The Map of Lost Memories (4 page)

As Irene stared into the gallery, the brittle frame of her defiance collapsed, and she wept. She had wanted to be the one in charge of this museum for so long, but this was about more than just her job. The Brooke Museum was her home. She had grown up in this small, narrow room. Catching her breath and wiping her eyes with her sleeve, she entered it now and approached the first of the ten sandstone pedestals that lined the walls. Each held a single bronze
apsara
, and she picked up the celestial goddess in front of her, the way she had when she was a girl, cradling it in her arms. Tenderly, she traced the flowered crown that rose high above the statue’s distant, enigmatic expression.

Such magical days, those days that went as far back as Irene’s memory would take her, when her mother had bundled up food as if they were going on a great expedition and brought her into this hall for picnic dinners with her father. After he began his rounds, her mother would take out her sketchbooks and let Irene choose a statue from one of the pedestals. Side by side they would draw, the honeycomb pattern of a decorative collar, the teardrop shape of an eye, the willowy, outstretched arms of an
apsara
captured mid-dance for the pleasure of a king.

Then her mother died, and each night her father spread out a bed of quilts beneath the
apsaras
’ passive gaze. It was more than a decade since Irene had slept on the museum’s floor, but she could still see the statues above her, swaying in the low caramel light that glazed the air from an oil lamp in the corner. She remembered the longing she had felt as she waited during those days and weeks and months after the funeral for her mother to return. How many times had she closed her eyes, desperate to hear
mon petit chou
, “my little cabbage,” whispered into her ear as she fell asleep?

The only thing from those days that Irene had forgotten was the futility of her longing, the inevitable realization that she would never hear those words again. But she recognized the same hopeless feeling as it washed over her now, as she stood amid the dancing goddesses in a world she had thought would one day belong to her.

Irene walked slowly away from the museum, her impractical, thin-soled shoes unable to find traction on the frozen slopes of the campus paths. Her face tingled in the icy air, and she pulled the lapels of her father’s peacoat over her mouth. Classes were done for the day, and winter’s somber dark encased the early evening hour. With her eyes bloodshot from crying so hard, she did not want to run into anyone she knew, and she was thankful for the piercing cold, which had pushed everyone indoors, where wood fires burned, releasing a smoldering promise of comfort into the night.

As she passed the buildings on the far north side of the campus, a row of white houses—half a dozen tiny two-bedroom cottages provided for the university’s watchmen and their families—came into view. Irene’s
house was in the middle, and she had almost gotten used to it being the only one in the row without a porch light on or signs of life stirring from its chimney. Once performed by her father to welcome her home from work before he left for the museum, these small rituals, like so many others she had taken for granted, had perished with him. But tonight, from the distance, she saw a glow in the front window and, as she got closer, a haze of smoke above the roof.

A membrane of frost slicked the metal doorknob, and she had to wrap her hand in her sleeve to turn the handle. Opening the door, she was not surprised to see Henry Simms, her father’s oldest and closest friend, standing at the fireplace. He didn’t say anything as she came in and took off her coat. Irene saw that his hair had been trimmed and smoothed into place, and she guessed that he had spent the afternoon with his barber at the Hotel Washington. He must have come to celebrate what they had both assumed would be good news, and she felt queasy at the thought of what she had to tell him, especially after he had gone to such effort. How deceptively healthy he had made himself appear, even though, at sixty-eight, he had been warring with cancer for almost a year.

She saw a decanter of wine on the coffee table. Beside it were two glasses, and the sight of them arranged so neatly emphasized the room’s disarray, a reminder of the full extent of her loss.

Once lined with books, the shelves were bare, and there were dark patches of wallpaper where her mother’s watercolors had hung. Everything Irene owned—plates, glasses, clothing,
National Geographic
magazines, phonograph records, and her father’s brass sextant—was piled on the floor. Empty crates lay about; they had been sent over by the university, which had also out of sympathy allowed Irene to stay through the holidays, even though the museum’s new night watchman had been hired within a week of her father’s death.

Irene had been born in Manila, but by her first birthday her parents had moved into this house. It was cramped and smelled of damp northwest forests all year round, but as with the museum, she had considered it hers. She knew every groan in its floorboards, every crack in its porcelain sinks. Now, she had to leave it. But whenever she tried to pack, she found herself standing helpless in the middle of the room, holding one of her
father’s cowboy novels or the toaster that made two slices at a time, given to him by friends one Christmas because he liked gadgets and they were always able to find something new from the Sears catalog to amuse him.

Taking in her surroundings, Irene’s eyes became damp once again. She told Mr. Simms, “I didn’t get the job.”

“I know.” His expression was solemn. “Lundstrom told me this morning.”

“Why didn’t you warn me?”

“You needed to hear it unarmed.”

“Why?”

“To know how you truly feel about it.”

Irene sat down on the sofa, in the wavering light of the fireplace. This made no sense. Then again, nothing about today made sense. “What did you say when he told you? Did you tell him that you wouldn’t let him do this?”

“Now that I’m dying, my influence with the museum is diminishing.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

Physically, Mr. Simms was not an imposing man, but he was nonetheless one to whom others felt compelled to give their attention. When he spoke, there was a quiet confidence in his voice that conveyed his power. Despite his sickness, that quality remained, and he sounded easily capable of following through on any threat as he said, “My dear, if you want me to make your curatorship a new condition of the Brooke’s endowment, I will. I’ll call Lundstrom right now and tell him I’ll withdraw my money tomorrow, and my collections too, if he doesn’t give you the job.”

Scratching her finger back and forth across a worn patch on the sofa’s tufted velvet arm, Irene thought this over. “Why didn’t you make that threat this morning?”

Rather than answer this question, Mr. Simms half-filled the two wineglasses and handed one to her. “Drink this.”

She took a sip.

“More,” he instructed. “You need it.”

She did as she was told, and as the warmth flowed into her limbs, she felt something coming loose deep inside her.
“A great help!”
she declared. “That’s what Mr. Lundstrom called me. As if I’ve been nothing more
than an able assistant all these years.” The insult was despicable, and she turned away, staring beyond the crystals of frozen white mist that varnished the window.

“Do you intend to stay on?” Mr. Simms asked.

Her outburst in the boardroom flashed back to her, and she could see the flame of her words engulfing the bridge she had painstakingly built over the past ten years. The trustees’ shock would surely turn to wrath, if it hadn’t already. “I can’t.” As she said this, she glimpsed her reflection, the swelling around her eyes blurred against the dark pane. Between her father’s death and the loss of her house and job, she felt as if she were vanishing. “What am I going to do now?” she asked.

“Just as we planned when you learned that you were losing the house. You will come and live with me.” Mr. Simms took a drink of his wine before adding, “Now that I have your undivided attention, we can finish cataloging my collection. This will give us the opportunity to complete it before I’m gone.”

Henry Simms was a formidable collector. Irene had assisted with his purchase of the Villeroy Collection when it came up for sale in Paris, and she’d overseen his acquisition of a portion of first-century Roman silver that was recovered from the ashes of Vesuvius. She had full access to his collections, those he loaned out to museums or displayed at private events, and the ones he kept shuttered away from curators, historians, and the rest of his fellow connoisseurs. She alone knew that he had Titian’s
Venus with a Mirror
, which had disappeared in the art world skirmish that followed the murder of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas. It was logical that Irene would be the one to prepare his final reckoning, but she was aware that by making this suggestion now, when she needed it most, Mr. Simms was also doing what he did best—saving her.

The first time he rescued Irene, she was not even born. Her father had been a sailor and curio trader in the Orient when her mother, eight months pregnant, was kidnapped in Manila and held for ransom. Irene remembered how Mr. Simms and her father had talked about it, nine years later, during the weeks after her mother’s death. Sitting together nightly at the museum, playing chess on a Ming dynasty
xiangqi
set in the Chinese hall, the old friends would relive the kidnapping—
that damn book … never seen
so much blood
—as if Irene weren’t there. Always, the conversation began with the mysterious book, the reason her mother had been kidnapped, and ended with the two men Mr. Simms had killed and the gunshot wound that had nearly taken Irene’s mother’s life.

Then after her mother died, Mr. Simms stepped in again, distracting Irene from her pain by cultivating her fledgling interest in the Khmer. Alongside plates of gingersnaps made by his cook, he left maps out for her in his kitchen, clever drawings that led her on hunts through the three levels of his Italian Renaissance manor on the top of Queen Anne Hill. With one of these maps clutched tightly in hand, she would follow its trails through greenhouses cared for by a man poached from Kew Gardens or secret passageways enveloped in Pannemaker tapestries, to find the bronze incense holder or glazed stone lime pot that Mr. Simms had hidden for her on any given day—so she could start a collection of Khmer relics of her very own.

Years later, when the war ended and soldiers returned from Europe to take back their old jobs as elevator operators and traffic policemen, Mr. Simms recommended that Professor Howard keep Irene on at the museum. But by that point, the professor had discovered her value. He was pleased by the way she tended the exhibition halls as if each were its own temple. He took pride as the museum’s reputation spread around the globe. Curators, gallery owners, and archaeologists started contacting him, asking for information and advice, and Irene let him be the one to give it—certain of her future, certain of her strategy, and certain that the days of needing Mr. Simms’s help were long in the past.

In her anxiety, Irene had picked a hole through the fabric of the sofa, and the stuffing popped out, wiry and rough. She told Mr. Simms, “It’s not enough.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Managing your collection.” Beneath her exhaustion, a new train of thought was taking over. “It’s not enough to give me the upper hand.”

“Are you talking about revenge?”

“I simply want what I have earned. I enjoy tending your collection, you know that, but the Brooke’s collection—I’ve done everything I could to make the museum a showcase for Khmer art. That’s the one thing I
really love. I actually thought that once I took over, I could turn the Brooke into the foremost museum dedicated to the Khmer. Everything I’ve worked for is there. I can’t imagine my life without it, and I have no idea how to prove to them how wrong they are about me.”

Crouching, Mr. Simms picked up her father’s electric percolator from among a pile of kitchenware. He examined the tarnished metal, as if in the dull surface he saw back to all of the conversations it had fueled. When he spoke, he had a strange smile on his face. “If there was ever a time to believe in providence, this is it.”

Smoothing the sofa’s torn fabric, Irene asked, “What do you mean?”

“The box your father left me. Irene, did you look inside it before you gave it to me?”

A few weeks earlier, when she emptied her father’s room, Irene had found a pine box the size of a small travel trunk, bound in twine that was tied with her father’s distinctive hitch knots. The label pasted on top bore Mr. Simms’s name. “No, of course not.”

Mr. Simms wrapped the frayed electrical cord around the percolator and placed the appliance with his hat and overcoat on the sideboard, as if he intended to keep it. Shuffling in the pocket of his coat, he removed a small book. He held it out to Irene. “This was in the box. Have you seen it before?”

The slim, calfskin-bound volume was soft from handling. She turned it over, examining the front and back covers before opening it to a faded inscription.

“No,” she said. “What is it?” When Mr. Simms didn’t reply, she thumbed through the onionskin pages to one marked with a grosgrain ribbon. Its margins were lined with sketches of stone spires sprouting through feathered palms. The handwriting was firm and masculine.