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children, polychrome thrusts into a new paganism, art disrobed of its duties to history, to piety, to anything but the glory of each day and its dappled skin of color. These hushed visits, these sanctioned contacts, kept Hope in touch with her childhood wonder at the glimmers called art.
    At Bryn Mawr, in the first two years of the new decade, with the European war blackening the horizon beyond the Atlantic, the art history department, still haunted by the recently departed Georgiana Goddard King, a personal friend of Gertrude Stein, revived Hope’s interest in man-made beauty—revived it enough for her to realize that Bryn Mawr was not enough, studying and admiring was not enough, there was a world not two hours’ train ride away where art was life, where her virginal young body with its brain and eyes could be an instrument, could do and makeand
be
, somehow, in a style that her faded, gentle Philadelphia would never allow. At the end of her sophomore year, while her mother was dithering over the details of this year’s move to their Maine island, where, tired of unprofitable rentals, her father had bought a shingled property whose upkeep cost more than rentals ever did, Hope headed to New York, at the height of the summer heat, to become an artist. Her parents were shocked, but it was a time of shocks, and she was twenty and it was 1942. Her older brother let himself be drafted; her younger had already enlisted. Quaker pacifism was superseded, and female passivity too. She went forth with a retrospectively absurd panoply of matched blue luggage including two drum-shaped hatboxes to engage the creature, colorful life, its pigments and snares. As she walked the dangerous streets, making her way among eyes in which she registered with a flick like that of a brush, her freedom enthralled her.
    Kathryn’s voice overtakes her on those crowded evening pavements; it is keeping pace with Hope’s mind. “Let’s leave the galleries and the Modern for later.” She looks at the printouts in her long black lap. “You were a student first at the Women’s Art School of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.”
    “I was. They were doubtful but let me in, on the strength of some sketches I had done at college, and a self-portrait with bared breasts, in acrylics. Cooper Union in those days was very academic, very practical-minded. The training was organized in ‘alcoves.’ In the first alcove, students drew from plaster hands and feet. In the second, from casts of torsos. For the third, they had casts of the full figure. Not until the fourth alcove did you get live models. I dropped out before we got to the live models. The second-alcove instructor, I forget his name, didn’t even want to promoteme to the third alcove; he said I was too linear. But he promoted me to get rid of me. I was trouble, I suppose. I was so thrilled to be in New York, in the Village.”
    “The instructor’s name was Leonard Wilton, the sculptor,” her interviewer tells her, having consulted the notebook. “But before you left you, uh, became involved with another instructor, the portrait-painter Gregor Rukavishnikov.”
    “Ruk was really only a substitute instructor, the other had been drafted.” Hope suppresses a longing to be outdoors, bathing her brain in colorless fresh air. Through the window, beyond her imprisoner’s head of hair with its silver combs, she sees in the forsythia bushes that arch against the sills a set of birds abruptly beginning to flutter and fuss, excited by some current among themselves: it is the animal kingdom that feels the excitement of spring first, a stray squirrel emerging from nowhere and managing to find a nut he or another squirrel buried in November; sitting on a warm flat rock in the wall, he holds it in two paws corn-on-the-cob style and chitters at it like a tiny electric typewriter.
    “I mean,” she tells Kathryn, “he made enough doing society portraits, his stuff was
chic
, he