The Truth About Lorin Jones

PROFESSOR MARY ANN FENN,

University of Connecticut

It was such a long time ago. I’d almost forgotten about her, really. Then — it was an odd, odd experience, painful in a way. I was in New York for a professional meeting last winter, as I told you in my letter. And I went to that show of yours, “Three American Women.” I was busy, but I made a point of going, because I was interested. I believe that women artists have new things to say to all of us. Important things.

Well, I was walking around the galleries, and I got to Lorin Jones’s pictures. I thought they were attractive. Unusual. The colors were interesting, subtle. But I saw them as abstractions, and I’ve never cared much for abstract art.

Then I read the title of that picture: Princess Elinore of the White Meadows. Well, it gave me a shock. In elementary school, when I was eight or nine, I and my best friend made up fairy-tale identities for ourselves: I was Princess Miranda of the Larch Mountains, because I lived in Larchmont, and she was Princess Elinore of the White Meadows. I thought, could it be? I mean, either this Lorin Jones was my friend Lolly Zimmern, or it was a fantastic coincidence.

Well, I stepped back and looked at the picture for clues, and suddenly I saw that the pale green splotches of paint at the bottom could be meant for grass, and the sprinkling of white and yellow dots over them could be daisies. Then the bigger gray splotches higher up might be clouds. And the jumble of sticks and blots and veils of color in the middle was really a lot like the way a tree would look if you were up in it, and the wind was blowing hard. Or it could have been a fairytale castle. And that was right, because we used to climb trees and make believe they were castles.

Yes, or sometimes sailing ships. I’d forgotten about all that, but there in the gallery — it was like the uneven pavement in Proust, you know — it all came back to me, from — my lord, it must be fifty years ago. The hot nearly white summer sky, and how it felt to hold on to the rough speckled branches of the apple tree, and the little hard shiny green apples, like sourballs. And I remembered how the wind would toss us around, only we pretended it was ocean waves. And the clouds going by would be fish. All kinds of fish, whales, and schools of porpoises, and mackerel. Yes, especially mackerel, because there was a picture of a mackerel sky in our science book at school.

I had to be sure, so I practically ran downstairs — I didn’t even wait for the elevator — and bought a catalogue. And there it was: Lorin Jones, born in nineteen-twenty-six in White Plains, New York. It had to be her. Well, I thought that was wonderful, and I began to plan how I’d write her a note, and tell her I’d seen her pictures. I’d ask the Museum to forward it, and we’d meet again after fifty years.

Then I read on down the page: where Lolly had gone to school, and the shows she’d had, and I turned the page over, and read a list of the collections her work was in. And then I saw: Died in nineteen-sixty-nine, in Key West, Florida. I just started crying, right there in the lobby of the Museum. I had to go and sit down on the bench by the door. I was so upset that I hadn’t known what had happened to her, and I hadn’t ever tried to find her again. I hadn’t done anything.

Yes, we were best friends for a couple of years. But then in fifth grade Lolly’s parents suddenly took her out of West-wind School. She just disappeared one day.

I don’t know why. My mother said years afterward that something happened that fall at the Parents’ Day picnic, after we’d gone home. Something went wrong. She didn’t know what exactly, but she’d heard Lolly had been badly frightened by something. Or someone.

Some sexual thing, she implied. But I’m not sure that was it really. My mother liked to imagine almost everything as sexual.

Oh yes, everybody called her Lolly back then. That’s how I always think of her now. Lolly Zimmern, ten years old. She’s up in the apple tree, seeing everything you can see in that painting, pushing the branches apart and looking out between the leaves. With her dark wavy hair tangled and blowing, and her white thin face.