Trace elements, p.3
Trace Elements, page 3
“Nothing happened. He’s coming right over to work on it with me,” Charley said with barely suppressed jubilation.
Calista herself was thrilled. It wasn’t just that Charley needed a father figure. He needed someone, not for role-modeling purposes, but with whom he could just tinker about. Charley and Tom had spent endless hours building, mucking about with assorted electrical-magnetic and mechanical junk. In the process Charley had accumulated a wealth of what Tom called tactual-intellectual experience which boiled down to simple experiences with real things—radio crystals to mouse traps. It all constituted a kind of hands-on learning situation. Something that Tom had found many of his own students sadly deficient in. It had been Tom’s notion that people indeed had vulgarized the Swiss cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget’s model of how children think and learn. It was true that because of Piaget’s work over the last fifty years people had come to accept that children move from a sensory type of learning system to concrete thinking and ultimately toward abstraction. This had all exercised a real impact on education. However, as Tom had written in an article in Scientific American, it was Western man’s wont to succumb to “an unswerving adherence to a hierarchical view of things.” Thus the ladder schema prevails in models of human evolution (ape to Homo sapiens) as well as models for cognition. What comes after is always viewed as better, more refined, advanced. What came before is thought of as primitive at best and often discardable. This inclination coupled with the ever- increasing tide of symbols and images generated from the media had distanced young people from those earlier and often more genuine experiences in encountering and constructing reality, in problem solving in a concrete framework.
Within ten minutes Oliver Harrison had been standing at their front door.
“Couldn’t wait to see it, Charley,” he said. “I thought Tom had a second one someplace.” Then he turned to Calista. “By the way, Cal. I wouldn’t go broadcasting this. You know there are assorted vultures out there in commercial lab-land who’d love to get a patent on this thing.”
“But Tom was never interested in patenting it. It was just for fun like all the other stuff he was always mucking around with.”
Harrison compressed his lips before he spoke. Calista wondered if there was something troubling him. “Well, of course it was fun. That was Tom’s perspective and mine too. But there are people who are blind to the fun quotient or would at least define it rather narrowly in terms of money and would scoop this up. There is no reason why they should reap the financial benefits and not you, Cal. All I am saying is keep it quiet and if we can get it working and other people want to use it just, for your own protection, go see a patent lawyer.”
She had watched as Charley and Oliver Harrison had sat at the kitchen table bent over the scattered parts trying to put the thing together. She had finally had to leave the room. And it was not out of sheer grief, but grief mixed with guilt. She had been standing there mesmerized by the glint of sun as it gilded even brighter the wild swirls and fiery cowlicks of Charley’s head bent over in concentration. The head was so similar to the father’s yet not the same at all and for a terrible brief moment Calista realized that, for Tom to come back, if only for one sun-shot minute on a fall day, she would have given anything—even .... She left the room before completing the thought. She had not expected this moment to happen. Perhaps she should have know that even a year later it was a recipe for emotional disaster to see Tom’s miniature next to his old mentor—two intellects straining together. But Charley had been so excited when he had found the Time Slicer, and he knew that Harrison would have loved taking it to the Grand Canyon, where he and his wife were going. The Grand Canyon would be a veritable showcase for the Sheer’s capacities. But they hadn’t been able to make it work. Then two days after Harrison and his wife had left Charley found an unopened box from one of the innumerable shops that had supplied Tom’s electronics addiction. This shop was in Portland, Maine, and in the box were scores of tiny fiberglass-coated coils. “Aha! Eureka!” Charley had exclaimed, and knew exactly what to do with them. But of course it was too late; the Harrisons had already left for Arizona.
Now as she thought back on the conversation with Harrison that day it struck her as quite odd. There was something out of kilter about his patent warning. It somehow missed the mark. It was not only out of kilter it was out of character too. Charley had called when they were gone and left a message on the Harrisons’ answering machine about finding the missing parts. Harrison had called back on his return. He was happy that Charley had found the missing parts but asked that he not leave messages on the machine concerning the Slicer. He had various graduate students checking on the house in his absence and they often took his messages for him off the machine. Again he cautioned of interest from others. Although this time he said nothing about patent lawyers . . . However . . .
Two-twenty. Ten minutes and school let out. She would ride her bike over to Lenox and meet Charley. Maybe he would want to ride over to the Peabody Museum with her to drop off some illustrations she had done for the Andean exhibit book. She climbed on her bike and rode down James Place toward Bryant Street. Her bike was a true jalopy. She’d bought it at a rummage sale for twenty dollars. Bike locks cost more than that these days, and she had never felt compelled to buy one—the advantages of a junk bike. She had never really understood gear shifts on bikes anyway, so at least eight on a ten- speed would be wasted on her. She took a right on Irving, following it around by the Academy of Arts and Sciences, until it intersected with Francis Avenue. A tiny pathway cut through from Francis to Museum Street, which bordered the Divinity School. Just as she was coming down the pathway she spotted a woman on an adult-sized tricycle. These tricycles had become quite popular with the over-sixty set in Cambridge. And the woman riding this one was at least eighty. “You first, Jean.” There was not room for them to pass.
“How gallant of you, Calista.” The woman, her gray hair neatly marcelled into ripples on either side of a center part, began to peddle slowly through the pathway. “How are you doing, dear?” she asked when she reached Calista’s end. Her dark eyes in their withered sockets opened wide in earnestness.
“Okay. Okay. Just bringing some drawings over for the Andean exhibit.”
“Good for you.”
“Well, you gotta get back to work sometime. It’s kind of therapeutic doing this kind of illustration, you know. Very straightforward, not much room to wander off.”
“Don’t underestimate it. That fellow we had before on this catalogue was disastrous—adding all sorts of curlicues to the decorative work and no sense of an object’s texture.”
Calista wanted to say that the fellow probably had had precious little chance to even touch an object because of Jean Scroop’s excessive vigilance as director of the artifacts general catalogue. She had been at the museum for over fifty years and in recent times had become almost pathologically security conscious about artifacts, not so much about new acquisitions, but earlier ones. Luckily, most of the stuff in the Andean book was fairly recent. And Jerrold Weiner, the field anthropologist, had been in Cambridge the last few months so there was no real problem. Jean Scroop could hardly deny the project anthropologist access to his own artifacts.
“Well, I think it’s just great that you’re getting back into the swing of things. How’s that darling boy of yours?”
“I’m just going to pick Charley up now at school. We’ll probably see you at the Peabody this afternoon.”
“Good! The North American Indian Hall has just reopened. I know how Charley loves all that.”
“It’s a relief for me after all this time of following him through the vertebrate halls of the MCZ and God knows how many hours in front of the Harvard diplodocus.”
Jean Scroop’s eyes shadowed briefly and she seemed momentarily diverted to another time. She abruptly brought herself back. “Yes, I suppose it could be a bore. No people, just beasts.” She laughed. There was almost a forced gaiety to the sound.
“Weapons are Charley’s thing now—atlatls, points, knives.” “Boys will be boys!”
“I guess so. Well, I better be off.”
“We’re rooting for you, Calista.”
“Thank you and see you soon,” Calista said as she started off. She sped through the narrow passageway, came out on Museum Street, crossed it, and rode two blocks down Carver, then took a left onto Wendell.
Most of the houses on Wendell were triple-deckers with small, fenced-in front yards. The gardens were especially nice. They certainly lacked precision or landscaping, but they were happy riots of color and imaginative juxtaposing. There were parsley and herb borders for small stone walks. Cherry tomato plants and marigolds, late roses and hearty mums all fought sunward together. She took a left onto Oxford. One block ahead she could see the yellow buses pulled up in front of the school. Children were just beginning to come out of the brick building.
The Lenox school looked like a school. It didn’t pull any punches, architecturally speaking. It wasn’t zoomy or innovative with disorienting flows of space and connecting ramps, like many of the newer elementary schools. Nor did it have the country club shingled charm and rarefied grace of Shady Hill, the Cambridge private school where the children of many of Calista’s friends went. Lenox was an erect brick building with no playing fields, just a playground and rooms with desks and a big smelly gym.
Charley and his best friend, Matthew, came down the steps together. He probably has something planned with Matthew, Calista thought. Charley had resumed his social life faster than she had. She had never intentionally meant to inhibit Charley’s social life or interfere, but she did tend to cling a bit to him. Face it, he was the only person she felt comfortable with. When Matthew had had a sleepover birthday party the month before, Calista had felt absolutely forlorn. She was in danger of becoming everything she had sworn she wouldn’t become as a mother—possessive, interfering, and dependent. She regretted immediately her decision to ride over to school. The boys were coming toward her, jabbering happily. Charley, his red hair a blazing mass of curls in the October light, was doing one of his routines from “Saturday Night Live.” Matthew was near hysterics. His mother obviously didn’t let him watch the program. What mother did let her twelve-year-old stay up that late?
“What are you doing here, Mom?”
“I just had to deliver some work to the Peabody. I thought maybe you guys would like to ride over with me. But if you’ve got plans, you know, don’t worry. Don’t feel like you have to . . .” The sentence dwindled off. She was sounding awfully defensive.
“I’ll come,” said Charley. The quickness of his answer almost startled her. Sometimes she worried too much about these things.
“I can’t,” Matthew said. “I got a dentist appointment.”
Chapter 6
Calista and Charley rode down Oxford Street toward the Peabody. There were actually two museums in one building. The south wing was the Peabody Museum of Ethnography and Archaeology. The north wing was the Museum of Comparative Zoology, home of the Harvard diplodocus, and a variety of other imposing vertebrate stars of the Cretaceous period, all of which had captivated Charley in what he referred to as his own Mesozoic stage of development.
Charley enjoyed fitting people into the geologic time clock, which had nothing to do with a person’s actual age but more to do with their evolutionary stage. He very generously put his mother somewhere between the Oligocene and Miocene periods. Some adults in Charley’s mind were “strictly Jurassic.” Now, however, as a budding Paleocene at the start of the Cenozoic era, Charley’s interest had shifted from dinosaurs to people, particularly Native Americans and their weaponry. Calista wondered if her friends from the sixties with whom she had marched on Washington and draped herself over the Pentagon steps were now having to deal with their own children’s passion for weapons. She and Tom had never allowed toy guns, but after Charley had discovered Indians he became proficient at making everything from tomahawks to bows and arrows. He was definitely no slouch when it came to defense.
As they entered the building, Charley headed left for the north wing of the MCZ while Calista turned in the opposite direction for the Peabody. “I’ll meet you in the Indian hall at the Blade and Club,” she called back over her shoulder. It sounded like a pub, but it was their name for the glass case that displayed Charley’s favorite Native American weapons. Charley first made what he referred to as a memorial visit to the MCZ to check out his favorites, the diplodocus and a delicate primitive horse called a Hypertragulus. The diplodocus had been dug up out west by a group of Harvard people in the early part of the century. There was a photograph of the archaeological team above the case that held the diplodocus. It was like a lot of old photos of Harvard teams—crew, football, baseball. There was the slightly faded image of the young men staring blankly into the eye that was to record them beyond their own mortal boundaries. The picture was similar to the thousands that could be found in buildings throughout the campus, except that instead of a paddle or shell in the foreground there was this huge hulking skeleton. Charley always examined the picture when he came to the case. The guys didn’t look very excited by what they had found or triumphant or even happy. They were just trying to sit still and look important for their little moment in the shutter between now and forever. And Charley decided that they were also trying to look older. He had a feeling that they all thought they appeared too young to have been part of this landmark discovery in paleontology. They were struggling very hard for a dignified look. Charley never could understand it. Who cared about a dignified look at a time like that. He went quickly to the primitive horse. There was no picture with this one. Probably some cowboy had discovered it who had never gone to school, let alone Harvard.
Charley was alone in this section of the vertebrate halls when he heard a cart being rolled through an adjacent room, and someone humming “Waltzing Matilda.” It was Tobias Scroop, Jean Scroop’s son. Charley knew this as soon as he heard the song. Tobias was always humming “Waltzing Matilda.” Tobias had worked at the MCZ and the Peabody with his mother for over twenty-five years. He wheeled into the room now with his cargo. Charley walked over to see what he had.
“Well, if it isn’t young Jacobs. What brings you here?” He stopped the cart. There was a small animal skeleton neatly laid out on the top tray. On a lower tray were some skulls of similar-looking animals.
“My mom. She’s delivering some drawings to the Peabody. What’s that on the tray?”
“Platypus up here. Shrew and small alligator down there.” “Where are you taking it?”
“Over to the case with the therapsids. It’s all this business comparing reptilian jaws to mammalian ones. They’re going to town linking up reptiles and mammals.” Tobias scratched his thin gray hair as if he were contemplating at that moment the missing evolutionary links. His bony face cracked into a sudden smile and Charley wondered if he wore dentures. His teeth seemed too perfect and nothing else about Tobias Scroop’s physical appearance seemed anywhere near perfect. “You know what they say? The therapsids may have lost the battle but they won the war.” Tobias laughed heartily at his joke, even slapped his knee. Charley didn’t really understand the joke, but he smiled.
“This platypus, is it a fresh one?”
“Yes siree! Got her two days ago.”
The skeleton was perfectly clean and articulate.
“You used the bugs, huh?”
“Betch your life.”
The MCZ, like many museums with zoological collections, kept cadres of dermestid beetles which in a matter of hours could consume every shred of flesh from a dead animal and leave a perfect skeleton. They had done just this with the platypus. Tobias would have overseen this little operation in the conservation laboratory of the MCZ and the Peabody, which was his little domain in the basement of the building. The rooms were not so little and in them Tobias, for the most part, went about his business of conserving time, for it was time that eroded the record of life’s history on earth. Time along with moisture and non-indigenous climatic variations were the predators of the record. Tobias literally saw his function in life as that of trying to make time stop for the millions of artifacts from the two museums that came under his ministrations in the conservation rooms. It was mostly preventive work, but he did some reconstruction and of course preparation of animal specimens. His armies of dermestids were kept in copper boxes on shelves at one end of the lab. In addition to these responsibilities, Tobias also made the dioramas for the museums as he was particularly gifted in small-scale construction and design. He had actually begun at the Peabody by building some of the dioramas used in the North American Indian Hall.
Charley walked now with Tobias to the therapsid case and helped him lift the top off after he had unlocked it. Charley then wound his way back through the vertebrate halls, passing through some intermediate rooms and into the Peabody wing. Downstairs at the Blade and Club he found Calista.
“How do you like it?” Calista asked, looking around the room that was somewhat dramatically lit and had huge photographs of various artifacts on rear-lit Plexiglas rectangles that were suspended about the room.
“It’s okay.”
“Just okay? Don’t let the display person hear that.”
Chapter 7
There was only one other person in the exhibit area, a tall man elegantly dressed, carrying a briefcase and a lightweight coat neatly folded over his arm. A bit austere but quite attractive, Calista thought. Her back was to him but she could study his reflection in the glass of the basketry case. He was scrutinizing some early Navajo work. He wasn’t from Harvard. Indeed he struck her as being a foreigner passing time between flights.
