Chapter 5 #2
"He mentioned," Hollis said slowly, "that his trust takes an interest in the institution's acquisition policy, and that he hoped we would consult before pursuing anything, ah, outside our collecting scope."
"That's a condition."
"That is a courtesy, Miss Broussard, in the language these people speak, and I am eighty-one years old and I have watched that courtesy be extended in this city my entire life, and I have never once seen it declined." A pause. "I am not telling you to take it."
"What are you telling me?"
"I'm telling you they got to me first," he said, "and I'm telling you that means they think you're the risk, and I'm telling you I'm an old man who'd like the boiler fixed and you should factor that into how much you trust me."
That's the most honest thing anyone said to me all year.
The second thing was that my museum's insurance carrier called about a routine reassessment of the annex.
The third was that Marisol, whom I had known for four days, walked into the archive at three fifty and put her phone on the table and said, "Somebody pulled your museum's floor plan from the parish permit office this morning.
Public record, so it's not a crime. I only noticed because I was pulling it too. "
I looked at that phone for a long time.
"They think I already have it," I said.
"They think you're going to have it," Marisol said. "Which means they think you're going to find it. Which means they don't know where it is either."
And that — I want to be honest — was the first moment in a week I felt something other than fear.
I told Camille that night, because Camille is the only person on earth I cannot successfully not tell things to.
She listened all the way through, standing at her counter, not moving, with a dish towel in her hands that she never once used.
Then she said, "Okay. What are you going to do with it?"
"Acquire it."
"Say more."
"It belongs in a repository. Climate controlled, catalogued, digitized, open access.
Every name in it goes into a searchable index and it gets cross-referenced against the freedmen's records and the succession filings and the church registers, and in eighteen months there are four thousand people in this country who can put a finger on a page and say that's my great-great-grandmother, that's what they paid, that's who paid it.
" My voice was doing something. "That's what it's for, Camille.
That's the entire point of the profession.
That's the only thing that justifies any of us. "
Camille nodded slowly.
"And the other side wants what?" she said.
"To destroy it."
"Right." She set the towel down. "So let me say this once, and then I'll make you eat something."
"Camille—"
"You want to give this to a museum," my sister said. "They want it to not exist. Those are the only two options, and one of them has more money."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"That's not fair," I said.
"It's not unfair. It's arithmetic. You have a boiler you can't fix.
They have foundations named after them. You want to publish a book that ruins their grandfathers, and every one of them has a lawyer whose entire job is to make sure nothing ever gets ruined.
" She came around the counter. "I'm not telling you not to.
I would burn this house down myself before I told you not to.
I'm telling you what the fight is, because you keep talking like it's a fight over the object, and it's not.
It's a fight over whether the object gets to be seen.
And those people have been winning that fight since 1821 without ever once having to touch it. "
"So what do I do?"
"You make it seen fast," Camille said. "Faster than they can buy it.
Because the second that book exists in a place where only one person controls the key, somebody writes a check, and it goes in a climate-controlled room in Zurich, and everybody's very polite about it, and in forty years a graduate student writes an article about a rumor. "
I looked at my sister, who works in insurance claims, who did not go to graduate school, who has known exactly how the world functions since approximately age nine.
"That's better than anything my board would say," I said.
"Your board has two dead people on it."
"They're the sharper two."
"There's one more thing," I said.
"Say it."
"If I do this, I'm the reason."
Camille stopped with the pan in her hand.
"There's a version where I hand it to a state archive and step back and I'm a footnote," I said.
"And there's a version where I put my institution's name on it, and my name on it, and I become the woman who did this.
And I have been telling myself for four days that I want the first one, and Camille, I don't. I want the second one.
I want it badly, and I don't know what that makes me. "
My sister put the pan down.
"It makes you thirty-four and good at your job," she said.
"That's generous."
"It's not generous, it's accurate, and the fact that you think wanting credit is a moral failing is the single most Catholic thing about you.
" She came over. "Listen to me. Those men out there want the credit too.
They want a building with their grandfather's name on it and they have wanted it so badly for two hundred years that they burned your house to keep it.
You are not in the same category as them because you happen to also want your name on something.
You're in a different category because of what you want your name on. "
I sat there.
"That's the second-best thing you've said tonight."
"What was the first?"
"The one about arithmetic."
"That one was better," Camille agreed. "I've been saving it since Tuesday."
Camille made me eat.
At eleven, Bishop called. He does not text. He is thirty-eight years old and has decided texting is for other people.
"Delphine."
"Bishop."
"Sister Agathe called." A pause. His voice went down a register and stayed there. "He's awake. He hasn't been awake in three days and he's awake and he's asking for me, and she says it won't last."
"Go."
"I'm going."
"Right now."
"I'm in the truck now." Another pause, longer. Rain starting somewhere on his end. "Delphine, I don't know what I'm gonna say to him."
"You don't have to know."
"That's not how I do things."
"I'm aware," I said. "You plan routes for a living. This isn't a route, it's a room, and you just have to be in it."
He was quiet.
"Come with me," he said.
"To the hospice?"
"Wait in the hall. I just—" He stopped. Started over. "I would like there to be somebody in the hall."
I got my keys.
"I'm on Carrollton," I said. "Don't speed. Actually, speed a little."