even know were there!”

  He responded with his usual quick enthusiasm. “Go for it!” he told her.

  Soon her list grew to sixty works of art, then to seventy-three, then eighty. In all, Carol spent eighteen months working on her presentation for “Uncovered Treasures—Secrets from Our Lost Archives,” as she subtitled it. When it was finished, it ran to more than two hundred pages. It included a complete index of the works themselves, a chronology of their discovery, and a bibliography of textbook sources. Carol drew up a detailed blueprint of how the exhibition could be arranged and hung and lighted. She compiled a budget of the show’s probable costs, and appended a list of possible corporate sponsors who might be expected to underwrite the show, at least in part. Needless to say, she did not include the Ingraham Corporation on this list. She even composed an outline and a table of contents for the show’s catalogue, and wrote a proposed introduction for it. When she was finished, she sent all her material to a printer and had it bound in blue leather with gold lettering. Then she presented this to the director, who promised to submit copies of her proposal to the board of trustees for consideration at their next meeting.

  But when, a week or so later, the director summoned her into his office, his face was long. “Everyone agreed that you’d put a lot of hard work into this,” he said, tapping a copy of “Treasures” with his fingertip. “But I’m afraid there wasn’t much enthusiasm for the idea among the members of the board, Carol.”

  “I wonder why not,” she said, trying to conceal her profound disappointment.

  “There was a general feeling that the timing isn’t quite right for this sort of thing,” he said.

  “Timing?” she said. “What’s timing got to do with it? These are works of art that have never before been seen by the New York public. The timing could be anytime.”

  “It doesn’t quite seem to fit in with our regular schedule of upcoming exhibits,” he said.

  “It’s a show that could be mounted this year—or next year—or five years from now.”

  “But it’s a show that doesn’t seem to have any clear focus. It doesn’t focus on any particular time period, or artist, or event.”

  “The focus is on the museum itself,” she said. “It’s a show that says that, like everybody else, the Metropolitan Museum has an attic in which valuable things get lost, or misplaced, and then turn up later. My idea was that this show would humanize the museum—make it seem more personal, less like an institution.”

  “I’m sorry, Carol.”

  “What else did the trustees say?” she asked him.

  “Well, of course I can’t quote you verbatim each trustee’s individual comments,” he said rather crisply. “But there was a general feeling that this show wouldn’t have legs.”

  “Legs?”

  “That it wouldn’t be a big box office draw.”

  “You sound as if we’re in show biz,” she said.

  “Well, in a sense we are,” he said with a small, pained smile.

  “Funny,” she said. “But I thought the museum was in the business of education, not entertainment.”

  He threw up his hands. “But what’s the point of mounting a big, expensive exhibition if nobody comes to see it?” he said. “I’m sorry, Carol. If it’s any comfort to you, I personally thought you had a hell of a good idea there.”

  And all at once she knew that he was lying, or at least that he was not telling her the whole truth. There was more to it than that, but there was nothing she could do. “Well, thank you, Roger,” she said, and rose to go, and he turned to paperwork on his desk.

  And so that was the end of it. The board of trustees was all powerful, and the director was their highly paid minion. She was a mere unsalaried volunteer. But she could not help but think that if she herself had been able to make her presentation to the board, she could have sold them “Treasures.” But that was not the way Things Were Done at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  For the next few days her thoughts centered mostly around the big antique silver coffee urn that stood on the Boulé sideboard in the Trustees Meeting Room, and the little array of Limoges demitasse cups arranged around it. If she could only figure out a way to lace that coffee with arsenic …

  It was only the coldest sort of comfort to her when she noticed, some weeks later, that Velazquez’s St. John in the Wilderness had been hung in a position of some prominence in a room devoted to seventeenth-century Spanish painters.

  She also knew that she could not quit her job now. The challenge to somehow leave her stamp on the museum had become even greater.

  One night she came home to River House to find Noah and her mother-in-law in the library with huge sheafs of architectural drawings spread out on the c
arpet between them.

  “Plans for the new Ingraham Building,” Hannah explained. “We’ve decided to build our own building.”

  “We’ve outgrown our space in the Chrysler Building,” Noah said. “We’ve had some cost studies done. This turns out to be the most economical way to solve the problem.”

  Carol studied the plans, which called for a huge square box, thirty-eight stories tall, made of shiny pressed aluminum, dotted with hundreds and hundreds of little windows, row upon row of them. Over the top of the building the architect had indicated a tall illuminated sign, reading INGRAHAM—THE TRUSTED NAME IN SPIRITS. The floor plans showed a maze of tiny offices.

  At first Carol didn’t know what to say. Finally she said, “Does Ingraham really need this much space now?”

  “Of course not,” Hannah said. “That’s the point. What we don’t need, we’ll lease out. As we need more space, we can take over the leases. This is going to be a real moneymaker for us, Carol.”

  “Who are the architects, Nana?”

  “Frankel and Steiner—tops in the business. They deliver the lowest cost per square foot in town.”

  “And you want—pressed aluminum?”

  “It turns out to be the cheapest way to sheathe a building this size,” Hannah said.

  “And it’s extremely durable,” Noah added helpfully. “Keeps the heat in winter and reflects the sun in summer, making it more economical to air-condition.”

  Hannah Liebling tapped the plans approvingly with her forefinger. “I like the sign best,” she said. She turned to Carol. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

  “What do I think?” Carol said.

  “Yes. What do you think? Pretty impressive, isn’t it? Particularly with that sign up there on the roof. The architect says you’ll be able to see that sign from the George Washington Bridge.”

  “You really want to know what I think?” Carol asked her.

  “Of course!”

  “If you really want to know what I think, Nana, I think it’s the ugliest design for a building I’ve ever seen in my life,” Carol said. “And I think that sign is—absolutely vulgar.” She looked quickly at Noah, who was merely smiling. His smile said, I’ve been trying to tell her that all along.

  “Well!” Hannah said, tossing aside the plans. “Who asked you your opinion about it, anyway?”

  “You did,” Carol said. “You asked me what I thought of it, Nana. And I just told you.”

  “Well, maybe I did,” she conceded. “But—ugly? What’s so ugly about it? It seems like a perfectly nice building to me.”

  “I’m not sure you really want my opinion, Nana,” Carol said.

  “Of course I do. I just asked you, didn’t I?”

  “Well, then let’s start at the top. That sign—”

  Noah cleared his throat. “That sign was Mother’s idea,” he said. “It was an afterthought. Actually, the architect wasn’t entirely sure—”

  “They’ll be able to see it from New Jersey!”

  “Let me just say one thing, Nana,” Carol said. “If you’re going to build your own building and attach your corporate name to it, I think you have to be terribly careful about what sort of a statement this building makes, because whatever it is, it’s going to be a statement about your company. And it’s going to be a statement that will be there for a good long time. I wouldn’t worry about New Jersey. It’s going to be a building that will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people who pass by it every year, people from all over the world. We’re going to have to assume that people will see that building on the New York City skyline long after all of us are in our graves. That means that it should be an important building, a building that will register in people’s minds, not just a building that’s energy-efficient and was cheap to put up.”

  “Huh!” Hannah said. “You’re saying that a building should be a work of art?”

  “Yes, but in a rather special sense, Nana. It isn’t like a book that you don’t have to read if the subject doesn’t interest you. It’s not like a painting that can be passed by, or a piece of music that you don’t have to listen to if you don’t like it. A building—particularly a corporate building, and a building of the size you have in mind—imposes itself on people. If you have business to do there, you have to find the building on the street, enter it, and find your way around inside. Buildings envelop us, wrap themselves around us, so they should be both pleasing to the eye and pleasing to the spirit.”

  “Huh!” she said again. “And you don’t think this one is?”

  “I really don’t, Nana. It seems to me that when a business organization decides to build a building, it takes a moral position. And it’s up to the architect to try to express that moral position.”

  “And you don’t think Frankel and Steiner have done this?”

  “Frankly, in this case, Nana, no.”

  “Well,” Hannah said, “I don’t suppose you have anybody better in mind, do you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Carol said.

  “Who?”

  “His name is Jean-Pierre Selancy. He’s a Frenchman—quite young, only twenty-eight. He’s won prizes for a theater complex he designed in Paris and an office tower in Marseille. His work has never before been represented in the United States. He’s quite wonderful.”

  “Hmm,” Hannah said. “If he’s never worked in this country before, then he might be willing to work for less—for the opportunity to design an important New York building.”

  “That’s a good point, Nana,” Carol said. “He just might.”

  “Make a note of that name, Noah,” his mother said.

  The subject of the new Ingraham Building did not come up again for several months. Carol made a point of not mentioning it to Noah. She knew the situation was a tricky one, and she knew that Noah was on her side. She had heard that invitations to submit designs had gone out to four more architects. But she didn’t know whether Jean-Pierre Selancy was one of these, and she was a little too afraid to ask. She did know that, in the end, the decision would be Nana Hannah’s. Though Hannah always made a great point of insisting that she bowed to Noah’s judgment on many matters, Carol knew that it was still Hannah who had the final word.

  Then, one evening, Noah came home beaming. “I’ve got great news,” he said. “She’s chosen your French architect. Congratulations, darling.”

  Carol clapped her hands. “Wonderful,” she said. “We’ve won!”

  He hesitated. “But then, the bad news is—”

  “Wait,” she said. “Let me guess what the bad news is. The bad news is that she’s taking all the credit for having found Monsieur Selancy. Am I right?”

  He gave her a rueful look. “Well, yes,” he said.

  “That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest,” she said with a shrug.

  The next morning she picked up the New York Times and saw, on the front page, the headline:

  Design for New Ingraham

  Building Is Unveiled

  The illustration showed the architect’s rendering of a slender, graceful tower to be built of bronze and glass, facing a plaza landscaped with trees, pools, and fountains. Paul Goldberger, the Times’s architecture critic, went on to praise the design’s “splendid simplicity,” its “fluidity of upward motion,” and its “timeless grandeur and glowing elegance.”

  And toward the end of the article, Carol read:

  The building’s prize-winning architect, Jean-Pierre Selancy of Paris, has never before been represented in America. His design was chosen, over many other candidates, by Mrs. Hannah S. Liebling, the farsighted CEO of Ingraham’s.…

  “You’re not upset, I hope,” Noah said to her that night.

  “Heavens, no. I’m used to the way she operates. I’m just happy that you’re going to have a beautiful new building, and not that upended egg crate she wanted in the beginning.”

  A few days later, Hannah mentioned it to Carol. “What did you think of the Times story?” she asked her.


  “I thought it was absolutely wonderful,” Carol said.

  “They called me farsighted,” Hannah said.

  “It was exactly what you wanted, wasn’t it? Of course, I noticed the misprint. It should have said the architect was chosen by Mrs. Noah Liebling, not Mrs. Hannah Liebling. But that’s understandable. The names—Noah and Hannah—are so similar.”

  Her mother-in-law gave her one of her narrow looks. Then she said, “I think you ought to be spending more time on your museum work, Carol. And try not to get too involved with the distilled spirits industry.”

  And that, in fact, was precisely what Carol planned to do. Just that morning, in Art & Antiques magazine, she had read:

  Perhaps the most extensive, and valuable, collection of antique Chinese and Japanese porcelains is in private hands, and has never been seen by the public. This is the collection begun by the late Truxton Van Degan, the glass manufacturer, in the late 1800s, and greatly added to by his son, Truxton Van Degan, Jr., in the 1920s. The bulk of the Van Degan collection remains in the vaults of several New York banks because of the enormous insurance costs that would be entailed if it were to be removed.

  Carol decided that this would be her next project. She had met Mrs. Truxton Van Degan several times at Brearley parent-teacher meetings. At that point she and Georgette Van Degan were little more than nodding acquaintances. But that would be a good place to start.

  In the darkness of their bedroom, Noah said to her, “I’m sorry your ‘Uncovered Treasures’ wasn’t a go.”

  “I think I made a mistake,” she said. “I thought all I needed was the director’s approval. I think I should have spent more time lobbying among the trustees—taking them to lunch. That sort of thing. That might have made a difference.”