This turned out to be Ellen Dunham, who followed up with a December letter to the editor of the Camperdene Daily Journal, saying, "I've been toying with the idea of giving a gift to the staff at The Museum of the Year 2012 as a token of my appreciation for their hard work, cheerfulness, and knowledge. A museum is more than its contents. It's the museum staffer who can introduce you to a delightful artist or collections, opening up your world. So let my holiday gift to the museum staff be this public expression of thanks. And may a chorus of readers of this letter join in the next time they visit the Museum of the Year 2012."

At this time, Neil was wrapping up his term as chairman of the Regional Museums Coalition, and he told his colleagues he'd enjoyed not only the discussions of regional programs and services, but also the discussions of broader goals and trends within the mueum profession, the sharing how they'd been coping with difficulties, keeping up with swift-paced change.

The next evening, a policeman came to the library in pursuit of a young man who'd received either a stay-away order or a restraining order from a Massachusetts judge and had violated it, purportedly by stalking a certain young lady -- in the museum. Lizzie Cunningham had entered Neil's office the day before, and had excitedly told him of there having been a young lady in the museum that afternoon who'd complained to Fran Micheline that a boy had been "waiting for her" with intentions of harming her.

Neil could not trust Lizzie Cunningham. He was very wary of Lizzie Cunningham's entering a room to speak to Neil alone without another person present. The lesson had been driven home to him that he was not to mention Lizzie's peculiarities in behavior to anyone, else she and her father and her father's friends would use their own words to prove Neil had a problem with her, and that this problem Neil had with her was the problem, and not any behavior or attitude of hers.

Neil had listened in silence to Lizzie's report. Lizzie had concluded by telling him about the differences between a court issued "stay away" order and court issued "restraining order". Her giving that lecture, which went on at considerable length, had made no sense to Neil. Finally, politely, he had thanked her. He'd said he would do what he felt was appropriate to the matter -- on learning more. Lizzie had left the room clearly disgruntled.

Neil had then phoned the police to make his own inquiry about "stay away" orders and "restraining orders" (both were court ordered, with the latter applied in domestic abuse cases, the former applied for all other cases of keeping particular people from harming other particular people). He had then spoken with Fran Micheline and asked that she write a short note of explanation to me as to what was the matter, i.e., what had occurred. Fran had said there was nothing to write. It was just a girl who'd said a guy was in the library who shouldn't be. She said she'd turned away, and when she turned back again, the girl had left. That was that, she said.

The next afternoon, Fran entered Neil's office with this same girl, who, she said, was afraid to leave the museum because she was sure she would get beat up. Neil asked the girl if there had been a formal court "stay away" or restraining order issued. She said no. Neil asked the girl if she wanted him to have the police come. She said yes. Neil phoned the police. He went upstairs with the girl and waited for the officer to get there. The officer arrived shortly, interviewed the girl, escorted her out of the building, and took her home. And that, as Fran liked to say, was that.

At noon, on December 21st, Friends President Nick Wentworth appeared at the library with a high white chef's hat and seven huge salad bowls and treated the museum's staff to a surprise "Appreciation Luncheon" -- which infuriated Wheel Barrow, as nobody had run it by him first. Anyway, while Neil could, he had a great time at the celebration, cherishing the high spirits, laughter, and good conversation in the staff room. Then Fran Micheline at the Circulation desk phoned down and asked Neil to please come up to the front entrance of the museum, immediately, to talk with an angry visitor.

The museum-goer was visibly upset. She was shaking. Neil sat down with her at a nearby table and asked her what was wrong. She said she'd never been treated so poorly by anyone. She said she couldn't believe the rude behavior of one of the museum's Circulation people. Neil asked her which person she was referring to She didn't know the name, and didn't want to point her finger at anyone, but she felt strongly that "someone should know how rudely her fourteen year old daughter had been treated by this person" whom she described as "tall, thin, pimply, with long, silky, mudbrown hair."

This was Lizzie Cunningham, certainly.

"This girl is probably efficient, it is obvious she is businesslike, but her treatment of human beings is, to say the least, very, very poor." The woman said the "other librarians are always pleasant and accomodating, but not this one."

Neil assured the woman he would do what he could to prevent the recurrence of such behavior. He told her a note from her stating her particular complaint would be helpful. She said she wanted to remain anonymous -- "I don't want to cause any trouble. I just felt someone should know about this individual's bad attitude." Neil said he could appreciate that, apologized, and thanked her for speaking up.

At the end of the evening, after closing the museum and setting Hayden Brown into gear to do his night rounds, Neil considered writing a reprimand for Lizzie's file, but balked. He'd been sternly warned by Barrow about what could and could not be put into a staffer's file. Here they were, living in the midst of an information explosion and there Neil sat, tearing up the jottings he'd scrawled while listening to the patron's complaints about the "tall, thin, pimply" girl "with silky mudbrown hair."

Neil looked in vain for any other documentation in Lizzie's file that could show the drift and pattern of her behavior. He knew numerous papers had already been lifted from the file. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Neil noticed, atop one of several paper piles on my desk, a formal patron "Request for Reconsideration of a Museum Acquisition." This he now took in hand.

A few weeks before, Neil had received just such a request, submitted by one Mrs. Marsha Wallace, which called for the removal of a controversial oil color picture painted by Wilburt Hayley in the year 1912. "We support," Neil had written, "the Freedom to View Foundation's principle that one of the musem's roles in a democracy is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, providing a wide range of artifacts, ensuring that individuals have access to artworks without others determining for them what they 'should' want to view or study. Our selection policy states, 'The Museum of the Year 2012 strives to provide artifacts, exhibits, and programs for adults, juveniles, and children according to historical relevance and current popular demand'." Neil had noted he could share in Mrs. Wallace's reluctance to recommend the painting to anyone in terms of "good taste" but, as a professional museum curator, Neil was "duty bound to provide a wide array of materials to a diverse public."

Now this new "Request for Reconsideration of a Museum Acquisition" was on Neil's desk, submitted by a gentleman in the town, Richard Muller, calling for the removal of an artwork "that certainly must offend a great many." The sculpture, titled The Artist's Mistress, was obviously meant to provoke, right from the get-go. In 1912, the Viennese sculptor Heinrich Schimmel had divided a human form into several segments and re-assembled the pieces most curiously and (of course) provocatively.

The next morning, Neil went in to work earlier than usual, in order to contemplate a reasoned response to Mr. Muller's request. Muller had maintained the sculpture The Artist's Mistress was "deeply misogynist," and had urged the curator to remove it post-haste from the museum. He had pointed out, rightly, that the Museum of the Year 2012 was the "only museum" in that part of Massachusetts that owned a work by "this rotten Austrian junkman," Heinrich Schimmel. If Neil struggled against meanness and madness (and he did), advocating reason and honorable conduct (this too he did), then he must also want this mean, mad sculpture to go away. But censoring it was just an invitation to worse outrage. Not cops, columnists, librarians, or curators ought to lock up opinions.

It wasn't in Neil's hands to decide. It was written in museum policy that it was up to the Board to deliberate and decide whether to keep or withdraw any acquisition. As if it mattered ultimately anyway -- Neil knew by now that this issue would be just so much fuel for yet another fire -- a trustee battle, a feud, a brouhaha. Mr. Muller would get no justice. Neil knew the entrenched, ridiculous, wild trustee donnybrook antics and mayhem would devour all.

At the Trustee meeting, Ben Mulvane delayed taking any action, insisting that Neil should first provide the board with an explanation of how the sculpture The Artist's Mistress came to be in The Museum of the Year 2012 in the first place. For safekeeping, until the problem could be resolved, Ben had moved the piece into one of the storage areas.

Neil went wading through a knee-high maze of recklessly strewn artifacts and ephemera -- recent acquisitions trucked in by at least six unidentified donors -- sheet music for Mahalia Jackson's "God's Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares" and "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"; correspondence between Mahalia Jackson and Isaac "Ike" Hockenhull, "Ike" trying to persuade Jackson to audition for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre production of "Hot Mikado" by Gilbert and Sullivan ("Nobody can touch your voice. You've got a future in singing. It's not right for you to throw it away hollering in churches. Woman, you want to nickel and dime all your life?"); guitar strings, drumsticks, screws, nuts, bolts, dice, rubber bands, and a tambourine that had belonged to the composer John Cage; a pair of tapdance shoes that had belonged to Gene Kelly; a pair of ice-skates that had belonged to Olympic gold-wining figure skater Sonja Henie of Norway; a poster from the Chicago Repertory Theater noting, in small print, the appearance of one Studs Terkel; a poster advertising Jose Ferrer's starring on Broadway in "Cyrano De Bergerac"; a poster advertising the movie "Blow-up," directed by Michelangelo Antonioni; a letter from Truman Nelson to W.E.B. Du Bois regarding Harvard professor and literary critic F. O. Matthiesen's having helped Nelson break into print (Matthiesen, who'd been called to testify before a McCarthy committee, had declined and jumped out of a window to his death); a frying pan, two egg-beaters, and a large wooden spoon that had belonged to Pasadena, California chef and cookbook author Julia Child; rocks and shells collected by David Brower (conservationist, a recipient of the Blue Planet Prize awarded by the Asahi Glass Foundation of Japan, the richest environmental prize in the world) from his travels in Kings Canyon, the North Cascades, the Redwoods, Dinosaur National Monument, the Yukon, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, New Mexico's Shiprock, Cape Cod, Fire Island, and Point Reyes, Olympic National Park, San Gorgonio, Mount Waddington (Canada), Thyangboche, and the Himalayan mountains; a souvenir miniature Statue of Liberty; and a pair of souvenir miniature Port Authority World Trade Center Twin Towers accompanied by a photograph of the architect who designed them, Minoru Yamasaki, standing not in front of the Towers but rather (for reasons not stated anywhere on the twenty-eight pages of accompanying documents describing Yamasaki's ouvre) in front of the Empire State Building; the headlights of the car the painter Jackson Pollock had died in, as well as seven cans of paint left unopened in his garage at the time of his death; clippings from The New York Times and several other American newspapers announcing the death, in World War I, on the battlefield at Verdun, of Franz Marc; a painter's palette that had belonged to the German artist Emil Schumacher; the sculpture The Artist's Mistress by the Viennese artisan Heinrich Schimmel....

Someone had sandpapered the acquisition number off. Neil could find no record of it. He had no idea how it had come to be displayed in the Museum. When the trustees met, they voted unanimously to let Neil deaccession the item or reaccession the item as he pleased -- "restore it, stash it, or trash it," Wheel Barrow allowed.

"I will begin with an apology," Neil wrote to Mr. Muller. "I appreciate your point of view concerning the statue The Artist's Mistress," he wrote, "which you requested we remove from our collection. I am hopeful you will understand and honor my position as a museum professional. This work, good or bad, will not be withdrawn. Our having an artwork in our collection does not mean that we endorse what's in it. It does mean we endorse the free flow of cultural information. One of the museum's roles in a democracy is to provide a wide range of materials so that people have access to culture without our determining for them what they 'should' want or 'ought to' reject."

Apparently, this just slayed him.

Ten days later, Neil read, in the Obituaries column of the Camperdene Daily Journal, that Mr. Muller, 83, had died. Neil's first thought, when he saw that, was that this was not the same man as Richard Muller, the museum visitor. Neil inquired of the Funeral Home, and learned that it was indeed him. He was told the Rabbi, in his remarks at the funeral, had made mention of Richard's enjoyment of the Museum of the Year 2012, and of his having requested that a provocative sculpture housed there be removed.

Neil was sad to learn of Mr. Muller's death. He was glad he had said, in his letter to Mr. Muller, that he believed Muller would understand and honor his position as a professional curator and would know how sincerely he respected him and appreciated his concern. Richard Muller had written back to Neil, saying, "Yes, it is better people should view such dreck and make up their own minds."

Neil now put into a frame a handwritten note sent to him by an anonymous scribbler the year before, and he set it on his desk in plain sight: "The world is divided into people who are right."