The Mountains of Instead

  (1910) Lulu felt the wind, what Percy had called a “cold front” but that seemed to her like a big boisterous person shouldering his way along, coming down her street bumping into the houses and making the windows rattle. She was reminded of a Maxfield Parrish picture she’d seen years ago, the wind pictured as a huge man – where had it been, in McClure’s magazine or another. O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being. Shelley’s wind seemed a little more gracious than this one. She sat brushing her hair at her dressing table, with the silver-backed brush with the soft bristles; one hundred strokes each night, as she had done for twenty years while her hair grew longer and longer. It was at once tedious and gratifying to do. Percy was already in bed out on the sleeping porch, the windows open as always, admitting the wind’s prying hands. It was surely cold out there, but not as cold as it would be in December when sometimes she’d wake to find snow on the blankets — but the heal...

  [Summer 1944] On hot nights in that summer, when she could no longer bear to sit in their apartment by the fan, legs splayed like a fat person and mouth open, Axel took her on the Staten Island ferry to get a breeze.   Some days when he was at work, she went to the air-conditioned movies.   Or she went uptown to the Metropolitan Museum, cool and huge, or the Museum of Natural History, not walking far within but finding a gallery or room she liked and sitting, placid as a houseplant in the dimness.             Natural history : the words soothed and calmed her all by themselves, not merely different from corrosive human history but its antidote.   A nightmare from which I am trying to awaken: that’s what Axel said history was.   That was only another quotation, though; Axel didn’t mind history, he loved it actually, and seemed not to see that it led to this, to people’s brothers and husbands sundered from...