The Palace of Green Porcelain

I have bought a diorama. It's an underwater window of a rivershore or a lakefront somewhere, possibly Great Britain, according to the auctioneer who sold it to me, for $225. That's a good price for a diorama of its size—three feet by two feet by half a foot deep—no matter what little rectangle of the world it is trying to depict. The "water" of this three-D still-life is a murky yellow-brown. It looks the way it would if all the half-dozen fish inside it had heavy nicotine habits. A knowledgeable friend of mine who examined its wooden case guesses that it was built at about the same time as the Titanic.

Age has ruined the long black eel that is lying on the bottom of it. Satisfyingly ugly, it has broken into halves. The pickerel, however, is well-preserved, and so is the pair of perch, placed symmetrically, fin to fin, in the scene's center by the anonymous diorama-maker. That disposition was a mistake in my opinion—the antithesis of underwater reality. But it's redeemed with a bird, at the very top, suspended in six inches of painted "sky." Flying low, over a fringe of faded weeds, the bird lends a verisimilitude to the picture that would be lacking otherwise, by supplying a narrative pull: Poor bird, looking for food. Will he find it? I like the combination of fish and fowl for another reason, too. One represents for me the hidden world, below the surface of things; the other, the world above. I'm always looking for the places where those two worlds meet.

And I've always been drawn in by dioramas. The first ones I ever saw were at the local cabinet of curiosities in my old hometown—the Bruce Museum of Greenwich, Connecticut—founded in 1912, the same year that my own diorama was estimated to have been built. At the Bruce there were dozens of scenes of all sizes, from table models (like mine) to huge, wall-sized, vistas. My best friend, Maureen, and I would go to the Bruce on a rainy Saturday. We were supervised by neither parents nor teachers nor museum guards on these trips, and that was part of the place's appeal. Free to roam the tall, turreted Victorian mansion, a former private home, roam we did, imbibing the strangeness and the familiar made strange. We liked the giant luminous clam shell (the color of the moon), near the foot of a dimly lit stairway. We looked up at it on its pedestal—into its fluted jaw, so to speak—or grew pleasantly dizzy looking down on it from the stairs leading to the Bruce's upper floors. Peering over the banister of the third-story landing, we liked to frighten ourselves by imagining how easy it would be to fall down on top of it. Back downstairs, we made a stop in the room that had been converted to a planetarium: we never tired of having our blouses turned temporarily fluorescent lavender under the magical black light. After that, we visited the little indoor zoo, with its live monkeys that leapt from branch to branch curling their rubbery lips and screaming behind the glass at us. In the 1950s we were already losing touch with nature in Greenwich. Maureen's and my neighborhood was part of the loss—a development of mostly identical houses built almost all at once, during the postwar rush. Its saving grace was that it abutted a golf course where, it was said, foxes lived. We never saw one, ourselves, but we did enjoy the profusion of wildflowers in the roughs between the fairways.

Upon entering the Bruce, we did not feel exactly reverential, the way we felt when we climbed up the stone steps to Mass at St. Mary's. It was closer to the feeling we had when we entered the movie theater downtown, but not quite that, either. This was more serious, like our library mood: the Bruce was certainly the library's next of kin, although much more enticing. We loved books, but did so without knowing it—that is, we loved the places books took us. Our minds were fertile; we could imagine our own stories: we didn't always have to read them. So what we loved with a conscious love were other things, other objects, particularly untouchable ones, like the things we saw at the Bruce.

An odd assemblage of paintings and sculpture was also part of the mix, but Maureen and I didn't explore them. Without even stepping inside the gallery, we could see from the doorway The Bust of Eve, a white marble sculpture of Adam's wife. And although, as I recall, it stopped just short of her breasts, the word bust was still too much for us—girls whose own breasts, tender swollen embarrassments, were getting ready to mound. With our heads down, nervously giggling, we hurried past it on our way to the rooms of dioramas. One of our favorites was "May Morning," featuring a doe and her fawns (Walt Disney's Bambi would long remain fresh in our minds). Another, whose name I have forgotten, showed a mother black bear and her cubs. The smaller mammals included in these large panoramas—chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits—were familiar enough to us, from our own backyards as well as our roamings on the golf course. But we weren't accustomed to seeing them motionless—dead. And it was hard to shake the wishful idea that they were still alive (merely stunned was our fiction), having somehow accidentally wandered into the scene, and were about to start scurrying around in the leaves at any moment. I think, however, that something beyond a mere re-creation of reality made possible the sweet confusion and held us transfixed. At the Bruce the preternatural tones of the painted skieseffects of aging here, again, as in my fish diorama, perhaps—made the scenes seem otherworldly. The lighting, too, just missed evoking natural light, and this increased the uncanny effect. It was, instead, the light of dreams, somebody else's not ours, and yet we were invited into them, to stay for a while in a kind of mutual dream, which was really better than having one alone. But the dioramas were better, as well, than the Bruce's zoo, because the frenzy of the monkeys, cooped up in their cages, made us feel frenzied, too. Here in front of the dioramas we got tranquilly alert, like two people fishing: we wanted to catch the dioramas' secrets, and these artificial windows on the real world seemed to have an endless supply. On each visit we always found something new. It was the best kind of watching. There were only a limited number of open secrets to be had at the pleasure of the scratching, tumbling, literally crazy monkeys.

These museum adventures of mine had residual effects at home. For example, it was because of the Bruce that I tried to dig for arrowheads in my own backyard. I used a garden hand tool with claws to engage in this dubious activity. Around my head I tied an old shawl, knotted in back, headband style, so that the tail ends hung down like the thick heavy braids of an American Indian squaw, or so I imagined. (In reality, I had a hated pixie cut.) I loved to feel the weight of those "braids" on my shoulders as I bent over my shallow excavation in an untended corner of our half-acre lot, near the pony-shaped boulders where I also played cowgirl, riding the range. Never mind that a real American Indian wouldn't have tried to unearth her ancestors' buried relics. I was mostly ignorant of Indians, and of cowgirls, too, for that matter. As for arrowheads, all I knew was what I had seen at the Bruce: bits of sharpened flint lined up in glass cases, with the names of streets in my own neighborhood on some of their yellowing typewritten labels.

What I planned to do with my arrowhead, had I ever found one, was to bring it to the Bruce. In fact, to make a donation, not to keep my find, was the reason why I was digging in the first place. For I had the impression that museum-goers looked at things and brought them in equal measure. Once, when a boy in our neighborhood found a mutant snake, his parents drove him over to the Bruce with it, and the museum took it in, adding it to its already large live-reptile collection. I knew somebody else who had presented the Bruce with an abandoned hornets' nest—it looked like a big whitish-gray Chinese paper lantern—and there it was, or else one like it, on display in an exhibition room that was packed with specimens of all kinds floating in bottles of formaldehyde. I wanted our family to be similarly represented by a gift to the secular shrine. And why not? To me, the Bruce was the place where, to paraphrase poorly Robert Frost, if you went there with it, they would have to take it in. In that world I was an observer as well as a participant—a collector, or at least a searcher after things.

The idea that I could be a museum-maker as well as museum-goer was, on the evidence, fostered inadvertently or otherwise by the Bruce's then curator-director, Paul Griswold Howes. In one of his eight books, Hand Book for the Curious (1936), Howes notes with some pride that whenever townspeople found unusual creatures under rocks or clinging to their backdoor screens, they would bring them to the museum in fascination and sometimes fright, and he would identify them, very often accept them into the collection, and in doing so, encourage Greenwich townfolks to bring in more, whether they had read his book or not.

"It is strange and interesting how many things are brought in to me each year," he wrote, "things which, their finders declare, 'they have never seen before in their lives.' These objects often come in waves. In late summer I may be swamped with praying mantids. When the dobson emerges in its winged form, it excites whoever may find it. Usually it is found dying harmlessly beneath a street light and in such cases even the police appear to be a little uncertain as to what should be done about it. Fishermen are amazed sometimes to learn that it is the parent of their beloved bass lure—the hellgrammite. And so it goes. There are the harmless snakes that are supposed to be copperheads, the baby fishes 'with their bellies bursting out,' the 'stunted lobsters lost in a freshwater pond.' These and a great many others are the classic members of this volume's household, selected by the people themselves, year after year, with wonder and delight."

My husband, Bob, is my museum companion these days. We visit museums of all sorts wherever and whenever we travel, as well as close to home, which is north of Boston, in Andover, Massachusetts. And while it's true that as adults we are naturally more discriminating than Maureen and I ever used to be, we find ourselves moving through new and newly refurbished museums with a sense of disconnectedness that I cannot blame on middle age. We may admire their designs, their concepts, or their artifacts, or be impressed by the way they have pulled us through the exhibits without our quite even knowing that we've been pulled. We may learn a great deal from the commentary either written on the walls or told to us by the disembodied voices on the Acoustiguides that we obediently rent. But there is often something missing from the experience, something I regularly used to take away with me from my visits to the old Bruce and that I still do take away from visits to certain museums today.

This feeling of loss is most profound for me in the completely reconfigured (no, reinvented) Bruce—the result of a $5.5 million, eighteen-month renovation and expansion in 1993-94. Childhood memories are notoriously untrustworthy; their distortions must be taken into account. Worse, these phantoms can act as tyrants, sending us in search of a kind of purity that was never truly ours to begin with. But even if over time I have fictionalized these stored mental images of the old Bruce, I cannot deny what I have freshly felt at the new Bruce and elsewhere.

Greenwich itself has changed, of course, along with other pockets of wealth in our country, beginning in the 1970s, the result of all the mergers and acquisitions and the moves of corporate headquarters out of cities and into suburbs. A public museum must cater to its constituency, and if that constituency changes, it must change, too, or risk irrelevancy, even ruin. So this is as much a lament for the times that made it possible for a museum to be as idiosyncratic as the Bruce once was, as it is for the old place itself. I find it particularly poignant that this loss has occurred in the realm of collecting, an idiosyncratic human activity if there ever was one. It's true that institutional collecting has always differed in nature from individual collecting. But even some large repositories still manage to convey the feeling I'm after. I felt it recently at the British Museum, monstrous though it may be, amid the painted mummy cases. The ancient was somehow brought close to me by these objects and by the simple, unadorned way in which they were displayed. I understand about differing "learning styles," to use the jargon. I know and appreciate the efforts that some museum designers make to reach all kinds of different people and to make museum-goers of them. Still, in London, in that roomful of antiquities, without benefit of exhibition copy or a nattering guide, a barrier was broken. A tunnel backwards was dug. The objects hummed down through the ages. Somehow they signaled their spirits, and I signaled back. It happened again, just a few months ago, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in the new whaling exhibit featuring paintings of whaling scenes, harpoons, scrimshaw, whale oil and whale oil containers, ships' logbooks, maps, much more. Somehow they got it right, without resorting to a little darkened room with a video presentation or anything else too jarringly high-tech. The story was told through the juxtaposition of the artifacts and the actual words of nineteenth-century participants or observers—quotations on the walls—along with the artworks. The proof that it affected me: when I got home, and for days and days afterward, I found myself thinking about it—the men, the ships, the whales themselves—and when I could no longer bring the feeling back, I felt compelled to reread a few chapters of my twenty-five-year-old, annotated college copy of Moby-Dick, which now looked to me like a piece of ongoing history itself.

Doubtless there are still people living in Greenwich who find unusual creatures in their own backyards. But do they bring them to the new Bruce? If I were a "curious" adult living in Greenwich today, I wouldn't consider it. It's not that the people behind the information desk seem capable of rebuffing. (Although they may well be. When I asked, "Where did the giant clam shell go?" one of them issued a curt, "In storage," without offering any further details. Maybe I wasn't the only former town resident to come looking for the old familiar landmarks and, not finding them, looking displeased, maybe even a little dangerous.) It's just that the sleek new Bruce into which they are charged with welcoming visitors hasn't the slightest hint of having been, or wanting to be, adlibbed, much less added to by an amateur. Whether a staff member wanted it or not, I don't think that the careful design could easily absorb a random gift of a snake or a hornet's nest. Not that the Peabody Essex could have absorbed my dog-eared Moby-Dick; still, I had the feeling that those who had designed the exhibit would, on some level, have appreciated it.

The original Bruce mansion, it should be noted, is, essentially, gone. As a matter of record, the architects used the old building's structure literally as a base for the new one, making their design decisions in and around it. (Is that why there was no public outcry over the mansion's loss?) But, as far as I can see, only its cone-shaped turret remains; the rest has dissolved into an entirely new stucco creation of cream and soft green, with a roof line that advertises Asian influences. Up the front steps, past the plaques listing columns of donors, visitors enter a towering, sky-lit rotunda, where there is no longer any need to wend one's way through a rabbit warren of exhibition rooms and up and down a vertiginous staircase. Instead, they may stroll in and out of a single floor of sleek exhibition space, double the size of the old square footage, on either side of a wide hallway that ends in a wall of glass showing a view of parkland and an atrium graced by an Alexander Calder mobile. It goes without saying, perhaps, that no trace of the little zoo remains, although there is a "touch tank." The old dioramas, also, have been jettisoned, and a solitary new one has been built with the help of a venerable master—one of the best, preparator emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History, Raymond DeLucia (1917-1997). A wall-sized panoramic piece of a Connecticut shoreline habitat, circa 1600—one of DeLucia's final works—is multi-media, incorporating sounds of birds and insects as well as subtle lighting effects that change from dawn to dusk in a matter of minutes. Other new permanent fixtures at the Bruce include a full-sized wigwam (equipped with a push button that activates a recording of a Native American folk tale) and a world-class geology collection (John B. Clark, executive director of the new Bruce at the time of the renovation, told The GreenwichTime that the old geology collection had "limited value as a museum collection"). But the temporary shows may be the biggest draw, designed to bring repeat visitors to the new Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, which is what it has rechristened itself. In the past couple of seasons, these have included exhibits of marine art, neon art, Japanese folk art, fashion photography, Native American beadwork, and paintings by the Connecticut Impressionists, many of whom lived in Greenwich at the turn of the century. (Yes, it seems much more of an art museum now.) There is also a 160-seat auditorium for lectures and films, and a full schedule of them on the calendar, as well as openings and receptions, one of which I attended on a Sunday afternoon. Munching cookies and strawberries, I meandered through, looking at the new exhibits but also in search of the old arrowheads (there were still a few on display, but one could easily miss them), then stopped off at the museum shop, where I bought the inevitable Treasures of the Bruce Museum Cookbook, featuring plum dumplings and fillet of beef with sour cream by none other than "Mrs. Donald Trump." (I don't know which one.) And it all sounds very nice as I'm writing this, and it is. But it's nice in the way that an upscale department store is nice.

The organization responsible for this new Bruce is a formidable one, to judge by the two dozen names and titles listed below the executive director's on a recent annual report: membership manager, admissions manager, finance manager, collections manager, director of development, curator of art, curator of natural science, education curator, exhibition designer, public relations director, coordinator of volunteers, plus all their assistants. The Bruce today also has a board of directors over fifty members strong. The erstwhile Bruce, my research tells me, was operated for its first fifty years by only two people, one of them much more influential than the other, and neither of them burdened by much supervision or bolstered by much cash. It was, then, a distinctly human-sized venture, practically a one-person show, undertaken in the days when such things, for better or worse, still were possible in the museum world.

The Bruce's namesake, Robert Moffatt Bruce, was not one of the two people who ran it, although without him the museum would not have existed, so his place in its history needs to be made plain. In 1871, when he was forty-eight years old, he bought a hilltop mansion in Greenwich, overlooking Long Island Sound. This son of a Scotsman was a New York businessman who had made a fortune in textiles during the Civil War, manufacturing blankets for the Union Army. In the only photograph I have ever seen of him he is old, with large astonished eyes and scrawny legs crossed at the knee as he sits in a throne-like carved wooden chair that dwarfs him. White-bearded, with his long bony hands dangling from his wrists as they rest on the chair's large arms, he looks a little like George Bernard Shaw, albeit a decrepit version. His wife and two daughters had predeceased him, so that could be part of the reason. At the time of the house purchase, however, he was the head of a healthy young household that had regularly summered in Greenwich and was now ready to make the town its permanent home.

The Bruce house had been dubbed "Hawk's Nest" by its previous owner, Francis Lister Hawks, a minister and a lawyer who'd had it built for himself in 1853. The name wasn't only a pun on his own; it was meant to acknowledge the birds that nested in the more than one hundred acres of woodlands that surrounded the property overlooking Greenwich harbor and beyond to the chain of tiny islands strung along the town's coastline. Bruce obviously found Hawk's Nest to his liking: he lived there for the rest of his life. Greenwich as a whole must have pleased him. It would be cynical for me to imagine that he became one of its earliest philanthropists merely because he found the town a convenient place for a man of his stature to discharge the charitable obligations of his day. At any rate, one of his gifts was a new town hall. Others were a hospital and an old-age home. He was known, too, for giving away shoes, clothes, and turkeys to the town's poor; and when he died in 1909, and his will was read, it was learned that his final gift to Greenwich was Hawk's Nest itself.

What he had in mind for it, his will said, was "a Natural History, Historical and Art Museum for the use and benefit of the Public, in such manner and under such rules as may be prescribed by the Selectmen of the Town." Typically, a man of Bruce's means would have had a collection of his own—art, antiquities, and other showy mementos of foreign travel—but nothing except $50,000, a few Bruce family portraits, and the giant, moon-colored clam shell came with the building. In any event, it would soon become clear that Bruce, in giving the building, the money, the pictures, and the clam, had done the easy part.

"Many people will say, and it is probably true, that a museum is about the last thing that the Greenwich of today needs," the Greenwich Press wrote on the occasion; "yet to quote an old saying, we 'should not look a gift horse in the mouth,' and the late Mr. Bruce gave Greenwich so much that was of practical and immediate value that it would be ungrateful to speculate about the practicality of this last gift." Grateful or not, the town was slow to take up the challenge. Although it quickly designated the acreage surrounding the house Bruce Park (and it remains Bruce Park today, which I used to pronounce "bruspark," as if it were one word; to me the term meant a place with tennis courts, rose gardens, paths for walking, a pond for feeding ducks and geese in summer and for ice-skating in winter), it allowed the empty mansion just to sit there. And if part of Bruce's vision had been that other well-to-do Greenwich residents, and there were many, would jump in and get the place going, he had miscalculated. Three years passed. Then the newly formed Greenwich Society of Artists asked if they could use the space for an exhibition.

Since the 1880s, a number of the impressionists and other artists who had been living in Greenwich had come to constitute a colony, founded in the waterfront village of Cos Cob by John Henry Twachtman. He and the others—Elmer MacRae, Childe Hassam, and Leonard Ochtman were three of the most prominent—had been attracted to the region's natural beauty as well as its easy train access to Manhattan. And although Twachtman died before the Bruce gift was given, the others, including Twachtman's son Alden, envisioned the mansion as an ideal place to establish a permanent gallery in town. They elected officers of their newly formed group—Edward Clark Potter, the sculptor whose lions have guarded the entrance to the main branch of the New York Public Library since 1911, was their first president—and then they made their request for use of the space. Acknowledging that the "masses" didn't have the time or the inclination to pursue art, they were nonetheless able to make the case that those same people "would visit art exhibitions if to do so they had only to go 'down street.'" Their first annual exhibit opened in the old Bruce homestead on September 28, 1912. Considered a success, it was repeated annually for the next few autumns. The Bruce Museum was called the Bruce Art Museum in those years. And given the artists' early involvement, it might logically have evolved into a gallery thereafter, if, that is, the town had chosen to ignore the other two subject areas that Robert Bruce had named, and if, in 1915, when it finally got around to naming an official curator, it had decided to tap one of the artists. But it didn't. Instead its choice was a fifty-five-year-old naturalist, Edward Fuller Bigelow, who did not at all envision the place as an art museum.

Town records show that Bigelow once proposed commissioning portraits of prominent local citizens and acquiring copies of classical artworks for the Bruce, but beyond those unexceptional ideas his art plans did not go. Instead, together with his assistant curator, Howes, Bigelow decided that benefactor Bruce had meant natural history to be the museum's focus, because he had listed it first in his will. Theirs was obviously reasoning by convenience, however, since natural history was Bigelow's and Howes's own personal preference and passion.

I sometimes think how different the old Bruce would have been if, back then, the artists had been given the leadership roles instead of the scientists. I imagine I wouldn't have been as interested in pictures of the natural world as I was in the natural world itself. I wouldn't have hung around the Bruce so much, and I think my life would have been different as a result. Of course, I exaggerate. Besides, it's also true that Howes, who made the Bruce's dioramas, was himself something of an artist or he wouldn't have been able to paint those evocative backgrounds. Not of the rank of a Raymond DeLucia (though it certainly didn't matter to me), for he wasn't trained, he may be more properly called a folk artist, just as Bigelow seems to have been a folk scientist.

The senior staffer Bigelow lived in Greenwich's Sound Beach section (later renamed Old Greenwich), along with his wife and three daughters, where, with only limited success, he had been trying to piece together a career as a nature writer, lecturer, teacher, and guide. If you drive down a certain street in Old Greenwich today, you can still see where he had his nature camp and science study center, which he named Arcadia after the idyllic place in ancient Greece whose inhabitants had lived a simple, pastoral life. And at the Greenwich historical society you may look at old broadsides advertising Arcadia, which were also advertisements for Bigelow's monthly self-published Guide to Nature.

The twenty-eight-year-old Howes was hired by Bigelow in 1918, but he quickly outgrew the title "assistant curator," preferring "curator of natural history." ("I was assisting nobody," he remarked in the oral history he recorded for the Greenwich Library in 1977, near the end of his life.) Because the town didn't pay him very much, Bigelow could only afford to be at the museum a few days each month, spending the rest of his time on Arcadia and on the Guide to Nature, because they were, at least potentially, income-producing, while Howes, with modest independent means, was able to consider his post his full-time position. The town was parsimonious not only with salaries but with coal for fuel, and the two men worked in the wintertime bundled up in their overcoats and moving a fumy oil stove from room to high-ceilinged room, with Howes taking pulls from a whiskey flask to keep himself warm and the teetotaler Bigelow chewing on peppermints, claiming they heated him up just as well. Eventually, though, they were forced to shut the place down for the coldest period of the year, giving Howes the opportunity to make collecting trips—at his own expense; and yet he brought everything back to the museum in the spring.

By this time, Howes had already spent years collecting for himself. It had been his passion since childhood in Stamford, Connecticut, the town next door to Greenwich. In another of his books, This World of Living Things (1959), he wrote an affecting account of the origins of his lifelong fascination with nature: "One day, as a boy, I watched steel-blue beetles courting upon a flower. I watched the male caress the female with his delicate in-bent and quivering antennae, saw him at length accepted, then watched the two become one. Removing them to a match box, I kept the pair in my room for a day or two, using a magnifying glass as a cover. Not long after they had separated I saw the glistening eggs emerge, and so came the revelation of the meaning of sex. It was the beginning for me of a life as an investigative naturalist, a life now, as then, crowded with discovery, with inexplicable facts, with pleasant shocks." His devotion surely also was fed by memories, detailed in the book, of the freedom he had enjoyed as a boy with his six siblings, roaming the family property, building tree houses, camping in tents in the woods, and observing all the life around them.

At age fifteen, while a prep-school student at Stamford's King School, Howes fashioned a private museum in a small outbuilding behind the family's main house. In photographs the structure looks no bigger than a large wooden tool shed. He called it the Maplewood Museum, and stocked it with an array of birds and mammals he had stuffed, as well as birds' nests, birds' eggs, pinned butterflies, minerals, rocks, and seashells. After graduation, Howes bypassed college in favor of six long study trips to Europe, where he continued to collect for Maplewood. That assemblage of a decade became the nucleus of the Bruce.

In his early twenties, before he was hired by the Bruce, Howes also made several expeditions to the rain forests of Latin America, traveling as a research assistant and photographer for one of the most eminent ornithologists of the day, Frank M. Chapman, curator of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History—the man who developed the bird habitat groups for the Hall of North American Birds, Birds of the World, and the Whitney Hall of Birds. Howes made these trips during the so-called Golden Age of Exploration, which ran from 1880 until the Great Depression. Photographs of the young Howes of this period show him to be a tall, lean, cool-eyed character in khaki who smoked a pipe, wore his Indiana-Jones-style explorer's hat set at a jaunty angle, and was just as likely to have in his hand a machete as a butterfly net in those moments when he wasn't sitting in front of his easel or his toy-like portable typewriter. Even before he got to the Bruce, Howes told the Greenwich Library, he had learned "the whole museum game" from these companions in the field.

Back on site, Howes built those now bygone dioramas. "Yes, I built all of those," he said to his library interviewer. He paid for many of their materials, too. "The money was so scarce in the beginning. You know that big May Morning diorama there, with the mother deer and her two fawns? It's half as big as this room. I even did the carpenter work for the case. I built that whole thing. It has a huge plate-glass window and the background is in the form of an arc, about twenty-four feet long, about ten feet high. I did all the painting and all the collecting of material for all the dioramas there—with the exception of those deer: I didn't, of course, go out and kill baby deer, nor did I kill the mother deer. We bought those specimens, already mounted, from other museums that had spare objects. But all the small fry, all the small stuff in the cases, I collected in the field and mounted, and painted the backgrounds, and also cast the leafage. The vegetation's all cast in rubber or in wax, exact replicas of the real vegetation."

Collecting is one thing; getting people to come see what you've got is quite another. In Howes's own words, this is how he and Bigelow first went about attracting people to the museum: "[We] did things like P. T. Barnum would do. Got freaks in there." Dime museums of the mid-nineteenth century offered human freaks; at the Bruce, no bearded ladies need apply, but Howes and Bigelow did put other live things on display: "For instance, we had a two-headed calf that was given to us. It was in a saloon, originally, and we got it from the saloon. . . . Then we got hold of a two-bodied rabbit with one head and two bodies and also a snake that had two heads. We put those in the paper, of course, and people would come in to see those. They'd call up and say, 'Have you still got the two-headed calf and the double-bodied rabbit?'. . . [Adults would] bring more children to see that, you know. Once we got them in there, they would go round and see what else we had. Then they'd tell other people about it. But those freaks really helped." The establishment of the little zoo was a perfection of that same Barnum technique. First, it was just kangaroo rats and mice that Howes had brought back with him from a trip to the Arizona desert. Later, though, he "got a couple of monkeys, and they had a young one, the first baby monkey that was born there. It brought in five hundred people in one day, just to see the baby alone."

Bigelow and Howes next established a trout hatchery "right in the building," using eggs supplied by the state. They used a microprojector to show museum visitors the living embryos' development. "I could magnify living trout eggs to three times the size of a football," Howes boasted. "People kept inquiring about that trout hatchery long after we dismantled it."

They never stopped working the local media, keying press releases to local events. When there was a shark scare on Long Island Sound, for example, they wrote up their shark teeth exhibit. When spring came around, they reminded residents that they could learn "the whole story of bird life" at the Bruce by studying the museum's collection of nests, eggshells, and mounted models. Gradually, too, they got more town support, having begun with a budget of $5,000, which included both men's salaries as well as all their other expenses.

In 1937, Bigelow died. The following year, the town made Howes curator-director, which he remained until his retirement in 1966, after which he served as curator emeritus for another two years. So his time at the museum was twice as long as Bigelow's, spanning half a century. I wish I could say I remember him. According to his oral history, he led innumerable tours of schoolchildren—the bread and butter of museums everywhere today—but I never took one with my school. The nuns at St. Mary's, for whatever reasons, did not bring us to the Bruce on field trips. I have said that what I miss in many new and newly refurbished museums today is evidence of human personality. But the actual persons don't have to be present for the magic to work. In fact, maybe it's better if they aren't, just as it's rarely a good idea to meet the authors of one's favorite books.

Not that I hadn't begun to realize, by the time I was a teenager, the true position of the Bruce in the hierarchy of museums, courtesy of school trips to the New York museums and to New Haven's Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. Then, in 1969, when I went away to college in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian became my "local museum," where I often felt that elusive universal connection—for example, while watching the Foucault pendulum knock over the circle of markers as the planet revolved beneath it. And I mostly forgot about the little Bruce. After I got married, we stayed on in D.C., during a period when many museums on the mall were refurbished in time for the Bicentennial and the one that is currently the most visited museum in the country was built: the National Air and Space Museum.

On weekend visits home to see my parents, I sometimes did revisit the old Bruce. I could see that its exhibits were careworn, outdated. I could see, too, that its dingy walls and scuffed floors and poor lighting were ready for refurbishment. At the very least, the place needed to be made handicap-accessible and temperature-controlled. Starting in the days of those early heatless winters, the place had never been an ideal one for preserving artifacts. There were also security issues—thefts had occurred, it had been reported in the newspaper.

There was one more important issue, too, reported to me by my ninety-year-old Uncle Dan, who, at the tail end of Paul Howes's tenure, was hired as a custodian at the Bruce. As a boy, he and his siblings—my father, among them—had gone to the Bruce "all the time, all the time," enjoying the live things especially. But while he worked there, people newly enlightened by the animal-rights movement were beginning to complain about the treatment of the monkeys in the little zoo, and in 1980 it closed, as part of a planned general reorganization, according to the front-page article in The GreenwichTime.

At about the same time, according to Uncle Dan, more art was starting to be shown at the Bruce, art for which he didn't have much use. For himself, he favored the art of the dioramas, and marveled over the man who had created them: "Paul G. Howes." (Whenever he spoke of him, he would always respectfully include his middle initial.) It was Uncle Dan who told me that, as another part of the reorganization, the dioramas were scheduled to be demolished. I never did get a final look at them.

And that was the end of the Bruce, at least as I knew it, where even art did eventually get introduced to me, in a strange way. It happened on an after-school visit: although the nuns didn't take us, my Girl Scout troop did, one memorable time. It was 1962. I was in sixth grade. Four years earlier, with compensation money paid to the town after the Connecticut State Thruway cut a swath through Bruce Park and damaged the structure of the old Bruce manse in the process, Howes not only repaired the building, he put on an addition—a two-story cement-colored box, quite ugly by anybody's architectural standards then or now; but, at least, the interior of the upper floor must have pleased those interested in aesthetics: it was reserved for a new art gallery.

We started our tour in the old first-floor gallery, looking at a traveling display of jewelry on religious themes. The artist who had designed the pieces was a Spaniard named Dali. With his slick black ringmaster's moustaches, his impish vampire looks, Dali was already a celebrity by then, but we had never heard of him. I liked saying the phrase "lapis lazuli," and recognized the crucifix and other sacred symbols that the designs incorporated; but the gems themselves didn't hold much interest for me. I went up to the second-floor gallery, where Dali's paintings and drawings were hanging. Some of the other Girl Scouts were already moving from one work to the next—and squealing with laughter.

I can't tell you exactly what I felt upon impact, but thirty-six years later I was able to pick out of a book one of the pieces I distinctly remember seeing that day, Debris of an automobile giving birth to a blind horse biting a telephone. The horse, with its teeth bared, its legs rearing, its tail furled, is biting the receiver of a phone (meant to allay its pain, the proverbial bitten bullet?)—except that it is not exactly a horse. There is an opening in its side, like a carriage door, and one of its legs is a wheel, and part of another leg is a fender. It's obviously a car that is metamorphosing into a horse, although, true, it is a blind one, for its eye sockets are black holes, eyeless, unseeing.

Our minds were used to making sense of Roman Catholic religious symbols and imagery that could be just as surrealistic as Dali's. But here no explanations were forthcoming from either of our troop leaders (doubtless, dismayed), or from any museum guide. But maybe that was better. Maybe it was a good thing that my reaction—pure, unadulterated shock—was unsullied by an analytical preparation or debriefing afterwards.

I wonder now if Dali was just another freak show to Howes. I hope, instead, that he recognized Dali's virtuosity. I hope, too, he realized that a surrealist was the perfect artist to feature at the Bruce, effectively mixing, as surrealists do, the features of the precise real world and of the slippery world of dreams from which all art springs.

 
In H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), the Time Traveler observes that there are no museums in the world of the future, although he does come across a ruin of one. It's called The Palace of Green Porcelain, and it reminds him of the Victorian era museums of his time. Assuming it must be some "latter-day South Kensington," he reports that he "found the old familiar glass cases," but since he is at that same moment trying to figure out how to battle the Morlocks, he has trouble becoming much interested in their contents—"old-time geology in decay." He also comes upon a diorama of a tin mine, and hopes that the dynamite is still live—he could use it against his enemies; disappointedly he discovers that the sticks are only dummies.

Wells's larger point has to do with class inequality and the idea that the upper classes were soft, lazy, effete, as a result of letting the other classes do all the work for them. In his futuristic vision, museums (and libraries, too) were obsolete, not because their designs and philosophies were, but because intellectual life itself no longer existed. If Wells could see what has happened to museums today, he would understand, as we do, that money, not lack of intellectual power, is one big reason why things have changed. A lot of it is needed to run these places today. Of course, too much money can present another sort of problem, as I discovered when I visited the new Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, near Mystic, Connecticut. It opened on August 11, 1998, financed with $193,000,000 in revenues from the tribe's Foxwoods Resort Casino, the largest gambling establishment in the Western Hemisphere. A month later, Bob and I were following a full tour bus along the winding road as we made our approach. When the bus turned into the casino, we went on, to the museum next door.

The space just inside the main entrance is huge, many-storied, with one massive slanted wall of glass that faces a woodlands. The effect is a transparent teepee-like configuration. We felt instantly dwarfed, while nature felt majestic—the Native American point of view, so distinctly opposed to the way Westerners often think of themselves. So far so good.

We took the elevator down into the basement level for a journey through 11,000 years of history, beginning, James Michener-style, with the ice age. A notable chilliness was in the air. (It was not just our imaginations, the signage informed us.) The museum has not emphasized glass cases, and some of the objects inside those that they do have are simulated, because Native cultures do not permit displaying certain sacred artifacts. This is a lesson slowly being learned by museums across the country, formerly insensitive to other cultures' beliefs, guilty of looting sacred burial grounds, now in the process of returning those artifacts to their rightful places. The word arrowhead, by the way, is not used at the museum: they are Lanceolate Projectile Points, 7,000 to 8,000 years old. They are Neville Points, or Brewerton Points, 4,500 years old. Where did those Anglo names come from? The commentary doesn't say. But it does note that the bow and arrow appeared in what is now the Eastern United States only as recently as about 1,000 years ago. Arrowheads or points, then, are hardly as important a piece of the Native American story as I once thought, and no child will leave here and futilely try to dig up one. But they may better understand than I did that Native Americans did not simply drop them on the trail, as I once blithely thought they had.

We passed into the first set of dioramas, featuring a simulated mastodon—extinct relative of the elephant—set against a curved painted snowscape. More familiar, though still strange (and extinct), was a model of a giant beaver, about three times the size of the ones we know today. Then there were the wolves—without a piece of glass separating them from us, and the sound of their howling all around us. These special effects sat less well with me, as such things did at Disneyland and Disney World, both of which I visited too late, as an adult.

Then we came upon the first life-size human figures. They are in a sunken, round, open "stage," and the scene is a caribou hunt. These eight early Pequot men and women, wearing splendid white animal furs, are stalking their prey with spears to the tune of more sound effects, winds and animals howling. And it's impressive, all right. Still, I found something unsettling about these high-class mannequins, something I could not immediately name.

Visitors are given Acoustiguides for the main event in a huge, open, multi-stage-like space that simulates the outdoors. Overhead, moving across the "sky," unseen Canadian geese are honking, faint at first, then louder, then faint again, just as it happens in reality. There is also the sound of rushing water. But sound effects are the least of it. Life-size models of people are everywhere, fifty-one figures in all, each based on sketches and measurements made of living ancestors of Pequots, stopped mid-task—cooking, hunting, farming, basket weaving—circa 1550. Listening to the Acoustiguide, I learned a lot and I liked the idea that I could push more buttons for an in-depth explanation, or not push them and move on. After the first couple of times, however, I didn't push. These deeper explanations are dramatizations. The "characters" speak. It's frozen theater, and we, the audience, are meant to be part of the scene, without speaking parts of our own. No, it's a giant diorama, and we visitors find ourselves inside it. So why did I find it off-putting? Isn't that where I've always wanted to be?

Actually, what I so cherished from my days at the old Bruce was not the sense of reality; it was the sense of unreality. Here it wasn't reality or unreality that I experienced: it was mere artifice, wax-museum-like artificiality. Duane Hanson sculptures without the sense of irony. And for that reason I never passed into a state of contemplation of the hidden world beyond mere appearances. At the Pequot Museum, appearance was all, as intended. What the designers may not have anticipated was that I felt no connection, having been distracted by my awe for craft and special effects. I left the museum impressed but unaltered.

How might a child have experienced it? I could not say. How would I experience the old Bruce as an adult? I thought I could answer that question, without a time machine. All I needed was to make a three-hour car ride to a natural-history museum that still looks about as it did at the turn of the century: the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Two friends who spent a lot of time in the Northeast Kingdom, as that part of the country is known, had told me about the Fairbanks and its astounding array of stuffed birds and mammals, all in a fin-de-siècle building right on Main Street in the quaint town. Franklin Fairbanks, president of the Fairbanks Scale Company, was a collector who regularly invited local residents into his St. Johnsbury home to see his curiosities. Eventually, though, in 1889, his guests outgrew the space, and he decided to establish a public museum.

Architect Lambert Packard designed the building in the Romanesque revival style of Henry Hobson Richardson. Boston's Trinity Church is one of Richardson's best-known works. The sandstone-faced Fairbanks, with its deep entrance archway and tower, exudes an ecclesiastical sensibility. Once a visitor is inside, the feeling intensifies under the vaulted, wood-paneled ceiling. I honestly wouldn't have been surprised to hear organ music playing. On one side of the Great Hall are the birds and mammals of Vermont lined up in a yards-long series of glass cases; on the other side, a matching length of cases featuring those of the rest of the world. The collection includes 131 species of hummingbirds alone. The animals are no less impressive, ranging in size from a polar bear rearing menacingly on its hind legs, to an ermine with its delicate prey, a tiny mouse, arranged in its mouth in such a way that the piece of taxidermy really does pass, inexplicably, from craft to art.

And, I'm happy to report, I did easily fall back into my childhood mode as Bob and I and our two friends toured the nearly empty museum that day. But did I say nearly empty? Yes. And for that reason, I came away realizing that the Fairbanks is a period piece—itself a veritable museum of a museum, emptiness and all. Indeed, one of the reasons why I enjoyed it so much may have been that I had not been in such an empty museum since childhood, when the Bruce was a kind of sacred clubhouse to me. How quiet it was, how conducive to concentration and to that mutual dreaming that I used to experience with Maureen! Similarly, I remember being able to feel much more connectedness in church on an extracurricular "visit" after school, when St. Mary's was empty, than I ever did at obligatory Mass on Sunday, when it was so easy to become distracted by all the coughing, sneezing, and shifting of posteriors on the pews in front of me.

But an empty church is a church in trouble, if not financially, then spiritually; and no public museum, with or without a substantial endowment, can afford to risk that kind of obscurity either. If tax dollars are being used, it isn't fair; the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Nor was the old indiscriminate shoot-and-stuff-as-you-please approach of Howes and his fellow explorers "fair" to the species they brought home from the bush, many of them now endangered or extinct.

In the end, then, although I do miss the old Bruce and its peculiar charms, I realize now that nobody should try to duplicate it, or the Fairbanks. Their day is done. I'm just sometimes sorry to see what our day has wrought: the banishment of the small, personal vision (yes, even the quirky ones) in favor of the corporate model.

Maybe that's why auctions and antique shows seem to appeal to me more these days than many museums do. At those venues there's still a congenial hodgepodge, without officious labeling; and sometimes the actual collector is on hand to answer your questions. And of course you can touch the stuff, even buy it, if you like.

The auction where I bought the fish diorama was in Greenwich, where Bob and I had come for a week to help my widower father empty the family house. Having sorted through nearly fifty years of accumulated possessions and hauled away most of it in my Uncle Dan's big green 1973 Pontiac Catalina—itself a candidate for the dump—we were ready for a little night-time diversion.

We'd seen dioramas for sale in the past, but not such a big one. They aren't a standard auction or antique show item for the simple reason that they were never a standard household item. So they're in that category of things that are rare but not necessarily precious. It's my guess that this one did not come out of a museum, at least not a public one, but I can imagine it in somebody's private museum, as, in fact, it is again.

When we got the diorama home to Andover, we put it on top of our upright piano, where it just clears the ceiling. We have a lot of other antiques in our house, but the diorama always elicits comments from visitors. More than one of them has turned to me and asked, "What do you think of it?"—as if Bob were the only one of us crazy enough to crave a diorama.

So far my reply has been a smile, but to myself I say that the piece is more than a curiosity. In my private thoughts I call it "my favorite object." That was the topic I used to give my classes of ninth and tenth graders, when I taught writing for half a dozen years. My theory, repeatedly proven, was that these little (500-word) compositions would quickly tell me about my students' inner lives, because the objects they chose were always personally revealing. With subsequent assignments, I would have to give them numerous examples of what I wanted; this assignment they grasped instantly. The only trouble for some of them was deciding among a number of objects or being unsure if a lost or stolen object qualified. Could something that they no longer possessed still be "favorite"?

I always said yes to that question, knowing that what is out of reach can be more meaningful than what is close at hand, provided it has synecdochical properties. It must, in other words, be a part that stands for the whole—an emblem, a symbol of a world—in the case of many of the student choices, a lost world, often unrecoverable.

I consider the fish diorama a representative of a lost world of mine. I admit now what I've known all along: I will not be returning to that place again.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks to Susan Richardson of The Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich; Richard Hart, Local History Librarian at the Greenwich Library; Interlibrary Loan at Memorial Hall Library, Andover, Massachusetts; Pyke Johnson; and especially Sarah Morris.