Katherine Ann Davis
Despite the Start A New Tradition! Christmas at the Thorne Rooms brochure pressed into my hand as a welcome, despite the well-dressed woman who directs me to a space slightly left, I thought they'd be tucked away, nestled in dim light and dust. I thought they'd be someplace you stumble onto by accident, a digression from the building's design, a smudge on the museum map, no destination but a stop-along-the-way. Gil, drawn to dark corners, would have discovered them alone during a school trip years ago; he would have slipped behind the students and the chaperones, and back farther still, to find solitude here. Or if not solitude, then the company of perhaps a handful like him, eager to experience the weight of it, the finality, the perfect thing—a complete collection. All at once they'd take it in, devour it with widening eyes, and forget each other, forget their own bodies. Hushed.
Then a bell, a soft tingle, would split the atmosphere and Gil would think of his teachers who organized the outing, the rowdy boys who pretended to molest ancient sculptures, and their hours on the bus between Chicago and Southport. Let them leave, he'd think. Let them go away and never miss me.
But someone, at some point, would grab his elbow, he knew. Someone would miss him, would find him and nod toward the exit. You can't miss anything under this light. It's antiseptic, the way rooms in hospitals are illuminated to expose patients' every scar, bruise, and angle. It's deliberate light in the way it reveals the sunken exhibit space, the way it makes you forget the carpet color seconds after you've looked at it. I step down as you'd step into an office or an airport, with a mind to navigate the flow of corners and hallways and foot traffic, a mind fitted to a system already established, like I'm following one ghost or several. Voices wind around the pathways, soft exclamations. Bored children shuffle their feet, chase each other to create shocks; adults squint into the glass and say the unremarkable things people say in art museums. An occasional thud sounds as the toes of visitors' shoes hit the carpeted barrier hugging the walls. It is as ordinary a scene as you can imagine.
Still, my brother saw magic here.
For Gil, it was the museum smell, the wool coats and rubber soles and wood polish. It was how the frames gleam gold against dark green walls, how the room is split by a horizontal stripe. How the eye is caught by those frames, how the fingertips automatically rest on the rail, how the brain is urged into a state of contemplation, of attention to the miniatures' details. Gil loved even the carpeted barriers, their presence an implicit request for the viewer to stand back, in position to view each of Mrs. Thorne's triumphs in its situational entirety. Every discovery a new emotion, a unique experience.
Sixty-eight rooms, and he wanted to be inside them all. Their stillness, like model sets from a series of plays, begs for movement, for an actor. He slides over handrails and swoops through the air like a cartoon, grabs hold of chandeliers and soars, crawls into fireplaces and hides, flops onto canopy beds and dreams. He makes faces at the portraits, handles the cups and saucers, the paintbrushes and palette—but gently now, so gently. He doesn't scuff the floors or twirl threads out of rugs; he doesn't scratch mirrors and force open the locked cabinet doors. He observes, learns the rules of these spaces, learns the behaviors they require, like he's been trained. This is what it means, he thinks, to live. His silent footfalls on the tiled floors. The handkerchief over his fingers when he pushes unlatched windows. His posture improves when he sits in the high-backed wooden chairs. "Can you believe someone carved these tiny things?" asks the man next to him. The man's glasses slide to the tip of his nose when he leans in toward the display, bumps the glass. Gil feels the chair-back's knobs press his shoulder blades. "Yes," he says.
English Library of the Queen Anne Period, the placard reads. Soft yellow curtains glide apart, lending warmth to the leaf-green space. Gil considers sitting on the ledge to breathe fresh air and sunlight. He wants to collapse into the scene, melt into it the way varnish stains wood, but he thinks the man who should sit here is strong-minded and capable, and has accomplished things.
He turns away from the window and runs his pinky finger across the globe, savors its stand's rough edge. The world seems small when it's propped up on a desk. Against the opposite wall, important ideas pack the bookshelves—ideas dreamt and studied and analyzed and translated by important people. My brother falls in love again with libraries, with how they can measure an occupant's worth. Like gazing at stars. He wonders if he'd freeze, if he could engage with the space if it were life-sized. He sits at the desk, clears his throat.
English Rotunda and Library of the Regency Period, the next placard reads. Gil has always admired busts on pedestals. Here are three: two black in the rotunda and a small white one on the desk beside the bookshelves. He imagines nighttime has fallen, the chandelier and sconces his sole light sources while the busts stand guard, cast long shadows beneath flickering candles. There is, he thinks, a draft from somewhere—a severe winter-months frost to plant nervousness in his chest along with a lingering cold, bronchitis. Pneumonia. How does a body survive? he wonders.
The shelves, situated in the room's rear, dead center, are a small comfort. His footsteps echo and he likes the sound, flinches only a little at his arrival's announcement. On the rug his steps dull, but he is grateful for a barrier between the body and the earth's chill bubbling up between the tiles. Determined to enjoy the rug's comfort, he selects a volume that shimmers gold, a book with tooled leather binding. Then he carries the volume while pacing the rotunda, under the busts' watch, to calm his nerves, which pour as steadily from his chest as the cold air bleeds from the ground.
New Hampshire Parlor, he reads next. There are times, he thinks, when cushions are preferable to bare wooden seats. There are times when it is better to sit away from the clock than to face it.
Gil adjusts the eyeglasses on the desk, angles them in a manner that looks attractive from his vantage point. A stray book has followed him here, a not unexpected problem. In a space like this, with less structure than a library, fewer lines in its layout that point in a single direction, he has to search. The doors, perhaps, signify possibilities.
Structure is welcome, even necessary, but now it is a structure of his own making. And so he readjusts the eyeglasses, in a deliberate way, and tells himself he'll always work with them in this position. And he opens the stray book to a certain page and decides it is the only option now. Such habits will alert his brain, signal it's time to work, time to execute something important, as one does in such a space. Somewhere in the past, he heard about the importance of routine. On the wall, next to the fireplace, is a dark portrait of a man. Gil sees in him what he wants for himself: a purposeful pose. Stoicism rooted in hard work. Confidence in his choices.
Connecticut Valley Tavern Parlor, he reads next. Here it's not shadow that draws his eyes, but light. Before he notes any detail, he moves to the display's far side and bends to glimpse an adjacent room, which blazes next to the parlor like fire. In the room sits a beer stein and matching cup, on a table half-blocking the doorway. Too close, he thinks. Squinting, he pushes the mug and cup so an absentminded hand—belonging, perhaps, to a voice beyond the table—can't knock them off the edge. Blurred items stock cabinets mounted next to the window, and Gil recognizes the beauty in shadows, their softness, in the way they coax your imagination. Like doves settling into snowy evergreens at dusk. Everywhere else is exposure, hideous, naked light. At the fireplace in the main display, he is assaulted by echoed voices, their arguments and announcements and proclamations made. Gil has nowhere outside the spotlight. He sits in the chair, eyes the glowing rug at his feet, and is forgotten.
New Hampshire Entrance Hall, the placard reads. Here are four paths, four choices, and he is stuck on a curved black bench beside the stairway. To his right, a short wall juts out to block the room's light source. To his left, a thick arch, the hall's most imposing feature, recedes in darkness. Gil thinks of childhood birthday parties thrown by our mother, how she kept the house cold, ran the air conditioner to accommodate a crowd while every bit of food and drink and company congregated outdoors, in sunshine. That's when he loved the house best. No one entered but briefly to use the bathroom, and he stalked their outside activities from window to window, low, cherishing a silence somehow amplified by chill. Always, he knew the magic had to fade—and this in-between, this sad appreciation for a comfort's transience, visits him here. He senses no heartbeat beyond the arch, and the illuminated path will reveal him nowhere. Up the stairs shines an orange light, something artificial like a streetlamp, with emptiness beyond. This bench, he knows, is where he belongs, in an extended present. Waiting.
An elementary school group enters the exhibit, a flurry of children about the age Gil was on his first class trip. One of their supervisors bends and re-bends the Christmas brochure. I haven't noticed decorations, but the students swarm the space with purpose, crowd the Christmas tree display with their enthusiasm and gasps, overwhelm the atmosphere with impatience and need. As I step aside, my fingers brush the wall where Gil's must have landed at least once, next to Mrs. Thorne's likeness.
Before my brother exited the museum to greet Chicago's cold rush season and the traffic screaming by him on Michigan Avenue, before his car reached the exit to 65 south, to Indiana, where he navigated the potholes, wind farms, traffic patterns, mile markers, and ghost signs that also guided me here, he might have thought of us, his friends and lovers, our mother and me, in stillness. We might have been specks on the globe, faces on the busts, voices of the ongoing adjacent party, the shapes he watched from shadows. Maybe he didn't call us, maybe he wouldn't disturb that stillness because it might have smudged a fantasy, his final wish for us: to give us in memory everything he thought we wanted for ourselves.
In a collective swoop, the schoolchildren round the corner down a new path. I sit on the emptied section of carpeted barrier, knees knocked, knowing you can't find answers here, museums aren't made for that. But inspiration isn't nothing. At once a boy returns to the display next to me, the one of the entrance hall, and leans in, his nose marking the glass. I rise and walk away, not wanting to disturb him. He licks his lips and breathes fog, he's so close. But he'll stay, he'll wait until he can see. He will hold his breath. And when the fog dissipates, he'll see a young man on a curved black bench before the staircase—a young man who waits too, yes, who is frozen waiting, but who also eyes the orange light, the jutting wall, the arch, their potential, perhaps even their comfort, as his forever options.