Seek My Face (25 page)

Had all this been only to hint that it was getting late? Hope feels light-headed with such an expenditure of breath, but she does want, so much, to communicate with this opaque, rather rejecting young woman, who is telling her, “Honestly, I don’t need anything to eat or drink. You’ve been too generous already. I never meant—I have only a few more questions.”

“But I’m nagged by the fear—the
terror
, Kathryn—that I haven’t answered your questions at all,
at all
, as the poem says. Please. Let’s take a break. It’s after four.”

So the thread-thin hands of the gold clock on the mantel state. Piet, her middle child, had had trouble grasping the principle of clocks, and in truth, when she tried, it was not so easy to explain, the big hand moving through twelve hours while the little hand moved only one, and why twelve hours when there were twenty-four in the day? The pathos of his puzzlement lasted in her mind for years beyond the unmarked moment—it might have happened at school, or perhaps Brenda or Josie successfully explained it to him—when the trick of it clicked into place and the child was saddled with knowing how to tell time, so that forty years later he was not late for appointments with multimillionaire clients who wanted to merge and acquire. Perhaps he got his mental block from her: though she was given years of
piano lessons, at a time when modest artistic skills were still part of a woman’s equipment in the hunt for a husband, the bass clef has remained for her something of a puzzle; when, to entertain her grandchildren, she attempts to peck out a Christmas carol or an Easter hymn on the piano, she has to locate the fingers of her left hand thinking, All Cows Eat Grass, A C E G, a munching, depressing reminder as opposed to the shining clarity of the upper clef, F A C E. How angry it used to make her when her little fat fingers couldn’t stretch the octave the big yellow music book—arrangements supposedly
for
children—demanded. It wasn’t
fair
.

“Come!” she cries to Kathryn, holding out her hand. “You
must
come outdoors. Put away those dreary sheets of questions reminding us of all we’d just as soon forget.” Though her hand remains in midair some seconds, her guest doesn’t take it in hers, instead using her own hands—long, pale, workmanlike, erotically charged with a serious intent at odds with her black (or are they deep purple, an aubergine?) fingernails—to switch off the Sony and lay her neatened pages of notes on the sea-chest, after balancing them on the chair’s broad arm but thinking better of it, since the act of rising, even if done carefully, in a three-quarters unfolding move from one side of the broad plaid cushion, might tip the pages and scatter them on the floor. Hope has already risen from the rocker, feeling liberated at last, certain that her duties toward this awkward person are nearly discharged. “First,” she all but sings, “let me put on the water for tea, so we’ll have it as soon as we come back in. We’ll just go out a moment. I know you’re thinking of the time.”

“No, I wasn’t,” says Kathryn, but hesitantly.

Heedless, unstoppable now, Hope leads the way to her kitchen, past back stairs narrow and steep with each bare
pine tread worn in two depressions as if by a double waterfall of footsteps. Jerry wanted to replace them, they were worn to half their original thickness in spots, but Hope always said no, she loved them as they were, testifying to all those laborious farmers’ feet clomping up to bed at the end of a weary day and then down again at dawn to begin another in the odor of breakfast meats frying, sausages and chops, oatmeal and dark bread, meals to get them through the six hours to noon. Beneath the stairs a beaded-board closet door hides brooms and a feather duster and an Electrolux and cleaning supplies that smell to Hope like sugary candy when she opens the door, which she rarely does, the supplies wait for the weekly visit of Mrs. Warren, who is always trying to give Hope a puppy, she and Jason breed Labradors in the valley as a business. The narrow door and its trim and baseboard and the window frame across this hall are painted a warm medium gray, paler than battleship yet darker than pewter, a low-gloss old-fashioned mole color Hope had picked from a chart of Colonial Williamsburg shades twenty years ago, when she and Jerry had bought the house to be a place where they could get away from everything, even television except for one channel, a place where their mortality could find them at home when it came knocking, though as it happened Jerry died in New York Hospital, between the East River and York Avenue, above but not far above the squawks of swerving taxis and wails of ambulances arriving at the emergency entrance. Hope sets the water kettle on the chipped prongs and blue flame and at the far sink verifies her impression that the rain has hesitated: the flecks on the Andersen windows actually are drying. When Kathryn came in the front door, which no one who knows the house would knock at, the strange tall girl was wearing a hooded cloak of purple cashmere
mere that got tossed onto the front-hall settee, but this is too fine a garment and perhaps not warm enough for early April in Vermont. However, the mud room off the kitchen, at right angles to the corridor to the studio, has pegs for holding skis and poles and snowshoes when these exertions were still feasible and lower pegs for parkas, of which Hope had a number, mustard and maroon and buff in color, all more or less dirty from rubbing around in car trunks and their goosedown stuffing somewhat flattened by the years, these outfits for vanished, more vigorous selves hung above rows of boots, high-ankled patchworks of leather and rubber and canvas, for snow and mud; there is no need for these, the lawn is still frozen, but she does grab the mustard-colored parka for herself and thrusts another, the maroon, which looks biggest and newest and fattest—it was Jerry’s, she can see him in it for a moment, his curly gray hair, thick as wool, smartly dented by the elastic band of his yellow ski goggles before he hid it in the striped green ski cap that made him look like a chunky elf, his tanned face with its little scar off-center on the upper lip (a boyhood brawl; he grew up tough) which made him look rough-hewn and good-humored somehow; he thought she was
funny
was what she had loved—upon Kathryn, who stupidly drapes it around her shoulders cape-fashion, stepping warily, like a heron wading, out the back door onto the millstone that serves as a step and then down in her quite unsuitable Via Spigas with their ladders of laces and odd high heels onto the earth, which is a little muddy, here by the door, where the shaded lawn is thin on grass. Really, Hope thinks, the woman has the passive aggression of a child, whom nothing quite pleases, yet who can’t articulate an objection you might argue her out of.

“There’s the old orchard,” Hope says, gesturing in the
chill dull air, in a direction up the hill past the house. “It still produces wormy apples and pears. Over here’s the bird feeder, where squirrels terrorize the chickadees and a pair of cardinals that show up, though I haven’t seen the male lately, there are runaway cats in the woods. I own twenty acres in that direction and fifteen more in this. Let’s go around to the front of the house—watch your step in this section, the moles did a terrible job on it last summer, and yet my lawn boys refuse to roll it, they say nobody owns rollers any more, it’s not part of lawn care now. When I was a girl in the Philadelphia suburbs every household had a lawn roller; you filled them with water from the garden hose and you could hear it slosh inside, it would slosh back and forth as you pushed it and almost knock you backward when you stopped, if you weren’t paying attention. Do be careful, those boots of yours aren’t as practical as they look, the soles are so smooth.” Her mind runs on into the unspoken thought that it is she, Hope, who must be careful, at her age it begins with a single misstep, an ankle, a hip, a healing that is ominously slow. Her sons will take her into their hands and end her living alone as she does, unsupervised, free. She knows they discuss her, as her parents used to discuss her when she was in bed and going to sleep above the soothing mumble of their voices.

After hours of her longing to take it into her lungs, the outdoor air is less rejuvenating than she had anticipated. She feels the irresistible lassitude that comes over an old person toward the end of the afternoon. Jerry used to speak of “pick-me-ups.” “Time for a pick-me-up,” he would say, when Hope had been intending to spend another hour in the garden or at the easel, and she blamed the daily drinking he invited for the increase in her weight. Until her mid-fifties and her third marriage, she still had a figure she
needn’t be too ashamed of in shorts or a snug black dress—feminine, and thickening, and soft in the upper arms, but with a waist still and hips that didn’t look like a pair of duffle bags packed for a long trip. She couldn’t have landed Jerry if she had been in the shape she acquired as his wife.

This is the present
, Hope tells herself. This bare, raw outdoor moment.
I am still alive
. The air is moist and gray, not quite freezing but with a breeze that cuts at her throat, where the turtleneck is loose and she did not bother to zip up her parka. The front lawn, as much hawkweed and dandelion and plantain as grass, all flattened by winter to one dun color, ends at a drystone wall mended by Jerry’s soft city hands until he got bored and paid the Warren men—Jason and his three sons and his twin bachelor brother, Ezra—to finish the job. The driveway, such as it is, comes off the road toward the house on the side with the bird feeder hung on the big beech backed by pines; Kathryn had driven her car, an orange Honda coupe with one unpainted fender left over from, presumably, a city accident, up the driveway and aggressively beyond it, parking at an angle beneath the beech where neither Hope nor the Warrens ever park. Beyond the wall, a dirt road with a high mane of hay leads to the houses of her two out-of-sight neighbors, one a retired Unitarian minister from the Syracuse area and the other a once-well-known ’forties radio personality generally assumed to be dead. “We’re up among the angels,” Jerry would joke. Beyond the road a bumpy meadow falls away, dotted with boulders and ghostly burdock stalks and a few starting cedars the mowers last fall somehow missed. The cold breeze is sharper out front, on this unsheltered expanse open to the panoramic prospect of brown and smoky blue and dull pine green from which faintly arises a whir of highway traffic in the valley, cars and trucks
hurtling unseen on Route 89. She zips the parka up to her chin. The far mountains overlap in waves like viscid, studiously continuous blue brush-strokes on glass. The clouds above align in advancing rolls of mottled vapor. A few fine cold drops prick her face and the back of her pointing hand. “That’s Camels Hump,” she says. “A nice afternoon’s climb twenty years ago, when I was younger.”
This is it
, she thinks again, this drab present, this overcast radiance, colder and bleaker than April should be, this moist air sharp in her shallow lungs, this brimming vacancy of the seen. Witnessing the world alongside another makes her realize how little it all is, how brief and even negligible compared with our soul’s expectations and bottomless appetite. A world made to our measure would go on forever. Instead, the million million molecules of H
₂
O overhead, and the thousands of leafless trees that from miles away blend into a tone of blue, a neutral yet delicately packed color like the blue-green-gray-pink background so frequent in Cézanne’s later still lifes, and the myriad microscopic structures that bestow consciousness upon us all so quickly slip away.

“Quickly,” she says to her mute companion. “You must see my garden. On the other side of the house.” They make their way across the frozen uneven turf, where a few wrinkled shoulders of ledge jut from the lawn, frozen flow from a fire that turned rocks molten millions or was it billions of years ago, these two women unequal in age and height but yoked together by a sisterly determination to make the moment succeed, a moment like the thinnest possible skin of time, thinner than lichen, on the rocks’ enduring unknowing. But the garden, lovingly extended and fenced while Jerry was still alive, and still tended by Hope to the extent her strength permits, with no more summer help than the Warren men can spare from more manly jobs and she can
coax from Mildred and Jason’s daughter, an overweight teen-age girl with her thoughts miles away, hopelessly stupid on boys and music, music she wears on her head in rustling earphones, music to drown out the merest sliver of a thought if any were to wander into her poor brain, Hope cannot believe she herself was ever that besotted, music came to her over her parents’ radio and hardly grazed her consciousness, nasal men singing through megaphones, New York hotel music piping with muted trumpets, even in the war you danced when the music, the swing, was there but you didn’t wear it on your head like a dunce cap—the garden presents almost nothing to see: the stubble of last summer’s phlox and a few hosta leaves left flattened on the earth when she ripped it up hastily one unseasonably cold October day, her hands hurting, and a rusting wire peony-support unaccountably overlooked and then lost for months under snow. Dead, dead as sticks appear the writhing thorned stems of the pink rambler she has trained through the lattice of the green fence she and Jerry had the Warren twins put up to give the multicolored canvas of the garden, as it were, a frame. Jason was the outgoing bluff one, the salesman, but Ezra was the craftsman.

“It must be beautiful in the summer,” Kathryn says, lamely, though Hope can’t blame her for that, it is a lame occasion, she wonders now why she was so keen to get outdoors.

“It’s English-style,” Hope tells her guest, “that is, crowded and blowsy, and I tend to lose my enthusiasm toward the end of June, when it gets hot, even up here.”

Already she sees, in the earth that has hardly begun to awaken, cracks indicating softening and refreeze, and the rounded tongues of daffodils and the pointed tongues of daylilies beginning to poke through. On the front of the
house, the southern side, next to the sun-warmed Barre granite of the foundation, snowdrops and crocuses are already pushing up to flower. Green threads of garlic will soon appear in the lawn. The garden and its care seems a suffocating challenge, a cruel hill she must climb into the future. She cannot get enough of the day’s darkening air into her lungs; her lungs are emphysematous from decades of heedless smoking. It wasn’t until her marriage to Guy and its pregnancies that she stopped, Guy had never smoked and complained about the smell of ashtrays in the apartment, there was something prissy and whining about him that she refused to let herself dislike; the public that saw him as the embodiment of mad invention, of irreverent Pop revolt against the seven centuries of painterly tradition since Giotto would have been disappointed to know what an orderly and abstemious prig he in fact was. He drank in moderation, rarely anything stronger than wine, and smoked grass with her the last time when they took the vacation in Mexico, their marriage’s last gasp; they arrived by 727 instead of by Route 10 in a sandy two-tone ’56 Nash Rambler with a biracial, bisexual duo with great bodies and vague ambitions, but as soon as she and Guy landed in Guadalajara the moon did look bigger, like a piece of display pottery, and its pale light smelled of flowers, the tree flowers that soaked in the night dew and closed when dawn opened with cockcrows. Her husband scored a little pot from a kid on the street just outside the Hilton, and that sweet evening on the balcony in their underwear did carry her back to 1958. She had gone with Guy for a wild ride, but the ride had turned out to be tame and to end with a jolt. The jolt had been building; he knew that tameness was the undoer of art and that no twentieth-century art movement keeps its kick for ten years if that, the label dries up and
curls off; though artists live forever with modern medicine, their moment becomes a corpse and there is no reversing the dissolution, resurrection flies in the face of molecular biology, Guy would have been sensitive enough to feel himself a walking corpse, with a wife well past fifty and three hostages to fortune receiving expensive private educations, no wonder he turned to tight-assed Gretchen, for a lighter ride.