The Storms of May
A Novel by Edward Hower

About the Book

In The Storm of May, Ruth Sullivan, an idealistic woman with a troubled past, runs a group home with her artist husband, Mike. Together they care for five at-risk teenage girls who are as volatile as they are appealing. Ruth seeks to discover whether love can heal wounded souls. Her heart goes out to the wounded kids, but as she struggles to help them turn their lives around, a mysterious girl who calls herself May Royale arrives like a typhoon, noisily upsetting the home’s fragile peace. Soon May introduces to the scene her boyfriend, Paco, a flashy former gang member desperate to escape his family’s criminal legacy. Paco, like May, is not all that he seems at first, as Ruth discovers both to her delight and terror. As Ruth is tempted to become involved in his shadowy life, she pushes her courage to the limits, testing both her convictions and her marriage.

About the Author

Edward Hower worked for several years as a counselor with troubled teenagers in reform schools and group homes in New York and California. He is the author of nine books, including the novels The New Life Hotel and A Garden of Demons, as well as The Pomegranate Princess, a volume of folktales he collected while on Fulbright Grants in India. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications.


Praise for the Author

“Edward Hower writes fine, assured prose with an absolute command of character and setting. Like all the best novelists, he creates people whose lives exemplify the pressures of history in a world where certainties, new and old, ruthlessly compete.”
—Robert Stone (in praise of Hower’s Garden of Demons)

From the Book

Chapter One

The snow whirled into my glasses, making the park look speckled with tears and sparkling lights. My husband Mike’s beard was sprinkled with white confetti, but I could still see his grin. Our new “daughters”—five at-risk teenage girls whose families couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them—huddled together near a deserted sandbox with their mouths open to the sky, a brood of raucous baby birds. This was the first afternoon we’d gotten all the girls outdoors to try to have some fun together. And after a while, they—and I—started to run crazily through the white blur, reverting to the happy childhoods we’d never had. We flung snowballs at each other, though we always missed on purpose since we were still being cautious with each other. I showed the girls how to pile three rolled balls into a snowman and press pebble-eyes into the face. “He looks like my step-father!” one kid said, and whacked the head off with her fist. Her “sisters” cheered as it rolled down the slope to smash against a tree. Except for a girl from an Indian reservation upstate, they found all this open white space an alien territory. But they gamely lay on their backs to make angel wings and were amazed to stand back and look at them. They slid past me on plastic trays “borrowed” from their high school’s cafeteria. “Everybody take them, Ruth!” a girl protested when I asked her where she’d got her tray. “Ain’t we supposed to act like normal kids?”

Later, on the rocky bank of the Hudson, we all stood together watching a tugboat splash across the waves. It sped closer, growing bigger, its motor giving off a low growl through the white mist. I doubted if the kids had seen any boat this close before, especially one bearing down on them so fast. I clutched Mike’s hand. The tug blasted its horn, a sudden rasping honk; this was probably just a bored captain’s greeting, but at that moment it sounded as if the boat were angrily warning us away. The girls must have thought so, too; they all squeezed tight against Mike and me for safety. I could feel their rough coats, smell their damp hair, even sense the fast beating of their hearts.

Then the tug swerved off, rolling a big wave toward us that exploded against the rocks. As the boat grew smaller, harmless out there on the wide river, I felt the girls let out held breaths. They hooted cheerfully after the intruder.

Just then, I remember thinking: this is where I belong--with Mike and my kids, banded together to keep all the world’s dangers at bay.

A few weeks earlier, we had all moved into a house in Chester, New York, a gritty little town which bordered a gang-ravaged part of the Bronx on one side and palatial suburban estates on the other. Along our block were other old row-houses, a brick clinic with barred windows, a beauty parlor whose toxic hair-glop I could smell from the sidewalk, and a radio/TV repair shop where I paused to listen to Spanish love songs fluttering out the door like gaily colored streamers. The New York State Youth Service, our employer, had painted the group home a creamy white outside and provided it with solid middle-class furnishings inside--“to give the kids something to aim for,” our boss said. We had bright plaid couches and armchairs, burgundy rugs with matching curtains, and happy daffodil decals on the kitchen cabinets. At first, the cellophane-fresh scent of the place made Mike, who was raised in a tenement, say he felt as if he were living in a Sears showroom. I’d grown up surrounded by sharp, brittle heirlooms, so I enjoyed the house’s soft surfaces. It was strange, though, to constantly discover price tags on our chairs, kitchen appliances, carpets, even toilet seats. For the girls, finding tags on the brand new things was like a treasure hunt; they loved shouting the prices to each other.

The state-issued prints on the walls gave off a sugary haze: cozy kittens snuggling by a hearth, a girl in a bonnet petting a duck, a thatched farmhouse nestled beneath a pink sunrise. To the kids they must have seemed like views of another planet. The pictures made Mike—an artist--grind his teeth, and he planned to replace them with some of his African landscapes from our house upstate, where we went each Saturday and Sunday while a weekend house-parent took over for us. One incongruous print in the dining room must have been left over from the house’s previous tenants--Gericault‘s The Wreck of the Medusa: shipwreck survivors sprawled on a storm-tossed raft. I left it up as a reality check to the relentlessly upbeat décor.

Mike and I had a big bedroom, bathroom, and study in the back of the house, and the girls’ rooms were upstairs off a lounge where goldfish swam serene laps in a bubbling tank. The study was mine, though I wasn’t sure what to do in it except write a journal. Mike had a studio to work in across the street at a community center, where he also taught drawing courses to senior citizens. In the house, the kids were careful not to scuff the rugs or spill soda on the gleaming linoleum—for about a week. Then they started to feel at home, leaving pizza crusts around the living room, clogging the shower drains with hair, squirting each other and the kitchen walls with whipped cream. I began to relax, too.

Mike and I saw to it that the girls went to school and lived as much as possible like a family of normal teenagers--albeit teenagers of three different races, with white “parents” who were only in their late twenties. With my chaotic upbringing, I was nearly as clueless as the girls were about what typical family life was supposed to be like, but I winged it. Sometimes I felt strange when I grounded kids for getting stoned with boyfriends who were no wilder than the thugs I’d hung out with at their age. Occasionally the girls came home drunk at three in the morning, threw up in the flower bed beside the front steps, and laughed so boisterously that they got all the neighborhood dogs barking at once. But since our place was an “alternative to incarceration” for crimes the kids had committed, they were usually on their best behavior.

So were Mike and I. We tutored them and took them shopping and taught them to cook and settled their squabbles. The state supplied us an allowance for “cultural events,” so Mike drove us all to a pro wrestling match, which gave me a pounding headache but delighted the girls, who shrieked curses at the hairy villains. I got us seats for Romeo et Juliet at the city opera, which gave Mike a headache but made the girls weep ecstatically. Most evenings, though, I was happy to just sit around the living room talking with the kids in the flickering campfire glow of the television screen. Soon we would have to accept a sixth girl, but Mike and I put it off, reluctant to jeopardize the calm we’d worked so hard to produce—not just among the kids, but between ourselves. We stayed too busy to fight, and for the first time in several years, avoided any personal crises.

I was aware—as my father occasionally thundered into the phone at me—that taking on a pack of juvenile delinquents might be a slightly insane way of getting my life together. But he’d thought I’d been nuts to go to Africa with the Peace Corps, too, though I’d met Mike there and married him and had loved running a school with him in Tanzania more than anything I’d ever done in my life. After four years, I came back to the States convinced that I could accomplish whatever I took up. Ha! I lost two teaching positions in New York and floundered around in some graduate school classes that went nowhere. Mike had as much trouble re-adjusting to American life as I did. At his international development job, he felt caged in his office; he longed for Africa, and went into black funks at night because he had no time to do his art-work. We escaped to a house in the Catskills. I wanted a baby. When the doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to have one, I locked myself in the bedroom until Mike broke down the door. We registered at a local adoption agency. I taught at a state Youth Service reform school, while Mike stayed home all day developing a bad case of cabin fever as he tried to carve strange African-looking figures out of logs. After a year, when he still couldn’t find a gallery willing to sell his work, he started gulping Jim Beam and beating up on himself for living off my inheritance from my mother.

So when the Youth Service advertised house-parent positions in Chester, we grabbed them. We could be partners in a joint project again. We could save our marriage!

Maybe.

My days in Chester were crammed full, but that was how I liked them. When I got up at 6:15, the house was already vibrating. As soon as I walked into the kitchen, I smelled the pancakes Mike was making for the girls. “Why no bacon?” demanded Darlene in her tent-like bathrobe, though just the day before she swore she was starting a diet. She weighed more than two hundred pounds and I reminded her that if she failed Phys. Ed. she might not graduate and get her college scholarship. For that reminder I got hip-checked into the fridge. I bounced back and stomped on her bare toes. She danced around in mock-agony. The girls laughed; wearing soft bedroom slippers, I was almost a foot shorter than Darlene and half her weight.

Mike couldn’t go to his studio that morning because he had to take Darlene to the nursing home to visit her mother, who was going blind and dying of AIDS. Since a cop shot Darlene’s father fleeing from a liquor store hold-up she was sure he wasn’t involved in (“killed him for running while black,” Darlene said), she was her mother’s sole family visitor. Her mother was the reason the court hadn’t shipped Darlene upstate for assaulting a teacher in her previous school. I’d liked to have taken her to the nursing home today, myself, but I had to go see the local school vice principal who wanted to talk to me about Gina’s “social adjustment issues.”

Usually the girls walked to school, but that day I drove them in the station wagon with its Youth Service seal printed on both side doors. “Don’t park so close to the gate, we don’t want everybody seeing the state car!” they pleaded, so I left the wagon around the corner.Gina hid in the car biting her already bloody nails.

The VP had learned about Gina’s background because her step-father’s story had been all over the papers that winter: “Prison for Mafia Kingpin.”Gina had told reporters that he’d often refused to give her mother cash for groceries, even though they’d just moved into a mansion with a chandelier in every bedroom.Her mother (who was currently in a mental hospital) used to send Gina to pick her step-father’s pocket while he was passed out drunk, but one time he woke up and cracked her skull with a heavy marble ashtray.The vice principal was sympathetic, but she said that Gina behaved and dressed “provocatively.”I kept my mouth shut, thinking: Gina couldn’t help being built like a movie star; I’d helped her pick out her sweater outfit myself, though she did sneak a smaller size into the bag.“Do you realize,” the VP asked me, “that white girls often arouse the resentment of African American girls by ‘dating’ African American boys?”(Did I realize? If only she’d known me a dozen years before!).Gina’s this-week-boyfriend was black--which probably explained why she and an angry black girl had been pounding each other in the bathroom on Monday during lunch period.

I nodded and smiled and assured the vice principal that I would discipline Gina firmly: two weeks grounding plus cleaning the laundry room for a month.Eventually I got the woman to bend the fiberglass pole she kept up her rectum and drop Gina’s suspension.In the car, Gina couldn’t stop hugging me in gratitude, tears streaming down her acne-pitted cheeks. She was the clingiest of all the girls.I hugged her back and sent her off to class, warning her that if she got into one more fight, she’d be scrubbing that laundry room floor till the day after forever.

The next stop was Sally’s probation office. The officer had fetched Sally from a homeless shelter in New Jersey, where she’d phoned him in a panic at 4:00 the night before, after running away from our house. Almost all Sally’s arrests had been for runaways—eleven in two years, including one escape from a juvenile facility in Pennsylvania where she’d done time for vagrancy and burglary. She’d gotten as far as Oregon once, fleeing parents who routinely thrashed her, leaving her with a deep dent-like scar across her forehead.

“Why did you run away this time?” I asked her in the Probation Department office.

Silence. Sally hunched over, her face nearly hidden by her red ringlets.

“Does it have to do with why the cop brought you home last week?”

She nodded and sniffled into the handkerchief I’d handed her. A park policeman had reported that she was giving blow-jobs to a line of high school boys down by the railroad tunnel, and I’d counseled her that doing this wouldn’t make her popular in the ways she wanted to be.

“All the kids in study hall make lip-smacking sounds at me now,” she said. “How can I go back to school?”

The probation officer reminded her that school attendance was part of the state group-home program, and staying in our home was her last chance to avoid being sent to a maximum security institution.

“I’ll talk to the theater teacher—he’ll probably let you built sets for the play during study hall,” I told Sally. “You want to try that, honey?”

“I guess,” she said, wiping her eyes. They were already red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

I took her home, put her in a shower, smeared medicine on the shelter-bedbug bites all over her legs, got some soup down her, and tucked her under the covers with Gina’s orange teddy bear. She conked out with her arm around it.

I slurped the rest of the soup, the only lunch I had time for, and greeted the kids at 2:45 when they came stampeding home from school. They loaded the kitchen table with white bread, Bologna, a gallon jug of milk, cherry Coke, raspberry soda, Twinkies, pretzels, Oreo’s, tortilla chips, and Cheese Doodles, and commenced to have “just a little snack.” Everyone talked at once:

“Ruth, can you sign a permission for me to go to the Bronx zoo with my class?—”

“You gotta give me a note saying I was sick yesterday!—”

“Ruth, I can’t go out in these jeans, nobody wears them with studs no more!—”

“Can you drive me to this boutique in Brooklyn, its got such cool shit, Ruth, can you?—”

Rose sat nibbling on a pretzel but she didn’t say a word. The girls had been calling her a wooden Indian until they heard that her mother had recently died of pneumonia in her hardly-heated cabin. Mourning for her, Rose and her father kept getting picked up on drunk and disorderly charges. I guessed this was her way of bonding with her dad. But the Onondaga Reservation elders had decided she needed to spend some time away from him, and got the state to ship her down here to mostly-affluent Westchester County, which probably looked as bizarre as Oz to her. Wearing her grandfather’s ancient, hand-loomed blanket over her jean jacket, she went to AA meetings with corporate executives in yacht club blazers. She seemed to like her new school, though she could barely read or write. The kids admired the braid that hung down her back in a dark rope and seemed to ripple like a live creature when she walked.

At 5:00 it was my turn to run the daily group therapy session. The topics were what to do about Gina’s fighting and Sally’s runaway. Gina was easy--the girls agreed to the penalties I’d outlined to the school vice principal. Sally was more difficult: if we grounded her, wouldn’t she feel even more like running away?

“She a runaway-junkie,” said Valecia, who knew plenty about addiction.

“I know.” Sally gazed at the carpet.

“Why do you think she’s like this?” I asked “What makes the open road so attractive?”

Just then Mike arrived from his studio. He sat down and spoke about his father’s early career in the Merchant Marines. “He couldn’t wait to ship out to new places every time he got home,” Mike said, “And when I was older, I got inspired to take off to Africa. So maybe there’s a good side to having travel-fever, too.”

Sally’s eyes widened, her jaw dropped—nobody had ever done anything but beat and discipline her for her travels. Suddenly she burst out talking—“I want to go to countries like that, too! And Texas and Paris and all kinds of new places!”

“Right,” Darlene said, “But how you going to do that without money? How you going to get money without finishing school? Better do your exploring in books for a while!”

“Are you listening to Darlene?” Mike asked. “She’d probably lend you some books if you ask her.”

“I got that African book you lent me,” Darlene said to Mike, then turned to Sally. “You can borrow it.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Sally glanced up at Darlene, whom she’d been too scared to talk to much until then. As a discipline for her runaway, Sally agreed to vacuum the office in the basement three times a week for a month.

As Valecia and I prepared fourteen pork chops for supper, she talked about a TV movie she’d seen recently called “Sluts on Cell Block Six.” She’d laughed along with the other girls at first, but suddenly had run upstairs crying with her hands over her ears. She hadn’t let me into her room to comfort her that night. She knew I’d read her file, which said she’d spent time on a cell block, herself, though she’d been only sixteen. She’d been arrested after two years with a pimp who’d imprisoned her in his stable of girls by shooting her up with heroin and whipping her with coat-hangers.

“I didn’t think the movie was very funny, either, Valicia,” I told her, trying to keep the sadness from turning my voice scratchy, as if I were just critiquing the film.

“Good. I’m glad I ain’t the only one,” she said.

After dinner, I had to chase Gina downstairs into the kitchen to do her usual clean-up chore. What happened to all that gratitude? Later, Mike and I supervised homework. Gina insisted that I check her English paper but I was already helping Darlene study for a test. Gina stomped back upstairs, screaming over her shoulder at me, “You never do shit for the white girls, Ruth!”

At 9:00, it was crafts time—“Yaaay! here comes Arthur!” Arthur was the visiting “recreational therapist.” What did he have for us this week--candle-making, origami, cloth flowers? Nope, it was balloon animals. Poor Arthur, was about five feet tall, British, with a stutter. I left him to his work until I heard a piercing shriek--oh god, had they stuffed him into the microwave?

No, he was sitting glumly at the kitchen table. The room was jumble of bright balloon figures: orange bunnies with tubular ears, a green sausage-dog, a pink pig flaunting a banana-sized cock.

I asked, “So, Arthur, are we having a good time yet?”

“S-s-sod it!” he said.

Darlene lumbered into the kitchen holding up what looked like a rubber weasel. Valecia dashed right behind her jabbing a straight-pin at the animal. Both girls were screaming at the top of their registers. Arthur clamped his hands over his ears.

“No stabbing in the house!” I shouted.

  Gina raced in, pursued by Sally with a pin.

Bang! a giraffe was assassinated. Pop! the pink pig was unmanned. The air was full of flying animals with hands and pins jabbing at them. Pop! Bang! Shriek!

Batting her eyelashes, Gina asked, “Arthur, where’s my pussy cat? Have you seen my pussy?”

“Girl, he don’t even want to see your pussy!” Darlene told her.

The kitchen had become a rubber graveyard, bodies hanging off chairs and light fixtures, littering the floor.

“Such wanton carnage!” Arthur moaned, dangling a long piece of balloon from his forefinger.

Valecia said, “That’s my elephant trunk, Arthur!”

“Your fucking elephant ate my rabbit!” Gina pouted.

“Law of the jungle,” Darlene said.

I yelled at them to start putting things away, but they ignored me. “Get this place cleaned up, goddammit!” I screamed. “Or no TV for the rest of your lives!”

Laughing, they gathered up all the balloon corpses. Rose walked in, holding a lopsided horse-like animal, still intact. She handed it to Arthur.

He hugged it to his chest. Everybody cheered.

At 11:30, I finally herded the girls upstairs. They all turned on their radios to help them sleep, but at the required low volume. Mike and I collapsed into our bedroom, red-eyed and utterly wiped out, but, as usual, too tightly wound to sleep right away. An overload of sadness, anger, frustration, excitement, and laughter careened like fireballs inside my head. Lying on the bed, we I talked and talked, exorcizing all the day’s events.

“You were terrific with Sally in group today,” I told him as we both finally started to yawn. “All that stuff about traveling. I wish I could think of things like that to say.”

“You were good with the girls about the balloons.” He smiled.

I watched him drumming his fingers on his knee, and wondered if he was anxious to leave. If he did, I knew he’d just be going to his studio for a few hours as he sometimes did late at night. He was obsessed with his sculptures—for their own sake, and also because his artwork gave him an outlet for all the day’s stress. I wished I could find an outlet of my own.

Suddenly I grabbed his hand. “Do you have to go?”

“Not tonight, I guess.” He gave my fingers a gentle squeeze. “Turn over, babe--come here.”

Smiling, I snuggled up backwards against his belly, feeling his arm wrap around my waist. Sleep started to fall over me like an avalanche of dark feathers, but I stayed awake long enough to wiggle my ass against him. The back of my neck grew warm from his soft, regular breathing. My eyes closed as I listened to the quiet reverberations of the girls’ radios, their musical notes tapping peacefully overhead like raindrops on a roof.

During those early days in Chester I felt more competent and confident than I had since my Tanzania years. The house seemed like a perfect set-up for us. Mike and I were becoming convinced that this time, we were really going to make it.

Then the sixth girl arrived, the typhoon who called herself May.…

ISBN 0-86538-307-3, $23.95