A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  He’d called me up to play with me. The dean was twitching the bait, reminding me that my continued presence at Caldwell College in Maine was on the line, just as I’d gotten away from those worries for the moment to submerge myself in my own work, real research for a change. Until now I’d thought of him as a balding, second-rate Dickensian villain, a pain that came with the territory. But I knew from my experiences with him over the past several years, that his call wasn’t just insensitivity, wasn’t just social maladroitness, he was genuinely screwing with my head, now that he was in a real position to do so.

  Congratulations, Dean Belcher. You’ve just been promoted to sadist, first class.

  I looked down and realized that I’d wrapped the phone cord around my hands and was pulling so hard that I’d managed to straighten some of the curls out. I unwound the cord from my hands carefully, noticing how I’d managed to cut off the circulation in them without even thinking about it: The ends of my fingers were red and cold and there was a deep, white groove where the cord had bitten into my flesh. My hands were trembling, and I tasted bile at the back of my throat, the way I do when I’ve been hit too many times at my Krav Maga class and I’m ready to tear the lungs out of my instructor Nolan’s chest if he’d only let me get close enough to do it. I knew from experience that it was a bad place to be, and I felt powerless to do anything about it.

  I let go of the last of the cord and turned around to go to my room. I nearly ran into Jack, who suddenly appeared on the stairs, just about eye-level with my fists. He stumbled backward and would have fallen, had I not steadied him by grabbing his shirt.

  “Oh, my God! What is this?” Jack said. “I thought it would be quiet out here.” He had been wearing his headphones and must have been scared to death to see me appear suddenly.

  I flushed at being caught acting so. “I’m sorry, Jack! I…don’t know what came over me. Yes, I do, it was my dean. I apologize.”

  “Hmmph.” An opportunity presented itself and a sly look crossed his face. “Well, no harm done. Perhaps you would care to join me in a drop of something to calm the nerves?”

  I was about to decline, but I felt so guilty about having scared him that I agreed. “Thank you. That’s very kind.”

  As Jack went off chattering and humming to himself, Michael slouched up the stairs, still dressed in his overcoat. I was beginning to believe that he’d been born in a tiny London Fog.

  “Care to join us, Michael?” Jack had returned and was very excited to have company in what was clearly his favorite pastime. He’d brought out a bottle of cheap cherry brandy.

  Michael eyed the bottle askance. “Thanks, I won’t. But I will watch you and Emma enjoy it.” A blank expression crossed his face. “I’d have thought you could make it up the stairs without tossing back another shot.”

  “Oh, Michael!” All atwitter with the unexpected attention, Jack explained the reason for the impromptu party in the sitting room.

  I took a sip and instantly my teeth ached to crawl back into my jawbone. My stomach rebelled, and I noticed Michael was leaning back, half-glasses perched pretentiously on his nose, watching me with vast amusement.

  “Deans are a malignant force of nature.” He shrugged. “Can’t be helped. It only gets worse, in our little slice of purgatory.”

  “Pshaw, you dreadful thing, that’s no help!” Jack swatted at Michael, who rolled his eyes. He took another sip, his round little eyes bright with the liquor, and took his glasses off to clean them as he spoke. “Oh, my dear, you must take heart! You see, both Michael and I have been through precisely the same thing, and now look at us. Just fine.”

  And if the sickening brandy wasn’t cause enough, I almost lost my dinner when Jack licked the lenses of his glasses, then dried them off with his sweaty shirttail.

  Michael made a rude, wet noise in the back of his throat. “Yes, Emma. Do look carefully at us.” He heaved himself off the wall. “That’s enough frolicking for one evening. Night all.”

  I threw back the rest of the thimbleful of liquor so that it wouldn’t linger on the palate and said “Thanks, good night” to Jack. But it was with that revolting taste, the churning in my stomach compliments of Dean Belcher, and the thought that I could look forward to grow up to be just like my housemates—seen and unseen—that I eventually fell into an uneasy sleep.

  Chapter 3

  MADAM CHANDLER KEPT ME FASCINATED FOR THE next day and a half. The journal was just about one hundred pages, covering just a few months. Although I had hoped for a full year, the content of the journal made it perfect for my needs. I wanted to be able to speak about everyday life on the site I’d been excavating, and I wanted to try to say something about the life of women, especially since all the other documents spoke of the public life of Justice Chandler. Margaret recorded much of her activities in running her household, possibly set down to provide an example for the children she had hoped would fill her future.

  Two things troubled me as I worked, however. I began to wonder about the location of the other volumes of her journal, if indeed they still existed. More immediately, I worried about the meanings of the unfathomable numbers I found on so many of the pages, since it was clear they held some deeper significance.

  As I read the normal text, I knew that something was causing the clouds to gather over her existence. She was concerned with the rapidly declining health of her friend, the Reverend Blanchard, and her sour relations with her neighbors. It was in these passages that the numeric sequences seemed to dominate, and I began to believe that her true feelings might be hidden in a code. Other journalists, like Pepys, William Byrd, and Leonardo, used codes or shorthand to confuse the casual reader and to protect their ideas, thoughts, and sins, so that it was possible that Madam Chandler was doing the same. But as compelling as those numbers were, my first task was to read and transcribe as much of the diary as I could, to take it with me when I finally left Shrewsbury. I’d have to leave cracking that code for later, if it could be done at all.

  Even without those questions, I had plenty to occupy me. When you are studying the life of someone you will only meet through documents, it doesn’t matter that you have no way of knowing for certain, but you begin to develop instincts about and even feelings for your subject. I began to develop a picture of Margaret Chandler’s character. She was certainly strong-willed, so much so that if she’d publicly vocalized the tart opinions that she revealed in her diary, she would certainly have been pilloried for a shrew. She thought well of the way she looked, and by the number of references to cloth and sewing, I gather that she kept at least one maid busy dressing her in keeping with her wealth and station. Margaret knew how to run a household and had obviously been well trained in the domestic and social side of her life: There were many accounts of dinners and parties that apparently facilitated her husband’s legal and political work. She was truly pious in a way that I found touching; having no belief myself, I am sometimes envious of faith in others.

  And at the end of most of the entries, even the briefest ones, she mentioned what she was reading. Sometimes it was the papers from London. These, it was quite clear, she had shipped over by her family, several weeks’ worth of issues arriving at a time, as was evident from the entry, “Tommy obliges with the Trumpet and sends word that he will send me others, if he thinks them not too political to be of interest to me.” With other books, however, it was clear she was ordering them from booksellers in London and in Boston, or borrowing them from her husband, Matthew Chandler: “Mr. Chandler has recommended Dryden’s translation of Ovid to me after I have done with the Plutarch.”

  It was still just a hunch, but I got the impression that she might have been hiding her voracious appetite for reading from everyone except the man to whom she was referring as “Mr. Chandler, my dearest friend,” with increasing frequency. This was compelling for a couple of reasons. Even though referring to one’s husband as “Mr.” might strike the modern reader as unduly formal, it wasn’t unusual right thr
ough the nineteenth century. But the use of the expression “my dearest friend” was sentimental and emotional to an almost extravagant degree. Based on what I knew of the times, Margaret was probably shrewd to conceal the extent of her interest in books; wit in a woman was compared to an unsheathed sword, dangerous to herself and everyone around her. And the fact that her husband helped her in this subterfuge indicated that trust and affection, if not true love, was growing on both sides of the marriage.

  I knew that I was beginning to like Margaret when I started becoming frustrated with her contempt for the Irish, her class-bound views, and her dislike of life in the rough frontier of early eighteenth-century Massachusetts. I tried to remind myself that they were common views for someone in her position, but cheered for Madam when she recognized some good quality in Nora, the Irish maid she had been so unwilling to take on, or when she observed how the odd manners of her New England neighbors worked well within their own society.

  Margaret became a little more real, a little more human to me in spite of her tremendous personal presence in writing, when I recognized that some of the spatters on a page full of the mysterious code were caused by teardrops. I wondered what the rest of the diary would eventually reveal.

  So I was able to keep my professional worries behind me until about eleven fifty on Wednesday, when Sasha reminded me about my lunch with Director Whitlow. I bit back a curse; I had planned on just a quick bite eaten in the staff lunchroom, so as not to take any more precious time away from my work on the journal. Making nice-nice with the officialdom just wasn’t as appealing as the life that was unfolding before me.

  As I hurried down the hall, I reasoned that talking about one’s work, especially with someone who was knowledgeable about such things, was almost as much fun as actually conducting said work. Whitlow, even if he was friends with Dean Belcher, must have some sympathetic qualities if he was willing to take a position as the director of such an institution as Shrewsbury. And although I knew that Belcher wouldn’t have lifted a finger to get me the fellowship, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have his “good friend” get interested in my project. It was an opportunity I should make the most of.

  I was surprised to see how imposing a figure the director was. Evert Whitlow looked more like a businessman than the head of a historical repository, and he worked hard to maintain that image. He wore a crisp charcoal wool suit with a conservative power tie, kept his thinning sandy-reddish hair cut close and carefully, and had a ruddy complexion that suggested an Irish heritage, a lot of weekend golf, and martinis before dinner and port after. He shook my hand firmly.

  “I hope you don’t mind a working lunch,” he said as he showed me to a chair. “I don’t like to give up too much time to the nonessentials, not when there’s so much work to get done in a day.”

  “Not a bit,” I responded. Even though he was saying exactly what I’d been thinking just moments before, I resented the impression that I was being categorized as a “nonessential.”

  “I’ll just have some sandwiches sent up and we can get started. There’s a nice gourmet deli in Monroe with a truck that stops by every day with their classic sandwiches readymade.” He picked up the phone. “It’s a real lifesaver for me, timewise. What do you like?”

  “Anything’s fine.”

  He told an unseen assistant to order some roast beef and chicken salad. “What else? Chips? I don’t know—” He paused to look over at me. I shrugged and he answered, “Well, maybe some fruit salad. And a couple of waters.”

  He settled himself into his chair and tidied some papers out of the way. “So. I understand you are looking at—” he glanced surreptitiously at a notepad—“the Chandler diary?”

  “That’s right. Are you familiar with it?”

  Whitlow shook his head. “No, not at all.”

  Trying to be gracious and get him off the hook, I said, “Well, I’m not surprised. It’s exciting for me, but compared with some of the treasures you’ve got here, it is pretty small potatoes.”

  “I’m not really all that familiar with the bigger potatoes,” Whitlow said, shrugging. “It’s not essential to my job; I leave that side of things to Harry Saunders and Sasha Russo. They keep me informed with an executive summary.”

  I must have looked surprised that he wasn’t any more interested in the collection, and he laughed politely at my expression. Fortunately, he received a call, and by the time his assistant came in with a couple of cardboard cartons with our food, I was able to compose myself. Whitlow looked at the labels on the sandwiches and said, “If you don’t mind, I’ll take the roast beef. My wife would kill me if she knew—cholesterol through the roof, you know—but as long as she doesn’t see…” He shrugged again, then promptly tore into his forbidden sandwich with gusto.

  I bit into my sandwich and was surprised by how good it was. Then I sighed and realized I hadn’t been for anything like a proper run since I’d been here and would have to make up for that shortly. If the amount of homemade mayonnaise was any indication, the director wouldn’t have been off the hook with his wife if he had chosen the chicken salad either.

  After a couple of bites, the director resumed our discussion. “I was hired, just a couple of years ago, now, to get the foundation known, to improve the bottom line, to expand the possibilities of the place. I haven’t got time, and frankly, I haven’t got the interest, to get too involved in the collections.

  “As you know, the foundation started out as a Shrewsbury family hobby, collecting Americana to share. The family would compete with each other, spending the timbering fortune their grandfather had made in Monroe, to see who could bring home the most important, the most antique, or the most curious documents of American history. It developed into some pretty serious collecting and connoisseurship; the sons hired a librarian to keep track of the family passion after a while, but he was a bit of an antique himself, and it took years before things were catalogued properly. When the old man died at the beginning of this century, the family began to invite upper-echelon scholars—you know, the more respectable sort from among their social set—to look at the stuff, and word began to spread. Other researchers began to ask to use parts of the collection, and the foundation was established to make the most of the collection. It was a coup for the Shrewsbury family, who wanted to come off like the big-time philanthropists. In its early days, the foundation had been sort of cozy, unofficial, and unstructured, and that’s fine, but these days, there are certain realities that need to be addressed that can be handled without compromising that intimate atmosphere too much, we hope. It’s a new world out there, and even such venerable institutions as the foundation can’t afford to get too hidebound about traditional approaches that just don’t work today.”

  Whitlow finished half his sandwich and picked up his cup of fruit salad, frowning slightly. He was obviously wishing he’d ordered the chips instead. I munched on my sandwich, thinking about what I’d heard from others of their time working at Shrewsbury. The principal charm of the place was that in addition to the really important early editions of Americana, the Shrewsburys had also gathered the odd, the comic, or the rare. The materials that had appealed to the whimsy of the collectors proved to be so valuable later on because the collection was more eclectic, perhaps in some ways, a more complete record of early America, than a more educated or disciplined approach to acquisition might have provided.

  “It would be a shame to sacrifice that atmosphere of…intellectual adventure for a few thousand bucks—” I began.

  Whitlow protested, in an “I’m an eminently reasonable guy” way: “But nothing’s going to be denigrated by trying to upgrade the library, make it into a world-class institution. We need to expand in different directions.” He shrugged. “I know it’s not a popular perspective, but I have high hopes that my approach will work. The Shrewsbury family left a very generous endowment, which showed tremendous foresight, but even though it was well invested, it doesn’t measure up to what our goals are today—
”

  I silently wondered what would make an already superb collection “world class.” It sounded like a vague bit of business-speak, to me. “How are you going to raise the money?” I asked.

  Whitlow didn’t even blink. “There will of course be an appeal to our more forward-minded donors, but there will also be a reorganization of the staff and some selective, prioritized deaccessioning.”

  My jaw dropped. “You mean you’re going to sell some of the holdings?”

  Whitlow put up his hand to forestall my reaction. “Cut away some of the deadwood, streamline the collections, focus on the first editions, the best-known writers, the most important material.”

  I paused thinking that, depending on his definition of the best material, Madam Chandler’s journal might be culled, sold off who knows where. I thought about how it was often that the documents that seemed the least important told us the most; how things like receipts, family photographs, and keepsakes stuffed into boxes best revealed what life was like for ordinary folk. Even a woman like Margaret, who was part of the elite, would have been invisible if it hadn’t been for her diary.

  Mr. Whitlow frowned again but spoke pleasantly enough. “Look, I can see by your face that you come down on the ‘conservative side—’”

  I jumped in. “I would say ‘preservationist.’”

  “Okay, fine. But you don’t keep every little scrap of everything you come across in your daily existence do you?”