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creating
things to keep
.
    It was her mother who kept her careful drawings and suggested that a neighbor in Ardmore, where they had moved from her grandparents’ Germantown house to a newly built big mock-Tudor on a curving shady street, come give her drawing lessons. She was eight, nine. However hard Hope looked, she failed to see what this thickset man, with his unaccustomed smells of pipe tobacco and cooking sherry and tooth decay, saw in the shadows, the greens in the reds, the blues hidden in the browns. Her little “gift” tended to crumple under the heaviness of his masculine attention—his name was Rudolph Hartz—and it relieved her when her family’s summer rentals in Maine ended the summer lessons, held in the head-hurting hazy Philadelphia sun in the side yard or in the shade of the willow or English walnut, vegetation crawling with subtleties of color like garter snakes and toads. Their indoor lessons occurred in the library; pages of the
Evening Bulletin
were spread over the coffee table, whose inlay formed a long square chain of paler bits, triangular and rhomboidal, ofwood. It was as if her slender, quiet father had grown thicker and put on an odor of German vices and brute force and was leaning over her shoulder, a hairy hand seizing her brush and impatiently dabbling in the water glass and the scooped rectangles of raw color in the watercolor set’s little folding tray and mixing up a muddy color that looked all wrong but when dashed into place did make the subject—the vase, or the Kewpie doll, or the yellow pepper—jump somehow into solidity. Little Hope felt too slight to bear up under Mr. Hartz’s passion, she felt herself a waste of his time, she smelled along with tobacco and stale armpits his mediocrity, his disappointment; he was one of Philadelphia’s legion of frustrated illustrators, consigned to an occasional portrait commission from a friend or a set design for suburban amateur theatricals.
    The lessons, even on winter weekends, ceased. Her parents must have spoken, politely, as grown-ups do, to Mr. Hartz. Hope tactfully let herself drift away from art, its muddy yearning—the water glass clouding from the dipped brush, the slick lindenwood palette with its circlets of stirred oils going gray from mixing with each other—as from a boy who, however fascinating, would never be a suitable husband. She was ten, eleven. As part of a proper upbringing she visited museums: the treasure house on the top of Fairmount felt inside like a great marble bank with a few customers shuffling and whispering under the skylights while high out of reach a naked slim Diana balanced on the ball of one foot; the more churchly—Daddy said “Byzantine”—Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had long stairs rising up between the two frightening big canvases by Benjamin West that somehow came out of the Bible, and beyond them rooms of white statues naked because they were goddesses instead of real people and ofold pictures of cliffs and waterfalls and portraits of Ben Franklin with his mischievous little lips and George Washington looking pained and flushed; the farthest rooms displayed Academy student work, charcoal drawings of Negro faces monumental and sullen and staring and industrial workers posed outside closed factories wearing thick cloth caps whose bills were lowered over brows shamed by unemployment, creased by injustice, the foreshortened perspective working to hunch and dwarf their bodies like an unseen industrial press squeezing all color from the world; in nearby Merion a certain Dr. Barnes had turned his Argyrol millions into a painting collection and to house it had built a Doric-columned mansion wherein, admitted by careful pre-arrangement, a select few, including tittering classes of Shipley girls in their pleated green jumpers and matching green kneesocks, could view walls covered as many as four paintings high by French flesh and Provençal sunlight, Impressionism and its wilder