“Well,” Mr. Hall answered, giving Althea a look, “it’s not an easy time for marriages. I try to consider it a challenge.”
“Sorry,” Althea muttered.
“Do you really think we’ve been that hard on them?” Ken asked. He wasn’t asking Althea, Phineas noticed. “Seriously, do you?”
Luckily, at that point they heard footsteps and voices in the hall, and the clacking sound of high-heeled shoes, so they all turned to greet whoever was arriving.
It was Mrs. Blight, the president’s wife, once again all dressed up for the occasion, and once again in the company of the expensively dressed lady. Mrs. Blight introduced the lady as “Mrs. Prynn, who is, as you’ve probably heard, one of the most involved members of our board of governors.” Mrs. Prynn wasn’t interested in any of them, except for Mr. Hall.
“You’ve been given quite a responsibility,” she said, as if she doubted his ability to carry it out, especially now that she’d seen him up close.
“Quite an honor,” Mr. Hall agreed, agreeably.
Mrs. Prynn looked around the room, not pleased with what she saw. Phineas could see why she might not be. Room 015 was pretty much like a bunker, like the kind of place where Hitler had spent his last days—cement block walls, four bare bulbs hanging down from the ceiling, the metal boxes that were the climate control tucked back into a corner, humming.
“Dear Olivia would never have done it this way,” Mrs. Prynn announced, with pursed lips, to Mrs. Blight, who made agreeing murmurs. “Olivia McPhail and I were lifelong friends, Mr. Hall. Lifelong. She would never have assigned any collection she’d gathered to a . . . cellar.”
Mrs. Blight murmured excuses.
“Or an entirely inexperienced curator.”
Mrs. Blight murmured apologies.
“But isn’t that just the way poor Felix always did things?” Mrs. Prynn asked, suddenly cheerful. “He could never admit that he didn’t have Olivia’s taste, or judgment.”
“What judgment?” a man inquired from the doorway, a man of about Mrs. Prynn’s age, a fringe of white hair around his head, a portly man in a three-piece pinstriped suit, with a walking stick in his hands, its silver handle carved into a duck’s head. “What taste?”
“I might have known you’d be here.” Mrs. Prynn’s lips were pursed again.
Phineas felt like he was the audience at a tennis match, with his head turning from one to the other of the two.
“You aren’t thinking of Olivia’s sentimental collection of third-rate watercolors, are you?” the man asked.
Mrs. Prynn sniffed.
“When she could have bought Braque, or Klimt, or Chagall? No, you must be thinking of her investment in the swamplands of northern Florida, another example of her judgment. And business acumen.” The man leaned on his walking stick, folding his hands over the duck’s head, and—having quelled Mrs. Prynn—asked Mrs. Blight, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to the lucky man?”
“Lucky—? Oh, you mean Mr. Hall. Why yes, of course. Sam, this is Calvin Fletcher, another board member.”
“Pleased to meet you, Hall, and congratulations. Felix always liked to put his bets on wild cards. You’ve lucked out on this hand.”
“I certainly feel lucky,” Phineas’s father said.
“Dr. Simard of the History Department, Mr. Fletcher,” Ken said, stepping up and holding out his hand. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’ve been doing what I can to help Sam out down here, using my special knowledge.”
Mr. Fletcher shook the hand. “Pleasure. Well. Well? Shall we take a look at this mummy before any more of the afternoon is lost? I’m a busy man. By the way, I approve of the security measures you’ve taken, Hall, and you’ve chosen a good climate control system. I’m on the board of the Museum of Fine Arts so I know something about how to handle antiquities.” This he said with a glance at Mrs. Prynn, to be sure she was still quelled.
“I do have an afternoon engagement,” she answered, as if he had asked. “I have a cocktail party in Kennebunk to get ready for.” She smiled a mysterious, hinting smile.
Mr. Hall took a crowbar and started prying at the lid of the crate. The nails creaked, pulling free. “We’re going to take the whole box apart,” he said, “and packing might fall around—I can’t predict.” Ken took up another crowbar, to help. The visitors drew back, Mr. Fletcher at the opposite end of the table from Mrs. Prynn, and Mrs. Blight as close to the exact middle point as she could get. As the wooden top creaked free, a voice came out of the corridor—“Wait! Stop!”
O’Meara ran into the room, her dark hair flapping against her cheeks, her sandles flapping against the floor. “I’m sorry. I got lost—this is a real rabbit warren down here.” Her camera was up and she was taking pictures. “Did I miss anything?” She came up to the table and looked into the box. “It’s gone! There’s nothing but straw here!” She looked slowly from one of them to the other, a complete circle. “Did someone steal it?” she whispered, “Or—”
Mr. Hall cleared his throat, and set the lid down on the floor. “Miss O’Meara—”
“No Miss, no Ms., I told you. Just O’Meara. I don’t want to run into any more of that sexist garbage than I have to. What’s wrong here? What’s happened?”
“We were just taking the top off the mummy’s crate,” Mr. Hall continued, patiently. “Like everything else in the collection, the mummy is packed in straw. O’Meara,” he explained to the two board members, “is covering this event for the Post.”
“Then I can get pictures of everything, every step.” That cheered O’Meara up. She got her camera ready.
Phineas didn’t have any part to play in all of this, but he was having a pretty good time. He always enjoyed it when grown-ups acted like jerks, and a lot of the grownups present were acting like serious jerks. He stood back and enjoyed himself.
Ken and Mr. Hall set to work on the sides of the crate with their crowbars. O’Meara wanted to know why they were doing that, and they explained that they didn’t want to risk damaging the mummy and that they didn’t know what kind of condition it was in. She took out her notebook and wrote that down. She said she thought mummies were mummified, and pretty tough, practically petrified after all this time. Ken explained that this was a Roman era mummy, when the funerary arts had degenerated. She wrote that down. When was the Roman era? she wondered. Both men were busy with crowbars, so Althea told her first to fourth centuries, A.D., roughly, and O’Meara wrote that down. Why was it called the Roman era when it was in Egypt? she wondered.
Wooden slats were piling up on the floor. Clumps of dry straw were falling down from the table. With the long sides off, the crate looked almost like a bed, with headboard and footboard, and a long mound of straw between them. O’Meara took some pictures. The two men pried at the ends to work them free of the crate’s bottom. More straw fell down, but everyone came close anyway.
“Althea? Phineas?” their father asked. “Help with the straw, will you please?—but carefully. We don’t know exactly what we’ll find.”
Phineas pulled gently at clumps of straw, up near where the head would be, he hoped. He made himself concentrate on the straw and the mounded shape within it, to push away his consciousness of the other people in the room and be alone with his first glimpse of the mummy. With its arms and chest wrapped as if with bandages, and its head, and its eyes—
At last the mummy lay uncovered.
Phineas and the others gathered around the table, like guests at a Thanksgiving dinner, and nobody said a word. Phineas was so busy looking that he didn’t have any words to speak.
The mummy lay on the table like a giant cocoon, wrapped around and around with strips of what appeared to be cloth—brown in places, creamy white in places—that had been wound into diamond-shaped designs all up and down the body.
The hairs at the back of Phineas’s neck prickled.
The mummy was hundreds of years dead and it seemed to be breathing out hundreds of years of death into the tomblike
room. It seemed old in a way none of the other artifacts on the shelves were, maybe because it had once been human like everybody in the room, but maybe because its face looked out at them with big, sad eyes.
Not its mummy face. A portrait. That was worse than a dried-up dead face, because the portrait looked like a real person, who had a real life, and a name, just like each one of them had.
Phineas couldn’t take his eyes off it. It was horrible, and wonderful. The shape under the wrappings couldn’t be anything but human—the rounded head, broader shoulders and chest, narrowing down to hips and then knees and then ankles, with what had to be feet sticking straight up at the end. He would have liked it better without the portrait, with the face just diamond-shaped wrappings. Without the portrait it was a mummy. But the portrait told you it was a person, somebody particular.
O’Meara broke the silence. “It’s a girl.”
Althea had tears in her eyes. Phineas didn’t blame her, looking down the length of the mummy to where his sister stood at her feet. He almost felt like crying himself, looking at the girl’s face in the portrait, her dark hair curled along her forehead under a wreath of flowers she wore like a crown, her sad brown eyes that looked right at him. Her skin looked like real skin, and her mouth was pink, and she had a little dimple in her right cheek, as if she was trying not to laugh. A heavy gold necklace with dark stones embedded in it circled her neck, and the dress she wore, of which all that showed was the top, was purple. He wondered what her name was, and why she had died when she was still so young, and how her eyes could look so sad even while her mouth looked like it was about to laugh.
CHAPTER 6
For a minute, Phineas forgot who he was.
The only sound was the hum of machinery. Beyond the open door, a maze of corridors and rooms and closets seemed to echo silence, almost as if Phineas were an archaeologist standing in the burial room of an actual tomb. Or even, for that minute, as if he were an ancient Egyptian, bidding a last farewell to the dead girl before he turned around to wind his way up, through twisting passages, to the clear desert air.
Phineas looked across the table, across the mummy’s face, to his father. Mr. Hall stared down at the wrapped figure, and at the portrait face that was held in place by wrappings, and then back down the length of the mummy to its feet, where Althea stood staring.
Phineas guessed he finally knew how his father felt. He’d never understood before how anything so old and long gone as the languages and books his father studied, and taught, and talked about, could be important. He wasn’t sure he exactly understood that now, but he felt as if this ancient mummy stood for something truer than . . . all the money he could imagine winning in the lottery, truer than Donald Trump, truer even than the threat of nuclear war and nuclear accidents, AIDS, or the waste crisis. If he could understand what the mummy had to say to him—only she would speak in Egyptian, wouldn’t she, or Latin, so even if she could speak he wouldn’t be able to understand her. But if he could—
Everybody else was feeling about the same, Phineas thought, Althea wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her sweatshirt and Ken peering down at the wrappings the way dogs looked at bowls of food in TV advertisements. O’Meara was looking from the mummy’s face to his father’s face, as if Phineas’s father had somehow gotten all the credit and responsibility for the mummy, at least in her mind. Mr. Fletcher was nodding his head, with a little I-told-you-so smile on his mouth for Mrs. Prynn, who was pursing her lips at the mummy, trying to look unimpressed. Mrs. Blight stood between them, looking from each of their faces to the mummy’s face, as if one of the three could tell her how she should react.
“Well,” Mr. Hall said, and he laughed out loud. “Wow,” he said. “Oh—wow.”
That broke the stunned silence.
“Can I take pictures?” O’Meara asked, and had her camera to her eye, clicking and forwarding film, before anyone could answer. She photographed the mummy first, from above and from the sides, and then the people standing around, and then she went out to the hallway to photograph the room from the outside. While she took pictures she asked questions. Mr. Hall and Ken took turns answering them, and the other visitors looked over the artifacts on the shelves and had questions of their own. Neither Phineas nor Althea had anything to say, nor did they have any desire to move from where they stood at the head and foot of the mummy.
“How old was she?” O’Meara asked.
“She doesn’t look anything over fifteen,” Mr. Hall said.
“Although the mummy herself might be much older,” Ken added. “Often, portraits were painted years before they were needed. Probably hung for decoration in homes, waiting until the subject died.
“That’s not a very pleasant idea,” Mrs. Prynn observed. “It wouldn’t be my idea of attractive interior decor.”
“And that sheet it’s lying on, is that an original Egyptian sheet?” O’Meara asked.
Now that she mentioned it, Phineas could see that the mummy lay on a single sheet that had been brought up over her shoulders and part of her feet, and sides.
“Yes. A kind of partial shroud,” Ken said.
“Well,” Mrs. Prynn announced, “Felix certainly didn’t take very good care of it. Which is no surprise to those of us who knew him. Look at those stains—and that looks like graffiti on the wrappings.”
“Sometimes sealing resins soak through the wrappings,” Mr. Hall told her. “Remember, this was done at least fifteen hundred years ago, and at a time when the funerary arts were in decline. You wouldn’t expect mint condition.”
“It looks like my dining room ceiling when the bathroom pipes gave out,” Mrs. Prynn insisted. “It looks to me as if Felix got himself a pig in a poke.”
“Not likely,” Mr. Fletcher said. He harrumphed over by the shelves. “The old man wasn’t the fool you women liked to make him out to be.”
“This is no fake,” Ken announced.
“You’re sure of that?” O’Meara asked.
“As a scholar, I have to wait for the results of certain tests to be absolutely sure. You should know that. But”—Ken put his hand up so she would let him finish what he was saying—“I’ve read Petrie, the great nineteenth century Egyptologist, you know, who was the first to do carefully documented exhumations of the Roman era cemeteries—and this tallies with his descriptions.”
“Is she wearing that necklace?” O’Meara asked. “It looks like gold, but what are those stones?”
“Probably uncut emeralds.” Ken didn’t even look up from the mummy to answer. “Emeralds were common, at the time. But at that time, it wasn’t usual to bury jewels, or anything else, with the dead.”
“You can’t say for sure though, can you?” O’Meara asked, writing away.
“I can’t, without an X ray,” Ken agreed.
Phineas had gotten over the first shock of the mummy and was happily watching what everyone else got up to. Sometimes, he thought he’d like to have the talent to be a cartoonist. If adults knew what they looked and sounded like. . . .
“Ken,” Althea said, “are those hieroglyphs?”
Ken moved to stand beside her and bend down over the feet.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“But those,” she pointed, “look like Greek. A kappa, isn’t it?”
Ken bent closer. He took his time, being careful. “No.”
“But, here, look. Isn’t that kappa, lambda, epsilon—”
Ken interrupted her. “I don’t see anything remotely resembling those letters.”
“But—”
“No,” he said again. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’ve studied hieroglyphs,” he reminded her. “These look demotic—later corruptions I’d guess—but characteristic. I know you’ve got younger eyes, I know you’d like to make a discovery, but I’m afraid you’re mistaking demotic hieroglyphs of a language in decline for something they aren’t. That’s how it looks to my experienced eyes. I can see what’s probably ankh, mew, smir—that’s courtier. A
courtier living by the water? I’d have to study it. I can’t pretend to sightread hieroglyphs, but everyone knows what ankh looks like.”
Althea pressed her lips together.
“Why would anyone write on mummy wrappings?” Mr. Fletcher asked. “Seems pointless—unless, did they write prayers on them? Or magic spells?” Mrs. Prynn turned around from her examination of the funeral wreath to sniff. “There were spells to keep intruders out,” Mr. Fletcher said to her, “to keep the mummy safe. The spirit’s home was in the mummy, and if the mummy was destroyed the spirit was homeless. Anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of Egyptology knows that.”
Mrs. Prynn sniffed again and turned her back to him. Mr. Fletcher humphed.
“Actually, it wasn’t that they wrote on the wrappings,” Mr. Hall answered him. “Sometimes they did, although the usual practice was to wrap a copy of prayers, or the book of the dead, in with the body. But most often, at this time, instead of traditional linen, they used strips of papyrus for the wrappings—rather like we use newspaper to make papier-mâché. Think of it as ancient recycling.”
Phineas grinned.
“Especially,” Mr. Hall continued, “after Christianity began to spread. Some of the pagan writers were acceptable to Christians—Plato for example, and Virgil—which is why so many of their works are available to us. But the others, who were a majority—like your Sappho, Althea, she’s a good example, because the early Christians used her as an example of everything sensual and sinful in the classical world. In fact, the bishop of Constantinople ordered all of Sappho’s writings burned. Sappho wasn’t the only pagan they disapproved of either, not by a long shot. There were dozens of writers, some of them we’ll never see even a line of their work. However,” he concluded his little lecture, “frequently the destruction of undesirable books took the form of ripping the papyruses into strips, for use as mummy wrappings.”
“I didn’t know you’d done work in history, as well as languages,” Ken observed.
“Oh I didn’t, or, not much. I’ve been reading up on Egypt. You don’t imagine that I’m the only person who doesn’t know I’m underqualified for this position, do you? But I intend to do as good a job as I can.”