by Kim Edwards
“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 featu
res 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 knowle
dge 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.
