The Colorman (12 page)

The colors called to her. The light and shape of the landscape teased and tempted her.

But Rain's studio was filling up with her scrubby abstracts. There were days, as she was working, patiently building up her odd, nest-like constructions that she wondered what she was doing there and whether she would be living there just a season. Days when she let her mind push ahead into winter and spring in the little house, the fresh air of the country washing her inside and out. Inside her secret mind, she saw herself gardening herbs and making soap, maybe even having babies here, but then she would brush all that away as sentimentality. No, it was hard enough, this path she had set herself on. And again she pictured the show at Shuldenfrei, wondered at what new phase of life it would launch her into. Thought about how different she would feel once she was a real artist.

In the meantime, she formed her days around house projects, studio time, walks and a little cooking, only very occasionally panged by the realization that she was happier alone and orphaned than she had ever been in her life.

Rain felt like she was hiding in some strange little cul-de-sac of life. Off to the side, all on her own, and free.

One late morning, Rain was in sweats, checking email on her laptop.

“Finally,” she muttered.

The email was from Karl. No subject. It read (in caps):

MAIL NOT BEING FORWARDED. NEED STATEMENT FROM BROKER. K.

Rain was frozen. Actually surprised. That was it?

The next email was from James Morrow—subject line “Re:Thank You for the Tour” and read:

Dear Rain Morton,

Thank you for your note. I appreciate your kind words. I did know your father, though I had not seen him for many years. I've left a small token of welcome at your doorstep. I've been ill and have forgotten all my manners. Please accept, forgive and allow me to grovel a bit.

Yours most sincerely, James Morrow

Rain rose, coffee mug in hand, and went to the front door of the cabin.

Emerging into the fine, early-fall morning, dry and bright, Rain sat on the front stoop of the cabin, rubbing her face. She took in the view, each day bringing a fresh crop of impossible color to the woods. She looked around and spotted the box squatting right next to her. It was worn looking but polished, about the size of a bread box. Rain ran her hand along its smooth surfaces, regarding it casually, like you might a friendly cat if you're not particularly a cat person. As she woke up a little, she put the coffee mug down and fingered the box's old-fashioned latch. Inside were sparkling bottles and tubes, all adorned with hand-pressed Highland Morrow labels.

Rain gasped, and quietly said, “James Morrow…”

Her hands moved around inside the box, touching and lifting bottles and mysterious looking tools from their velvet-lined slots. Her fingers found a small, letter-pressed card that read:
FOR THE PAINTER. LET IT RAIN. MAY THIS SUPPLY LAST
UNTIL I FINISH A MORE WORTHY SET
. And was signed with quill and ink,
JAMES
.

Dear James Morrow,

I'm flabbergasted! I can't thank you enough for this incredible artifact! I feel like I've come into the possession of a work of art in and of itself, though surely it is undeserved.

I thank you for your generosity and hope that I might one day give you a painting worthy of such a self-contained perfection as this.

Yours, Rain Morton

Rain was slouching in one of the old ratty couches at the Market, working on her computer, making a composite out of some of the photographs she had been taking, when Chassie flopped down into the couch next to her.

“So, you're a photographer,” she said.

“Nah,” Rain said. “Just reference.”

“So you paint landscapes?” Chassie asked.

“More abstract, I guess,” Rain said as Chassie tried to peer over her shoulder. “I really just do this other stuff as a hobby. To relax, I guess.”

“Maybe that ought to tell you something,” said Chassie.

A pair of low-slung Levis swiveled into view. “What would you know about it,” the woman wearing them said, accusingly.

“It's from
What Color Is Your Parachute?
,” Chassie answered sincerely. “I'm reading it for Hunter. By the way, Rain, this is Marisol? Marisol: Straight-Girl.”

“Nice to meet you,” Rain extended a hand to Marisol, who took it in a surprisingly floppy little handshake. Marisol smiled apologetically.

“Hunter's my brother,” Chassie told Rain.

“Hopeless playboy goof. Not even a real brother,” Marisol was smiling and nudging Chassie with her torso.

“Real as far as I care,” said Chassie. “I adopted him after my Dad died. Grew up with him. He's my family.”

Marisol perked up. “Yeah, maybe Straight Girl'd like him.” She flashed her perfect teeth and leaned past Chassie to grab the
Post
from the coffee table.

“Married, I think,” said Chassie, looking at Rain and making a face.

Rain was watching their little show, amused, and only then realized they had moved the game onto her. “Yup, married,” she said a little weakly.

“Not married very much though. I think,” said Chassie. Marisol laughed at this, shifted her butt into the couch next to Chassie and snapped open the paper. Rain was trying to keep her expression light and amused looking. “I kid!” Chassie said. “Omigod, she's going to start avoiding this place. I kid, I joke!” she said, slapping Rain's leg. Chassie rose. “Gotta go grind some beans, now.” She put a hand on Rain's shoulder as she passed behind her and said, “Sorry. Run my mouth for my own amusement and crap slips out. Don't hate me.”

“You're hard to keep up with!” Rain said, wondering how she could possibly be so easy to read.

“Good, I like that.” Chassie laughed and went behind the counter. “And you are required at dinner tomorrow!”

Rain smiled and nodded and then turned back to where Chassie had gone. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me!” Chassie said.

Marisol tore part of the front page of the paper off and began writing on it. Her very long, manicured fingernails caused her to wrap her fingers around the pen childishly, where they glinted and clicked as she wrote a phone number, an address and “8:00 Saturday—BE THERE.”

Morrow's house was on the opposite side of the factory and though small, it enjoyed a seasonal view of the Hudson from the back porch and upper-rear windows. During summer, the greenery was too thick to see anything but an occasional tiny glimpse of river. But during the long, gray winters, the water shone up at the house encouragingly.

James had maintained the little house carefully if not imaginatively over the decades of his widowerhood. Honeysuckle and jasmine grew up over the porch and enclosed the house in their fragrant embrace. Morrow cut the vines back in the winter, dried them and burned them, carefully and slowly, into drawing charcoal. Their stubs still hung possessively around the entrance in a brown, twiggy halo during the cold months. The lawn was mowed, the leaves raked and Morrow retained the interior cleaning services of one Roselle Jenkins whose work was efficient and thorough.

What Mrs. Jenkins found when she stepped in through the split Dutch doors every Monday was a place that felt like a display to her. She did find dust and the odd stray evidence of life in the house, but her impression was always that the occupants spent little time there. Life appeared to take place only in three or four distinct corners of the building, and the rest of it never changed in the slightest detail. A chair by a window in the living room, for example. The arms were worn, the books and newspapers in stacks by the lamp changed each time Mrs. Jenkins came, but the chair next to it gathered dust undisturbed. A couple of books, a pair of women's reading glasses and even a water glass were set carefully on a small table. It was a sad little tableau and once Mrs. Jenkins came to understand it, she refreshed the water in the glass every time she cleaned, thinking that Mr. Morrow was keeping an offering to his departed wife there.

The kitchen, distinctly dated by its appliances and the little curtains over shelves in place of proper cabinets, was another place of limited life. The refrigerator, one of those curved impenetrable tombs from the 1940s, held a few wrapped, unmarked packages. Beer, cheese and a few sausages. It was cavernous and empty, no cheery sauces or jars or anything friendly. The metal grill shelves rang hollowly when Mrs. Jenkins defrosted the freezer every couple of months to keep its little internal metal box from taking over the small space. Behind the curtains on the shelves sat strange tin boxes of crackers, teas and unrecognizable jars of imported condiments that Mrs. Jenkins found slightly menacing.

Not that Mrs. Jenkins made those sorts of judgments, no. It took quite a high degree of oddity to impress Mrs. Jenkins after all those years of cleaning houses. Years of tissues and magazines and electronic doohickeys, stashes of booze and empty bottles in odd places, pills upon pills, medical equipment, straps and contraptions and dirty underpants, nothing seemed all that surprising to her anymore. But it was more a matter of breezing past the implications of people's private spheres, rather than actually accepting any of what she saw.

Mostly Mrs. Jenkins tried to feel about those things the way she'd like some theoretical housekeeper in her own life to feel. Nothing. Really nothing. Just a kind of slipping by.

It must have been forty years that Mrs. Jenkins had been walking into people's houses without their being present. So that feeling she used to get when she was first cleaning houses on her own was familiar—but had so long ago been banished by her practical nature and sleeves-rolled-up work ethic—and so it surprised her that she felt an ear-ringing hollowness at Mr. Morrow's. She guessed it must have been the doubled layer of residents missing, Mrs. Morrow having been gone many years before she began working for Mr. Morrow. It was a rather outsized shock, however, to Mrs. Jenkins, when she had first learned that Mrs. Morrow had been dead so long.

She had been cleaning Morrow's house for almost a year by then. The Morrows were never around and her contact with them was limited to the envelope she found waiting for her on the kitchen table every week and the very occasional phone call from Mr. Morrow asking to change the date or cancel a week. He had always paid her for the weeks he cancelled and was very generous at the holidays. But, considering herself the kind of person who understood things, it was very disconcerting to her to realize that she had not made any conclusions about the very particular strangeness of the Morrow house.

It was in the most casual of conversations with Donna at the grocery store that she learned about it. Why they had been talking about the Morrows, Mrs. Jenkins couldn't remember, but she did remember how cavalierly Donna corrected her about Mrs. Morrow being dead as she slid bacon and orange juice and ground beef and cans of beans over the sensor's beep and straight into the shushing plastic bags. How her gasp and clapped hand over her heart were greeted by one of Donna's quirky, sidelong looks. And how Donna wondered aloud why a death from almost twenty-five years before should touch Mrs. Jenkins so deeply. Somehow Donna's finding her shock curious made Mrs. Jenkins feel the need to downplay the more serious amazement she felt to discover that Mrs. Morrow had been so long gone. So she put her hand back down, worked her wallet open and composed her face into a more appropriate expression.

Shutting her wallet with a decisive little snap, Mrs. Jenkins had thanked Donna and had declined to ask any more questions when the checker had made leading remarks about there having been intriguing circumstances. She had made sure to leave Donna with an expression of casual merriment. But the next Monday when she had entered the Morrow house, Mrs. Jenkins had felt distinctly haunted.

She had entered tentatively, not with the clatter she usually employed to flush out the silence of locked, waiting houses. The chair that Mrs. Jenkins only now understood as Mrs. Morrow's seemed to bare itself to her, with the lady's glasses atop the books she must have been reading. They were a hardcover of a Norman Mailer book and two paperbacks with bent back covers,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
and something called
Danville's Mission
. She had dusted these books over and over for months without ever noting that they never changed. Tentatively, she picked one up and looked at the back cover.
Danville's Mission
by John Ray Morton. Pulitzer Prize for 1971, with its black-and-white author photo of a young, delicate-featured man looking off into the light and distance. The casual ease of his expression was contrasted neatly by the tight, white shirt and thin, dark tie. He looked sun kissed and blithe. His hair was combed neatly, except for a piece that blew handsomely across his laughing face. Mrs. Jenkins put the book back in its place, the author's face back down against the book beneath it and delicately returned Mrs. Morrow's reading glasses atop it. She felt oddly devastated. She needed to get her work done and get to three more houses that day. But just this once. Just in order to shake out the juju she was feeling, Mrs. Jenkins decided to take a quick look around. And she knew just where she wanted to look.

Mrs. Jenkins went directly to the door leading to the third floor of the house. The floor Mr. Morrow had told her she needn't bother with. He had never expressly forbidden her access to it, but he had employed her to do the first two floors of the house only, and in her efficiency and experience, Mrs. Jenkins had never had the leisure to explore. Nor, of course, had she the idea that there would be anything unusual to see.

Behind the door, Mrs. Jenkins was surprised to find a wide entryway and a broad set of stairs. No tiny attic stairwell, but a fresh, broad access way. The steps were mostly stacked with boxes and bags and odd piles of books and papers, but there was a clear pathway on the right-hand side all the way up. Mrs. Jenkins glanced up and saw that there was ample natural light flooding the room, though its walls and ceilings were unfinished, dark-stained wood. As she mounted the stairs and more and more of the attic space came into view, she could see that it was not a storage space nor a finished rumpus room, but a vast formal display. Cases on pedestals, glass-fronted shelves full of objects, an easel with a huge painting of a landscape that looked familiar. She stopped. Turned to leave. Stopped again. Went quickly up into the space to get a closer look.