And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass Read Free Book Online

tourists (or opportunistic curators) wanted to poke around their streets and towns as if perusing dioramas at the natural history museum, they would want to take home souvenirs. In this case, art answered the call of materialism rather than defying it. The sculptures of seal hunting took the place of seal hunting itself. Whales were rendered in polished soapstone rather than butchered on a vastsheet of ice. Not that these fabrications were any less worthy of the label “art” than altarpieces commissioned by fourteenth-century burghers in Antwerp.
    So when, alone in his office, Kit opened the e-mail informing him he was to be cast out alone on the professional tundra (Ian, his one real friend in the department, had done him the brave courtesy of warning him), he had no window out of which to gaze in despair and dread. He had only this picture to stare at, this painfully apt story about the plans we make for the future and the sudden surprises sprung by fate.
    Briefly, he had envied those tiny hunters their simple, attainable goal: find and kill those seals, get them home to be skinned and cooked. Feed your family, sell the pelts. Sharpen that spear and start all over again.
    He remembered the title the artist had given this work:
On the Way Out
.
    He stood up from his desk and circled the small room. If he were brave, he would leave right then, for good. But instead he sat down again to finish grading papers on contemporary American sculpture. At the top of the stack before him lay an essay titled “Richard Serra, Man of Steel.” Oh to be a man of steel.
    After Sandra goes upstairs, Kit sits at the kitchen table for another half hour. It’s as if she is literally correct and he is indeed paralyzed. He does not read or straighten up the clutter. He does not drink, if only because Sandra will know that he did—she knows these things, instinctively—and will see it as further evidence of his withdrawal. (And she would be right.) He tries not to think about his options as narrowed by his wife. So he thinks about his children. Is it true that something as murky as his refusal to confront his mother about his father’s identity could affect the lives of nine-year-olds who care more ardently about football and ballet, about fourth-grade fashion dictates, about Halloween costumes, than they care about the grandparents they do know? Forget about phantom relatives they never
will
know.
    That’s hardly the point, Sandra would say. The point is that Kit is missing something crucial, like a limb or one of his senses. “It’s as ifyou don’t know that you should be in mourning, because you don’t know who’s died,” she said to him in the couples counselor’s office. (They saw the woman for three sessions: all they could afford.) The counselor suggested that Kit find a support group for adult adoptees working through the difficult emotions of finding their biological parents; she promised to e-mail him a list of websites. Kit did not bother to remind her that this wasn’t his situation. He has a “real” biological mother, and isn’t she enough? Have people forgotten, in this needy, narcissistic world—to quote a song his mother used more than once in her favorite class—that you can’t always get what you want? Maybe Fanny and Will should grow up understanding that less than everything is often enough, even plenty; that you can be a fully dimensional, well-grounded, largely content adult being without knowing everything you can possibly know about your “roots” (your pedigree back to the ark; your connection to early American history or British monarchs; your past lives, if past lives there are, and who’s to say otherwise?).
    Yet now this is also true: after so much endless talk about this mystery father, the shadow he casts across Kit’s life has grown to the size of a monster storm cloud, a cumulonimbus. (Nor does it help that meanwhile the life over which that shadow looms appears to be shrinking.) At his