The painting I stole for Imogen Linny, Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam, arrived to the Glace Museum, here in Halifax, on September 5, 1938. I had left my room in the Lord Nelson Hotel at 6:45, and gotten to work at 7 a.m. in order to help my curator, Mr. E. S. Connaught, install a new exhibition, "Eight Paintings from Holland." Mr. Connaught did not go in for lofty titles, the way they did in some museums.

We set to work unpacking the crates. The Dutch all got Room C, the Margaret Glace Memorial Room, named after the founder's wife. To me, it was a mystery why Mr. Connaught chose to put a painting here or there. He asked me to hang Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam on the south wall between windows, where you could glimpse Halifax Harbour. He must have had an intuition for that painting in that spot, because when it was on the wall, he said, "Perfect."

In the Glace Museum, there are only the large rooms, A and C, both 18' x 22', and Room B, 8' x 21', which is more a connecting hallway. Though Room B has a certain importance, because it is where the permanent collection resides. There is a bevy of watercolors and oils by Canadian artists. Among them is a trapper's shack, a totem pole above a rocky beach, a blind cellist, and a very unhappy-looking nude. And there is also an oil, 18" X 12", The Glace Museum, which was painted by Simon Glace, the museum's founder. The scale is off in this painting, I noticed. The schooner masts meant to be in the background--the wharf is actually four blocks from the museum, which is on Agricola Street--seem to jut directly up from the roof. Otherwise, it is a nice painting.

I always tried to study up, learn enough about our new paintings to answer basic questions. But I was a guard, not a tour guide. That was Miss Helen Delbo's job. She also taught Art History at Dalhousie University.

All that October, I was the guard farthest from the front door, in Room C. The other guard was my uncle, Edward Russet. He worked in Room A. We could both see the entirety of Room B, so shared jurisdiction.

When all was said and done, "Eight Paintings from Holland" took two hours. After we got all the Dutch on the walls, Mr. Connaught clutched his hands behind his back and toured the room. This was a ritual of his. He stood in the middle, next to the bench donated by Mrs. Yvonne Glace, niece of the founder and herself an amateur watercolorist. She did not have work in the permanent collection. Mr. Connaught revolved slowly, chewing his lip. Bifocals on, then off, then on again. He is a tall man, with completely white hair. A week earlier he had turned fifty; I had gotten him a tie pin, which was what I could afford on my salary. When deep in concentration like this, he had the tendency to rub the sides of his head and jaw, as if kneading bread dough. My uncle could do an expert imitation of this. Mr. Connaught has a tired, intelligent face, thick eyebrows also turned white, and can sometimes display a look of genuine bemusement. Studying the museum walls, he often puffed out his cheeks, sighed with sudden torment, and said, "No--lower that one. Put that one over there," and the like. So, now he appraised the Dutch. But in the end, he left the paintings exactly where he had me first put them. "Let me get used to this arrangement for a few days," he said. "I'm slightly troubled by the positioning of the still lifes. Too many still lifes on the same wall can be deadening. But it's fine for now." He walked over to me, put his hands on my shoulders, closed his eyes, opened them again. "Therefore, DeFoe," he said, "these are your new charges." As if it completed a formal agreement that I would die on behalf of any and all the paintings, we solemnly shook hands. "By the way," he said, "Mrs. Boardman won't be attending the bookstore today. She's quite ill, I'm told. You'll have to sell postcards." Then he returned to his office, just behind the small bookstore, to the left as you walked in the front door. The door had a brass ram's-head knocker; before 1920, when the museum opened to much ribbon-cutting fanfare, it was Simon Glace's private mansion.

About 9:15, Mr. Connaught left for a fund-raising lecture across the harbor in Dartmouth. I unlocked the doors to the public at 10 a.m. The way he or I did every morning, except Mondays, when the museum was closed.

My uncle stumbled in about 11:00, maybe 11:30. His over-all dilapidation was more familiar than alarming. He had on rumpled black trousers, a white shirt, not tucked in, sleeves rolled up unevenly. Black shoes, no socks, and it was quite chilly out that morning. His extra guard uniform, pants and suit coat, I mean, still on their hanger, where the hotel laundress, Mrs. Klein, had put them, was slung over his shoulder. He had puffy, bloodshot eyes. His face looked swollen. His entire countenance was racked with drink and insomnia. Despite how wrecked he looked, here again was the inescapable fact of how handsome he was. With unkempt, but richly thick black hair, like a young man's. He was forty-eight years old. And despite the stubble beard, slumped shoulders, it was uncanny how much he looked like my father. My father had been the elder by two years.

My uncle glanced around at the new exhibition. "I'm nearly twice as old as this boy here," he announced, more to the Dutch than to me. "And look at his scowl of disapproval, will you?" He was slurring. "I have lived life tenfold what my nephew has, or ever will."

He then laughed off his insult and condemnation, all of it made worse because it was so true. He walked up to me, cuffed my chin, embraced me, falling heavily against my chest. "Oh, come now, DeFoe," he said. "You know how I talk."

"Mr. Connaught's over in Dartmouth," I said. "He won't be back until after lunch. Better go into the custodian's room and clean up a little, Uncle Edward. Take a nap."

"I see the Dutch have invaded, eh?" he said. "I'd intended to help you get them on the walls. But Natalie forgot to set the alarm."

"Who's Natalie?"

He studied me a moment. "No matter how bad I might look today," he said, "nephew, you look worse. I mean, sure, you're all neatly packaged, as per usual. Ironed your tie, and all that. But what happened to you last night? Oh, oh, oh, Imogen, was it? Wouldn't let you sleep with her again. Another night of howling at the moon, I suppose. We'll discuss it later. We'll have an old-fashioned uncle-and-nephew talk."

Locking my arm in his, I guided my uncle to the custodian's room, located next to Mr. Connaught's office but with a door leading directly in and out of Room A. He lay right down on the cot. The room also had a deep washbasin with a movable spigot. Mops were upright in a bucket, scrub brushes hung on a cork board. I kept an iron, bought with my own money, in the cupboard. A wooden ironing board with an asbestos coverlet and collapsible legs was behind the door. A radio was on the shelf. The custodian, Mr. Tremain, came in three nights a week to mop floors, wash the inside windows, dust the frames, tidy up the office and bookstore, clean the washrooms. Weather permitting, on Monday mornings he got out a ladder, bucket, and sponges and washed the outside windows.

Before I could bring a glass of water to him, my uncle was asleep. I closed the door and went back to Room C.

Had Mr. Connaught seen him come in late that day, he might well have cornered my uncle and shouted, "Tardy!"--a dunce-cap child's word, my uncle called it. Mr. Connaught had reprimanded my uncle in public any number of times. One day, my uncle might be ten minutes late, the next day not show up until noon, then immediately take his half-hour lunch. One time, he began his workday at 1:30 p.m. and said to me, "I just took my lunch, or else I would've been in at one sharp." There was just no predicting. He would be absolutely punctual two, three, even four weeks in a row. Though more than three weeks of punctuality inevitably resulted in lots of truancies--another of Mr. Connaught's words. In 1937, my uncle was tardy every day in January. One day mid-January, he did not come in at all. At 5:00, Mr. Connaught emerged from his office and said, "No doubt Edward was just too worn out from his--how does he put it--amorous investigations. With a hotel employee, as usual, isn't it? A Matilda, or Isabel, isn't it? Or Altoon, wasn't it? He doesn't stray far from home." My uncle also lived in the Lord Nelson Hotel. I was in Room 22, my uncle in Room 34. One floor apart.

The odd thing was, when Mr. Connaught dressed my uncle down, his face up close to my uncle's, announcing, "You're docked a full week's pay, every last penny!"--still, my uncle simply took his medicine, bowed, and said, "Very well, my liege," or some such extravagance, then repaired to his assigned room. "Since I earned and expected such punishment," he said after one such drubbing, "why lose my temper over it?"

By the time, in 1936, I began as a guard, my uncle had already worked thirteen years for Mr. Connaught. He had hired Edward after being curator merely a week. Before that, my uncle had worked in the baggage room of the Halifax train station. The only other previous guard, Trevor Salk, whom I met once, had retired to Peggy's Cove. Anyway, from early on, I sensed that Mr. Connaught and my uncle liked each other, and that that fact made for mutual irritation. My uncle took advantage of Mr. Connaught's tolerance. Any fool could see that. In turn, Mr. Connaught seemed to have no limit of tolerance toward my uncle. So there it was. Their give-and-take. Or, as regarded my uncle, his take and take and take. In the museum I think that my uncle's most desperate satisfaction was to flaunt tardiness and not get sacked. To flaunt tardiness in order to prove he would not get sacked. That is my best guess. By and large, I would say that my uncle was a good museum guard. Though he would hiss--I mean a loud Hsssss!--and shake his head back and forth at a museumgoer for no reason the museumgoer, or I, for that matter, could detect. Quite often, on some whim or other, he would retreat to the custodian's room, leave the door slightly ajar, then turn the radio up full volume. I could easily name a dozen such behaviors. At dinner one night in the hotel dining room--I had been a museum guard for over a year--my uncle said, "I don't much like working around people. Or paintings, for that matter. But what's my choice in a museum? I just do my best." Mostly, I felt that you had to shrug off his quirks, work around his irritabilities, try and ignore his violations, even when they were not at all comical. After all, he had all those years of museum guard experience. He had gotten me the job. I had learned a lot from my uncle.

I know this is leaping ahead. But as it still pertains to my uncle and Mr. Connaught, I'll tell it. Late one morning, roughly six months after I was hired, Mr. Connaught beckoned me into his office. He sat behind his desk. I sat in a chair directly across. "As far as your uncle is concerned," he said, "I know you've already seen much for yourself. With a colleague like Edward, you'd have to be blind not to. Seen his rather personal interpretation of how to carry out his guard duties. And I'm not sure what he has, or hasn't, told you about his years at the Glace. For example, did you know that Edward single-handedly looked after the museum, for the two weeks I was in St. Rita's Hospital recuperating, never mind from what?"

"No, sir. I did not know that."

"Of course, later I found out that Edward had simply locked the doors, put up a sign that said CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, and taken a paid holiday. Spent I have no idea how. I was not amused. Especially in my weakened condition. After a very difficult night's thinking, I came to see it as the action of a man who knew his own limitations. You see, to Edward, the prospect of being responsible for the museum on his own must've simply overwhelmed him. Not to mention, he was drinking with great dedication in those days. I believe he's cut back a bit, hasn't he?"

"Some nights."

"Back then, we employed but the one guard. That was Edward. When the Board of Trustees was informed what he'd done--one of them had dropped by midday for a visit, surprised, to put it mildly, to see the doors locked--well, I was put on probation for a year, Edward having been my hire. Very much a public humiliation. What's more, I had to argue fulsomely against Edward's being sacked."

"Maybe I shouldn't ask, but why did you keep him on?"

"Why do I, that's the question, isn't it? And right to the point, DeFoe, hiring you was my way of keeping Edward employed. Because we simply had to have another guard. Because Edward, paid full-time, you see, is at best half a guard. I mean by that, he's so often occupied somewhere outside the museum during working hours. Edward and I have what may be called a truce. We have an ongoing truce. Yes, I'm comfortable with that word. You have to first have a battle to come to a truce, now, don't you; in our case, hundreds of battles. Perhaps in a strange way, it's brought us closer. It's not a friendship. It's a--vigilance. As a museum guard, Edward--well, I'd started out with higher expectations. Let me put it that way. I'd expected him to practice the basic courtesies. To stay alert. To not quote Ovid Lamartine at whim to the museum's visitors. The radio personality Ovid Lamartine, whom Edward is so obsessed with and dedicated to. And to not eavesdrop and then take personal umbrage at what he hears. If Edward overhears an opinion about a painting he disagrees with--have you noticed?--he's quite likely to shout, `Stupidity!' Oh yes, that, and worse.

--From The Museum Guard, by Howard Norman. © August 1998 , Howard Norman used by permission.