Sheila Connolly: Fundraising The Dead

I gave him a warm smile. “That would be wonderful.” I stood up to head back to the next item on my multipage to-do list, but stopped at the edge of the cubicle. “Unfortunately, I don’t think Marty’s likely to let this go, unless we come up with a good answer for her. Or better yet, the documents themselves. So I think we’d better think about what to do next. But at least now I can tell her we’re working on it, right?”

As I made my way back to my office, I congratulated myself. I’d started one ball rolling. Time to get back to all the other balls I was juggling. Only two and a half hours until the guests started arriving.

But there was one more thing I had to do first: talk to Rich Girard. Luckily the staff members who spent a lot of time in the stacks carried beepers, so I could get hold of him quickly. When he responded to my page, I said, “Rich, can you come to my office for a moment?”

“I’m up on four-I’ll be right there,” he responded.

Rich Girard was barely twenty-two, just out of Penn with a degree in history, and this was his first full-time job. He was trying to make up his mind whether he wanted to go on in history in graduate school or get a library science degree or do something totally different. He had been hired specifically to work on the Terwilliger Collection, which worked out for everyone: the collection got a dedicated staffer, the materials he was working with would serve him well if he applied to either graduate school or library school, and because he was young and inexperienced, we could pay him a miserable pittance and tell him that he was gaining valuable experience. Still, he was smart, conscientious, and hard-working, and seemed really excited about the work.

When he showed up three minutes later he began, “Hey, Nell, what’s up? I mean, aside from the obvious party stuff.” He slouched in the chair, all angles and legs.

I had no time for chitchat, with the gala looming. “Have you talked to Marty lately?”

“Yeah, she asked me how far chronologically into the collection I’d gotten to by now. Why?”

I went on. “She came to me to say she couldn’t find something she was looking for in the collection, something she knew was there earlier. I said I’d ask you if you had set anything aside to work on.”

He looked perplexed. “No, I had a couple of boxes out so I could catalog them to folder level, but I put those back over a week ago. I told her that. What’s gone missing?”

“Something from Major Jonathan, apparently. But she’s coming by tomorrow morning, and I said I’d help her look. Can you join us?” I was being polite, since I was a senior staff member conveying a board member’s request, and he would have to be there unless he came down with malaria. Or maybe smallpox.

“Sure, no problem. There’s some other stuff I wanted to ask her about anyway.” He seemed unworried.

“How’s the project going overall?”

“Oh, great. There’s some amazing stuff in there-the Terwilligers were definitely pack rats. That’s good and bad from my point of view. I mean, there’s all this fascinating material, but it’s all jumbled together, sort of loosely grouped by date. So you can find a letter from Benjamin Franklin thrown in next to somebody’s nineteenth-century shopping list. I’m having a lot of fun, but it’s a long, slow process.”

“You’ve been here for four months now, since, what, July?” He nodded. “How much do you think you’ve covered?”

He looked up at the ceiling while he considered. “Lessee. I decided to approach this chronologically, so I started at the beginning, and there’s less stuff there…” I knew that the Terwilligers had arrived in Philadelphia early in the eighteenth century and had set themselves up as bankers and merchants and done extremely well for themselves, all the while reproducing and establishing their offspring in businesses in Philadelphia and beyond. “I’d guess I’ve finished roughly twenty percent in terms of volume. Of course, that’s just to folder level-if I was going to do it down to item level, it would take a lot longer.”

“And where are you now?” I asked.

“Just before the Revolution.”

That’s what Marty had said. “Marty was looking for some correspondence between Major Jonathan and George Washington-have you gotten to that yet?”

He looked nonplussed. “No. You know, she said something about that the last time she was working on the papers, but like I told her, I haven’t gotten up to the war years yet.”

“Hey, don’t panic, Rich. I know you’re doing a good job. But Marty’s got clout, and she says they were there the last time she looked and that they’re not there now, so I told her we could all go look for them together. Okay?”

“Sure. Maybe they’re just misfiled. Heck, maybe she put them back in the wrong place-she’s always poking around in there.” He was all too right: Marty seemed to continue to regard the collection as her personal property rather than the Society’s. While the Society’s stacks were in theory off-limits to the public, there were some people like Marty-a triple threat board member, donor, and researcher-who felt quite free to come and go in the stacks as they chose. How many other people might have had the same idea? Did we have a list somewhere, and how up-to-date was it?

“You may be right. Let’s hope so.” I sent him on his way. I didn’t really think he had been careless, but I had to check. “We’ll meet her in the lobby at nine tomorrow morning, okay?”

“I’ll be there,” Rich said, and ambled out.

Nothing is going to go wrong!I told myself firmly. Ihoped I was listening to myself.

I stood at the top of the grand staircase and surveyed the scene of organized chaos below me. Standing on the handsome staircase with its massive mahogany rails and slate stair treads, I gauged the mob below. A newly installed exhibit on Philadelphia ’s theater history adorned the display cases in the catalog room-which was also the location of the open bar. Dinner would be served in the main reading room, with its soaring ceilings and brass railings, the usual massive reading tables lugged to the bowels of the basement in order to allow circular dining tables to take over for the night.

From my elevated vantage point, I could see that the flower arrangements looked handsome, the coat-check system seemed to be functioning, and the pile of name tags had dwindled nicely as arriving people picked them up. Senior staff members had all received a memo from the president commanding their presence at this important event, to help if and as needed, and they had turned out in force-and were actually talking to guests, not just to each other. A few board members had even managed to remember the date-several were lawyers whose offices were nearby or academics whose time was flexible. I counted the members of the press, including the ladies from the suburban newspapers who were hovering near the doors hoping to catch any of their local stars for photos to appear in the next weekly, as well as a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer who kept looking at her watch.

All was going according to plan. Even the weather had cooperated, the October evening crisp and cool and blessedly dry. It was time to jump into the water and get my feet wet.

I continued my descent of the staircase, largely unnoticed, even though I’d made time to put on a dress and heels. I’m used to not being noticed: I waved good-bye to thirty-five a few years ago, but am fighting forty; I’m carrying ten extra pounds (all right, fifteen) that I would gladly give to someone who deserved them; and my features could best be described as pleasant, and apparently easy to forget. But I like my job, and I’m good at it, so I don’t worry if people’s eyes pass right over me-as long as they sign their checks.