Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  “Dear Editor, I am a graduate student in Sociology, doing research into the question of …” of … women who run away? No. Disappearances? Maybe. Think that one over for a bit. Think about what to say next.

  “Someone told me …” Too conversational. “I was informed regarding …” No, sounds too stiff. “I was told that a woman named Colette Bogatyr disappeared from your town a bit over a year ago. I am interested in any stories you have regarding this disappearance.”

  Should I offer to pay them for copies? I’d better check with our local paper and find out what their policy is. That’s better. My allowance is only going to go so far. I can use some of Stan’s paper, but I’ll need stamps and envelopes. Should I even give this as a return address? I usually get the mail, but what if Stan’s home? He always looks at return addresses, and he’d wonder. Okay. I could have them sent to Betty’s, but that would mean telling her or she’s going to think I’m having an affair. And if she let something slip!!!

  Okay. That means a P.O. box. I don’t think they cost much. And going to the library and seeing if they can help me find out the name of the local newspapers. Should I just check Las Vegas? No, better check Santa Fe. That’s not too far, really. Maybe even Albuquerque. That’s farther, but it’s the closest really big city. I mean, Santa Fe may be state capital, but as I recall it’s pretty dinky.

  It’s good to have a plan.

  5

  The Ideal Queen Anne … should be so plastered with ornament as to conceal the theory of its construction; it should be a restless, uncertain, frightful collection of details, giving the effect of a nightmare about to explode.

  —Gelette Burgess, quoted in Daughters of Painted

  Ladies by Elizabeth Pomada

  INSIDE THE LINES

  I was still thinking about Aunt May’s search when I drove over to Phineas House the next morning. She’d really sweated over the letter she’d sent to the various papers. The journal was filled with rough drafts. Her interests and enthusiasms had been so broad that all the time we’d known each other I’d never really thought about what it must have been like to be the product of only a high school education. Aunt May had never even worked outside of the home. She’d gone from high school to being married—and married for a long time without children.

  She’d had to type each letter out individually. There’d been no word processor with which to manufacture multiple copies, and in her fear of seeming ignorant, she’d permitted herself no cross-outs. She’d even had to go out and buy more paper and a new typewriter ribbon because she was afraid Uncle Stan would notice.

  She kept saying that the reason she didn’t want him to notice was because she thought he’d be angry that she was violating the terms under which they’d agreed to take me in, but I had a feeling it was something more. The fact was, as much as she loved him, this was a time and place when men came home and were waited on—and their wives didn’t question this. I had vague memories of how Uncle Stan would come home from work, change out of his suit, then sit and read the paper while Aunt May put the finishing touches on dinner. Afterward, she’d clean up—or I would, when I was a bit older—and he’d go back to his paper, or to watching something on TV.

  I felt a bit angry in retrospect. Hadn’t Aunt May been working all day, too? Even with those much vaunted “modern labor saving appliances” she was still responsible for an awful lot—and she didn’t take many shortcuts when it came to meals.

  This didn’t put me in the best of moods when I pulled my truck up in front of Phineas House—my house—and Domingo Navidad came strolling around the side to meet me, acting for all the world as if he owned the place. As before, his little white dog followed him, bouncing in a rocking rhythm that made the mere process of moving forward a game.

  Mr. Navidad was holding a mug of coffee in one hand, and with his free hand he opened the gate in the waist-high wrought-iron fence that bordered the front yard.

  The fence was, like the rest of the place, completely and wildly overdone, rioting with vines and leaves. There were creatures hiding in the tangle. I remembered being fascinated with the fence when I was a child, but I hadn’t been encouraged to linger out front, so my inspections had been quick glimpses, guaranteed to increase interest rather than otherwise.

  I paused now to look at the fence, revelling in making this man wait on my pleasure. The majority of the iron had been painted a glossy black, but details had been highlighted very subtly in dark green and, just occasionally, in gold or cream.

  I located a face set in the left panel of the gate. I had particularly liked this detail when I was a child—partly because it seemed so alive and partly because its leering expression scared me that little bit that small children enjoy. Back then the face had been the same flat black as the rest of the iron. Now the eyes had been highlighted with white, so they seemed to be alive and watching me. The face’s leer seemed mocking.

  “Lady of the Manor?” the lips said, moving to show a carnivore’s long teeth. “What right do you have to be so proud?”

  The imagined reprimand made me ashamed of my bad manners, and I tried to make up for my coolness with a smile I knew was a bit too hearty.

  “Good morning, Mr. Navidad. I apologize for my lack of greeting. I simply had to stop and look at the fence. You’ve done a marvelous job maintaining it.”

  Mr. Navidad smiled and continued holding the gate open for me.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I think I get too absorbed in the details, like on this fence. Before you praise me to the heavens for my diligence, there is a confession I must make.”

  “Confession?”

  “It is easier to show,” he replied, and motioned me around the right side of the house.

  I followed him without a word. The morning was still cool, holding nothing of the heat of the previous afternoon. The heat would come, however. The weather had been the primary topic of conversation that morning in the hotel restaurant. Apparently locals dined there as well as transients. As I took polite shelter behind my newspaper, I had heard frequent mention of the “monsoons.” That sounded very tropical to me, and I’d made a mental note to ask what they were talking about.

  For now, I enjoyed the relative coolness of the morning, a coolness that increased as we moved into the shade of the trees that surrounded the house. The elms kept a courteous distance from the towering monstrosity, but I knew from experience that their shade was very welcome.

  Mr. Navidad led me to a point from which we could see the side of the house clearly, then motioned upward.

  “You see,” he said, and I did.

  The paint job that adorned this side of the house was an illusion—a clever one, but an illusion nonetheless. The wildly ornate designs of the front facade only carried back as far as they could be clearly seen from the street out front. The carved details were still there, but had not been picked out in the same meticulous glory.

  It was not that the structure was not well-cared for. Monochrome evergreen paint covered most of the siding. In a few places, mostly railing or window frames, details were painted in lighter shades. The wood beneath was well-protected. The paint was reasonably fresh. There was no peeling or cracking. The house was healthy—but it wasn’t alive.

  “Oh,” I said. “I see.”

  “It helps,” Mr. Navidad said, as if we were picking up in the middle of a longer conversation, “that you own the extra lots to either side and to the back. It makes it easier. Even so, I am embarrassed. I should have done more.”

  Struggling for a reply, I realized that for Mr. Navidad this was a conversation we had had before. He must have been rehearsing how to explain his perceived negligence to me from the moment he heard I was coming to Las Vegas.

  “You have done a good job,” I said. “I saw the budget you were given when Mrs. Morales reviewed the paperwork with me. It was hardly enough to supply paint and labor for the most routine of cover jobs.”

  “Maybe in Ohio, yes,” he agreed, his gaze sl
iding from the house to my face and back to the house again. “Here. Well, here sometimes labor can be cheaper—if you know who to talk to, yes?”

  I understood he was talking about illegal immigrants and didn’t press the question.

  “But cheap labor wouldn’t be able to design the color scheme for the detail work,” I said. “You must have spent hours.”

  Mr. Navidad smiled and spoke with a quiet honesty that touched my heart. “I did, señora. I took many pictures with a telephoto lens. My nephew is very good with computers and he scanned them into a computer. Then I used what is called a paint program to try different colors. ¡Milagroso! Have you used one of these?”

  I nodded. “I’ve never liked them as much as I do real colors, but for something on this scale … It would save a lot of paint.”

  We stood, staring at the house together. Mr. Navidad’s little white dog circled each of the trees, sniffing as enthusiastically as if he hadn’t seen them probably every day of his life. I heard a jay scolding the dog, then Mr. Navidad spoke very softly.

  “I tried the colors, señora, and sometimes I liked what I saw, but mostly I listened, and let the house tell me what it liked. It took more time, yes, but I think it is worth it.”

  We walked slowly around the house trailed by the little white dog. We didn’t say much, but our silence was not uncomfortable. I felt as I had done when I had shared a model with other artists, my concentration intensified by my awareness of another person looking at the same thing.

  The back garden that I remembered playing in as a child was still there, its fieldstone walls creating a sanctuary within a larger space. Roses spilled over the walls in cascades of pink, white, and pale yellow.

  Once again, Mr. Navidad held a wrought-iron gate open for me, and this time I passed through with a murmur of thanks. I glanced around the walled garden with interest. The green patch that had been my refuge was still there, as were an array of fruit trees neatly pruned to the fit the space or espaliered against sections of the wall. The herb garden was where I remembered it, and so was a flourishing young vegetable patch.

  “Yours?” I asked.

  Mr. Navidad nodded. “It is a good place. The walls give some shelter from the wind and the little animals. The ground gets watered from run-off—when we have rain.”

  Something in how he paused before the final phrase reminded me of the conversations I had heard that morning in the hotel restaurant.

  “Is this a droughty year, then?”

  “Very bad,” he agreed. “We are all waiting to see if the monsoons will come. There is much concern.”

  “Monsoons? I thought those only happened in the tropics.”

  “It is what we call our seasonal rains. They come in the late summer, less so in the winter. Depending on where you are in the state, most of your rain will come in only two times of the year. It is very serious indeed when the year is rainless.”

  Rainless. The word rung in my ears as if spoken in my mother’s voice, but Mr. Navidad’s expression was bland. Did he know the importance of what he had said?

  I couldn’t ask. It would mean saying too much about things I was still uncertain about myself. And what could I say? “My mother claimed that there was no rain the year I was born”? Even if he had heard some such thing why was it important? There were probably more drought years than wet in this climate.

  To cover my discomfort, I led the way out of the walled garden, using the matching gate on the far side of the yard. We finished our slow patrol around the house, and by then I had collected my courage.

  “Mr. Navidad, I would like to see the inside of the house. The electric company told me the power should be on by now, but I’ve brought some flashlights. Would you advise me which door might be best to open?”

  His expression was strangely vacant for a moment, almost as if something had distracted him, but he pulled his gaze back to mine.

  “I would have said the kitchen door,” he replied. “That is the one I use when I go in a few times a year to make certain that the roof is still sound and no pipes have broken—things like that. But I think the House would be happier if you came in through the front door. The kitchen door is not one for a homecoming such as this.”

  I forced a smile, unsettled by this tendency to personalize the house. I knew that this manner of speech originated in his being a native speaker of Spanish. Spanish pronouns personalize, give genders even to inanimate items. The tendency to speak of things as if they are alive often slips over. Mr. Navidad was too fluent in English to talk like some stage Mexican, “The house, she is happy to have you, sí, señora,” but still the Spanish flavor was there. That was all there was to it.

  “Very well,” I said. “I’ll go to my truck and get the flashlights and a few other things I brought along. I don’t doubt you have a crowbar we can use to get the boards off the front door.”

  “I do indeed,” he said. “I take them off to make sure moisture has not leaked beneath—when we have much moisture, that is.”

  “Truly,” I replied, “you are the most diligent of caretakers. I’ll meet you around front in a few minutes.”

  Getting the door open was as easy as Mr. Navidad had promised it would be. We stood there in the shade of the porch staring at the double-paneled door.

  “Usually,” the caretaker offered, “I only open the one side.” He motioned toward the right panel. “It is enough and more to admit a man.”

  I looked at the door. The knobs were shaped like leering gargoyle heads. They were duller than I remembered them being, but doubtless, one of the silent women had kept them polished.

  Once again I found myself contrasting the differences between my upbringing here and in Ohio. In Ohio there had been no servants, only occasional “help” before a big party and that, more likely than not, had been someone from the church who would be given a “gift” rather than paid outright.

  I never remembered the silent women being paid. For that matter, I had no memory of them ever leaving the house except on a specific errand. Where had they lived? Had they had families? Tantalizing thought … Were any of them still alive and in the area? Could I find them and ask about my mother? Who else might I find and question?

  “Señora?” Mr. Navidad’s voice, politely inquiring, brought me back to myself. “Would you like me to open the door for you?”

  I shook myself as his little white dog might have done.

  “Sorry. Woolgathering. There are so many memories here.”

  Without further hesitation, I laid a hand on the knob. It was surprisingly stiff, refusing to turn. I thought it might have rusted in place. Then, belatedly, I remembered the ring of keys Mrs Morales had given me. Blushing, I shook out one labeled “Front door.” It was slightly larger and heavier than the others on the ring, and turned the old lock easily.

  “You’ve kept it oiled,” I said.

  “Graphite powder,” Mr. Navidad said, removing a small tube of it from the toolbox he’d brought along. “It works very well. Not all the interior locks may be as easily handled, so I brought this for you.”

  I thanked him, then, as I turned and pulled the door open I asked, “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  Mr. Navidad made an apologetic gesture. “If you wish, of course, but when I went back to the carriage house there was a message waiting from my sister Evelina, asking if I might come and help with a window that has been broken. If you don’t mind …”

  He trailed off, and I nodded, feeling a mixture of relief and mild apprehension. There was something creepy about going into a house that had been closed for so long, but on the other hand, this way I could stand and stare as much as I wanted.

  “That’s fine,” I replied. “I have your cell-phone number. If anything crops up, I can reach you.”

  “Good,” Mr. Navidad said. He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. “This has my sister’s number, just in case the cell phone is not working. I will leave you this toolbox.”

  “Won’t you
need it at your sister’s?”

  “I have another,” he said, “and so does Evelina. You may find yourself wanting a screwdriver or something, and this way you will not need to search.”

  I watched Mr. Navidad go passing through sunlight into shadow and back again, the little white dog bouncing at his heels. Then I turned back toward Phineas House. Bending to lift the toolbox, I balanced one of the more powerful flashlights in my free hand. Then I stepped over the threshold into the house of my childhood.

  The hallway was filled with ghosts. Pale shadowy forms moved slightly, as if uncertain whether to stay or vanish soundlessly away. Then my eyes adjusted to the yellowish gleam cast by the flashlight, and I realized that what I was seeing was furniture swathed beneath dust sheets.