Enchanted Forests (18 page)

She pushed him away and got to her feet. "Not tonight, Ned.

The dance figure isn't working. I've got to find something else

to balance and comment on the blue flow."

His face closed in. It was a minute before he found his usual

smile. "Ah, you did warn me. Elena."

He came back in the kitchen and watched Jenny as she stood

washing the dishes. After a minute, he pulled her away from the

sink. "If your mother won't, you'll do."

The pool was bright and silver in the moonlight. Jenny

grabbed a handful of grass, tore off the old dress which was the

first that had come to her hand, plunged into the chill clean water

and scrubbed at herself, trying to scrub away the smell of the

Man.

The water went very cold; it numbed her and seemed to push

away the bad thing that had happened. When she was shivering

so hard she couldn't stand up, she crawled out, wrapped the

dress around her and lay beside Grandma Mossy, sobbing out her

fear and outrage. "If I tell, he'll kill us both like he kills the

squirrels and things. He said it. He said it lots of times. He's go-

118 Jo Clayton

ing to do it again. He said I was pretty and sweet and soft. He

said he knew I wanted it. He said I wasn't like my mother. He's

going to do it again."

The goatboy came and patted her shoulder, then played her a

song on his pipes that started soft and ended fierce. She heard

the promise in it and lay still.

Cold touched the back of her neck. It was the white doe, nuz-

zling her. Beyond her, on the far side of the pond, the homed

man stood. He lifted his head. opened his mouth, and cried out

without sound at all, yet Jenny heard the terrible wild sound of

it. Then he went away.

Aunt Piney rustled. The sound comforted her, it was so homey

and ordinary. Clutching the dress around her shoulders, she got

to her feet, looked down into Grandma Mossy's deep dark eyes.

and drew a long breath. She didn't say anything more, just put

on the dress and started home through the forest, her hand on the

shoulder of the white doe.

The Man went hunting in the morning and he didn't come

home that night. He never came back.

At the end of the summer when Jenny was twelve, she came

sad and angry into the Forest. She spread out a dishtowel on the

grass and set out the picnic she'd made for herself. Grave and si-

lent, she broke off bits of sandwich and laid them on Aunt Pi-

ney's roots and in front of Grandma Mossy, then she poured a

dollop of lemonade on the bits, gave another to the pool, the rit-

ual she'd followed through the years though she no longer really

believed in it.

She poured lemonade into the thermos top, sipped at it, then

sat holding the cool silver cup in her hands. "I'm going away,"

she said- "Mother says I have to. I'm supposed to live with my

father back east and go to school there. She says I should go on

with my clay stuff and I can't do that here. I think she's just tired

of having me around, not that she really notices me much. Jake

says I can learn by myself, but she tells him to shut up, he just

fools with words, he doesn't know what he's talking about when

it comes to working with his hands. Well, that's true. He can't

sharpen a pencil without nearly cutting his finger off. But he's a

good guy. He teaches me things and doesn't fuss. I don't even

know my father. I'm afraid he won't like me."

The afternoon was hot and dry and very still. Once or twice

she heard a snatch of birdsong and the bark of a fox, but they

THE PRISM OF MEMORY        119

were far off and very faint. The boulder was only an old rock

with patches of drying moss, the pine tree was only an ordinary

tree, the pool had dust on the surface and a spiral of tiny black

bugs buzzing around it She finished her sandwiches, drank the

last of the lemonade, cleaned up after herself, and went away.

When Jenny was thirty-two, Jake hired a private detective to

find her, then paid her way so she could come back for her moth-

er's funeral. Twenty years since she'd seen the house, twenty

years since she'd heard a word from her mother. She'd heard

about her, at least after she walked out of her father's life, seen

her on TV, read about her in magazines and newspapers, but

never heard a word from her.

Hard years.

Stupid years.

Coming back here showed her just how stupid they were, all

the days she'd wasted looking for ... something.'...

She stopped thinking. It was one thing she was really good at,

not thinking.

Jake had almost vanished behind bushy white whiskers and

eyebrows fibrous as dead lichen. His eyes were red with grief,

but when he looked at her, they turned cold. After the funeral

and the session with the lawyer, he drove her to the house and

took her inside. She didn't want to go into her mother's studio,

but he took her by the arm and walked her there- "Your mother

wanted this," he said- "I would've let you go to hell your own

way."

There was dust on everything which told her more than any-

thing else how long a time her mother had spent dying- "It was

her sent me away."

He walked to a comer of the room to the slotted case where

her mother kept her drawing portfolios, counted along the slots,

and drew out a shabby black folder. "Because your father threat-

ened to haul the both of you to court and get her declared unfit;

Acre was me and the other men and what happened the time Ned

disappeared, she knew how fighting it would turn out." He fished

m the slot, drew out a sealed envelope, brought both across the

room and set them on the palette table. "She wrote to you every

day the first year. Not a word from you. Then she said 'if she

wants to talk to me, she knows where I am.' You know her, she

put the hurt away and went on with her work."

"I never got any of those letters."

120                      }o Clayton

"Ah." He brushed at his eyes, turned away. "Even so," he

said, not looking at her. "Even so, you should have written at

least once."

"I did. I took the letters down and gave them to the clerk to

mail; that's what you did in that piace. I took them myself. I

didn't trust him. He must have paid off the clerk. He wouldn't let

me go out by myself, he said the streets were too dangerous."

She sighed. "In a way he was right. When I left...." She picked

up the letter, looked at it, saw the blob of red wax and impres-

sion from the goatboy seal she'd made her last summer here. She

set it down as if it burned her fingers-

"You should have come back here."

"Yeah. Well."

Jake had scrubbed down her mother's room, got it ready for

her. He was staying in town these days. Shrugged when he told

her. Said it just seemed the best thing to do.

Because she couldn't deal with the stench of sickness that lin-

gered in that room. she cleaned out her own and lay staring at

the stains on the ceiling whose patterns she'd never forgot. Same

old bed, grown too short for her now. Smells of ancient turpen-

tine and oils. Her mother was a practical woman in unexpected

ways and had used this room to store paint cans and old easels.

It was like trying to sleep in the middle of ghosts.

The light from the full moon came in through curtains held to-

gether by cobwebs and dust; it fell across the bed, across her

face. Her mind went round and round. Round and round like a

squirrel in a wheel. Round and round and getting nowhere.

She left the bed and wandered about the house. It seemed

smaller than she remembered. The long narrow kitchen was full

of light now and dancing shadows as the wind fluttered the

leaves on vines that had grown across several of the windows.

She opened the door to the studio and looked in, decided she

didn't want to go in there and wandered into the small living

room with the fireplace that took up half a wall. Her room was

on the other side of that fireplace. Winter nights she pushed her

bed against its backside and snuggled against the warm bricks-

She only had the one black dress she'd worn for the funeral.

so she went into her mother's room, opened the closet, and

pulled out what came to hand, a pair of ancient twill slacks, one

knee torn, smears of dried paint stiffening the folds, an even

older sweater and a pair of boots worn so limp she didn't know

if she could get her feet in mem. She threw me clothes on the

THE PRISM OF MEMORY         121

bed and it was like standing by her mother's coffin, looking

down at her before they closed the lid and sent her to the fires.

seeing the strong bones that were always there though never

quite so stark as now with the masking flesh gone from between

bone and skin.

She remembered her mother as a big woman, with broad

shoulders, heavy hips and big strong hands that were always

gentle and always smelling of oil and turpentine. Usually a

bruise on a thumbnail where she hit it with the hammer when she

was building one of her stretchers. Pencil smudges on her finger-

tips and along the resting side of the hand. And charcoal

smudges everywhere.

She pulled the sweater over her head. The shoulders were all

right, but the arms were too long and the body hung in bunches

about her narrower torso. On her way out she passed through the

kitchen to collect the bottle of wine she'd seen in the refrigerator.

She found an unbroken wineglass, rinsed it out, and dried it with

a forgotten dishtowel drawn through the towel loop beside the

sink.

The pool glimmered like molten silver. She'd tried so often for

that particular effect in her glazes, never remembering where

she'd first seen it. "Easy for you," she said, and laughed until

she heard a too familiar edge to the sound and broke it off.

The old boulder was smaller than she remembered, but the

eyes and the smile were still there. The pine tree had got taller

and scragglier, but the rustle of its needles was as welcoming as

ever.

Creakier in the joints now than she'd been as a child, she

bowed to them both, gave them a libation from me wine bottle,

and added a dollop for the pond, the small ritual bringing back

a flood of memory. Wishing she'd brought a blanket as the chill

rose into her bones, she settled on the dew-damp grass and

poured herself half a glass of the wine. Before she drank, she

lifted it to the moon floating overhead through shreds of cloud.

"To dreams and madness."

She emptied the glass, set it beside her. "I wasn't a drunk, in

case you think that's what this is about. It wasn't cool, being a

drunk. You know, I must have damn good genes. I'm still alive.

Maybe broke. Maybe thirty years wasted. Maybe the guy I

thought loved me kicked me out when I started getting straight.

That's a hoot, isn't it. I^ong as I was a mess, he adored me. But

I'm still alive."

122                      Jo Clayton

Legs drawn up. arms crossed (MI her knees, she sat gazing into

the mirrored water, watching me face of the full moon glide

slowly across it, remembering her mother.

Remembering how desperately she'd loved her. How much

she'd wanted her approval. How sad she'd been when her moth-

er's absorption in her painting took her so far away in mind, if

not in body.

She thought about the portfolio of sketches Jake had given her.

Hundreds of them, some of them finished drawings in me min-

imal style of her mother's early period, achingly lovely, simple

lines, some of mem quick studies that were barely more than

scrawls on scraps of paper. All of them her. As a baby, a toddler,

a young girl. Her. Yet she'd never posed for her mother, not

once. And the ones that touched her most deeply were me messy,

labored sketches from her mother's last days, attempts me dying

woman had made at extrapolating the adult from the child.

She cried a little, more for herself than her mother. And for all

the wasted years. The stupid years.

"Maybe Jake was right," she said. "Maybe I should have

come home long ago. Maybe a lot of dross would've been

cleared away. Maybe not. The mess I was...."

She leaned on the boulder, it was warm against her back like

bricks of the fireplace. "Grandma Mossy." She smiled. "Jake's

the writer," she said, her voice drowsy and dragging a little with

weariness. Above her, pine needles rustled a gentle reproof.

"Aunt Piney. Well, if you don't mind, why should I."

All her mother's money, more than she'd expected actually,

was in trust to the land. A lot of land. An old grant the lawyer

said. Your great-grandfather got firm title through Congress. I

wish I knew how. It's yours now, along with the income from the

trust. You nave to live in the house for five years, though, and if

you sell any land. the trust money stops immediately and the re-

mainder of the grant goes to the Nature Conservancy.

Through half-closed eyes she watched starlight glitter on the