Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (38 page)

“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.”

“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.

“Could be,” she said cheerfully.

Besides, they’re right, by God. Isn’t time the medium of all those interwoven lives I saw there, bringing us together and apart and together again?

“I’d like a shot of you with your daughter and the poodle, Mrs. Howard,” one of the photographers said.

The letter found Blanca at the asthma camp, where the juvenile court judge had insisted that she go. She hated the camp, just as she had known she would. Her mattress sagged, the kids in her bunk were noisy and silly, and someone had stolen her comb. They watched you like a hawk here. She would have spent her entire time in the crafts room carving soapstone, but they wouldn’t let her. They had all these activities, and they made you do them all.

If you had an attack, nobody was impressed. They weren’t actually mean, but they treated you so matter-of-fact, and everybody else went on about their business. She had no tv and not enough to read. After a while you got bored being sick and got up, even if you didn’t feel great. Nobody made a fuss about that, either.

Every day you had mail call at lunch and then a rest hour when you could write letters or sleep.

The letter Blanca had gotten was in a thin, bluish envelope, and the stamps were foreign. The return address was St. Christopher’s Hospice, London. The name of the sender was G. Eric Maulders.

Blanca put the letter on her pillow and looked at it for a while. Nobody took any notice. The girl in the next bunk was sleeping. Nobody came sneaking over to Blanca’s bunk to whisper with her. Blanca had made no friends here. She didn’t want to.

She opened the letter.

It was written in blue ball-point on flimsy paper, like tracing paper.

My Dear Blanca,

You will have been told, I imagine, that I was too ill to respond to your card or your phone messages during the remainder of my stay in New Mexico. This was true in the sense that although physically far better off than I was the last time you saw me, mentally I felt a great deal nearer my death. Frankly, I did not wish to nourish ties to a world I must so shortly be leaving. I may have been mistaken in this, and I apologize for any hurt my silence caused you.