by Kim Edwards
“I don’t know,” I said, finally. All the energy seemed to have drained from the room now, but maybe it was just jet lag. “I don’t know what I meant. It’s just—you know, a lot of changes, very, very fast.”
She nodded, but didn’t speak right away. “Not so fast,” she said, finally. “Not really, Lucy. But it must seem fast to you. I get that.”
I almost told her then how it might have changed everything if I’d gone fishing that night, how we’d be in a completely different place if I had. But she was happy now, that was the thing, maybe as happy as I’d ever seen her. In this moment, at this time, she was happy.
“All right. Who knows—maybe selling the land, even to Art, would be okay. I mean, Blake and Avery can’t raise a baby on a boat.”
She turned and looked at me hard. “What did you say?”
I closed my eyes for a second and swore silently to myself.
“Look, I wasn’t supposed to say anything. But that’s why Blake took the job. And that’s why Avery didn’t even sip the comet wine.”
“Oh, you’re right. Oh, my! It makes sense. But I didn’t realize—”
“Don’t tell him you know, okay? He’ll be upset. I promised him. And he promised Avery. She’s looking forward to making some sort of formal announcement.”
“I’m the grandmother-to-be. They won’t care that I know. I’m sure they won’t.”
She paused and pressed her hands against her face, her silver rings flashing. She shook her head once, let her hands fall.
“Oh, it’s very exciting, isn’t it? What a shock. Though now that I know, I guess it makes perfect sense. You’re right,” she added. “They absolutely cannot raise a baby on a boat. Where’s my phone?”
“Oh, please. Don’t tell him I told you.”
“I won’t. I’ll say I guessed. You’re right, she didn’t drink. When’s she due?”
“October, I think.”
My mother was already punching numbers into her cell, and didn’t seem to notice when I left the room and climbed the stairs.
I lay awake for a long time, the events of the evening running through my mind, before I finally fell asleep. Later that night a thunderstorm came in, and in my restless sleep I dreamed another dream like the one on my first night here, the urgent seeking of round things hidden beneath the leaves in the forest. But this time I found them, beautiful spherelike shapes tucked beneath leaves, as delicate as rain but made from glass, so beautiful it was painful to look at them, filled as I was with yearning. When I picked them up they turned liquid in my hands and fell to the earth, and rolled away in tiny beads, and I crawled after them, my heart breaking to think of all that beauty lost. I gathered all the fragments together and sat on the forest floor, trying to put them back together, to mend them with glue, to fasten them with metal rods, but time and again they melted at my touch, and disappeared.
Chapter 8
I WOKE UP EARLY, TO A GRAY DAWN, RAIN COMING DOWN SO hard and the clouds so low that it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the lake began. The rain had knocked the balloons from the trees, and the paper lanterns we’d strung by the patio sagged, heavy with water. I went downstairs, the residue of my dream lingering, all beauty and loss, and made a cup of tea, moving as quietly as I could. My mother was sleeping in; she didn’t have to be at work until ten, and it was something of a relief not to see her after our argument the night before. Some of the food from the party was still out on the counter, so I snacked on Brie and crackers and took a cluster of grapes when I went upstairs. I closed the door to my room and sat cross-legged at the head of the bed, sipping at the orange pekoe while I gazed out the window, the rainy lake mist-covered, the grass dark green, drenched, and flattened. Yoshi had promised to be home by seven, and it was five minutes before that. I dialed into Skype and he answered right away, his face filling up the screen.
“I brought home some noodles,” he said. “I’m here in the kitchen. Do you mind if I eat while we talk? I’m starved.”
“From that place down the street?” I asked. It was a small shop, paneled in light wood, with stools pulled up to the counter where they served big bowls brimming with noodles and broth. Yoshi and I liked to go there on weekends.
“Yes. I got your favorite, curried noodles,” he said, lifting the spoon to show me before he ate a mouthful. “Too bad for you that you’re so far away.”
“I have my own pleasures,” I said, holding up the grapes. “You forget it’s early in the morning here. It’s not at all a curry time of day. So, how are you?”
“Not so great, in fact,” he said. “Sorry I couldn’t talk earlier, but the office was a little tense when you called.”
“What happened?”
“It’s the Indonesia project. There were those objections from the people in the village, you remember that? They don’t want the site destroyed, because they think it’s sacred. So, we spent the last week drawing up a set of alternate plans that would let the bridge go around the site. Win-win, right?”
“Sounds that way to me,” I said.
“Hang on just a second,” he said, and disappeared. I thought of all the times I’d been warned not to go out at dusk in Indonesia—a transition time, when it was easy to lose your spirit or suffer some sort of danger. It had always made sense to me, illogical though it was, and it made more sense now that I was in this other kind of transition, drifting between the past and the present, between the life I’d been living and whatever sort of life was to come, a time when I sometimes felt I might lose myself entirely.
Yoshi was on the screen again; he’d gotten a bottle of sake. “Right, exactly: win-win. That’s what the engineers all thought. Completely good solution. But the manager disagreed. It would add too dramatically to the cost; and they already own the rights to the land in question anyway, so they don’t have to compromise.”
“You were vetoed.”
“Yes. And worse—I argued.”
“Ah. I see.” There were any number of expats in Yoshi’s company, so it was more flexible than many, but with his looks and heritage and fluent Japanese, Yoshi was expected to walk a different walk. It seemed to me that he overcompensated, staying longer at the office and going out drinking with his business clients more often than anyone else, trying to offset moments like this, when the differences in his training and philosophy broke through. “It’s not a big deal, though, is it? I mean, they’re not going to fire you.”
I was half joking, but Yoshi didn’t smile.
“No. At least, I hope not. It’s just very quiet around me right now. The fact is, when they hired me they expected my experience in Indonesia to be helpful to them, but they didn’t expect me to advocate for the Indonesians. So now I’ve been assigned a partner when we go to Jakarta next week.”
“Really? A chaperone?”
“Something like that. I’m not too happy. So, no, it’s not a big deal in some ways. But to be honest, I’ve been giving some thought to quitting.”
“Quitting? Really?” I laughed, but in fact it filled me with a rush of panic to imagine us both adrift in the world.
“Some thought, yes. Not real serious thought, mind you. Just the late-night thinking after a bad day.”
“If you quit, we’d both be unemployed,” I observed.
Yoshi must have heard the flare of panic in my voice, because he smiled into the computer, across ten thousand miles. “I’m just frustrated, that’s all. Let’s change the subject. What’s been happening with you? Is it pouring? I’ve been checking your weather.”
“It is.” I glanced out the window. The sky was beginning to lighten at the horizon, a pearly gray-white line above the green, and I hoped it would clear. “I’ve been making fascinating discoveries about my ancestors,” I said, and told him about the windows I’d discovered and the trip I planned to Rochester to visit the Westrum House. Yoshi was interested, though he was having a hard time following all the various relationships.
“She’s your great-grandmothe
r, this Rose?”
“No. My great-grandfather’s sister. I guess that would make her my great-great-aunt? We never heard about her. I think there was a scandal.”
“Sure you want to know?”
I considered this because it echoed so clearly my own apprehension, my initial sense that the past might have been covered up for very good reasons. “You know, I really do. I’m not sure I can explain exactly why. Just that it feels like an important piece is missing from my family. I mean, if the scandal had to do with Rose being a suffrage leader, then that’s remarkable. We could use some more heroic women in the family.” As I said this I thought of my own struggles all these decades later, pale in comparison and yet real enough, especially for a woman in science. Times when I’d been interrupted in the middle of a presentation, or given all the paperwork to finish, a kind of corporate housekeeping, or had been excluded in a routine way from important conversations outside of work.
We talked for a little longer about his travel plans, and then Yoshi said he had to go. There were reports he had to look over before he could relax. He took a long drink, looking tired, I thought, sapped.
“You should get some sleep.”
“I will. Once these reports are done, I’m going to crash in front of the TV. Mrs. Fujimoro asked after you, by the way. She noticed you were gone.”
I remembered the press of her hand, the earth trembling beneath our feet.
“How is she? How are the earthquakes?”
“There was a biggish one yesterday. When I came home the bookcase had fallen over, and the rest of the plants in the kitchen.”
“I can’t say I miss the earthquakes,” I said. “I miss you, though.” And I did, thinking of the long June dusks there, the walks we’d take sometimes in the evening, by the sea.
“I wish you were here,” Yoshi said, his voice wistful.
“Soon,” I said. “Love you.”
“Likewise,” he said, and before I could give him a hard time about his lack of romantic impulses, he’d switched off Skype, and the screen went dark.
Downstairs, I had a quick breakfast with my mother, then drove her into town. We were a little formal with each other, guarded. She said Blake had seemed glad to talk about the baby, though he’d asked her to keep it quiet because Avery had been planning to announce it more formally.
“Does he know I told you?” I asked as I dropped her off at the bank.
She winced a little. “Well, maybe. I didn’t say so, but maybe he guessed. He seemed a little taken aback at first that I already knew. But Lucy, I really don’t think it will be a problem.”
I watched her hurry up the steps in the rain, clenching a plastic coat around her to protect her cast.
From there I drove to Rochester, first on local roads, winding through the countryside, cows grazing in the fields like black-and-white clouds, the new corn trembling in the steady rain. Route 20 connects the northern tips of all the lakes, roughly following the route of the old Erie Canal. It travels through the nineteenth-century towns strung like beads along the tips of the lakes, so beautiful and faded, having grown and prospered a hundred years ago when the streets were unpaved and full of horses, barges floating down the canal and stopping at these ports to load crates of glass or garments, pumps or rope, fresh from the assembly lines. Now, with so many factories closed and so many businesses having left, the towns were stately but worn, some thriving with tourists, some with their windows empty or boarded up or given over to transitory businesses that offered fast cash advances against payday. Their outskirts trailed on for miles, full of strip malls and fast-food chains.
The Westrum House didn’t open until two o’clock, so I stopped to visit the Sonnenberg Gardens in Canandaigua, and I had lunch there, too. Then I got on the highway into Rochester and found my way downtown. The Frank Westrum House was tucked away on a street full of tall brick homes, hidden by a row of overgrown forsythia bushes. The path was made of flagstones leading past the bushes and through a garden full of nooks and alcoves, hidden benches, and wisteria trailing from trellises. The house was immediately distinct, two stories, built in a style reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, with lots of horizontal lines and windows everywhere. It was so quiet that I worried that despite the hours posted on the Web site the house wouldn’t actually be open. Yet when I finally walked up to the entrance—a portico, really, with several long beams extending over the stoop—a little sign with red cursive letters said OPEN. I stepped into the hall, called out, “Hello.” My voice echoed.
Newspaper articles, framed and hung along the wall, documented the history of the house, and I studied these as I waited. The neighborhood had been built in 1873, and the brick houses along the street dated from that time. However, there had been a fire on this site in 1910, one house kindling another and both fires raging most of a night, burning the houses to their shells. No one died in these fires, but the families lost everything. The lots sat empty until Frank Westrum bought them in 1920 and began building this house, which had taken him the better part of a decade to complete due to scarce funds. The final framed article talked about the restoration of the house in the 1960s, when it was purchased from private owners and the search for the glass art of Frank Westrum to fill it had begun.
There were distant footsteps, hurrying, and then a tall man clad in khakis and a white shirt stepped into the hallway. He had short, wavy flaming-red hair that made me think of the fires that had burned here, and his skin was pale, freckled. His name tag said STUART MINTER in thick block letters. Stuart was about my age, and he gave a nervous smile as he approached, speaking so quickly he was almost hard to follow.
“Hello and welcome, sorry to make you wait. It’s usually a pretty quiet time of day, so I wasn’t really expecting—well, sorry, as I said. Did you come to take the walking tour?”
“Yes, I would like to do the tour,” I said. “But I have some questions for you first.” I told him about the windows I’d seen in The Lake of Dreams, each with their distinctive rows of moons and densely woven vines and flowers along the bottom.
“Here’s the motif. Does it look familiar at all?” I asked, bringing the digital image up on my phone. “It’s a little hard to see. But the church had documentation—an original receipt—that indicated Frank Westrum made these windows on commission in 1938.”
Stuart Minter took the phone and studied the image. “No,” he said, finally. “We have nothing like that here, nor have I ever seen that motif in the Westrum archives. I’d remember it, I’m quite sure. It’s unusual, isn’t it? But even with this image—it’s very fuzzy—I can see trademarks of Westrum’s work in the window. Look, there’s this distinctive pattern of leading. You can just barely make it out, but if you look closely you can see how the pieces of stained glass come together here and there in a kind of flower shape. You’ll see this again as you take the tour, as well. That pattern is in every Westrum window, something of a signature, as the audio guide points out.”
“That’s very interesting,” I said, making a mental note to mention this detail to Keegan. “Is there any way to trace how Frank Westrum came to make these particular windows on commission? Do you have those records here?”
He bit his lip lightly, thinking. “I don’t know, but the archives are pretty extensive. I’ll check while you’re looking around, if you want.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“Not a problem.” He smiled. “It’s rather exciting, isn’t? Something unexpected to liven up the day, anyway.”
Stuart gave me an iPod with the audio tour, along with a map of the Westrum House and its exhibits, then disappeared back down the same corridor he’d emerged from, marked STAFF ONLY, his footsteps fading. The house was not large, but it was open, empty of furniture and with extensive windows against which the art glass of Frank Westrum hung, casting colorful patterns on the opposing walls, the ceilings, and the floors. I started the audio and walked from piece to piece, through bands of light and color, learning about Wes
trum’s life, his childhood, his brief but significant apprenticeship with John La Farge, his equally significant break with his mentor, his marriage and two children, the death of his wife, and his move upstate. Clearly, from his windows, Frank Westrum had entertained a passion for water; the stained-glass scenes were full of its calm sheen or swirling currents or white-tipped waves. He’d liked vines, too, which tended to climb the long sides of glass panes he’d made to flank doors, and he liked flowers of all kinds. Much of his work was architectural, transoms or narrow panels to be inset above picture windows. In the middle of his career, he had experimented with geometric shapes as well, a counterpoint to the lush and intricately patterned scenes of his early work. In a series of square windows he had worked with green and blue and the white glass shaped into diamonds and triangles, arrowhead points.
There was something very calming about his work. In part it was the effect of the room itself, its white walls and vast windows everywhere. But it was also the glass art, with its radiant colors, its images of earth and leaves and water, the human figures in their flowing clothes, the geometric patterns with their soothing continuity and order.
The audio tour took me through the four downstairs rooms, and then instructed me to return to the foyer and travel down a short hallway. I did this, still glancing at the pamphlet, but I stopped, transfixed, when I reached the base of the stairway. Its open risers backed to a wall of glass; there was light everywhere. An enormous stained-glass window hung in the landing, radiant gold and green, purple and vermilion, pale blue and dark amber. It depicted a woman walking on a path of bluish-gray pebbles in a garden, holding a sheaf of many-colored long-stemmed flowers in her arms. Her hair was loose, falling to her shoulders in a dark cascade. Her simple dress was a golden green, falling to her toes, tightly belted at the waist in a darker green. Her feet were bare, her eyes cast toward the flowers, and her arms, her face, were done in a soft white glass that made her seem to glow, like the flowers in my mother’s old moon garden. I noted the flowered leading pattern that Stuart had mentioned in the lower left corner, and again in the edge of her sleeve. However, what held me still was her stance, the way she stood half-turned, gazing outward as if she recognized someone beyond the frame. Her face was familiar, too, rather long, her downcast eyes large, dark blue. I got my camera out and scrolled quickly through the saved images until I reached the one I’d taken of the Joseph window. Yes, one woman stood out amid the others, turned just this way, her face the same shape, though the image was much smaller, of course. Cupping my hand over the screen to darken it, I glanced from the phone to the stairwell with a growing sureness and excitement. Yes, I felt certain—these two images, in two very different scenes, had used the same woman as a model.
