Jennifer Haigh (23 page)

On one of these afternoons, alert and surprisingly lucid, Mamie had grasped Gwen's hand.
Dear heart, have you ever considered it? There is such a shortage of vocations. Everything happens for a reason, my love. God has a plan for each of us.

It took Gwen a moment to make sense of this. Mamie had always been religious; she took Communion daily and had sent Paulette and Martine to Sacred Heart, scandalizing the Protestant Drews. Now she hoped—had hoped for years, she said—that Gwen would consider the convent.
It may be the best life, dear, for a girl like you.

I'll think about it, Mamie
, Gwen said, because what else did you say to a failing grandmother—devout, kindly—who worried about your future?

I'm so glad
, said Mamie.
Thank you, dear.

She died a week later, of a second, massive stroke; and true to her promise, Gwen continued to think about what her grandmother had said. (For years the thought returned to her unbidden, whenever misfortune arose:
There's always the convent.
This never failed to make her laugh.)

But the conversation had another, more immediate effect. Gwen realized, suddenly and powerfully, the need for a change. That fall, without telling anyone, she applied for transfer to the University of Pittsburgh, where Andreas Swingard had been hired as the new chair of anthropology. She chose it for its large student body, where she could be perfectly anonymous, and its undemanding admissions profile: according to Barron's they'd be perfectly happy with her B average, the undistinguished board scores that had wait-listed her at Wellesley.

When the acceptance arrived in the mail, Gwen told her father first.

"Pittsburgh?" Frank paused a moment, gathering his thoughts.

Gwen could see a lecture taking shape in his head. "I have some experience with that part of the world," he said tentatively. "It's quite different from here, in many respects."

Gwen nodded, waiting. It was strange to see her father at a loss for words.

The University of Pittsburgh, while a fine school, was not Wellesley. Gwen understood that, didn't she?

"Yeah, Dad," she said."That's kind of the point."

She explained, then, about Andreas Swingard and cultural anthropology. Pitt's department was larger than Wellesley's, and more specialized. And of course, Pitt offered the PhD.

Frank brightened visibly. Gwen knew her father, knew what pleased him. Shamelessly she invoked the Steelers, the Pirates, the Penguins. She could see that she had him. There was no need to mention that Pitt, unlike Wellesley, was coed.

She had no intention of taking the veil.

That spring Frank became her hero. She would go to Pittsburgh, he promised; her mother would be convinced. Gwen stood back while her parents battled. In the end, her father prevailed.

All that summer Paulette raged.
I can't believe you're leaving
, she said again and again—alternately angry and weepy, in a way Gwen hadn't seen since the divorce.

Gwen's response was always the same:
Mother, it's time.

To her father's amazement, she requested driving lessons. Together they cruised the back roads between Lincoln and Lexington, practiced three-point turns in parking lots. Frank called it
a fascinating experiment
: most Turners had difficulty in judging space and distance, he explained, and Gwen was no exception. In spite of this she was a better student than Scott, whose lessons nearly killed Frank and had, in fact, finished off his transmission. After Scott passed his test, Frank had unloaded the old sedan, and Gwen learned to drive on his new Saab 900.

Her brother Billy, who ridiculed Frank's love of all things Swedish, called the new car
Dad's Nobel Prize.

Before she left for Pittsburgh, her father gave her another gift.

Gwen learned to scuba dive. The certification class, an early birthday present, was held twice a week in a high school swimming pool two towns over. This gift would be important later, in ways Gwen couldn't yet imagine.

The Stott Museum sat north of the Allegheny, just over the Seventh Street Bridge, in a cavernous brick building that had served as the original Stott brewery. The place had been gutted in the early 1980s, a renovation financed through the generosity of Juliet Stott, the oldmaid heir to the Stott brewing fortune. Miss Stott had poured millions into the project, imagining her museum a centerpiece of Pittsburgh's renaissance, the city's transformation from dying steel town to gleaming technology center, from Rust Belt dinosaur to American Florence, a center of intellectual and cultural life.

Or something like that.

The Stott's collection was vast but eclectic (some said
incoherent
), its acquisitions guided largely by the whim of Miss Stott—who, accompanied by her cook, maid, and driver, had tagged along on a few archaeological digs back in the 1940s. Miss Stott had a great respect for the indigenous art of Oceana. The Minoans interested her. She was fascinated by all things Egyptian. The atrium of the Stott displayed a painstakingly reconstructed Maori meeting house. Yet the collection was light on the Cretaceous period; and when it came to the Jurassic and Triassic, virtually nonexistent. "No dinosaurs," the grande dame had decreed early on, and though the staff had bent this rule with small tetrapod fossils, they had never broken it. Now eighty-nine years old, Miss Stott still visited the museum occasionally, prompting a flurry of activity among the development staff. Buffets were laid, fresh fruit and pastry from an outside bakery. (The rest of the time, the staff bought weak coffee and thawed bagels at the dank basement cafeteria.) Miss Stott, despite her generosity on certain fronts (folk arts, Egyptiana) could be tightfisted when it came to what development called
added value
and what Miss Stott called
frills.
Development had lobbied for years to get funding for an IMAX theater which, they claimed, would increase traffic by 30 percent in the first year. In the second year, it would wipe the Buhl Planetarium off the tourist map.

(That Miss Stott had no interest in effacing the Buhl, that she had, in younger days, sat on the Buhl's board of directors, came as an embarrassing surprise.)

"A movie theater?" the old lady repeated."Who wants to look at movies when you've got all this?"

The development staff exchanged glances, unsure how to explain that pottery and artifacts held little appeal for pampered suburban children who spent half their lives glued to high-resolution video screens.

The Stott was a nonprofit, it was true, but in recent years had become so nonprofitable that its very existence was in jeopardy. Attendance was off, impairing the staff's grant-writing efforts. Unlike its peers—Field in Chicago, Natural History at the Smithsonian—the Stott lacked big exhibits (e.g., dinosaurs) that grabbed headlines. And the building itself, while handsome, lacked profit-generating amenities. Its gift shop was minimal, its cafeteria in need of renovation. Development envisioned a full-service food court, with world cuisines thematically tied to the Stott's exhibits. Led by a dynamic new hire named Lois Kraft, development conducted fact-finding interviews with certain of the collections staff:
These . . . indigenous tribes of Australia. The aborigines. What do they eat?

Their diet has changed in the twentieth century
, said Gwen.
Now it's not so different from ours.

Lois Kraft looked disappointed.
What about before?

Roots and grubs
, said Gwen.

Grubs?
Lois repeated.

Worms
, she said.

Such was the tenor of Gwen's interactions with senior staff. In her own department she was, if not precisely liked, then valued and respected. After seven years in collections she was considered a veteran, an in-house authority on Stott history, policy, and procedures. With her master's degree she was overqualified for the job, yet without the intercession of Tova Windsor, Gwen wouldn't have been hired at all.

Tova—wife of her father's old friend Neil Windsor—knew the director, and had gotten her an interview for an assistant curator's job.

Face-to-face with Bennett Whitley, the suave man of forty who would be her supervisor, Gwen found herself answering in monosyllables.

He said you were too introverted
, Tova told Gwen afterward.
Honey, you need to relax a little. Learn to open up.
She made a second call to the director and landed Gwen another interview.
It's a behind-the-scenes job,
Tova explained.
Not much interaction with the public.
This time Gwen met with the human resources rep charged with hiring underlings, a bored-looking paper pusher who glanced frequently at his watch.

"This job is physically demanding," he said. "You'd be on your feet a lot, and you must be able to lift forty pounds without assistance."

Gwen tried to take offense at this remark, and found it impossible. The man scarcely looked at her, and she'd been sitting when he arrived. It was possible he hadn't even noticed her size.

"No problem," she said.

He made a mark on the open folder in front of him "We've never had a collections assistant with a Master's degree," he observed mildly.

"That's okay," said Gwen."I don't mind."

And she didn't. She enjoyed the research, the physical effort of building the exhibits."Wow, you're pretty strong," said her supervisor, Roger Day, after watching her load an unwieldy plywood frame onto a dolly. For some reason, this pleased her immensely. She loved surprising people with what she could do.

That was seven years ago. In that time her adult life had taken shape in the same gradual, quiet way the estrogen had shaped her body.(
Modestly
, as Dr. Chapin had said. She now wore, with some irony, a regular bra, in the hard-to-find size of 38AA.) She'd kept her modest Volkswagen, ten years old but still reliable; her modest grad student apartment in Oakland, an easy bus ride from the Stott. Her modest salary kept pace with inflation (though her modest inheritance from her grandfather Drew had, after a few years' investing in an unprecedented boom market, nearly tripled.)

Her modest circle of friends included her landlady, Mrs. Uncapher, and her master's thesis adviser Andreas Swingard (she had never finished the PhD). There was also Sister Felicia Pooley, a friendly nun who visited the Stott with her fifth-graders. (
Keeping my options open, Mamie
, Gwen sometimes thought.) Yet friends her own age eluded her. Her peers were busy marrying and having children, a way of life that seemed all consuming and that Gwen could not imagine for herself.

In her interests and attitudes, her daily routines, she had more in common with a sixty-year-old nun.

Her coworkers were not friends. Most were just passing through.

In seven years the staff had turned over several times. Collections assistant was an entry-level job, filled, except for Gwen, with recent college grads.

She called them, privately, the Toddlers. They arrived in early summer; in a year most would leave for graduate school. The current crop—Colin, Connor, and Meghan—seemed like teenagers. Meghan wore a tiny hoop earring in her left eyebrow; Connor's loose blue jeans pooled around his ankles and flashed the waistband of his boxer shorts. All day long they played music at a pulsating volume: rap, hip-hop, a frantic kind of dance music they called ska. The throbbing bass line gave Gwen a headache. She began wearing earplugs to work, but the noise wasn't really the problem.

The Toddlers themselves troubled her, their youth and exuberance, their unconscious high hopes for the future. They treated Gwen with quiet deference, which depressed her. She was too young to feel so old.

Finally she'd complained to her supervisor.
I can't work this way
.

I need my own space.
But instead of moving the Toddlers, Roger had installed Gwen in the only available office, a windowless corner of the basement. Reasonable, of course: there were three Toddlers, and only one Gwen. They'll be gone in six months, she reminded herself, and settled in to her dank solitary confinement. Then Roger crammed a second desk into her office and hired Heidi Kozak.

Gwen disliked her on sight.

"Gwen's the expert," said Roger, by way of introduction. "She's been here forever. She'll show you the ropes."

Heidi smiled broadly, showing large teeth. Her smile was oddly familiar.
Where do I know her from?
Gwen wondered. She was a tall, bosomy woman with long hair the color of broom straw. Her fingernails extended half an inch past her fingertips.

"Welcome," Gwen said, relieved. The intrusion would be temporary. With those fingernails, Heidi Kozak wouldn't last.

But Heidi did last. She appeared for work each morning freshly bathed, it seemed, in floral cologne. Like her fragrance, she was impossible to ignore. Her first day on the job, she told Gwen her life story.

She was a local girl, a steelworker's daughter, raised in a South Side row house with five brothers and one bathroom.
(Eight assholes, one toilet
, she told Gwen.) She'd dropped out of Pitt to marry her high school sweetheart, and had kept busy as a volunteer tour guide at the Stott. Recently divorced
(don't even ask)
, she now needed a paycheck.