The Murder in the Museum of Man (19 page)

As you may well imagine, the representatives of the media were as egregious as I predicted they would be. They swarmed all over the museum, at one point invading my office, harassing me with klieg lights and cameras and pointless questions until I insisted they leave. That awful woman Amanda Feeney asked me if I had ever noticed what Mr. Morin brought with him to work for lunch. They pestered everyone. Even poor Doreen, blowing pink bubbles of gum and snapping them with her teeth, was corralled by a reporter with a microphone and asked, I’m sure, all sorts of loaded questions. I came across one camera crew set up in front of Herman in Neanderthal Hall. For a moment I thought the reporter was interviewing the encased model, but he was apparently using the exhibit as a “backdrop,” as he delivered a soliloquy to the listening camera. I heard something about “reverting to the days when our savage ancestors tore each other limb from limb …” Cornelius Chard, of course, was in his glory. “Cannibalism,” I heard him telling one admiring woman reporter, “is nothing less than dining out at the very tip-top of the food chain.” The
Bugle
got the story last night and ran a typically tasteless headline, something about an obese museum official arrested as the gourmet cannibal.

I must also report that Dean Oliver Scrabbe did not help matters in the least the way he pandered to the media, agreeing to
answer, and elaborating on, their most poisonous, insinuating questions. “This kind of behavior,” he said to one network reporter, “is precisely why it is imperative for the university to take immediate charge of all aspects of the museum.” He was playing politics, of course, and I’m afraid that my attempts to control the damage only made things worse.

For all that, things seemed eerily normal once the news dogs left. There were a few summer visitors slowly circulating up and down through the exhibits. A docent from the Public Affairs Office was quietly explaining
metapes
(those marvelous Mesoamerican gristmills carved with zoomorphic ornamentation from solid pieces of volcanic rock) to a touring group from Japan. Marge was in her office dealing with the financial mess. And as I write I can hear the chimps yapping as usual in their exercise yard below. Speaking of which, I was the recipient today of another of those communications from the Genetics Lab. To judge from it, there may be a new public relations fiasco in the making over there, something I shudder to think about. I am entering it into this log, if only to keep a record.

I have been prepared all along to dismiss these communications as a kind of practical joke, but just this past week, Marge Littlefield informed me that for the last two fiscal years the Primate Pavilion has received large sums in its fees-for-service income account, mostly paid by checks from the Onoyoko Institute in the Genetics Lab. Now it is true that Damon Drex has received considerable support from the Ruddy and Phyllis Stein Foundation for his “research.” But perhaps income from the Genetics Lab really is the source of funding for the wholesale renovation of the pavilion.

Not, I suppose, that it makes any difference regarding a possible connection to the Fessing case. But it does give Scrabbe and
the powers that be at Wainscott one more pretext for seizing the museum. What I should do now is ask Dr. Commer to convene a meeting of the Board of Governors to deal with the situation. Whatever else Malachy Morin might have been, he was at least nominally in charge. Indeed, what I fear now is that I will, by default, have to decide and do more things myself, which means, I will not have the time to devote to the history of the MOM, which in any event appears to be coming to a bad end. I suppose I could always limit the time span, say, to just after World War II. But that might give the impression that the founding of the Primate Pavilion ushered in some bright new future when, in fact, it signaled, I think, the beginning of the decline. Well, maybe things will turn out better after this current mess is cleared up. Maybe that could be the happy ending. Happy ending. Another curious term when you think that every single one of us dies.

I have just survived a “literary” party of the kind I never want to experience again. The humiliation of it all! With that young man Snyders and some of the others nearly collapsing with laughter while Damon Drex extricated me from a situation at once too ludicrous, too frightening, and too embarrassing to describe. I can still feel the paws of the beast where it grabbed my person, and my hands, quite literally, are still shaking as I sit here trying to type while down below the noise and now, with this hot weather, the stink rises and …

Perhaps I should start at the beginning. Late this afternoon, more on a whim than anything else, I joined Esther and Margery in making an appearance at Damon Drex’s “meet the authors”
travesty in Pan House. I think we were all a little giddy with relief that Dean Fessing’s murderer had been arrested, even if it turned out to be Malachy Morin. We naturally took the reception as a kind of joke, and had to suppress our tittering as we went through the gleaming new quarters and out into the exercise yard. I was surprised to see gathered there quite a few of the “regulars,” the social core of the greater Wainscott community. Drinks in hand, they were chatting among themselves and mingling with the chimps. I waved to Thad Pilty and Corny Chard and said hello to Izzy and Lotte Landes, who reminded me (as though I needed it) that I was going to spend the weekend of the Fourth with them at their cottage on Mercy Island. A regular bar had been set up for the guests, and I ordered a gin and tonic while chatting to Pilty and Chard about how much relief we all felt that the Fessing case had been resolved even though it turned out in the end to be one of our own. Corny Chard allowed how the situation represented a unique research opportunity and how he had already petitioned the prison authorities for permission to hold a seminar with Malachy Morin for a few select graduate students.

The whole thing was, as you can imagine, quite surreal. Drex and Snyders were off to one side with what apparently were some of their “stars.” A kind of receiving line was in effect, with some of the guests more or less lined up to meet the authors through their keepers. The venue certainly added to the fantastical scene. The gracious old courtyard, now enclosed on its open side by a high Cyclone fence topped with barbed wire, was lit with spotlights that threw everything into garish glare and black shadow. Thumpingly imbecilic music blasted from loudspeakers. And one had to step carefully around the liberal amounts of chimp scat of varying degrees of freshness, the sources of which were shuffling and scampering around with cans of beer in their paws from which they were drinking with great lip-smacking relish.
One of them, its can empty, tried to take my drink and made a horrible hissing sound when I refused to give it to him.

I hung on to my drink and my
sangfroid
, and a few minutes later I was “shaking” the long, hirsute appendages of Damon Drex’s pongid literati. Is this safe? I asked. “No problem,” said the young assistant, whom I thought I had just seen go back into the building. He seemed to nod his teeth at me. “Dr. Drex is absolute master of the chimps. If there is a Nietzsche among the group he has no doubt identified Damon as the ‘Superchimp.’ ” I must say the beasts bobbed and bowed around the man, Damon Drex, that is, as though he were the Messiah. F. Snyders did not try to hide his amusement as he made the introductions. It was he who gave the animals their whimsical
noms de plume
or, in this case,
noms d’ordinateur
. I met Royd, short for Hemmingroyd, “a pithy storyteller, a boozer, and a bully”; Impostor, “who likes to follow Royd around and imitate him”; Kupide, “our most accomplished stylist”; Ninny, “from the Paris Zoo, a femme fatale”; El Doc, “somewhat overrated, but not by himself”; Barleycorn, “who writes and writes and writes”; JH, “who writes and cooks with equal facility”; and Aych Aych, “a real character, ha, ha, with a fondness for
fruit vert.”
I mentioned to Izzy, who had wandered over, that I found it a bit unnerving to hear the authors described so frankly to their faces. At the few literary gatherings I have attended, I said, most people had had the politeness to disparage others behind their backs. Izzy was astounded, I think, beyond his usual bons mots.

At times I thought the chimps did understand what was being said. They do have the most soulful expressions, and I could not look at them for very long without recalling Damon Drex’s awful remark about God being a chimpanzee. Still, the animals gazed back with such an unnervingly predatory relish that I thought, given the opportunity, they would tear us apart and eat us.

The actual interspecies literary chat was minimal, although
Mr. Drex did carry on some convincing ape talk using various hoots and pants rendered with indrawn breath. (There’s been some rather vicious gossip over the years about Drex and some of his female charges, but really, it’s too squalid for retailing here except to say that when Eva, one of the—)
[On the advice of counsel this portion of the Log has been excised — Ed. note]

I have no idea what Mr. Drex and his simian friends were saying to each other, and no translation was offered. He appeared to be in the middle of a regular conversation with Royd, the “alpha male” of the troop, when his assistant, who seemed to be in several places at once, directed my attention to quite a different scene in another corner of the yard. There, in the full glare of a spotlight, Kupide was showing his slender, pink, and quite erect member to Ninny, who, judging from her inflamed hindquarters, was in heat. In any event, she seemed quite impressed by the display and turned her back end to the gallant Kupide. This exhibition of troglodyte passion had drawn an appreciative audience of young and old alike, the yaps and squeals of which, reaching Royd, sent him into an instant tantrum. His hair stood right on end, he threw down his can of beer, discharged a foul stream of excrement, and went in a determined rush at the mating lovers followed by ’Postor. But too late. Chimp lovemaking, apparently, takes only seconds, and by the time Royd got there, Ninny was already crying out her pleasure.

“Happens all the time,” said the assistant. “But we have to make allowances for writers and artists, for the creative geniuses among us who live their urgent, passionate lives without the restraint of ordinary mortals.” Then he laughed.

Poor Royd, I felt sorry for him right then, the way with nearly human dejection he slouched back toward us, picked up his empty can, and, with affecting pathos, begged for another beer. All the while Aych Aych was displaying his turgid apehood to and taking liberties with a young unattended female. What horrifies
me in retrospect was the way, after a while, that it all seemed perfectly normal, as though the apes were a species of humans and the humans a species of apes.

With a mock earnestness lost on Damon Drex, his assistant told us the group was much like most creative writing workshops, in terms of social interaction and the quality of literary effort. However, the pongs, as he called them, were much less critical of one another’s work than is usually the case in undergraduate or graduate writing programs. “But surely,” Izzy Landes said, “the animals can’t read.” “That’s true,” he replied, “but you would be surprised at how many people who want to write these days can’t read either.”