Seek My Face Read online

  Hope thinks this was worth saying, and regrets that Kathryn doesn’t have her tape recorder running. But, then, what kind of capture is it, the words on tape, words on paper, if nobody listens, nobody reads? It all just pours into the dark, the darkness that exists even in the midst of the light; the light itself is blind.

  “This is the best,” Kathryn says, her circuit of attention returned to the painting on the easel. The assertion takes Hope aback; who is this girl to judge?

  Hope self-dismissingly sighs. “It’s very like all the others, yet there are little differences that I can feel. Each is an adventure, even at my age.”

  “You must stop thinking so much of your age. I never think of mine.”

  “At your age, I didn’t either.” Is this true? Hope doubts it. It was part of the old way, the way still mapped by religion, to see yourself on a path, within a journey from which you might be called out at any moment, for an accounting. She cannot picture how this young woman conceives of her own, her only, existence—as an unaccountable present tense, an unframed now that imposes duties upon her, such as this interview, without a possibility of drastic, everlasting failure? Hope knows enough younger people, her children and their children for a start, who would never think of being grateful for existence; as best she can tell, the universe for them is a kind of joke to be shrugged off, a cosmic sneeze rapidly dissipating into the original nothingness. What’s to praise? Who’s to blame? Her father, Hope in her childhood came to sense, had a religious sense of failure, for all his nice home of false timbers and stucco and chalky bricks, and his office overlooking Market Street from a suitable height, and his handsome energetic wife organizing his party life and summer homes, and his perky auburn-haired daughter and his two sons, both of whom had inherited his good bones and fair fine hair and thoughtful, faintly melancholy calm. His pious ancestors, those fanatics risking hanging and exile in their zeal to strip Christianity back to its uncorrupted essence, made him feel a failure in his worldly status, a genteel offshoot of his more immediate ancestors’ success in trade, in manufacture (a carpet factory whose vast clatter and heaving looms and sense of imprisonment formed one of Hope’s earliest memories, a visit with her grandfather just before the plant closed under pressure from the South’s lower wages) and investment (railroads, coal, slums). To “feed” his “face”—a favorite phrase of his—for decade after decade, to feed his children’s faces, to put clothing on their bodies, and to drape them in the educational credentials needed to maintain membership in their social class, and to mediate, in a time when lawyers also served as financial advisers, between old Philadelphia money and the hazards of an ever-new world that played host to a market crash followed by a radical Democratic President who laughed at privilege, being himself privileged—none of this seemed, by the inner light that burned dimly within him, enough. He did not much protest when his daughter rebelled and went wild in New York.

  She thinks Kathryn has seen enough of the studio. It was important to Hope that her studio feel secret, an extension of her brain, flooded with a thinking silence, a fluorescence wiped clean of the traces of visitors. “Where is your tea?” she asks.

  “Oh! I forgot it and left it in the kitchen!”

  “I don’t think you’re a tea drinker. Don’t be. It stains the teeth. You have beautiful teeth. You should smile more often.”

  Back in the kitchen, past the bags of Milorganite and buckwheat hulls, Kathryn says, seeking something smiling to say, “It’s warmer in here.”

  “The studio cools down; it’s on a separate system, electric heat, terribly expensive, and I turn it down to fifty-five when I’m done for the day.”

  “I’m taking too much of your day. Kick me out whenever you have to.”

  “But we’ve only gotten up to 1946!”

  “That’s true.” The girl sees, dartingly, with a bit of fright in her eyes, that the older woman is game for more. “I think I will accept your offer of a bathroom, before we—”

  “Go back to work,” Hope finishes for her. “Out into the hall, turn right, under the stairs, a narrow door on your left. We had to squeeze it in.”

  Momentarily alone, Hope empties the mugs—her own, nearly empty; Kathryn’s, nearly full—in the sink. Then she swishes hot faucet water around in them and puts them mouth-down on the drainer to dry. The pets she and Jerry had have all died, but even these mugs, with their painted parrots and red-and-green stripes, have that quality pets do, of sharing your innermost domestic existence, so that you come gratefully home to them from a venture into human society. They give you back your self after others have dirtied and addled it. She stands at the double door leading to the side yard, for the thousandth time annoyed that the panes don’t quite line up, and feels that this swaying feeder on its wire, this gray birch and the woods beyond, with its tinge of red and smoky gaps of pallor, are friends whose silent trust she is betraying with all her excessively eager talk to an intruder. She longs for solitude as if for Paradise. What did Freud say happiness was? Release from tension, of which sexual release was the model. How bizarre and unconscionable, really, her own sexual activity looks from the altitude of years. Bug-behavior, the repulsive intricacy of insect genitals and strategies, strategies in which the death of the individual is quite casually folded. Poking, biting, squirting, dying. Bernie, who relished Nietzsche’s thought that truth is ugly, used to talk about such things; his parents had once given him a microscope, and he would draw for Hope insect genitalia, to see if it turned her off. It did not. What a chemical daze it must have been that allowed her ever to see male genitals, especially when erect and inflamed—the blue vein, the lavender head, the painfully stretched translucent skin—as beautiful, so beautiful she wanted the thing within herself, incorporated, possessed. What is the irritation female bugs feel, that they submit?

  The toilet down the hall flushes: Kathryn rising from the seat, having patted her oily dark cleft with a pad of tissue. This downstairs water closet sometimes keeps running, the stopper balancing upright on its hinge and failing to fall, so that water runs without filling the porcelain box and making the ball cock rise and shut off the flow. Hope listens for the telltale change of pitch in the toilet’s murmur that signals a fallen stopper and a seal. She imagines she hears it, through the rush of an open faucet: Kathryn washing her hands. Had Hope set out a clean hand towel? The other woman emerges with that curious stalking gait of hers, as if walking in her boots on uneven stepping-stones, a praying-mantis gait. Hope wonders if she should follow the younger woman’s example but foresees that the seat will be warm, an uncanny undesired intimacy, and decides she can wait. The tea will want out in an hour or less.

  Mustering an uncertain half-smile—Hope regrets having said anything about smiling more often, her tongue runs away with her, all from trying too hard to please—Kathryn stalks back into the front parlor, to Grandfather Ouderkirk’s plaid chair. Irritably the interviewer peers at the little gray Sony, holding it nearsightedly close to her face to check if the fresh tape is turning, then replacing it on the old sea-chest, among the brass nailheads. “A church wedding,” she prompts.

  Hope bridles at this re-emphasis. “As I said, we could scarcely, in 1945, live together in a rural community like the Flats without a marriage license. You couldn’t even do it in Hollywood, that’s why all those stars like Lana Turner and What’s-her-name—the one with the purple eyes—kept getting married. The locals were suspicious enough of us. They couldn’t understand how Zack earned a living. And in fact he scarcely did—the agreement with Peggy paid him a hundred fifty a month, which was less than the twenty-three dollars and eighty-six cents a week he had been collecting from the Federal Arts Project plus the sixty a month my father had been sending me. That stopped, of course, when we got married. As to the church part, Zack had these touching pockets of conventionality. Maybe he thought it would please me. And actually it did. I got to wear one of my hats.”

  “Your work. How much were you painting at that ti
me?”

  “Some. By the fall of ’44, I had dropped out of Hochmann and was waitressing at an Italian restaurant, Eugenio’s, south of the Park. Weekends and evenings I tried to paint, but once Zack entered my life there wasn’t much time for myself.”

  “He was demanding?”

  Hope sighs, feeling this to be tired terrain. “He had been the youngest of five and was like a child in that you had to be paying attention to him every minute; except when he was painting, he had no inner resources. Even when he wasn’t there, you had to keep worrying if he was going to get killed, hit by a car or his neck broken by some guy in a bar he would pick a fight with. He was always picking fights and always losing. It was like his drinking—he was poor at it. My theory was, he had been the runt of his litter and being beaten up reminded him of home. I mean, he came home to it.”

  “Or perhaps he thought,” Kathryn says, “that this time he would win.”

  Hope is enough accustomed to the subservience of interviewers to be piqued. Does this girl think that, through her research, she knows Zack better than his wife, who steered him up from those Village gutters into greatness?

  Kathryn senses Hope’s stiffness and says meekly, “It did happen with his painting. Winning.”

  “It did,” Hope concedes. “But then he smashed it all up. He hated success, it seemed tawdry to him. It got him too much out into the open, he felt painfully exposed, though he had thought it was what he wanted.”

  “Your painting,” Kathryn says, as if bringing Hope to heel. “Was it abstract at this time, around the time you moved?”

  “I kept backsliding, how did you know? Fragments of the city—faces from the restaurant in Little Italy, neon light reflected on the wet pavements, the silhouettes of midtown you saw from the walk-up on East Ninth Street—kept working their way in, through what Hochmann used to call ‘holes’ in the canvas. Zack was contemptuous. ‘What’s this representational shit?’ he’d ask. ‘Who you think you are, Hopper?’ He’d tell me, ‘Let Levine and Ben Shahn do the political cartoons.’ Jack Levine was big before the war and in the ’forties, and Zack had an especial dislike for him, I think because he could do all those Old Master-ish things—draw anatomy, work with shadows and light—that Zack couldn’t do if his life depended on it, any more than he could assemble an evenly lit pseudo-Renaissance tableau like Benton.”

  “There was a lot that Zack couldn’t do as you saw him.”

  She thinks she knows Zack better and loves him more. “But there was something,” Hope says, “he could do, a kind of impacted emotion, a sort of strangled truth dug up from that hardscrabble childhood with that weird, dominating mother. Even Alfred, at the Modern, was made to see it, though his taste ran to the more European of the young Americans—Roger, Onno—who could speak French and do nice brushwork. In ’45, Barr okayed purchase of one of Zack’s messy Jungian canvases—the one of the wolf that looks like a cow. That six hundred dollars paid for a lot of building supplies our first year in the Flats.”

  “Tell me about the Flats. You were happy there, at least the first five years, before Zack began to drink again.”

  “Happy. Let me think. We were busy, which may come to much the same thing. The place had been left a total mess, chock-a-block full of dumpy sad furniture and old clothing, and the little barn crammed with rusty farm equipment that hadn’t been used since the Depression. There was no central heating, no hot water, no bathroom, as I said. That first winter was brutal, the worst in years, the natives told us. When a storm blew in from the ocean it seemed our house was the first thing it hit. And we had no car, we went into the city by train when we had to. Henry Drayton, who ran the general store a half-mile down the road, loaned Zack two dollars to buy an old bicycle to get back and forth on. Henry sold everything, on credit in the winter—food, hardware, liquor, paints. A lot of Zack’s painting was done with industrial enamels—Duco, Devoe—straight from Henry’s shelves. The only other commercial establishment in the Flats was a bar called the Lemon Drop about a mile away. A little far to walk in bad weather, though Zack would do it. He complained nobody would talk to him, the way they did at the bars in Manhattan. The locals just sat there with their drinks, grunting at each other now and then. Of course, they saw each other every day, and were all intermarried. They called each other ‘bub’—Zack at first thought they were insulting him, but it was their language. Women were ‘dollies’ and children were ‘yowns’ and summer people were ‘drifts.’ We were ‘drifts,’ poor as we were. They distrusted us, how could they not? Zack minded this more than I did. He worked at breaking down their resistance—somehow he and Henry amused each other, and the crowd at the Lemon Drop warmed up. But that first winter the wind and the cold were so ferocious we didn’t go outdoors for days—just huddled by the woodstove in blankets drinking coffee to keep warm. Things kept breaking down—the pump in the basement gave out, the porch was collapsing, the windows all rattled like machine guns. We weren’t happy, we were frantic. Zack hardly painted, it was too cold in the upstairs room he had cleared of junk. Still, it was lovely not to have him hungover most of the time. He was so innocently proud, to own a house. His family never did, after the father left. The buyers had wanted four thousand five, we got them down to four even. To raise the down payment Zack had to sell his soul, practically, to Peggy’s gallery. Banks wanted nothing to do with us, though finally one in East Hampton came through with a mortgage, after Roger put in a word for us. He had come out to the Island, too, but of course on very different terms. East Hampton was seven miles away, down Fireplace Road, but light-years away socially, in those days.”

  “Weren’t you lonely?”

  Hope gives it a second’s reflection. She wants to be honest but not to feed this young inquisitor’s desire to come between her and Zack, to fit their marriage into a frame somehow flattering to herself. “I wanted to be. I wanted to be alone with Zack, because I loved him and because it was the best thing for him and his work. We were just married, this was our honeymoon.”

  “How old were you?”

  “We moved in November of ’45. I turned twenty-four in May of ’46.”

  “Wasn’t that terribly young, to be taking charge like that?”

  “In the war, nobody seemed young. Zack was ten years older, but as I say he was a child. He was missing about half the components of a mature human being.”

  “Really?”

  “Kathryn. How can you doubt it? You know what happened afterward.”

  This silences the doubter. Hope goes on, “And then, eventually, spring came. It came early that year, actually. In the dunes, there were all these tiny pink blossoms—people called them bearberries. The farmers began to plow up the ryegrass for potato planting. The fishermen began to put out their nets for striped bass. The ocean, the ocean that had been such a bitter dark enemy while we suffered through the winter, softened in color, became a mild china blue. Zack was ecstatic. I could hardly get him to come indoors. He dug and planted a big garden for vegetables and melons, the way his father had done years ago. He brought home a mongrel dog one of the neighbors wanted to get rid of, he had had a piebald dog like that as a child. We walked with that dog, Trixie, for miles, and rode our bicycles all over, to Montauk and back, to East Hampton and back. It was a pleasure to bicycle, there was nothing like today’s traffic. The last time I visited the Flats, to check on the museum they’ve made of our old house, I was struck by how stifling everything has become: stop-and-go traffic all along Route 27, the people from New York bring their congestion out with them, along with their laptops and Starbuckses.”

  Hope remembers the sense, new to her, of claiming a region, making a stretch of scenery and history their own, finding a leafy corner of America where she and Zack could taste freedom. The simplest transactions of country living pleased her—being greeted “Madame McCoy” by Henry Drayton at his store with a solemn ironical nod that said he knew what she was putting up with but saluting her undiscourageable youth and perkiness. H
e would add her purchases to their lengthening tab, and she would bicycle home fighting the front-heavy wobble from her loaded basket, between the new-sown potato fields and blossoming wild cherries beside the road. The most mundane signs of communal acceptance took her back to Ardmore, where the tradespeople had seemed giants at the back door, family members. The Flats’ plumber, Al Treadwell, would let himself into the downstairs noisily, to warn them in case they were upstairs making love, as he installed, bit by bit, carton by carton, a plain but functioning bathroom to end forever their windblown winter trips to the outhouse. For two weeks later that summer, as the albizia dropped its feathery blossoms on the lawn, in whose center some previous owner had left a collection of six or so large boulders, she and Zack woke each dry day to the whistling, knocking sounds of Jimmy Herrick and his two adolescent sons arriving to paint the house’s weathered shingles white and the trim and windows blue. Owning this house restored her to certain simplicities of childhood, when houses and yards demarcated territories of safety and drew upon deep wells, mysterious cisterns brimming with communal reserves. “Zack surprised me by being so handy,” she tells Kathryn. “I didn’t really know that much about his boyhood, just that his father had owned a twenty-acre dirt farm outside of Santa Fe and after the farm failed and the father faded away—he got road-building jobs, surveying jobs, and came home less and less, there was never a clear break—the mother took all these boys to California and kept moving from place to place, sometimes little boarding houses they would run, I don’t know how many, as I say he didn’t like to talk about his past, his family made him very uncomfortable, which may be another thing we had in common; what I’m trying to say is that he was fearless about doing things. Plumbing, wiring—he’d tackle it. He and Eddie Strode, a fireman he had met at the Lemon Drop, ripped off the whole roof of Eddie’s house, right down to the rafters.” In her mind’s eye Zack sits silhouetted, shirtless and laughing, holding a beer can, his legs dangling down on either side of the bare ridge beam, the bright thunderheads of a coming storm piled behind him against a sky as profoundly blue as the indigo sky she has just seen through the skylight of her studio. His bald head glinted. “Neither he nor I liked the way this shabby barn came between us and the view of the harbor, so all by himself he laid down a cement foundation thirty yards up the hill, to one side, and he and some other men girdled the barn and its shed in two-by-fours and tried to push it uphill but finally had to get a local fisherman, his name was Brick, it just came to me, Brick Lester, he died not long after, to haul it up on the winch on the back of his truck.” Has she already told Kathryn this story, or just passed it through her mind? An epic tale deserving to be oft-told, the moving of the barn: Hope can still feel in her gut and groin the sensation of release when the winch creaked, the cables tautened, the chocks under the truck’s back wheels held, and the barn, big and hollow as the Trojan horse, budged and tottered forward beneath the great silver maple that sticky summer day, the watching men, having sweated their shirts wet in vain, cheering, shouting admonitions and encouragements to one another, dancing about to see that the girdle of beams was holding together, Brick’s face reddening, his fat white hand bunched on the black winch lever; the sputtering engine fed its power into the cable reel and all the nails and rivets held as human ingenuity and good fortune majestically converted desire into movement. Brick had a great drooping gut, which dragged him down into death not long after. “I kept serving everybody lemonade, and then beer when they were done. If they hadn’t done that, think of it,” Hope tells Kathryn, “the barn wouldn’t have been close enough to the house to use as a studio, and Zack’s paintings would have stayed easel-size. He cut a big north window high in one wall, but when I suggested another window lower down, toward McGonicle’s Harbor, he said No, he didn’t want to be distracted by any view. He loved the view, he would spend hours sitting looking at the dunes, and the marshes, with the ducks and red-winged blackbirds, but he wanted the studio sealed off. He wasn’t articulate but he was smart enough to know that—his painting now had to come entirely from within.”