Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  I didn’t recognize where the picture had been painted, and while she looked a bit younger than I remembered, the difference was not great. Could this picture have been painted during that mysterious year when she had been absent? If so, she certainly hadn’t been pregnant at the time. The pinched waist beneath her swelling bosom showed no sign of thickening.

  I forced myself to confront that image, to compare it without hesitation to my own as it was captured in a hundred versions in as many bits of mirror. The comparison was not kind. I was older, greyer, stouter, and shorter, but for the first time in my entire life I saw a similarity. There was something in my bearing that was like Colette’s—not the arrogance, but something of the same unflinching pride in how I held myself. There was in both of our postures that which said: “Here I am, as I am.”

  It was a startling revelation, especially since to that point I had seen nothing alike between us—indeed, I had seen much more alike between myself and Aunt May. Still, if there was something I had to have inherited from Colette, this was not a bad thing at all. I smiled, and turned to inspect the room.

  Bed, several dressers, built in closets, vanity. There was a blanket chest at the foot of the bed, and I started my search there. I found nothing but several blankets of varying weight, each woven of the finest lamb’s wool, soft as the hues that whispered to me from interstices between the weave.

  Next I turned to the closets, but I found that unlike the closet in my former nursery these were filled with clothing, the floor beneath the hanging skirts arrayed with neat lines of shoes.

  I balked. Colette’s favorite perfume—something like Chanel Number 5, but with a muskier, sexier bite—eddied from the ranks of elaborate dresses. I staggered back from it as I had not from the portrait, overwhelmed once again with fear, with the sense that I was a trespasser here.

  Holding onto the edge of the closet door I steadied myself, forcing myself to breathe deeply, to accept this stale scent for what it was—a bygone breath, dissipating even now by the fresh air from the open windows.

  “She’s not in there, Mira,” I said aloud. “She hasn’t set foot in the house in over forty years. Get a grip on yourself.”

  I managed not to run, but neither did I delve deeper into those clothing-crowded closets. Later. There would be enough time later.

  Guessing that the dressers would be as filled as the closet had proven to be, I cast around. My dilemma was not too few choices, but too many. Here there was no evidence of methodical searching by the police. Doubtless they had made a cursory check, probably focusing on whether Mother had taken a change of clothing or luggage with her when she had vanished.

  I really had to see if I could get a look at the police records.

  For now, though, I had a sense that if I started going through closets I’d become mired in minutiae. What I was looking for might be hidden within the folds of a skirt, the dip of a sculptured bodice, but my feeling was that Mother would not have hidden anything important where it might be found—say by a servant doing mending or alterations, or laying out that evening’s formal wear.

  I paused, wondering if the silent women, well, counted as people that way. I decided to act as if they did. Mother had been careful enough with those blank checks she’d sent out for local purchases that the silent women must have merited being watched.

  Or something. My thoughts were swimming as I tried to make sense of things that wouldn’t add up in a sensible fashion. I didn’t want to go through the closets. Fine. I wouldn’t. I cast around, looking for a new target. My gaze rested on where the vanity stood by itself on one side of the room, uncrowded, an altar to the perpetuation of beauty—or perhaps to the perpetuation of illusion.

  Compared to the closets and dressers the vanity was a contained challenge. I crossed over to it with something like eagerness, for once finding comfort in the repetition of my familiar image in the mirrors that faced me.

  Like the rest of the bedroom set, the vanity was painted antique white, elegantly accented in gold. The table was kidney shaped, and held seven drawers: three on each side, a broad one in the center. Bracketed to the vanity’s back were triple mirrors, angled so the one seated there could apply her cosmetics to the greatest effect. Bulbs to provide even lighting were set around the edges, but I didn’t bother to activate them. My interest here was exploration, not adornment.

  I sat myself on the elegant little bench seat. It wasn’t a comfortable fit. Mother had been much trimmer behind than I was. Still, I soon forgot my discomfort as I focused on my search.

  I started with the center drawer and found there, as I vaguely recalled I would, the smaller cosmetics: tubes of lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara all arranged in neat order, lighter colors to the left, darker to the right.

  The top drawer on the right-hand side yielded a variety of hairbrushes and combs, as well as a hand mirror, doubtless for those times Mother needed to see the back of her head. The drawers below were filled with more hair-related items: nets, pins, clips, even a couple of shower caps, never removed from their packaging. There were spare brushes, old combs with a few teeth missing. Oddities that had probably been tried and found, for some reason now lost to time, wanting.

  The one thing I expected to find but didn’t was hair coloring. Later, I found a store of it in the bathroom cabinet under the sink. It was, for the time, professional grade stuff, and I wondered if one of the silent women had been trained to act as a beautician. The idea seemed very likely.

  The left-hand drawers were devoted to cosmetics: eye shadow, eyeliner, eyebrow pencils, foundation, powder, rouge, nail polish, more lipstick, lip liner, gloss, mascara, and exotic items I couldn’t identify. Mother had more cosmetics than many a well-stocked store, all of very good quality. She must have had the stuff shipped from New York or California.

  I opened a tube here, a case there, and found that, natural deterioration aside, some of it was in fairly good condition. Most of it had been transformed by time into pure junk, oils separating from coloring compounds, pastes drying and cracking so they looked like highly colorful renditions of drought-stricken riverbeds.

  My scrounger self was making a mental note that the cases and bottles might fetch something, even while my artist heart was weeping at so much lovely color gone to ruin. I wondered if I could do something with it, and the odd idea of painting a second portrait of Colette, a counterpoint to the one that now dominated this room, came to mind with almost frightening force.

  I was fingering through the drawers, estimating volume and coverage and wondering if I could somehow salvage something from all the pretty, perfumed trash, when I realized that the bottom drawer on the right side was shallower than it should be.

  Pushing back the bench and kneeling on the floor, I slid out the drawer. It came easily enough, the tracks unswollen as they almost certainly would have been in a more humid climate. Gingerly, I tipped the accumulated mess of old combs and brushes onto the carpet. With them came a heavy piece of stiffish white fabric folded up around the edges.

  “A drawer liner,” I said aloud. “Meant to make it easy to lift out the lot without making a mess. I’ll know next time.”

  The bottom of the now empty drawer was apparently seamless. Feeling like a bit of a fool, I tapped and heard not quite hollowness, but certainly not the dull thud a solid bottom would have given. I have a good eye for detail and discrepancy, and it didn’t take me long to find the place where I could press down and release the hidden catch. The false bottom lifted up on hidden hinges, revealing a compartment about four inches deep and as long and wide as the drawer.

  “No wonder it didn’t sound hollow,” I said. “It’s completely full, but what of?”

  The compartment was filled with tubular objects, each ranging from roughly eight to twelve inches long. The diameters varied too, from narrow enough I could span them with thumb and forefinger, to fat tubes thick enough for a gerbil to set up housekeeping. Inside they were made of wood, of metal, of glass. No two
were alike, though all had similarities. Each rested neatly in a velvet-lined trough clearly fashioned to hold it alone.

  I stared blankly for a moment, then registered what I was seeing.

  “Kaleidoscopes!” I said in astonishment. “It’s a hoard of kaleidoscopes! I hope I haven’t broken any of them.”

  One by one I lifted the kaleidoscopes from their places in the holding tray and held them to the fading sunlight coming in the window. Each was unique, each extraordinarily beautiful. The mandala views within were enough and more to match the external adornment.

  I don’t know how long I sat there on the floor, looking through each kaleidoscope in turn, then beginning again with the first. I couldn’t seem to get enough of the gem-colored scenes. There were the simple, classic mandalas; there were elaborate snowflake patterns. Multicolored patterns contrasted with rare, nearly monochrome arrangements, these all the more beautiful in that they relied upon subtle differences in shading for their effects.

  Eventually, the failing sunlight made me aware how much time had passed. I set the kaleidoscope I had been holding—a triangular one made of stained glass with an elaborate hand-blown sphere set in a bracket on the end—into its holder, got to my feet, and stretched.

  After the brilliant colors in the kaleidoscopes, the white and gold of my mother’s bedroom furnishings seemed pale and insubstantial. I crossed to the wall and switched on the lights, noting again where bulbs needed to be replaced. The electric light was not as satisfying as the sunlight had been, but it was ample to see by.

  Going back over to the vanity, I thoughtfully stared down at the hoard I had discovered, wondering what to do with it. I knew something about kaleidoscopes. Each one of these was worth a tidy sum. Something other than their value awakened my curiosity. The artistic renaissance of the kaleidoscope was only about twenty, maybe thirty years old. Before that the elegant optical playthings that had so delighted the Victorians had declined to cheap, if charming, toys made mostly of cardboard, their inner mirrors a bit of bent metal as often as not.

  This hoard was at least forty years old. That almost certainly meant they were antiques, their value enormously higher than that of contemporary pieces. But that was not reason enough for my mother to have hidden them in this way. She had left her jewelry in the open—even the better pieces had been tucked away in a velvet bag in her lingerie drawer. I knew this, because it had come to me with the rest of her estate.

  Why would she leave jewelry out and hide these kaleidoscopes? And what should I do with them now?

  Frowning, I decided that the place in which the kaleidoscopes had remained safe this long would do a bit longer. As I was lowering the false bottom on the drawer into place and resetting the liner and the concealing junk, I remembered I hadn’t checked the left-hand drawer.

  Knowing what I now did, I made a much neater job this time. I found the liner could be removed without taking the drawer out of the vanity. With this out of the way, I found the release and opened the false bottom panel. At first I thought I’d found more of the same, for again I was confronted with neat rows of kaleidoscopes, each in its tailor-made velvet bed.

  Then two things caught my attention simultaneously. One kaleidoscope was missing from the first row. Then I realized that all the pieces in that first row were not kaleidoscopes but their close cousin, the teleidoscope.

  I took out the one from the niche next to the empty one and held it to my eye to confirm my realization. Instantly, I was treated to a mandala in which the bedspread’s gold and white were fragmented into a perfectly symmetrical mandala. I moved my head, and the view shifted with me, picking up glints of silver from the wall mirrors, a dash of the green from the foliage outside the window—for unlike the kaleidoscope, which relies on the images in the object chamber at one end to make its images, the teleidoscope transforms the world around the viewer by means of a convex lens set at one end.

  I lowered the teleidoscope, pulling myself away from the enchanting images with difficulty. I had to resist an urge to leave this room with its dominating pale hues and see what the teleidoscope would do with the richer colors elsewhere in the house. I did resist, and instead sat staring at the teleidoscope, my earlier puzzlement returning.

  There was no doubt that the instrument in my hand was a beautiful thing. The case was wood, the rich hues ranging from dark honey to nearly black. The woodworker had turned it on a lathe, giving it an almost femininely seductive curve. The whole had been polished so satiny smooth that my work-roughened fingertips could hardly believe anything was there. The lens at the end was actually a perfect crystal sphere set into the wood without seam or join.

  The exteriors of the others varied somewhat, but not as much as with the kaleidoscopes. Here wood, enamel, inlay, or other less fragile materials seemed to be preferred over the stained glass that had been common in the kaleidoscope casings. Yet there was no reason why the exterior casing of a teleidoscope shouldn’t be as varied as that of a kaleidoscope. It was the arrangement of mirrors within, the set of the eyepiece, the arrangement of the lens that effected the image.

  So why had my mother preferred these relatively hardy teleidoscopes? Why had she hidden the collection in this way? Why had she hidden it at all? And why was one teleidoscope missing?

  I started to put the teleidoscope I had been using away, but stopped at the last minute. Instead, I set it carefully on the vanity top, then hid the others away. After drawing the blinds and shutting off the lights, I left my mother’s room, taking the teleidoscope with me. Once outside, I locked both the bedroom and the upper parlor doors. Then I went into the room I was using as a bedchamber and slid the teleidoscope into an odd sock. I hid the bundle at the back of my sock drawer.

  I did this methodically, not even thinking whether or not I felt stupid about it, but that night, after I’d eaten and chatted a bit with Domingo, and gone back up to my room, I didn’t read in Aunt May’s journals as I usually would. Instead I lay on my bed, turning the crystal at the end of the length of polished wood here and there, watching the colors transform into wonderful symmetrical patterns that followed me into my dreams.

  12

  In the Middle Ages, color was used in heraldry … Color helped carry the message of the design: White = faith and purity; Gold = honor; Red = courage and zeal; Blue = purity and sincerity; Green = youth and fertility; Black = grief and penitence; Orange = strength and endurance; Purple = royalty and high birth

  —Betty Edwards,

  Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

  That an argent field meant purity, that field of gules meant royalty or even martial ancestors, that a saltire meant the capture of a city, or a lion rampant noble and enviable qualities, I utterly deny.

  —A. C. Fox-Davies,

  The Complete Guide to Heraldry

  INSIDE THE LINES

  Until the day I discovered Colette’s secret hoard, I had faithfully read forward in Aunt May’s journals. Mostly, I had read of frustration—how her efforts to learn something from police and reporters had met with silence, how she had tried and failed to learn who my father might have been, how pushed beyond patience, she had even tried to find Colette’s own birth certificate.

  All of this had met with no success—or so she thought at the time—and given that the search had now stretched over a year, Aunt May had good reason to give up in frustration. Then came the announcement that a much loved cousin was dying in faraway Arizona, and with that announcement came temptation.

  OUTSIDE THE LINES

  Breast cancer, her mother writes. They’ve taken both breasts away, and all sorts of glands and muscles, but it seems the cancer persists. I can’t believe it. Linda and I played together as kids. Death is something that happens to old people, not to a woman who isn’t even forty-five.

  But it’s going to happen.

  I’ve been moping around for a week now, and yesterday Stan told me he wants me to go out to Arizona and see Linda. He doesn’t spell it out, Stan doe
sn’t, but he knows I need to see her to make this real. And, yes, I need it to be real. Otherwise, there’s going to be a phone call and a funeral someday, and I’m going to break down and hate myself for lost chances.

  So I agreed to go, and while I was looking at the map something came at me. Arizona borders on New Mexico. The drive to Las Vegas would be a long one, but … I could make excuses to Linda and her mother. Stan wouldn’t know where I was. Long distance costing what it does, he isn’t going to call me every night or anything like that.

  I could rent a car, but I’ve checked. Trains run that way. I could catch one from Tucson, get to Las Vegas. Stay a day or so, ask some questions. No one would know. How could they? It’s been over two years since we adopted Mira …

  Two days later.

  I asked some questions at a travel agent while I was doing the shopping. A round-trip ticket from Tucson to Las Vegas wasn’t all that outrageous. I made a deposit. Tonight Stan came home with my airplane tickets to Arizona. He’d gone to get them on his lunch break. Different travel agent, of course. He’s being so kind, I almost hate myself for breaking our promise, but this is something I have to do.