Authors: Jane Lindskold

Child of a Rainless Year (4 page)

BOOK: Child of a Rainless Year

3.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

No, what had me so excited was that this trip was
my
trip. The Fenns were my guests, courtesy of my victory. Since some artistic organization had sponsored my prize, we were staying in a really nice hotel, and even had an expense account for meals and travel. Reviewing all the forms and signing my name on various documents was heady stuff for a sixteen-year-old.

The Fenns were excited, too, but I sensed a tension in each of them that I couldn’t explain. None of my ever-so-polite questions yielded anything but vague replies, so finally, with the egotism of my age, I decided that they were uncomfortable with this first sign of my coming adulthood, that their pride in me was tinged with regret at the awareness that soon they would lose me. It must be a phase that all parents went through.

We arrived the night before the award ceremony. The next morning, the Fenns suggested that we go to the exhibit early, so we would have a chance to view the other pieces before dressing for the ceremony. I agreed with enthusiasm.

The show was huge. All the pieces that had been runners-up in all the categories, from all the counties of the state of Ohio, were displayed in areas separated by temporary partitions. The blue ribbon winners were displayed prominently within their section, each given a panel of its own.

The exhibition hall wasn’t as full as it would get later, but we weren’t the only ones who had come to take advantage of the preview. I strolled in feeling like a princess. It only took overhearing an acid-voiced matron who was viewing the oil paintings say to her companion: “I don’t see why this one took the ribbon. The one over there is
much
better,” to make me very shy about my own accomplishment. Clearly winning and being accorded universal acclaim were not the same thing at all. My egotism went down another peg when I realized there was a Best of Show, and I wasn’t it. That honor had gone to a very fine pastel of two girls in a field of corn and poppies.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether
Homecoming
would have caught the judge’s fancy. Would it have been too fanciful or would they have been taken by the implied story?

Even with my sense of my own self-importance restored to more reasonable levels, I enjoyed looking around. There was a freshness and immediacy to these works that I had never experienced in a museum display. It was as if I could sense the effort that had gone into each piece. Sometimes, I would find myself mesmerized by a picture or sculpture, drawn in not so much by what was there, but by what I sensed had been intended. It was frightening, a little like being on the edge of getting drunk.

Although I felt shy about doing so, I eventually drifted over to where my own piece hung. The collages were off to one edge of the cavernous display area. The category was not entirely to the liking of some of the purists, who said collages and mosaics were more craft than art. These formalists had been outvoted by those who said that Ohio must catch up with trends in modem art.

I was studying each of the competing works, trying hard not to stare at the wonderful sight of
Last Blush
hanging in solitary glory, but for the blue rosette hanging beside it, when I noticed the man studying my piece. His expression was assessing, without any antagonism: purely, thoughtfully critical. There was something else there, too, and I found myself falling back on a half-remembered trick to get a better look at his face.

One of the other collages had made heavy use of fragments of mirror. I moved over to it, shifting my gaze until I found a piece that neatly reflected the stranger. He was tall and lean, brown hair combed neatly over from a left-side part. His clothing was a version of the sports jacket and shirt most of the men in the room were wearing. He also wore a tie, loosely knotted beneath a prominent Adam’s apple.

From the critical intensity with which the stranger viewed my work, I guessed he was an art teacher, rather than a parent or family friend of one of the participating artists. I knew my own art teacher would be coming to the award ceremony and showing tonight, partially to share in my glory, partially because she loved art, just a little to see what other art teachers were achieving with their own students.

Then I remembered that I’d seen the man once before, and the memory both soothed and accentuated my own unease. I’d seen him last year at our annual winter pageant. In addition to the usual carols and such, the senior class did a one-act play written by a talented member of their number. It was based on the rather frightening fairy tale, “The Snow Queen,” rewritten slightly to give Gerda’s journey a more Christmasy feel.

Although a senior was technically in charge, this was the first production where I’d really influenced set design. I’d done a lot of the rough sketches, made the drawings that others had later helped paint. I still remember the joy I felt, how the colors seemed to sing to me, how the glitter we’d liberally applied along the faux roof beams jingled like sleigh bells.

After the close of the final performance, I’d seen this very man standing on the stage, studying the set we’d used for the Snow Queen’s palace. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now, seeing him studying
Last Blush,
his posture mirroring what I’d seen then, I wondered. I also felt irrationally afraid. It was like he wasn’t so much studying the art as assessing the artist—assessing me.

Swiftly, my heart beating hard, I slipped from the display area and found Aunt May and Uncle Stan. They were chatting with some people Uncle Stan knew through work. Their son had been a runner-up in the pencil drawing category with a marvelously detailed sketch of a barn at harvest time. I liked it at least as much as I did the drawing of a chubby toddler playing with a kitten that had won, though I could understand why the judges had made their choice. It’s harder to do subjects that hint at motion than those that don’t.

From time to time, I glanced around but I didn’t see the man again. Gradually, my heart rate slowed, the irrational sense of panic subsided. That night, walking up on the stage to receive my prize and my share of the polite applause, I thought I glimpsed him standing at the back, but I could have been wrong. I didn’t see him again, but I never forgot him.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

—Lao Tzu,
Tao Te Ching

INSIDE THE LINES

I finished high school without incident. Then, with the Fenns’ blessing, I enrolled in a prestigious art school in New York City. It took me away from home, and introduced me to city life. Uncle Stan was doing very well by then, so he and Aunt May made frequent visits. Sometimes she came on her own, and the two of us would go exploring together.

Years of disappointments had not dimmed the intensity of whatever private search Aunt May was on. Although neither of us ever said anything about it, it was tacitly understood that when she visited we would tour churches and odd bookstores, ethnic neighborhoods, art galleries, and other places that would be considered downright bohemian in the still-provincial little town we all thought of as home.

Much of what today is commonly called “the sixties” actually happened in the early seventies, and so we found a lot worth investigating. In between Aunt May’s visits, I would make mental note of places I thought would interest her, and often check them out in advance. Because of her, I probably was exposed to a lot more of the counterculture than I would have been otherwise.

I remember when she was going through her Chinese phase. I came back to the apartment I shared with a fluctuating number of other art students to find Aunt May deep in discussion of Lao Tzu and the
Tao Te Ching.
They tried to draw me in, but I shook my head and laughed.

“Too deep for me,” I said, and went to wash paint off my right eyebrow.

Despite what the media would have you believe, the majority of us—even the artists—didn’t “drop out.” We went about our lives much as before, hair a little longer, clothes a little wilder, but otherwise very much the people we had been all our lives before that point. The revolution existed mostly in the media—and in the trickle-down effect as we all came to believe what we were hearing.

Shortly before I finished art school, I passed my twenty-first birthday. I went home for the occasion, and we shared a huge meal that ended with the same sort of chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream that had been served at every birthday since I had come to stay with the Fenns over ten years earlier.

I had just filled everyone’s coffee cups and was settling into a comfortable overfed torpor when Uncle Stan’s words jolted me to full wakefulness.

“Mira, you’re twenty-one now. The time has come for Aunt May and I to discuss with you the terms of your mother’s estate.”

His voice was very stiff and unwontedly formal, as if he’d been rehearsing how best to say this for weeks. For all I know, he had been. It had been years since any of us had talked about the circumstances that had led up to my coming to live with them. I suspect that the Fenns, like me, preferred the comfortable fiction that we were a family like any other—except that I called them “Aunt” and “Uncle” rather than “Mom” and “Dad.”

Uncle Stan reached around behind him and opened one of the drawers of the big sideboard that stood there. He drew out a fat manila folder and set it down in front of him.

“Mira, this folder contains copies of the pertinent documents having to do with the years in which you have been in our custody, including an annual accounting of the money and personal property that—as of today—you will inherit.”

I gasped. It may seem incredible, but I had never thought of myself as a potential heiress. I suppose this was because to me my mother was gone, not dead.

“At the time we learned of your mother’s disappearance,” Uncle Stan continued, “and that you would be coming to live with us, I consulted both a lawyer and an accountant. They helped me set up a trust fund that would cover your care while permitting the bulk of your inheritance to accrue.”

He looked at my stunned expression, and answered the question he thought he saw there.

“I regret to say that you are not wealthy,” he said, the faintest of rueful smiles touching his lips, “but I hope you will understand that I did not feel it was my place to gamble with your future. I chose safe investments, which, although not exciting, have largely paid every year.”

He slid a neatly clipped stack of papers over to me, and I reviewed them, understanding enough to see that he had only told the truth. While I turned through the pages, each one taking me with biannual steps back across the years, Uncle Stan continued.

“This packet”—another stack of papers was slid over to me—“contains an annual summary of those times when money was drawn from your funds. I have the supporting documentation in my files upstairs, should you wish to review them. I would rather like if you would.”

Obediently, I inspected the typewritten sheets. Each contained remarkably few entries, and it was several minutes before I realized how to ask the question that had been nagging at me from the moment Uncle Stan had referred to the circumstances of my coming to live with them.

“But, Uncle Stan,” I said, hearing a note of protest in my voice, “I don’t see anything here for your expenses. There are lawyer’s fees, accountant’s fees, and a few other things, but nothing for …” I hesitated, not knowing how to say it without sounding rude, “my care and feeding. Are you saying my mother just dumped me on you without giving you anything?”

Uncle Stan blinked, unable to find a reply. Aunt May put a hand across the table and touched my arm.

“Mira, dear, it wasn’t quite like that. We could have drawn reasonable expenses from the estate. The trustees would have signed off on that. We chose not to do so. You weren’t dumped on us. You came to us as the answer to a prayer.”

“Prayer?”

Aunt May nodded. “Your mother left instructions for your care should anything happen to her. She named trustees for her estate, and directed them to arrange for your care. Apparently, she had no close relations.”

For the first time, other than in dreams, I thought of the silent women, wondering who they had been, what had happened to them. Presumably the big house I vaguely remembered had been sold, and the proceeds from that were among the monies so carefully invested by the trustees.

Aunt May went on. “One of the trustees had become friends of friends of Stan and mine. Our friends knew how much we wanted children and mentioned it by chance to this trustee. Since there remained a question as to your mother’s whereabouts, you could not be offered for adoption. The other trustees were prepared to send you to a boarding school. Our friend’s friend convinced them to let us act as your guardians instead. The other trustees agreed, as long as we agreed to submit to periodic reviews.”

“Reviews?”

She smiled. “Every spring. They kindly notified us in advance, but, especially those first few years, Stan and I were terribly nervous.”

I was still shaken by how impersonally my mother had arranged for my care. Trustees! I had been told about them years before, but the word had meant nothing to me then. Hadn’t my mother had friends to whom she could entrust her daughter? Perhaps she had not.

“Annual inspections and a half-grown girl,” I said, knowing I sounded grumpy, but not able to help myself. “That hardly sounds like the answer to a prayer.”

“We hadn’t been able to have a child of our own,” Aunt May said stubbornly. “Then you came and … Really, Mira, it was just like the answer to a prayer.”

Her eyes were beading up with tears. Suddenly, kicking myself for my stupidity, I realized how much of that searching I had always sensed in Aunt May had begun with the emptiness of a childless woman who very much wanted children of her own. I was around the table and hugging her before I realized what I was doing. When we all got done being weepy, Uncle Stan resolutely insisted on continuing to present me the contents of the folder.

There was quite a bit, and I was so overwhelmed I hardly heard a word he said. What I did hear, although he never said it, was his plea for me to believe that he and Aunt May had not taken me in and acted as my parents for these past eleven years for money. Indeed, they hadn’t taken a penny, not even when I was twelve and broke my wrist when I fell off my bicycle, or when I had braces on my teeth, or for tuition for art school. The only money that had been spent was that which was necessary to maintain the estate, nothing else.

I did hear what Uncle Stan said at the end.

“You can arrange matters to your own satisfaction now, but if you would prefer to have me continue to handle matters, I will do so. The only thing I ask is that you promise to sit down with me once a year and review things. You must take responsibility for your inheritance.”

I nodded, my eyes flooding with tears for the second time that evening.

Inheritance
, I thought, surprised at how sad and abandoned I felt.
I guess that means Mother is really and truly dead.

After my graduation from art school, I became an art teacher rather than taking the route that might have led to my becoming a professional artist.

When they heard I had accepted a job teaching art at a grammar school in a suburb of Toledo many of my teachers were disappointed. The critical comments came hard and fast—far more ferocious than any that had been applied to my drawing and painting.

“Mira, you have too much talent to be teaching art to little children …”

“I know a place that would be happy to have you. It’s a technical art studio, true, but they have connections to galleries … . You could get paid for doing design while you work on breaking in.”

“Don’t throw yourself and your gift away. Is there a man? Someone you think will disapprove if you do something so unconventional? He isn’t worth it. Marriage is overrated, take it from me.”

“Do your parents disapprove? Do they want you to have a ‘real’ job? I’ll speak with them if you’d like.”

I turned down all of these kind offers, promised to consider all the good advice, deflected the worst of the critical comments with promises that I didn’t plan on abandoning my art. What I didn’t tell any of these well-meaning people was that over the last few years I had increasingly felt that, as much as I loved using them, I needed to keep my artistic gifts to myself. I was haunted by my memories of the man who had demonstrated such interest in my
Last Blush.
I knew I didn’t want to attract any more like him.

Whoever he was. Whatever he was. I knew nothing about him, but the one thing I was sure of was that he had not been the more usual kind of talent scout. My recent discussion with Uncle Stan about my inheritance had reminded me all over again that my mother had vanished without a trace.

I was more sophisticated in the ways of the world than I had been when Mother had disappeared. Now I began to wonder more seriously what had happened to her. I wondered if she had gotten involved with organized crime or with smugglers. I had no real idea. All I knew was that I didn’t want to attract the attention of the kind of people who could make someone vanish without a trace.

Did I hide then? I don’t really know, but with hindsight (always 20/20, damn it), it seems like I must have done so. I took a wide variety of jobs involving art, but never again did I show my art in a public place—not even when one of the schools where I was teaching invited me to contribute to a national show.

I moved around, trying big city life, life in other states, finally settling in the town where I’d grown up. I told myself that this was because Aunt May and Uncle Stan needed me close. In reality, I think it was because that little town was the one place where everyone who mattered already knew me, and didn’t try to push me out of my comfortable rut.

Did I know it was a rut? I think so, but that doesn’t mean I felt useless or unhappy. I did a lot of good as a teacher, a lot more good than I ever would have done as an “artist.” I mean, only the most popular artists ever touch more lives than a teacher does.

Maybe it was a dream, not a rut, a dream that this was what my life was and how it was always going to be. It wasn’t a bad dream, not at all.

I kept right on dreaming, dreaming in living color, until a single phone call woke me up.

Aunt May and Uncle Stan died in a car crash when I was in my early fifties. I’d been wondering for a year or so if I should at least try to convince Uncle Stan to turn most of the driving over to Aunt May or to me, when I was available. I’d moved back into the area a few years before, and when I wasn’t skating between teaching art at three different schools, I had time.

Uncle Stan was seventy-seven, after all, and didn’t see as well as he once had. The lenses of the glasses that had framed his eyes for as long as I had known him had gotten progressively thicker, but he stubbornly refused to give up both driving and the freedom it represented.

I wondered if they might still be alive if I’d succeeded in convincing him, and said as much to the police officer who had discovered the wreck out on the shoulder of one of the country roads where Aunt May and Uncle Stan had always enjoyed going for the proverbial Sunday drive.

“I’m not sure, ma’am,” he said politely. “All we know is something made the Fenn car swerve. It went off the road, hit a trees.”

I felt no relief at this information.

“Drunk driver?” I asked.

BOOK: Child of a Rainless Year

3.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads