STORMY LEGACY

By John Skow

Having one's heart warmed is a chilling experience not always avoidable by even the wariest cynic. A shameless manipulator in the hot-ventricle dodge is Michael Dorris, who 10 years ago, as a first novelist, gave us Rayona Taylor, the 15-year-old, part black, part Native American heroine of A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. You couldn't help falling for Rayona. She was plucky, pretty, buffeted by fate (her Indian mother Christine dies during the novel, and Elgin, her lackadaisical black father, is seldom seen) and crazy enough to enter a bronco-riding contest disguised as a boy.

Now comes a darker novel, Cloud Chamber (Scribners; 316 pages; $24). It is a sequel of sorts, though Rayona appears only at the end. She's still 15 and untroubled by romance, still living with her crusty Aunt Ida on the reservation in Montana. Her father turns up in the last chapters with a couple of elderly white ladies who are, surprisingly, his Irish-American mother and his aunt. By this time the novel has traced Rayona's tangled lineage from her great-great-grandmother Rose Mannion, a formidable immigrant from Ireland. The author follows a chain of matrimonial disasters involving weak men and angry, churchbound women who wish they had married someone else. Bridie, Rayona's great-grandmother, is one of these harridans. She speaks gloatingly of withholding sex: "I taught my husband to beg, and I despised him for his weakness."

The fury abates with Marcella, one of Bridie's daughters. Recovering in a TB sanatorium, she falls in love with Earl Taylor, a handsome young black man who delivers groceries. Their son is Elgin, and his daughter is Rayona. Dorris, whose own ancestry is Irish, French and Modoc Indian, writes that "the past ruled the present with unsympathetic dominion." And until Rayona, this is true. With her, the future is April going on May. Her reappearance at the end of this intricate and brooding second novel cools like a spring breeze.

--By John Skow