The Saturday Club

Amalia arrived at the Pejepscot Historical Association and Museum (PHAM for short, as many called it) at 10 A.M. on a Wednesday. That was the time when it opened, but staff could come in an hour earlier if they were working on a project that required freedom from inquiring patrons looking for things like a deed to a house from 1889 or documentation regarding a quilt donated to a clergyman in nearby Harpswell when he arrived in the area. Amalia didn’t need the alone-time because she was mechanically cataloguing and dating the items in the files for The Saturday Club. However, her interested in the materials was far from mechanical, and for a very good reason. She had been working on the project for over a week and had developed a rhythm for the archiving procedure for the documents. The hardest part was not getting distracted by her desire to stop and read every scrap of paper in the files, down to the random notes scribbled on the backs of invoices or telegrams.

The files. What were they, actually? They were papers that spanned forty years of women’s activities, both fascinating and boring, mundane and forward-thinking, individual events and agendas that were planned a year in advance. Of course planning in advance for events in New England, particularly in Maine, was not easy, given that between 1895 and 1935, weather, health, war, and various other things could not be predicted. Maine, after all, was quite a few miles north of Boston and it was in fact quite amazing that The Saturday Club had been able to organize so well. After all, the general idea was that women - the ones who were not French-speaking immigrants who were doing slave labor in the town’s spinning mill on the noble Androscoggin River - sat around, drank tea, and ate cake. Their lives were naturally spent talking about husbands, children, the most recent flood, etc. Domestic stuff, the things women liked to do, had to do.

That was not what the files were about. That was also pre 1960s thinking. The diligent recording of minutes, expenditures, communication with visitors from Boston and further away, had been revealing to Amalia what women were really doing, what really interested them. She had felt a thrill when discovering how wives whose husbands were on the faculty at Bowdoin College, whose doors were only open to male students until far into the 20th century, would take advantage of speakers on the campus and lure them into their ‘ladies’ circles’. The same wives had reading groups and organized lectures with visual presentations employing technology their academic husbands used. The wives and single women also staged Greek tragedies for the town, in public venues. The women acting in the plays had no fear of representing male roles. It wasn’t called cross-dressing then. Amalia surmised that few people knew how many spouses were tracking the lectures they were not allowed to attend until - gasp! - 1971, even while women like the Walker sisters Harriet and Sophia were donating money (their uncle’s money, presumably) to commission the college’s excellent art museum or were organizing to help build a real community library for the use of all Brunswick residents.

Some of the paper items consisted of clippings from the local newspaper, The Sentinel, and letterhead paper from performers’ agents. There were minutes that included references to other women’s groups, to the famous but quirky Chautauqua Movement, to educational reforms, to women’s suffrage - just about any major issue was worth addressing in the meetings of The Saturday Club. Amalia was well aware that the documentation was very valuable, both for women’s studies and for the history of Brunswick. Everybody at PHAM knew she was ecstatic to have been assigned to the archiving of a group that had ties to a surprising number of performing venues and other women’s organization, in Maine and beyond. She was working with real enthusiasm, inspired by the ladies she would never know, wondering how they had shrugged off the labels of golden cake-making and painters of shabby watercolors of park scenes. She knew somebody should write a book on the club, which had only received brief mention in a couple of books. She might even write herself.

On the day in question, it was pouring, damp and chilly like only the midcoast of Maine can get, and Amalia expected to be drinking numerous cups of hot tea while she huddled by the feeble heater on the second floor of the drafty museum. She stepped inside the squeaking door with its ancient, rusty screen, left her rain footwear behind the door, and put on the shoes she kept near the entry so as not to dirty the well-worn hardwood floors more than necessary. After that she went up the dark, oiled-oak staircase that had a hand railing on the right and a device for ascending by chair attached to the wall. (Somebody must have needed assistance getting upstairs while the old building was still a private residence.) At the landing on the second floor, there was a short open hallway to the right, with three storerooms adjoining it. Each small room was flanked with shelves full of artifacts and had a medium-sized rectangular table in the center. There was a crook-necked lamp on each table that could be moved up and down for better viewing of sometimes faded texts. The staff would claim the rooms with their tables to work on cataloguing or to monitor patrons who wanted to do research. Nobody except Amalia ever entered her space. As a result, she was always free to leave her materials on the table when she left for the day. Yesterday she had left one box with its manila folders, the top flipped back and a scrap of paper inserted partway through. She had been doing this for a week.

The box was gone. When Amalia checked the others for The Saturday Club that she knew were still on the shelves, those too were gone. Four boxes. A veritable treasure. Vanished.

Thelma and Louise (not their real names) were two volunteers who resented the fact that Amalia got paid and they worked for free. Not that they did the same type of work, but they spent time in the same building and helped reshelve artifacts, so in their opinion it was the same as if they were trained archivists, which meant they definitely should be getting some monetary compensation for their efforts. 

They stood off to one side and giggled at Amalia’s distress and her frantic search of the shelves.

Why would somebody remove the boxes? Amalia considered all the options. Maybe PHAM was having its holdings digitized. It was a slow process and the items had been transported to the Bowdoin College Special Collections where a sophisticated copier did the work. Maybe they had had a last-minute slot for copying holdings not in the Bowdoin Library, and somebody had rushed the boxes there.

Maybe somebody had come in to clean and had tossed the box left on the table into the garbage. Of course that did not explain the disappearance of the other three boxes that had been removed from the shelf. Note: All the boxes were heavy, and very full with tightly-packed papers.

Maybe Thelma and Louise had hidden the boxes full of such important information either to fluster Amalia or get her in trouble.

Maybe some other researcher had turned up and wanted to work with the materials, so they had been transferred to another part of PHAM.

Whatever the explanation, Amalia could not work without her artifacts and documents. She would also be in serious trouble if she had to report that they had gone missing. Thelma and Louise kept looking at her with sideways glances, a few pointings of the fingers, and the smirk of the incompetent. Amalia tried to keep them in her line of sight to see if their body language might provide any clues to where the boxes had gone. She considered going up to them outright and demanding they return the boxes, so certain was she that they had removed the missing items in order to put her job in jeopardy. However, she knew that accusing them when she had no concrete evidence was a dangerous move and could well get her labeled as arrogant at best, or sued for discrimination at worst, so she chose to watch and wait for a sign that the two women were guilty of the theft.

Days went by and Amalia busied herself with other tasks, but it would soon be time to provide a report on The Saturday Club. The cataloguing should already have been uploaded onto the PHAM website and only the description of the overall contents, size of the collection, and its historical significance, needed to be written up, according to the plan laid out by the director.. It should have been easy to prepare, and the writing should have only taken a day of good concentration.

Except the files were gone. All of them. All four big boxes with years and years of letters, minutes, annual programs, event posters - every last thing the ladies of The Saturday Club had documented for four decades - were gone. The loss of information was immense, because it is that type of thing - the recording of daily, weekly, monthly activities and how they were organized, why those activities had been chosen - that helps us understand our past, get important glimpses in women’s lives that were infrequently available. No video game can even come close. All the while Thelma and Louise, not living up to their namesakes in that fantastic film - continued to steal sneaky glances at Amalia and snicker behind her back. They were enjoying her anguish to the fullest. She hadn’t actually told them about her dilemma, but they knew. They knew.

Was there any other explanation? The most logical one was the practical joke by two jealous volunteers, and it became necessary at last to force the perpetrators to show their hand. Maybe a little eavesdropping would reveal the hiding place as she whispered to one another. Or watching where they went in the old building. Some places were off limits to volunteers, so if they went where they weren’t supposed to go, it could mean they were checking to make sure the boxes were still safely stashed where Amalia couldn’t locate them.

None of this attentiveness bore any fruit. The boxes were just gone. Kind of like the popular novel by Gillian Somebody. Then it occurred to Amalia that they might have been loaned to another institution or historical society for an exhibit on women’s history. That must be it. She relaxed, even smiled for the first time in several days. Unfortunately, PHAM’s director, Lisa Mills, said that no materials had been shared with another institution in the past year. They might be getting a request in next month, but it had been a while since any had come in. Director Mills wondered why her senior archivist was interested in knowing. She should have been making a proposal to organize an exhibit in situ for Women’s History Month, with some of PHAM’s great artifacts. Would Amalia like to do that?

Meanwhile, Amalia was walking around the building like a ghost or a lost soul, some imaginary being keening for the objects of its desire. The longer she went without hearing they had been taken or mailed somewhere, and the longer she had to remain silent about the fact that so much history had just - poof! - gone up in smoke - the more she felt like it was surely her fault. She had not returned the box to the shelf, had not locked the room where she worked (although none of the workrooms seemed to have a key), she had talked about her excitement at reading through the many pages without considering that the wrong ears might be listening.

Finally, there was nothing to be done. Amalia hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night for the past week. She was not eating much and people had noticed she was under tremendous stress from her wan face and the circles under her eyes. It was time to ‘fess up, tell the director that valuable holdings of PHAM had disappeared on her watch (or lack thereof). The bad thing about that was that other items could have been vanishing as well, maybe for a long time. She shuddered at the thought, but steeled her nerves and asked to speak with the director after lunch.

When they met in the director’s office, they both sat on the same side of the bulky oak desk. Then the director smiled and with her left hand signaled a fairly large box sitting on the floor near the door. It hadn’t been opened yet, she explained, because it had just been delivered, and she would appreciate some help in lifting it onto the desk where it could be carefully slit open with a pair of scissors. Amalia was more or less numb to the box’s arrival, but she got the scissors and slid them through the taped edges. Then she flipped the four flaps open and saw crumpled brown paper, which she promptly removed. There were all - ALL! - the boxes pertaining to The Saturday Club. All four of them, looking like not a fragment of paper had been removed. 

Stuck into one of the boxes was a note that read:

Enclosed please find these things that have come from your storage shelves. They’re just a bunch of chatty ladies’[little tea parties and really pretty darn worthless. We took them, thinking they might bring a pretty penny at an auction or an antique dealer. Well, we were wrong. We can’t imagine why you’re holding onto them. 

We were going to throw them away, but finally decided just to return them to you so you can find a place to put this junk. 

Next time we’re going to aim for something that is more profitable. Some somebody wants.

Meanwhile, you really ought to install a better security system.