The Vandemark Mummy

  “Once Mom makes up her mind, nothing can change her,” Althea said. “You know that, Dad.”

  “We all made the decision together,” Mr. Hall said.

  “You and Phineas and I did.” Althea wasn’t going to budge. “She’d already made hers, no matter what we did.”

  “Be fair, Althea. Your mother is the one who earns big money.”

  “That’s the argument she used, and it’s not honest,” Althea said. “This job here, teaching college, is your chance. It’s the first time you asked us to move to your job. Equality doesn’t mean that women get to drag their husbands around after them, the way men used to do women, all their working lives. Does it? It means everyone has a chance.”

  “It was just bad timing,” Mr. Hall said. “Your mother isn’t any happier about it than we are.”

  “I didn’t say I was unhappy,” Althea pointed out.

  “No,” her father agreed, “You didn’t. You just suddenly decided that you couldn’t live if you didn’t know enough Greek to translate Sappho, and buried your face in books. A psychologist would go to town on that, Althea.”

  Althea shrugged. Phineas didn’t know why they were bringing it all up again, since the decision had been made weeks ago, and there was nothing more to be argued about.

  “You and Mom don’t have exactly the same set of values, you know,” Althea said.

  “I know,” Mr. Hall agreed.

  “If you ask me,” Phineas said, “which I notice nobody is, it’s pretty dumb to break up over a BMW. It wasn’t even our BMW. What does it matter to us if the Tunneys give their kid a BMW for a sixteenth-birthday present?”

  “We haven’t broken up,” his father said.

  It turned out, that was what Phineas really wanted to hear. Between the fancy apartment—fireplace in the living room, tennis courts and swimming pool—and the congressman, and not having all the irritation of taking care of them—all the nagging and all the cooking—he wasn’t too sure what his mother might do next.

  “We’re not even legally separated,” his father said.

  “One of the letters for you looks like a lawyer,” Althea said then.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lawyer-type names, with P.A. after it. Mailed in Portland,” she warned her father.

  He picked the envelope out. It was large, creamy colored, and didn’t have the yellow sticker the post office in Westchester put on to forward mail.

  “Maine,” Mr. Hall said, “Portland, Maine, see? But why would a lawyer here be writing to me?”

  “Looking for business?” Phineas suggested. “Lawyers are allowed to advertise you know.”

  His father had opened the letter, and was reading four short, typewritten lines, holding in his other hand another envelope, even creamier and more expensive-looking than the first. He opened that one too, and read it without even looking up at his children, who stood watching. When he had finished the second page, he was puzzled but amused.

  “The effect preceded the cause,” he announced. He didn’t expect them to understand. “All is explained,” he added, which explained nothing to Phineas. He spread the letter on the table for Phineas and Althea to read.

  “To Whom It May Concern,” the letter began.

  It is my eighty-eighth birthday. That need not concern you, just as who you are does not concern me. That I am eighty-eight does concern me. It is time to begin thinking of my demise. When you read this, that event will have occurred.

  I have bequeathed to Vandemark College my Egyptian Collection. Do not get your hopes up, young man, and I hope you are scholar enough to restrain the board of governors in what will inevitably be their shortsighted enthusiasm. The Egyptian Collection contains no treasures. It is, however, of historical interest as well as—I flatter my youthful judgment—having some use to scholarship.

  You come into the business because I have decided to establish a curatorial chair for the Collection. I have further decided to award that position to the newest appointee in the Department of Classical Languages. This choice may well be idealistic of me, or willful, but I have my reasons. Experience tells me that a scholar may be more clear-sighted in a field other than his own. It tells me, further, that a Classical linguist will possess qualities the Collection will benefit from—a lack of what the world calls ambition (by which word the world usually speaks of greed), and a patient meticulousness of mind. I can only hope that you have these characteristics.

  The bequest includes a gift of money sufficient to build a small wing on to the present library. On no account is this building endowment, or the Egyptian Collection, to become an adjunct of McPhail Hall.

  The curatorial salary is presently set at the sum of ten thousand dollars per annum, to be adjusted annually for cost of living. You will more than earn it, in the first years. After that, it will perhaps smack of the sinecure. I don’t know what your moral structure is, young man, but one should never scorn a sinecure out of hand. It may even, once the real work is done, enable scholarship. I have always admired scholarship.

  The Collection, as you will find, is a hodgepodge. There will be some pleasant surprises for you, or so I like to think. The mummy, which is its centerpiece, has a certain wistful appeal, being from the Roman era. I have neglected the Collection, distracted as I became by other interests. I hope it will find a better home at Vandemark College than the cellars where it has spent its time with me. I hope it will find a better curator in you than it had in me. Should any article of the bequest be unfulfilled, then the Collection will return to the disposal of my son and grandson, as joint executors of the entire estate which I will have left behind me, when I have left this world.

  I have, I trust, been quite clear. The president will also have been informed of the bequest, and its conditions. I have, I think, foreseen all contingencies, to the best of human abilities.

  Yours from the brink of mortality,

  Felix K. C. Vandemark II

  “Will I be able to help out?” Althea asked. “Do you notice? He assumes you have to be a man.”

  Phineas noticed what his sister always thought of first—sexist stuff.

  “I don’t know if I’m qualified,” Mr. Hall said.

  And that was what his father always thought of first.

  “I don’t think this guy cared about qualifications,” Phineas pointed out.

  “It’ll give me something to write your mom about.”

  “She’ll be jealous,” Phineas said.

  “There’s nothing to be jealous of,” Mr. Hall said. “It’s just something a scholar would enjoy.”

  “Well I can see why Mrs. Batchelor is angry at you,” Phineas said. “Who would want a mummy around permanently? Dirty, probably smelly, it’s just an old dead body.”

  “That’s really dumb, Fin,” Althea said. “It’s a collection, the letter says. That means antiquities.”

  “Yeah,” Phineas agreed. He’d been to the Metropolitan Museum on more class trips than he cared to remember. “Broken jars. Pieces of stone with things carved on them in a language nobody has spoken for hundreds of years. Statues with pieces missing.”

  “Why don’t you two wait and see what it is, before you start fighting about it?” Mr. Hall asked.

  CHAPTER 3

  The next ten days were busy ones for Mr. Hall, who, along with his summer school classes, also had frequent meetings with President Blight to discuss how to store the Egyptian Collection until the Building and Grounds Committee could have the proposed addition designed and built, and frequent meetings with Mrs. Batchelor to discuss her objections to everything President Blight and Mr. Hall had agreed on. Mrs. Batchelor was throwing up roadblocks at every point, Mr. Hall told his children.

  If, Mrs. Batchelor said, the collection needed temporary housing, why not in McPhail Hall? If the terms of the will forbade that, then why not in the gym? If the gym was open to the public over the summer, couldn’t it be closed? The library cellars were already used for faculty offices, and
the Sports Department office, and general storage, why did they have to take even more space for nonlibrary purposes? If they were going to go to the expense of an air control system, why couldn’t they put it in the rare book room, where there were irreplaceable books and holographs, acknowledged treasures? If they were going to go ahead and ride roughshod over her opinions, they couldn’t expect her to like it, could they? If they said that they agreed with her that a library was the heart of any educational institution, they didn’t expect her to believe them, did they? Not if they went ahead and did this.

  Mrs. Batchelor was not happy. Mrs. Batchelor was not satisfied that the library cellar was the right place for the collection. Mrs. Batchelor felt demeaned, personally demeaned, by what was going on. Mrs. Batchelor was not going to be sweet-talked; her only concern was for the integrity of the library.

  Preparations went on regardless of all the meetings. A room in the library cellar was chosen to hold the collection until the new wing had been built. The library cellars were like an underground city, narrow concrete corridors lined with closed, numbered doors. There were no windows, and only one exit to the outside, a door opening onto the parking lot behind the library. There was only one door leading up into the library from the cellar. It was, Phineas thought, the perfect place for storage, like a rat’s maze in a scientific laboratory. For the collection, the largest room, number 015, a room the size of a lecture hall, had been emptied. Dehumidifiers and a self-contained heating system had been set up to maintain the correct temperature and humidity for antiquities. Because all the doors of the library opened to a single key, the door into 015 had been fitted with a new lock, to which only Mr. Hall, Mrs. Batchelor, and Captain Lewis of the College Security Squad had keys.

  Mr. Hall had taken charge of these preparations. After about the first hour, he hadn’t said anything more about not being qualified for the job. Even when President Blight called up, just after the letter had arrived, Mr. Hall didn’t say anything about not being qualified. Phineas and Althea could guess what the president was hinting by their father’s side of the conversation. “I understand, sir, but luckily I’m a quick learner, and I did have a couple of classical art courses, so I’m not unfamiliar with the field.” He grinned at his children. “It is a pity, isn’t it? Unless the will is ambiguously worded, the old gentleman hasn’t given me any choice, and I’ll just have to manage as best I can.”

  * * *

  The morning the collection was due to arrive, a bright Saturday morning, Mr. Hall looked at Phineas and Althea over breakfast. “The big day. You’re coming, aren’t you?” They were. “It will be a relief to finish with these interminable arguments with Lucille, so I can concentrate on my classes and the cataloging of whatever the collection turns out to be.”

  Phineas thought it would be a relief to have something happen, anything. He was getting bored with solitary bike riding and solitary TV watching—seriously bored. At least, with the Egyptian Collection, he didn’t know exactly what was going to happen.

  When the Halls arrived at the big grassy quadrangle of which the library formed one side, there was a small crowd gathered. Mr. Hall turned off to join the reception committee—President Blight and his wife, and standing with them a Westchester woman, as Phineas called the type, looking expensively well groomed and expensively well dressed. “A board member, what do you bet,” Mr. Hall told Phineas and Althea. “I ought to introduce myself. I feel underdressed.” He went toward the president’s group, reluctantly.

  Phineas and Althea hung back, looking around them. The sky was turquoise blue, and cloudless. The tall leafy trees that grew on the quadrangle cast cool shadows onto the grass. A few students lay around in the sunny patches, talking and tanning and watching the excitement. During the summer only one classroom building, the gym, and the library stayed open. Only those students who lived nearby could take summer classes. Nobody paid attention to Phineas and Althea.

  Mr. Hall was standing sort of with the president’s group, but mostly aside, ignored. A person—Phineas couldn’t tell what sex it was but the way it kept writing things down in a notebook identified it as a reporter—was talking with President Blight. Phineas moved closer to his sister.

  “What’s a reporter doing here?”

  “I guess it’s a big deal for the college.”

  “But I thought it wasn’t much of a collection.”

  “It has historical interest. Just because something’s not worth a whole lot of money doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any value, Fin. Don’t be any more of a Philistine than you can help.”

  “Even junk is a big deal, as long as it’s old junk?”

  “Jerk,” was all his sister had to say to that.

  “Oh yeah?” But he couldn’t get interested in the quarrel. “Look,” he said, “There she is.” Mrs. Batchelor, dressed in her usual seersucker suit, emerged from the big glass doors behind a man who was as tall and weedy as she was. He wore khaki slacks and a turtleneck, and managed to look like someone from Greenwich Village, or maybe Paris, France. He looked like someone who was temporarily stranded in an alien environment, or at least he hoped it was temporary. He led Mrs. Batchelor over to where President Blight was standing. They ignored Phineas’s father. The reporter hopped around taking pictures.

  Phineas didn’t like to see his father being pretty much ignored, so he was glad to notice a man with a thick red-gold beard and bright red-gold hair come up to talk to his father. His father looked glad to see the man.

  “Who is that?” Althea asked.

  “I’ll find out.” Phineas went over and hunkered down beside the nearest tanners. These were a boy and girl who lay side by side on their backs, hands clasped, faces to the sun, eyes closed. “Excuse me,” Phineas said.

  They opened their eyes lazily.

  “Do you know who the guy with the beard is?” Phineas pointed.

  The boy raised himself onto one elbow. The girl closed her eyes again. “Simard,” the boy said. “History. Or Dr. Simard, as he likes his students to call him. The Rugman.”

  “Rugman?” Phineas wondered.

  “You know what a rugman is, don’t you, kid?”

  Phineas didn’t want to admit that he didn’t. He thought—rugs lie around and get stepped on. He figured a rugman was a wimp, a wussy. He grinned. “What kind of history does he teach?”

  The girl answered. “Ancient history mostly, you know, like, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.”

  “Bo-ring,” the boy said, lying back down and closing his eyes. “Most boring lectures I ever heard. And he only does lecture courses.”

  “He publishes a lot. He’s successful,” the girl said. “Maybe you’re the boring one.”

  “Ha ha. Who’s the guy the Rugman’s talking to?”

  “My father,” Phineas said. “He’s going to be the curator of this collection.”

  “If it ever gets here,” the boy muttered.

  The girl opened her eyes. “What’s your name?”

  “Phineas. Phineas Hall.”

  “Nice to meet you, Phineas Hall. You ought to forget what we said about Dr. Simard. I thought you were a townie, otherwise . . .” she closed her eyes again and let the sun fall over her face.

  There was nothing more to say, so Phineas reported back to Althea, who didn’t even thank him for doing what she was too chicken to do herself. They waited a while more. The president kept looking at his watch. The expensive lady looked at hers, and talked at Mrs. Blight. She looked pretty cranky.

  More time passed, slowly. The students drifted away into the library, or the classroom building. The greeting party on the library steps chatted, and stood around, and looked at their watches.

  “Why did they say ten-thirty if they didn’t mean it?” Althea grumbled. “Who said ten-thirty?” She was always finding out who was to blame, and blaming them. With perfect timing, the motor of a big truck ground in low gear from behind the library. At the same time, two people walked around the sid
e of the building and up to President Blight. Phineas perked up.

  They looked like impossible twins, dressed exactly alike in blue blazers over gray flannels, with striped ties. They looked like Schwarzenegger and DeVito, except the tall twin was much older than the short twin, who looked about Phineas’s age—overdressed, if those were really tasseled loafers on his feet, seriously overdressed, but a kid like Phineas.

  “Come on,” Althea said, interrupting his thoughts. “The truck’s out behind.”

  In the parking lot, a medium-size moving truck was backed up to the cellar door, and four men waited beside it. As Phineas and Althea came around the corner, they saw their father step up to talk with the movers.

  “If Dad’s in charge—” Phineas said.

  “We’d better,” Althea agreed. They went to stand just behind their father. The rest of the greeting committee stood back, watching what would happen. The head mover passed Mr. Hall a clipboard, holding a thick wad of papers. “Ah,” Mr. Hall said, and looked down at the clipboard in his hand, as if he’d never seen one before in his life.

  “I can check the containers off,” Phineas offered. They’d moved a couple of times in his life, and he was familiar with the process. “You and Althea can show them where to put the things, and make sure they’re handled properly.” Phineas and his mother were the efficient ones. When anything needed to be done efficiently they stepped forward to take charge.

  “Isn’t is nice when you have your children to help you out?” Mrs. Batchelor’s voice asked. “Yes, nice,” a male voice answered, “to have helpful children when you need help.”

  Phineas ignored them.

  “We don’t have any,” Mrs. Batchelor said. “No,” the male voice which had to be her husband’s agreed, “we don’t.”

  Which was lucky for the kids, Phineas thought.

  “The blind are leading the blind here,” Mrs. Batchelor said.

  “Let’s go home, I’ve got better things to do than . . .” he answered.