Free And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass Page B

some wandering, Kitten. This is such a perfect part of the city just to explore, just to see what we might see.” It was sunny, noticeably warmer than it had been in New Hampshire, but Kit grew tired of zigzagging to and fro, without a clear destination. His mother looked constantly at street signs, as if to keep them oriented—yet they passed along the same row of shops three times.
    Kit pretended his toes were cold and asked if they could go inside somewhere. They had eaten breakfast, but he was hungry again before noon. So they sat in the window of a tiny restaurant with dented tables and wooden benches, eating pastries and drinking cocoa. While Kit’s mother reminisced about a field trip she had taken to New York City with her high-school orchestra (“We sang in a concert hall that I don’t think exists anymore”), she looked past him out the window.
    All of this Kit still remembers clearly, more than thirty yearslater, but what he remembers best is their visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    “I say we head for Egypt,” said his mother, once they had climbed the gargantuan stone staircase and entered yet another space made for giants. (Was it the quantity of air so many people required to breathe, was that why these places were so huge, bigger even than any of the churches Kit had seen in New Hampshire?)
    “Here come the mummies,” she said as she led him down a series of windowless halls. “I read that they have just about the world’s most amazing collection of mummies. Outside Egypt, I guess.”
    Kit knew plenty about the pharaohs and the pyramids from social studies. He wasn’t wild about any of it. It seemed as if all that remained of those people was everything to do with their death, not their lives. Now, in this extraordinary place that so obviously thrilled his mother, he was reluctant to hurt her feelings by saying that he didn’t really want to look at mummies.
    He asked her, “What else do they have?”
    She stopped and looked down at him. At first he worried she was angry, that mummies were the only reason they had ridden the subway for so many stops, walked so many blocks, to come here. But she laughed.
    “Kitten, what
don’t
they have here!”
    Was that a question she expected him to answer?
    But then she said, “They have pictures and sculptures and jewelry and rooms full of furniture, and—wait, I almost forgot—they have suits of armor. Armor! Do you want to see armor? I think they even have armor for horses.”
    He didn’t care for war much more than he cared for death, but he agreed to look at the armor. Armor for horses: that had a certain appeal. On the way to the armor, however, his mother became lost, and they found themselves in a room filled with brightly colored pictures of fields, rivers, flowers in vases, boats on the sea, people with faces of scarlet or blue or painted as a tumult of purple and orange. Kit slowed, arrested by the force of all that color. And here (unlike the halls of the mummies), sun was permitted to enter. Light soaked the room from a wall of windows, making the color even richer, even more mesmerizing.
    Kit’s mother let go of his hand. He walked from picture to picture,around the entire room, not missing a single one. She followed. For the first time, she didn’t try to explain or tell a story about what he was seeing. Finally they stood, side by side, before a picture showing cyclones of paint in every conceivable shade of violet and green, with quavering slashes of blue and buttonlike blotches of red.
    Kit was unsure whether he thought the picture was good—you couldn’t call it pretty, and it didn’t look terribly “real”—but he couldn’t stop looking at the colors, at the way the paint stood out from the surface of the picture. The paint looked wet. Was the painter crazy in some way? Possibly a little blind, like Papa when he couldn’t find his glasses?
    “Mownay,” his mother said.
    Kit thought she must mean a particular way of