The Vandemark Mummy (2 page)

“I'll be fine, Dad,” Althea said. “You don't have to find things for me to do. I'm doing fine.”

He didn't look like he believed her.

“We're not the ones being chased down the library steps by angry women,” she pointed out. “What
did
you do to get her so angry?”

“Nothing. Cross my heart. I didn't do anything.”

“Maybe she doesn't like short guys with frizzy hair,” Phineas suggested.

“She didn't seem to like you any better,” his father argued.

“Maybe she doesn't like men,” Althea suggested.

“She's married,” Mr. Hall argued.

“Maybe she doesn't like her husband,” Phineas continued—and didn't need the look Althea shot at him to be sorry.

“Then maybe her husband wanted the job you got,” Althea said.

“He can't want my job, he works for the art museum.”

“Were you assigned her office?” Phineas asked. “Or her parking place? Did you use her coffee mug?”

“No, no, and no,” his father said. “No, it's got to be a mistake of some kind. It makes no sense. She was angry.”

“And at you, personally,” Althea added.

“When I find out what it was, I'll exercise my famous boyish charm,” Mr. Hall said, and they all started laughing. “But I hope it gets cleared up quickly,” he said. “This is the first job in fifteen years that I'm not overqualified
for, and I plan to enjoy it, and I'd hate to find that I've made an enemy of Lucille Batchelor without even knowing how.”

“I dunno,” Phineas said, “it might be fun. Exciting. She looked like a piece of spaghetti, didn't she?”

Althea grinned.

“A piece of angry spaghetti,” Phineas said.

Both of them were grinning at him now, just waiting.

“A piece of angry, whole wheat, health food spaghetti,” he said. He was enjoying himself. They were all three enjoying themselves. They were fine, just the three of them.

Home, at Vandemark College, was one of five little houses that lined up tidily along a gravel roadway. Each house sat on a square of grass. Each square of grass was enclosed by a knee-high picket fence. When Vandemark College was the Vandemark Estate, servants lived in these houses. Now the college used them for faculty housing. Because the Halls' house in Westchester hadn't sold yet, they were in no position to buy a house in Portland. Because Mr. Hall was on a one-year contract, and it might not be renewed, he was glad to rent one of the small gable-roofed houses. Even if the rooms were dark and the furniture massive, the house was a five-minute walk from the center of campus, a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from downtown.

That afternoon when they arrived home, Althea pulled the mail out of the letter box, and they all went into the kitchen. Althea sorted the mail. Phineas didn't pay any attention. He never got letters. He didn't write any. If he moved back to Westchester, they'd pick up where they left off, he figured. If he never moved back, what did they have to say to him, Bobby and Phil, Davy, Jason K. and Jason P. and Jason A., Josh, Gerry, Mark? He didn't have anything to say to them. You couldn't exactly play D&D or tennis in a letter, or go for a skate, or do anything worth doing in a letter.

“Letter for you, Fin,” Althea said. “From Mom.”

The letter was addressed to Phineas Ciamburri-Hall with a return address from Anne-Marie Ciamburri-Hall in Portland, Oregon. She knew he was going to drop the double-barreled name up here; he'd told her. It was a pain, with people never knowing how to pronounce Ciamburri, and having to spell it out all the time. She was ignoring that, he guessed. He held the letter in his hand, without opening it.

“One for me too, and a thick one for you, Dad,” Althea said.

They all three stood looking at their envelopes. “I never got a letter from your mother before,” Mr. Hall said. His was a brown manila envelope, addressed to Sam Hall, Vandemark College, Portland, Maine. “It
is
thick,” he said. He opened it carefully. “Pictures,” he said, and unfolded the piece of paper, to read.

Althea and Phineas read theirs. Nobody sat down. “Hey kiddo,” Phineas's mother wrote, “how are things in Vacationland? Things here are rainy and I start work
tomorrow.” She told him about the apartment, and the swimming pool and tennis courts that came with it, about what movies were playing and where she'd seen kids and what they were doing. It wasn't a very long letter. At the end she said, “I admit it, I almost miss the mess, and the smell of old feet. You wouldn't consider sending me one of your previously owned socks, would you? I could hang it up in the spare bedroom.” Phineas grinned. He'd been wondering what he'd say when he wrote her back, because he was going to have to write her back, and he thought it would be pretty funny to really send her a sock. First he'd wear it for a few days, until it got seriously smelly.

“She sounds okay,” Althea reported. “Lots of museums and concerts, libraries.”

“She gets cable TV with the apartment,” Phineas reported.

They looked at their father. He spread the photographs around the table, so they could all look at them. “It looks like a pretty typical apartment complex, don't you think? Not swinging singles.”

“How can you tell that from pictures?” Phineas asked.

“The parking lot. I figure swinging singles have smaller, newer cars. There's a nice mix of station wagons here, and big old sedans.”

“I don't think Mom will like it,” Phineas said. “It looks like a giant motel.”

“She likes the job,” Althea reminded them.

“The job's why she's there,” Mr. Hall reminded them. “A job she couldn't turn down. It's the congressman who worries
me.”

“Really?” Phineas asked.

“Yeah, really. He's much too good-looking, and much too unmarried, and your mother is—a heart-stopper.”

Phineas didn't have any idea what to say about that. Luckily, Althea did. She not only looked like their father, she thought like him too. Phineas looked and thought like his mother, mostly.

“Once Mom makes up her mind, nothing can change her,” Althea said. “You know that, Dad.”

“We all made the decision together,” Mr. Hall said.

“You and Phineas and I did.” Althea wasn't going to budge. “She'd already made hers, no matter what we did.”

“Be fair, Althea. Your mother is the one who earns big money.”

“That's the argument she used, and it's not honest,” Althea said. “This job here, teaching college, is your chance. It's the first time you asked us to move to your job. Equality doesn't mean that women get to drag their husbands around after them, the way men used to do women, all their working lives. Does it? It means everyone has a chance.”

“It was just bad timing,” Mr. Hall said. “Your mother isn't any happier about it than we are.”

“I didn't say I was unhappy,” Althea pointed out.

“No,” her father agreed, “You didn't. You just suddenly decided that you couldn't live if you didn't know enough Greek to translate Sappho, and buried your face in books. A psychologist would go to town on that, Althea.”

Althea shrugged. Phineas didn't know why they were
bringing it all up again, since the decision had been made weeks ago, and there was nothing more to be argued about.

“You and Mom don't have exactly the same set of values, you know,” Althea said.

“I know,” Mr. Hall agreed.

“If you ask me,” Phineas said, “which I notice nobody is, it's pretty dumb to break up over a BMW. It wasn't even our BMW. What does it matter to us if the Tunneys give their kid a BMW for a sixteenth-birthday present?”

“We haven't broken up,” his father said.

It turned out, that was what Phineas really wanted to hear. Between the fancy apartment—fireplace in the living room, tennis courts and swimming pool—and the congressman, and not having all the irritation of taking care of them—all the nagging and all the cooking—he wasn't too sure what his mother might do next.

“We're not even legally separated,” his father said.

“One of the letters for you looks like a lawyer,” Althea said then.

“What do you mean?”

“Lawyer-type names, with P.A. after it. Mailed in Portland,” she warned her father.

He picked the envelope out. It was large, creamy colored, and didn't have the yellow sticker the post office in Westchester put on to forward mail.

“Maine,” Mr. Hall said, “Portland, Maine, see? But why would a lawyer here be writing to me?”

“Looking for business?” Phineas suggested. “Lawyers are allowed to advertise you know.”

His father had opened the letter, and was reading
four short, typewritten lines, holding in his other hand another envelope, even creamier and more expensive-looking than the first. He opened that one too, and read it without even looking up at his children, who stood watching. When he had finished the second page, he was puzzled but amused.

“The effect preceded the cause,” he announced. He didn't expect them to understand. “All is explained,” he added, which explained nothing to Phineas. He spread the letter on the table for Phineas and Althea to read.

“To Whom It May Concern,” the letter began.

It is my eighty-eighth birthday. That need not concern you, just as who you are does not concern me. That I am eighty-eight does concern me. It is time to begin thinking of my demise. When you read this, that event will have occurred.

I have bequeathed to Vandemark College my Egyptian Collection. Do not get your hopes up, young man, and I hope you are scholar enough to restrain the board of governors in what will inevitably be their shortsighted enthusiasm. The Egyptian Collection contains no treasures. It is, however, of historical interest as well as—I flatter my youthful judgment—having some use to scholarship.

You come into the business because I have decided to establish a curatorial chair for the Collection. I have further decided to award that position to the newest appointee in the Department of Classical Languages. This choice may well be idealistic of me, or willful, but I have my reasons. Experience tells me that a scholar may be more clear-sighted in a field other than his own. It tells me
,
further, that a Classical linguist will possess qualities the Collection will benefit from—a lack of what the world calls ambition (by which word the world usually speaks of greed), and a patient meticulousness of mind. I can only hope that you have these characteristics.

The bequest includes a gift of money sufficient to build a small wing on to the present library. On no account is this building endowment, or the Egyptian Collection, to become an adjunct of McPhail Hall.

The curatorial salary is presently set at the sum of ten thousand dollars per annum, to be adjusted annually for cost of living. You will more than earn it, in the first years. After that, it will perhaps smack of the sinecure. I don't know what your moral structure is, young man, but one should never scorn a sinecure out of hand. It may even, once the real work is done, enable scholarship. I have always admired scholarship.

The Collection, as you will find, is a hodgepodge. There will be some pleasant surprises for you, or so I like to think. The mummy, which is its centerpiece, has a certain wistful appeal, being from the Roman era. I have neglected the Collection, distracted as I became by other interests. I hope it will find a better home at Vandemark College than the cellars where it has spent its time with me. I hope it will find a better curator in you than it had in me. Should any article of the bequest be unfulfilled, then the Collection will return to the disposal of my son and grandson, as joint executors of the entire estate which I will have left behind me, when I have left this world.

I have, I trust, been quite clear. The president will also
have been informed of the bequest, and its conditions. I have, I think, foreseen all contingencies, to the best of human abilities.

Yours from the brink of mortality
,

Felix K. C. Vandemark II

“Will I be able to help out?” Althea asked. “Do you notice? He assumes you have to be a man.”

Phineas noticed what his sister always thought of first—sexist stuff.

“I don't know if I'm qualified,” Mr. Hall said.

And that was what his father always thought of first.

“I don't think this guy cared about qualifications,” Phineas pointed out.

“It'll give me something to write your mom about.”

“She'll be jealous,” Phineas said.

“There's nothing to be jealous of,” Mr. Hall said. “It's just something a scholar would enjoy.”

“Well I can see why Mrs. Batchelor is angry at you,” Phineas said. “Who would want a mummy around permanently? Dirty, probably smelly, it's just an old dead body.”