by John Updike
To rescue Hope from her pause, Kathryn tells her, “Why would it be your job to show him how to reap happiness? His happiness was Zack’s own responsibility, surely.”
Hope clears her throat and smiles, tearily, to thank the other woman for giving her her voice back. “Oh, I know that’s sensible, everybody is responsible for themselves, that’s the theory now, it makes it easier to get out of a relationship, but back then the wife, even a child wife as I was in a way, ten years younger, was supposed to do everything for the husband, the way women did for their children, if anything turned out wrong for the child it was your fault, and Zack was very dependent, worse than a child really, since you got the blame and not any obedience, the guilt and not any credit. Women now talk about empowerment and have all these paying jobs, but back then a woman really was thought to be omnipotent, on no salary, and if anything went wrong in your vicinity it was all your fault. Any resentments about my own upbringing I had I always directed toward my mother, for instance, and not toward my father, who though he supported us was considered otherwise perfectly ineffectual, like a man in a Thurber cartoon.”
“What resentments about your upbringing did you have?”
How quickly this lanky intruder can pounce! “Oh,” Hope answers slowly, “not very many. Our comfort, I suppose—I thought of it as coming out of the hides of the poor. Our complacency, though I didn’t pass up any meals, I noticed, and dressed just the way the other Shipley girls did. Our Quaker heritage seemed to me pretty dim and colorless—I used to daydream about being a Roman Catholic and having all those saints and painted statues. I thought my two brothers got all the serious attention, and were expected to do something serious, unlike me, who was just expected to catch a suitable man. The usual sort of resentments a girl of good family would feel.”
Kathryn accepts Hope’s implication that this is a dead end, for now at least, and shifts her black-clad weight in the broad chair where Isaac Ouderkirk would sit and read the Evening Bulletin with tipped-back bifocals. “Did you and Zack ever discuss having children?” she asks.
“We did. He claimed to be quite keen on it.”
“Claimed to be?”
“Zack had his enthusiasms, but except for his painting he didn’t much stick with anything. I told him I didn’t want to raise children with such an unstable man.”
She had in fact said, “I don’t want a crazy man for the father of my children.”
His face went slack. His eyes narrowed to a hurt glitter. “Who says I’m crazy?”
His pressure on her to have children made her tongue harsher than she wanted it, but she could not beg his pardon or she would find herself giving in. Zack had his ingratiating mode as well as his destructive one, the winning child who had grown from the frowning baby. He would worm his way around her, and her well-bred politeness was a weakness he used against her. “The draft board, for one,” she told him. “You got your shrink to say you couldn’t take Army discipline and they didn’t argue.”
This hurt him, as she knew it would. He could hardly speak. “You dumb cunt, it wasn’t that simple.”
She tried to cover with hurried words the wound she had inflicted: “I don’t give a damn if you served or not, I was raised to be a pacifist, my brother wound up getting killed because he wouldn’t hide behind the Friends, but I know you gave a damn, being stuck in New York with a pack of 4-F fairies all during the war. I don’t think the worse of you for it, Zack, but I don’t want a baby—your baby, any baby. We’re artists. We’re poor. You’re on to a great thing right now and you don’t want to be changing diapers. I’m not even sure you could change a diaper.”
This was unfair. In small mechanical tasks Zack was often expert. And his feeling for children, his brothers’ and those of their friends, for many painters do breed, was tender and quick to kindle. At beach gatherings or lawn parties where ignored children collected in the background, Zack would gravitate to them, shambling up, drink in hand, as if he were still one of them at heart, a reprobate indulgent uncle. But Hope had denied him, in the harshest terms she could muster, calling him unfit, 4-F as a prospective father. His wish for a child had come to her as a wish to make her a mother, stupidly caught up in the needs of an infant at the moment when she was seeking to recover herself as an artist, as an independent spirit. This was when, ’49? Though he would be productive for another year, the sunny season of their marriage had passed; her refusal of his so normal desire stood between them. In her memory he took the rebuff by narrowing his eyes like a child who, having been unfairly struck by a cruel parent, stands his ground, expecting another blow, silently vowing revenge.
“It might have made him more stable,” Kathryn presumes to tell her.
“Or it might not. Then there would have been two of us to suffer, to sit up all night not knowing where he was or if he had been killed.”
“But this was in his least drinking period.”
“There were still some nights.”
“Was he ever abusive? Did he ever strike you?”
Hope tries to be honest. “Not till later, till the ’fifties and his work was blocked. It was I who occasionally hit him, he could be so frustrating, so pig-headed and unreachable. But I think, I’d like now to think, that we both understood I was violent because I loved him and couldn’t stand seeing him destroy himself. That he never hit me was a way of keeping his distance, insisting on his superiority. Or that was how I felt it. Remember, I was only twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and still very romantic. Psychologists still spoke approvingly of female masochism. I wouldn’t have minded being hit, if it meant real contact.”
“You would have been twenty-eight in 1950, when he did those three huge canvases, so different from one another. I think of them as like the three last novels by Henry James.”
Tall black laced combat boots, and a Jamesian besides. Perhaps letting her come here wasn’t entirely a mistake, the young have their pockets of knowing, their surprising humanity. “Except,” Hope says, “that James was sixty and Zack wasn’t even forty. Do you think he knew he was going to die? People ask me that and I never know.”
“I think,” Kathryn states, as if the tape recorder is now for her too, her and her opinions, “he had removed the safety barriers. He was courting death. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that death will say Yes. He was lucky, you could say, in being unlucky.”
“That seems a cold way to put it.” Zack, alive, even so bloated with alcohol his eyes were piggy, tawny slits, was betting in some quarter of himself on more of the same, a life long enough for the redemption that one more masterpiece brings. He could pull it off, pull something off just as he had pulled off how to do away with image, how to paint nothing but paint. His hands, she remembers, were sometimes startlingly warm, warm on her waist and buttocks in bed. Though she thought of herself as hot-blooded, a little tidy plump body too anxious to please, Zack sometimes jumped when she touched him, complaining that her hands were cold.
“How can they be cold?” she asked him, hurt.
“Circulation,” he explained. “Women have smaller hearts than men. The blood doesn’t get to the extremities.” He so seldom offered to explain anything, it amused her to hear his practical, mechanical sense applied to their own selves, which she thought of mainly in hazy spiritual terms. Zack saw the two of them as upright instances of flexible plumbing.
Kathryn is smiling at her, seeking a concession. “I’m twenty-seven, as it happens,” she tells the older woman. “Does that make me romantic?”
Hope feels a blush warm her face. “More than you realize, perhaps. Romanticism is a function not of the mind but of the blood; it’s the fever whereby Nature gets her work done.”
As before when Hope softens toward her, Kathryn hardens: “Did you see any contradiction between the love you say you felt for Zack and your refusal to bear his child?”
“Well, of course. But I was very sure I was right. For his good as well as mine. He was the child, he wanted what he wanted whe
n he wanted it. Zack had very little capacity for reflection—for imagining, so to speak, beyond the edges of the canvas. As I told you, that German was shocked when he saw how little Zack hesitated or thought about what he was doing. He couldn’t understand how such a mind worked. Neither could I, to be honest. If Zack had had a normal mentality, he couldn’t have done what he did. He would have tried to think his way around it, like Roger and Bernie. Even Onno, for all his wild brushwork and Surrealist dérèglement, was thinking—was canny. Only Phil and Seamus had Zack’s uncanniness, his style of plunging in, of staking his whole soul. And they both died young—both drank themselves to death, aided by pills in Seamus’s case. He was always trying to diet. And look at his paintings—the paint gets thinner and thinner, until it’s just a wash, a ghost of paint. They said they drank to feed their visions, but I think it was because they knew they couldn’t keep it up, the intensity, the painting for no reason—nothing to hold on to but their own hands in front of them, moving.”
Kathryn lifts her chin, her opaque protuberant eyes flash like those of a predator on the scent. She wants Hope’s analytic mood to keep expanding, but already the effort has embarrassed the older woman with its immodesty. Who is she to speak for these dead men, just because she has outlived them?
“You wouldn’t have children with Zack, and yet with Guy—”
“Guy was sane,” Hope snaps. “He was exceedingly levelheaded. Pop Art was all about sanity, about modesty, about accepting the world as it was, flags and trash and ads and goopy hamburgers, and not trying to heave something impossibly momentous up out of the poor nebulous self. Guy was crisp and irresistible; he made me laugh, and he made our children laugh, when he paid some attention to them. As at first he did. He adored them.”
“Before we get into Guy—”
“Let’s not get into him. He’s still alive.”
“But he has Alzheimer’s.”
“I know. But our children don’t have it. I don’t want them hurt by their garrulous old mother.”
Kathryn glances down, regrouping. Her nostrils draw in; her long white dark-nailed hand reaches out as if for the tape recorder, then withdraws to her long black lap. “Did I understand you to say that Zack’s being disqualified for service created or emphasized his doubts about his own sexuality?”
“I don’t think I said that, but others have. Apart from his painting, you must realize, Zack was not self-critical. If he had some homosexual experiences, he was possibly too drunk at the time to remember them. Any mouth in a storm, he may have thought. His having been 4-F bothered him less than I may have thought it should. He was beyond, or beneath, politics; if Hitler and the Japanese had taken over the country, I’m not sure he would have noticed for a while. His father had been one of those left-wing Wobbly types, and I think this came down to Zack as a mild contempt for the system, before it was called that. In his dealings with the Federal Arts Project, he took what they offered and gave as little as possible back. He never signed on for a mural project, though one of his brothers did work on the one they’ve restored at the Marine Air Terminal. The main thing Zack got out of the Mexicans was their scale and the archaic symbols.”
“That isn’t quite what I meant. I’ve seen interviews and statements by men in New York during the war who claimed they had had sexual contact with Zack and that he participated in all-male orgies.”
“Well, truly. How lurid.” Hope finds herself repelled by this woman and her questions—so common, so scandal-mongering. And she dislikes being trapped into a topic where she must doubt her own honesty. “You’re asking me,” she tells Kathryn, “how queer Zack was. As I said already, he was shy, sexually, but there was nothing queer in”—she blushes, damn it—“in his approach to me. He was an American man of his generation, quite puritan. Once, when we were still in New York, he asked me to masturbate for him so he could watch, and after a minute or two he was so embarrassed he looked away.” If this is the topic, she will slap the other with it, coolly punish her with it. “We had straight sex, quite often those first years on the Island, then less often beginning around ’49, and the last years, when he was seeing that pathetic groupie, hardly at all. We were like trapped animals with one another, all claws and teeth. But the very day he died he telegraphed flowers to my hotel in Venice. The telegram said, ‘Miss you.’ He signed it, ‘Hopeless.’ ”
“Where is that telegram? I’d love to see it.”
“Oh my goodness, long gone. I don’t think I even brought it home, because the next day I got the cable saying he was dead.”
This is an unblushing lie. Both telegrams are upstairs in a steel drawer, in a filing cabinet, along with saved reviews of old shows of hers and Zack’s and Guy’s and brave worried letters from her family when she was young in wartime New York and the clipping from The Public Ledger covering her coming-out in 1939 and even her Shipley yearbook signed “Lots of luck” by the girls she knew. Why should she go rummaging for this common-minded intruder to see them, to paw them, these antique telegrams—strips of teletype pasted onto crumbling yellow paper, the cheapest possible, meant to last a day—which had once had the force to knock the breath out of her? The second had been a blow she thought she could not outlive. The first, Zack had meant for her eyes only. Her heart had lifted at his overture, his shy pun, then sank back in weariness at knowing what her return to him would mean, the terrible soggy burden of his life laid on hers, a life he had lost the capacity to lead, pity and wariness warring within her there, in her front room at the Danieli, the Grand Canal outside her window churned by vaporetti and freighters and a few sails beyond San Giorgio Maggiore glinting within the sea-glitter and the tourist crowds, the Americans and the Germans already indistinguishable, in 1955, prosperous, bland, blond, the losers doing a perfect imitation of the winners, shuffling in their tours along the broad sidewalk for their dutiful look at the Bridge of Sighs, trying to imagine the passions of doomed and shackled prisoners.
Outside the thin-paned windows, birds cannot be seen, a hush has thickened the air. The small shreds of cloud have grown flat lead-blue bottoms and white tops shaped like cauliflowers. Hope wonders if giving this girl lunch would terminate the interview, which is turning ever more invasive. It is strange how, in this shameless day and age, a breach of privacy gives the breacher more and more rights, as if a burglar should start moving the furniture around and loudly ridiculing the décor: having to defend her sex with Zack as normal, and to describe herself naked but for grease and coal dust. Or had that been her own idea, bringing that up, feeling again the brush of air on her exposed abdomen at that overheated wartime dance? Ruk had thought her an exhibitionist, citing the careless readiness with which she stripped to model, his “Quaker Pocahontas,” and Bernie, in his rural bedroom loft that smelled of fresh-cut wood, teased her as his red-haired Renoir. She had put on a few pounds by then, turning thirty, drinking to keep company with Zack, to muffle her married misery.
“Kathryn, could I offer you a little lunch? I don’t know quite what I have—sliced smoked turkey for a sandwich, or a can of tuna I could make into salad. You must be starved. I am.”
In a gush of innocent self-promotion the young woman says, “Oh, when I’m interested in what I’m doing I totally forget to eat. Then around four I wonder why I feel so light-headed. But you get up so early, and—”
Are old and frail, she doesn’t say, and have so few pleasures other than food. Food and reminiscence. What is it, in our pasts, that we keep trying to recover, what misplaced marvel trod under in our haste to live the days, the days which, once gone, acquire the majesty of eternal testimony—I was there, I did this, the times were such, I was beautiful and pregnant with my potential, my beautiful future?