A Sudden Hush

A Sudden Hush

     Bare of greenery, Munich’s art museum, the Alte Pinakothek, fronted an empty field, its ground-floor entrance a simple door cut in tan-yellow stone. Inside, a double staircase rose, free of ornament. Compared, say, to the Art Institute of Chicago whose interior was draped, festooned, and monumentalized with caryatids, the Alte Pinakothek proceeded as if she knew her worth and didn’t need to rouge.

     As long as I can remember, my mother, sister and I have worshiped at museums. My father, on the other hand, preferred religious and historical sites, but my mother made sure we girls poked into major U.S. museums from New York’s Metropolitan Museum to Washington’s National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago.

     Bare of greenery, the Alte Pinakothek fronted an empty field, its ground-floor entrance a simple door cut in tan-yellow stone. Inside, a double staircase rose, free of ornament. Compared, say, to the Art Institute of Chicago whose interior was draped, festooned, and monumentalized with caryatids, the Alte Pinakothek proceeded as if she knew her worth and didn’t need to rouge.

     It was the sudden hush that impressed me most. On the curb, we’d say good-bye to my father and his dithers about cleanliness and proper attire. Climbing what seemed like hundreds of steps, we entered a quiet that descended like the stroke of a bell. Nobody bothered us. All was reserved and anonymous. Nobody cared what we wore or how clean we were as long as we didn’t touch anything. Even my sister, who usually whined and had to go to the bathroom, followed without a peep.

     Our mother wore a distant, peaceful look that I recognized from the beach when she walked into the wind. Later I would call this her “Blue-Twilight” look from her stories of skating in North Dakota. Shadows deepened, and she spun in tighter and tighter circles on a frozen pond. Ice-skating was unheard of in Charleston, and my father didn’t dance. But you could pretend you were skating over slick museum floors. The light that shone from paintings was strange and compelling in its own right, blue as the twilight snow in my mother’s stories.

     My tastes like hers ran to the Impressionists. I was hypnotized by light flickering over a young woman reading on the grass. Or color breaking like waves, splattering a boating party. Small figures on a Greek vase called me to attention. Once I slipped into a vase beside oxen pulling a wagon, their right feet raised for the next step. A dancer with rippling skirt shook her tambourine. Listening to that silent music, I fell into a trance that carried me around the belly of the vase