Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  One day a few weeks before the wedding, Andrew paid an unexpected visit on his way from Philadelphia to a new job in Detroit. Agnes was pleased to see her old friend, though the sight of him brought tears to her eyes as she remembered happier times when they were carefree students in Philadelphia. He walked with a new limp caused by the wound he had suffered trying to rescue Richard, and although he treated Agnes the same as always, he coldly shunned Harold. Agnes did not ask why; something in the steely gaze Andrew fixed upon his former brother-in-arms warned her that she did not want to know what had passed between them in the war.

  That evening after supper, Andrew spoke privately with Sylvia in the library. Agnes was passing in the hall when the door banged open and Sylvia stormed out, furious, tears streaking her face. Andrew had followed her as far as the library door. His face, too, was wet from tears.

  “What happened?” Agnes asked him. As soon as the words left her lips, she felt a flash of panic. She did not want to know.

  But Andrew had already taken her hand. “Agnes, there’s something you don’t know about the way Richard and James died.” He hesitated. “You should know the truth.”

  But Agnes tore her hand from his grasp and begged him to say no more. What did it matter how Richard had died? All that mattered was that he was never coming back to her. That was burden enough. She could not bear to add to it the picture of her husband’s last moments—the explosion, Richard bleeding, limbs torn off or blasted away, screams of agony ripping from his throat. She imagined too much without hearing Andrew’s story.

  Andrew left the next day, but before he departed, Agnes never once observed him take Claudia aside to tell her the horrific tale of the men’s deaths as he had told Sylvia, as he had tried to tell her. Agnes vowed to absent herself whenever Sylvia chose to tell her sister what Andrew had said. Then, a few days before the wedding, a terrible argument erupted between the two sisters, worse than any Agnes had witnessed. Sylvia stormed from the house carrying two suitcases, and although Claudia assured Agnes she would return, Agnes knew with bleak certainty that she would never see Sylvia again.

  Claudia and Harold married, although moments before walking down the aisle, Claudia had confessed to Agnes that she was not sure if she should go through with it. Even so, the couple seemed happy, so Agnes dismissed Claudia’s last-minute nerves as perfectly understandable given the circumstances. Perhaps the couple was too happy. They threw lavish parties nearly every week, spending money as if to make up for all the deprivations of the war years, as if by laughing and dancing they could undo all the pain they had suffered. Agnes looked on in dismay as Harold and Claudia neglected Bergstrom Thoroughbreds, selling off horses for a fraction of their value to raise cash, which they spent as quickly as they earned it. Agnes had learned something of financial matters from her father and tried to steer the newlyweds down a more prudent course, but they laughed off her concerns. Fearful that they would lose everything, Agnes secretly invested money in stocks and bonds, but she knew the dividends could not possibly keep up with the Middens’ spendthrift ways.

  As Claudia and Harold’s first year of marriage passed, Agnes began to detect a new tension between them, an undercurrent of hostility and accusation in Claudia’s tone when she spoke to her husband, a sullen defensiveness in Harold’s replies. Once, inexplicably, Claudia asked Agnes if Andrew had told her how Richard and James had died.

  “No, he didn’t,” she said, trembling from a sudden chill of fear. “I wouldn’t let him.”

  “Of course.” Claudia gave a mirthless laugh. “Well, if it were true, if it were important, he would have insisted on telling you, right?”

  Agnes could not reply, not without risking that Claudia might blurt out what she knew.

  As the family business failed and the money ran out, Claudia and Harold’s marriage gradually, inexorably disintegrated. The empty halls of Elm Creek Manor echoed with their mutual antipathy. Agnes had never felt more alone. She longed for her family, for her friends back in Philadelphia, and, most of all, for the love of her heart, Richard. She even missed Sylvia, who had never accepted her, never liked her. Only Sylvia could forestall the complete loss of the Bergstrom family legacy. Agnes prayed for the strength to preserve what she could until Sylvia came home.

  Agnes never thought to pick up a needle again after her failed first attempt, but in desperate need of something to fill the empty hours, she asked Claudia to continue her quilting lessons. Agnes had read a newspaper article about a woman who had made memorial quilts for her two sons killed on the beaches of Normandy, and she asked Claudia to help her create such a quilt for Sylvia.

  “She may never see it,” Claudia replied.

  Agnes would not acknowledge that possibility. “Of course she will. We should try to finish it before she returns. Think of what it would mean to her.”

  The memorial quilt would be a peace offering, she thought. It was an act of hope when all hope had fled. If they made a quilt for Sylvia, they must believe that she would one day wrap it around herself in a warm embrace of reconciliation and forgiveness. Agnes had to believe that or she could not get through the days.

  Eventually Agnes won Claudia’s consent, and together the sisters-in-law searched James’s closet for shirts and trousers and ties they knew Sylvia would recognize. From the cloth they cut diamonds and triangles and squares and sewed them into the pattern whose name conveyed all that the founders of Elm Creek Manor had wanted their descendants to find within its walls: safety, sanctuary, family, home.

  “Castle Wall,” Claudia murmured as she taught Agnes the pattern. Claudia had chosen it for its symbolism and not because it was an easy block for a beginner to master. But Agnes was determined to learn, and although at first she picked out almost as many seams as she put in, eventually her hands grew accustomed to the motions of the running stitch, to finger-pressing seams, to setting in pieces, to squaring up blocks that were not quite true. As they sewed, Claudia shared stories of the Bergstrom family, wistful tales of the mother-in-law Agnes had never met, stories from Richard’s childhood that alternately made her smile and wrenched her heart. But even as the quilting lessons brought Agnes and Claudia closer in their shared mourning, the crevasse between Claudia and Harold widened.

  Despite Agnes’s efforts, the Middens steadily drained their resources throughout the second, miserable year of their marriage. All too soon the stable was empty, the last remaining stable hands sent away. Agnes begged Harold and Claudia to make some provision for the future, but the couple only brooded and offered vague assurances that things would work out somehow. Frustrated and desperate, Agnes sold off antique furniture chosen at random from the unoccupied rooms, refusing to wonder about their sentimental value to the Bergstrom family.

  On one of her all-too-frequent visits to the Waterford antique shop, Agnes met Joe, a history professor at Waterford College who occasionally appraised items for the store’s owner. One day, curious how she found so many remarkable pieces, he invited her to lunch. Agnes had been so long without a confidante that the whole unhappy story spilled from her. With almost unbearable kindness, Joe offered to put her in touch with colleagues in New York who would secure higher profits for her than she could obtain in Waterford. Overwhelmed with gratitude, Agnes threw her arms around him, and he laughed in surprise and held her.

  Agnes again turned to Joe for help when Claudia and Harold began selling off Bergstrom land. Agnes fought for every acre, but each time a tract came up for auction, Claudia and Harold reminded her that they had no other source of income. “Sell one last parcel and invest the cash,” she begged them. “Live off the dividends. Economize.”

  They ignored her.

  Agnes knew she had to act or there would be nothing left of Richard’s beloved childhood home. Joe helped her find a savvy lawyer who managed to put most of the estate in Sylvia’s name. As long as Sylvia lived, no one but she could sell those protected acres. Thwarted, but unaware that Agnes was responsible for the obstructio
n, the Middens brought their lavish spending to an abrupt halt—and began to lash out at each other with renewed fury. Perhaps because in her misery she wanted others to suffer, too, Claudia blindsided Agnes with Andrew’s secret, that Harold had been responsible for Richard’s and James’s deaths.

  Agnes knew Andrew never could have invented such a nightmarish tale. At last she understood why Sylvia had left, and she desperately wished to follow. As Claudia’s marriage crumbled under the strain of grief and guilty secrets, Claudia withdrew into solitary bitterness. She abandoned the memorial quilt just as she had surely abandoned all hope of happiness. Agnes pretended she had not learned enough to continue on her own, but Claudia was unmoved. “Leave it, then,” she muttered. “Put the blocks in the scrap bag and let someone else worry about it.”

  But Agnes knew there would be no one else. Alone in the west sitting room that had once been the Bergstrom women’s favorite place to quilt together, Agnes sewed the blocks into rows and joined the rows into a top. She found a quilt frame in the ballroom and, drawing upon memories of Sylvia’s quilting, she layered top, batting, and backing and set herself to the task. With no one to teach her the rocking, fluid stitches she had seen the Bergstrom women make, Agnes invented her own method, stabbing the needle through the top of the quilt with one hand, grasping the tip with her other hand as it emerged on the underside, stabbing it back up through to the top. The repetitive task was her only solace—that, and occasional trips to Waterford to meet Joe.

  When Joe asked her to marry him, she hardly dared believe that a lifeline had been thrown to her and she had caught it. Joe’s profession of love and promise of fidelity was the only glimmer of hope she had seen in three years.

  He was too good a man for Agnes to deceive him. She had to tell him the truth of her heart, though it might make him pull the lifeline from her grasp. “I care for you, very much,” she told him, tears falling freely, “but I will never love you the way I loved Richard. I’m sorry.”

  Joe looked pained, but he managed a crooked smile. “That’s all right. I know you like me, and that’s a start. You never know. I might grow on you.”

  And he did. Oh, how he did. She married Joe, and not a day went by that she didn’t thank God for bringing him into her life. She did indeed come to love him with all her heart, and she knew Richard did not begrudge her the happiness she and Joe shared.

  The next two quilts Agnes sewed were made in joyful anticipation of the births of her two daughters. When they were a little older, she joined the Waterford Quilt Guild and forged enduring friendships with lovely women who never could have imagined her privileged childhood in Philadelphia or her heartbreak as a young war widow. Those friendships and the love of her daughters and grandchildren sustained her years later when her loving husband of more than thirty-five years passed on.

  When she thought of Richard—and she did, from time to time—she remembered him in Philadelphia, where they had met, where they had been so happy together. Her memories rarely placed him within the gray stone walls of Elm Creek Manor, where she had longed for him and mourned. She assumed she would never return to the Bergstrom estate, for she and Claudia had parted on bad terms and her former sister-in-law had lived out her years in bitterness. But although Agnes’s ties to the Bergstrom family had stretched transparently thin, they yet remained, and Claudia’s newspaper obituary struck her with all the force of new, raw grief. At the sparsely attended funeral, Agnes overheard a woman whisper to a friend that it was curious that Claudia had asked to be buried in the Bergstrom family plot in the small cemetery on Church Street, rather than in the larger, new cemetery on the outskirts of town, where she had laid her husband to rest. Agnes, who had seen anger and hatred divide the couple in life, was not surprised that Claudia wanted to remain apart from her husband in death.

  Then, one late autumn day, she heard a rumor that Sylvia had returned to Elm Creek Manor. Only Agnes’s closest quilting friends and her daughters knew of her unhappy years in the manor and of Sylvia’s dislike for her, but every scrap of news about the long-lost Bergstrom heir eventually found its way to Agnes, and the rumor was soon confirmed. Sylvia had been spotted at the market buying groceries. She had met with Claudia’s banker for an hour behind closed doors. She had gone to lunch with an agent from University Realtors. When Sylvia began selling her quilts on commission through Bonnie’s quilt shop, Agnes resigned herself to their eventual meeting but hoped, at last, to be able to sate her curiosity. Where had Sylvia been all those long years? Was she all right? Did she have a family—a husband, children, grandchildren? And were the rumors true? Did she intend to sell Elm Creek Manor?

  That summer, a newcomer to town, Sarah McClure, brought about the reunion Agnes had simultaneously longed for and dreaded. When Agnes met Sylvia in the newly restored north gardens after fifty years apart, she scarcely recognized her sister-in-law. Sylvia was as tall and slender as ever, but her lush waves of chestnut hair had gone silver-gray and were blunt cut a few inches below her chin. The girlish softness of her features had fled, and time and worry had etched feathery lines around her eyes and mouth. A pair of glasses dangled from a silver chain around her neck, but as she slipped them on and spoke, all the years fell away and the same determined, domineering Sylvia stood before her.

  Never in her wildest imaginings would Agnes have thought that the path of life she followed would circle around and bring her back to Elm Creek Manor. And yet there she stood in the garden welcoming Sylvia home and offering her friendship, for they were the only ones left who remembered those long-ago days, and there was no longer any reason for enmity between them. In truth, there never had been.

  In the days that followed, Agnes joined Sylvia, Sarah, and their other friends in an ambitious venture: the founding of Elm Creek Quilts. As the new Elm Creek Quilters worked to transform the manor into a quilters’ retreat, the formerly estranged women shared histories and confidences about their time apart. Upon her return to the manor, Sylvia had discovered the Castle Wall memorial quilt sagging unfinished in the quilt frame, and as the bonds of friendship that had failed to form in their younger days at last were forged, Sylvia and Agnes finished the quilt together.

  “Your quilting skills have come a long way since we last sewed together,” Sylvia remarked as they fashioned a hanging sleeve from leftover backing fabric. Her words implied more than they said, evoking Agnes’s first imperfect efforts, her unwise choice to follow Claudia’s advice instead of Sylvia’s, and the tragedy that had ended the lessons.

  “So have yours,” replied Agnes saucily, so that Sylvia would know she was not the same guileless girl Richard had brought home so many years before.

  The finished Castle Wall quilt hung in the library, to one side of the fireplace on the north wall. Sometimes Agnes caught Sylvia gazing upon it, lost in thought, and she would slip her arm around her sister-in-law’s waist and stand with her, so that she would know she was not alone.

  Agnes came to the manor nearly every day on Elm Creek Quilts business or to visit with Sylvia, and at last she could say she felt at home there. But to live there once more? She loved her own little house—where she had lived so contentedly with Joe and where they had raised their daughters—too much to leave it, even for a place as grand as Elm Creek Manor.

  She was sure Gwen, Bonnie, and Anna had reasons of their own.

  “Moving every Elm Creek Quilter into the manor isn’t the answer,” said Agnes. “Sometimes people living under the same roof communicate least of all.”

  “It would solvesome of our problems,” Diane insisted, sipping from her mug.

  Agnes thought of Bonnie’s perpetual tardiness and Gwen’s inexplicable absence from the party, and she could not disagree.

  Anna remained behind in the kitchen while the others went to the foyer, where they found Sarah and Summer arranging the registration tables while Gretchen unfolded chairs. Sylvia and Gwen sat on the bottom step of the oak staircase, Sylvia’s arm around Gwen’s slumped shoulde
rs. Agnes knew then that Gwen had arrived too late to bid Judy good-bye.

  “The moving van had already left.” Gwen’s face contorted in disbelief as she told them what had happened. “As soon as I hung up the phone with Agnes, I ran all the way to her house, but they were gone.”

  “Did you call Judy’s cell?” asked Jeremy.

  Gwen spread her hands and shook her head. “No.” The gesture conveyed helplessness, as if saying farewell by phone was beside the point.

  “Sometimes saying a last good-bye is simply too painful to bear,” Sylvia consoled her. “Judy understands.”

  “I don’t,” Gwen shot back. “How could I have forgotten her party? When I saw my car parked on Main Street, why didn’t I remember why I had driven to the library? Something must be seriously wrong with me.”

  “I’ve been saying that for years,” Diane remarked.

  “Diane,” Agnes admonished gently, then she joined Gwen and Sylvia on the step. “You’re right, Gwen. No one simply forgets a farewell party. You either didn’t want to come, or you couldn’t. Perhaps even you don’t know for certain. It’s possible that Judy’s leave-taking was so difficult for you to think about that you grew accustomed to putting it out of your mind. In the end it doesn’t matter. A true friend would forgive you, whatever the reason.”

  “I hope Judy thinks so,” Gwen muttered. Abruptly she rose and began helping Gretchen set up chairs next to the registration tables.

  Agnes and Sylvia exchanged a knowing look. The hurt would pass, the friendship heal. They understood better than their younger friends that this misunderstanding was only one slender thread in the fabric of their friendship. The whole would not unravel even if that one brittle thread snapped under the strain.