Seek My Face (2 page)

The young woman, a narrow new knife in the chair’s fat old sheath, reads in her edgy New York voice, a voice that leans toward Hope with a pressure of anxiousness but also with what seems, in this shaky light of late life, a kind of daughterly affection, “
For a long time I have lived as a recluse, fearing the many evidences of God’s non-existence with which the world abounds. The world, it has come to me slowly, is the Devil’s motley, colorful instead of pure. I restrict my present canvases to shades of gray ever closer together, as if in the predawn, before light begins to lift edges into being. I am trying, it may be, to paint holiness. I suppose I should be flattered when some critics call this phase my best—they write that at last I am out from the shadow of my first husband. But I have, miraculously it might be said, ceased to care what they think, or what figure I cut in the eyes of strangers.
End quote. This was five years ago. Would you say it is still true?”

Hope tries to slow the young woman down, dragging her own voice as if in thought. “True enough, I would say, though it does sound a shade self-dramatizing. Perhaps ‘fearing’ is strong. ‘Feeling dread and distaste in regard to’ might have been more accurate and—and seemly.”

It makes a lump in Hope’s throat to have this nervously aggressive intruder here, with her city-white face and her dark-nailed long hands and her doctrinairely black outfit—black turtleneck, black imitation-leather jacket with a big
center zipper, black hair held off her ears by a pair of curved silver combs and falling in a loose and silky fan-shape down her back—finished off so ominously with heavy squaretoed footgear, combat boots of a sort, laced up through a dozen or more eyelets like two little black ladders ascending into the flared bottoms of her slacks, the slacks made of a finely ribbed, faintly reflective fabric Hope has never seen before, a fabric without a name. The boots, with that new kind of high heel, wide sideways but narrow the other way, front to back, couldn’t be very comfortable, unless mannishness was always comfortable now. It is a new century—more appallingly yet, a new millennium. This millennial fact for Hope is a large blank door that has slammed, holding her life behind it like a child smothering in an abandoned refrigerator.

The visitor’s voice, insistent with a certain anger yet femalely flexible, insinuating itself into her prey’s ear, asserts, “You were raised as a Quaker.”

“Well, ‘raised’ is a kind term for it. My grandfather was an elder, true, but my father, especially after we moved to Ardmore, attended meeting only once or twice a year. The Ouderkirks had been Dutch Quakers; Dutch Quakers settled Germantown, a misnomer really, it should have been called Dutchtown, just as the Pennsylvania Dutch should be properly Pennsylvania Germans. Pockets of these Dutch Quakers had been living in the Rhine Valley; the Ouderkirks came from Krefeld; Penn himself had visited them in the sixteen seventies, telling them of his lovely colony, his ‘holy experiment’ across the sea. When they first came over, in the sixteen eighties, some lived in caves until they could build their houses. My mother, though, was quite Episcopalian, typically lukewarm, but she would never have called herself irreligious. We all went to meeting together a
few times, it seems like quite a few but in a child’s mind a little does for a lot. I remember mostly the light, and the silence, all these grown-ups waiting for God to speak through one of them—suppressed coughs, shuffling feet, the creak of a bench. It upset me at first, you know how children are always getting embarrassed on behalf of adults. Then the quality of the silence changed, it turned a corner, like an angel passing, and I realized it was a benign sort of
game
. The Friends speak of ‘living silence.’ Actually, someone did eventually speak. It had been arranged. The Quakers
did
make arrangements, but left space for God, so to speak, to upset the arrangements. There was a kind of elaborate courtesy to it all. Once there had been a bench up front for the elders and recorded ministers, but by the time I remember, the late ’twenties it must be, the very early ’thirties, I would have been ten in 1932, the benches were arranged in a square, so no one had any priority in the seating. Though my grandfather never led us to a back bench.”

Be quiet
, Hope tells herself. This has ever been her fault, talking, giving, flirting, trying too hard to please, endeavoring to seduce. Her grandfather would use a Quaker phrase, “of the creature,” for anything that was too much, too human, too worldly, too selfish and cruel. War was of the creature. Lust and intemperance of course, yet reason and excessive learning and disputation, too. The arts—save for the domestic, Edenic art of gardening, and the hidden art of making money—were of the creature, howls for recognition and singularity. Things of the creature were weak and dirty and unworthy; they were a form of noise. As a child Hope had chattered too much, feeling her round freckled face redden with excitement, her heart nearly bursting with its own beating, wanting within her ribs all of her, head to toes, scalp to footsoles, to be loved, to be held, to be
desired. Even now, on the grave’s edge, seventy-nine last month, the unmerry month of March, she is trying to charm the lithe black-clad stranger, charmless though she herself has become, in her baggy brown corduroys and slack-necked yellow cotton turtleneck and thick wool lumberjack shirt left untucked as if to hide her belly but in truth calling attention to it; her belly bulges but her breasts and buttocks are sunken, she has become beneath her clothes a naked witch by Schongauer, with imps of arthritic pain her familiars, or Rembrandt’s dreamy Saskia several decades further lost in sags and wrinkles. Her shiny auburn bangs, her signature when a young woman, are not even gray now but white, so thinned and dry and lacking in body, each filament sticking out with a mind of its own, as to be a mere souvenir of what once covered her forehead with the smooth bulge of a coppery cuirass. Her hair was cut short then, two points curving in to touch the angles of her jaw, the wide jaw defining the pale pentagon that looked back at her from a mirror with a deceptive calm, firm in its freckled hazel gaze, the nose small and straight, the lips not quite full but tidy and quick to express receptivity, to laugh, to smile, even at herself so earnestly appraising her face in the mirror, a dimple leaping up low in the left cheek. As a child she wondered where the reflection went when she walked away; mirrors hung on the Germantown walls like paintings that kept changing subject. The ’sixties liberated her from lipstick and those frizzing ’forties and ’fifties perms as well as from girdles and garters; she let her hair grow long and flat down her back, bundling it into a quick ponytail to paint or do housework, she had all sorts of artful clips and hinged round combs, tortoiseshell, and ivory before endangered elephants became an issue. The gray ghost of this ponytail now is gathered at the back of her skull in one of those candy-colored
elastic circlets they sell at the Montpelier five-and-ten (one of the few five-and-tens left anywhere, they don’t call it that, just the phrase dates her, a dime gets you nothing now), and on her feet she has thick socks the color of lint and cradling soft Birkenstocks, which date her also. The ’sixties had been for her a grateful release, a joy, though she was in her forties for most of them. Money worries, mating worries were behind her, she was a Manhattanite with a horse farm in Connecticut, married to Guy Holloway, Pop Art’s super-successful boy wonder, and, more amusingly still, a mother of three young children, pushing in her denim miniskirt and auburn bangs a wire cart with little Dot in the infant seat in corduroy overalls (the pocket a staring teddy bear or a round-eyed canary) and the two boys trailing behind whining for this and that through the aisles of the Lexington Avenue Gristede’s, all those clustered consumeristic colors under the blazing cool ceiling, such uninhibited colors, Day-Glo oranges and phosphorescent greens and acid persimmons, a decade of brazen rainbows, of gold leaf and silvering returning to canvases, of shimmering psychedelic trips. Yet these interviewers always asked her about the dreary, fearful ’forties and ’fifties, the first decade a gunmetal gray and the second that sickly powder blue you can see in the washed-out ’fifties movies on television.

“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.”