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persisted underground, the need for revolution. It moved into art. Wartime was deprivation, but so was the artistic life. The news all somehow glided by, apart from art. I was so surprised, coming to New York at the age of twenty, by the fact that art schools were still going so strong. Rationing and war bonds and propaganda everywhere you looked, and the streets full of uniforms, and nevertheless …”
    “Of course,” Kathryn smoothly interrupts, mistaking Hope’s pause for a senile trailing off, “there were all the émigrés, Duchamp and Mondrian and the Surrealists, Breton, Max Ernst—”
    “Yes,” Hope snaps. “We—I, at least;
you
might have gotten to them—never saw them. The rich made pets out of them, they hung out in Connecticut and the Upper East Side, of all of them only Mondrian wasn’t a snob about American life, thought he might learn from it—but they were there, yes, on our side of the Atlantic, upping the ante, making an
atmosphere
. There were exhibitions. That was one of our complaints, that the galleries gave all their space to Europeans. And Barr at the Modern of course could only think European at that point.”
    Who was this young woman, Hope wonders, to come pushing (she
must
be Jewish) into her life, reading it back to her from her studious sheets of printout? As Hope ages, theouter facts of her life, including her legendary marriage to Zack, seem to have less and less to do with her inner life, a life that began with her noticing the paintings and reproductions that hung in the Germantown house, quaint things collected by a timid Quaker taste—a few examples of Pennsylvania Dutch Fraktur, crabbed wedding certificates with the doll-like figures watercolored in spots, framed magazine-quality oleographs of Lawrence’s
Pinkie
and Vermeer’s
Woman with a Water Jug
and pink-cheeked heads with powdered hair, possibly Copley portraits from the big brooding caramel-colored museum in Philadelphia she could see from the back of Daddy’s Packard as they drove to Center City along the coal-black Schuylkill. And her grandfather’s house held some original paintings: hanging hushed in velvet boxes, oval miniature portraits of Ouderkirks long dead and crumbled in graves, tiny shiny stippled presences with eyelashes and ear folds and ringlets if she looked hard, and watercolors of tumbling nasturtiums or the Brandywine glimmering between heavy overhanging trees whose reflected shadows she could trace on the water, the work of some cousin or aunt of her grandparents who had taken art lessons at the turn of the century and was considered among her gentlewomen friends very gifted, and oil paintings holding visible peaks and ridges in the hardened paint, there had been one of a bowl of fruit posed on a checked tablecloth, which Hope even when very little could see would be very difficult to get right, the checks going up and down the folds and wrinkles of the cloth, and larger ones of woods, of fallen trunks like crusty rotting bodies, dark paintings these, not pleasant but powerful in that the child could feel the damp gloom, the strange truth that this mossy shaded tangle, this loose scatter on yellow-brown leaf mulch, this untended patch of forest, of Penn’soriginal Indian-haunted wilderness, would be here whether anyone was standing here with an easel or not. The paint
hardened
, Hope saw, touching (the child was alone in the room, there was nobody to tell her not to touch) its little rough spines. The hardened paint carried a glimpse forward into a radiant forever, along with the groping, stabbing movement of the painter’s hand and eye. She felt an infinite, widening magic in this, and also the element of protest which made people want to nail down pieces of a world that was always sliding away from under them; the world was an assembly line that kept spilling goods forward, into a heap of the lost and forgotten. With the protest came a gaiety, that of small defiant victories over time,