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Chapter 10
SOME DREAMS MATTER, ILLUMINATE A CRUCIAL CHOICE,
OR reveal some intuition that’s trying to push its way to the
surface. Others, though, are detritus, the residue of the day
reassembling itself in some disjointed and chaotic way, and those
were the sorts of dreams I had the night before I drove back to see
Oliver Parrott—dreams of chasing after Max, whose laughter I kept
hearing in the trees, floating over water; dreams of running across
the depot land, trying to climb out over the fences, which kept
growing higher. Yoshi was in the dreams, too, trying to help,
unable to find me. Frantic dreams, they left me tired, and I woke
grouchy to another rainy day, the sky so densely gray and the rain
so thick that I couldn’t see the opposite shore.
I pulled on the only pair of jeans I’d brought, my
last clean T-shirt, and the same dark blue Night Riders sweatshirt.
In the gray light, the color made me look bleached-out and tired. I
brushed my hair and teeth, collected a basket of dirty laundry, and
made my way downstairs.
Though it was Saturday and she had the day off, my
mother was already up and dressed, her short hair moussed into
spikes. She was sitting on the floor of the living room, near the
door to the sleeping porch, a cup of coffee steaming by her side
and several big boxes lined up at the edge of the rug.
“I’m taking it on,” she said. “I don’t have to work
today, and so I thought I’d start digging into this mess. Want to
help?”
“Oh, not really. It’s such a funky, rainy day. It’s
put me in a bad mood.”
“Well, have a quick look anyway. Blake’s coming by
in a few minutes to take a few things.”
I got a cup of coffee and sat down beside her on
the floor, pulling open the flaps of the box closest to me. It was
full of books, children’s books. I pulled out The Little Engine
that Could, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and The Cat in the
Hat. They were worn from many readings, the cardboard corners
dented in places, the pages soft.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” my mother said, reaching
for Goodnight Moon. “I loved this one. So did you. I must
have read it out loud three hundred zillion times. Anyway, I
promised Blake this box of books, now that he’ll have a use for
them. I’m glad you told me, Lucy, even though it was awkward at
first. I mean, yes, Blake was a little upset, but I think he really
wanted to talk about it, too, and when he realized I was happy
about the whole thing, he relaxed. Really, I can’t wait,” she went
on. “People always say how thrilling it is to know you’re going to
be a grandparent, but I didn’t imagine it really would be. I’ve set
another box aside for them already, filled up with old toys.”
“What about me?” I meant to say it in a kidding
way, but even to my own ears I sounded a little shrill. Seeing my
mother so excited made Blake and Avery’s baby seem very real, and
although it was ridiculous, I felt left out, or left behind, the
sweep of life moving on while I kept doing the same things over
again in different places. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m in a lousy mood—I
didn’t sleep well. I guess I just mean that if I ever have a baby,
everything will be long gone.”
“Trust me—people will pass things on.” She looked
at me then, and added softly, “But if there’s anything special you
want to hold aside—you know, for some day—go ahead. Blake and Avery
won’t even notice.”
“It’s okay. Maybe that mobile Dad made when I was
born. I’d like to keep that.”
My mother nodded. “It’s already in a box in your
closet. I put it away—oh, a couple of years ago. And the trains he
made for Blake. I put those away, too.”
She reached into the box in front of her, pulling
out a handful of folders.
“So—you and Yoshi have any plans?” she asked,
trying to sound offhand and failing so miserably that I
laughed.
“New plans every day, it seems. But no. If you’re
talking about settling down and having children, no.”
She nodded and rested her hand briefly on my arm,
which irritated me because I was afraid she felt sorry for me.
“Just curious,” she said, pulling away.
“Need help with any of that?” I asked, glad to
change the subject, as she caught a slipping folder. “How’s your
arm feeling, by the way?”
“I’m fine. I saw the doctor yesterday. I’m healing
nicely, he says. If all goes well, I can get rid of this Aircast
next Wednesday, hooray. Oh, look at this, Lucy.”
She handed me a poem written carefully on wide
blue-lined paper, back when kids still practiced cursive writing.
I’d decorated the edges with dolphins and fish, waves and
seashells, even though I’d never been to the ocean.
“Guess my inclinations were clear even then.”
“Guess so.” She glanced at several files full of
business papers left from my father’s time at Dream Master and
chucked them into the recycle bin.
“Ah, report cards.” I gave her a stack of Blake’s,
and pulled one of mine out, from fourth grade. “ ‘Has strong
writing skills and loves science . Needs to work on sitting
still.’ That was Mrs. Blankenthorpe,” I said. “I remember her. We
used to call her Mrs. Battleship.”
“That’s terrible,” my mother said, though we were
both laughing.
We kept going, refilling our coffee cups one time,
then again. The porch roof was leaking, and every now and then my
mother went to check the bucket she’d put out to catch the drips. I
suggested that she could install rain barrels, and she
sighed.
“It must be hard to keep up with this place,” I
said when she came back from having dumped the half-full bucket
onto the lawn.
“It is.” She sat down again. “But I truly haven’t
decided what to do, Lucy. Art has his ideas, but they aren’t
necessarily my ideas.”
I didn’t answer; I didn’t want to argue again.
Despite what she said, it felt like an understanding had already
been reached, even if my mother hadn’t quite come to terms with it
yet.
By the time Blake stopped by the rain had eased,
but he was soaked from doing some caulking on the boat. We took a
break and ate some scrambled eggs along with more leftovers from
the party: tabbouleh and French bread, now a little stale, spinach
hummus on crackers. Then we went back to sorting out the boxes. The
phone rang; my mother reached into her pocket and smiled when she
saw the caller ID.
“Back in just a second,” she said, then went into
her room and closed the door.
Blake and I didn’t speak for a while, listening to
our mother’s murmuring voice. Tension, either from the party or
from my mistake in telling the news about the baby, was in the
room, invisible but real, limning everything.
Finally, Blake asked what I was doing with my day.
I told him I was going to visit Oliver Parrott and invited him to
come.
“Today?” He waved his hand, dismissive. “This may
surprise you, Sis, but some of us actually have to work.”
I decided to let it pass, not to mention the work
he seemed to be doing with Art and the developers. Because Blake
was doing his best, probably, doing what he thought would make a
good life for himself and for Avery and the baby in the midst of a
rotten economy.
“Well, sometime, then—you should go see this place.
Take Avery; it would be a nice drive. The stained glass is really
striking, even if there turns out to be no connection to Rose. And
I’m totally curious to know what Oliver Parrott thinks he’s
discovered.”
“He seems a little off to me, this guy—dedicating
his whole life to the study of another person, some dead
ancestor.”
“Well—it’s not the person he’s dedicated to. It’s
his legacy.”
“Same thing. It’s weird.”
“Well, it’s really no different than you and Art,
is it?” I asked, keeping my voice pleasant even as I lashed back.
“Doing everything you can to keep Dream Master alive.”
Blake didn’t answer. His jaw was set and he was
staring out the window at the lake. It took a few minutes for him
to speak.
“I’m just trying to make my way, Lucy—got a problem
with that?”
I let the silence gather, too, trying to figure out
why Blake was so upset, and why Oliver’s choices were explicable to
me while Blake’s were not.
“No,” I said, finally. “I don’t have a problem with
that. But it was strange—really disconcerting—to find out what
kinds of deals were being cooked up with this house and all the
land, all these plans you and Art and Joey are making, all those
conversations happening, and I had no idea. Not that it’s any of my
business.”
He gave a short, angry laugh. “It’s not. That’s the
thing, Lucy, it’s not your business, at all. You seem to think
we’re trying to pull a fast one, but we’re not. The deal would be
good for Mom, if she decides to take it. You haven’t exactly been
around to help, you know, these last years when she’s been rattling
around in this old house, trying to hold it together.”
“True.” I bit my tongue then. I didn’t say what I
so deeply wanted to say: I haven’t been going around in circles,
either, tethered to the past. But then Blake, encouraged
perhaps by my agreement, stepped things up.
“You know, Lucy, you’d do yourself a real favor if
you were more willing to embrace change, not resist it.”
“Are you talking to me about change?” I
asked. I put down the papers I was holding and stood up, barely
able to contain myself. “Do you have any idea how many places I’ve
lived in these past years, Blake? Two states, four countries, seven
different jobs. New cultures, new communities, new people, every
time. You think I can’t handle change?”
“Oh, I know all that. But this is different. This
is a different kind of change. A letting-go kind of change. Not a
running-around kind of change.”
Was it? Yes and no. I loved my life, but I also
thought about how I’d felt earlier, talking to my mother about our
old books and toys.
I was still standing face-to-face with Blake, so
angry I couldn’t speak immediately; I imagined taking the old swim
trophy from the table and hurling it across the room to smash
against the wall, I was that furious.
“That’s enough.”
We both turned, startled. My mother was standing in
the doorway, her cast held close to her chest, the phone in her
good hand.
“I’m just expressing some concerns,” I said.
“Right. So altruistic. Like I’m not,” Blake
countered.
“Stop it! You seem to forget, the two of you, that
you’re fighting over something you don’t control. I’m not an
imbecile, and I’m not behaving like a teenager, either, unlike the
two of you. I’ll keep my own counsel, thank you. And I will not
listen to this senseless bickering in my house. My house,
you understand?”
She stepped out of the doorway, strode across the
room, and sat down in the overstuffed chair where she used to read
to us as children.
“Now,” she said. “I’m going to continue sorting
these things. Blake, I’m sure Lucy would help you carry those boxes
out.”
Blake refused my help, but I walked out with him
anyway. I stood there in the mist, hands in the pockets of my
jeans, as he put the boxes of toys and books in the passenger side
of his truck and slammed the door. Blake didn’t get angry easily,
but when he did, it was hard for him to let it go. Maybe he would
have said the same about me. The times we’d seen each other over
these years, either here or meeting up in exotic places, we’d been
on our best behavior, not admitting any tension. Now we were being
our teenage selves.
“I don’t want to fight,” I said.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned the baby
to Mom. I asked you not to do that. Avery answered the phone and
you can imagine how she felt.”
“I’m sorry. It was after the solstice party and I’d
had a couple of glasses of wine, and it just slipped out.” All this
was true, but it was also true that I’d been angry in that moment,
as I was in this one, about Blake’s collusion with Art about the
land.
“Okay, then,” he said, finally. “All right. Truce,
okay? That stuff I said about change? I didn’t mean it.”
“I figured,” I said, stepping back to let him climb
into the cab.
“We’re good, then?”
“We’re okay.”
“Okay. Good.”
He waved as he backed out, and I waved back,
watching him drive away, his red truck disappearing into the
mist.
When I went back inside my mother stood up from
where she was sitting on the floor amid piles of paper. She
stretched and said she was tired of the dusty past. When I told her
what I was doing and asked if she’d like to come along, she
surprised me by agreeing. I went upstairs for my purse and my
papers, and by the time I came back down she had changed into dark
jeans and a crisp white blouse, the rhubarb scarf flowing around
her neck, silver earrings dangling. We popped open our umbrellas
and ran to the barn for the car. The rain made the Impala feel
cozy, heat pouring out of its vents.
“Did you and Blake patch things up?” she asked in
the middle of our conversation, halfway to Rochester.
“More or less. I still think it’s a mistake, the
way he’s attaching himself to Art, to Dream Master. It didn’t end
well the first time, and Blake can’t fix it now. Plus, I don’t care
what Art says, I can’t imagine that he’d share things he could give
to his children equally with anyone else.”
My mother sighed, looking out the window at the
rainy landscape. “I don’t know. There are forks in the road that
I’ve second-guessed for years. But I can’t do any of it over. We
made the best decision we could at the time. And even if you’re
right, Lucy, even if Blake is making a mistake, it’s his mistake to
make. I have to stay out of it. And honey, so do you.”
I didn’t answer, and we drove the rest of the way
in silence. It was still raining when we arrived at the Westrum
House. We huddled beneath our umbrellas under the dripping portico
as the bell sounded deep in the empty rooms. It was several minutes
before we heard footsteps; then Oliver fumbled with the keys for a
little while longer before the door finally swung open. If he was
surprised to find I wasn’t alone, he didn’t show it, but graciously
shook hands with us both. He stepped back, pulling the door wide
open, and ushered us inside.
The house was utterly still, even more silent than
it had been on my last visit, and our quiet footsteps—my mother’s
flats, my sandals—echoed. Stuart gave us a brief tour of the main
rooms and served us tea. Then we climbed the open stairs with
Oliver, lingering on the landing to take in the window of the woman
with her arms full of flowers.
“She looks like you, Lucy,” my mother said softly.
“Don’t you think? If your hair was different, pulled up like this,
she would look a great deal like you.”
“I suppose,” Oliver said, a bit reluctantly. “I
guess I can see the resemblance. But then, she might look a great
deal like a great many women, if they had their hair pulled back.
I’ll show you a picture of Beatrice when we come back down. He
loved her very dearly, and he used her image a few times after she
passed away, working from photographs. I have several photos of his
daughter, Annabeth, as well. She modeled for him frequently, and we
always imagined he’d used one of them for this window. I think
you’ll see the resemblance.”
Oliver turned then, and took us down a narrow
hallway to an interior room, windowless, with a projector set up in
the back. He explained that he’d been through the slide archives of
windows that were either owned by the Westrum Foundation and
currently in storage, or still privately owned but whose Westrum
provenance was sure and whose owners had agreed to have the windows
documented. We took our seats in the middle of the room like
students in a class, my mother folding her hands in her lap and me
jutting my feet out, crossed at the ankles. “Sit up,” my mother
admonished in a whisper, but I paid no attention.
The first image that came up on the screen was of
two very large doves with gray bodies and reddish-orange heads and
chests. They were facing each other; between them was a bush with
dark orange berries. The window in which they appeared was square;
a pattern of blocks in alternating colors ran around the
edge.
“This window is still in a house in Mount Vernon,
New York,” Oliver explained, his voice soft, the cone of light
illuminating the dust in the air. “It was custom-made for the house
in 1919, to commemorate the passenger pigeon, which had become
extinct. The owner of the house was a naturalist—indeed, he had
been a founding member of the Sierra Club before he moved east from
California—as well as a patron of the arts. In the 1800s passenger
pigeons were so profuse a flock would darken the sky like a storm,
but they were zealously overhunted and their habitats were
destroyed, and finally, in September 1914, the last one died in a
zoo in Cincinnati. This is quite a good replica, and the colors of
the glass are especially worth noting here. We hope to purchase
this someday—I would like to have it in the entrance—but the
current owners don’t want to part with it. Never mind—we will
persist.”
He clicked through several more pictures, pausing
to comment on a design feature or a point of history of each. His
knowledge of his great-grandfather and everything concerning him
seemed utterly inexhaustible. The room was warm, and the projector
made a quiet hum. My mother pressed back a yawn, and even though I
was fascinated and curious, I did, too.
“Let me hurry us along here,” Oliver said, as if he
sensed the way sleep was settling on the room. “What we want is
slide number eighty-nine. Numbers eighty-nine and ninety-seven,
actually. Those are the operative images, the reason I contacted
you, Lucy. I went through everything again after we last spoke,
because it was nagging at me so, once I saw the woman in the photo
you’d taken of the window Keegan Fall had found. Here we are.” He
stopped clicking through the images, which had rushed by in a blur
of shape and color, settling on a long, rectangular window.
The image of this woman was stylized. She was tall
and thin, and she gazed down at her cupped hands. Her auburn hair,
piled on top of her head, escaped in tendrils; her dress was deep
blue, falling to her ankles, with an empire waist. Her toes were
straight, and her hands and face, her arms and feet, were a pearly
opalescent white. She was looking down at three pale blue eggs in
her palms and her eyes seemed almost closed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The angle is so different,
it’s hard to say if she’s the same woman or not.”
“I have to agree,” my mother said. “She seems a
little bit generic. Maybe the similarities are in the artist’s
style?”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Oliver said, both excited and a
bit impatient. “In this one, I’m not looking so much at the face.
You’re right, it’s ambiguous, maybe yes, she’s the same one, maybe
no. But I think she is the same woman, and this is why: look at the
pendant she is wearing. Look at the bracelet on her left wrist.
They are the same.”
He was right. The pendant was oval, like the eggs,
a nugget of dark blue lapis lazuli resting against her pale chest.
The bracelet, too, was a deep vibrant blue, made of oval-shaped
beads strung together. I’d been concentrating so much on the face
and the flowers in the other windows that I hadn’t really paid
attention to the jewelry and couldn’t remember if it had appeared
in those or not. But Oliver knew. He clicked to the next slide,
which was of the woman in the stairwell. The bracelet was not
visible beneath the flowers in her arms, but the lapis lazuli
pendant clearly was.
“You see,” he said, and then clicked again to an
image of the Joseph window, which Keegan had sent at Oliver’s
request. Here, the woman was much smaller, but the resemblance of
her stance and facial shape and features to the women in the other
two windows was very strong, and Oliver was right—she wore the
lapis lazuli pendant, too.
“Now, one more,” Oliver went on, after giving us a
minute to absorb the image. “This last one is a very recent
acquisition, a couple of months ago. I found it at an auction,
actually, an estate sale right here in Rochester, just a few miles
away. The proximity of course makes me think that the owners must
have known Frank Westrum, at least professionally, but the
executrix of the estate didn’t seem to have any information. She’s
the niece or grandniece of the owner of the house, quite elderly
herself. I asked her to check, but she phoned a few days later to
say she had nothing that connected the window to Westrum—or to
anyone, for that matter. So, we are going on style.”
He clicked to the final image.
This window was large and, like the window in the
stairwell, featured the now familiar image of the woman. Here, she
stood on steps, one sandaled foot pointing down to the next stair.
She wore a tunic, caught tightly at the waist, fastened at one
shoulder and leaving the other one bare. She was looking at
something out of the frame, smiling, her hands lifted as if to
catch something falling from the sky—raindrops, or snow, or the
rays of the sun. She wore no pendant, but the dark blue bracelet
hung from her wrist. A tangle of vines and flowers climbed the side
of the window, scattering dark red petals and blossoms on the
stairs around her feet.
“Roses,” I said. “She’s walking on roses.”
“I suppose it could be,” Oliver said. “They might
be climbing roses, or maybe they’re clematis. Still, I concede
roses as a possibility. The trouble, though, is that there’s no
concrete evidence that Frank Westrum knew Rose Jarrett personally.
None whatsoever.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” my mother suggested. “Maybe she
just modeled for him.”
“Unlikely. He didn’t typically work with hired
models. He liked to work with people he already knew.”
I looked back at Oliver, who was studying the image
on the screen.
“You said you talked to the executrix of the
estate?”
“I did,” he said, shifting his gaze to me. “As I
said, I was quite specific about connections to Frank Westrum. I
took photos of his other windows to show her, but she had nothing
to share.”
“But I wonder if you asked her about Rose.”
Oliver ran one hand through his hair and shook his
head. “No, of course not. This was weeks ago. I didn’t even know
about Rose. But I really don’t think it would have mattered.”
“Well, I think it could. It’s a stone
unturned.”
“Well, by all means look into it, then,” he said
curtly, and moved on through the slides. He didn’t believe in Rose,
I could tell. That she’d existed, yes, but not that she’d mattered
at all to Frank Westrum or these windows.
I watched Oliver, whose hair was thinning, and who,
despite his careful and elegant attire, looked tired in the light
from the projector. Blake’s dismissal of his passionate interest in
the past did make me wonder, for the first time, why Oliver had
invested his whole life in preserving the reputation of his famous
ancestor. He was so deeply invested in the family history he’d
pieced together that he wouldn’t welcome any disruptions to his
vision of the world. He’d asked me here to learn something, I felt
sure of that, but I wasn’t sure what he wanted to know. Clearly, it
didn’t really have to do with Rose.
Oliver turned off the slide machine.
“There’s one more place I want to show you,” he
said. “If you have enough time?” When I nodded he said, “Good, I’m
glad. This is off the tour, of course. I seldom take anyone to
Frank’s studio, but I’d like you two to see it.”
Oliver led us down the stairs and through a narrow
hallway that opened onto the back porch, where he handed each of us
a compact umbrella. The path to the carriage house was made of
pebbles that shifted under our feet as we hurried through the
spitting rain. Oliver held his bright blue umbrella high, and the
wings of his bow tie, a dark gold, fluttered as he ran. We followed
him through wide doors, pausing in the empty open space that
smelled of dust and old leaves, the concrete floor cold beneath our
soles.
“It’s upstairs,” Oliver said, shaking the rain off
his umbrella and waiting for us to do the same. Then we climbed a
narrow flight of stairs to the studio. The space was wide open, one
large room without walls, flooded with light from the windows and a
central cupola. Even on this rainy day it was bright. Several
easels stood at one end of the space, and at the other was a kind
of sitting area with a cluster of winged chairs around a low table.
The center of the room was taken up by a grand workbench with
multitudinous narrow drawers. Oliver beckoned us over, and slid
some of the drawers open to reveal fragments and panes of brightly
colored glass and layers of translucent drafting paper.
“This is where he worked,” Oliver said. “He
designed this studio himself, renovating this old carriage house,
which didn’t burn in the fire, while the main house was being
built. This was in 1920. He was grief-stricken at the loss of
Beatrice, and I think he simply couldn’t stand to stay in New York
City once she was gone. You can see how organized he was,
everything arranged by year. It’s been an invaluable resource as
we’ve worked to reconstruct his creative process. Now, here’s what
I wanted especially to show you.” Oliver pulled open another of the
long, narrow drawers and took out a framed photograph of a woman.
She was tall, her hair hidden by a cloche hat with a flower over
the left ear. She was standing outside, turning to look back over
her shoulder, laughing, carefree and appealing.
“This is Annabeth Westrum, my grandmother,” Oliver
said. “It was taken in 1923, in the garden out front, beneath the
wisteria trellis, which had just been installed. Here’s another
one, a frontal view, taken on the same day. It was her wedding day.
She was twenty-six. You see the resemblance, I’m sure, to the women
in the windows. I have always felt quite certain that she was the
muse, as it were. The model.”
I studied the photos, Annabeth’s long face, her
laughing eyes gazing across the decades. I could see what Oliver
meant. In a very general way, she did resemble the figure in the
window; it was a natural conclusion to draw. Yet I wasn’t quite
convinced, nor did I really want to be. After a polite moment, I
handed the photos to my mother and wandered the perimeter of the
studio, pausing by the easels. Had Rose ever been here, standing in
the clear light while Frank Westrum sketched her? My mother and
Oliver were talking, their voices low and steady, first about the
photos, and then about the contents of the drawers. Oliver had gone
through those marked 1936 to 1938, the years when Frank would have
been working on the chapel windows, but he’d found no sketches, no
prototypes. Odd, Oliver said, it was very odd; all the other
commissions had a clear paper trail. Beautiful, my mother murmured
more than once, the papers rustling as she sifted through them. I
ran my hand along the frame of an easel, imagining Frank Westrum,
precise, contained, meticulous, standing here, his pencil flying
over the paper as he drew her.
“Lucy,” my mother called. “Look at these!”
She was standing over a pencil drawing of wild
irises with their narrow, swordlike leaves, their pendulant,
opulent blossoms. “Look, there’s a whole sheaf of them,” my mother
said. “Irises mostly, but also a couple of sketches of roses.”
Before I could speak, she turned to Oliver and added, “Rose had a
daughter, you know. A daughter named Iris. I think Frank Westrum
must have known her, don’t you?”
Oliver’s expression closed up a little bit, growing
inward, and thoughtful. I had the same plummeting feeling I’d had
after telling him about the windows in the first place. I’d hardly
had a chance to look at the sketches—fields of irises, banks of
them, a single iris in a vase—before he gathered them up again and
slid them back into the drawer labeled 1938. “Well, that’s very
interesting, I have to say. You hadn’t told me. Even when you saw
the window in the landing, you didn’t mention it.”
“Does it really matter?” I asked, because I could
see that it did, that the mention of Iris had triggered some memory
or piece of knowledge he didn’t want to share.
“Oh, probably not.”
He glanced at his watch and suggested that we spend
a few more minutes with the windows themselves before we had to
leave. I didn’t object, turning this new piece of the mosaic over
in my mind as Oliver hurried us down the stairs. It was clear to me
that Frank Westrum and Rose had been close, though the evidence was
only anecdotal, only a few sketches and a sheaf of irises in a
window.
At the open doors of the carriage house we paused.
The rain was pounding down outside, splashing in the puddles that
had begun to collect in the gravel.
“My umbrella,” I said. “I left it upstairs. I’ll
catch up in a second.”
I ran back upstairs—my umbrella was by the easel
where I’d left it when my mother called me over to see the
sketches. And though I hadn’t done this by design, I couldn’t help
myself—I went back to the worktable and pulled out the drawer
labeled 1938. There were nearly a dozen sketches, the penciled
lines smeared in places. He’d been playing with the contrast
between the sharp leaves and the lush flowers in drawing after
drawing. I didn’t dare to take them, and when I heard Oliver coming
up the stairs I slid the drawer shut again in a rush of panic and
left.
Back in the museum, Oliver was very attentive to my
mother, witty and charming, telling stories about the place the
Westrums had liked to vacation in the Thousand Islands. I walked
from window to window as they talked, half listening, looking for
any further evidence of Rose, wondering what Oliver was holding
back from us. It was physical, almost, my desire to know who she
was and how she had lived, what had ever happened to her and to her
daughter. From this point in time, almost a hundred years later,
the events of her life looked fixed, determined. And yet, in her
brief notes I had recognized a restless passion that seemed
familiar, mirroring my own seeking, my own questions. My
great-grandfather’s story had been long established by the time I
was born, and I’d never had the sense that he’d questioned his
choices or made a single mistake. Yet here was this ancestor,
hidden from view all these years, who seemed more like me. I was
more determined than ever to track down Rose—to know her story, to
understand how her story had helped to shape my own.
Before we left, Oliver gave me the contact
information for the executrix of the estate—her name, Joan Lowry,
as well as her address; he even gave me directions to the house
nearby where the estate auction had been—probably because he was so
sure I’d turn up nothing more than he had. He wrote the information
on an index card, holding the pen oddly with the tips of his
fingers, copying the address carefully from a Rolodex on the
credenza—no BlackBerry for Oliver—and handed it to me, asking in an
offhand way what day we planned to view the chapel.
“Wednesday at nine o’clock,” I replied, regretting
the words even as I spoke them, feeling I’d somehow walked into a
trap. Maybe this was why I’d been invited.
“Oh, good,” he said. “Keegan mentioned it would be
happening soon, but your Reverend Suzi hasn’t let me know when.
Maybe she didn’t get my messages. That’s fine, though, that date.
I’ll put it in the calendar right now. And I suppose I’ll see you
then.”
He held out his hand and I shook it.
My mother’s hand he kissed, saying that he’d been
enchanted, which made her laugh in a flustered way.
“He’s slippery,” I said as we opened our
umbrellas—it was raining hard again—and made our way down the wide
stone steps. “He probably arranged this whole meeting just to get
that information about the viewing.”
My mother slipped into the passenger seat.
“Sweetheart,” she said. “I don’t think so. You’re starting to sound
a little paranoid. I thought he was charming.”
She shut the door and I started the car, letting it
warm up for a moment, wiping away the condensation that had begun
to gather on the windshield.
“He was certainly charming to you. He likes you, I
think.”
My mother smiled, but didn’t reply.
“Anyway, I’m not paranoid. I’m suspicious. Wary.
There’s a difference.”
“Suspicious of what, though?” My mother looked up
from the damp pamphlet in her hands. “I mean, really, Lucy, what
difference does it make if Oliver Parrott ends up with these
windows? Maybe they belong here. After all, it is a museum. It’s
not like he’s selling them on the black market or grinding them
up.”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I opened the map and
searched for the address Oliver had given us. “I feel possessive
about Rose, I guess. It’s personal for me, probably in the same way
Frank Westrum is personal for Oliver. To find this woman, Rose, who
was part of the family story, but never included—well, it matters
to me, that’s all. She matters to me. Plus, I think Oliver
knows more than he’s revealing. Did you notice how he reacted when
you told him about Iris? I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“Why in the world not? I didn’t notice anything
strange at all. It was fine.”
“I don’t want him to know everything we know,” I
said. “I just don’t trust him, that’s all.”
“Oh, Lucy. That’s ridiculous. Well, I hope you can
find out what happened,” my mother said. “And I hope you aren’t
disappointed if you do.”
I gave her the map and the directions and she
navigated us through the city. We drove by a tall brick town house
just a few blocks away, where Oliver had found the windows. Then we
headed out of town. Joan Lowry’s retirement community was just off
the highway, in a modern three-story building with porches made of
dense plastic formed to resemble wood and windows with plastic
strips made to resemble panes. It was an assisted living unit,
where you lived in your own apartment as long as your health was
good, though the nursing home was right there, in another building,
should the need arise. It made logical sense, but I didn’t like to
think about it.
We found Joan in good spirits. She was in her own
apartment, and when the desk clerk called upstairs and explained
who we were, she said she’d be glad to see us right away. My mother
and I took the elevator up to the third floor and walked down a
hallway with wide wooden railings along each wall until we reached
number 354. Joan opened it almost before we’d finished knocking, a
slight woman with thick gray hair and stylish glasses. She was
dressed in blue polyester pants and a dark blue sweater, sturdy
shoes. Her apartment was small, painted a neutral beige, filled
with furniture she must have taken from her old house, a velvet
couch and a massive entertainment center across from it, a heavy
round table with carved legs, set for one. She made a pot of tea
and insisted that we sit on the sofa while she carried the pot and
cups to the coffee table on a wooden tray. I glanced around as she
poured, her hands shaking slightly. There were Scottish terriers
with red bows everywhere—in framed prints, stenciled onto the wall
in a border, in the fabric of the curtains, statues perched along
the windowsills.
“Aren’t they cute?” she asked wistfully when I
remarked on them. “I used to have a little Scottie. I always had
one, actually, but when the last one died I didn’t get another. No
pets in this place,” she explained, sitting across from us in a
wingback chair. “Though I do think Mr. Kitteredge down the hall is
hiding a cat.”
My mother and I sipped at our tea while she talked,
filling us in on the residential gossip. I was grateful to my
mother, who managed to keep the conversation focused. I saw why
Oliver had felt frustrated, and kept trying to steer her into
conversation about her aunt. Her great-aunt, it turned out.
“It must have been quite a task to settle the
estate,” I said. “We’ve been going through a few boxes at our own
house this morning, and I’m already exhausted.”
“Oh,” she said. “It nearly did me in, I can tell
you. There were boxes and boxes and more boxes of things—in the
attic, in the basement, in the extra rooms. She was a pack rat. All
sorts of memorabilia, everywhere. She never married, so there was
no one else to see to it all. And she had been so active, in so
many different things. Plaques from this and certificates from
that. Plus, I had all the stuff from her former housemate; all of
her boxes were in the attic, too.”
I put my cup down carefully on its saucer. “Did you
say she had a housemate?”
“Yes, from ages ago. She died a long time back. In
the 1940s, I think. But all her things were still there.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Oh, yes, her name was Rose. They were great
friends, apparently. Even at the end of her life, my aunt used to
speak of her. They were radicals together, you see. Free spirits,
thumbing their noses at convention, that sort of thing. My aunt was
something of a black sheep in the family,” she confided. “You know,
never marrying, having a career. In those days, it wasn’t the done
thing. She was making a statement, at least that’s how other people
felt. Really, though, she was just living her own life. She said
she liked me because I showed some spirit, and when I went to
college she sent me money for books every semester. We kept up a
correspondence.”
“She sounds remarkable.”
“Indeed, she was. She was a suffragette, you know,
and the first woman in this county to cast her vote in 1920. There
was an article about her in the newspaper.” She gave a wave of her
hand. “I saved it here somewhere.”
“I wonder,” I said, trying to sound more casual
than I felt, “what happened to all those things that belonged to
Rose?”
Joan pressed her hands together for a second.
“Well, let me see. I had the auction people come—they took the
stained-glass windows, for instance, that your Mr. Parrott was so
keenly interested in having. They took all the biggest furniture,
too. Then I had a great big garage sale. You know, pots and pans,
glassware. My neighbor Bobbie Jean helped me get it organized.
She’s good at that sort of thing, a little bossy, but she means
well. And after everything was gone, there were still boxes and
boxes of papers. Bobbie Jean took them all. She said she was
dropping them off at the Women’s Rights National Park in Seneca
Falls. Because you realize my aunt, Lydia Langhammer, was arrested
once and thrown in jail overnight. I remember how she used to like
to tell that story. It was something she and Rose had in common,
too. One of the reasons they were such good friends.”
I’d been letting the commentary wash over me,
listening for key words, and at this I interrupted.
“You mean Rose was arrested, too?”
“Well, yes. I think that’s what Aunt Lydia said.
More than once, as I recall. Aunt Lydia used to call Rose the fire
to her oil. Or maybe it was the oil to her fire. It’s terrible, you
never think to write these things down and then later they’re just
gone. Poof!”
I let my breathing slow, forced myself to be calm
as I asked the next question.
“I wonder—did they take those boxes full of papers?
The Women’s Rights National Park?”
“As far as I know, they did. Bobbie Jean didn’t say
otherwise. More tea?” she asked, as she saw me glance at my
mother.
“No, thanks so much.”
“I’m afraid we have to get going,” my mother
added.
“I wish you’d have more tea. I wish you’d stay a
little longer.”
“We’re already late. It was so nice of you to see
us, though.”
She walked us to the door, talking all the while,
and didn’t stop even when we’d stepped out into the hall. Finally,
I put my hand on her arm. She glanced down and paused in the stream
of words.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll let you know if we find
out anything.”
And before she could start talking again we were
striding down the hall. I took the steps two at a time, and burst
out into the cool, damp air. The rain had stopped and the sky,
though overcast, was lighter.
“She seems very lonely,” my mother said.
“I know,” I said, glad for my skin, my clear eyes,
but aware of how fleeting youth is. There had been a photo of Joan
as a young woman on the wall above the table; she’d once been just
as strong and agile as I was now.
We took the highway back, passing the signs for
Geneva, Seneca Falls, Waterloo, winding through the countryside on
local roads for the last few miles. There were deep puddles in the
gravel driveway, and rain dripped from the foliage, so dense around
the fence. The bucket on the porch was overflowing; inside, the
boxes waited, their contents strewn across the living room
floor.
“It’s this hour I don’t like,” my mother said.
“This, and when the wind is up, that’s the other time this house
seems like a hostile place.”
“You’d be happier somewhere smaller?”
“Absolutely,” she said, turning on the lights. “A
maintenance-free condo, that’s what I have in mind. It’s beautiful
here, but sometimes this house feels like my enemy.”
That night I lay awake for a long time, listening
to the steady rain on the roof, thinking over the events of the
day, so excited about the boxes at the Women’s Rights National
Historic Park that I couldn’t sleep, worried because I hadn’t heard
from Yoshi in two days, except for his brief e-mail. When I called
him, he was packing, heading for his flight, so we didn’t talk
long; he’d be in Jakarta by evening. I closed the phone and lay
awake in the darkness, remembering my argument with Blake, what
he’d said about change, wondering what it was I’d set in motion,
and whether I’d be glad, at the end, that I had.