"Only a game?" she said mockingly. "That's a fine thing for the next top-seeded man to say."
"No, I'm serious. Oh, I don't mean I intend to stay in Wall Street; that's not my ambition either. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of painting again."
"Painting? You haven't painted since your freshman year. You think you can make a living at it?"
"I was always pretty good, you know that. I'd like to try doing some commercial illustration; that's for the bread and potatoes. Then, when we don't have to worry about creditors, I'd like to do some things on my own."
"Don't pull a Gauguin on me, friend." She kissed his cheek lightly. "Don't desert your wife and family for some Tahitian idyll...."
"What family?"
She pulled away from him and got up to stir the ashes in the fireplace. When she returned, her face was glowing with the heat of the fire and warmth of her news.
Andrew Hills, Junior, was born in September. Two years later, little Denise took over the hand-me-down cradle. By that time, Andy Hills was signing his name to the magazine covers of America's top-circulation weeklies, and they were happy to feature it. His added fame as America's top-ranked amateur tennis champion made the signature all the more desirable.
When Andrew Junior was three, Andrew Senior made his most important advance in the field of art—not on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, but in the halls of the Modern Museum of Art. His first exhibit evoked such a torrent of superlatives that the New York Times found the reaction newsworthy enough for a box on the front page. There was a celebration in the Hills household that night, attended by their closest friends: copies of slick magazines were ceremoniously burned and the ashes placed in a dime-store urn that Paula had bought for the occasion.