Inside, the tiled vestibule was clearly on familiar terms with ammonia and strong cleansers. The brass fixtures gleamed and Tess felt almost guilty for leaving a fingerprint behind when she pressed the call button beneath a hand-lettered notecard, mm.
“M amp;M’s?” Whitney asked hopefully. “Marilyn Monroe?”
“ Maryland Mu-she-um, I guess.” Tess could not quite get the name out without a giggle and a sigh.
A throaty whisper answered Tess’s ring, and the interior door’s lock was released.
Tess had expected a private home with a few framed photographs and glass cases of dusty artifacts, but the rooms they entered were as professional looking as any small gallery, with blond wood floors, white walls, and track lighting. A rectangular shadow box, featuring Maryland ’s writers, was hung on the wall to their immediate left.
“Anne Tyler, of course!” Whitney said. “I see her at Eddie’s.”
“Do you ever try to talk to her?” Daniel asked.
“Of course not. If you know enough to recognize Anne Tyler, you know enough not to approach her.”
Don’t be so imperious, Tess wanted to hiss at her friend. You’ll scare him off.
The other books and photos in the case included Leslie Ford, a mystery writer from the 1930s; Gertrude Stein, who had passed some time in Baltimore with Alice B. Toklas; a woman known for one book, Here at Susie Slagle’s; and Sophie Kerr, who had used the money she made as a popular novelist to endow the country’s richest literary prize, at Tess and Whitney’s alma mater. Then there was Zelda Fitzgerald-who had come to Baltimore primarily for its mental hospitals, alas-and Louise Erdrich.
“Louise Erdrich?” Crow asked. “But she’s from out west somewhere, lived in New Hampshire, and then moved to Minnesota. How does she qualify?”
“Got her MFA at Johns Hopkins.” It was the whis-pery voice that had admitted them, but Tess couldn’t see anyone. “I was going to put Grace Metalious in there too-her second marriage took place in Elk-ton-but I think I’ll wait and devote a special exhibit to Peyton Place later. I’m very liberal in what constitutes a local, if it’s someone I want to include. I can also be quite strict, if it’s someone I want to exclude. You’ll notice Maria Shriver is here but not Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. I can’t help feeling she’s something of a carpetbagger, even if she is lieutenant governor.”
The curator-owner had been lurking behind a glass display case, which was possible because she was quite small. Well, she was short. It was hard to ascertain her body’s proportions, given the voluminous yards of silk in which she had wrapped herself. That, and the snowy white turban she wore, made her look like a fortuneteller or psychic. But the white puff on her head wasn’t a turban, Tess realized on second look, just her hair, teased into a hard bubble. The Mu-sheum curator looked a little like a better-kept version of the distracted-looking women seen wandering the city’s streets, muttering to themselves. The women who walk, as Tess thought of them, for they stalked through their empty days with a palpable sense of mission, speaking sternly to themselves.
But this woman had something the crazy women didn’t have, a sense of irony, a self-awareness of her eccentricity that made her approachable.
“You’re the young woman I spoke to on the phone,” the curator said, moving toward Whitney. People always assumed Whitney was in charge. “I’m Mary Yerkes.”
“No, I’m the one who called, Tess Monaghan,” Tess said. “Whitney Talbot and Crow Ransome came along because they’re interested in Maryland history, while Daniel Clary works at the Pratt.” She had used Whitney to provide plausible cover for this visit, and Crow was trying to stick close to her side these days, determined to go with her where Esskay and Miata could not. “But Whitney’s family foundation often underwrites projects such as yours. You might want to chat with her about what you do, apply for a grant.”
“Oh, no,” Mary Yerkes said, smiling, fiddling with one of her earrings. They were clip-ons, quite large, silver tabby cats with gleaming blue eyes. “I don’t want anyone else’s money, because I don’t want anyone telling me what to do. This is a very personal project. I won’t even apply for nonprofit status. Then again, there is no profit-I just put my collections together and let people come by and see them. I refuse donations.”
“But how do you support yourself?” Daniel asked.
“With money,” the curator replied, eyes narrowed, as if she found the question odd. “Oh, you mean, where does the money come from? I had a little inheritance from my father. You see, Father didn’t believe in higher education for women. So he sent my brothers to college and invested the money he would have spent on my tuition, saying it would be my dowry. But I fooled him; I never married. By the time he died, that little stake of money was worth quite a bit. I think I got the best end of the deal. Because the only reason I wanted to go to college was to read history and literature, and it turns out you can do that on your own. So my brothers have degrees; I have my historical mission and one million dollars, thanks to the wonders of compound interest.”
“Do you consider yourself a historian?” Tess asked.
“I believe everyone’s a historian,” Mary Yerkes said, and Daniel nodded, as if he had found a kindred spirit. “We are the historians of our own lives. Think of the way most people decorate their homes, how they keep scrapbooks and correspondence, as if awaiting history’s anointment. I’ve simply widened the scope beyond myself.”
Tess saw her point. “But why a museum dedicated to women?”
“Why not? Gracious, darling, they have a museum dedicated to the city’s sewer systems. Don’t you think women deserve one too?”
“Wouldn’t it be better,” Whitney asked, “if women’s history took its place alongside men’s, if we saw history as an inclusive panorama, as opposed to being totally Balkanized so every special interest group has to have its own slot?”
Mary Yerkes reached up and pinched Whitney’s cheek as if she were an adorably precocious child-no small feat, given that Whitney was as tall as Tess and there was little flesh to spare on her sharp-boned face.
“Darling, of course it would. You send me a telegram the day that happens, okay? Assuming I’m alive to see it.”
The four began to walk through the gallery, an open space created by knocking down most of the walls on what had been the grand first floor, although the sliding doors between the front parlor and dining room had been retained. It was hard to know if Mary Yerkes was a little daft or ironic like a fox. The Maryland in the movies section, for example, included Edith Massey who had starred so memorably in early John Waters films. But here, also, was Divine, Waters’s best-known star. Mary Yerkes had to realize that Glenn Mil-stead, as he had been born and as he had died, did not qualify for membership here. But, as she said, she was liberal about those she wanted to include, strict when she wanted to keep someone out. It was her museum, after all.
And she did have a photograph of Linda Hamilton, Tess noted, circa Terminator 2, with those wonderfully veiny arms. Tess had tried to develop her own arms to look like that but quickly realized she wasn’t prepared to make the dietary concessions that the cut look demanded. Nothing was worth giving up bread and pasta.
“Now, is there something in particular you wanted to know?” Yerkes asked as they wandered through the rooms, trying to take everything in.
“A local jeweler sent me here,” Tess said. “He thought you might know something about Betsy Patterson Bonaparte.”
“I was interested in her, when I was younger. The phase passed-it saddens me now to contemplate women who had to marry their way into history-but I did quite a bit of reading on her at one point.”