Sheila Connolly: Fundraising The Dead

Bottom line: we have a whole lot of stuff, and it could be anywhere in the building. It was Alfred’s job to try to keep track of it-and he was the first person the Society had ever hired to do that specific job. It wasn’t easy. In theory, each item had an identifying number, which would tell you when the item came in, but that number had to be linked to some sort of map, which would tell you where it was right now. I shudder to think what this process was like before the advent of computers. Still, Alfred handled all of it with good cheer. He massaged his computer programs and made them sing. He prowled the dark corners, and he had unearthed some unexpected treasures in his wandering. He was the man I needed to talk to.

Alfred and his machines lived in a cubicle constructed of modern movable partitions, which gave limited privacy-not that it seemed to bother Alfred, even though it meant that everyone had to pass by his cubicle to get to either the restrooms or the coffee room. Inside his cubicle, he had two desks, one where he worked and one that housed his computer and a scanner-printer; behind him loomed a massive array of filing cabinets holding all the earlier paper records, which he was slowly transferring to electronic format. Luckily, Alfred was extremely conscientious about the transfer process. Though it made a slow job slower, he took very little on faith, usually insisting on seeing the item and verifying its number and current location, before entering it into his precious database. He estimated he’d completed perhaps ten percent of the total to date. Barring any disasters, Alfred could count on doing exactly what he was doing now for the next twenty years, before retiring at seventy or so.

I poked my head around the corner of his lair. “Hi, Alfred.”

“Hello, Nell. You need me?”

“Alfred, what I need is to pick your brain. Do you have a minute?”

“For you, sure.”

I slipped around the corner of his partition and sat down, allowing myself a small sigh of relief. “I don’t have much time before the gala, but I need to ask you about something. Let me give you a hypothetical. Let’s say I’m writing a heart-wrenching appeal letter about Dolley Madison’s boot scraper, given to the Society in 1883 by her great-grandniece four times removed, detailing how the poor boot scraper will disintegrate into a pile of rust if we don’t buy a mink-lined box for it immediately. Are you with me?”

Alfred gave me a shy grin. “All the way.”

I went on. “And I really want to take a smashing picture of the boot scraper to send out with the letter. How do I locate it?”

Alfred looked thoughtful. “Do you have the accession number?”

I shook my head. “No, I have a lovely note in my file-copperplate hand, mind you, but at least there’s a date on it-that says that the donor hopes we will treasure Aunt Dolley’s boot scraper. That’s it.”

Alfred was warming to his task. “Was it a single item or part of a larger collection?”

“No clue.”

“And you’re sure it was a boot scraper, and not a snaffle bit or a peach pitter?”

“Well, the great-grandniece thought so, but we have no idea what Dolley did with it. Maybe she beat her children with it. Did she have children?”

“Can’t tell you. Okay, so we have an unknown object, possibly a boot scraper, with an accession number that should begin eighty-three something or other. Type: object, not paper. I punch those facts into Cassandra here… and voilà, a list of possibilities.”

“Cassandra? That’s your computer?”

“Yes. She’s often issuing predictions of dire catastrophes, when she isn’t crashing altogether. Somehow it seemed appropriate, especially since I usually ignore her and plow on regardless. But don’t worry, I back things up all the time, just in case.”

“Right.” I was not reassured, though I did chuckle at the appropriateness of Alfred naming his computer system after a Greek prophetess, who, if I recalled correctly, was doomed to be always right yet was never believed.

“Then we look at our list… and we see that Metal Objects, Miscellaneous , are housed on the fourth floor, northeast corner, shelves eleven-A to twelve-G. So that would be a good place to start. Unless, of course, the thing weighed fifty pounds or more, in which case it would be on the floor someplace, so nobody gets brained trying to get it down off the shelf. You would go up to the fourth floor and look for it.” Alfred sat back and beamed at me, clearly pleased.

“What about if the great-grandniece also donated her diaries? How would I find books and documents?” I pressed on.

“Well, you know the card catalogs downstairs, right?”

I nodded sagely, even though I was fairly clueless, knowing that Alfred wouldn’t understand how someone working here might not be intimately familiar with our catalogs.

“They give you the call number for the book, but sometimes we move books, or even whole collections, so we have to cross-reference in Cassandra here, so we know where the books actually are,” he said.

“You keep all this up-to-date?”

“As far as possible. That’s just the bare-bones version. I’ve only been working with it for two years, so the data are kind of limited. Everything that’s come in since I started using Cassandra is in here, or anything that I know has been shifted, but the earlier stuff, not so much. I’m working on it.”

“And how much of a lag time is included in that possible ?”

Alfred almost blushed. “A couple of weeks? Depends on the scope of the shift, or the backlog.”

I contemplated the poster behind his desk. It was a picture of the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin, where it looked as though no book had been moved for at least two hundred years. Comforting, that. “All right, Alfred-here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What if the item is not where Cassandra says it is?”

He looked at me bleakly. “Well, that’s actually a multipart question. One, I might not have gotten around to entering the details of the move into Cassandra. Two, it’s been misplaced, or put back on the wrong shelf. Or, three”-he paused and swallowed-“it’s gone missing.”

A thick silence fell and lasted for about five beats. Alfred looked around him; he stood up and peered over the panels that made up his cubicle. Then he sat down again, rolled his desk chair closer to my chair, and leaned forward conspiratorially.

“Have you heard something?” he whispered, sounding worried.

I stared at him. “Should I have?” Our eyes locked for several seconds, until I roused myself. After all, the party clock was ticking. “Alfred, I have the feeling that there’s something you want to talk about. Something about the collections?” I said, my tone coaxing.

He nodded. “I just don’t know what to do. At first I thought, well, the files were incomplete, or some files had been archived. And then I began to wonder if I was getting sloppy, misplacing things, forgetting things…” He had picked up a piece of scrap paper from his desk, and he was folding and unfolding it, making and unmaking a fan. He wouldn’t look at me, keeping his eyes on his hands.

“Alfred,” I said firmly, “you are the most organized person I know, and the most conscientious. You’re worried about something. What is it?”

Finally he looked up at me, with something like fear in his gaze. “I don’t want to make any trouble. I mean, I love my work, I love the Society, and I’d hate to think that there was anything wrong, but…” He swallowed, and I resisted the strong urge to shake him, to hurry the words out of him. “You must know that a lot of what I do is very repetitive. Some people would say boring, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m happy doing what I do, even though it seems very slow. But even I like a little break now and then. So, over the years, I’ve devised a sort of reward system for myself. I’ll do however many regular entries, or a single collection, or some specific batch of processing, and then I’ll treat myself to something special. I’ll save the really nice pieces until I need a little boost, and then I’ll check their tracking history and go visit them, just to make sure everything is right. You know, there are some wonderful things in the collection-real stars-and a lot of people, even staff, don’t even know they’re there. But I do.”