Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  “It is an area where mountains meet the plains,” Mikey said, “not gradually, with a fading into foothills, but comparatively abruptly. Another useful quality is the degree of geothermal activity simmering beneath the surface. If the pressure broke out into active eruption, it would not be as useful, but the hot springs offer a nice blend and emerge within a few yards of an icy mountain stream. The weather is also classically liminal—a temperate zone that experiences the seasonal borders, but is not defined by them. It is an area that knows both drought and flood; that is divided by a river, but not defined by that river.

  “Moreover,” Mikey continued, “the dry places of the earth have always been especially transitional. Living things cannot exist without water, and so deserts regularly move between the appearance of death into the vitality of life. Desert plants bloom apparently from nothing after a rain. Brown shifts into green; then, as the water is withdrawn, it shifts back into brown once more. Human occupation only intensifies the situation, for frequent rituals meant to bring rain, meant to alter one state into its opposite, create liminal states.

  “In Las Vegas specifically, the coming of humans only intensified the multiplicity inherent in the natural landscape. Because of the hot springs, a wide variety of native peoples shared the area in relative peace, each bringing their own customs and traditions. When the Spanish arrived, the complexity increased. Later, Las Vegas was part of Mexico, later still part of the United States. Each change was made in a fashion that increased the complexity of the situation without wiping out previous influences.”

  I nodded and Mikey looked at me narrowly. “I can see from your expression that you’ve thought of some of these things yourself. I am impressed.”

  “I hoped I wasn’t showing it quite so plainly,” I said, “but you’re right. I had wondered why Phineas House should be in Las Vegas, New Mexico, of all places. As history maps the world, Las Vegas has been passed by more than otherwise. In fact, it’s almost defined by the number of times it has been passed by.”

  Mikey nodded. “That passing by is not accidental. Even before Aldo Pincas built the house that would evolve into this Phineas House in which we sit, the Las Vegas area was on what … Let me start over. Are you familiar with the concept of trade winds and currents—natural phenomenon that helped define how the ocean travel evolved?”

  “A little. Enough to see what you’re getting at. You’re saying that Las Vegas is on the liminal current.”

  “That’s about as close an analogy as I can give you,” Mikey said. “It’s nothing like, of course, but helpful in what I’m trying to explain. Aldo Pincas decided that he would like to be able to use the Las Vegas current more effectively. The city of Las Vegas was young then, hardly more than a tidy collection of adobes. Aldo found it easy to acquire the precise piece of land he wanted, and he built Phineas House. The House is placed to take advantage of all sorts of things. You’ve heard of feng shui?”

  “Chinese geomancy,” I said. “It’s dreadfully trendy these days.”

  “And most feng shui is nonsense, but like most occult sciences, it has a germ of truth to it. Aldo Pincas used feng shui—like techniques to harness the current. This didn’t prevent others from using it, but did weaken it—like running a stream through a mill wheel slows it down without stopping it.”

  “I bet other liminal sorcerers, or whatever you want to call them, weren’t crazy about that.”

  “They weren’t, but that only touches on what I’m telling you—though we may come back to it. Let me stay with Aldo for now.”

  “Okay.”

  “What Aldo had not anticipated was that in channelling the liminal current through Phineas House, he would slow the very force from which he wanted to benefit. Once he realized this, Aldo set out to make sure the part of the environment he could influence would create more dualities—thus the checkered history of Las Vegas. I won’t go into all the examples, but if you were to go and read the minutes of the meetings discussing the placement of the first rail line, you would discover Aldo’s influence. Later, he would encourage the split that lead to the creation of the two towns.”

  I frowned thoughtfully, remembering that the Bible had listed Aldo’s date of birth as 1831. He would have been a man in his prime during the events Mikey was relating. It fit.

  “What about the State Hospital—the one that treats mental patients. Did Aldo have something to do with that?”

  “He and his son Amerigo were influential, yes. Pincas family members helped encourage the founding of the Normal University as well. There’s nothing like an institution of learning to intensify liminal space. That’s one reason that, for a town so small, Las Vegas has had so many. The nice thing, from the point of view of the Pincas clan, is that unlike geographical features, educational ventures tend to encourage the creation of other, competing ventures.”

  For a moment I almost felt the fragmentation going on around me, as if I was a spider in the middle of a web of thin, flexible, but very strong strands. I understood why Mikey had been reluctant to use the trade winds analogy. Liminal space was more like a web spun by a host of spiders on LSD.

  Mikey was studying me thoughtfully, and I suspected he had been aware of my insight, making me think what I had understood had not been intellectual, but actual perception. He did not comment, and I, eager that the tale of Aldo Pincas and Phineas House not be truncated, held my peace.

  “Now, you must understand that Phineas House is not the only structure of its kind or the oldest or anything like that, but it is an important one. Aldo was a proud and arrogant man, and he was determined that his masterwork would not leave the control of his family. Therefore, he—to use another not completely accurate analogy—mixed into the very mortar of Phineas House bindings that would tie the House to one member of his family. Those bindings did not prevent others from benefiting from Phineas House, but only one person in each generation would possess the full power.

  “Because this was a chancy thing to do, Aldo also made the House determined to care for and protect the person to whom it was bound. To ameliorate hurt feelings, Aldo set in place the tradition of trustees for Phineas House—and therefore of its partner. The trustees received certain benefits, and as these came to them through their fidelity to their trust, they had every reason to perpetuate the scheme.”

  I nodded. “I’d forgotten. I realized when I saw the names of Colette’s trustees and then mine that you and I are probably related somehow.”

  “That’s right,” Mikey said. “My father was your mother’s trustee, Amerigo Hart. His mother was Catarina, the youngest daughter of Amerigo Pincas, who, in turn, was the son of Aldo. Your great-great grandmother, and my grandmother were sisters. I suppose that makes us cousins by several removes.”

  I grinned. “I must have lots of cousins. Amerigo Pincas and his wife had a mess of kids. The tendency seems to have decreased, though.”

  “Actually, only in your line,” Mikey said. “It may be the House’s influence, indirectly. You see, the system worked well for several generations. Amerigo Pincas was a bit surprised when the House showed preference for Isabela over his first-born, a son named Urbano, but there was no fighting it. Urbano was as sensitive to liminal space as a man born blind is to color.

  “However, when Isabela gave birth to identical twins, Pinca and Mercedes, Phineas House didn’t know what to do. That was a bad time, let me tell you. Eventually, the House was convinced to fix on Pinca, the elder of the twins by a minute or so. It’s said that her name was given to her specifically to assist. Initially, she was to have been named for Belinda, Isabela’s younger sister.”

  I thought about the Bible chart. “It didn’t get better, though, did it? There were problems in the next generation, too.”

  “Perceptive,” Mikey said.

  “Well, I was helped by something Paula Angel said,” I admitted. “She told me that one of the reasons Colette had problems with her father was that while Phineas House had wanted nothing t
o do with him, it bonded with Colette. He resented this, and took it out on Colette.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Mikey said, “but there’s truth in what Pablita told you. Pinca married a Russian named Ivan Bogatyr. Their first born was a girl that, maybe for insurance reasons, they named Pinca as well. Phineas House liked young Pinca, but even the best efforts of a guardian cannot prevent death. When she was in her late twenties, Pinca Minor died in a road accident.

  “Apparently, Pinca’s younger brother, Nikolai, expected Phineas House to take him on—this in spite of the fact that he had only the most minimal sensitivity for liminal space, hardly more than what is usual in the average person.”

  “Then it is an inherited trait?” I asked.

  “Yes. There is some evidence that the tendency to develop the sensitivity can be encouraged by environment—or, equally, discouraged by the same, but then biologists are discovering the same is true of many genetic traits. What a mother eats while the child is being carried can influence what genes turn on or off. A child who is never exposed to art, or is discouraged from making art, may never learn she has the potential to be a great artist.”

  Mikey’s last sentence came so close to my own situation, I wondered if, as when he mentioned the terms “Queen of Mirrors” and “Mistress of Thresholds” to Maybelle Fenn, Mikey Hart wasn’t dropping a hint of sorts. I filed it away for future meditation.

  Mikey went on without pause. “Growing up as he did in Phineas House, Nikolai had what little gift he possessed encouraged, but it didn’t amount to much. Therefore, the only one who was surprised when Phineas House passed him by and chose instead his infant daughter, Colette, was Nikolai himself.”

  “There was another sibling, wasn’t there?”

  “That’s right, a brother named Urbano. He had even less talent than his brother, and, perhaps as a reaction, developed an aversion to anything that smacked of the occult. At a young age, he married, left Las Vegas, and, except for an annual Christmas card, pretty much didn’t keep in touch with his family. Urbano Bogatyr died of liver cancer when he was fifty-one. He left a wife and a couple of children. I think they’re all still alive, though his wife would be quite elderly by now.”

  It still felt odd to hear about people dying younger than me. I made yet another mental note, to get Mikey to give me as list of what had killed my various relatives. Up to this point, I’d lacked that vital information, and had never known whether I was at risk for, say, breast cancer or heart disease.

  Of course, I thought cynically, knowing your grandfather died from being pushed down a flight of stairs isn’t helpful in quite the same way—though it does give insight.

  “Again,” Mikey went on, “Phineas House may have played a role in Urbano’s desire to leave, in Nikolai having only one child. The House isn’t like a human or even a cat or dog, but it is certainly sentient in its own way. It was created to give order to something that, by its very nature, is outside of the usual order. It has been speculated that Phineas House was shaken by the birth of the twins, and from that point forward did what it could to assure that it would not be faced with a similar confusion.”

  “I guess,” I said, hesitantly, “it could meddle easily enough, especially since the owners tended to live within its walls.”

  “That’s right,” Mikey said. “In fact, I think that the selling of some of Phineas House’s property was done less because of financial need than in an effort to curtail the House’s growing power, its sense that it was entitled to shape the lives of those who lived within it and benefited from its power.”

  I drummed my fingers on the sofa, trying to arrange a thought. “Does this happen frequently, I mean, with the other structures of this type?”

  “Sometimes, but not in the same way. You see, Aldo Pincas created the situation by his strong desire to keep Phineas House in his personal line. The House was built with that desire in mind, and has ever since attempted to be faithful to that need.”

  “Like a computer program or something?”

  “More like a herd dog,” Mikey said. “A computer program is limited in what it can do. A herd dog is inventive and has the inbred imperative to herd.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I had a friend who had a lovely border collie, but there aren’t a lot of sheep in my part of Ohio, so the poor dog took to herding anything it could—pigeons, small children, other dogs. When my friend had triplets, the dog was perfectly content keeping them in line.”

  “Now imagine,” Mikey said seriously, “if the dog had been able to make your friend have triplets. That’s what we think Phineas House did to the later descendants of Aldo Pincas—restricted their ability to confuse her.”

  I looked up at the ceiling. “She’s going to have trouble with me. I’m too old to start having kids. It wouldn’t be fair to them—even if I managed.”

  “Right now,” Mikey replied, still very serious, “I don’t think it has occurred to her. She’s too happy to have someone living here. Tell me. Have you considered returning to Ohio permanently?”

  “Several times. After all, I have friends there. It’s more my home than here.”

  “But you haven’t gone. You even took a leave of absence from your job.”

  I saw where he was headed, and didn’t like it much, even though the idea wasn’t completely unreasonable.

  “And you think the House encouraged me to stay.”

  “That’s right.”

  I drew in a deep breath. “I’m not going to say that’s impossible. I can’t. It’s unsettling, though. What do you think will happen when the House realizes she has a middle-aged lady here, not a fecund maiden?”

  “I don’t know,” Mikey said. “There’s a lot I don’t know. Let me continue telling you what I do.”

  I nodded.

  “There’s not too much else, and I wouldn’t even mention it except that it may relate to Colette’s eventual disappearance. I’m sure you realize that not everyone in Aldo Pincas’s family was happy with how the patriarch had set up matters of inheritance.”

  “That’s natural. He took the family’s biggest asset and gave it to one person—even if he did make provisions for the others.”

  “Right. In the first generation, there wasn’t too much of a problem. It was still a time when first-born regularly inherited most of the estate—though in the Spanish tradition, this was less common than in other parts of Europe. The next generation was a bit more of a problem.”

  I mentally traced the family tree. “That’s the big group, the one where Isabela was the heir.”

  “Right. Urbano was blind to liminal space, and there were other properties for him. Belinda married the older brother of Isabela’s husband. Her talents, combined with the fact that this was the boom time for Las Vegas, meant they were fairly well-to-do. The younger two, Guillermo and my own grandmother, Catarina, were less content. At the time, matters were eventually ameliorated by drawing two of the trustees from their offspring.”

  “Two of my mother’s,” I said. “I’d thought Guillermo Jefferson was somehow related to Isabela, but I admit I was confused.”

  “Natural, but it is not unheard-of for sisters to marry brothers, and that’s what happened there.”

  “And everything worked out with your family, too,” I asked, a bit anxiously, I admit. I’d gotten to like Mikey, and didn’t really want to be at odds over something a common great-great-whatever grandfather had done.”

  “All fine,” Mikey assured me. “I rather prefer not having to live in Las Vegas, to be honest. But back when the resentment was more current, efforts were made to dilute the effects of Phineas House. We skipped over discussing the Montezuma Hotel earlier, but it, too, fits into the story. All the histories say that it was built by the Santa Fe Railroad, and that is correct, but only as far as it goes. Part of the reason the hotel was built where it was, and as elaborately as it was, was in an effort to counter the effects of Phineas House.”

&nb
sp; “Are you serious?”

  “Completely. What do you know of the Montezuma’s history?”

  “A fair amount, actually. Domingo and I went and played tourist a couple weeks ago. He knew the background of the place pretty well.”

  I thought about mentioning how Domingo had worked on the renovation, then remembered Domingo’s own odd superstition that Phineas House might not like that he’d done that Given what I’d just heard about the House’s rather proactive role in the lives of my family, I no longer thought the superstition odd.

  “So you know that the hotel suffered a rather astonishing series of disasters.”

  “At least two wholly destructive fires,” I said, “despite the fact that the architect’s designs were specifically designed to be fireproof. It seems to me that Domingo also said—or maybe it was in one of the books I read—that the hotels showed an incredible inability to turn a profit.”

  “Right. And, yet, despite this, the Montezuma Hotel was not only repeatedly rebuilt, but repeatedly invested in, and monumental efforts have been made to keep it open.”