My grandmother kept a portrait in her spare bedroom with its face turned to the wall.
She said it had always faced the wall. She said her mother had kept it that way before her. She said it was a family portrait — her great-grandparents and their children, painted in the Victorian style — and that it had faced the wall since the day it came into the house, which was sometime in the 1890s.
She said to leave it that way.
I slept in that spare bedroom every summer as a child. The portrait faced the wall. I was aware of it the way children are aware of things they've been told not to touch — with a heightened, specific attention. I never turned it around. The rule felt important in the way that rules that come from grandmothers sometimes do, carrying more weight than the woman who delivers them.
When my grandmother died, I inherited the house. I didn't turn the portrait around for six months.
Then one night, feeling foolish about respecting a superstition I'd held for thirty years, I turned it around.
The portrait was a standard Victorian family portrait. Two adults, four children, a parlor background. The painted figures were stiff in the way painted figures of that era are stiff — formal, unsmiling, positioned for posterity.
All the figures faced forward. All the figures except one.
A child on the far left of the composition — young, maybe six, in Victorian dress — was painted looking to the side. Not toward the viewer. Looking at the other figures in the portrait. Its posture was slightly different from the others. Slightly less formal. Its face, turned in profile, showed an expression the painter had not given the other subjects.
I could not identify the expression exactly. It was not one I have a clear word for.
I turned the portrait back to face the wall.
Some things face the wall for a reason. Some things should not be looked at. My grandmother knew this. Her mother knew it.
Now I know it.