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That, alas, is the rub. The purpose of the museum is to find, preserve, and display the best that humanity has created through the millennia. Any enterprise that detracts from this essential mission strikes me as self-defeating.

You might argue that yours would be the only contemporary relics on the premises. But I fear there would ensue substantial and justified pressure from other benefactors to be afforded the same privileges. We might be quickly overrun and diverted from our primary responsibilities.

So I must, in all good conscience, decline your offer. We would, however, certainly welcome your outstanding collection of Egyptian art and artifacts that, with appropriate support, we would display in a temple worthy of its excellence and with suitable, eponymous tribute.

Sincerely,

Norman de Ratour

It is one thing to write a letter like that and feel noble about it. It is quite another to put it in an addressed envelope, stick on a stamp, and drop it into a mailbox. Which is precisely what I did, thereby canceling whatever small elation that the news of the Sterl case and my part in it had provided.

I wondered if I had, with a lick of the tongue, sealed my own professional doom. Perhaps. He would receive the letter just days before the meeting of the Governing Board. I could have waited. But I had acted instead. The thought gave me a kind of depressed peace of mind. I walked home in the warm gloaming of a summer evening, my integrity, if little else, intact.

Alphus, I could tell from a smell of burned food in the air when I arrived home, had been trying to cook again. He hasn’t gotten the idea of different degrees of heat under a frying pan. The hot dogs he had been trying to make for himself and Ridley were charred beyond recognition, and he had an abashed look on his face. I had told him cooking without my presence was strictly forbidden.

More to placate me than anything else, he produced a third installment of his memoirs and, under my direction, mixed me a medium-bore martini. I put the memoir aside and took some lean hamburger out of the refrigerator and some appropriate rolls out of the freezer.

They sat on stools around the counter watching the run-up to a baseball game while I sipped my martini and made a green salad. They were both wearing baseball caps and lettered T-shirts. Ridley’s read, GLOBAL WARMING IS COOL. Alphus’s read, SAY NO TO THE MALTHUSIASTS.

As “guys” they are both starting to permutate into something I don’t particularly admire. I want to state for the record that I had no objection when Alphus became a “guy,” wanted to be called “Al,” and started listening to country-and-western music. I did tell him to keep it down. A lot of it consists, as far as I can tell, of grown men and women feeling sorry for themselves. I did not object in the least when he began drinking Budweiser from a can instead of sipping rare malts from a glass. And if he wants to watch the Red Sox and other teams with quaint names go through their rituals late into the night, that is his affair.

But he has started listening to someone named Rush something or other. I have listened in a few times. I must say that when Alphus starts taking this man seriously, then I confess I am vulnerable to the usual stereotypes about simian intelligence.

I also confess that I find listening to those radio communicators so diligently sharing their ignorance with their listeners exhilarating in its own way. I quite understand the appeal to indignation. It’s as though there exists a great reservoir of it out there for the tapping. From which I do not exclude myself. I just like to think that my indignation is better informed, that it is more justified, higher, more worthy of being indulged.

Take for instance those public radio reporters who use exaggerated Spanish pronunciation when referring to the names of people and, especially, places south of the border. They do it, of course, at least in part, to show that they speak the language or at least know how to pronounce it. Or,