He explained to Nancy, when she asked about his work, that he'd had "an irreversible aesthetic vasectomy."

"Something will start you again," she said, accepting the hyperbolic language with an absolving laugh. She had been permeated by the quality of her mother's kindness, by the inability to remain aloof from another's need, by the day-to-day earthborn soulfulness that he had disastrously undervalued and thrown away — thrown away without beginning to realize all he would subsequently live without.

"I don't think it will," he was saying to their daughter. "There's a reason I was never a painter. I've run smack up against it."

"The reason you weren't a painter," Nancy explained, "is because you've had wives and children. You had mouths to feed. You had responsibilities."

"The reason I wasn't a painter was because I'm not a painter. Not then and not now."

"Oh, Dad—"

"No, listen to me. All I've been doing is doodling away the time."

"You're just upset right now. Don't insult yourself — it's not so. I know it's not so. I have your paintings all over my apartment. I look at them every day, and I can promise you I'm not looking at doodlings. People come over — they look at them. They ask me who the artist is. They pay attention to them. They ask if the artist is living."

"What do you tell them?"

"Listen to me now: they're not responding to doodlings. They're responding to work. To work that is beautiful. And of course," she said, and now with that laugh that left him feeling washed clean and, in his seventies, infatuated with his girl-child all over again, "of course I tell them you're living. I tell them my father painted these, and I'm so proud to say that."

"Good, sweetie."

"I've got a little gallery going here."

"That's good — that makes me feel good."

"You're just frustrated now. It's just that simple. You're a wonderful painter. I know what I'm talking about. If there's anybody in this world equipped to know if you're a wonderful painter or not, it's me."

After all he'd put her through by betraying Phoebe, she still wanted to praise him. From the age of ten she'd been like that — a pure and sensible girl, besmirched only by her unstinting generosity, harmlessly hiding from unhappiness by blotting out the faults of everyone dear to her and............