“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.
“Maybe,” the officer said, a defensive note in his voice. “We don’t have enough to go on. The Fenns’ car showed no sign of impact with another vehicle.”
I left the matter there. Clearly he didn’t want to pursue it, and what good would it do in any case? What mattered was that the two people who had been my parents for over forty years were gone, taken from me without warning. I tried to convince myself that in some way I was glad. After all, Aunt May and Uncle Stan had been spared the horrible deaths I had seen take so many of my friends’ parents. There had been no lingering cancer, no senility, no progressive degeneration.
There might have been a moment of fear or shock, followed by a tremendous impact that their aging bodies could not take. Pain … . The coroner assured me that death had probably been nearly instantaneous. They had even been spared the pain of being separated from each other. I knew Aunt May had wondered how she would cope without Uncle Stan. She had occasionally talked about it with me as women do, knowing the statistics favor them surviving their husbands. Uncle Stan had never said anything, but he must have feared it, too. He’d have feared leaving May alone, if not for himself.
It really had been a good death, as such things go, but I found little comfort in this. I sat in the living room of the comfortable ranch house into which we had moved when I was thirteen, alone once friends and neighbors had returned to their routine, wondering what I should do.
The accident had come just as the school
year was ending. I had intended to take the summer off, travel a bit, do some stuff for my parents around their house. I had my own house on the other side of town, near enough, but far enough to give us all some privacy. Should I keep it or this place? Certainly a spinster didn’t need two houses, especially in the same town.
I sat there, unaware that I’d leaned forward to rest my head in my hands until there was a knock at the front door. I came upright with a jerk that caught my neck. Massaging the sore spot I rose and went to the door.
I knew the woman who stood there: Betty Boswell. She and her husband, Alan, were good friends of Aunt May and Uncle Stan. They’d met at some fund-raiser for the church a few years after we’d moved to town. Their eldest son was close to my age, but the Boswells themselves were younger than Aunt May and Uncle Stan by a good six or seven years. They’d been at the reception at the church hall earlier that day, had been among those who had come back to the house after.
“Mrs. Boswell,” I said, trying to keep an odd mixture of relief and dismay out of my voice, “did you forget something?”
Betty Boswell smiled. She and Alan were the popular choice to play Mr. and Mrs. Claus most years, but tonight her expression held nothing of its usual easy affability.
“No, but if you aren’t too tired, I would very much like to speak with you. Privately,” Betty added, lowering her voice. She was usually round and comfortingly amiable, but tonight she reminded me of a rabbit who has heard an owl. “I didn’t think anyone had stayed, but …”
Frankly mystified, I stepped back to admit her.
“I think there’s still some coffee,” I said, “and enough sweets to make sure even if I do forget to eat I won’t lose any weight.”
I ran my hands over my waist and over my hips for emphasis. No one would cast me as Mrs. Claus, but I was far from svelte. Days spent teaching at as many as three separate schools, grabbing lunches and dinners from fast-food restaurants, had not been kind to my figure. I was sturdy rather than plump, and stronger than many women my age. I took comfort in that last—most of the time.
Today, dressed as I was, still in the black dress I had worn to the funeral, I felt myself for what I was: dumpy, middle-aged, plain, and now very, very alone. I had never realized how much that was positive in my own self-image had come from the loving pride I saw in the Fenns’ eyes whenever they looked at me. Now that was gone, and I knew how all those fairy-tale princesses who found themselves transformed into unspeakable things must have felt.
I said nothing of this as I led Mrs. Boswell through the living room and into the comfort of the kitchen. Almost without speaking, we took chairs across from each other at the table. The coffee was still acceptably fresh, and neither of us had much appetite for anything, but I set out a tray of pecan cookies just the same.
Betty Boswell seemed to be using the motion of stirring her coffee to focus her thoughts. Now she set the spoon aside, and left the coffee untasted.
“You have already spoken to the executors of your parent’s estate,” she said.
I nodded. The same lawyer who had helped Uncle Stan set up my trust all those years ago was still alive, though mostly retired. He and the accountant had told me they would deal with the details—and I needn’t worry about a bill.
“Liven up the next few weeks,” the lawyer had assured me, and I heard in his voice the same note I had learned to recognize on that long-ago train trip. He needed to be kind to me to ease his own pain, and so I gratefully accepted.
“Good,” Mrs. Boswell said. “They’re good men. Reliable.”
“Yes,” I said, mystified. “They have already gone over the basics, and say they’ll have something together for me next week.”
Betty took a deep breath. “You might say that your parents appointed us executors of another sort. At least your Aunt May did—me.”
She stopped, frowned at herself, and sighed.
“I’m doing this very badly,” she admitted. “Let me start over.”
I nodded, rather stunned. What was going on here?
“May and I were good friends,” Betty said, “and one day we were talking about keeping diaries. Did you know she kept one?”
I frowned slightly. “I don’t think I did. I knew she kept trip journals and such, is that what you mean?”
“No. May kept a diary in the more usual sense—a book in which she wrote down her thoughts and what was happening, and things like that.”
“For how long?” I asked, rather astonished.
“I think for most of her life,” Betty replied. “She said she’d lost track of how many little blank books she’d filled.”
“And she kept them all?”
“All,” Betty agreed. “She showed me where. There’s a locked box at the back of one of the closets.”
I thought I knew where this was going.
“And she wanted them destroyed unread,” I said, thinking that’s what I would have wanted.
“Actually,” Betty said, reaching into her purse and coming out with a ring from which a single small key dangled, “she thought that might be your reaction. What May wanted was for me to make certain that you would read through those diaries—especially the ones since you came to live with her and Stan. I think she thought it might be a comfort to you.”
Betty’s tone as she said those last words made me think she was guessing at Aunt May’s motivation, but I nodded.
“I guess I understand,” I said, though what I felt was closer to confusion.
“Would you like me to show you where she kept them?”
I nodded.
Betty got up with a briskness that almost concealed her own discomfort. “They’re upstairs.”
She led the way to the small room that had once been my studio. After I had moved away, Aunt May had converted it into an all-purpose workroom. Betty opened the closet, bent, and lifted a box filled with fabric remnants.
“Hold this,” she said, her voice muffled from the closet’s confines. “It’s down here.”
I stood holding the box, letting my gaze rest on the assortment of color swatches within. Aunt May had taken up quilting about twenty years ago, and this box contained only a portion of her hoard. Idly, knowing I was distracting myself, I made a mental note to find out if her club wanted her supplies.
“Here!” Betty said, emerging, her neatly styled hair a little awry. She dangled a square, grey, fireproof document box from one hand. It was clearly heavy, and I moved to take it from her.
Betty made the trade with me, setting the fabric scraps back in the closet before turning to inspect the document box.
“This key will open it,” Betty said, handing me the little key she’d pulled out downstairs. “There’s another one about somewhere, but I had the impression May hid it so well that she didn’t think you’d find it—or if you did, you would just think it was a lost key.”
I nodded. I was doing that a lot this evening, but words seemed to have failed me.
“One more thing,” Betty said briskly. “These are her older ones. She showed me where she kept her current one.”
She left the room and I followed her, thinking as I did so that Aunt May apparently had not wanted Uncle Stan to know about these journals. Otherwise, once I was grown she could have given up hiding them. What secret was she protecting? Had she a lover? An illegitimate child? Some crime in her past?
Betty turned into the master bedroom, then moved to Aunt May’s side of the bed. She hefted the mattress and slid her free hand underneath, bringing it out a moment later holding a slender, fabric-covered journal in an elegantly pretty russet and gold pattern of Japanese chrysanthemums.
“Here,” Betty said, a faint note of triumph in her voice. “That’s the current one. Now, do you promise me you’ll take the time to go through them?”
Her tone had become very serious, and I ducked my head in a wordless promise.
“I will,” I said. “Tell me, Betty, did Aunt May tell you anything about what was in them?�
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Betty shook her head. “No, she didn’t, and I didn’t ask. We had a promise between us, the two of us. It came up when Lacey died a few years ago, all so suddenly. Apparently, she’d kept her love letters from before her marriage and her husband found them. Poor fellow took it hard, for some reason. May and I decided that it would have been better if some kind soul had known about them and slipped them away and, well …”
She shrugged. “I have a few letters and things. May had these journals. She wanted to make sure they came to you and that you would know without a doubt it was all right for you to read them.”
I understood, feeling sad. Now Betty would need to find another confidante. I wondered who it would be. We walked downstairs then, talking too deliberately of other things. Betty promised to look into whether the quilting club would want the supplies, and who might benefit from a gift of clothing.
Child of a Rainless Year Page 5