Child of a Rainless Year Read online

  Aunt May lavished a great deal of attention on both me and Uncle Stan. Her house was always in perfect order. As I grew older I sensed Aunt May was searching for something. She never said what it was she felt she lacked, but I noticed that she collected churches and religious groups the way some of my classmates’ mothers collected recipes.

  Officially Aunt May remained a solid, churchgoing Methodist, but the bookshelves in her workroom contained an orderly assortment of myths, legends, anthropological works, religious texts, and self-help books. I am absolutely certain that if Aunt May had been younger when the Flower Child movement began she would have been one of those earnest young people who practiced transcendental meditation and ate only natural foods.

  Indeed, one of the few times Aunt May and Uncle Stan had an argument in my hearing was over her attempts to introduce vegetarian meals into our weekly routine. Stanley Fenn was a solidly meat-and-potatoes sort of man, the kind who would eat vegetables reluctantly—mostly because he knew his growing foster daughter needed to eat them and he had to be an example. Aunt May gave up her attempt to adapt the family diet, though I am absolutely sure that when she was alone, as she was so often once I became more and more busy with school, she reverted to what Uncle Stan would have called her “rabbit diet.”

  But none of this touched me, except to give me a sense of balance. If Uncle Stan could be unhappy but get up and go to work anyhow, then I could do the same. If Aunt May was sometimes restless, well, then, that was a normal part of being human. In any case, I had more than enough to keep me busy.

  Somewhere between grammar school and high school, I accepted that my fascination for color, line, shading, and all the rest meant that I really was what I had heard my teachers say practically since my first school term in Ohio. I was “artistic.”

  I liked knowing that. It gave an explanation to the fascination I had for color, a reason for my preferring to spend my allowance on paints or crayons or colored pencils, rather than whatever toy was the fad of the moment. It put a word to what I was, gave my greatest oddity a place in the usual order—oddly enough, making the abnormal normal.

  I wasn’t the most social of children, but I wasn’t the shyest either. My grades were solidly average, peaking and dropping as my interests did. I joined a few clubs, and when my talent for drawing and painting became generally known, I found myself drafted to help design sets for school plays, or banners and posters for upcoming events.

  I was a junior in high school when my art teacher asked a handful of us to contribute a piece to be sent to a countrywide show. I knew she wanted me to give her an oil painting I’d done earlier that year, a complex piece called Homecoming.

  Homecoming showed an older woman in all her finery, viewing her reflection in what is obviously a mirror in a high-school public rest room. She is at least forty, but in her reflection she is still the seventeen-year-old prom queen she had been in her days of glory.

  I was loading the painting into the family sedan when I balked, almost as if I’d slammed up against a solid wall. I carried Homecoming back inside and returned it to its hook on the wall of the room I proudly called my “studio.” Then I took a just-completed collage from my workbench, wrapped it carefully in an old blanket, and loaded it instead.

  The collage was a pretty piece, almost a mosaic, worked from fake gemstones glued down in an abstract pattern that nevertheless somehow evoked a rosebush in the fading lushness of late summer bloom. I named it “Last Blush,” as I drove over to the school. My teacher was initially disappointed, but she had sense enough not to push—and Last Blush was nothing to be ashamed of. It was painterly in its complexity, recalling Monet or Seurat.

  To my great joy, Last Blush won first place in its class, the only piece from our school to do so. It went on to the judged competition for the statewide show and won there, too. So the Fenns and I went from our little town all the way to Columbus so I could accept my prize.

  I was terrifically, almost irrationally, excited. It wasn’t like I had never gone anywhere before. Thanks to the Fenns, I was actually very well-travelled for a girl of my age and class. Uncle Stan’s architect had developed a national, then an international, reputation. Our family vacations had capitalized on this, allowing Uncle Stan to mix business and pleasure. Last year we’d gone to France for a month, then hopped over the channel for two deliriously wonderful weeks in England.

  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.

  3

  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.”

  “Pr
ayer?”

  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.”