Suddenly sharper, newly bold in their outlines, the images on our living room wall taught me more than style. They were vessels of something beyond themselves; their subtle, potent work was the transmission of world and culture despite a historical void around them, despite an absence of assigned meanings. It almost didn’t matter; all by themselves, projected on the living room wall, onto the new white Sheetrock, they meant, and meant intensely. Here were Circumcisions (which my mother found distasteful) and Salomes, Davids, Judiths with the sad and grisly heads of Holofernes; here were Floras and Psyches, and allegories of Time, and soap bubbles caught forever in virtuoso demonstrations of technique; here were the hushed rooms of Vermeer, like Helen Doyle’s gallery. Here was evidence both antique and new: when we looked at the title of Caravaggio’s image, that geisha-haired boy with the full-lipped pout, his delicate fingers toying with a dish of cleft and dewy fruit, my father said, “That’s a boy?”

Sometimes at the end of the box we’d start over again, and look till we were too tired, our eyes too full for any more, after we’d been talking about the pictures all evening. And so what may have begun in naïveté ended in grace; the music and the pictures entered us, drew us into their sphere of time and of style, and drew us together. We wouldn’t ever be this much of a family again, this much in easy relation, though of course we didn’t know that.

My studies in art history bore an immediate and surprising result in school, in the classroom of my new fourth-grade teacher, Miss Tynes, a tall woman with a loose red swathe of hair piled high on her head in Gibson girl fashion, and a fine clutches of soft lines around her eyes. She wore beautiful and subtly colored shawls she’d woven of mohair and alpaca, yarns whose names I loved to learn, words nearly as tactile as what they signified. Often the shawl was secured by a big silver pin, something sculptural, centered on a lozenge of obsidian or a tear of jade. Miss Tynes believed in our education in the arts, which is to say that she was devoted to the cultivation of our spirits. She approached her work in a seamless and coherent fashion I now recognize as evidence of a sort of commitment I’d never before seen anyone muster for anything, not quite.