My Name Is Lucy Barton (Amgash #1)

by Elizabeth Strout

It is a marble statue of a man with his children near him, and the man has such desperation on his face and the children at his feet appear to be clinging, begging him, while he gazes out toward the world with a tortured look, his hands pulling at his mouth, but his children look only at him, and when I finally saw this, I said inside myself, Oh. I read the placard, which let me know that these children are offering themselves as food for their father, he is being starved to death in prison, and these children only want one thing—to have their father’s distress disappear. They will allow him—oh, happily, happily—to eat them. And I thought, So that guy knew. Meaning the sculptor. He knew. And so did the poet who wrote what the sculpture has shown. He knew too. — A few times I made a trip to the museum specifically to see my starving father-man with his children, one grabbing at his leg, and when I got there I didn’t know what to do. He was as I had remembered him, and so I stood at a loss. Later I realized I got what I needed when there was a furtiveness to my seeing him, such as if I was in a hurry to meet someone elsewhere, or if I was with someone in the museum and I’d say I needed to use the bathroom, just to get away and see this on my own. But not on my own the same way as when I made the trip entirely alone to see this frightened starving father-man. And he is always there, except for once when he was not. The guard said he was upstairs in a special exhibit and I fel...