Seek My Face by John Updike

arranging when the studio was newly built, attract Kathryn’s attention less than Hope expected. Only the old photographs tempt the interloper to move closer, her neck cranked forward in that unbecoming way. “How pretty you were.”
    “I never thought of myself as pretty, but I tried to be amusing and not lazy. If you’re raised as a Quaker, the world seems terribly exciting, like a party you didn’t expect to get invited to. The Devil’s party, if we take that obsolete statement of mine seriously.”
    Hope thinks this was worth saying, and regrets that Kathryn doesn’t have her tape recorder running. But, then, what kind of capture is it, the words on tape, words on paper, if nobody listens, nobody reads? It all just pours into the dark, the darkness that exists even in the midst of the light; the light itself is blind.
    “This is the best,” Kathryn says, her circuit of attention returned to the painting on the easel. The assertion takes Hope aback; who is this girl to judge?
    Hope self-dismissingly sighs. “It’s very like all the others, yet there are little differences that I can feel. Each is an adventure, even at my age.”
    “You must stop thinking so much of your age. I never think of mine.”
    “At your age, I didn’t either.” Is this true? Hope doubts it. It was part of the old way, the way still mapped by religion, to see yourself on a path, within a journey from which you might be called out at any moment, for an accounting. She cannot picture how this young woman conceives of her own, her only, existence—as an unaccountable present tense, an unframed
now
that imposes duties upon her, such as this interview, without a possibility of drastic, everlastingfailure? Hope knows enough younger people, her children and their children for a start, who would never think of being
grateful
for existence; as best she can tell, the universe for them is a kind of joke to be shrugged off, a cosmic sneeze rapidly dissipating into the original nothingness. What’s to praise? Who’s to blame? Her father, Hope in her childhood came to sense, had a religious sense of failure, for all his nice home of false timbers and stucco and chalky bricks, and his office overlooking Market Street from a suitable height, and his handsome energetic wife organizing his party life and summer homes, and his perky auburn-haired daughter and his two sons, both of whom had inherited his good bones and fair fine hair and thoughtful, faintly melancholy calm. His pious ancestors, those fanatics risking hanging and exile in their zeal to strip Christianity back to its uncorrupted essence, made him feel a failure in his worldly status, a genteel offshoot of his more immediate ancestors’ success in trade, in manufacture (a carpet factory whose vast clatter and heaving looms and sense of imprisonment formed one of Hope’s earliest memories, a visit with her grandfather just before the plant closed under pressure from the South’s lower wages) and investment (railroads, coal, slums). To “feed” his “face”—a favorite phrase of his—for decade after decade, to feed his children’s faces, to put clothing on their bodies, and to drape them in the educational credentials needed to maintain membership in their social class, and to mediate, in a time when lawyers also served as financial advisers, between old Philadelphia money and the hazards of an ever-new world that played host to a market crash followed by a radical Democratic President who laughed at privilege, being himself privileged—none of this seemed, by the inner light that burned dimly within him, enough. He did not muchprotest when his daughter rebelled and went wild in New York.
    She thinks Kathryn has seen enough of the studio. It was important to Hope that her studio feel secret, an extension of her brain, flooded with a thinking silence, a fluorescence wiped clean of the traces of visitors. “Where is your tea?” she asks.
    “Oh! I forgot it and left it in the