Seek My Face Read Free

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 bedesired. 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-coloredelastic 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