Uneasy Relations

SEVEN

Tink-tink. Tink-tink-tink.

The tapping of Adrian Vanderwater’s fingernail on his glass had its intended effect. His fellow diners in the Top of the Rock Bar and Restaurant ceased their several conversations and turned amiably toward him.

With Adrian at the smaller of the two tables was his one-time student Corbin Hobgood, now an associate professor at Stanford and the man who had been Adrian’s assistant director on the Europa Point dig. On the three bar stools were Rowley Boyd, Audrey Godwin-Pope, and Audrey’s husband, Buck.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Adrian was saying, “I think we all owe a debt of thanks to Rowley and the Museum of Archaeology and Geology for their generosity in arranging this delightful outing and the superb lunch we’ve just enjoyed.”

Wine and water glasses were lifted in Rowley’s direction. “Hear, hear,” came from someone.

“Yeah, but you could have done a better job with the weather,” Pru said to general laughter.

“But what could I possibly have done about the weather?” Rowley asked earnestly, going off into a long, serious explanation of how, because of the conference programming, this was the only day that he could confidently assume that everyone would be free for an outing to the Rock. If it had been possible to arrange for a day with better weather, he would have done so, and so on. And on.

Gideon couldn’t help smiling. He knew Rowley from having run into him at various meetings, and he had come to know him as a charming, cheerful, almost cherubic man. But he was also just about the most literal-minded person he had ever met. Irony was totally lost on him. In its April 1997 issue, Discover magazine had run a playful article about some Neanderthal musical instruments that had supposedly been newly discovered in Germany’s Neander Valley, including a tuba (made from a mastodon tusk), a bagpipe (made from the bladder of a woolly rhinoceros), and a collection of hollowed-out bones that was dubbed a xylobone. The alleged discoverer of these instruments, “Adrian Todkopf,” went so far as to theorize that the Neanderthals’ fondness for music might well have accounted for their extinction: “Maybe their music scared away all the game. They would have produced an awful racket oompah-pahing all over the place.”

To Gideon’s knowledge, no one other than a handful of creationists took it as anything but the joke it was – except for Rowley Boyd. Shortly after the article came out, Gideon had sat, one of a half-dozen mortified fellow anthropologists, as Rowley heatedly (for him) and at length attacked the article as preposterous… because, among other things, “the true woolly rhinoceros – Coelodonta antiquitatis – has never been associated with the Neander Valley!” When it was gently explained to him that the article was an April Fool’s gag, his response was a stricken, incredulous question: “Why would anyone joke about something like that?”

“… but now,” Adrian continued, as always serenely oblivious to the prattling of others, “inasmuch as all of us who are going to take part in this evening’s festivities are here together, it might be a good time to finalize the program plans. Corbin, my boy, perhaps you’d care to address the details.” There weren’t many people who could call a Stanford professor “my boy” and get away with it, but Adrian was one of them.

“Certainly, Dr. Vanderwater,” Corbin said soberly, having cleared his throat first. The minutely but heavily written-upon four-by-six card in front of him showed that he had already given the matter considerable thought. “As our first order of business, I suggest we agree upon a moderator for the event, someone to run things and keep us to a schedule.”

“Can’t you do that, Corbin?” someone suggested.

“I suppose so… yes,” Corbin replied as guardedly as if he’d been asked to facilitate the next session of the UN Commission on Disarmament, “but I think it would be more appropriate to have someone of greater stature. Dr. Vanderwater, would you be willing to take that on?”

“Well, I don’t know about ‘running things’,” Adrian said jovially, tipping a few drops of Tullamore Dew into his coffee from his leather-covered flask, “but I’ll be glad to apply the hook if people run on too long. That is, if the others would like me to.”

This was met with generally mild acclamation and a little indifferent hand-clapping. Nobody gave much of a damn, it appeared. Except Audrey Godwin-Pope, Gideon observed. Audrey’s head snapped up and her eyes glinted with something like indignation, but only for a moment, after which she’d joined in the tepid applause.

How like the three of them, a now thoroughly relaxed Gideon thought with amusement. For fat, rosy-cheeked Adrian, affable and avuncular, the limelight was his natural habitat, and wherever he was, in whatever group, he gravitated naturally to it. The idea that anyone might object would have come as a crushing blow to him. Corbin, on the other hand, was just the man you’d want in charge of the behind-the -scenes details; the more trivial they were, the harder he’d work. And Audrey – so capable and accomplished in her own right, and yet so sensitive to slights, real or fancied, so vigilant in protecting her status against all comers.

In a very real way, Adrian’s happy association with the Europa Point dig was due to Audrey. As the Horizon Foundation’s director of field archaeology, she’d been the one who had invited him to direct the dig when Ivan Gunderson had offered the site to them. It was no secret, however, that at first she’d been far from satisfied with what she considered to be Adrian’s extravagantly expensive running of it. She had maintained close administrative oversight and they had quarreled several times over costs. Adrian had grumbled publicly about Horizon’s penny-pinching approach to staffing and equipment, but Audrey, in control of the purse strings, had won every time, which must have infuriated Adrian. As soon as the First Family was unearthed and the news hit the media, however, hostilities were suspended, the coffers were opened wide, and everything turned rosy, but Audrey, who could hold a grudge for a long time, must have been hell to work for all the same.

Thankfully, Gideon had never been in that position, but he’d seen her in action in other situations. At a conference in Boston once, when she had made the arrangements for a dinner party of eight, including Gideon, at a Thai restaurant, the hostess had called for the “Garwin Poe” party.”

“It’s Godwin,” Audrey had told her. “And Pope, not Poe.”

“Madam, that is what I said.”

“No, you said Gar win. It’s God win. Godwin-Pope.”

“Gardwin?”

“No, Godwin. G-o-d-w…”

And on and on, to the embarrassment of the dinner party and the consternation of the Thai hostess until the poor woman got it right. And this was a place Audrey had never been to before and was unlikely ever to go to again. So what was the point? But that was Audrey.

Along the same lines, a mutual acquaintance named Victoria Tarr had confided to him that, for a time, Audrey had stopped by Vicky’s house for coffee once or twice a week. Whenever Vicky went in afterward to tidy up the guest bathroom in the event that Audrey had used it, she found that the toilet paper roll had unfailingly been reversed so that the new sheets unrolled from the top, instead of the less standard way that Vicky preferred it, with the new sheets coming from the bottom.

Once again, that was Audrey. Things had to be right.

Dry-stick appearance and prickly manner notwithstanding, however, Gideon had always liked her, in small doses at any rate, partly because of the wry, pithy sense of humor that would sometimes come peeking through the arid exterior. She had a pet parakeet, for example, which she had named Onan. Why Onan? “Because,” she had replied drily, “he casts his seeds upon the ground.”

She was also a surprisingly good mimic, even of men’s voices, once she had a couple of glasses of wine inside her. “Who is this?” she would ask, looking suddenly up from her Chardonnay, and then proceed to skewer some colleague with wit and wicked accuracy. Gideon had once come in for a skewering himself. (“Greetings, sir, I am the Skeleton Wizard. If you will kindly show me your left multangulum majus, I will be glad to tell you who you are.”) Gideon had laughed as appreciatively as everyone else.

In any case, she was someone to be reckoned with; a brilliant archaeologist, a more-than-competent administrator, and the author of over a hundred wide-ranging monographs. She was also a founding member and two-time president of Sisters in Time, the feminist caucus of the International Archaeological Society. Forthright and free-spoken, she was in Gideon’s opinion not well suited to her present position with Horizon, inasmuch as an important part of it involved getting money out of people, which necessarily involved tact and diplomacy, not her strongest points. Still, she’d been there for years now and seemed to be doing fine, so apparently he was wrong. Maybe it was the moderating influence of big, solid, benevolent Buck.

Corbin Hobgood he knew from having run into him at conferences and having served with him on a student-research grant program for AAA, the American Anthropological Association. In his late thirties, with pallid, shiny skin (in the field, no matter how steamy the location, he wore a broad-brimmed hat, long sleeves, and long pants to protect his melanin-challenged complexion), he had thick, black eyebrows that met in the middle and a jaw that was always shadowed, although he often shaved twice a day. He was, by all accounts – and Gideon’s observations supported them – meticulous and hardworking, and he was reputed to be a decent field archaeologist as well. But he was a plodder, always drudging away, more at home with details and minutiae than with the provocative, exciting themes and patterns that made archaeology something alive. He was also cursed with a slow, nasal, maddeningly precise monotone that, depending on your mood at the time, could either put you to sleep or drive you up the wall.

But his positive traits – thoroughness, diligence, an exacting if narrowly focused intelligence – had worked in his favor, as had a certain tendency toward servility to authority that Gideon found unpleasant, but that some others apparently did not. He had been one of Adrian Vanderwater’s last research assistants at Cal, and it was to his loyal, reliable former student that Adrian had turned when he was in need of an assistant director for the Europa Point dig. Corbin, for his part, had been born to be an assistant director. He accepted eagerly and was with Adrian from the beginning to the end of the excavation.

It had turned out extremely well for him. His association with Gibraltar Boy and the First Family had made his name. He had written several excruciatingly detailed papers on the dig, and two of Adrian’s books on the subject listed Corbin as full coauthor (although Gideon had always assumed this was simply a generous gesture on Adrian’s part; an expression of thanks for Corbin’s probable assistance with bibliography, background research, data compilation, etc.). On the strength of all this, he was able to leave his position at Tunica State College in Mississippi, where he’d been locked into a disastrous specialty in ceramic techniques of the middle woodland horizon, and move into an assistant professorship at Stanford, where he had since acquired tenure and advanced to associate professor.

“Now then,” Corbin said, having studied his card a few moments, “as to timing. I think we ought to keep the whole thing to no more than an hour and a half, so may I suggest that we all limit ourselves to fifteen minutes each at the most? Would fifteen minutes be agreeable to everyone… yes, Rowley?”

Rowley Boyd, looking uncomfortable, coughed discreetly and stood up, nervously sweeping back a few strands of lank, straw-colored hair from his forehead. “I just want to say that, ah, we might want to rethink tonight’s event entirely. Ivan is… well, I don’t know how to put it other than to say that he’s not the man he was.”

“As are none of us,” Audrey said. “And your point is?”

“I only mean to say that, well, that he doesn’t always… he’s not always… we don’t want to put too much, shall I say, stress on him, that’s all I mean to say.”

“I don’t think there’s much fear of that.” Adrian laughed. “I’ve never known anyone to be overstressed by testimonials to his own eminence.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Rowley persisted. “I’m suggesting that we eliminate the testimonials completely. Just present the awards and call it an evening. Keep it short. I say that entirely in his own interest. ”

Rowley was closer to Gunderson than any of them, and probably more in debt to him as well. Before the Europa Point dig, the Gibraltar Museum of Archaeology and Geology had been a virtually unfunded operation with a dedicated but unpaid part-time staff of a single archaeologist (Rowley), housed above a hole-in-the-wall Arab grocery store in George’s Lane. Now it was in an impressive old naval headquarters building on Line Wall Road, with a salaried staff of eight, the finest cast of the First Family skeletons in existence, a collection of stone tools from the site, and three magnificent, life-sized dioramas of prehistoric life at Europa Point, including a torchlit, affecting scene of the burial in progress. All of this was thanks to Ivan Gunderson, only partly because of his initial excavation and subsequent donation of the dig site itself. More important, Gunderson, who now lived in Gibraltar most of the year (he had other homes in Palm Beach and Aix-en-Provence) had been extremely openhanded in his financial support of the museum. He was by far its most generous and reliable donor.

“Oh, bosh,” Audrey said. “I spoke with Ivan by phone less than two weeks ago. He was very much his old self. He was very excited about the dinner.”

But Rowley wouldn’t be put off. “He has his moments, but I assure you, if you haven’t seen him recently, you’ll find him very much changed. He spends most of his time now, er, gluing pots.”

That got everyone’s attention. It wasn’t simply the notion of the celebrated Ivan Gunderson sitting around gluing ceramic shards together all day, it was the very idea of pots. Gunderson had never had any interest in pots. The European Neanderthals and early humans to which he had devoted the last six decades of his life had never managed to make one. It had taken another 15,000 years before someone in Japan came up with the first pot.

“Gluing pots?” Adrian repeated dully. “What kind of pots?”

Rowley, twisting his hands around one another, looked miserable. “Any kind. I just get them from a ceramics shop in Ronda. I, er, break them up with a hammer and bring them to him and he glues them together. He puts them on shelves and forgets where he put them, and I take them away and… and break them again and bring them back, and he… well, he glues them together again. He never seems to notice.”

There was shocked silence. Something squeezed Gideon’s heart. “What does he imagine he’s doing?” he asked quietly.

“I tell him I take them to the museum,” Rowley said wretchedly. “Not that he asks very often.”

“Is it Alzheimer’s?”

“We don’t know. I suppose so, but he won’t see a doctor. He becomes angry if it’s brought up.”

Audrey was furious. “Rowley, for God’s sake, I wish you would have told me this before. I’d never have arranged the damned dinner. Oh, the poor man. We’ll have to cancel it. Oh, this is dreadful.”

“Aw, honey,” Buck said, “he’ll love it, you’ll see.”

For once he had no effect on her. “Oh, poor Ivan. I had no idea-”

“No, no,” Rowley interrupted, “Buck’s right. Ivan is looking forward to it tremendously. He’s been talking about it all week. It would be a terrible disappointment to him to call it off.”

Audrey rounded impatiently on him. “So then what exactly is it that you’re suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting that we have the reception and dinner as planned – moving things briskly along – and then present him with his awards.” Here he was referring to the Horizon Foundation’s V. Gordon Childe Lifetime Achievement Award in Archaeology, to be conferred by Audrey, and the annual Mons Calpe Medal from the Gibraltar Historical Association, which Rowley himself, as director of the museum, was to present.

“And then we simply call it a night and go home,” Rowley continued. “No testimonials. It’s really his awards that he’s so excited about.”

“No testimonials at all?” said Adrian bleakly.

Rowley offered an apologetic shrug. “Well, a few words with the awards, of course, but I really think it best that we don’t do any more than that. He tires easily, you see, and when that happens, his mind tends to… his memory seems to… well, I fear that an hour of testimonial after testimonial would simply tax him too much.” Another shrug, equally apologetic.

“It seems like the best thing to do,” Gideon said, his spirits low. Others offered reluctant agreement. Everyone was disappointed. And depressed.

“As you may know, we have a similar situation arising in a few days, and we’ve been struggling with what to do about that one too,” Rowley said by way of appeasement. “We’ve come to the same conclusion. No long addresses.”

As Gideon knew, a public event was set for the day after tomorrow, at which the first shovelful of dirt was to be turned at what would eventually be the Europa Point Prehistoric Site and Ivan S. Gunderson Visitor Center. Ivan, who had matched the public funding pound for pound, was supposed to make a speech and also have yet another award, the Honorary Freedom of the City of Gibraltar, bestowed on him by the territory’s minister of culture.

Audrey was not that easy to appease. “I see,” she said stiffly. “And assuming that we hold our own little dinner at all, can we be sure he’s going to remember to come?”

“Absolutely. I’ll be collecting him myself.” Rowley hesitated. “He does have good days, you know. More often than not, actually. Perhaps this will be one.”

“Let us fervently hope so,” said Audrey with a roll of her eyes.