The Bloody Unicorn

In late February, when public places were still open and it might have been considered not just reasonable but admirable to take two young children to a cultural institution, I brought mine to the Cloisters, a gothic building high on a hill in Upper Manhattan that houses the Met’s medieval art collection. It was the unicorn tapestries I wanted to show them. Unicorns are so popular with my daughter’s kindergarten class that the school offered an afterschool enrichment program devoted to making rainbow unicorn crafts. I thought she would like seeing the tapestries, especially displayed on the stone walls of the castle-like building.

The Cloisters unicorns are very different from the rainbow-maned variety Thea draws on white printer paper. In a palette that is muted and autumnal, the tapestries show a bearded unicorn first pursued by hunters, then impaled by a spear, and finally entrapped in a fence. They are gothic, sad, bloody, mysterious. We zig-zagged through the museum, stopping several times to look more closely. “What’s happening to her?” Thea asked. As I tried to skim-read the plaque mounted on the wall for an answer, she’d interrupt: “She’s bleeding!” or “She has a beard!” The interruptions implied a justifiably indignant question: How could I think these unicorns were the same species as the ones on her coordinating school accessories? My daughter would wander over to a fountain or examine the carving on an arch, and stop a few moments later in front of a different tapestry and interrupt my condensed reading of its plaque with another matter-of-fact observation: “She’s trapped!”

When I was a little girl, the books I loved best were dark, and though they did not disturb me, an adult might have wondered. Even in a book that was not on the whole frightening, what I often liked most