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said. “Talent generally gets as much exercise as it’s worth. Want to walk a little? I know where we can get some decent beer.”
    “In a minute,” he said, not stirring. He was watching some fat tourist children rooting among the flower plantings at the base of the central fountain. “Any of that lovely stuff left?”
    She shook the last fragments of candy into his palm.
    “I see,” he observed, “it was Claire, in the dream the other night. You’re sure it was her?”
    “It was her voice. I didn’t actually see her.”
    “Are you and your children close these days, may I ask?”
    “Not especially. But we get along; we’re even fond of each other. Claire’s the hardest one for me. She’s so…demanding — of herself, of me, of everyone. She writes me scolding letters, charging me with ducking my responsibilities as a ‘prominent woman artist,’ a public role-model for other gifted women.”
    “And you reply?”
    “That I haven’t got time for all that stuff because my job is art, not politics. Anyway, what she means, I think, is that I walked out on the family; I ducked being her role-model in the way that she wanted me to be.”
    “Ah,” Ricky murmured. “The eternal cry of the artist’s child — you never put me first! Complicated here by the fact that of course you did actually walk away, for the sake of your career.”
    She licked the last sweetness from her fingers. “Come on, Ricky, do you buy that crap too? I know that’s the story, but you should know better. Well, maybe not, maybe I never made it plain enough. I didn’t leave until they were grown, all three of them. Before that I was an amateur, and afterward, I was lucky. A lucky dabbler without background or a decent education in art. You know why my friends in New York were all Nathan’s friends, all poets, writers, musicians, anything but painters? Because I knew the painters would see right through me in a second, that’s why. They’d all been studying with Albers and Kline while I was making prints in my garage after the kids went to bed, using an old press I’d picked up at a barn auction!”
    Ricky crooked a dubious eyebrow. “And this retrospective?”
    She laughed. “Oh, somebody resurrected some of those damned arches of mine and included them in a group show called ‘Treasure Trove’ about women artists who’d been undeservedly passed over by the art-buying public. Somehow everybody in the show got labeled a ‘major influence,’ myself included. It’s all a lot of nonsense. Claire makes much of it, the way George does in his way, and she wants me to do the same. I won’t.”
    “But you think it’s really childish resentment left over from the break-up of her family?”
    “She’s the only one who reproaches me. I think daughters are more sensitive to these things than sons. Sometimes I suspect that men take alienation for granted. They expect it.”
    Not the most tactful thing to say, perhaps, to a man who was rather pointedly not going home to his own kindred, even in extremis; but he had led the conversation onto this ground, and he had troubles a lot worse than a gauche remark from her. Her poor friend, who managed to sit there looking not at all poor but poised, collected, aristocratic as a wading bird at rest.
    “I should think,” he said, “that whatever the connection with Claire, the violence in the dreams comes from some other source, and I’m very puzzled as to what that might be. All that blood and gore… What have you been reading lately?”
    She grinned. “Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner.”
    “Have you got a secret taste for splatter-flicks?”
    “Not a chance. A good visual memory can be a curse if you’re not careful with it. I’m fussy about what I let my eyes look at.”
    “Any history of nightmares?”
    She shook her head. “Not since childhood. I was never even really scared of the dark, maybe because my mother used to come and sit with me if I woke up. She’d sing me