“Mom!” Charley said suddenly. “Come here.”

  “What is it?”

  Charley was standing in front of a case displaying stone tools, including several projectile points.

  “What are you looking at?” Calista asked.

  “That point?” Charley wondered aloud.

  “Don’t tell me you’re still interested in flintknapping after nearly chopping off your fingers.”

  “I’m getting better. Besides I wear gloves now when I do it. But I’ll never be that good,” Charley said, pointing to the diamond-shaped projectile point.

  “That’s like the one you were trying to make.”

  “Yep—Sandia point. The exact one, I think.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, it’s got the same catalogue numbers.”

  “Charley, how can you remember catalogue numbers?”

  “Easy. All that time you were drawing up there in the spear room for the catalogue this summer, Matthew and I were trying to copy this point. Staring at it, trying to get it right. Besides, the numbers are easy to remember.”

  “What’s so easy to remember about 8448-40-70?”

  “Well, 8448—all those old points from the desert, at least the leaf- and diamond-shaped ones, have 84 as the first two digits. I just remember the 48 I guess.”

  “Well, what about the 40 and the 70?”

  “Mom!” His voice was thick with what she had come to think of as a blend of prepubescent scorn and exasperation for Oligocenic opacity.

  “Well, I don’t know, Charley.” In a minute he would consign her to the pre-Cambrian.

  “Don’t 40 and 70 have any significance whatsoever for you?” His voice was drenched in disdain. She felt herself fossilizing in front of him.

  “Actually, no.”

  “Seventy was the year I was born. Forty the year . . .”

  “Daddy was born.” Calista spoke softly. Shit! Kids could be mean. “Well, Charley, how very interesting!” she said stiffly and turned to move away.

  The man who had been looking at the basketry case turned his head quickly. He apparently had been temporarily distracted from the baskets by her exchange with Charley.

  “Mom.” The scorn was gone. There was the faint blush of an apology in his voice. “It is interesting.” Charley spoke softly now.

  “Your fascination with weaponry has always exceeded mine, Charley.” Come on! Calista chastised herself. Be grown up. He’s on the pubescent brink of raging hormonal imbalances. Don’t be nasty. “Okay. What’s special about this arrowhead? I mean point.”

  “It’s not the same one.”

  “What do you mean—not the same one?”

  “It’s just not the one I copied this summer.”

  “Well, there must be hundreds of these . . . what do you call them?”

  “Sandia points.”

  “Yeah, hundreds of them.”

  “But two with the same catalogue number?”

  “Huh! Guess not. But Charley, how come you’re so sure this isn’t the same one you copied?”

  “It isn’t. I know it.”

  “It’s the same stone, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but it’s been worked differently. I can just tell. I spent hours holding that one, looking at it. I can just tell. I know it like my own hand.”

  “The one you chopped?” Calista said quickly.

  “Ho! Ho! Very funny.”

  “Well, maybe there’s a bloodstain.”

  “I washed it off.”

  “What?”

  “The blood from the point. Some did get on.”

  “You mean the one you were knapping or the one you were copying—old 40-70.”

  “Both. I spurted.”

  “Charming. Well, in any case, I don’t know why there should be two with the same number.”

  “Me neither,” Charley said.

  “It must be a cataloguing error. I mean, there are so many thousands of points it would be easy to write down a wrong number.” For a moment Charley looked blank, but Calista recognized it as his thinking expression. It was the same look Tom would have when he was thinking something through.

  “It’s not just that it’s the wrong number, Mom. It’s the same number.”

  “Wrong number, same number—what’s the . . .” She caught herself, but not quite in time.

  “Mom! What are the chances of someone just coming up with the identical eight digits?”

  “Well, pardon my trilobite brain, but isn’t that what the whole state lottery is based on?”

  Charley was beyond scorn. Terminal embarrassment. Calista recognized the symptoms. She was intimately familiar with the syndrome and not through Charley exclusively, but her own childhood experience. How many little deaths had Calista died as a child due to parent-generated moments of embarrassment? She should know better. Was she not “in touch with the child within herself'? Zelma

  Woodcock had just written this in a long article in last Sunday’s Times book review section. She had cited Calista along with Maurice Sendak and Arthur Rackham as those illustrators who had “maintained an uncanny contact with the child within themselves.”

  Mercifully the man who had been at the basketry case interrupted. “Now,” the man said brightly, “perhaps, young man, you can tell me something about these weapons.” He spoke with a slight German accent but it was obvious that he had learned his English in England. “This is my first time to this museum.”

  “What do you want to know?” Charley asked.

  “Well, for example, what are those sticks there that look similar to but not quite like boomerangs?”

  “Rabbit sticks,” Charley said quickly. “They’re a lot like boomerangs but they won’t return.”

  “Aha!” The man raised his eyebrows. “I wonder what the advantage was?”

  “Probably not much. Maybe better accuracy in the short-range situation,” Charley said with authority. “For my money, I’d take the boomerang.”

  “Yes.” The man laughed warmly. Calista smiled at Charley, who was obviously enjoying this relatively modest display of his knowledge. “And I think that I would follow your advice. You seem to be the resident expert on weaponry, at least Native American.”

  “Oh, he’s no slouch as a medievalist—weapons, that is,” Calista offered.

  “Crossbows as opposed to Chanson de Roland?” he said. This time Calista laughed. “Permit me to introduce myself—Werner von Sackler.” He extended his hand to Charley, but lifted his eyes toward Calista. They were a cool, clear blue. Nothing to get excited about. Not a Paul Newman electric blue. Indeed his eyes were made warmer by the crow’s-feet that crinkled when he smiled.

  “Oh good! You’re meeting our neighbors,” a voice broke in. Diane Rudolf, director of the museum loan department, strode over to where the three stood. “Calista, Werner is from the Altertumskunde Museum in Berlin.”

  “Oh, for the Peruvian exhibit.”

  “Right,” said Diane, then, turning to von Sackler, “Calista did some of the illustrations for the catalogue. She’s one of our favorite illustrators when we can tear her away from her children’s books.”

  “Ah! You illustrate children’s books? How marvelous! I just made a special trip to New York to the Morgan Library to see their collection and the Sendak exhibit.”

  “Oh, yes?” Calista was impressed—references to Chanson de Roland and Maurice Sendak within three minutes. She looked at him again. He bore a striking resemblance to Prince Phillip. Too bad about the accent.

  “What kind of illustration do you do? What are your books?” “A lot of fairy tales and then some more contemporary stuff.” “I would love to talk about this!” he said with enthusiasm. He was most attractive Calista thought. Then she immediately tried to cancel the thought. It was the first time she had noticed a man since Tom. The accent was growing on her. Charley must be ready to kill her for diverting the conversation from clubs to fairy tales.

  Diane spoke up. “You’ll have a chance to talk tonight. You’re coming to the cocktail party, aren’t you, Calista?”

  “Yes. I had planned to.”

  “Werner will be there, and then I thought we’d all go out to dinner at the Harvest. You’ll join us?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m taking Werner over to the Cyclotron now to see some of the Peruvian mummy bundles.”

  “Are they over there now?”

  “Some. The last load of stuff went over this weekend.” She turned to Werner. “We’re not into splitting atoms. It’s just that we’ve been involved in a massive moving project. They’re going to start renovating some of the upper floors here and we had to move over a hundred thousand artifacts to the Cyclotron for the duration of the construction. All that banging, you know—everything would crumble.” “Not to mention the attic,” Calista said.

  Only a fraction of the Peabody’s enormous collection was ever on display. The rest of the artifacts, which numbered in the millions, had been stored for years in upper floors and attic rooms of the museum. The attic floors had weakened to the point that all the contents had to be removed and no one was permitted in the rooms. The Cyclotron, a building just a block away, had enormous storage facilities. It was to that building that almost sixty percent of the collection had gone. There were still rooms filled to the brim at the Peabody. Calista often thought that they should cease financing expeditions around the globe and instead send people to the attic to excavate. There was long- forgotten stuff up there under layers of dust that people would be amazed to discover. Charley had been standing by listening politely to the three adults. He suddenly burst in. “Diane, did they move anything out of the room behind the spear room?”

  “The room behind the spear room,” she said slowly, trying to place it in the jumbled geography of the upper floors.

  “You know, there’s that metal gorilla and then a few dugout canoes.”

  “Oh, the basket room.”

  “Yeah. There’s all those baskets. Right.”

  “No. I don’t think they moved anything from that room. I’m not sure, though.”

  “Can I go up there and look for something I saw last summer when Mom was drawing up there?”

  “Charley,” Calista glanced at her watch, “we don’t have time. I’ve got to get home.”

  “It’s all right with me,” Diane said.

  “Come on Mom, only for a minute.”

  “Okay, but just for a minute. We better be going then. See you all this evening.” She extended her hand to von Sackler. “Nice meeting you, Mr. von Sackler.”

  “Werner, please.” He smiled directly at her, and she felt something undiagnosed stirring within her.

  Up in Room 64, Charley began going through the display drawers in the projectile point cabinet. One minute had stretched into ten as Calista sat in the dim light watching the dust motes in a column of sunlight that poured through a clerestory. She thought about Werner von Sackler. She was surprised at herself, not because she had been attracted to a man, but because it was this man. She had never found the sophisticated European type very appealing. Their touted “charm” failed to charm her. Perhaps that was just it. Notions of being “charmed” were somewhat alien to Calista’s way of thinking about men. To be charmed meant in a certain sense to relinquish a share of control in matters. Charm suggested magic and magic was for fairy tales and not people. As an illustrator of such tales Calista knew better than most the difference between what was real and what was not—between documentary and fantasy, between life and fairy tales. Yet despite all this she felt a strong attraction to Werner von Sackler. And though not “charmed” yet, there was always that possibility. She was not entirely comfortable with the feeling. There was a sensation of vulnerability that she found disquieting. Calista in all her life had never really experienced these feelings. Even just after Tom had died she had never really felt vulnerable in her grief. She had felt weakened, lessened in a sense, even debilitated to a certain extent, but she had never felt really vulnerable.

  “I can’t find it, dammit!”

  “What?” Calista said. “Oh, the point. It’s not there?”

  “No. I can’t understand it.”

  “Well, it must have been moved to the Cyclotron.”

  “But all the others are here.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I can tell. I know my way through these drawers.”

  There were footsteps in the next room, the spear room. They stopped just as Calista turned around to look and she heard whoever it was quickly walk in the other direction. “Come on, Charley. We’ve got to go.”

  Chapter 8

  Calista was always waiting for the day when some overly imaginative caterer would fill up the Aleut dugout canoe with raw vegetables and dip at one of these Friends of the Peabody cocktail parties held in the North American Indian Hall. But the food services department was not so accursed. Red-jacketed waiters from Harvard Student Agencies bearing platters of stuffed mushrooms and fried zucchini spears performed flawlessly the one job they would probably never be required to do again in their lives, except perhaps in their own homes.

  As she entered, von Sackler was not across the room, the way he was supposed to be had he been Ezio Pinza and she Mary Martin, so their eyes could meet and lock through the crowd. “What do you drink, Calista?” She whirled, surprised by the touch at her elbow.

  “Werner! Nice to see you. Beer, if they have it. If not, white wine and soda.”

  “I will be right back.”

  He returned quickly with a white wine and soda. “The work you’ve done on the Andean catalogue is quite remarkable. I only wish the Altertumskunde had such talent available. We are certainly going to use the catalogue precisely as is, just drop in the German translation. Wonderful work. Truly marvelous.”

  “Well, it was a diversion,” Calista replied abruptly, and almost immediately regretted it. Von Sackler opened his eyes, slightly bewildered by her tone as much as by what she had said. “From your children’s work, no doubt?”

  “Yes. No. Well, you see.” She paused. She had not meant to bring it up, but having started, she would try to speak as matter-of-factly as possible. “My husband died a little over a year ago. And I found it quite difficult to draw, to illustrate stories. Fve only recently begun again, and quite frankly I found the catalogue a diversion from what I normally do.” She nearly clamped her lips shut.

  “I understand completely,” he replied, and she knew he did. Then why, and later she did ask herself just this question, did she continue the subject?

  “Tom died, actually, out in Nevada at the Rosestone site.”

  “The dig Diane Rudolf has been telling me so much about?”

  “Yes. It is quite extraordinary, Peter Gardiner’s work out there.”

  “Your husband was an archaeologist?”

  “No, actually he was a physicist. He had been doing some work in the area of geological dating using minute magnetic variations in trace elements. It sounds terrible, but I never was sure exactly what he was looking for at Rosestone before he went. It was to be a quick trip.” Calista’s mouth quivered slightly. God, she thought, I must be getting tiresome as a widow. Why did she do this?

  “What happened? How did he die?”

  “Oh.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “A rattlesnake bite.”

  “A what?”

  “A rattlesnake bite. You know. No, maybe you don’t know about rattlesnakes.”

  “Yes, yes! I do. It seems so unbelievable.” A waiter came by with fried zucchini spears, but when he saw the intense expressions on their faces, he swerved around them to a small group standing by a diorama of some Pueblo cliff dwellings.

  “But how,” von Sackler continued, “did such a thing happen?” This was precisely what everyone always asked.

  In an almost toneless voice Calista spoke. “There was a rattlesnake in Tom’s sleeping bag.” This always seemed like the most absurd part. “He went to bed. Didn’t check, got in, and was bitten.

  The snake was sleeping, presumably, and Tom startled it. He was bitten right in the femoral artery.”

  “But wasn’t anybody around to help?”

  “Not really. It was a weekend, and all the people from the dig had gone into Ely, the nearest town, about one hundred miles away. By the time they came back it was too late. The worst part was that there was only one snakebite kit in the camp and somehow either the serum had leaked out of the bottle or Tom had broken it when he was trying to use it. Anyway, he was dead by the time Peter returned.”

  “How awful for you, Calista. This kind of death is not something that one gets used to, if one ever gets used to death.”

  “No,” Calista said. He had said the right thing. The words were in their own peculiar way good and comforting. Her dark eyes rested on von Sacker’s face. She wondered if she would ever draw that face. There were hundreds of faces of close friends and people barely known to Calista that made their way into her illustrations. If she did not use a face in its entirety, she might pick up on some attribute or feature—the flare of nostrils, the shadows around the eyes, an attitude of the head. But for some reason she instinctively felt that no trace of the strong, elegant face inches away from her own would ever appear in a drawing of hers. “You didn’t come here to talk about this,” she said suddenly. “Come, let me introduce you to some people.”

  It was not really the Scroops she had in mind when she said this. One could hardly consider the octogenarian mother and her fifty-five- year-old son a dazzling couple, but there they were when she turned around.

  “Jean, Tobias! Let me introduce Werner von Sackler. Werner, this is Jean and Tobias Scroop.”

  “Oh! Mrs. Scroop, the cataloguer!” von Sackler exclaimed. “At last we meet after how many years of correspondence!” Von Sackler inclined his head toward the old woman while he spoke in a gesture that must have pleased her.

  “At least fifteen, I should think, and lately I’ve been kept hopping with all this Andean stuff flowing between us.”