Seek My Face (8 page)

“She
never
liked it, really. Poor dear Herbert, yes, I think he loved Zack, much the way I did. Except he also liked those muddy Picassoesque ’forties paintings of Zack’s, all those scribbled Jungian symbols. I didn’t. Herbie was a miserable person, poor soul—overweight, queer, terribly epileptic, which he tried to hide, but he had the training, he had been to Paris, he had the eye to see the genius in Zack. He called him a genius from the outset. For me in my ignorance there was too much groping and searching in Zack, not enough finding. Zack couldn’t draw really, as I was saying, and until he began to use industrial paints right out of the hardware store his color was dismal, I thought. But what did I know? I was timid and tidy; I hated to dirty a clean canvas, the first strokes that Hochmann said were so important. No, it wasn’t Zack’s painting I was attracted to, it repelled me actually, it was Zack himself, his body, his face. He was beautiful, and it was a beauty that, unlike Ruk’s, took some creativity to discover. You’ll think I thought all men were beautiful, I was your usual de-repressed ex-Quaker hotpants, but no … it was Zack. Something about the
knit
of his face, and its color; he had skin, Western skin I thought of it as, leathery-soft, it didn’t wrinkle, it
creased
, and he kept a sallow sort of tan through the winter, and in summer he never used lotion; his face had these lovely low-relief episodes of muscle, even in his forehead, the two
diagonal high places up from the deep creases where his eyebrows frowned in, he was always frowning; as his hair thinned more and more, he looked less and less as if he had
ever
had hair, it was the most natural and becoming baldness I ever saw. When I was shown snapshots of him with this blond mop from boyhood I felt a kind of disgust. His dimples are always mentioned in descriptions of him, but there was something in the
planes
, a kind of perfectly symmetrical push-and-pull that may have been what Hochmann was always talking about. And perfect ears—look at the photographs, they’re rather amazing, big but perfect, without lobes. And the rest of him—we never talked about men’s ‘bums’ back then, but his was tight and quite lovely, he couldn’t see it so he was un-self-conscious about it, the two buttocks tight against each other with this fuzzy innocence—he had a lot of body hair but it was pale hair—and the legs looked almost bowed out, the calf muscles were so rounded, he was always telling people he had been a cowboy and it was a lie but his body looked it. You can’t do a beautiful person item by item, there’s the unity, there was a
swing
to his body, a
thrust
I guess we can say without getting too Freudian, that used to take my breath away when he wasn’t aware I was looking at him. You know those male bodies they used to do in murals, like in Rockefeller Center, not the ones bringing the electic light bulb or whatever but the workers operating the capitalist machinery or hauling bales of cotton up from the docks? Zack had that kind of body, but because he never did exercise if he could help it there was nothing preening about him. It would have violated his sense of manhood to be pleased with his own body. His art was strangled by self-consciousness, before it got great suddenly, but his body just always happened to
have this grace. Except, come to think of it, he couldn’t dance. He just couldn’t match his steps to yours, or let you match his.”

She feels emanating from Kathryn an opinion that this is enough on the subject, but Hope continues with a superior insistence, “He was trouble, yes, but, dear,
life
is trouble. Bernie used to say that life disturbs matter’s unconscious mineral calm, that’s why we have a death wish.” To bring herself back within the bounds of an interview, Hope tells the young woman, offhandedly, “I’ve been trying to remember the year of that dance when I went as a Hottentot, the New Year might have been 1944, but the mood, the temperature of the war outside feels more like ’45; we were no longer so afraid, the end, in Europe at least, was in sight, though people forget how grim that drive toward Germany was, it still didn’t seem impossible that Hitler would roll us back into the Channel. Hitler
did
the impossible. He was surreal; he was the bogey who had escaped the collective subconscious and found a country to run. The Germans followed all his orders, however mad, right down to the Berlin bunker; it all seems quite unbelievable now. Meanwhile, we had this aristocratic cripple to lead us, and Britain an old brandy-soak. Stalin, it turned out, was better at killing Russians than even Hitler was. It was the biggest, baddest fairy tale the world had ever seen, the kind of carnival that has those giant papier-mâché heads.”

Kathryn, perhaps stupid after all, seems tensely intent on nailing down a point she can use: “Did I understand you to say you didn’t think Zack had a future as a painter?”

Hope searches for a way to avoid giving her satisfaction. “It’s hard enough to remember what you did, let alone what you felt. I wanted to like him as an artist because I came to like him as a person. He did have his champions, like poor
Herbie, and in ’43, before I got involved with him really, he was in this show at Peggy’s Art of This Century—who could have dreamed then that This Century could someday become That Century?—and he got the famous nod from Mondrian—though there may have been some politics behind it, it turns out, there was another artist in the show who had helped Mondrian escape from Paris, and that’s why Mondrian came to the show at all, he wasn’t well, he died the next year—but I was really impressed less by Zack’s work than the dogged way he kept at it, against all these odds. Still, he was losing heart, his binges were getting worse, he would be gone for two or three nights, if I was to keep on with him we had to get out of the city.”

“Is it true he insisted on a church wedding?”

“I had insisted we get married, it was one thing to live in sin with a man in the city and another to do it in rural Long Island in 1945. I would have been happy with City Hall, my snotty family had pretty much given up on me, my younger brother’s being killed in the war had left them just shadows of their disapproving old selves, but, yes, it was Zack who insisted on a minister, I thought he did it mainly to make it so difficult I would give up, but Myrtle Strunk and I found this little old Congregationalist preacher in a musty sad church down beyond Bleecker who didn’t terribly mind that I had never been baptized—Quakers don’t do it, you know—and Zack couldn’t say if he had or hadn’t, his religious upbringing had been so end-of-the-world, off and on. The minister kept smiling all the time, like a demented person—his face had absolutely no color, you felt his whole life had been lived under this rock of lower Manhattan—and with Myrtle and Herbie there as our witnesses gave an oddly lovely short sermon telling us about marriage, and Creation, and how beautiful, now that the war was ended,
all our lives were going to be. The only thing he asked from us was that I wear a hat and Zack a jacket and tie, so, luckily, I still had my hatboxes, with the rest of my blue luggage, in a closet behind all my dried student paintings. What
I
asked of Zack was that he stay sober, and he did. He took it seriously. It’s hard to say what he believed, but he definitely did
not
believe in nothing; he had been to a number of shrinks about his drinking, and they had all been Jungian. It tied in with his painting, of course, the archetypes, the magic of symbols, the unearthing of the deepest self. What it didn’t do, for very long ever, was cure his drinking. So, yes, in answer to your question, it was a church wedding. A wistful little linen-white interior with box pews and tall clear lozenge-pane windows, one side blocked from the light by an adjacent building, like Sainte-Chapelle, and high above the altar a circular stained-glass window of Jesus with a lamb. Jesus in a grape-colored cloak and an ecru lamb. Oh my, my mouth is dry and my head feels light from too much talking.
Much
too much. I
am
going to make a cup of tea now. Please, could I make one for you too?”

Kathryn leans forward to frown at her tape recorder and reluctantly switches it off. “I’d prefer coffee if you had it,” she says, perhaps she doesn’t realize how ungraciously.

“Coffee. I gave it up so long ago—they said doing that would lower my blood pressure and prolong my life, and I suppose it has—that I have no coffeepot. Or grounds. There may be some instant in one of the cabinets, if you could look for me in the upper shelves; you’re taller than I.”

But when the two women stand together Kathryn even in her boots seems not incommensurately taller; her eyes come to the top of Hope’s head. She surrenders: “Tea would be fine. I’ve never been a fan of instant. These percolators
they have now with clocks you can set for the next morning spoil you, I guess.”

“It’s Taster’s Choice,” offers Hope, feeling sorry for the little red-labelled jar gathering dust somewhere at the back of a shelf that she hasn’t gotten out the kitchen stool to look into for years. Her hand remembers how the jar had a subtle, friendly waist, to make holding and tipping it easier.

“No, really, tea would be nice. My mother used to give me tea, half milk and half tea, when I was sick.”

“Good,” Hope says, “if you mean that.” She pushes up from the rocker and takes her first steps carefully, in case her knees have stiffened or a foot has fallen asleep. The rag rug has tripped her more than once, hurrying to answer the front doorbell, which nobody who knows her or the house ever uses, or getting to her feet after losing herself in a book in the plaid chair, a good sleepy-making mystery or international thriller written by the child of some old friend; imagine being young and believing the world is such a conspiracy. On one occasion not so many years ago she sprawled right onto the floor, its black-red sheen swimming under her eyes as she mentally checked her body for the signal, first dull and then frantically pulsing, of a broken bone. She knew the sensations because she had broken her tibia skiing in the Poconos when she was sixteen, the bindings had scarcely any release then, the tows were merely rope tows and single metal chairs, icy-cold right through the ski pants and the woolen long johns, it was all very uncomfortable but boys did it and so you had to.

“I’ll heat up water in a pot, since there are two of us. When I’m by myself I just microwave a mug, though the heat in the water for some reason doesn’t last as long. The way it agitates the molecules, I suppose.” One of the reasons
Hope doesn’t like talking to young people is her fear of being stupid about all the new technology that has come along—not since she was a girl, but since about 1980. The VCR was a dividing line; until then, it was
her
technology, and she could handle it, but she never has been able to program a VCR, even with reading glasses on.

Now that she is standing upright, her voice sounds as if it originates, crackling and indistinct, some distance from her head, like one of those little radios that used to be everywhere, playing daytime serials in shops and dentists’ offices and front desks at dry cleaners, before people had cell phones and television sets to make themselves feel connected. When she goes into Montpelier now, she is astonished by how everybody has cell phones, even the schoolchildren walking along with their knapsacks on their backs, and in summer there are all these earnest girl hikers in very short shorts clutching in one hand a cell phone and in the other a bottle of water, suddenly everybody in the new millennium has to have a private bottle of water. There do seem to be fewer and fewer public drinking fountains, they used to be everywhere, that had been one of the great things about America, you could always get a free drink of water. Behind her grandfather’s house, near the giant droopy-limbed hemlock, down some slippery boards, there had been an open spring lined with mossy stones, and a tin dipper for anyone to use, even someone off the street if they cared to venture in on the brick walk alongside the house. Strangers might be angels, was the old superstition.

The way to the kitchen leads around a table with an old-fashioned black dial phone on it and beside it a cane-seated ladderback chair in case the conversation is so long and important Hope needs to sit down, which ever fewer of them are, and down a short hall past the narrow and steep
back stairs on one side and on the other the back door and its storm door. Through the double glass—nine six-by-nine panes, both doors, though they don’t quite line up—the outdoors calls to her, bright and bleak and still wintry, pieces of snow visible in the woods like scattered laundry, the side lawn beneath the feeder gray with sunflower husks the birds or the squirrels have spilled. The beech tree from whose lowest limb the feeder hangs seems, at a quick glance that flashes through her eyes upon a brain still displaced by its effort to remember the past, a photograph of a silvery explosion, monstrous, multiform, spraying outward like a Richard Lippold construction, the beech’s narrow white-tipped leaf buds still tightly sheathed but taking on a ruddy, sappy tan. And the woods beyond have a russet tinge where the maples cluster, and the bleached lawn shows in bare spots, a dark gleam of thawing earth though mud season is not quite here, in this part of Vermont. The lawn still looks hard enough to walk on. Hope imagines it rocky and crunching beneath her feet. Where patches of snow linger in the shadows of the woods they look, she has often noticed on her walks, like smoke; so do, oddly, distant mountains and a lake and even a blue house, seen through branches: to a painter’s open eye the world abounds in optical illusions. The other day, by the dining-room window, she was transfixed by what seemed to be a piece of translucent paper, wax paper, caught in the brush at the edge of the lawn and trembling in the breeze, and she wondered what impudent litterer had flung it here, then realized it was a gray squirrel, clinging to an alder shoot thick enough to half-hide the little animal body but so slender it kept swaying.

This is burning season. If the girl would only go soon, Hope could spend an hour outside picking up dead sticks—the beeches and hickories drop them endlessly—for the
brush fire Jason Warren would light when he came this Saturday, if the wind wasn’t high. Though he is one of those men to whom women are always in the way, strange two-legged incessantly talking animals found now even on the mountainsides, Hope likes to stand with him, adding to his blaze with garden stakes and dry stalks and feeling the heat on her face, enough to singe her eyebrows if her eyebrows hadn’t faded to wisps ages ago. Until she turned seventy she did almost all her own yardwork, Zack, much as she maligns him, having shown her what a person can do on their own; they had been too poor to think of hiring many workmen there on the Flats. Zack knocked out partitions and replaced shingles and porch supports and moved the barn uphill, out of the center of their view of the marsh and the distant strip of saltwater that was really a small harbor. Zack got neighbors—Andy Silcox, Glenn Urquhart—to help push the barn on rollers, it moved five inches each time they leveraged it up, less as the uphill pitch increased, they finally had to get a fisherman with a seine-hauling winch on the back of his truck to pull the big dilapidated thing onto the cement foundation Zack had laid by himself, spraining his shoulder in the process, spreading the hardening concrete. The Flats had been a frontier to them, though English sailors and their inbred descendants had been farming and fishing here since 1640. Neighbor helped neighbor, Zack paid back his labor-debt with labor on their places—rebuilding the Urquharts’ porch, helping harvest the Silcox potatoes. “It was the end of the world,” Hope says aloud. “Just the elements.”