Still As Death (12 page)

“Do I look all right?” she demanded of them as they walked up, talking seriously. Seeing their dark heads bent toward each other made her even more nervous. What were they talking about? Toby had suggested that they meet for a late lunch and walk over to the museum together, and Ian had been pleased that Toby had thought of it.

“We don’t see Toby enough,” he’d said to Sweeney after the phone call. “We should have him over for dinner.”

In fact, Toby had been away a lot. He’d sold his finally finished novel—a semiautobiographical tale about his relationship with his Italian poet father—and had used his advance to travel for most of the past year. He’d been in Europe for three months and then gone hiking in Ecuador and Peru for another four months, and the upshot was that Sweeney felt she hadn’t seen much of him lately. He was her best friend. He always would be. But watching his familiar lanky form coming toward her, she realized that she felt a little abandoned.

“Yes, you look lovely,” Ian said, kissing her and looking a little perplexed. “Of course you do.”

Toby, who had known Sweeney for far longer and therefore knew exactly the right thing to say, kissed her on the cheek, stood back to look at her long black taffeta skirt, sleeveless white linen blouse, and layers of jet beads, and said, “You look perfect. Exactly what you should wear to an exhibit titled ‘Still as Death.’ ”

“Okay. Ready?” Ian said, taking her hand.

She looked up at him. “You don’t think the outfit’s too … strange?”

He hesitated, and the hesitation was all she needed to be racked with another wave of self-doubt. Ian didn’t always approve of some of her stranger vintage ensembles. “No. You’re fine. You’re beautiful.” He kissed her forehead and smiled at her.

“Okay, okay, we should probably go in.” But she still felt off, as though she’d forgotten something. She looked up at the banners announcing the exhibition and allowed herself a little moment of pure happiness. She had been planning this exhibition for almost three years. In some ways it was what all of her work up to this point had been about. And then, just as suddenly as the pleasure had washed over her, she felt an equally strong wave of emptiness. It was done. What now?

Olga was just inside the door, taking coats and pointing the attendees toward the hors d’oeuvres. She looked more attractive than Sweeney had ever seen her, her short gray hair slightly wavy, as though she’d had it set, and her sturdy body dressed in black pants
and a crisp white blouse that was open to show off her elegant neck and pale throat. Sweeney had never seen her in anything other than the dumpy uniform she wore for cleaning, and it struck her for the first time that Olga must have been pretty once.

Sweeney greeted her, and Olga nodded back with a look of disdain, or perhaps preoccupation. There was a line of people backing up behind them, so she just took Ian and Toby’s arms and led them toward the long table covered with cheese and crackers and the attractive but pedestrian hors d’oeuvres provided by the university dining services.

The three of them got drinks—Sweeney was too nervous to eat—and found Fred and Lacey Kauffman chatting with Harriet and some of Sweeney’s colleagues from the History of Art Department.

Harriet gave Sweeney a tight smile and said, “Very nice, Sweeney. Very interesting,” patting her perfect hair as if to reassure herself it was still there.

“Thanks, Harriet.” Sweeney had never seen her in a social setting and wasn’t surprised to find that she was just as ill at ease as she was at work. Harriet excused herself, and Sweeney could feel everyone breathe a small sigh of relief.

“Why do I always have the feeling that Harriet’s mad at me?” Lacey asked them. Sweeney had always liked Lacey, a tall, pretty woman from Quebec who made high-end hand-knitted sweaters that sold in boutiques all over Cambridge and Boston. They were beautiful and Sweeney had thought about buying one once, then changed her mind when she saw that they cost upward of $500.

“Hello, Madame Curator,” Fred said with one of his big smiles, though when Sweeney leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, she caught him glance over her shoulder in a preoccupied way. He was wearing a chocolate brown linen blazer and trousers, and the monochromatic brown made him look even more ursine than he usually did, though his height and round belly made him look like a teddy bear rather than a grizzly. His curly gray hair was desperately in need of a cut.

Sweeney introduced him to Toby and hugged Lacey, who immediately engaged Ian in conversation about his work. She had a way of making people feel fascinating that Sweeney appreciated. You always left an encounter with Lacey Kauffman feeling just a little bit better about yourself than you had before it. Sweeney caught Fred watching his wife, his face unguarded and supremely relaxed for a moment before reverting to the tenseness Sweeney had noticed. Still talking to Ian, Lacey reached out and took Fred’s hand.

Sweeney looked around. The place wasn’t packed, but the turnout was certainly better than she’d hoped for. And it was still early. She saw a number of people from the university, as well as some members of the public she didn’t recognize. And she was touched to see that some of her students had come.

“It turned out so well,” Fred was saying. “You should be very proud of it, Sweeney. Really.”

Tad, looking uncharacteristically dapper in a red shirt, waved from across the room. Sweeney watched him go back to his conversation with an elderly man in a rumpled sports coat and, oddly, since it hadn’t rained in weeks, galoshes. There was something about him that said money, though, and she pointed him out to Fred. “Who’s that talking to Tad?”

He looked. “Oh, that’s Cyrus Hutchinson. Guy who gave the canopic chest?”

Willem had shown her his prize that morning, and she knew how excited he was about displaying it. “Tad’s on chaperone duty?”

“I guess so. Willem’s trying to keep Hutchinson happy. Obviously. He’s so delighted. He’s been taking people down to the basement to show it off all night.”

Ian and Toby were chatting with Lacey, so Sweeney turned to Fred and said in a low voice, “Lacey’s so great. Ian was saying that he hoped she’d be here. I think she could make anyone feel good about himself.”

She’d said it lightly, but Fred gazed at Lacey and said, “Yeah.
She’s amazing that way. I swear to God, the first time I met her it was like … like I’d all of a sudden become a rock star. You know? I felt like crap that night, and when I walked out of that dinner party with her phone number in my pocket, I felt like I could take over the world.” He watched his wife as she laughed at something Toby said and, seeing the look on his face, Sweeney felt as voyeuristic as if she’d walked in on them in bed.

She waited a beat and then said, “You were here in 1979–1980, right?”

“Yeah. In graduate school,” he said in a guarded way. “Why do you ask?”

“Do you remember an intern named Karen Philips?”

He nodded. “She was a nice kid. We all felt bad about what happened to her.”

“You mean that she killed herself?”

A student waitress passed carrying a tray of meatballs skewered with toothpicks. Fred took one, popped it in his mouth, and turned his attention back to Sweeney. “Yeah. She was here during the robbery and she was tied up and left in one of the study rooms. I always figured she was so traumatized about it that it affected her, made her depressed.”

“Did she seem depressed?” Fred looked guarded again, and Sweeney caught him scanning the room.
He’s looking for someone
, she told herself. “Fred?”

“I didn’t really know her, Sweeney. I can’t say whether she was depressed or not. She just seemed kind of, I don’t know. Off. Not her usually chipper self.”

There was something slightly ironic in his tone, and Sweeney knew he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Still, she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Did she strike you as honest?”

“Honest? How should I know? Why are you asking me about her?”

“Sorry. I just heard something about her and … Forget it.”

He studied her for a minute. “Okay. I have to go. There’s someone I need to talk to over there. But I’ll see you later, okay? Congrats.”

Ian and Lacey went off to look at the show, leaving Sweeney and Toby alone.

“So how do you feel?” he asked her. “The show seems to be a great success.

“Honestly? Sick to my stomach. Outside, I got … I don’t know so sad and empty all of a sudden.”

“Well, there’s always a letdown after something like this. You’ve been working on this for almost a year now. Besides, now you have to figure out what you’re going to do. About work, about a place to live. About Ian.” He hesitated, then said, “By the way, he told me about London while we were walking over here. What are you going to do?”

“I have absolutely no idea.” She watched a couple—students, she decided—kissing and whispering at the other end of the gallery as they looked at a cabinet of canopic jars. She wondered if they knew that the jars had been used to hold human viscera.

“You’re going to go, aren’t you?” He was watching the couple too.

“What do you mean? You make it sound like I should.”

“Sweeney. I don’t want you to go. You know that. But I don’t know, it just seems like you guys have gotten pretty serious. I just assumed you’d want to …”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said as Willem approached them, steering a young guy dressed in black by the arm.

“Sweeney,” he said, ignoring Toby completely. “I’d like you to meet David Milken, from
The New York Times
. He was hoping you could show him around a bit.” Milken looked more like a painter than a critic, right down to his black turtleneck and black cowboy boots.

“I’d love to,” she said, feeling nervousness overtake her for a moment. This was probably the guy who would be writing about the exhibition.

“David, Sweeney is one of our brilliant young things. I’ve been so excited about ‘Still as Death.’ ” The thing about Willem, Sweeney thought as she nodded good-bye to Toby and led David Milken toward
the first section, was that he seemed self-involved sometimes but was actually always looking out for the best interests of the museum. If your own interests coincided with his, you were in luck. He had been so involved in the planning and execution of the exhibition—necessarily since the Egyptian burial items were his specialty and not Sweeney’s—but he seemed willing to give Sweeney all the credit.

“These are canopic jars,” she explained to Milken, showing him a few examples from the twenty-second dynasty. “The jars were made of alabaster and they held the organs that the deceased would need in the afterlife.”

“Yuck.” But he was smiling. “What do they represent?” He looked through the glass at the little jars, round bottomed and topped by carved heads.

“Funerary deities. The four sons of Horus.” She pointed to each one. “The one that looks like a baboon is Hapy. He guarded the lungs. Then there’s Imsety, the only human-headed one. He’s the liver. The jackal, Duamutef, is the stomach, and the falcon, Qe-behsenuef, is the intestines.”

“Who’s got the brains?”

“Oh, they didn’t think we needed our brains in the afterlife.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It’s interesting to compare that sentiment with the Christian belief in the ascendancy of the soul.”

“That’s true. We Judeo-Christians tend to want to leave the guts behind. We only care about the brain, don’t we?” He ran a hand over one of the smooth stone sarcophagi. “Did all the Egyptian kings get buried the way King Tut did? Like Russian dolls?”

“The body had to be preserved,” Sweeney said. “And the layers and layers of wrapping and protection did a good job. I’ve always thought there was an interesting dichotomy about that, though. They were really very earthy, preserving the organs and all that. But how was the guy supposed to get out of the twenty coffins they put him in?”

Milken laughed and Sweeney took him into the next room to show him the photographs of gravestones. “See how they evolve,” she said. “We move from these very Puritan images of skeletons, very corporeal, really, and then on to the much more spiritual ones.” She pointed to photographs of round-faced souls’ heads. “The appearance of these sort of coinicides with new theological ideas of heaven and the afterlife.”

“It’s all about the afterlife, isn’t it?” Milken asked, wandering around the crowded gallery, looking at the photographs.

“To a certain extent, though I’m even more interested in looking at those words from a different perspective. ‘Afterlife. Life after.’ What happens to those who have to carry on with life after someone has died. That’s who this art is for. That’s why we have gravestones and canopic jars and postmortem photography.”

Milken wanted to know how she had gotten interested in memorial photography, and Sweeney talked about how she’d seen Civil War battlefield photos of the dead that fascinated her and how she’d been astonished the first time she’d seen a postmortem photograph of a young child, dressed in finery and propped up in her bed.

She stood back and let him take in the photographs. Sweeney had discovered that people needed to look at them in silence in order to really see them. When he’d finished, Sweeney showed him around the final gallery.

“These are amazing,” he said, looking at the collection of memorial decals Sweeney had included. “I didn’t even know about these.”

“I love them. I think it’s really interesting that we kind of decorate our personal space with our ideas about death. Buddhist households have shrines, of course, and the Puritans saw their macabre gravestone carvings every day as they moved about their communities. We Americans live in our cars, so what do we do but make them into rolling memorials.”

She told him good-bye and went to find Ian and Toby, who were talking with Lacey and Jeanne. For the occasion, Jeanne had adorned herself in a vaguely Greco-Roman dress that draped extravagantly
around her chest in swirls of blue silk. Her hair was coiled on either side of her head, completing the look.

“… that he doesn’t understand how women are discriminated against at this university,” she was saying. “It’s all just bullshit. I really see it as my role to educate them.”