by Kim Edwards
Frank
Here it was—proof. She had known him, and she had designed the borders and been integral in the design of the windows. It was such an intimate letter, too, so warm, and it made me feel sure they had been lovers. I wondered how Oliver would react to this news. He’d need to see this letter sometime, though the thought of it made me uneasy. I suspected he wouldn’t like this upheaval in all the careful histories he’d written. For myself, I was glad to know that Rose, stranded in the train station, had somehow ended up all right.
The next letter was on the same thick paper as the very first one I’d read of Joseph’s, and in his handwriting. It was postmarked March 24, 1915.
Dear Rose,
We were up on the barn roof yesterday. A bright windy day. We were putting on new shingles and almost done. Jesse fell. I heard him shout and then he hit the ground. The barn is high and he landed on his back. We don’t know what it will mean but tonight he cannot move.
Your brother Joseph
And then the next, written on the same sort of paper, more than two months later:
25 May 1915
Dear Rose,
I am sorry to tell you that our cousin died yesterday. He has not been right since the fall. The pain is over for him, anyway. Cora does not want people in the house, so hold your visit to a better time. I am sending a picture Iris drew of the flowers in the garden.
Joseph
I checked the envelope again, but there was no drawing inside. Maybe Rose had hung it in whatever place she lived once she finally left the train station.
I heard a car in the driveway and got up to look out the window. It was a slow summer twilight, the shoreline glimmering with tiny lights in the violet dusk. Andy’s headlights flashed white against the worn side of the barn, and my mother got out. After a few minutes she came upstairs and stood in the doorway, holding a bag of take-out food in her good hand.
“I can’t wait to ditch this cast,” she said. “Hungry?”
“Starved.”
She sat down on the floor and spread out the containers, handed me a plate.
“We’re not allowed to eat in the bedrooms,” I reminded her.
She smiled, scooting back so that she could lean against the wall, reaching for the closest box of food. The scent of cashew chicken filled the room.
“I’m mellowing out,” she said. “Getting positively decadent. Most nights I don’t even bother to cook. I’ve lost my interest in it, I guess. Andy knew about this place,” she added, nodding at the food. “We had lunch there earlier this week. It’s good. So we stopped to pick up some takeout.”
“He seems nice,” I said finally, which sounded lame, and too little too late.
“He is. He’s very nice.” Her voice was a little reserved. “You know, I don’t need you to approve, you or your brother. It’s making me a little crazy. You’d both be up in arms if I poked around in your life this much.”
I wondered what Blake had said about Andy, but, chastened, decided not to ask. “So, what did you find?” my mother said after a minute. “Looks like treasure.”
“It is treasure. These are all letters by or to Rose Jarrett. A couple of them are from her brother, the illustrious Joseph Arthur Jarrett. I found them in the Lafayette Historical Society. The boxes that Joan Lowry donated ended up there. They were closing early, so I slipped this binder into my bag.”
“Lucy! You stole them?”
“No, not really. I borrowed them. Though actually, it feels like they belong to us. Or to Iris,” I added, thinking of the lock of hair. “They feel like her letters, actually. Could she even still be alive?”
“I suppose it’s possible. She’d be quite old. Well into her nineties.” My mother put a container down, her chopsticks balanced precisely across the center, and took the letters I handed her, reading through them quickly, shaking her head. “These are amazing to read,” she said, letting the pages fall into her lap.
“Aren’t they? I’ve been captivated for hours.”
She ran her fingers quickly through her short hair. “Are there more?”
“Just one. At least that I have here. There may be more in the last box I didn’t get to see.” I pulled the final letter from the binder, a simple square white envelope, addressed to Iris, dated October 12, 1914, written on lined yellow paper. I read it out loud.
Dearest Iris,
I am here now. I am safe. An attic room, pale yellow wallpaper with a pattern in green. The floor is dark gray. I have a white pitcher and basin, and a narrow bed with a plain white cover. I don’t need more.
They never came for me. I had the address, I asked directions. It did not sound far but it was. Three miles they said, take a carriage they said, but I walked. The satchel was so heavy. I thought my fingers might fall off. Still, I preferred walking to arriving. I stood a long time on the stoop to gather my courage, checking the address again and again. At last I rang the bell.
Her name is Vivian and she is Mrs. Elliot’s sister. She was still talking to someone behind her as she opened the door, laughing, her face turning serious when she saw me. Her skin is pale but not freckled, her hair is the color of oak, creamy brown with a reddish cast and traces of gray, pulled carefully back in a bun. She wore a skirt over softly draping trousers, but otherwise she does not resemble Mrs. Elliot at all.
I handed her the letter.
Her eyes widened. “But you’re a day early! And so pale! Come in, come in!”
So I am here. This house is like no other house. It is very simple, almost bare, with little furniture and no rugs. There are paintings on every wall. And books, too, everywhere. She took me into the kitchen. A man and a woman, Hubert and Jane, were sorting papers. She had me sit and bustled around. Hubert offered me a drink and Jane said nonsense, she’s just a girl, and Vivian said she’s more than a girl, she left her child, give her a drink if she wants it, and put a plate of beef and little egg sandwiches and a glass of warm milk in front of me. I tried to eat it slowly, but could not. They watched me with kind eyes. When I was finished she showed me up to this room. Then I slept all around the clock.
This house has little furniture but it is always full of people. They come and go, there are meetings and suppers and passionate discussions. Some of them do not even knock, they just walk in. And the things they say—Mrs. Elliot is mild in comparison.
The dinners are full of talk and I sit quietly. They are interested in the story of how I came to be here. So I tell them how I used to stand in the hallway when Mrs. Elliot came over and began to talk about the rights of women and the great march she attended in Washington. How I began to slip over to her house when she held her meetings. Cora warned me not to go, but I went anyway. I kept it as quiet as I could. Already my position was in danger; they had not known about you when they agreed I could come. They were sorry for me because they believe I am a widow.
On the day Mrs. Elliot led marchers through The Lake of Dreams, I was working in the garden. The singing came first. Then the women, so many women, maybe three hundred. Their singing voices swelled the air. I put down the garden clippers. I pulled off my gloves, finger by finger. You were upstairs, sleeping. Cora was on the porch and she called a warning, but in that moment I felt such excitement, I did not care. I stepped down the walk and through the gate and I joined them, marching. I sang.
We marched all the way into town, to the park. There was a big table and several women handing out flyers about the right to vote, and other flyers, too, a page I’d seen before and saved. “What Every Girl Should Know”. But this time it was blank below the headline, and stamped with black letters at the top saying “NOTHING! Outlawed by the Post Office”. I was standing by the table listening to the speeches when an officer came up and took me by the arm and put me into handcuffs. I was very scared. But Mrs. Elliot was arrested, too, and a dozen other women. We spent all night long sitting on the hard benches in the jail, telling stories and singing. They fed us nothing and gave us water in the morning, and
by noon the tempers of all of us had begun to fray. That was when we decided we would not be powerless. They brought lunch and we refused to eat it! Dinner, too, we sent away untouched. We declared a hunger strike, and this was reported in the papers.
Joseph came to visit me. He brought food but he was angry. He said I should be reasonable and understand my loyalties. If not to myself, to you. I told him that I was in jail so you might have a better life one day, and then he got a little less gruff, because he loves you, and he said you were safe and well with Cora, even though she was furious with me. So I felt a little better.
Our hunger strike lasted three days. When we were released we hugged one another and spilled out into our separate lives. I walked back to the house, eager to gather you in my arms.
But when I got there, the door was locked. No one answered when I rang the bell and pounded.
I tried the back door, too. I tried the windows and the cellar door, all locked.
They had gone. I did not know where. They had taken you with them.
I did not know what to do. I sat on the porch, too hungry and too hurt to weep.
Mrs. Elliot took me in. Cora and Jesse refused to have me back, they said I was a disgrace and no longer welcome.
So I have come all this way to live with strangers. Mrs. Elliot said I would find work in the city and could save enough money to bring you here, but when I told this to Vivian she shook her head in clear amazement and said her sister was a hopeless romantic and what did she think, there were jobs hanging from the trees?
She asked what I could do and I told her that I sewed. This was the work I did all winter for Cora, her best velvets and silks, while you played at my feet. Some days I staggered out of the room so tired from bending over little stitches that my head felt stuffed with cotton, my eyes burned. But it was better work than scrubbing floors or doing laundry, and you were with me.
“And they paid you how much?”
“They fed us”.
She sat back in her chair and swept her hand through the air in disgust.
“I’m very good”.
She sighed. “Yes. I’m sure you have the finest stitches”.
I flushed, because then I knew she was mocking me, but I did not know why.
“I don’t know”, I told her, speaking slowly. “I had the finest stitches in my village, yes. But it was a small village”.
She glanced at me again, her eyes faintly kinder. “Don’t pay attention. It’s just—so many arrive, every day. I see them streaming off these ships with their suitcases, and then I see them later, spilling out of the factories that take them in when they can find no other work. Take them in and wear them out. I see them when they are ill. I am a nurse. So I have become cynical, I fear. Trust me—you do not wish to work in a factory”.
“Do you like your work?” I asked.
She considered this. “No. I like bringing comfort to people when that’s possible, though often it is not. I earn my own money, and that brings me freedom, which I do like”. She looked at me then. “Have you any nursing experience?” I said I did not.
“I felt free on the boat”, I said, remembering the trip we made across the ocean.
She nodded. “Oh, yes. On a boat you are no place at all”. She was quiet for a moment. “But now you are here, and we must decide what to do”.
Downstairs, they come and go, talk and argue, voices lapping at my door. Sometimes I join them. Other times I stay alone in my room and sleep, or read, or write. I do not know what will become of me.
“Let me see,” my mother said. I handed her the pages and sifted through the papers from the cupola until I found the page Rose had mentioned in her letter, the page that had launched my search, the brittle paper with the dense text discussing basic human physiology, and the scrap of paper that had been folded inside it where Rose had written her startled and impassioned thoughts. Such a simple article, such straightforward facts; I wondered if Cora had ever read these pamphlets, or if she’d been too shocked. Rose had fished some of them from the eggshells and coffee grounds; perhaps they’d been left behind when she went so hastily to New York City, or perhaps Cora had found them only after the move from town to this house on the lake, and had shoved them in the space beneath the window seat—out of sight, out of mind.
We sat up for a few more hours, my mother and I, going through the letters and the papers, trying to sort out the chronology and fill in the gaps. After my mother went to bed, I stayed up even longer, writing down names and dates on index cards and putting them into little piles. I lay down on my stomach on the bed with my chin in my hands, the facts swirling in my mind. I closed my eyes, thinking I would not sleep, just rest.
In my dream that night I took Rose’s journey, stepping from a train into an unfamiliar city. I walked, stopping at houses all along the way, but the doors were locked, or the people who lived there did not recognize me and had no idea who I was. Panic was a steady thrum beneath all my actions. I put my suitcase down and it was gone. I walked until I came to a park. It was spring, new leaves on the trees, and a crowd had gathered, held back by waist-high metal barriers. I was trying to see something, we all were, but no matter how I craned my neck or shifted my position, nothing was visible beyond the heads of the crowd. A woman next to me asked my name. I told her, and she expressed surprise. I have something for you, she said, reaching into her purse. Something I’ve been holding for a long, long time. You must have lost it. She pulled out a wallet and handed it to me. Inside I found my ID cards, all my identification. I’ve been looking for these forever, I said. Where did you find them? Here, she said. Right here, in the museum. I looked up then and saw that’s where we were, that the walls were filled with paintings and the windows with stained glass, and as I watched, the figures in the windows began to emerge, beautiful, luminous men and women stepping into the room. I walked from place to place slowly, because everything, and all the people, were so very fragile. Before I reached the door, I woke up.
I sat up, rubbing my neck, the unease of my dream flowering into the still morning. Letters and papers were scattered all over the floor. The lights were still on. Then I remembered: I’d promised Yoshi that I’d call last night, and I’d forgotten all about it.
It was evening there, and he answered right away when I called him on Skype, his face appearing on the screen with an expression both concerned and annoyed. He was out of sorts to begin with—one of his flights had been canceled, and he’d had to reschedule his whole trip. When he didn’t hear from me he’d gotten worried, and his concern came out as anger. We argued, me sitting on my childhood bed, Yoshi in a hotel in Jakarta, ten thousand miles away.
“Maybe I just shouldn’t come,” he said, finally. “If it’s just going to be like this.”
“No. No, please come, Yoshi. I want you to come.”
“It feels strange, Lucy. Like you’ve been gone longer than a week.”
Had it been only a week? I counted back—yes, but so much had happened that it felt much longer. “When you get here it won’t feel that way,” I said.
“What’s so important that you forgot to call?”
“Nothing,” I said, glancing at the cards splayed all over the floor. “Just more news about my family history. I’ll tell you all about it when you get here.”
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look terrible.”
“Do I?” I looked at all the papers scattered across the floor, covered with dates and facts. I wondered if I’d changed in this short time, if Yoshi would even know me anymore. “I just woke up,” I explained. “I fell asleep in the middle of all this research. It was a long day yesterday, I guess.”
“Well, it was long for me, too. I was worried when I couldn’t reach you. What research are you talking about?”
I explained then about Rose and Iris and the letters, but I was still groggy and the story sounded both confused and boring, too full of detail.
“Anyway,” I ended. “How are the meetings going?�
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“Okay. We go out to the site tomorrow.”
“It will be interesting to see the sacred places,” I said, thinking of the chapel and the ancient burial sites on the depot land.
“I don’t know if interesting is the word I’d use,” Yoshi said. “I have a feeling this is going to be confrontational, though probably in a very passive-aggressive way. I have a feeling we won’t get much accomplished.”
“Maybe that’s okay.”
“Not if I get fired.”
“Are you really worried about that?”
“Not really,” he said, but I could tell that he was. “Look, I have to get some dinner, and I need to get some sleep.”
“At least you’re on your way to a vacation, once it’s all done.”
“We’ll have to see, Lucy.” Yoshi sounded tense, but I wasn’t sure; it might have been my own scattered feelings I was projecting. “This might turn out to be a bad time for me to leave, job-wise.”
“But you already have your tickets.”
“I know. Look, let’s just wait and see how it goes.”
“All right,” I said. Everything seemed so fragile now, after the dream, and I didn’t want to argue with Yoshi. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten to call him, so lost in the mysteries of the past that I’d neglected what was happening all around me. “Let me know, okay? I’m planning that you’ll be here, unless I hear otherwise.”
