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self-educated. And ofcourse drank too much. But we all drank too much, it was part of the war, the blackouts, our desperate dingy mood, all that death, the newspapers dealing every day in death, hundreds, thousands, numbers that would make screaming headlines now. It was a man’s world. Art was a man’s world. They could hardly make room for women, even when they married us. It was a tough, man’s world. You speak of Zack and the rest as heroes of this historic moment you have—what’s the word now?—constructed, you see them as Titans in the clouds, but the Titans were a sad group actually, who came to a sorry end, if I remember my childhood Bulfinch. Except for funny old Bernie, who had married money, and Roger, who had a trust fund, and Onno, who began to sell before any of the others—he had that European flair that dealers and buyers could already understand, not our poor American groping, up from the depths, Jung and all those archetypes—
everybody
was poor and had been for years, living off the Project, the Federal Arts Project, before the war and even during it, though the dole was drying up. At the moment you mention, post-war, even after the publicity had begun to come in, Zack was still not selling paintings. A few prints and works on paper but not the big paintings. He was getting to be famous, but we stayed surprisingly poor—it maddened him. Peggy’s gallery gave Zack a dole, we had to borrow from her to buy the house, a house and three acres for four thousand dollars, think of it, the land alone would be a million now, out there close to the Hamptons; he never earned it out, and so the gallery kept his paintings. Just kept them, for years. Most people had no idea anything wonderful was happening. They didn’t know there was a moment. They were still thinking Picasso and Miró and the Surrealists. Not Dalí—he was as much despised as Benton, standing for everything we hated.”
    “Of course,” Kathryn murmurs, placatingly, sensing a kindling, wanting Hope to run on.
    “Dalí was a one-man circus, department-store window-dressing. He actually
did
some windows for Bonwit’s, and then fell through the glass tearing up the display when the management insisted on putting clothes on the mannequins, who were, I don’t know, stepping into fur-lined bathtubs and lying on beds of red coals, a lot of feathers and disembodied hands holding mirrors. It made all the papers, which of course is what he wanted. He understood publicity, and was shameless. Europeans are, when they get over here. This was before I moved to New York, but Zack somehow had been there and would describe it and laugh, but it also offended his sense of dignity that an artist would sell out like that. Zack could be in rags, filthy from a night in the gutter, but he had this ideal of dignity, of, I don’t know, the artist not as some performer and society leech but as a
worker
, and at least as worthy of respect as a preacher or a banker. It was one of the things about him I loved.” Hope feels herself roused, her face reddening, her heart pumping, striving to please, stung by the fear of appearing doddery; the old deprivations and ridicule seem as close as if this interloping girl had been one of the glib art journalists who had served up easy wisecracks in the ’forties
Time
and
Life
. But by the time these publications were taking any notice, a tide had turned. “You speak about a historic moment, Kathryn, but the attention was all in a few galleries, with a few critics, who had their own fish to fry for that matter, their own names to make—Clem used Zack to make his own name, and when Zack faltered Clem was the first one off the boat. The canvases, the ones that later everybody could see were magnificent, and that went for millions—what good were they? They were too big.They were public art without a public. Zack—it was pathetic—when he was in his cups used to tell people what a great investment his work would be, and of