Authors: Sarah Stewart Taylor
There were scores of insignificant pieces, scarab rings and gold hoop earrings that had been donated years ago and weren’t seen by anyone but students anymore. Sweeney remembered coming down to the museum as a graduate student and looking at some New Kingdom amulets for a paper she was writing about funerary mythology.
Now she found listings for a number of amulets in the shape of various animals and flowers that had special meanings for the ancient Egyptians: hippos and flies and vultures and lotuses and fish. She put them aside, thinking it might be interesting to include a few, but quickly forgot about them when she opened the file folder labeled, “Beaded Collar. 18th Dynasty.” On the outside was a little grid with a name and date scrawled in it. Sweeney assumed it was a record-keeping device to track everyone who had taken the piece out of storage. It appeared that the last person had been someone named Karen Philips.
There was a photograph of an absolutely magnificent piece of jewelry stapled to the inside of the folder, and Sweeney spread it out on one of the worktables to get a better look. The photo showed an intricately beaded collar made of gold and faience that would have covered the chest area of some very lucky mummy. It had falcon heads where the strings of beads gathered together on either side, and the eyes and beaks were accented with blue and amber-colored stone. The file was thick with paperwork, shipping labels and lists and receipts, and as Sweeney looked through the documents she decided
they had to represent the object’s provenance or history of ownership. Most pieces donated to the museum were accompanied by similar paperwork showing that the person who was donating it was the actual owner. From the paperwork she saw that Arthur Maloof had donated the collar in 1979. Well, well, well. The basement gallery had recently been renamed the Maloof Gallery, and she knew that Arthur Maloof had donated the gold funerary mask that was the crown jewel of Willem’s collection.
She looked at the photograph again. Why wasn’t the collar on display? It was as beautiful as anything Sweeney had seen from the period, almost as stunning as some of the collars found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, though the beadwork was finer and more delicate, stylistically different. She decided she’d ask Willem if he could have the collar brought out of storage.
The collar decided upon, Sweeney headed back up to the third-floor galleries. The next order of business was figuring out the placement of the twenty postmortem photographs in the exhibition. She’d always loved the haunting photographs of deceased loved ones that had been so important to the Victorians. Because of her desire to include them in the exhibit, she’d gotten important support from Fred Kauffman, the Hapner’s curator of photography. All of the pieces depicted the deceased, most of them dressed in their finest clothes and posed in coffins or upright in chairs. Sweeney had always been fascinated by the oddly moving postmortem photographs that had been so popular during the nineteenth century. For many Victorians, the postmortem portrait was the only one they would ever sit for. Families would spend what were then exorbitant sums in order to have a final image of a loved one.
She was starting to go through the framed photographs and daguerrotypes and tintypes stacked against one wall when Fred came into the gallery.
“Morning, Sweeney. How’s it going?”
“Very well, thanks.” He looked over her shoulder at a set of daguerrotypes of a young girl. She was dressed in what looked like a
white christening dress and propped up in a fancy wing chair. To the unpracticed eye, she might have been a pale but lively six-year-old posing for the camera. But the static, staring eyes told a different story, and Sweeney shivered a little, the way she always did when looking at postmortem photos of children. There were a lot of them around. Epidemics felled so many infants and children. She always thought of those parents, left with a single image of the child who would never grow or change.
The process of choosing the photographs that would be included in the exhibit had been a push and pull between Sweeney’s interests and Fred’s. She had tried to be conscious of his opinions and expertise, but she kept remembering a report card she’d received in the third grade: “Sweeney does not work well as part of a team,” the teacher had written. “She prefers to do group projects on her own and does not like to share credit or responsibility.”
But she liked him enough to want to make it work, and she was proud of how the exhibition had turned out. Fred was a short, well-padded guy with curly gray hair who was passionate about photography. He wore unfashionably large glasses that reminded Sweeney of a camera’s telephoto lens, and though she knew he had gotten his Ph.D. from the university in the late ’70s and was a good twenty years her senior, he had always treated Sweeney as an equal. They had gotten to know each other fairly well over the last few months, and she and Ian had been out to dinner with Fred and his wife, Lacey.
Fred was giving his opinion about where to hang a particularly haunting daguerrotype of a young girl when Willem stuck his head in to see how they were doing. Every time she saw him, Sweeney couldn’t help thinking about the first time she’d met Willem. She’d been an undergrad, doing an internship at the Hapner the spring semester of her junior year, and she’d been assigned to work with Willem. He’d been curator of ancient art then, and he’d had Sweeney doing research on an Egyptian sarcophagus that had been given to the university. She had been nervous, very much in awe of
the good-looking man who was known around campus for being very brilliant and very icy, and when he’d said, “Well, have you gotten inside yet?” she hadn’t realized he was making fun of her. She’d almost climbed into one of the stone vessels before he’d cracked a smile and let her off the hook.
She and Willem got along well now, and she knew he respected her work, but she always felt a little bit like a nineteen-year-old student around him. He was a tall, rangy man of sixty, with perfectly cut gray hair and a professorial mustache. Unless he had a meeting or event, he always wore a gray or tan cashmere sweater, jeans, and expensive running shoes.
“Sweeney, the catalog looks terrific,” he said. “I’m really pleased.” He was holding one of the paperbound catalogs, with the title of the exhibition superimposed over one of the postmortem photos. There had been a lot of talk about whether it was too macabre an image to put on the cover, but Sweeney had eventually gotten her way. It worked well, she saw now, the cover image literally confronting the viewer with the reality of death, and with the desire of the living to memorialize those who had passed, a desire that had led to a highly stylized mourning ritual. These were themes that Sweeney examined throughout the exhibition, from the funerary items from ancient Egypt to the modern-day mourning items she’d found—memorial tattoos and car decals as well as contemporary mourning jewelry.
Willem held up the catalog. “Good work. I wish I could say the same for her.” He nodded toward the hallway, and Sweeney knew he was referring to Jeanne Ortiz, a professor of photography and women’s studies who was curating an exhibit on depictions of women in American photography that would run sometime over the winter. Sweeney liked Jeanne and was interested to see the exhibit, but she knew that Willem couldn’t stand her and found the somewhat radical premise of her show specious to boot. When he’d discovered that Jeanne was planning on including a series of photographs from
Hustler
and
Penthouse
, he’d raged for days.
Sweeney and Fred exchanged a look, neither one wanting to get Willem going on Jeanne’s various transgressions.
“Well, I’m off,” Willem said. “Tad has a pile of papers for me.” Tad Moran, Willem’s assistant, was always trying to get Willem to sit down and sign papers while Willem preferred to spend his time roaming his museum.
“Before you go,” Sweeney said, jumping up and going over to her worktable to find the file containing the information about the collar, “I think I found another piece I want for the exhibition.” She held out the folder.
“Great,” Willem said, distracted. “I don’t have time, but show it to Tad. He’ll arrange everything and I’ll have a look and see what I think. Good progress. I’m very, very pleased.”
Fred stood up as Willem turned to go. “Do you have a minute, Willem? I just wanted to talk to you about the Potter Jennings exhibit. The book’s out in December and I was thinking …” Fred’s biography of the American photographer Potter Jennings was, in many senses, his life’s work, and Sweeney knew he was hoping that Willem would agree to an exhibition that would help promote it. Willem, a singularly focused Egyptologist and antiquarian, didn’t seem very excited about it. Sweeney knew that the only reason she’d been able to get Willem to be supportive of her exhibition was that she was including some of his favorite pieces of Egyptian burial items from the museum’s collection.
“Okay, walk with me,” Willem said, looking bored. “See you, Sweeney.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Fred said to Sweeney. Something came over his face suddenly.
He’s ashamed
, Sweeney thought. She watched them walk out of the gallery and along the hallway, then went back to her work.
By four o’clock, she’d figured out the placement of all of the photographs and was feeling considerably more confident that the exhibition would be ready by the date of the opening. She headed over to the museum’s administrative offices to ask Tad about the collar.
The museum staff’s offices were on the second floor of the annex, a modern glass addition that had been built onto the museum in the ’70s and provided office space for Hapner staff as well as members of the History of Art Department like Sweeney. She used her electronic passkey to cross over to the annex, knowing that the system was recording the time she passed through the doorway as well as her identity. The security was necessary, of course, but it always felt a little Big Brother to Sweeney.
Tad Moran was talking to Harriet out in the reception area, and when he saw Sweeney he gave her a shy smile and said, “Hi, there. How are things coming along?” before glancing nervously behind him. Tad always seemed scared of something, Sweeney thought. Willem probably. Tad had been working for him for years, and she’d always wondered why he hadn’t moved on to another job. Willem was brilliant but famously a tyrant to work for. Tad had been quite a gifted Egyptologist, apparently, and had chosen to be Willem’s righthand man rather than make a career of his own. She’d once asked Fred about it, and he’d said that he thought he’d heard that Tad had a sick wife at home, something like that. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, Sweeney thought, though he appeared not to have changed his haircut or clothes since he’d been in prep school. His dark brown hair was parted unfashionably on the side, and he always wore khakis and neatly pressed blue oxford cloth shirts with red and blue or yellow and blue striped ties. Though he must be in his early forties now, he looked far younger, his thin face nearly unlined and his short brown hair untouched by gray.
“Fine. Willem said to ask you about this piece. It’s in storage, I guess. But I’d love to make a last-minute addition.” She held out the file folder and added, “We know it’s not in the catalog or anything. It’s just to provide some more context,” when she saw that Tad looked a little panicked. It was very late to be making additions.
He jotted down the numbers written on the outside and said he’d arrange for it to be brought up. “What are you going to do about displaying it?”
“I think there’s room in the cabinet that’s already there.”
“Good. I don’t know if you’ve got time to build something new.”
“You definitely don’t have time to build something new,” Harriet offered. Sweeney resisted the urge to slap her. Harriet was a perfect collections manager, a hyperresponsible cataloger and record keeper. Her precision got on Sweeney’s nerves. Her bobbed gray hair hardly moved when she shook her head, and her clothes were always perfectly matched, brown shoes with brown slacks, black shoes with black slacks. Sweeney always had the feeling Harriet didn’t like her.
“Fine. I’m not going to.” Sweeney turned to go, then remembered the file. “Hey, all these old documents in here, what are they for?” Sweeney showed him the documents, the inventories and shipping labels and lists.
“Probably someone was researching the provenance,” he said.
“That’s what I thought. Does every item in the collection get the same treatment?”
“Not always,” Tad said vaguely.
But Harriet jumped in, pleased at an opportunity for didacticism. “You may have heard about museums having to search their collections for Nazi art. Well, we’re also particularly concerned with antiquities. There was a 1970 UNESCO convention that prohibited the removal of any more antiquities from their countries of origin, and then a 1983 law passed here in the states that basically said the same thing. It had been a particular problem in Egypt, where you could buy antiquities right on the street. The UNESCO treaty meant that if you wanted to accept or buy a piece, you had to be able to prove that it was part of a legitimate collection that had been assembled before 1970. That’s probably a piece that was given to the museum and someone was just checking to make sure everything was in order.”
Tad turned to go. “I’ll let you know when they can bring it up for you.”
“Thanks. Do you know why it’s not on display? It’s really beautiful. I just thought Willem might have some reason.”
“I couldn’t say,” Tad told her. “We have a lot of beautiful things that we can’t display for whatever reason.”
He was right, Sweeney reflected as she walked out into the humid afternoon air. She was just going to have to be satisfied with that.
IT WAS ALMOST SEVEN by the time Sweeney got home to the apartment on Russell Street. Walking past the newly renovated triple-decker next door, she felt a pang of nostalgia. Before a wealthy young couple with two kids had bought the old Victorian and turned it into something out of
Architectural Digest
, it had been the shabby home to a Russian couple who used to give Sweeney bottles of homemade wine at Christmastime; a Bulgarian poet who used to ask her out at three-month intervals, as though she might have forgotten she’d already said no; and an assortment of students whose lives Sweeney tracked by the romantic partners who came in and out of the building, the cars with out-of-state license plates bearing parents and grandparents at graduation time, the nods hello when they recognized Sweeney on the street or on the T.