by Kim Edwards
That is all, then, Iris dear. Sweet child of my heart.
My throat was tight by the time I finished reading.
There were several letters left. I still had an hour, but suddenly I wanted to get away, to read the rest of these in a private place, to be sure I had them with me and could keep them safe. For the director, however well intentioned, might lose them. Or, if Oliver ever found these, he would want to display them in a glass case in the Westrum House and add Rose as a footnote to Frank Westrum’s story. Whatever their historical value to the world, these letters were personal, first. They’d been written by a woman lost in my family, and though they hadn’t been written to me, though I’d been decades from being born when her hand had moved across these pages, I felt quite powerfully that they were somehow meant for me to find, nonetheless.
I put all the other papers back in the box. The letters I folded carefully and put into my bag. I left the historical society, waving to the curator, who was on the phone, and walked down the wide streets with their tall trees. There was a little park that overlooked a small lake that had been engineered when the canal was built to contain the falls. Underneath the tranquil water were whole streets and factories, abandoned, flooded, silent in the currents. A boat glided past, headed for the locks. I sat down on the grass, pulled another letter from my bag, and read.
14 October 1916
Dearest Iris,
Five months have passed since I saw you in the garden, and though the pain of leaving you has not gone away, the days have passed. Lately they have passed in such a way that I have become convinced that I did the right thing to leave you there. For you see, I have gone to jail again.
You know that I go with Vivian when she visits the homes of the poor. More and more, I go. These visits are not joyous. On almost every one the mother will send the children into another room or scatter them outside, and she will beg to know how she might keep from having another child. Perhaps she has seven children already; perhaps she has been told she will die if she has another. Perhaps her husband drinks and loses every job he gets, perhaps he works hard and cannot find a job, perhaps he is sick. Perhaps she is powerless, as I once was. It does not matter. For us to tell her what we know is not legal. The information we possess about the basic physiological facts of life is illegal to convey. Mr. Comstock saw to that. Vivian used to be afraid of this law. She kept silent. Then she watched a woman who had begged for information die in childbirth, and the child died, too. So now when they ask, she speaks. I do, too. There is no kindness in this law, no mercy.
Though we put ourselves at risk, we tell them what we know. When we heard that Mrs. Sanger and her sister Mrs. Byrne would open a family planning clinic, we made up our minds to volunteer. It was a windy day. Before the clinic opened, the line stretched for several city blocks. We helped hand out information. That is all we did—we handed out booklets with facts about the body. I hope, if you should ever read this letter, that you will be astonished that such simple actions should cause such great consternation and uproar. The lines grew and grew each day, but on the 26th of October the police arrived and closed the clinic and arrested us all.
Beatrice and Frank came to get us, she so quick and plump and outraged, he silent as always, standing firm and tall beside her. We walked out with them from the white-tiled cells. Mrs. Sanger will go on trial and Mrs. Byrne is still in jail and has embarked upon a hunger strike. We fear she will die but she says it makes no difference if she dies, when thousands of women die each year in childbirth because they were kept in ignorance, helpless to decide their own fates. Everywhere people speak of her, in the subway crowds, on street corners. I heard one man say “They are imprisoning a woman for teaching physiological facts!” And this is so.
I am glad now, Iris, that you are not here to see your mother arrested and sent to jail. Still, I never stop thinking of you and wondering how you are, what small pleasures fill your days.
Your loving mother, Rose
I checked the date again—1916. This history, told through Rose’s eyes, didn’t seem very far away, and it made me wonder how my own life would have unfolded if I hadn’t been able to study or work or even know the most basic facts about my body. A difficult history was hidden beneath my independence, like the ruins of the factories beneath the tranquil surface of this water. The rights I took for granted seemed suddenly very new, measured against the centuries. I picked up the next letter and began to read.
3 March 1920
Dear Iris,
Today I received a letter from Joseph saying that you were well, that he and Cora were well, that everyone in the household has survived the influenza, though so many have died in the village. For this I am deeply grateful—I trembled to open his letter, fearing it would say otherwise. Today I went to the little church. For many years I did not go at all. I felt I could not, because I was still angry. But I have been to many funerals of late, and after one I stayed when all the people had left. I sat in the silence. I let myself feel all the fear and sadness and anger that had driven me away for so many years. I let myself feel sorry, too, for the mistakes I have made in my life. The silence was great. After a time, I cannot explain it, the silence was a comfort. I felt a little as I used to feel as a young girl. And so I went back. Sometimes I go to the services. And sometimes I go alone and sit in the silence. This morning, when I got the letter saying you were well, this is what I did.
It is hard to express the joy your good health gives to me. Here the epidemic has taken so many. Vivian has been ill for several weeks. I, too, recover slowly. The parties in this house, those fierce, exciting meetings, ended with the war, of course. Now we receive news daily of friends who have been infected with this influenza or who have died. The closest to me, the deepest and saddest loss, is my dear friend Beatrice, who seemed perfectly healthy and who even came to assist when Vivian was so ill, and who may have come to me when I was sick, I can’t remember. But then she herself fell so swiftly into a feverish delirium and did not know who I was. I held her hand, but she did not rouse or speak to us. She died within a day.
So it is with this disease. The world changes overnight.
They say the right to vote will finally pass this year. She did not live to see it.
Frank is nearly inconsolable. Quietly so. He sits in the dark house day after day. His work had fallen out favor and he will not adopt the popular artistic fads, and so he was insular even before this loss. Beatrice was his interface with the world, and his buffer to its blows, and she is gone. I bring him cornstarch pudding and keep him company for an hour or two, but there is not much more I can do. I am 24 and he is 48 and I cannot pretend to know his grief.
30 April 1921
Dear Iris,
I cannot believe it—you are ten years old today. I think of that sweet morning when you were born, the flowers blooming outside the window. The moment I held you I felt that I had known you all my life. Mrs. Elliot is here to visit for two weeks. She is helping pack up the house. She told me she had seen you turning cartwheels and had paused to cheer you on. She also brought a photograph of you dressed in lace and pleated cotton. You are so serious. Maybe Cora told you to be still. I wish I could see you smile. Joseph writes very little, occupied with his business. Locks, the sort that clamp onto a door, the sort both he and I could open with a touch.
Mrs. Elliot told me all this amid the packing. These beloved rooms are stripped and filled with boxes, the shapes of absent furniture bright on the faded walls.
Vivian will go to live with Mrs. Elliot in The Lake of Dreams. She promises to watch out for you and write to me of you, too. Poor Vivian has never completely recovered her strength—she who used to be so active—and this house is too big and too empty and simply too much. It has been sold; our days here are numbered, dwindling one by one.
Frank, too, has gone—to Rochester. He finds the city cold, but peaceful. He writes that he is happy. We still miss Beatrice, his beloved wife and my dear friend, and it i
s a comfort to speak of her. In the wake of her death Frank was disconsolate for so long that I feared he might never regain himself. He seemed disengaged from life, and did not even care about his art. So I stayed sometimes and made him tea. This is how it began. Quietly, with a mutual respect and friendship and the memory of Beatrice, whom we both loved.
And now we love each other. I have agreed to go to Rochester when this house is all packed away. But I will not marry him, or anyone. Nor will I live with him. He has bought a house near the center of the city, and I have taken a room in the house of a woman I knew slightly in the days of our splendid parties. Her name is Lydia Langhammer. She is a nurse. I have already begun to write in search of work.
So I will see Frank every day and have that pleasure, and I will always be able to go to my own room and shut the door and delight in my solitude, too.
Dear girl, may you grow in wisdom and in kindness, always.
Love, your mother Rose
1 October 1925
Dearest Iris,
Oh, my dear, I saw you today. I spoke to you. You do not know who I am, you think only that I am a friend of Mrs. Elliot, and her niece Mrs. Stokley. I gave you a false name, Rose Westrum. True enough in heart. Perhaps you found me too intense, perhaps you noticed that our eyes have such a similar look—the same blue, as changeable as water. I found you utterly beautiful, perfect in every way. When another guest remarked on our resemblance, you were not exactly pleased. You are 14, and I am 30, so to you I am old. There is no one save Mrs. Elliot who knows of our connection, even Mrs. Stokley who took you in does not know.
You were glad to leave The Lake of Dreams. I do not blame you, though I wish you had not run away and put yourself in so much danger. I wish also that you did not have to work, but I am glad that the work is good. I am glad you can take classes at the college. I always send money to Mrs. Elliot for little things you might like, and I was so happy to see you wearing the blue cardigan with tiny buttons that she had given you. And I feel glad somehow to know that the famous author who once lived down the street was born and died in the same light beneath which I once stood, dreaming that the world would shift and change, or even end.
Love from Rose, your mother
I walked the few blocks to the car, following the wide purple path that had been painted on the sidewalk, mulling over the letters, the complex arc of Rose’s life, glad she’d found happiness, gladder still that she’d seen Iris again, even if her presence had remained forever secret. Iris had been born in 1911, which meant she could still be alive, though she’d be in her midnineties by now, and of course I had no way to begin to look for her. I slid inside the sun-hot car. When I put my bag with its stolen letters on the floor, I hit the glove compartment door with my elbow, and it swung open. I hadn’t thought to look inside before, and it was empty except for three pencils, never sharpened, their orangeypink erasers intact and hardened with age, the marina logo my father had designed printed on them in blue. He must have left them here one day long ago, when he’d taken the car out for a Sunday drive. I wondered if anyone did that anymore, drove just for pleasure. How odd, for that matter, that this storage space was still called a glove compartment, left from a time when women wore gloves whenever they went out. I wondered where my father had been going, what he’d been thinking about, that day. I snapped the little door shut, and slipped the pencils into my bag next to the letters Rose had written and received. And then I drove back over roads that were becoming so familiar, through the start-stop traffic in the villages, through the verdant fields rippling in the evening breeze. Tomorrow I’d get up and drive back to pick Yoshi up in Rochester. He’d be somewhere over the Arctic Circle just about now, sleeping a restless, interrupted sleep, flying west with the night.
When I reached The Lake of Dreams I parked downtown, on the main street, grabbed my bag, and walked to the pier where Blake’s boat was moored. I hadn’t spoken to him since we’d argued over the boxes of old toys in the living room, and I hadn’t talked to him yet about Avery’s anger over my lapse. I couldn’t blame him for being upset, and the image of him standing on the dock, watching as Keegan and I had driven out into the dusky lake, had lingered. I was full of the letters, too, bursting to talk about Rose and her extraordinary story, which was also ours.
Blake was working on the Fearful Symmetry, painting stain onto the wooden trim. It gleamed a clear, glossy brown. He rested the paintbrush across the can and stood up when he saw me coming, wiping his hands on a stained white rag he pulled from his pocket. I stepped over the railing, onto the deck.
“Hey,” I said. “That’s looking good.”
His hair was golden red in the sun. He nodded. “I think so, too.”
“You know, I’m sorry, Blake. Mom said Avery is still mad.”
“Yeah, well, that would be something of an understatement. Is she overreacting a little? Maybe. But she’s really upset, and I can see her point. She wanted to be the one to say something, you know? She wanted to choose the time.”
“I didn’t think clearly,” I said, understanding in that moment how deeply Blake’s allegiances had shifted. He had his own family now. “Would it help if I called her?”
Blake shrugged. “Maybe. She’s really mad at me. She didn’t know I’d told you, Lucy. She didn’t know that anyone else knew, and when she found out—well, you can imagine how she felt.”
My bag with all the letters was hanging from my arm, and though I’d meant to share everything I’d learned with Blake, it suddenly seemed trivial compared to what was unfolding between us.
“I feel terrible. What can I do?”
He looked past me, over the water, and sighed. “Nothing, at this point. I mean, it would be good if you talked to Avery.”
“I will.”
“Okay.” He managed a small smile. “Just don’t expect her to name the baby after you.”
“Okay on that, too.”
We were quiet for a moment, the boat moving slightly on the gentle waves.
“Yoshi’s coming tomorrow,” I said.
“Hey, I’m glad to hear that. You guys are good?”
“I hope so,” I said.
He nodded, no doubt remembering Keegan and me traveling out on the lake the night before. “I was beginning to wonder.”
“Keegan and I were never meant to be.”
“You okay with that?”
“I’m okay. Sad a little. I mean, Keegan is great in a lot of ways. I just got disoriented for a while, so far away from home. So close to all the lost past.”
Blake smiled. “Yeah, I get that. Well, look—we’re doing a July Fourth party on Tuesday,” he said, gesturing to the half-stained railing. “Here on the boat. That’s what I’m doing, getting ready. I’m inviting everyone, Art, Joey and Zoe, Austen, Mom, a few friends, some people from the restaurant, too. Mom promised not to tell anyone else about the baby, and we’re going to formally announce it then. The baby and the wedding, by the way. I’m not telling when we’re getting married.” He smiled. “You’ll have to wait like everyone else. You’re invited, by the way.”
“Well, thank you. And congratulations.” I hugged him, the bag catching between us as he put his arm briefly around my shoulders.
Then I left, walking down the dock and through the village to the Impala, driving up the lake road until the house came into view. The sun was setting by then, and light flashed off the cupola windows in spectacular shades of gold and fuchsia and orange. I parked on the lawn and walked straight to the shore, shedding my shoes as I went, and dived off the end of the dock into the cold clear water of the lake.
Chapter 16
YOSHI’S FLIGHT WAS DUE TO ARRIVE EARLY, SO I WAS UP AT dawn, rough clouds scattering to the east and muting the sunrise, the sky flaring red and gold, as if on fire. My mother had been spending a lot of time upstairs, going through the closets and packing up my father’s things. Quietly, without saying anything about it, she had started sleeping there again. Her door was ajar, her bre
athing soft and even, so I moved quietly, down the stairs, the kitchen tiles cold on my bare feet as I made toast and tea.
Breakfast over, I got into the Impala and took the highway. There was little traffic so I got to the airport with an hour to spare, taking a seat in one of the black Naugahyde-and-metal chairs to wait. At this early hour the regional airport was almost empty. I’d brought my computer to catch up on e-mail. My account was so full it almost shut down, so I spent the first few minutes deleting spam and chain messages. Neil and Julie had sent photos from their recent snorkeling trip, so the screen was suddenly full of a tropical paradise, with Yoshi sitting on the white sand beach, leaning back on his elbows and smiling, his legs crossed at the ankles and his jet-black hair cut very short, looking so relaxed it was hard to believe he’d just quit a job and didn’t have another.
I found myself smiling back. I thought of the rain, and I remembered how happy we had been.
While I was working through the inbox, a message popped up from Oliver, of all people, labeled “point of interest.” I clicked it open, thinking he’d probably just put me on a mailing list for the Westrum House, but in fact it was a real message from Oliver himself.
Dear Lucy,
First, allow me to apologize for being so terse with you during the visit you and your mother made to the Westrum House. I hope you can understand my concerns about thoroughly investigating any claims regarding Frank Westrum. One cannot be too careful, I find, in this high-tech era. I would not wish for any misinformation to go viral, as they say. Yet I am aware of my own tendency to be a bit overprotective of his legacy, and a recent conversation I had with your Reverend Suzi helped me reach the conclusion that perhaps I had been too abrupt, even rude, when we last met.
