Seek My Face by John Updike

spot with pathetic white bangs, a snatch of smoke, white straw too dry to be tamed.
    Hope turns on the gas, holding the knob pointing to noon until its rather frantic little clicking ignites a blue rush of flame that she subdues by turning the knob to where eleven o’clock would be. She feels Kathryn looking about the kitchen, its flaking surfaces and pockets of jumble, and wondering where Hope’s money has gone. She will not ask that, but Hope has a ready answer. She has kept the money,and invested it conservatively, to leave to her children, the major share to her daughter: conscience money, but she won’t go into that. Her father had dribbled
his
father’s money away, so she is proud of her shrewdness and thrift. She held Zack’s paintings back as their value went up and up; then Guy was an astute and industrious exploiter of the fat art market in the ’sixties and ’seventies; and Jerry was generous, leaving her the same share of his fortune as each of his children by the former wife and listing the Vermont house in her name from the start. It had been hers as the search for silence and country simplicity had been hers. Zack was her partner in that search for a while; a child of Western spaces, he needed room to roam in, as he had that first summer, the one of ’46, dazed by the marshes and dunes as they came into bloom. “What I loved about the Flats,” she tells Kathryn, “was the light, the way the land accepted it, as if it were the flat palm of a hand at the end of an extended arm. It felt like the end of the world. You’ve been there, of course, as part of your research, but not then, right after the war. Nothing had changed for so long. Farmland had that treeless look then, though our own land had the silver maple on it, and a tropical-looking tree with gauzy pink-and-white flowers and feathery locustlike leaves that when you handled them wanted to close up like the page of a book. An albizia, or silk tree, though people called it a mimosa. One of the farmers who had owned the place must have planted it, for an ornament. That far out on Long Island there were almost no houses that weren’t farmhouses—a church, a Masonic lodge—and the potato fields stretched everywhere. The land where it wasn’t cultivated was sandy and marshy, and here and there great stray boulders had been left by the glacier. Montauk had been an island until the glacier filled in the gap with a moraine.Looking east as we did, we saw a strip of blue saltwater—McGonicle’s Harbor—a strip of land beyond, and a huge windy sky. Water, air, sand, the sun. But I bet you wish I wouldn’t talk without your tape recorder being on.”
    “I
would
prefer it, though my memory is pretty good. Still, it’s better to have your exact words.”
    “Oh dear, does it really matter? I hardly trust my words any more, it’s always been a failing of mine to say what I think people want to hear. And I do doubt there’s anything I can say I haven’t said someplace already. What would you like in your tea?”
    “My tea? Oh. No, just plain, thanks.”
    Why had this simple request startled her? The interviewer’s mind had been elsewhere. Hope finds she is hurt by this, this inattention when she is putting herself out, making tea, talking so freely. Yet this female stranger must have a life, back in the city—men friends, job worries, rent to pay, or condo fees more likely in this day and age. When Hope was young it was easier, you paid by the week and ducked the landlord when you were late. He was stuck with you to some extent, eviction was a legal procedure, so there was some play in the situation. Kathryn is looking around, disappointed by the plainness—the Redouté calendar such as anyone could buy in a book-and-card shop, the cabinets with their soiled handles, the appliances twenty years out of date, the fading photographic keepsakes—vacation snaps and official school photos of grandchildren taken in a curtained booth one by one and