THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
571
later, she wore a soft white lace collar folded in a deep V across
her breasts-a fichu really. There were a number of uniquely
old-fashioned touches about her: she bought long earrings in
the dime-store and wore them with her black hair, which had
never been cut, spiraling in a sombre crown round and round
the summit of her perfect little head.
What my father had failed to take into account with Viola
and Sarah and even Nanette was that an artist usually demands
both genuine and unusual beauty in
his
woman. Not just any
pretty girl. But a
different, beautiful
girl. When Vasiliki bent
over Joshua to offer him a snowy box of
loukoum
and a glass
of
mustikah
and her pretty breasts belled downward in her
Betsy Ross bodice and her obsidian coronet tilted toward him,
like gleaming, curved
blades-then
I saw him leap toward life.
His hands and feet jerked, and his face lit like a Roman candle:
eyes, lips, teeth, taut incandescent skin. My father saw it, too,
and purred deep in his throat like a big cat-rumble of vicarious
pleasure in all that fragrant female flesh. Then he sighed and
drew his brows together, probably at his own denial.
But I was lost in the second act. What divine revelation
was taking place in our makeshift creche? Such pain, such
pleasure! Like my father's really- pleasure in the sudden stimu–
lus to the senses which the spectacle of those two offered us,
pain in knowing that I was only in the audience.
Once Jason, who knew a Trojan horse when he saw one,
said, "What's he so crazy about that glamorpuss for?"
"Oh, he thinks it's so la-dee-da, being Greek," I sneered.
Years later--only a matter of weeks ago-I saw Joshua's
face again as it was at that moment. I was standing in the Uffizi
before the central panel of the Portinari Altarpiece: the "Adora–
tion of the Shepherds." And there he is. The third peasant, racing
in on the tides of his need, his shepherd's crook clasped to
his
breast like a crucifix, like the hand of his beloved-his crazy
northern face lit and wild with recognition as he stares at the
Virgin. Diamond of Judah! Full, bursted melon of the House of
