Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (14 page)

Amidst the sounds of waves and a distant foghorn, the narrative voice advised that “In order not to be set hopelessly adrift in this seemingly endless sea of complex and interrelating beliefs, this exhibition has limited its discussion to five areas of inquiry: Pins and Needles; Shoes and Stockings; Body Parts and Secretions; Thunder and Lightning; Insects and Other Living Things.”

Thus we were once again tending into quintessentially Jurassic territory, having launched out on manifestly solid ground only to find ourselves … well, not really having any idea where the hell we were finding ourselves. The Voice was now explaining the title of the show, which drew on funeral practices dating back to Hellenistic Greece, when bees were understood to be “the muse's bird” and hence needed to be apprised of all major family events. There were elaborate rituals involving youngsters and beehives; and “there are a great many other practices that are observed concerning bees,” the Voice continued. “Among those who know them well, bees are understood to be quiet and sober beings that disapprove of lying, cheating, and menstruous women. Bees do not thrive in a quarrelsome family, dislike bad language, and should never be bought or sold.” And so on.

Finally, with the chorus of Pergolesi's
Stabat Mater
swelling in the background, the Voice concluded: “Like the bees, from which this exhibition draws its name, we are individuals, yet we are surely, like the bees, a group, and as a group we have, over the millennia, built ourselves a hive, our home. We would be foolish, to say the least, to turn our backs on this carefully and beautifully
constructed home, especially now, in these uncertain and unsettling times.”

Uncertain and unsettling, it occurred to me, were two good and apt words. I put down the earphones and quietly began drifting among the half-finished display cases. (Wilson, over in the corner at his workbench, completely involved in his labors, seemed to have become entirely oblivious of my presence.)

One apparently finished case contained a vial of an exquisite amber liquid alongside a curious little brush, like a toothbrush, only with metal bristles. Its caption read:

Another vitrine featured a wax face into whose mouth the bill of a stuffed duck's head protruded:

The duck's breath cure
(
illustration credit 2.7
)

David subsequently explained to me how he wasn't quite happy with that exhibit yet. The wax face looked too old and he was intending to cast his daughter DanRae's face in its stead—he just hadn't gotten around to doing it yet. (Didn't there use to be a surrealist comedy troupe named The Duck's Breath Mystery Theater? I decided not to ask.)

There was a large, ominously elegant-looking pair of scissors (actually a pair of old-fashioned sheep shears, I subsequently learned), mounted upright, and David was apparently trying to rig a mechanism inside the display's chassis that would allow the blades to open and close in a gently lulling motion. The caption read:

And there were a good couple dozen other displays as well, each lovingly and meticulously rendered: uncertain and unsettling, and very funny—and then not.

As I was getting set to leave, I noticed a deliriously browned single-portion pie mounted alongside a burnt piece of toast. There were two dead mice on the toast.
MOUSE
CURES
read the pieces' joint caption, although each
of the dishes had its own legend as well. The caption under the first read: “Mouse Pie, when eaten with regularity, serves as a remedy for children who stammer.” The label under the burnt toast read: “Bed wetting or general incontinence of urine can be controlled by eating mice on toast, fur and all.”

Mice on toast and mouse pie

After which, there followed an italicized citation:

Right then and there I made myself a promise; and I've kept it: I have not gone to the library to track down that Lupton reference. There has to be an end to all this.

No, really.

I
T
WAS
GETTING
LATE
—in fact, this time I was late for a plane—so I bid David a quick goodbye, and let myself out through a passageway leading from the workroom into the museum proper. The space immediately on the other side of the workroom wall, which would soon be housing “Tell the Bees,” was in the meantime filled with a wonderful traveling exhibition on loan from the Mütter
Museum. Now, I'd heard of the Mütter Museum, and I knew that it actually does exist. It was founded in 1858 when Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter presented his unique (and unquestionably bizarre) teaching collection of anatomical and pathological curiosa to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, where it resides (having been steadily augmented) to this day. It's the sort of place where you can find the skeleton of a giant (7′6″) looming over the skeleton of a dwarf (3′6″), or the skeleton (skeletons?) of Siamese twins, or wax casts of all manner of malignancies, or the actual tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland's jaw during a
secret operation in 1893.
²¹

The Mütter's show at the Jurassic featured an array of arcane and vaguely threatening antique surgical instruments, the plaster cast of a trephined skull from Peru, various gallstones, some astonishing photographs of sliced heads and haunting (haunted) bell jars, wax models of syphilitic tongues … There was a heartrendingly luminous display, across a flat expanse of black velvet, lovingly lit, of the 206 minute incipient bones extracted from a miscarried three-month fetus, each bone separated out and gleaming: the rib cage like a delicate array of filleted fishbones, the fingertips like so many flakes of stray dandruff.

Disarticulated skeleton of a three-month-old fetus from the Mütter Museum collection, Philadelphia
(
illustration credit 2.8
)

Dr. Chevalier Jackson's drawer of inhaled objects

There was a teeming little chest of drawers, compiled by a punctilious physician named Chevalier Jackson during the early decades of this century, and containing, across a splay of neatly divided interior compartments, highlights from the collection of miscellaneous foreign bodies the good doctor had managed to extract over the years from the windpipes and digestive tracts of various choking victims (jacks, rings, chains, crucifixes, marbles, doll arms, a toy battleship), complete with documentation as to the age, identity, and fate of the various inhalers.

Everything was actual, everything was real, including …

It was getting very late now, and, really, I
had
to be going, but just as I was heading out the door I happened to gaze into one final display case, over to the side, and there, tellingly spotlit, lay the actual solitary remains of
a real human horn
, an incurled protrusion (“20 cm long and between 1 and 3 cm in diameter”) sawed off the skull of an unnamed seventy-year-old woman in the middle of the last century by one S. Beaus, M.D.

So, go figure.
²²

A woman's horn (nineteenth century) from the Mütter Museum collection, Philadelphia