by Kim Edwards
Fondly from your brother, Joseph.
I let the letter fall into my lap and stared out at the lake—smooth this early evening, and deep blue. This brief missive written by my great-grandfather was almost more astonishing to me than Rose’s longer letters had been. He had lived here, had worked on the cupola of this house, perhaps pausing to wipe sweat from his face and gaze out at the ever-changing lake, as I was doing now. His portrait hung over Arthur’s desk at Dream Master, and though Joseph Arthur Jarrett had died long before I was born, I’d grown up with that image of him as a middle-aged man, successful and certain, the master of all he surveyed, and I’d filled in the rest through imagination and story. The voice in this letter was as different from my image of the man as Rose’s story was from the family legends we’d grown up hearing. Kind, he seemed—there was the lock of hair—but also, by turns, terse and judgmental.
I folded the page back up and slipped it into the envelope with the lock of hair, remembering Rose’s first letter, where she’d talked about her daughter’s dandelion hair. The next letter was to Iris again, and I opened it to find several sheets of plain paper, tissue-thin, the ink once black but now fading to brown, the handwriting slanted, strong, and sure. It had no date, and on the later pages the color of the ink changed and grew lighter, then darkened again, as if the letter had been written over many days.
Dearest Iris,
I am at the station. People come and go. They did not meet me. I waited on the platform, but no one came. After a long time I found a bench and sat. The lobby is vast and grand and there is a clock in the center. I have an address but they are supposed to meet me and I do not know what to do. I must not weep. I must look calm no matter how I feel. So—I will write.
It is late. The station is cold and I keep my coat on.
I think of you warm and safe beneath the blanket. I hope Mrs. Elliot has given it to Cora and that you sleep beneath it, warm and comforted. I wove it all last winter, in the cold attic at night. Across the street, Mrs. Elliot’s lights were often on late. They gave me company. Mrs. Elliot is a suffragette and not afraid to say anything. While she is in the room the other ladies are always quiet, but when she is not some of them whisper that she is too extreme. Cora threw away the pamphlets Mrs. Elliot left, but I took them from the trash. I took them up to our room and read them. They made me feel on fire with ideas. After that I tried to stay in the room when Mrs. Elliot was talking, keeping my expression calm even though I wanted to jump up and agree. I think the ladies who came to tea are safe, so they did not understand. They are safe so the world seems safe to them. But to me the world is different and her words were like lamps.
An hour has passed. I am tired, but I must keep writing, that is one way to be safe. When I put my pen down earlier, a man sat beside me and invited me with a wink to share his bed. He shrugged at my outrage.
I am not so desperate.
Not yet, at least.
Oh, I did not set out to be a scandal. To be so alone in a place I do not know.
It is near midnight. I hold myself still. I dozed a little and dreamed of your father disappearing into the bell tower, gone, a silver ghost, and me climbing up and up forever.
He kissed me in the ruins and that moment became like a dream woven into my other dreams, things I yearned for but could never have. I was haunted by his laughter, too. For what he said was true: I could wash and mend the altar cloths or make dinners for the rector or the bishop, but no matter how much I loved the church or God I could not carry the communion wine or bless it or serve it to the people. No woman could. Not even Mrs. Wyndham in her silks. The more I thought about this, the angrier I got. Anger ate a great space in my heart. If the rules of the church made me less—less human—then maybe the rules did not apply to me. I was foolish, I know that now. The rules always belong to those who make them. I was foolish, and so young. I worked, scrubbing or mending, my skin growing brown in the fields. I worked, and in my anger I remembered that kiss. It was like flowers opening and it made me confused. Sometimes I shaded my eyes to watch his automobile flashing through the trees.
On the night of the comet I was fifteen. Our windows were sealed and we were frightened and the air was very still. Everyone was sleeping, but I could not. A sliver of light came in beneath the wool, where I’d left it loose. After a long time I got out of bed and I felt my way in the darkness to the window. When I opened it clean air rushed in, full of the scents of water and the earth.
I crawled out onto the roof to see the comet, soaring like a jewel against the sky, trailing light. Voices rose up and I knew them: Joseph, and another. I hesitated. My hair was loose. I was wearing an old dress I had pulled on, and no shoes. And then I jumped. When he saw me in the garden Joseph’s voice turned low with anger.
“You can’t come, Rose. Go back to bed”.
“I want to see the comet”.
“You weren’t asked”.
“Never mind”, Geoffrey said. He was by the hedgerow. I’d heard his voice, but I didn’t see him until he spoke. He was carrying a brass telescope. “Let her come, if she wants. At least there will be three in this village who haven’t succumbed to mass hysteria”.
Succumbed. I remembered the word. All these years. I looked it up in Mrs. Elliot’s dictionary. To bring down. To bring low.
Joseph didn’t answer. He could not, since Geoffrey was a Wyndham. But he walked ahead of me, by Geoffrey’s side. He pretended I wasn’t even there.
I think all my life I will remember that night, and the light. It was a new moon, so the sky should have been dark. Instead, the dirt road, the roofs, the trees, all glimmered faintly, as if frosted. From the roof of the church tower we found the comet, its head like the tip of a pencil and pure white, like an eraser in the darkness. The tail spreading out like tresses of hair.
Geoffrey opened his telescope. We took turns looking. The village slept below. An excitement ran through me.
The same sky, I thought when it was my turn and I found the comet in the glass. Here or India or America, it didn’t matter. The same moon and the same stars, and on this night the same wild light on everything. I felt as if the world were turning and must change. No more sewing, no plucking warm eggs from beneath the chickens, no walls built up against my deepest yearnings. I could study and travel and have adventures and be a priest or anything I wanted, I could give voice to the truest aspects of my nature.
I do not know how long we stood under the spell of the strange light, watching the comet, before birds began to sing in the still-dark trees.
Geoffrey folded up the telescope and looked at Joseph. “You go on”, he said. “You go on, Joey. I’ll see her home”.
“I’ll wait”, Joseph said.
“No need”, Geoffrey replied, his voice reserved, dismissive.
The Wyndhams owned the land. They owned our cottage. Joseph stood for a long moment, his eyes as dark as the sky, before he punched the wall and started down the stairs.
I could not speak. I was as powerless as Joseph. Also, I was full of anger and desire. I was like the bird that senses a cat amid the leaves but can’t resist the brightness of the flowers. We started down the stairs, around and then around again, and at first I thought it would be all right, that we would reach the bottom and he’d see me home beneath this comet sky, as he had promised.
But at the landing he caught my arm and pulled me into the bell room with its long windows.
That first time he never touched me, only asked me to stand in that faint light, so he could look at me, he said. Step out of that old dress, he said, I only want to look, and after a long time of hesitating, tears in my eyes, I did. That time he kept his promise, walking around me and whispering oh, my beauty, and he never touched me. My fingers were shaking when I dressed.
When I stepped out of the tower, the shapes of things were starting to come out from the darkness. Joseph was waiting. We never spoke, walking home.
I did not seek him out, but he found me that wh
ole summer long. In a clearing, by a stream, in the dusty barn at the end of the lane. Oh, my beauty, I’ll marry you one day. He said this each time. I believed him. I understood nothing, I see that now. I told myself I was the princess in a fairy tale, helped from a silver carriage, unfastening my hair in the tower, even though it hurt my heart to do it. Later, when Mrs. Elliot talked about the rights of women, my face would burn at how little I had cared for myself and what might happen to my one and only life. But I was very young, and I had no power, and I believed this was a fate I could not question.
My phone rang, startling me so much that the papers slipped from my fingers to the floor. I had to dig through my bag for it, and by the time I found it the ringing had stopped. Yoshi—it was Monday morning there, early, so he must have arrived, it must be before his first day of meetings. I pulled up the number and pressed REDIAL, standing up to stretch and pace in the little room. The lake was as smooth as glass, a silver gray.
“Hey,” I said when Yoshi picked up on the second ring. “Where are you?”
“On my hotel balcony. Overlooking a river of traffic. Where are you?”
“In the cupola at the top of the house, watching boats on the lake. I found her letters, Yoshi. Rose’s letters. I’m in the middle of reading them now.”
“Are they good?”
“They’re amazing. Very moving. I don’t know the whole story yet. I wish you were here,” I added, though in fact I was riveted by the letters and had hardly been thinking of him at all.
“Why can’t I just be there?” he agreed. “Why can’t I be there and not here, watching the boats and floating on the water with you?”
“It’s just a few more days. How’s everything?”
“Not looking forward to the meetings. Otherwise, okay. Look, I have to go, but I’ve got a break in three hours. Can you give me a call? We can Skype, and I’ll fill you in on what’s happening.”
“Good,” I said, “that sounds great. About noon your time, I’ll call.”
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You sound a little off.”
“Just distracted,” I said. “It’s the letters. That’s all.”
When I hung up I saw that Zoe had left me three messages, but I was so eager to get back to the letters that I tossed the phone into my bag without calling her and picked up the fallen pages from the dusty floor. I scanned the last paragraphs I’d already read—the comet night, when the whole world changed, the way he’d pursued her all summer long, the way she’d blamed herself although she’d had no real choice—and came to the place where I’d stopped.
It ended when he went on holiday. I stood in the fields as the Silver Ghost passed by. My friends, weeding, said I was pale. They made me sit down to rest, they brought me clusters of red grapes. So sweet, they stained my fingers. The blood of grapes, I kept thinking, those verses from Isaiah, that cry against injustice. The blood of grapes.
It was Joseph I finally told. The Wyndhams had returned by then. Grim, he went up to the manor house.
I waited outside. I waited for Geoffrey. I’d been inside the manor house just once, the ceilings so tall and the furniture all beautiful, and the servants scrubbing floors or making food and serving it on silver trays. Soon I would know how it was to live there, to drink lemonade or chocolate all day long.
I was so young. I see that now. Yet he had promised to marry me. I felt so sure that I could hardly understand what Joseph was saying when he came out alone, an envelope in his hand, talking about the new life we would have, both of us. How we could travel to America and start again. How no one would ever have to know. We would help each other—a whole new life.
He had piles of money. Passage to America. I touched it, then pulled away.
“But he said he’d marry me”.
“Don’t be daft. Be glad he gave this money to start your life again”.
“Start my life again?”
“A new beginning, yes”.
I remembered the silver auto flashing in the trees, and the scattered stones of the ruins, and the comet.
“But he said he would marry me. He promised”.
“I went to him like a beggar”, Joseph said. “You might at least be grateful”.
And then I remembered. In the plaster wall behind his bed, Joseph had hidden the few coins he’d gathered, saving for his dream. I’d seen him pull them out, holding them like small silver moons in his palm. I’d seen his longing.
“So. Now you have your dream”, I said.
He was silent for a long time.
“You can’t go to America alone”, he said at last.
“I don’t want to go to America at all”.
Maybe it was in this moment, as my words drifted off into the dusk, that I came to understand how small I was. The manor house across the fields was like a great ship, and somewhere inside, in a beautiful room full of light, Geoffrey was laughing, shaking loose his napkin and sitting down to have his dinner.
“I’ll go to him myself”, I said. “I’ll go right now. I’ll walk right up the front steps, and I’ll wait until he sees me”.
Joseph’s next words were low and hard, like rocks.
“He said he doesn’t even know you, Rose. That’s what he’ll say again”.
“He gave you the money, didn’t he? That’s proof, I’d say”.
Joseph caught my arms and made me look straight at him then.
“Who would believe you? Your word against his?”
“It’s true!”
“It doesn’t matter”.
“You’d lose your chance if I spoke out”.
“Yes, I would. But Rose, don’t you see? So would you”.
And so I followed him home.
I went about my days in a kind of disbelief, watching myself scrub and sew as if I were outside my own body. I did not see your father again. We heard he had gone to India. They prayed for him in church.
The night before we left I slipped from the house and walked through the vineyards and then the orchards. The shadows in the moonlight wove patterns on my skin. It was October, chilly, and leaves crunched beneath my feet. At the top of the hill I turned to look back. The manor house stood at the edge of the village, faintly outlined, distant and impassive.
I could unlock the oak door to the church just as well as Joseph. The metal whispers a language of its own. The rows of pews fell away into the shadows and the high, arched windows caught a faint light. I had polished every pew and swept every corner, and my stitches were woven into the white cloths on the altar. I sat down in the velvet-covered bishop’s chair. Always before I had sensed something beyond the familiar in this place, something silent and just out of sight but present, welling up. But that night I was so heartsick I could feel nothing else.
I stayed a long time. Slowly, more light came into the church. The stained-glass windows began to come alive. The silver chalice and plate, set out for communion, were visible, like faraway planets, two silver circles, small and large. I had prepared the altar often enough to know what they said on the bottom: “A Gift from the Wyndham Family”. I stood and picked up the chalice. It was heavy in my hands. I ran my fingers lightly across the letters, scratches in the silver. Passage to leave he had given me, yes, but nothing else, and nothing for our child, for you. The silver rim of the chalice caught the faint light. It would be nothing to them, I told myself, to replace one cup. And so I added one more mistake to those I had already made. I slipped the cup beneath my apron, and I walked out the door.
This letter ended abruptly, with no signature, no drawing. I sat back on the window seat. I’d been so engrossed that I hadn’t noticed the dwindling light, but the sun had begun to dip behind the opposite shore and there was a faint coolness in the air. I gathered up my papers and carried them down to my room, where I spread them out on the painted floor—Rose’s letters in one pile, Joseph’s in another, the photocopied documents and the pile of papers from the cupola in the third.
I was so moved by Rose’s lette
r that I read it again rather than starting another, imaging her waiting on the dusk-covered lawn outside the grand house while the negotiations that would determine her life went on without her; imagining her loneliness in the church, and the chalice heavy in her hand. It made me think of the days right after my father died when I’d felt the same lost way. I was remembering the window in Keegan’s studio, too, the Joseph window, which had a chalice hidden in the sack of grain, and the crowd full of unnamed women, trying to puzzle out how it connected to the letters Rose had written. I’d looked up the story about Joseph and the coat of colors out of curiosity. He was tossed into a pit because his siblings were jealous of him. He ended up in Egypt, in exile, interpreting dreams. When a famine came, the brothers who had thrown him into the pit came to ask for food, not knowing who he was. He gave them grain, but he also tricked them by having the cup he used for divination hidden in their sacks; when they came back to return the cup, he accused them of theft. Interested, I’d also read Grail stories, and the bones of both narratives seemed very close—disharmony, a land in famine, a quest for healing, and a silver cup or bowl.
Maybe that window was personal, I realized, thinking of Rose sent into an exile of her own, starting a new life in a strange country, exiled again by some sort of scandal, forced to leave her daughter. Maybe that’s why it had never been installed. I couldn’t know exactly where she saw herself in this story or what, if anything, she had meant to say by choosing it. Maybe it was just the image of the chalice she had liked. I wondered what had happened to the one she’d taken. I wondered what had happened to Rose.
I opened the next letter, dated April 11, 1938. It was from Frank Westrum.
My darling Rose,
The windows progress so beautifully, and my only regret is that you are not here to see them. Dearest, I think they would please you. I have taken all your suggestions about the passages to illuminate, and I have made the border and many of the windows exactly according to your design. Nelia visited yesterday and gave her enthusiastic approval of all we have done. Indeed, she called it a masterpiece. Well, I do not think so. But it has given me great pleasure. First the pleasure of working by your side, all the moments we have shared together all these years somehow woven into this final venture, so close to both our hearts. But there is the pleasure of the glass, too, the days in the glassworks blowing and shaping the sheets, the careful cutting and piecing together. Your templates are quite handsome, Rose, the windows, too. I will come to you on the 30th unless you are well enough to come home. Meanwhile, I send all my love.
