Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “I’ll go find out,” she said, rising. “You get the bill, all right?”

  Paying the bill, he watched her from the register desk. She leaned into her forearm beside the wall phone outside on the concourse, her face hidden from him.

  Can’t stand much more of this, he thought.

  “That was the first gate announcement,” she said, meeting him outside the coffee shop door. “B-Eight.”

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. “I hate hanging about.”

  She walked close enough to brush against him, and he kept the nylon bag slung on that side, between them, warding her off. His medicine was only effective against certain kinds of pain.

  At the security counter he had to give up the bag for inspection. He turned toward her, unable to speak. She could go on with him to the gate if she wished to. He hoped she would, he prayed she wouldn’t.

  She stepped against him, her arms lightly encircling, and he stooped to embrace her. He smelled a fragrance in her hair, something floral — not a sweet perfume but a green and tangy scent like cut stems.

  This brought a flash of memory: his sister Margaret, small and solemn, snipping roses, as she had often seen her mother do, for a play party. Oh, she had caught it later on when the poultry shears was missed from the kitchen and the rosebush found butchered. Lord, how many years ago? More memories pressed, a deep stream patiently crowding for entry. Why, yes, he thought, his heart oddly lightened, but not just yet.

  Dorothea’s lips brushed a kiss onto the corner of his mouth and she stepped away and said intensely, “Next time, if there is a next time, I’ll know you right away, damn it. We’ll do a whole set together, how’s that?”

  We just have, he thought, but I’m game for another if you are. He said, “That’s the nicest folie-à-deux anyone’s ever proposed to me. You’re on.”

  And then they parted and he watched her walk quickly away.

  Later, on the plane, he grew tired of the book he had bought for the journey, and hunting about his pockets for something to use for a bookmark he found the napkin Dorothea had drawn on. He flattened the paper out and studied the drawing, struck again by that peculiar detail of the broken bit of projecting drapery. Imagine conceiving of the object complete with damage like that! What a mind! She should be writing novels, she’d do better than the poor sod whose book lay neglected in his lap.

  The figurine is damaged, he thought with a blinding flash of memory, just as it was when I saw it myself, years ago now, in the museum of a French town somewhere near St. Vallien.

  Dorothea has never laid eyes on that inkwell. She’s never been to France, and that tiny place didn’t even have a catalog of its collection, let alone photographic postcards. She can’t have seen it.

  Except in her dreams. Except through the eyes of the judge, scratching away with pen and paper a century and a half ago.

  “Her dreams,” he whispered.

  The stewardess was heading his way, all smiling concern. Hastily he folded the napkin and slid it into the nylon flight bag at his feet. He pretended to be reading his book, and after hovering a moment above his stubbornly lowered head the stewardess passed on to a tanned gangster in sunglasses behind him.

  “Christ Jesus,” Ricky breathed, seeing nothing on the page in front of him. His eyes watered and his hands shook, but beneath his agitation he felt calm and amused — as if he had always known that the ghost had been real.

  “But it’s so early,” Claire said blearily.

  Dorothea gulped her coffee. “I know. I just want a last, quiet look at it before the locusts descend.” Today the photographers and reporters, lined up with alarming efficiency by Claire, were coming to see the wall. Something — the secrecy — was going to be officially over. Dorothea had wakened with a taut, dark feeling in her chest, like dread.

  “They’re not locusts,” Claire said. “They’re some of the best art photographers and journalists in the business. If you’ve changed your mind, you should have told me before.”

  Snappy; oh dear. Poor Claire. She had always hated early rising, and here she had pulled out all the stops professionally to round up these people. Her reputation was on the line.

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” Dorothea said. “I’m just a bit sensitive, I guess. Put it down to leftover irritation with that Ellie Stern person and her plan to write a book about it all. God almighty! I have a feeling George put her up to it. Did you know he’s been seeing her? Looking for another way to glom onto me, I think. Well, they deserve each other. Anyway, you can blame her if I’m a little edgy, all right? It doesn’t mean I’m going to mess up this — event.”

  “I’d like to come with you,” Claire said. “The others can find their way without me.”

  “But you’re not even dressed!”

  “Give me five minutes. Please, Mom. I’d like to.”

  Dorothea had wanted to see the wall by herself, but what the hell. She let Brillo out of the back room. He frisked in the arroyo, waiting with her. The sun was just up, and the air was crisp.

  Claire came. They walked.

  “This must be the first time I’ve ever come down here without tools or anything in my hands,” Dorothea said.

  Claire, hunching along with her hands jammed in the pockets of her windbreaker, said, “It’s funny to think of you trotting out here almost every day, all by yourself, making that thing, and nobody knowing. So much of women’s art is like that — nobody knows, nobody notices. That’s why it’s so crucial to have these people come today. A couple of them are really important in the women’s press.”

  “I know,” Dorothea said, not wanting to go into all that again.

  “Have you thought some more about those foundation women?”

  Several calls had come, once the word was out, from a feminist culture foundation. They were all excited about building a museum of women’s monumental art around the wall.

  Something of the sort was bound to happen, she supposed. One way or another people would come and stare and talk nonsense about the wall and expect her to talk nonsense too, but more artistically. Someone would want a soft-drink concession, and there’d be toilets set up and white stones laid to mark the trail to the wall for those mad or devoted enough to want to walk. The wall would acquire its satellite sculptures of human use: the drinking fountain, the curved plastic sun-shelter for viewers by the busload, the garbage cans, the guardhouse.

  This is my land, she thought. I could prevent all that, at least until I myself was dead — and maybe after, too.

  “I am thinking about it,” she said.

  “It’s a great idea. The work needs to be seen by lots and lots of people. I think it’s a masterpiece.”

  “You do?” Dorothea glowed with pleasure, feeling foolish for being so easily flattered. But what the hell, her own daughter.

  “Didn’t I tell you that?” Claire, wiry and taller than her mother, bounced along on the balls of her feet, speaking eagerly. “I do. I think it’s wonderful, and important, and you could do such fantastic things with it — think what it would mean if you let the foundation build here. They could have exhibition space and maybe someday studios and living quarters for artists, and courses to help women artists get along in the world, and you could funnel through all kinds of programming for poor women and women of color and their kids to get them involved. After all, you have these big Spanish and Indian populations here. If you left the land to the foundation, they’d never have to worry about getting kicked off —”

  “Thanks,” Dorothea said dryly, “for planning the rest of my life. It sounds a little super-public for my tastes.”

  “You still won’t accept it, will you?” Claire said with exasperation. “Even while you use your influence on behalf of those grubby Mexican kids, you deny that you have any and —”

  “They’re not Mexican,” Dorothea interrupted firmly. “Their ancestors came from Spain and got here before ours did. And they’re no grubbier than any other kids their age, either.”<
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  “And you refuse to help your own.”

  “My own? You mean women, as a class. I don’t know that I understand ‘helping’ a whole class of people. And I’m not helping the Spanish-American population at large either, if it makes you feel any better. I’m trying to keep a very crude corrections-system from pulverizing a few individuals who’ve stumbled clumsily into its way, that’s all. They happen to be Hispanics in a time and a place where that signifies to people who count votes, but I don’t do that. What makes sense to me is that the Cantus are kids I’ve come to know, kids I feel some responsibility for.”

  “But you’ve got to see beyond that!” Claire pressed urgently. “You don’t owe these people anything. You’re an artist first, an important woman —”

  Dorothea caught her arm to stop her and stood facing her. “I do owe, believe me, where the Cantus are concerned. As for the other, well, look, my darling, I accept that there’s going to be a furor over this piece of work, and a lot of attention, most of which I won’t want. But I’ll put up with it anyway, to find out what it’s good for, and because I think it’s time. But if you think I’ve become somebody different — some arm-waving demagogue, some aspiring congresswoman or board-member or tireless cross-country lecturer or administrator of a desert school for poor women artists — you are setting yourself up for disappointment.”

  Claire didn’t answer.

  “We could both end up wishing we’d never taken a walk this morning or had these people come. I don’t want that. I’m rolling, Claire, at my own speed, turtle-like though it may seem to you. Don’t push me, all right?”

  “Okay,” Claire said. “I’m sorry. You never pushed me, did you?”

  “I tried not to.”

  “But you’ll let me advise you a little? I do know about the ins and outs of feminist politics, and that’s just as important in the arts as anywhere else. You put that on top of the regular politics of art, and it’s a real back-breaker.”

  “Believe me,” Dorothea said grimly, “I’ll take advantage of all the expertise I can get.”

  They stopped in front of the Indian pictographs.

  “God,” Claire said in a low voice. “You can almost feel them watching you — the spirits of the old people who put those marks there. Didn’t it feel spooky, working over there with these images watching over your shoulder like this?”

  “To tell the truth, once I got to work I forgot about them.”

  They turned.

  Part of the wall was in sun, part in shadow.

  “God,” Claire breathed again. Suddenly she grabbed Dorothea and hugged her hard. “I am so proud of you!”

  “Thanks, love,” Dorothea said, patting her on the back. “It does look pretty good from here, doesn’t it? Scars and all.”

  “It’s magical!”

  “That’s what Ricky said. He said my finishing the wall was what brought him here, and the ghost too.”

  “Ghost? What ghost?”

  “Um — well —” Oh, oh, what have I said? First she thought I was wonderful, now she’ll think I’m nuts.

  “What ghost? Come on, Mother, tell me!”

  Haltingly, Dorothea told her.

  “You’re kidding!” Claire cried. “You can’t mean it! That actually happened? And it’s all over, and I missed the whole thing? Why didn’t you call me, I’d have come right away! God, all my life I’ve hoped for something like that!”

  She seemed near tears.

  “But I never thought you had any — any spiritual leanings, Claire. You never indicated —”

  Claire swung away from her. “Never mind, I guess I just missed out. It was only intended for you anyway, judging by what you say. You and Ricky. I’d have just been in the way.”

  Dorothea touched Claire’s shoulder lightly. “Don’t be jealous of Ricky. I needed him here, and he needed to come and help me.

  “It’s your turn now, if you’re willing. Ricky was my guide in a part of life that touches death and dying. Now I think I need someone to help me navigate aspects of the art world that I’ve been avoiding for years.”

  Claire said cautiously, “That could work, maybe.”

  “I’d be grateful,” Dorothea said. “Just try to remember that I’m older than you and slower and more scared, all right?”

  “And you’ll let me read that letter?”

  “On the understanding that nothing about it gets into print anywhere,” Dorothea said sternly. “Is it a promise?”

  Claire put out her hand. They shook.

  Dorothea walked down to the wall, and Claire had the sense to stay behind and let her be there by herself. Dorothea glanced back and saw her daughter standing, hands in pockets, hair lifting on the morning breeze. A good kid, a surprising kid, though more grown-up than kid these days; try to remember that.

  Right over there was where Ricky used to sit, in the shade of those twisted junipers, watching or reading. She could see him lifting his book, holding it open and shaking the sand out of the pages after a scud of wind had bullied past.

  She sipped cool water from the plastic bottle she had brought.

  A huge, mockingly diverse and rich monument for Ricky; was that what she had been fashioning all this long time? “Ricky’s Headstone.” Not, come to think of it, a bad title for the thing, if you wanted to avoid inanities along the lines of “Opus X.”

  Ricky’s Stone: courses of studded wire, porcelain curves, shards of sand-frosted glass, brash splinters of plastic — all pieces that her hands remembered holding, her eyes remembered placing, but beyond her now and moving as she watched. Her assemblage of these remnants of the past would travel further into the future than she would. Traveling — did she see an illusion of motion? How odd; it was like the seconds-long sequence in an underwater film where a school of fish hovers briefly before they all flicker and are gone.

  A school of souls, each trailing its wake of older lives, the wakes interwoven with each other all the way back, and weaving forward to interweave again in the unguessable future: why not? All of us weaving together: flowing and changing, meeting and passing, meeting and dancing, meeting and fleeing each other, flicking away from meeting here only to meet and merge there, and all the time scarcely knowing it. Some perhaps never knowing it, swimming blind their whole course until the end, and others coming with a start to suspect and look about them at all this company shimmering through the greatest sea.

  As for these intruders whose arrival she anticipated with amusement, resignation, and dread, weren’t they up there too, swimming on the rock? And Ricky? And so many others that she knew?

  Brillo trotted up, and she knelt and leaned her forehead against his wooly one. He tried to lick her face and patted at her leg with a delicate forepaw. She was acutely, miserably aware of the gritty sand under her palm, the label of her new shirt sticking her in the back of her neck; and no one sitting under the junipers.

  In that instant, the mosaic had somehow shifted, gearing down to nothing more than a decorated ridge of stone standing against a sky that dwarfed it. Busy work, embroidery to fill the time, whatever Ricky said or Claire said or anyone said. These people will come and discover that I’m a fraud. It’s not what Roberto did. Ricky was right, they won’t even notice that. It’s me. A jumped-up collage-maker with delusions of grandeur.

  No, there — it was itself again, a broad cliff-face shimmering faintly as with vast and intricate movement, intimations of a pattern making itself in the flicker of an eyelid. What she had seen in that first instant and now again was too much to hold in the mind for very long. Maybe for those who could see, even if only for a second, the cliff-face could stand as a sign of our true depth, our speed, our beauty.

  I was not wrong in withdrawing into making this thing, only in trying to stay with it past its completion. And I am right now to let it go.

  Brillo barked. A jeep was grinding its way down the arroyo.

  Today Art Directions, tomorrow the world.

  Claire took charge,
making introductions, looking very sophisticated and shining with pride. Thank God there were only five of them, eager people with pads and cameras and tape recorders no bigger than a cigarette pack. George was not there. Sulking, no doubt. If he couldn’t have it his way, he wouldn’t have it at all. Too bad.

  They loved the wall — took pictures, made notes, asked questions. Claire lounged against the side of the jeep, shooting Dorothea a shy smile of commiseration every time their eyes met.

  My new life, Dorothea thought ruefully. Why is Claire smiling over the ruins of my precious solitude? Because she thinks I could get to like all this razzmatazz. Could I? Sure. The whole point of letting go of what’s behind you is to leave you open-handed for what’s already blowing toward you from the future.

  She had an inkling of the first thing to come after the wall: a painting of Ricky as she had seen him that day on the living-room couch with the brightness of the afghan blanket lying over his leg. And then perhaps other portraits from memory.

  “What do you call this work, Ms. Howard?” a man was saying.

  Do you name it “Ricky’s Stone” and end up explaining? The hell you do. Besides, the wall isn’t only Ricky’s. It’s for the judge too, and the young Cantus, and others.

  “Spirit Shoal,” she said. There: named, completed, done.

  “‘Shoal?’” the man said, writing on his pad. “As in shoals of fish?” He squinted. “Yes, you could see it as a great, barnacled fin cutting the water. Are you concretizing here the geological history of this area, the fact that all this land was once covered by an inland sea?”

  “Well, I hadn’t actually worked out anything like that,” Dorothea said, taken aback.

  One of the others, a black woman who had shrugged off her fleecy vest in the warming sunlight, said, “That native American rock art, just opposite your own work — did you mean to suggest that much of what archaeologists attribute to primitive ‘men’ is work left behind by women of early times, women like yourself making use of whatever comes naturally to hand?”

  Well I’ll be damned, Dorothea thought, looking from one of them to the other. They look at the wall and they see time — geological, historical, some kind of time. This is where you really let go or not — let the work take off and be whatever it can be, or shackle it with your own intentions, kill it with possessiveness.