Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

She didn’t mean to hide the fact that she had renewed her relationship with Rushkin, it just never came up whenever she was around Kathy. Her roommate might have heard it from someone else except that, having finally received her share of the advance for the paperback sale of her book, all her time was caught up in the work of establishing her children’s foundation—everything from finding suitable staff and applying for charitable status to renting a small building in which to house the operation.

As she’d predicted to Izzy back in January, the money from her advance wasn’t nearly enough—not even starting at the modest scale at which she planned. Late in June she organized a combination benefit concert and art auction that, when added to her fundraising efforts once her charitable status came through, raised another seventy-two thousand dollars. Eleven thousand of that came from the sale of one of Izzy’s paintings.

“The doors open July twelfth,” she told Izzy a few days after the benefit. “Are you going to have a party to celebrate it?” Izzy asked.

“Of course. But it’s going to be a potluck affair. I don’t want any of the Foundation’s money to be used for anything except for the kids. The thing that really worries me is that we’re going to get swamped and I don’t want to turn anybody away.”

“So organize another benefit,” Izzy suggested.

“I don’t think it would be as successful. People only have so much money and there are a lot of other worthwhile causes. It’ll work better on a yearly basis, I think.”

Izzy smiled. “You better get writing then.”

“I am. I have—whenever I can spare the time. Alan says there’s already a lot of interest in a second book and the first paperback’s not even out yet.”

“Will you take it to the same publisher that’s doing the paperback edition?” Izzy asked.

Kathy shook her head. “I’m letting Alan publish it first and then he’ll offer it to them. It’s a chance for his press to really establish itself and after all he’s done for me, I figure it’s the least I can do to repay him.”

“But if he gets fifty percent of the next paperback sale as well,” Izzy began. “He won’t. He didn’t even take that for Angels.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s earmarked forty percent of what would go to him as an ongoing donation to the Foundation.”

“Wow. I can’t believe he’s giving up all that money.”

“Some people would say the same thing about the painting you gave us to auction.”

“That’s different,” Izzy began, but then she shook her head. “No, I guess it’s not.”

“I couldn’t ask for better friends,” Kathy told her. She tried to stifle a huge yawn, but wasn’t successful. “I have to go to bed,” she said. “I’m dead on my feet.”

Kathy’d been losing weight, Izzy realized, taking a good look at her roommate. It wasn’t something you noticed right away, because of the baggy clothes she usually wore. But she was thinner, and there were rings under her eyes from lack of sleep.

“Don’t overdo things,” Izzy warned.

“I won’t,” Kathy said as she stumbled off to bed. “I’m just so happy that everything’s actually going to happen.” She paused at the doorway to her bedroom to look back at Izzy. “You know, that maybe I can save some kids having to go through the shit I had to.”

But you don’t look happy, Izzy thought as Kathy continued on into the bedroom. You look dead on your feet.

XVI

July 1978

It seemed as though everybody that Kathy and Izzy knew showed up for the open-house party to celebrate the opening of the Newford Children’s Foundation. The only exceptions were Rushkin and John, both of whom had been invited—Rushkin by Izzy and John by Kathy, who’d run into him in the Walker Street subway station the week of the benefit. The house had been furnished in what Jilly called Contemporary Scrounge, because everything had been acquired from flea markets and yard sales.

“The furniture just has to do its job,” Kathy had said, resenting any money spent that didn’t go directly to the kids. “It doesn’t have to be pretty.”

To offset the battered desks and filing cabinets, Izzy and Kathy, along with a number of their other artist friends, had spent a few weeks repainting all the rooms, making curtains, wallpapering, painting wall murals in the kitchen and offices and generally giving the rooms a more homey feel. The centerpieces of the waiting room, which also housed the reception desk, were the two paintings that Izzy had based on Kathy’s stories: La Liseuse and The Wild Girl. She’d given them to Kathy a year ago.

“I’m so glad you hung them here,” Izzy said, as she and Kathy finally got a break from greeting the guests and were leaning up against a wall in the waiting room, sipping glasses of wine.

Kathy smiled. “I love the way they look in here. I know you based them on stories in Angels, but they perfectly suit what the Foundation’s all about. The Wild Girl is all the kids we’re trying to help and La Liseuse is a perfect image of what so many of them have never had and never will have: the quintessential mother figure, about to read them a story before bed. I can’t imagine them anywhere else.

In fact, they’re part of the Foundation’s assets now and I’ve written in a stipulation in our charter that says they’re always to hang in the Foundation’s waiting room, no matter where we eventually move, no matter what happens to me personally.”

“I like that,” Izzy said. “I think that’s my favorite thing about any of the arts, that we each get to put our own interpretation upon the message that’s being conveyed. There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate, there’s only honest or dishonest.”

“I see her from time to time, you know,” Kathy said. “Rosalind.”

Izzy looked at her, feeling a little confused. Considering what she knew of Rosalind’s feelings about meeting Kathy, she was surprised to discover that the numena had managed to overcome her shyness in the matter.

“Really?” she said finally.

“Oh, I’ve never talked to her or anything,” Kathy explained, “but I catch glimpses of her from time to time—across a street, sitting in a cafe, walking through a park. It’s both odd and neat to see someone from one of my own stories walking about in the city. It gives me a better idea what it must feel like for you when you bring the numena across.”

Izzy really wished that Rosalind could overcome her shyness. She just knew that the two of them would get along famously. She’d often considered secretly setting up a meeting between the them, but then she’d think of John, she’d think of how Rosalind had entrusted her with her feelings, and she wouldn’t let it go any further than a thought.

“And Cosette?” she asked. “Do you ever see her?”

Kathy shook her head. “I’m too civilized to visit the kinds of places that she’d hang around—don’t you think? But I’ll bet Jilly’s seen her.”

“I think Jilly knows every fourth person in the city.”

“More like every third—and she’s working on the rest.” Kathy paused. “How come you’ve never told her about the numena? It’s so up her alley.”

Izzy shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not trying to be selfish or anything, but I feel like everything would change if I told anybody else.”

“You told me.”

“That’s different,” Izzy said. “That’s more like telling another part of myself.”

“Are we going to be friends forever?” Kathy asked.

Izzy turned to look at her roommate. Kathy looked so serious that Izzy stifled the humorous response she’d been about to make.