“Like your first husband’s canvases,” the voice proposes, pleased with the connection. “Attacked from every side of the canvas. Without priority.”
She is referring, Hope realizes, to the Quaker meeting house. “Zack wasn’t anything of a Quaker. He had no inner quiet, none. His mother, after Zack’s father left, had tried to enlist her family in one of those grotesque Western sects, where they go up on high hills and expect the Lord to come down and end everything. It was one of the things he didn’t like to talk about. One of the many things. He was still resentful.”
“Resentful because he was made to go up, or because the Lord didn’t come down?”
This is amusing, Hope sees. This young woman perhaps does not need to be utterly resisted. She is going on, her voice both spiky and silky: “The lack of priority also suggests to me your paintings, the later ones. Everything even, nothing too intense. Every square inch equally important.”
“I’ve never made that connection,” Hope tells her flatly. The flatness would have been softened with the addition of the young woman’s name. Her name … What is the name she gave, in letters and e-mails that Hope’s gallery on Fifty-seventh Street forwarded and then over the phone and finally at the door? There this living body was, incongruous with the everlasting mountains behind her, startling, a tall black-haired person, her face city-pale, in a purple cloak with a huge hood, like an apparition of death in a Bergman film. Hope pictures the “K” jutting above the line, the “y” swooping below it: Kathryn. That odd, mannered spelling. People now that they’ve gotten away from ancestors and the Bible give the oddest names, names they invent, black welfare mothers naming their dolls: Luceen, Baylee, Maryvonne. Her own grandchildren, five of them and not a John or a Mary among them, or even a Bill or a Barbara. Barbra now. Ardmore and Shipley had been full of Barbaras, and Mary Anns. Hope wonders if her visitor is Jewish. She has never developed the skill that anti-Semites and Jews themselves have in spotting who is Jewish. In art circles you assume anyone with any dash or presence is, any fast talker with a certain tang to the consonants, sounding out that concluding “g,” but even that doesn’t always work. Around Philadelphia the only Jews they knew were their dentists; though Quakers and Jews had both been persecuted and were closer to biblical religion than, say, Roman Catholics, they belonged to different law firms, different country clubs. Hope’s family belonged to the Germantown Cricket Club, because unlike Merion Cricket Club it had a swimming pool, though its dining room had that depressingly low ceiling. There were whole mock-Tudor, fat-lawned, high-hedged enclaves where invisible real-estate agents kept Jews out. Bernie Nova, for instance, with his poseur’s monocle and curling mustache with waxed tips, she thought to be a German or an Armenian even, as the great and crazy Korgi truly was. Bernie and Roger Merebien were the ones of Zack’s crowd of competitors she felt easiest with, most fraternally cherished; they were the most articulate, writers of statements and letters to the editors, formulators of credos and haughty letters to the press, and on account of that rather condescended to by the others, by Zack and Phil and Seamus, as too glib for sublimity, lacking in the proper American passion, beyond words. Kathryn’s skin has the matte lustre, the racial suppleness, but so much is makeup now, she might also be of Mediterranean descent, or Eastern European. We are all so assimilated. Last Saturday, Hope was watching the evening news and the weekend newscaster instead of Tom Brokaw was a perfectly stunning young woman, light topaz eyes as far apart as a kitten’s, sharp-cornered wide mouth pronouncing everything with a perfect rapid inflection, more American than American, crisper, a touch of that rapid barking voice of ’thirties gangster films and romantic comedies, and when she signed off her name wasn’t even Greek, it was more like Turkish, a quick twist of syllables like an English word spelled backward. The old American stock is being overgrown. High time, of course: no reason to grieve. On the contrary. She and Zack had been old stock—Quaker, Yankee, Western pioneer, Protestant, each a priest on his or her own, out of the Northern European mists to this land of sharp, cancer-inducing sun. “Kathryn,” Hope says, cementing her hold on the name, “is this really one more article about Zack? Haven’t there been too many already?”
“Not Zack, you. All of you. The moment, the historical moment, the explosion, when everything came together, and America took over from Paris, and for the first time ever we led world art. Why? How?” She sounds like a newscaster, reading the prompter as it unscrolls. Hope’s bones feel leaden, heavy with the reality this young person is assigning her—needs to assign her, to justify her time, her spent energy, the boring trip up the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway on into Vermont, winding through the fading farms of cows in stony pastures and the overbuilt developments of A-frame ski houses and the pretty little experimental colleges for the difficult children of the rich, the gas stations that are also mini-marts, the little lunch restaurants trying to be homey with white curtains at the windows and usually closed this time of year, and then the night of fitful sleep in the motel so as to be at Hope’s door by nine-thirty; Hope told her over the phone her days began early, with some hours after dawn in the studio, and ended early. The young woman fears not getting enough for her mileage.
That “all of you” was kind, though. Hope was never considered a significant soldier, just a camp follower, one of the many, and then a wife, which few camp followers achieve. Her painting embarrassed Zack, somehow a subversion of his manhood, and he hid her as a painter upstairs like the mad Mrs. Rochester. “Well,” she offers, “to be simple about it, the war had left the other countries ruined. They were exhausted. The same way we dominated the ’48 Olympics—everybody else was still weak with hunger.”
Kathryn brushes this aside as facetious, as unworthy. She can’t imagine hunger and poverty as real cultural factors. Her face presses a few inches deeper into the space between Hope and herself, she in the soft old sunroom chair and Hope in her hard rocker, a rocker made by former hippies in Burlington of no less, the nicely printed (in green ink) leaflet that came with it said, than five different woods; they shrank at different rates and made the fit tighter as the chair aged, so the leaflet claimed. She had given the chair to Jerry for his first birthday up here and the claim is not yet disproved. It supports her weight, as she leans back to keep her inquisitor at a distance. The unkind clarity of the morning light—not a cloud in the blue sky, a glisten of mud on the bare earth outside the kitchen door when she had loaded up the bird feeder ten minutes before Kathryn too punctually arrived—strips the interviewer’s face of beauty and shows it to be horsy and humorless, its plummy eyes astride a long nose with a slight bump in it, its lips downturned in determination not to be distracted or too easily charmed, lips that might melt if kissed but are in danger of settling into a permanent sour frown of unfulfilled ambition. Kathryn glances down into the sheets of paper balanced on her black lap, her thin thighs pressed tightly together, pages of computer-typed questions to help her as the interview tape unwinds in the little machine, a Sony of two tones of gray, its purr tinny in the silence, on the low table between them, not a table but an old wooden sea-chest Hope bought in River-head in the ’forties for twenty dollars and sanded and varnished, those first few years when she and Zack were enthusiastic about making a home together on the light-soaked windy tip of Long Island, worlds removed from what he called, euphemistically, covering his from-bar-to-bar binges, the “wear and tear” of Manhattan. Kathryn says hurriedly, as if Hope were sensitive to such matters, “The triumph was exploited, I know, politically, by the Rockefellers and the CIA among others, but I don’t see it as a political movement, originally. I see it as innocent, the last flare of our idealistic innocence.”
“Oh dear,” Hope responds. “We didn’t feel innocent to ourselves. We felt very sophisticated and a bit wicked. And the painters didn’t all know each other equally well, or should I say like each other equally. A number of the others, the more intellectual and better organized, didn’t like Zack much, especially after his paintin
gs became so famous and his drinking became terrible again. Zack wasn’t easy to like, or even, after a while, to love.” She lets that float a few seconds, tantalizing this other, tempting her to pounce prematurely on that belly-up word “love,” but Kathryn ignores the provocation, and Hope has to continue, explaining, clarifying what would have always been better left mysterious. Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminacy that gives art life. She flutters a hand—knobby, freckled, smelling of paint thinner—at the end of her man’s lumberjack-shirt sleeve and says, “Everybody now is expected to turn inside out on command, like impatiens seeds when touched, or—what is that plant called?—squirting cucumber. Zack hated being interviewed; it offended his lower-class sense of dignity, of there being things one didn’t say. We all—me, Clem, Peggy, Betty, Herbie Forrest—used to coach him on what to say, but when the time came he refused to say it, or mumbled it. It was his arrogance—he thought you shouldn’t chase recognition, it should come to you without being asked. He was wild for it yet despised playing the game.” He is gropingly coming back to her, his squarish puzzled bad-boy face, its three muscular dents, deep dimples as if in amplification—a stronger restatement—of her own lone dimple, and with his face the look of the Manhattan streets back then, before glass-skin architecture and plastic garbage bags: the curbs of East Ninth Street crowded on collection days with corroded galvanized trash cans, angrily dented on the dump truck’s hydraulically lifted lip, and the huge metal noise they made in the middle of the night, the trash men getting their own back at all those sleeping safe above them. The cans smelled plainly of garbage then, and class war was unconcealed, unions versus management, the Reds against the rich. You were not asked to have a nice day; buildings looked much the same in Manhattan as in any city, brick and four stories high; each block formed a little village, with a shoe repairman, a barber shop, a notions shop run by a pair of sisters, a Chinese laundry, a coal-and-wood cellar, a drugstore with a marble soda counter. Eighth Street was a kind of souk, where you were jostled down into the gutter, and the area north and east of Washington Square had a furtive European quality, Grace Church with its waffle-pattern gray steeple presiding where Broadway slightly bent like a medieval street sneaking along, and Cooper Union standing afloat in its square like a brown Venetian palace. University Place was a string of bars, including the Cedar, which when you opened the door always seemed warm, and dim enough so that your defects were left outside. It smelled of smoke and sawdust.
“He was,” Hope says, halting, conscious of herself as the possessor, in this other’s pendulous black eyes, of a wandering, frayed old mind, beyond any usefulness but some shreds of memory to be woven into another’s story, “he was self-indulgent and hardly even self-educated. And of course drank too much. But we all drank too much, it was part of the war, the blackouts, our desperate dingy mood, all that death, the newspapers dealing every day in death, hundreds, thousands, numbers that would make screaming headlines now. It was a man’s world. Art was a man’s world. They could hardly make room for women, even when they married us. It was a tough, man’s world. You speak of Zack and the rest as heroes of this historic moment you have—what’s the word now?—constructed, you see them as Titans in the clouds, but the Titans were a sad group actually, who came to a sorry end, if I remember my childhood Bulfinch. Except for funny old Bernie, who had married money, and Roger, who had a trust fund, and Onno, who began to sell before any of the others—he had that European flair that dealers and buyers could already understand, not our poor American groping, up from the depths, Jung and all those archetypes—everybody was poor and had been for years, living off the Project, the Federal Arts Project, before the war and even during it, though the dole was drying up. At the moment you mention, post-war, even after the publicity had begun to come in, Zack was still not selling paintings. A few prints and works on paper but not the big paintings. He was getting to be famous, but we stayed surprisingly poor—it maddened him. Peggy’s gallery gave Zack a dole, we had to borrow from her to buy the house, a house and three acres for four thousand dollars, think of it, the land alone would be a million now, out there close to the Hamptons; he never earned it out, and so the gallery kept his paintings. Just kept them, for years. Most people had no idea anything wonderful was happening. They didn’t know there was a moment. They were still thinking Picasso and Miró and the Surrealists. Not Dalí—he was as much despised as Benton, standing for everything we hated.”
“Of course,” Kathryn murmurs, placatingly, sensing a kindling, wanting Hope to run on.
“Dalí was a one-man circus, department-store window-dressing. He actually did some windows for Bonwit’s, and then fell through the glass tearing up the display when the management insisted on putting clothes on the mannequins, who were, I don’t know, stepping into fur-lined bathtubs and lying on beds of red coals, a lot of feathers and disembodied hands holding mirrors. It made all the papers, which of course is what he wanted. He understood publicity, and was shameless. Europeans are, when they get over here. This was before I moved to New York, but Zack somehow had been there and would describe it and laugh, but it also offended his sense of dignity that an artist would sell out like that. Zack could be in rags, filthy from a night in the gutter, but he had this ideal of dignity, of, I don’t know, the artist not as some performer and society leech but as a worker, and at least as worthy of respect as a preacher or a banker. It was one of the things about him I loved.” Hope feels herself roused, her face reddening, her heart pumping, striving to please, stung by the fear of appearing doddery; the old deprivations and ridicule seem as close as if this interloping girl had been one of the glib art journalists who had served up easy wisecracks in the ’forties Time and Life. But by the time these publications were taking any notice, a tide had turned. “You speak about a historic moment, Kathryn, but the attention was all in a few galleries, with a few critics, who had their own fish to fry for that matter, their own names to make—Clem used Zack to make his own name, and when Zack faltered Clem was the first one off the boat. The canvases, the ones that later everybody could see were magnificent, and that went for millions—what good were they? They were too big. They were public art without a public. Zack—it was pathetic—when he was in his cups used to tell people what a great investment his work would be, and of course he was right. One man in the Flats—Jimmy Quinn, who ran what was really a glorified vegetable stand—took a little thirty-by-forty fiberboard of Zack’s in payment and ten years or so ago finally sold it for two million dollars. He still drives around in his beat-up pickup. Zack would have liked that.”
Hope pauses, and Kathryn’s lips part to spit another question into the tape, but Hope is not done with her long, looping thought; there is a picture of Zack she wants to finish, though the memory of him threatens to suck her back, out, down, like waves foaming at her ankles at one of the beaches, one of the remote rocky ones past the bluffs, past the old fish-factories, toward the Point, where they would stand as the afternoon gave up its strong light and turned ruddy and the breeze picked up, there being nothing to the south but the Atlantic, a few gray ships on the horizon like index tabs in a filing cabinet. “We all drank,” she repeats, “but for Zack it was a poison, it released demons. Like many a famous drinker, he really couldn’t drink. I held my liquor better than he did, and I was just a slip of a thing in my twenties.” Zack was in his thirties when they first went together: his narrow hips, his chest and shoulders coated with blond wool, even his bare feet were beautiful, knobby and broad across the toes, and the insteps as white as the skin inside a woman’s arm. She stood beside him feeling the suck of ankle-high surf, the way it pulls the sand out from under your heels. There had been the white noise of the waves and the far-stretching scent of beach, salt and iodine and rotting marine bodies, fish and jellyfish leaving their round ochre corpses like puddles of varnish on the rocks, collapsed, unable to get back to their element, their anatomy dimly seen within the puddle, useless, wasted,
something like breathing still taking place, poor doomed creatures, so we all. She had liked the way Zack was not too much taller than she, like some men, including Ruk; she felt like an Eve matched to him, as in those marvellous Cranach panels in Pasadena, or the two frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, the Masaccio so anguished and ashamed, the red angel over their heads banishing them, and the Masolino so serene and stately and haughty, the little benign female snake’s head above Eve’s, Eve cool with her centrally parted fair hair, unrepentant, before the Fall, the cleft of her sex not hidden, nor Adam’s penis. Face it: this young woman, too, is beautiful. Hope imagines Kathryn’s naked body—the swing of hip into thigh, the rose-madder-tipped breasts floating on the rib cage, the pubic triangle pure ivory-black and oily as in a Corot—all in a flash, then renounces the image: of the creature. Her susceptibility to beauty, Hope has always known, is what has kept her minor as an artist. The great ones go beyond beauty, they spurn it as desert saints spurned visions of concupiscence and ease: the Devil’s offer of the world as reward.