by Kim Edwards
“Okay.”
“Okay, then. Hope your meetings go well.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll call you soon.” And then he was gone.
Chapter 13
THE REVEREND SUZI WELLS WALKED UP THE GRASSY SLOPE to the chapel, which stood alone in a field, a small red stone building with windows that resembled keyholes, four on each side. She led an odd procession: Keegan followed her, dressed in jeans and work boots and a T-shirt with a small tear at the shoulder. Next came Oliver Parrott in his black bespoke suit and polished leather shoes, stepping gingerly through the long grass as if he might somehow avoid the dew. A bald reporter from The Lake of Dreams Gazette walked by Oliver’s side, a little recorder clipped to his black leather jacket, asking questions about Frank Westrum, which Oliver answered effusively, in great detail. Suzi had contacted the Gazette, maybe hoping for publicity for the church, perhaps as a smart preemptive action to keep Oliver and his acquisitions committee at bay, but Oliver was losing no time in telling the story of his illustrious ancestor and his museum. Behind these two came Zoe, in cutoff shorts and flip-flops and a tank top, a canvas bag over her shoulder, bouncing against her hip. She’d called again, wanting to see if I’d drive her to the mall, and I’d told her about my plans, never imagining she’d want to come. But now here she was, plunging through the tall weeds, pausing to brush away insects or remove grass that had stuck between her toes, tossing back excited comments on the day, the weather, the adventure of entering this church, which had stood empty for so long.
She didn’t seem to expect me to answer any of this, which was good, because I was still preoccupied, as I had been for the past two days, caught in the secret history Rose had written, consumed with wondering what had happened to her next. It was frustrating, of course, that the historical society was closed, but it had given me time to read Rose’s letters again and again, to think about her life as I kayaked and swam and floated on the raft. Her longing to become a priest, her conflicted feelings when Geoffrey Wyndham’s attention—unsought, unwelcome—fell upon her, all the ways she had been powerless to choose her life—her story was poignant, and moving, and unsettling. I wished I could march into the past and set things right. And I wondered, also, what her story had meant to my great-grandfather, how these events had shaped him in ways that were perhaps shaping the family still. I’d kept spreading out the index cards with dates and facts, first in one pattern, then another, as if I might finally reassemble them, like the scattered bones of a skeleton which, if I got the pieces in the right configuration, would suddenly take life and rise up and walk away.
Ahead, Keegan paused, stepping out of the procession to wait for me to catch up. His arms were muscled from his work with glass and fire; he had a long narrow burn just below his elbow.
“Excited?” he asked, falling into step beside me.
“Very. You must be, too.”
“Oh, yes.” He smiled, nodded ahead. “Not half as excited as Oliver, though.”
“No kidding. Have you seen his collections? His archived collections, I mean?”
Keegan glanced at me with interest. “He invited you over?”
“He did. I took my mother.”
“You must have impressed him. He doesn’t show those images to many people. What did you think?”
I remembered the quietness of the Westrum House, the black auditorium seats all empty and the doors to the world locked, the images flashing up on the screen. I thought of Oliver’s passion and the exquisite beauty of the windows. As uneasy as I was about Oliver’s intentions, I’d also left feeling dazzled by the intricate, luminous glass.
“They were exceptional. He needs more display space, though, not more windows. Do you think he’ll go after these?”
“Wouldn’t you? An interrelated series—that’s got to be a very special find. Did he serve you tea?”
“He did. Orange spice. With honey. It was very good.”
The tall grass and weeds reached the hem of the only dress I’d brought, short-sleeved and as soft as a T-shirt, the sort of cloth that never wrinkled, good for traveling. It was black, and I wore black sandals, which had gotten soaked within a few steps. Keegan’s jeans were wet to his knees, which reminded me of our wilder days, pulling the canoe out of the water, his legs wet and his feet pale against the shale beach. We’d been so carefree. My departure had been fixed even then, but it was still so far on the horizon I felt we’d never get there. That last spring the present had seemed somehow eternal, as if nothing would ever change. I wondered if Keegan ever thought about those days, the innocent world we’d inhabited until my father died.
“How’s Max? I keep thinking of him standing above that rushing water.”
“He’s good. He probably doesn’t even remember, so don’t be worrying. I thought about bringing him today, so he could see where they were digging.” He gestured to the small cemetery adjacent to the church, enclosed within an ornate black iron fence; beyond this fence, unrecognized for decades and now roped off with dark blue tape, was the site where the Iroquois had once lived, before the village of Appleton was built and razed, before the land was taken by the government. Though it was still early, two archaeologists were already standing just outside the taped-off area, drinking coffee from paper cups. They waved. I found myself thinking of the lake, of the earth beneath my feet, which had seen so many people, so many seasons, come and go.
“He didn’t want to come?”
“Oh, he’d have come in a heartbeat. Are you kidding? He’s totally into digging. But in the end it seemed like a bad idea. He’d just be all over the place.” Keegan waved back to the archaeologists, whom he seemed to know. “They found some bowls yesterday, did you hear? Big stone bowls, with granite pestles, probably used for grinding corn.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, imagining the streets and buildings that had once filled this land, and the trails and patterns of the Iroquois who lived here before that.
Suzi had reached the chapel door. She was wearing black jeans and a simple black shirt with a white clerical collar. The ministers of my youth would have been men, dressed like Oliver, and they would have driven cars like the one he had arrived in, too—sleek, quiet, and black. Suzi, however, had a blue compact car and used her bicycle around town.
“Well, that was quite a trek,” Oliver said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe off his shoes. Keegan caught my eye and we both smiled.
“Totally cool,” Zoe said. “How long has this place been locked up?”
“Since 1941,” Suzi said, taking a key from her jacket pocket. It was ornate, made of iron, probably fashioned at Dream Master. Our great-grandfather or grandfather might have made this key, but I didn’t say so. “No one really expected it to be closed for this long. But as far as I know, no one’s been in here since, not until they came to uncover the windows.”
The key stuck, and Suzi jiggled it; finally it caught, and the door, stripped of its paint by years of weather, swung open. One by one, we stepped across the threshold into the musty stillness of the chapel. Except for a few pews at the back, the sanctuary was still intact, as it had been when the last services were held so many decades ago. The floor, beneath a layer of softening dust, was tile. The room smelled of cold, damp, and mildew. But I noted these details only later.
What captured me, what captured us all, were the windows.
In the darkness of the chapel—there was no other light—the windows seemed to float. Like the Wisdom window, the colors were bright and vibrant, the images stylized and elongated in the Art Nouveau style. Each window had the familiar border of vine-encrusted spheres along the bottom, iridescent white against the jewel tones that surrounded them. No matter how much I’d hoped and even expected to see it on these windows, the pattern riveted me even as the others began to disperse through the sanctuary, Suzi to the closest window in the west wall, Zoe trailing behind her, and Keegan and Oliver to the east windows, where the early morning light was strongest.
“Oh, it’s certainly Frank’s work,” Oliver said, his voice both excited and proprietary. “Exquisite work, just breathtaking.” He turned in a circle, taking in all the windows. “What a find this is for the Westrum Foundation. What an absolute treasure.”
He turned back to the closest window and began to look at the detail. A sense of possessiveness flared through me, too. I didn’t think of these as Frank’s windows. To me, they belonged to Rose. I couldn’t bear the thought that she might be obscured, cast as a footnote to Frank Westrum.
Oliver and Keegan began to speak in low, charged voices, talking about the nature of the glass, the quality of the leading, remarking on how well preserved the windows were, how clean—the wooden panels that had protected them all these decades had only just been removed. The reporter was taking rapid notes. “You see,” Oliver said, trying unsuccessfully to mask how thrilled he was. “You see this pattern right here, and here—this is the Westrum trademark, these are his windows, that is certain.”
Maybe so, I thought. But they also belonged to Nelia, who had paid for them. And in some way I was only beginning to understand, they belonged to Rose.
The words of her letters were still so present, all the love and loss of her early life. I walked around the chapel once, taking in the images. Suffused with light, the glowing windows cast color across the floor, across our faces and our hands. Luminous colors, the yellow of marigolds, the red of blood, the vibrant dark green of late summer grass. I walked from window to window studying the figures. A woman, pensive, holding an alabaster jar, stood beside Jesus, who was seated at a table, a silvery light around him. In the next window, two women, both visibly pregnant, spoke together in a garden. In the third, a woman turned from a cave, her hands open, her skin pale and radiant, her expression filled with wild amazement. In the last window on this wall, a woman stood in front of a temple holding an unrolled scroll while a group of men gathered around, waiting, listening for her words. I touched the bottom of this window, tracing the row of overlapping vine-encrusted moons.
“They are exquisite,” Suzi said softly, coming to stand beside me. Her face was flushed and animated, and it struck me that she was moved by the windows, that for her they were not simply an artifact of the past or a clue to a forgotten life but a connection with the stories themselves, with whatever mystery they attempted to catch. What Suzi seemed to be experiencing in this chapel was something that resonated from my past, the sense that there was something numinous present, real and potent, that I could not understand. Rose, too, must have felt this. She must have felt it strongly to want to be a priest at a time when that was impossible, to have helped create this extraordinary chapel full of windows. I thought she would have liked seeing the Reverend Suzi here. Maybe she would have understood even me, with all my doubts and wrong turns and seeking.
“It’s the same glass,” Keegan was saying across the chapel. “It has the same tonalities and composition as in the Wisdom window. I’m sure, even without an analysis. Just look at the consistency of the color. These windows were clearly all made at the same time, for the same commission, don’t you agree? I wonder—when would you place them, Oliver, in the Westrum work?”
Oliver didn’t answer immediately, but stood with his arms folded, considering. Suzi’s footsteps echoed softly as she moved from one window to another.
“It’s difficult to say. In terms of craft, they’re late examples. But in terms of design, he’s using this Art Nouveau style that he liked so much as a young artist. They certainly recall his youth. I know you have dates on receipts and so forth, but even so these windows are out of character for the work he did at the end of his life. Actually, they’re like nothing else I’ve seen of his, ever.”
I walked across the back of the chapel, past where the Wisdom window would be hanging if it were here, to the east wall. The figures in the four windows on the other wall all featured women, too. The first was familiar, a woman kneeling at the edge of a river, pulling a basket from the water to the shore; that story, the rescue of Moses, I vaguely remembered. The next window depicted a young woman in a sun-struck field, presenting a bushel full of grain to an older woman; the third showed a woman pulling water from a well and offering a cup to the haloed figure of Jesus. Jesus was in the final window, too, sitting across from a woman who listened to him avidly, while behind her another woman stood, holding a basket of fruit.
I studied these images, trying to recollect the stories, taken back to my days in Sunday school, the air full of the scent of paste, the rustle of paper, the teachers’ voices as they read out loud. But we hadn’t read most of these stories, I didn’t think. All I seemed to remember were tales of floods and battles and fleeing through the desert. Aside from Eve, the only woman I remembered was Mary in her pale blue robes; we had all wanted to be her during the Christmas play, even though she didn’t have any lines.
I walked slowly from window to stunning window. They depicted such ordinary moments, really—women carrying grain or jars or baskets of fruit; women in a garden, by a river or a well, at a grave—even as they dazzled in their beauty and harmonious design, filling the chapel with shifting shapes of color. There was a cumulative power in the images, too, all these women in pivotal moments of their lives, moments infused with spiritual longing or celebration or fulfillment. In the windows of my childhood church, most of the images had been male; Jesus was male, and the disciples were, too, and the language used in the service had referenced only men. Here, that had been turned upside down. I walked from window to window again, feeling my perspective shift. For the first time ever, I could imagine myself into these stories. At the west wall now, Keegan and Oliver were still talking of glass and the Westrum opus. Zoe, who had been uncharacteristically quiet since we’d entered the chapel, came and stood beside me.
“They’re so pretty,” she whispered.
I nodded. “They really are stunning. She’s related to us, you know,” I said, on impulse. “The woman who designed some of these windows. See that pattern along the bottom? That’s hers.”
Zoe didn’t ask me how I knew this, or anything about Rose, not even her name.
“Cool,” she said. “You know, I like to draw. I wonder if maybe I inherited it.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling possessive about Rose again; I’d already claimed her adventurous spirit for myself.
“What are they all about?”
“I don’t know, exactly. We’ll have to ask.”
As we talked I looked again from window to window, trying to determine if any of the figures resembled the woman in the landing at the Westrum House—that is, if any might be Rose—but none was familiar, nor did they resemble one another.
Keegan turned to me and called softly across the room, “Hey—did you see?”
“You mean the border pattern?”
“Yes, but not just that. Look at their clothes.”
I did then, searching. Each figure was dressed in the usual fluid robes, the green of new grass, a deep lake blue. And then I saw what Keegan meant, what I had not seen before: in each window, at the clasp of a gown, at the edge of a belt, or caught in the hair, was the trademark Westrum flower. Roses were in all of these windows, tiny but vivid, and deep, deep red.
“Oh!” I stood up and went over to the closest window, touched the rose floating on the water of the river.
“What?” Oliver asked.
“The signature flowers. They’re all roses, in every window.”
“Are they?” He stepped back to view them all, thoughtful. A square of purple light fell through the thinning place in his hair.
“All right,” he said, finally. “I guess you’re right—he must have known her. In fact, he must have known her very well. That’s something quite personal, isn’t it? All the little roses. He only did that a handful of times, putting a significant emblem in the glass, like a game he was playing with the people who bought his work. Things that no one else would notice, only the person for who
m they were intended; sometimes it was even a private joke. For example, one window we have was commissioned by his neighbor. Frank needed money at the time, but he didn’t like this man, we know from letters we’ve retrieved; he found him pompous and self-satisfied and very irritating. The neighbor’s name was Baum, which means ‘tree’ in German. The window is quite striking, and Mr. Baum was delighted with it. He never noticed all the leafless trees scattered throughout the scene; Frank used their bare branches to divide colors.”
Keegan, who was standing nearby, laughed.
“Yes, but this is different,” I said. “This seems a very beautiful sort of tribute.”
“Oh, I agree. He clearly made these windows with great delicacy and intention. Some of his best work, I would have to say. He must have had a great affection for her.”
“I think so, too.” Remembering Oliver’s reticence in the studio, I decided not to tell him about Rose, that I’d found her letters, that I’d learned so much more. I didn’t want him to know about Iris, either, how she’d been left behind, how all Rose wanted was to earn enough money to come back and claim her daughter.
Zoe and I sat down. Suzi took a seat ahead of us and turned, sliding her elbow over the smooth wooden edge of the pew.
“This Rose Jarrett, who was she? Do you know anything more? Because if I was curious about her before, I’m just consumed with curiosity now.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Zoe said. “Lucy says we’re related, but I’ve never heard of her. And these windows are so beautiful, but I don’t know what they mean. Can you tell us?”
I was glad she had asked so I wouldn’t have to admit my own ignorance. I hadn’t gone to church since I was seventeen.
“I can tell you something about the windows,” Suzi said. “As beautiful as they are, they’re powerful, too. The west wall—it’s a wall of prophets, really. All four windows. The first image is Elizabeth talking to Mary. I’m sure you can see that they’re both pregnant—Elizabeth, who thought she was past child-bearing age, with John the Baptist, and Mary, a young woman, unmarried, with Jesus. Elizabeth has given a prophecy to Mary about her child, and in this window, Mary’s speaking, she’s saying the Magnificat, which is prophetic, too, and which talks about justice for the poor. Two women, two prophets, their children about to be born, their lives about to change in ways they can’t imagine or control.
