Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Phoebe
Maybe it’s more correct to say I encounter the spirit of Foster Martin.
I don’t even realize that’s what it is at first. What I see is an envelope on the counter with my name written across it in black ink, bold downstrokes on both of the P s in “Hopper.”
When I open it, I find a typed letter inside, and a quick glance at the bottom reveals Foster Martin’s signature. It’s dated from six months ago. I lean against the kitchen counter to read it.
Dear Phoebe,
If you are reading this, it means I have shuffled off my mortal coil and you have accepted the position of inaugural director of the first museum in Serendipity Springs. One could not happen without the other, and rest assured, I am happy about both. I am no doubt waltzing to heavenly harps with my beloved Bonnie as you read this.
I wanted to be the first—or close to it—to welcome you to your new home and job. After our many lunch talks over the last three years, I’m convinced you are the perfect person with whom to entrust my family’s legacy. I admire the work you have done in your time at the Sutton. I respect your passion and deep knowledge of curation and your sense for the relatedness of people, places, and things. I feel confident that in both temperament and experience, you are the person best suited to bring my vision for this museum to life. Of course, patiently listening to me blather about it these last few years doesn’t hurt.
I know working at the Sutton has always been your dream, so I wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to say yes to my job offer. I hoped seeing to your housing might sweeten the deal, and with many of our conversations in mind, I chose The Serendipity for you.
It is a fine old building, and it enjoys something of a colorful reputation. Since you love a good mystery, I’ll leave you to discover what is fact and what is fiction. I have been friends with its owner, Galentine Valencia, since she bought it many years ago, and I have my own theories about the stories that surround it. Due to my friendship with Galentine, once I decided upon you as the museum’s first director, she permitted me to lease this apartment either until you declined the job or until a year from your first day of occupancy. Beyond that, you can renew the lease, of course, or move elsewhere should your circumstances change.
I am delighted that you’ve taken the job. You’ll need to immerse yourself in the history and culture of Serendipity Springs, of course, but you know that. I hope and believe that you will feel the sense of kinship to it that you have developed for Boston and that my beloved city will come to feel like home.
There aren’t words to express my profound gratitude that you’ve accepted the challenge of opening this museum. I have done everything I can to ease the process, from settling it with an endowment large enough to keep it running for several generations to handpicking trustees who possess a bewildering amount of common sense for a museum board.
I have pulled every string I can, but I am sure that serendipity will carry you the rest of the way.
Yours in memory,
Foster P. Martin
I feel the sting of sentimental tears as I read through Foster’s letter. We’d become friends when he approached me after a board meeting for the Sutton, impressed with a presentation I’d been asked to give highlighting the exhibition we’d be mounting the following quarter. He’d asked if I was “ amenable” to having lunch with him in the museum’s café so that he might ask me more about it.
So began an unlikely friendship. Elderly Foster, with his kindly eyes and lively curiosity, and me, the youngest full-time curator on staff, always gesticulating wildly over our garden salads as I described whatever fascinating artifact I’d been assigned to research.
Guilt feathers through my stomach as I wonder if Foster would still feel grateful if he’d been around when the Sutton board had voted against my promotion. Would he have agreed? Would he have still offered me this job?
I want to believe he would, but I’ll never know the answer. What I do know for sure is that I will give it everything I have while I’m here so that if he was still alive, he’d have no cause to regret choosing me to open his museum.
I sniff to disperse the threatening tears. Living up to Foster Martin’s faith in me starts Monday. Right now, I need to handle basic living. Time to make this gem of an apartment my home base. I slip the letter into an empty drawer so it won’t get lost in the shuffle and hurry downstairs.
For the next hour, we unload the truck and trailer, my new neighbor helping the whole time. When everything is in the apartment, I thank Scarlett profusely and promise to treat her to lunch sometime as she’s leaving. Then as if we rehearsed it, Daniel and I both collapse on my sofa with matching sighs.
“Best brother,” I say after we’ve rested for a couple of minutes.
“Only brother.”
“Still best brother. Better than everyone else’s brothers. How about we power nap for fifteen minutes and then we go walk around a bit and find some more food before we unpack?”
“Deal.” He taps his phone. “Timer set. Power nap. ”
And then, in the tradition of all true Hoppers, we catnap like champs. When we get up, we find a funky café with delicious salads and come back to my apartment to put on my “Unpacking Playlist” while we get back to work. It starts with “My House” by Flo Rida, of course.
The next day, after unpacking what’s left and eating a big Sunday lunch, we drive back to Boston so I can return the moving truck and pick up my car. Then I drop Daniel at the airport with hugs and promises to come home for Christmas.
When I get back to The Serendipity, I’m happy not to run into anyone on the way up to my apartment. I need to save all my mental energy for my new job tomorrow, because right now, my instinct is to ignore all the education, training, and experience I have and instead google “How to be a museum director.”
Maybe I already did that. Several times. Maybe there’s not an article that specifically explains the many, many facets of the job I’ve spent the last ten years learning.
Maybe. I’ll never tell.
But I do settle on my sofa and pull up all my saved research on Serendipity Springs. I could recite it, I’ve read through it so many times. And these are just the highlights. I’ve read every known book (nine) written on the history of Serendipity Springs, or central Massachusetts, or any of the nearest communities. Factually, there isn’t much I don’t know about my temporary new hometown.
It was established not long after Boston but stayed small for nearly two hundred years until Serendipity Springs joined the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. This era is my expertise, and I know the pattern of the spread of industrialization through New England. But the curious thing about Serendipity Springs is that although it should have followed the same trajectory as nearby Worcester, the distinct differences between them usually make up the meat of the books written about it.
Worcester had the advantage of closer proximity to Boston, the powerful engine of the Massachusetts economy, but it suffered great rises and falls in its fortunes. Serendipity Springs, on the other hand, managed to comfortably weather everything from revolution against Britain to the bank failures of the Gilded Age without any of the hardships that tried other cities.
One of the earliest accounts of Serendipity Springs was from a man writing about his memory of stopping one night with his family to camp beside the spring. They were traveling with a group of other families to homestead property they’d been promised in New Hampshire. His mother had fallen ill almost as soon as they set out, and they’d had to stop often until her stomach pains subsided. That night, she’d drunk the water from the spring—they all had—and she’d felt so much better that they decided to stay longer until she was recovered.
None of that group of families ever reached New Hampshire because their stay near the spring became permanent. That journal was from Foster Martin’s many times great-grandfather, whose family had been among those first English settlers in the area. Others began to join them, and any time a newcomer would ask in surprise why the soil was easier to turn here and the pests never much fussed their crops or why the sky was always a bit brighter blue than Worcester, they always got the same answer: It was something in the water.
Modern experts from all sorts of academic disciplines attempted to study and explain the remarkable placidity of Serendipity Springs, but without fail, they were always met with the same answer by the locals: It was something in the water.
Three of the books I read were collections of claims locals made about the spring through the years. While they credited the water with everything from improving their luck to healing their gout, no one could exactly say how the water did it. At some point early in the town’s settlement, someone said it was just serendipitous that people got what they needed when they spent time near the spring, and the name stuck.
As an origin story, it’s the kind of colorful legend you can build a great museum around, and Foster trusted me to do it. So I go through my notes, my questions, and my lists of ideas again and then again. Because whatever self-doubt I may be trying to ignore, I’m not letting a bit of it show tomorrow when I officially walk back into the Martin House as its new director.