Free Seek My Face by John Updike Page B

the New Year might have been 1944, but the mood, the temperature of the war outside feels more like ’45; we were no longer so afraid, the end, in Europe at least, was in sight, though people forget how grim that drive toward Germany was, it still didn’t seem impossible that Hitler would roll us back into the Channel. Hitler
did
the impossible. He was surreal; he was the bogey who had escaped the collective subconscious and found a country to run. The Germans followed all his orders, however mad, right down to the Berlin bunker; it all seems quite unbelievable now. Meanwhile, we had this aristocratic cripple to lead us, and Britain an old brandy-soak. Stalin, it turned out, was better at killing Russians than even Hitler was. It was the biggest, baddest fairy tale the world had ever seen, the kind of carnival that has those giant papier-mâché heads.”
    Kathryn, perhaps stupid after all, seems tensely intent on nailing down a point she can use: “Did I understand you to say you didn’t think Zack had a future as a painter?”
    Hope searches for a way to avoid giving her satisfaction. “It’s hard enough to remember what you did, let alone what you felt. I wanted to like him as an artist because I came to like him as a person. He did have his champions, like poorHerbie, and in ’43, before I got involved with him really, he was in this show at Peggy’s Art of This Century—who could have dreamed then that This Century could someday become That Century?—and he got the famous nod from Mondrian—though there may have been some politics behind it, it turns out, there was another artist in the show who had helped Mondrian escape from Paris, and that’s why Mondrian came to the show at all, he wasn’t well, he died the next year—but I was really impressed less by Zack’s work than the dogged way he kept at it, against all these odds. Still, he was losing heart, his binges were getting worse, he would be gone for two or three nights, if I was to keep on with him we had to get out of the city.”
    “Is it true he insisted on a church wedding?”
    “I had insisted we get married, it was one thing to live in sin with a man in the city and another to do it in rural Long Island in 1945. I would have been happy with City Hall, my snotty family had pretty much given up on me, my younger brother’s being killed in the war had left them just shadows of their disapproving old selves, but, yes, it was Zack who insisted on a minister, I thought he did it mainly to make it so difficult I would give up, but Myrtle Strunk and I found this little old Congregationalist preacher in a musty sad church down beyond Bleecker who didn’t terribly mind that I had never been baptized—Quakers don’t do it, you know—and Zack couldn’t say if he had or hadn’t, his religious upbringing had been so end-of-the-world, off and on. The minister kept smiling all the time, like a demented person—his face had absolutely no color, you felt his whole life had been lived under this rock of lower Manhattan—and with Myrtle and Herbie there as our witnesses gave an oddly lovely short sermon telling us about marriage, and Creation, and how beautiful, now that the war was ended,all our lives were going to be. The only thing he asked from us was that I wear a hat and Zack a jacket and tie, so, luckily, I still had my hatboxes, with the rest of my blue luggage, in a closet behind all my dried student paintings. What
I
asked of Zack was that he stay sober, and he did. He took it seriously. It’s hard to say what he believed, but he definitely did
not
believe in nothing; he had been to a number of shrinks about his drinking, and they had all been Jungian. It tied in with his painting, of course, the archetypes, the magic of symbols, the unearthing of the deepest self. What it didn’t do, for very long ever, was cure his drinking. So, yes, in answer to your question, it was a church wedding. A wistful little linen-white interior with box pews and