A group from St. Christopher’s School for Boys made this same pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every spring, marching down along Central Park in militaristic formation in their crested navy sport coats. The trip was overseen that year by Mr. Fabry, Arthur’s sixth grade Latin instructor. Arthur had no interest in Latin, and thought it irrelevant to midcentury life in America. He’d rather learn to shoot a pistol like The Man From Laramie. But his father insisted these things were important to preserve — these pillars of culture that were fast dying out. He’d repeatedly proclaim so at the dinner parties he’d host for his colleagues from the firm.
“This country is on the decline,” Father would say, cheeks ruddy from gin. “Those goddamned beatniks let their girls run around practically nude, skirts up to their privates. None of them married, none of them mothers. Lazy whores — no, I’m sorry Helen, that’s what they are, really — whores, the lot of them, with not one decent man to set them straight.”
It had been an especially hard winter that year, but the city was on the other side of it, now. The trees in the park were lush, aflutter with noisy birds. Arthur spotted an awful lot of women with prams about. Spring was the time for babies, he supposed — for freshly hatched eggs, for pollen and bees.
Mr. Fabry led the boys up the wide, grand steps out front of the museum, into the entrance hall. It was a very large room of arches and columns, all of it pale stone that echoed terribly — echoes of hushed reverence, like in a cathedral.
Arthur had been dragged here many times by his mother, who liked the John Singer Sargents. She’d been an artist herself — or so she said, though Arthur had never seen any evidence of it, save the little doodles she penned absentmindedly on notepads while she chatted on the kitchen phone. But Arthur supposed she’d been young once, too — one of those students who visited the Met with their sketchbooks and ambitions — though he’d only known her as a wife and a mother.
The boys of St. Christopher’s started off in the rooms of white statues. Arthur had to admit he didn’t mind these so much. They were better than all those paintings of some saint or other.
Better still than all those odd, nonsensical works in the modern wing. What a waste of a canvas, Father would say. But the statues were often nude, which excited all the boys, including Arthur.
While the others soldiered on, he stopped to consider one — a likeness of three headless girls. The Three Graces, the plaque read. He knew they’d once had heads — were intended to have heads — but he liked them this way, all body. Their thighs were pressed together, hiding the mystery of what lay between them. The girls were armless, too, except for one. Were they flesh instead of stone, they would have been vulnerable to all sorts of things.
Looking up at those firm, marble figures, Arthur thought of his mother — the way her breasts hung heavy in the mornings when she boiled him eggs in her housecoat, or at night when she came to tuck him in and kiss his brow.
Arthur stood transfixed before the Graces. The rest of the world fell away. His skin started to feel very tight, his blood a deafening roar in his ears. He reached up, taking one of the marble breasts in hand. It was smooth and cold, just the right size for his childish grip.
He only held it for a moment — one gratifying moment — before he was suddenly and roughly pulled away. He looked up into the rather horrified face of his teacher.
“What on earth were you thinking?” Mr. Fabry hissed.
“What does it matter?” said Arthur. “They’re not real.”
Mr. Fabry’s face reddened. He seemed at a loss for words. In lieu of them, he spun Arthur around and gave his rear three sharp smacks. They echoed in the vast room, in Arthur’s ears.
He didn’t say another word all day. His mind kept turning over the feel of the breast in his hand, the sharp sting of the spanking, the shame, the burgeoning hunger.
That night at dinner, he looked across the table at his mother and wondered if she had once been small and firm like those marble girls, and if his father still bothered to take her soft body in his arms, or if he’d rather grab at one of those lazy whores from Greenwich Village he was always grousing about.
Sophia Holtz has a BFA from NYU, and is a two-time writer in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. She is the winner of the 2024 Donald Drury Award for fiction. An excerpt from her novel “Classic Girl” can be found in the 16th edition of the Pomona Valley Review.
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