Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the short story “Ghirlandaio” by Francine Prose (©1993 by Francine Prose).

On the morning of the trip to the art museum I woke up shaking with fever. I still remember staring down into my dresser drawer, wondering how many sweaters I could get away with wearing. I must have put on three or four, but nothing felt warm. At breakfast, I shivered and tried to hide it. How strange that my parents didn’t notice; normally, one sniffle and they were feeling my forehead. But sometime during the night we must have entered that world of mischance that parents so fear, with its history of catastrophes occurring in eye blinks when parental vigilance lapsed.

Briefly I wondered if maybe I did have polio, as my mother so dreaded, but I was still a child, and didn’t

know what was worth fearing; children rarely fear airplanes but, almost always, the dark. The prospect of missing the trip scared me far more than polio. Besides, I already knew that first principle of everyday magic: once you say something, give it a name, then, only then, can it happen. So I kept quiet and shivered and wrapped my hands around my cocoa cup and everything around me slipped in and out of focus.

This is how I recall that day—at moments the edges of things would be painfully sharp; then they would blur and turn wavy. Kissing my parents goodbye, I was so confused I imagined my father would be interested to hear that the world looked to me like an El Greco painting. But just in time I caught myself and climbed onto the steamed-up bus.

Our classroom was in chaos, but through it all rang Miss Haley’s strained voice, yelling, “Hang on to your coats,” which struck me as the most deeply kind, the most thoughtful thing she’d ever said. There was one moment, as we lined up to leave, when I knew I was in danger, that I should tell someone and go home. But then I felt someone bump into me, and even through all those sweaters, I knew who it was. Kenny was right behind me in line, and as we pushed toward the narrow bus door, he whispered, “Can we still go see it?” It took me a while to think what he meant, though for days it was all I had thought of.

What he meant was the Ghirlandaio painting, which he’d heard about from me. It had required astonishing bravery to approach him in the schoolyard, to speak to him for so long, but that was minor compared with the courage it took to mention the unmentionable—that is, Miss Haley’s nose. I don’t recall how I’d phrased it, how precisely I’d made it clear that there existed a work of art with a nose like our sixth-grade teacher’s. It had left us both feeling quite short of breath, as if we’d been running and had gotten our second wind and were capable of anything. And in that light-headed state I offered to take him to see it. It would be easy, I said—I knew the museum so well we could sneak off and get back before anyone noticed.

Yet now the idea of walking even the shortest distance exhausted me, and my plan (which I’d never expected him to agree to) seemed to demand impossible stamina—though less than it would have taken to shake my head no. I told him to be on the lookout for the right moment, and my voice dopplered back at me through an echo chamber of fever.

At the museum, a guard instructed us to throw our coats in a rolling canvas bin. And this is my clearest

memory from that day—the panic I felt as my coat disappeared, how it looked to me like someone jumping, vanishing into a sea of coats. Suddenly I was so cold I felt I had to keep moving, and I caught Kenny’s eye and we edged toward the back of the crowd, and dimly I heard my fever-voice telling him: Follow me.

Not even running helped. I just got colder, wobbly, and unsure; of course we got lost and crisscrossed the damp medieval hall, where the shadows climbed the chill stone walls, pretending to be doorways that vanished when we got close. At last we found the staircase, the right gallery, the Ghirlandaio. And I gloried in the particular pride of having done what I’d boasted I could.

Kenny stared at the painting. Then very softly he said, “Wow. Disgusto.”

“Disgusto” was the word, all right. And yet I felt strangely hurt, protective of Ghirlandaio’s old man, as

if he and his grandson were relatives of mine and Kenny had passed judgment on my family, on my life, on those afternoons when I stood here with my father pretending that this was something compelling and beautiful and not what it was: disgusto.