Seek My Face Read Free Page A

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’tlike 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,