Renee soon morphed into the hostess she had always wanted to become. She held dinner parties and Rex invited his students for Sunday afternoon spaghetti dinners. He also felt privately that his life as a painter and teacher did not quite match up with the stylish bourgeois surroundings in which he now found himself.

Renee further involved herself in the A.R.E., The Association for Research and Enlightenment established by Edgar Cayce before his death and now run by his son Hugh Lynn. She was soon hosting prayer meetings and filling her bookshelves with titles by or about various psychics, clairvoyants, supernatural phenomena and all manner of spiritual materials. She used a Ouija Board, performing seriously as though she were channeling communications from another plane of existence. Rex found these interests difficult to relate to seriously and focused on his painting and reading.

By 1956 they planned a cross country trip with their children, knowing it would be the last vacation the family would spend together. We all drove to New York in a two door 1940 Chrysler, stopping at various historical and tourist attractions along the way. When they arrived in the east Rex heard that the painter Jackson Pollock had driven his car into a tree and died. In New York they stayed with Rex's sister Jane, now married to a classmate from graduate school in music at Yale. Renee bought clothes at Best and Company on Fifth Avenue.

Then, with stops in Washington DC and Williamsburg Virginia, my Rex left the three in Virginia Beach, to stay the headquarters for the A.R.E. for the summer. Rex went back to New York and went to museums and galleries for weeks, his first opportunity to satisfy his craving.

At the end of the summer he came back to Virginia Beach to collect his wife and kids and they headed into the long drive back to California. The family was two weeks late for the start of school that year.