Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder Read Online Free PDF Page A

Younger—who, let’s face it, was a kind of bumpkin, not very sophisticated—and he got Owen the Younger to write a deed of gift to him, Billius, into his will. Billius was a lawyer. As the years passed, Owen the Younger and his wife, Hester, began to sense Billius’s true nature and they tried to retract the deed but it had been written in such a way as to be unrevocable. After Owen the Younger’s death, his wife, Hester, got into a terrible confrontation with Billius—she was trying to deed the collection over to the Nebraska Historical Society instead—and it all ended up with her drowned in her backyard pool under highly suspicious circumstances.”
    When did he say this was?
    â€œOh, this would have been in the late fifties. Anyway, so the collection went to Billius. Only, he quickly lost interest in it—I guess it turned out not to have the importance,or anyway the financial potential, he first saw in it. So then—well, I get a little hazy here, I’ve never been quite sure how it got from Billius to Mary Rose Cannon, or anyway to her family. I think maybe she was his granddaughter or something—she’s from Nebraska too, or maybe Texas. Anyway, though, she was a person whom we’d known indirectly for some time, and then about ten years ago she sort of gave the material over to us. A nice woman, although we’ve kind of lost touch. But anyway, that was the start.”
    It was also, as I would subsequently come to recognize, a quintessentially Wilsonian narrative: ornate, almost profuse, in some of its details, but then suddenly fogging over, particularly as one gets closer to the present. Such stories usually both perform and require a kind of leap.
    What about the stink ants?
    â€œWell, those we first heard about, let me see, I think it was on a PBS special actually, and we immediately realized we wanted to include a specimen in our collection. However, tracking one down proved incredibly difficult. None of the usual outlets had ever heard of them or could lay their hands on one. Finally we tried the Carolina Biological Supply Company in Portland, Oregon.”
    Carolina Biological Supply … 
in Portland, Oregon?
    â€œYeah,” Wilson assured me. “And that’s where we ran into Richard Whitten.” He thereupon launched into another byzantine saga, this one about a certain phenomenally gifted bug amateur who had his own spectacular collections of beetles and butterflies but had all kinds of other qualities as well (he was a great lover of song andsinging and had had a lifelong ambition to sing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and one day just piled his family into a van and headed to Salt Lake City, where he rented a tux and then secretly insinuated himself into the choir during one of their concerts—all kinds of other stories), and he was the only one anywhere who proved capable of laying his hands on any stink ant samples, and he kept the museum regularly supplied.
    And how, for instance (by now I’d started choosing my words carefully) had Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madalena Delani, um, entered his life?
    â€œWell, I first came upon Sonnabend when we were trying to expand an exhibit we used to have on memory. Those three empty portholes in the back of the museum—I don’t know if you noticed them. Well, they used to contain an exhibit contrasting the memory theories of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. I myself tend to be pretty forgetful, so memory’s always been an interest of mine. For instance, Plato suggests somewhere that memory is like an aviary inside your head, with all these birds flying around, such that you might reach in for a ringdove and accidentally pull out a turtledove instead. And we represented that through a wax hand holding a stuffed bird. Anyway, we were planning to expand that exhibit with a fourth porthole, evoking the work of HermannEbbinghaus, who was a great turn-of-the-century German