Seek My Face Read Free Page B

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. Sheand 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 dominatedthe ’48 Olympics—everybody else was still weak with hunger.”
    Kathryn brushes this aside as facetious, as unworthy. She can’t imagine hunger and poverty as real cultural factors. Her face presses a few inches deeper into the space between Hope and herself, she in the soft old sunroom chair and Hope in her hard rocker, a rocker made by former hippies in Burlington of no less, the nicely printed (in green ink) leaflet that came with it said, than five different woods; they shrank at different rates and made the fit tighter as the chair aged, so the leaflet claimed. She had given the chair to Jerry for his first birthday up here and the claim is not yet disproved. It supports her weight, as she leans back to keep her inquisitor at a distance. The unkind clarity of the morning light—not a cloud in the blue sky, a glisten of mud on the bare earth outside the kitchen door when she had loaded up the bird feeder ten minutes before Kathryn too punctually arrived—strips the interviewer’s face of beauty and shows it to be horsy and humorless, its plummy eyes astride a long nose with a slight bump in it, its lips downturned in determination not to be distracted or too easily charmed, lips that might melt if kissed but are in danger of settling into a permanent sour frown of unfulfilled ambition. Kathryn glances down into the sheets of paper balanced on her black lap, her thin thighs pressed tightly together, pages of computer-typed questions to help her as the interview tape unwinds in the little machine, a Sony of two tones of gray, its purr tinny in the silence, on the low table between them, not a table but an old wooden sea-chest Hope bought in River-head in the ’forties for twenty