seemed grotesque and absurd. I caught Kenny’s smell of hair oil and damp wool, and for a second I gagged.
Was it the tears that so turned me against him? I think it was something more: we were at the age when love cannot stand exposure, when to be caught brings humiliation so profound we can only blame the beloved. We were, in that way, not much older than Adam and Eve, whom we must have resembled as Miss Haley chased us through the galleries, past those paintings of the expulsion from Eden which my father always rushed by—perhaps because the couple was naked or, more likely, held no interest for him, having nothing physically wrong.
Meanwhile, my fever was climbing, the chill in my bones transforming itself into needles of ice. When we rejoined our classmates in the Egyptian wing, I hardly recognized them. Shuffling obediently, gazing morosely at their feet, they could have been the funerary procession that the docent was describing. Miss Haley had prepared us for the highlight of the tour—a trip through the vast Egyptian tomb that the museum had imported brick by brick from Luxor. But as we approached it, the docent narrowed her eyes and dropped her voice to an ominous register and warned us to stay together because the tomb had been built as a maze to foil robbers. And then it hit us all at once—we were entering a grave.
Inside, the temperature dropped. I had never been so cold. Perhaps the docent was chilly, too, or didn’t like it there; in any case, she walked faster, until the children were practically trotting to keep up. I knew I couldn’t do it—and then the urge to curl up and lie down suddenly overwhelmed me. I let the others push ahead through the twisting corridors, and when we passed a roped-off room, I ducked into it and found a corner where I couldn’t be seen from outside.
I crouched in a cul-de-sac, surrounded by glass-covered walls. Beneath the glass were friezes, lit with a soft golden light. Figures in a procession surrounded me. It was a funeral procession, extending into the afterlife to follow the dead and their gods, and it gave me a strange sense of comfort that I knew who everyone was. First came the mourners, shedding their broken-line tears, then the cows, the oxen dragging the carts with all the dead’s possessions, then the boats that would ferry them across the waters of the other world. And now came the lesser gods: Bes, the dwarf; Tauret, the hippopotamus; frog-headed Heket; the lioness Renenet; the scorpion Selket.
Slowly the line began to move forward, and I watched it moving across the glassed-in walls like an animated cartoon—the goddess with the balances for weighing the souls of the dead, then Thoth, Isis, Osiris to greet the lucky spirits. And all at once it seemed to me that the figures were leaving the walls and marching straight at me, coming for me and for everyone I loved. In silence came the fifty-two judges, then Horus, Bast, Anubis, the hawk, the cat, the jackal streamed toward me through the air, and at the end of the line stood Amement, the Devourer, crocodile, hippo, lioness, receiver of the souls who had been tried and found guilty.
But really the goddess I saw was Miss Haley, who stood looking down at me, her white hair backlit, flaming around her head. She must have come searching for me, and yet she seemed not to recognize me.
Her face was opaque, her eyes looked visionless and dead, and that seemed strange because it had just occurred to me that I had been wrong, that all this time I had been thinking Miss Haley and I were opposite, when in fact we were just opposite sides of the same coin—she and her Christian Science, me and my father and our Ghirlandaio. We had precisely the same concerns. We did the same things in our spare time. This thought made me strangely, inexplicably happy; I was suffused with affection, not only for Miss Haley but for my father and me, a compassion much deeper than anything we credit children with and so consider the
Was it the tears that so turned me against him? I think it was something more: we were at the age when love cannot stand exposure, when to be caught brings humiliation so profound we can only blame the beloved. We were, in that way, not much older than Adam and Eve, whom we must have resembled as Miss Haley chased us through the galleries, past those paintings of the expulsion from Eden which my father always rushed by—perhaps because the couple was naked or, more likely, held no interest for him, having nothing physically wrong.
Meanwhile, my fever was climbing, the chill in my bones transforming itself into needles of ice. When we rejoined our classmates in the Egyptian wing, I hardly recognized them. Shuffling obediently, gazing morosely at their feet, they could have been the funerary procession that the docent was describing. Miss Haley had prepared us for the highlight of the tour—a trip through the vast Egyptian tomb that the museum had imported brick by brick from Luxor. But as we approached it, the docent narrowed her eyes and dropped her voice to an ominous register and warned us to stay together because the tomb had been built as a maze to foil robbers. And then it hit us all at once—we were entering a grave.
Inside, the temperature dropped. I had never been so cold. Perhaps the docent was chilly, too, or didn’t like it there; in any case, she walked faster, until the children were practically trotting to keep up. I knew I couldn’t do it—and then the urge to curl up and lie down suddenly overwhelmed me. I let the others push ahead through the twisting corridors, and when we passed a roped-off room, I ducked into it and found a corner where I couldn’t be seen from outside.
I crouched in a cul-de-sac, surrounded by glass-covered walls. Beneath the glass were friezes, lit with a soft golden light. Figures in a procession surrounded me. It was a funeral procession, extending into the afterlife to follow the dead and their gods, and it gave me a strange sense of comfort that I knew who everyone was. First came the mourners, shedding their broken-line tears, then the cows, the oxen dragging the carts with all the dead’s possessions, then the boats that would ferry them across the waters of the other world. And now came the lesser gods: Bes, the dwarf; Tauret, the hippopotamus; frog-headed Heket; the lioness Renenet; the scorpion Selket.
Slowly the line began to move forward, and I watched it moving across the glassed-in walls like an animated cartoon—the goddess with the balances for weighing the souls of the dead, then Thoth, Isis, Osiris to greet the lucky spirits. And all at once it seemed to me that the figures were leaving the walls and marching straight at me, coming for me and for everyone I loved. In silence came the fifty-two judges, then Horus, Bast, Anubis, the hawk, the cat, the jackal streamed toward me through the air, and at the end of the line stood Amement, the Devourer, crocodile, hippo, lioness, receiver of the souls who had been tried and found guilty.
But really the goddess I saw was Miss Haley, who stood looking down at me, her white hair backlit, flaming around her head. She must have come searching for me, and yet she seemed not to recognize me.
Her face was opaque, her eyes looked visionless and dead, and that seemed strange because it had just occurred to me that I had been wrong, that all this time I had been thinking Miss Haley and I were opposite, when in fact we were just opposite sides of the same coin—she and her Christian Science, me and my father and our Ghirlandaio. We had precisely the same concerns. We did the same things in our spare time. This thought made me strangely, inexplicably happy; I was suffused with affection, not only for Miss Haley but for my father and me, a compassion much deeper than anything we credit children with and so consider the
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