Free And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass Page A

history?Unusual for a guy, isn’t it?
Sometimes he suspects that what they mean is
Unusual for a guy who’s not gay
.
    Twice, before Jasper, Kit’s grandparents gave his mother, as a birthday present, a weekend in New York City. Her birthday is in November, so both times she chose the weekend adjoining Veterans Day, allowing her time to travel by bus. The first time, Kit was four or five; this was the first time his mother was away from him overnight—three nights at that. Nana let him eat foods his mother refused to buy: Cheetos, Froot Loops, Fresca, Devil Dogs. The conspiracy they shared (enhanced by the metabolic joy of so much sugar and salt) took the edge off his anxiety. Nana let him sleep in a cot next to the bed she shared with Papa.
    The second time, when Kit was eight, his mother took him along. That Friday was cold: flurries mottled the windows of their bus as they traveled south through Massachusetts, arriving in New York after dark. Kit’s first clear visual impression of the city was Port Authority, by far the largest enclosed space he had ever seen. A pigeon—indoors!—swooped back and forth over their heads as they made their way down several escalators and out toward the street.
    The taxi with its black interior; the long vertiginous sweep of the avenue carrying them forward, straight as a ruler; the chain of traffic lights unreeling rhythmically, red to green to yellow again and again, as far ahead of them as Kit could see through the plastic partition behind the driver; the tall brick house that claimed to be a hotel, the flowery room at the top of three long flights of stairs: every bit of it was new. Like snapshots tucked in an album, these experiences are still in sharp focus when Kit calls them up.
    His mother had tickets for two concerts and a musical play. One of the concerts was in a small theater, not much larger than the auditorium in Kit’s school, but the other one took place in a hall higher than it was wide, nearly as vast as the bus station. They sat in seats so far up that to look down toward the distant stage, at first, made Kit feel as if they must inevitably fall. Surely they would be sucked into the vortex by the pull of all the bodies tiered beneath them. Leaning even slightly forward made him feel dizzy. But when the music from the orchestra rose, with astonishing clarity, it seemed to still the spectators all at once, to pin the audience firmly in place.
    His mother’s sense of enchantment was contagious. Just as the firstinstruments spoke up, Kit could feel her arm, against his, trembling. “This is Brahms,” she whispered. “Beautiful, beautiful Brahms.”
    That night she wore a red dress Kit had never seen, with lipstick to match. She had twisted and pinned her hair tight against the back of her head. Kit had watched her do this in their hotel room, her arms bent unnaturally over her ears. She had sighed with exasperation as she did it. Now, each time he looked at her face, he was startled by her bright mouth and darker eyes, the jewels swinging from her shapely translucent ears.
    At the intermission, she insisted they return all the way to the bottom. “Let’s look at the people!” she urged. What a dense crowd it was, and what a din they made. Kit was too short to see much more than a shifting collision of jacketed and sequined torsos. His mother held his hand, but she didn’t speak to him. She looked in every direction, as if she expected to meet someone. She did this at the end of the concert, too, when once again they joined the chattering perfumed wave of bodies flowing down the stairs.
    She behaved the same way in the neighborhood where they were staying. Their hotel stood on a street of similar buildings, brick houses joined side to side, with tall windows and absurdly small front yards bordered by black iron fencing. Here, the trees stood higher than the buildings, sometimes touching above the narrow streets. On Saturday morning she announced, “Let’s do