She pushed open a door and I followed her into a red room brilliant with mirrors and the flames of many candles. I saw a high white armchair, a great dressing table with a soaring mirror. Smaller mirrors hung on each wall; the dark red wallpaper was patterned with little pale princesses leaning out of silver towers with their long flaxen hair. She stepped onto a stool before a swivel mirror and clapped her hands sharply twice. An elderly woman in a black dress appeared and began removing her ball gown with its flounced skirts and blue bows. Then she removed another skirt under that, and several petticoats, leaving a billowy, frilled petticoat and a satiny white corset with crisscross laces in back. “Thank you, Maria, now go away, go away, go away now…” For a while she stared at herself in the tall mirror, then hopped from the stool and began pacing about, glancing at herself in the swivel mirror, in the mirror over the dressing table, in the mirrors on the walls, in a silver bowl. The room filled with images of her, turning this way and that. As she paced and turned she heaved great sighs, and pushed out her bottom lip, and tossed her curls, and muttered to herself: “get away with…just who does he…can’t breathe in here…” Though she paid not the slightest attention to me, I felt that my presence permitted her to display her petulance with the richness she required; and as she pranced and pouted she tugged at a fastening at the front of her corset, she kicked off her shoes, she unbound her high-piled hair, which spilled down her flame-lit shoulders and shook as she moved. And as she flickered and shook before me I felt a vague excitement, my skin began to tingle, as if she were brushing against me with her thick, shaking curls, her trembling skin, her white silk stockings. All at once the shaking stopped and I saw her raise the back of a hand to her forehead. Slowly, like a falling leaf, she swooned onto the dark red rug.
I had no thought of calling for help, for the swoon had been executed with such elegance that I felt certain she had intended it to be admired. She lay on the floor between the lion-paw legs of the chair and the red wallpaper. Her heavy yellow ringlets were strewn about her face and shoulders, her lips were partly open, her stomach moved gently up and down, the lines and bands of her corset went in and out, in and out. I stepped over to her and looked down. An unaccountable desire seized me: I wanted to feel the satiny material of her corset, I wanted to place my hand against the fire-lit white breathing cloth. In her white slip my mother had sat at the edge of the bed, drawing on a stocking. Slowly the corset bands went in and out. I bent over, careful not to touch the breathing form in any way; the skin of my palm prickled; I felt tense and anxious, as if I were about to transgress a law. And as I lowered my palm against the forbidden white cloth with its stretching and contracting bands I felt my hand sinking through melting barriers, as when, on a trip to New Hampshire with my parents, one morning I had walked through thick white cottony mist that lay heavy on the grass and parted like air as I passed. So my hand fell through the whiteness of that cloth. My sinking hand struck the velvety hard rug — I felt myself losing my balance — suddenly I was falling through her, plunging through her corset, her breasts, her bones, her blood. For a fearful instant I was inside her. I had a sensation of whiteness or darkness, a white darkness. On the sudden rug I rolled wildly through her, wildly out of her, and sprang up. Blood beat in my temples. She lay there drowsily. My whole body tingled, as if I had dried myself roughly with a towel.
I stared at my hands and shirt and pants as if fearing to see little pieces of cloth and flesh stuck to them, but I saw only myself.
A moment later she sat up, shook her headful of thick, springy curls, and pulled herself lightly to her feet. “Why, I must have…fainted or…Maria! Oh, where is that woman?” She began pacing up and down, sighing, pouting, flinging back her hair; a corner of her flying petticoat rippled through my hand, which I snatched away; and in the many mirrors her many images appeared and reappeared, thrusting out their bottom lips, darting glances, fluttering their many eyelids.
I didn’t know whether I was relieved or bitterly unhappy. Would I have guessed her secret? I knew only that I wanted to go.
In the doorway I stopped and half turned to look at her. Fiercely she paced, exuberantly she sulked, in the full radiance of her being. I was tempted to say something, to shout, to draw attention to myself in some way, but the desire drained swiftly out of me. A shout, a scream, a knife in the throat, a plunge to the death, all were quite useless here.
I stepped through the door and looked for the room I had come from, but found myself in an alien room filled with harsh laughter. I was careful not to touch any of them as I passed. Through a nearby doorway I emerged in a corridor that led to another room, another doorway, another room. I came to an upward-sloping corridor lined with shimmering mirrors; the sudden repetition of my anxious face gave me the sensation that my anxiety had increased in a burst. At the end of the corridor I climbed three steps to a closed door. I opened it and found myself in a dusky room I had never seen before, with many seats and a dark wall-hanging that resembled a curtain; gradually I recognized the theater.
I had entered by another door, beside one of the red-glowing exit signs. I hurried up the sloping aisle, stopped for a moment in the lobby to glance toward the sign that said REST ROOMS, then pushed open one of the metal doors and stepped into the sun-flooded entranceway.
A kneeling usher was sweeping a pile of candy wrappers and cigarette butts into a dustpan. In the white sand of a standing ashtray a slanting white straw cast a rippling shadow across a piece of bright yellow cellophane. The man in the pith helmet was taking aim at a tree concealing an orange tiger upon whose back sat a woman in a black fur loincloth. Through the brilliant glass doors I saw my father frowning at his watch. His look of stern surprise, when he saw me burst through the door into the late-afternoon sun, struck me as wildly funny, and I forgot to chasten my features into repentance as I seized his warm hand.
THE BARNUM MUSEUM
The Barnum Museum is located in the heart of our city, two blocks north of the financial district. The Romanesque and Gothic entranceways, the paired sphinxes and griffins, the gilded onion domes, the corbeled turrets and mansarded towers, the octagonal cupolas, the crestings and crenellations, all these compose an elusive design that seems calculated to lead the eye restlessly from point to point without permitting it to take in the whole. In fact the structure is so difficult to grasp that we cannot tell whether the Barnum Museum is a single complex building with numerous wings, annexes, additions, and extensions, or whether it is many buildings artfully connected by roofed walkways, stone bridges, flowering arbors, booth-lined arcades, colonnaded passageways.