[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 them and sent far away for remote causes, for vengeance or conquest or to stop wrongdoing, whatever history’s reasons were.

            She walked in the room of Asian fauna, where animals and birds from the Pacific were mounted and put behind glass in spaces that reproduced the lands they came from, far islands whose names she read with a shock, for they were the very ones that were now in the papers and in Sam’s letters, where the terrible fighting was going on; they appeared in the newsreels blasted and smoky and gray, but here they were green and altogether still.  New Guinea.  Samoa.  The Solomons.  Fabulous birds in a thousand colors who had lived there unobserved for centuries, for all time.  The diorama of Samoa was set high on a cliff above the sea, looking down through the leaves and vines to an empty beach; it took you a while to see, perched at the end of a twisted limb, a small brilliant bird.

[fom Endless Things]