by Kim Edwards
I scanned through the job descriptions, which were with aid agencies and NGOs.
“They sound interesting,” I said. “Hard, but good.”
“Different than we’re used to. The pay is okay, but they don’t have the same benefits, not by a long shot.”
“Right now we don’t have any benefits at all,” I pointed out.
After a second, Yoshi laughed. “True enough,” he said. “I wrote back, asking for more information, asking if there were other positions that might be interesting for you.”
“Okay. That’s good. I’ll send some queries, too.”
On the patio, my mother and Blake were still deep in conversation. I sighed, and found my phone, not sure if I was doing the right thing but knowing I was doing the only thing I could. Ned answered on the second ring, and seemed surprised to hear from me.
“Is your mother okay?” I asked.
“I think so, yes. She’s been absorbed by the letters. We haven’t really spoken of them in much detail. She hasn’t let anyone else read them, either.”
“I wanted to invite her to see the Westrum collection. When she’s ready. To invite all of you. And there is a chapel full of windows she ought to see as well.”
“Yes. Didn’t we discuss all that?”
“We did. I just wanted to confirm.” I hesitated. “And something else has come up since,” I went on, touching the envelope that held the will. And then I told him, carefully and concisely, everything I knew.
Chapter 21
IN THE TRANQUIL LIGHT OF THE WESTRUM HOUSE, IRIS looked less pale than she had at home, her eyes quick and vibrant. She was wearing a pale blue suit with a dark scarf tucked around her throat, and little pearl clip-on earrings. Her hair had been carefully styled. Ned hovered, helping her down the sidewalk and up the steps, but when we were inside she stepped away from him and went to speak with Oliver, who offered his arm to her in a way that seemed courtly, allowing her to accept his help without feeling dependent. It was thoughtful, and I admired his gesture from across the room. Iris curved her fingers around his elbow as they moved from one window to another, Oliver telling her all about Frank Westrum and the history of the house, his voice booming, using his free hand to gesture. Iris listened, studying the windows. Stuart Minter stood behind the desk; he’d flashed a smile and waved when he saw me come inside, and I took Yoshi over to say hello.
When my mother arrived with Andy a few minutes later, Yoshi and I introduced them to Ned and Carol, and then we stood together in a friendly but uneasy cluster. I’d sent a copy of the will to Ned, who’d told me he intended to consult a lawyer to see what they might do. I’d gone with my mother to a lawyer, too, a friend of Andy’s who did estate work and who’d suggested things could potentially be complicated. Still, it wasn’t clear what would happen, and we hadn’t spoken of the matter to the Stones since I’d made that initial call.
When we finished touring the first floor of the Westrum House, admiring all the windows, Oliver led the way to the stairwell, where the woman in her golden-green dress stood with her arms full of flowers. I hadn’t seen the window since I’d discovered the letters Rose had written, since I’d entered into her story and understood my connection to her, and I’d forgotten how captivating the window was, six feet high, the cascading irises in her arms life-sized and vibrant. I stood staring at her image, her familiar eyes. I imagined her posing in a light-filled studio, Frank Westrum sketching the curve of her ear, the elegant line of her neck, pausing for a moment as he was swept through with his love for her, which he could never translate exactly onto paper, or into glass.
“It’s beautiful, is it not?” Oliver said when we paused on the landing to admire it. I’d given him copies of some of Rose’s letters, finally, and he’d shared some correspondence from Frank to Cornelia that he’d found in his archives. “She is beautiful. Mrs. Stone, I think your mother was the model for this portrait. Look at her eyes. And look at what she’s holding in her arms—they are irises, Mrs. Stone.”
Iris didn’t speak, and though we all looked at her, it was impossible to read her expression. She didn’t take her gaze from the window for a long time. Finally, she released Oliver’s arm and sat down right on the stairs, in the middle of the third step from the bottom.
“Mom?” Ned said.
“I’m all right.” She pushed back the sleeve of her suit jacket and held up her wrist. “Ned, Carol. Look at that pendant she’s wearing. It matches this bracelet. Ned, you gave this to me a few years ago, do you remember? You told me you’d found it. Where?”
“In the boxes I was going through. I didn’t tell you exactly, because they were in a box of things that had been sent to you from Rose when she died. From Frank Westrum, actually, that name is on some of the envelopes, though of course it never meant anything to us, not until now. Dad showed me where it all was. He said you’d wanted to throw it out, but he’d put it away because he thought it might be important someday. You know how he was.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s the way he was. Did you save the rest?”
Ned nodded. “There are some drawings. There’s a piece of stained glass, a field full of blue irises.”
“Ned,” she said, after a long moment. “Mr. Parrott. I wonder if I could sit here for a while, just by myself. I’d like to do that, if the rest of you don’t mind.”
So we left her, following Oliver upstairs to a corner room with tall windows on two walls. Oliver had gathered all the stained-glass windows he’d had in storage that contained images related to Rose, and these hung against the clear glass.
The first window I’d seen, the window that had started me on this whole adventurous search, was hanging on the closest wall, backlit. It had been cleaned since I’d seen it in Keegan’s studio, then still coated in grime from its years sitting uncovered in the closed-off chapel. It hadn’t been included in the original receipt to the church, I’d realized, and I could only conjecture that Frank had made it for Rose, or perhaps at her request, and then couldn’t bear to keep it when she’d become so ill. Now its colors were so deep and true and dazzling; the image of the chalice in the bag of grain, the crowded figures of the men and women in the background, were all infused with light.
The interwoven spheres and vines ran along the bottom. I’d done some research, and I’d found this motif everywhere. These overlapping circles were ancient, tracing back to Pythagorean geometry—geometry, a measure of the world. In more mystical terms, the shape had always evoked the place where worlds overlap: dreaming with waking, death with life, the visible with the unseen. Rose had probably glimpsed this pattern in a medieval church and woven it into the blanket for her child.
“What are you thinking about so seriously?” Yoshi asked. He’d gone around the room from window to window, and now he came and stood close.
“Rose,” I said. “My great-grandfather’s dream. It was always his dream we knew about and not hers, and that’s the problem. I think that’s what she’s saying somehow, in this window. I mean, in a personal sense, not as an interpretation of the text. But in this story, Joseph always has these dreams, right? I looked it up. That’s what puts a wall up between him and his brothers to begin with. His arrogance, their envy; that’s why they throw him in the pit and sell him into slavery. This cup in the grain, it’s the cup he uses later for divination. For dreams. And it’s not until he sends that cup off with his brothers—even though it’s a trick to get them to come back—that balance is finally restored.”
“Maybe,” Yoshi said. “It sounds plausible enough to me.”
I thought of Rose, packing the soft blanket to send to a daughter who would never know her, and the chalice slipped beneath her skirt and carried through the night. I looked again at the women in the crowd around the sack of grain. This cup, buried in the grain as surely as Rose’s story had been buried in the family narrative, spoke to me.
“There was some good news earlier,” Yoshi said after a few minutes, when he judged that I’d fi
nished looking at the windows. “Want to come and see?”
We retreated back down the stairs to the lobby, where we sat side by side on a low bench, going through the e-mails that had come in that morning. Yoshi’s contacts in both Papua New Guinea and Cambodia were cautiously optimistic about finding a position for me; they were talking with other agencies to see what was available. I’d sent out queries of my own, and as we waited I checked, shading the screen of my phone against the flickering light that fell in through the trees.
“My friend Alice thinks there might be a position opening in Mali, but it sounds a little too corporate. She gave me the contact name, though.”
“That’s good. Worth looking into.”
“It is. I’ll write when we get back.”
“I guess we just have to keep looking hard. It may take a while to find what we want.”
We sat for half an hour longer, talking quietly about what we hoped would happen, how we might see to the closing up of our place in Japan. I kept thinking of a line from a Mary Oliver poem I’d read: “What is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” What indeed?
I hadn’t seen Iris leave the stairs and go to view the windows upstairs, but she must have, because eventually she came down with Ned, trailed by Oliver and Carol, and my mother and Andy.
“They’re going home,” my mother said, coming up to talk while Iris paused at the desk to sign the book Stuart was holding out to her. “I think she’s very tired. It must just be emotionally exhausting to take all this in.”
“It must. Have they said anything about the will?”
My mother glanced across the room. “Actually, yes. They were very nice. They suggest a meeting tomorrow afternoon, in The Lake of Dreams. Their lawyer, my lawyer, Art, and his lawyer. Apparently, secretaries are calling each other even as we speak. They want to move quickly, before the town board meets to issue any zoning changes. I don’t know what to expect at all. But it seems they have something to propose.” She glanced at her watch, and sighed. “I really need to get back to the bank before lunch. They’ve been so good to me, I don’t want to push my luck.”
They were all crossing the room now, Ned on one side of Iris and Carol on the other. When they reached us they paused to say good-bye. Iris touched my hand.
“Thank you,” she said. “For finding her. And me.”
Since the afternoon was so fine, Yoshi and I didn’t go directly back to The Lake of Dreams. I was acutely aware that our days here were beginning to dwindle, and that most of his vacation had been spent dealing with my family issues, past and present, or trying to find another job. Yoshi wasn’t the sort of person to complain, or inflict his stress on other people, but I could tell from the way he was sometimes distant and reflective that he had a lot on his mind. So instead of going back to the house, we picked up some sandwiches and drove to a state park near Ithaca that I’d always loved. We hiked along a cascading stream through the gorge, then swam in the pool at its base. It was too cold to swim for long, but we jumped in for as long as we could stand it, then sat on the rocks by the water in the sun.
When we got back to the house that evening, my mother was just getting home from work. Blake was there, too. We saw his truck first, parked at an odd angle in the gravel driveway. I expected to find him in the kitchen, but he wasn’t there, and after we called to him a few times, he answered from upstairs, his voice muffled, floating down from his old room, where he was standing amid the dark blue walls with a pile of books in his hands, looking at his posters of the moon, of the beautiful image of the earth from space.
“It’s like a cave in here,” he noted. “What was I thinking?”
Our mother, walking up behind me, laughed. “You were a teenager,” she said. “That’s where your mind was. Growing into some new state of being. Look at Zoe. That should remind you.”
He shook his head. “I was growing in the dark, I guess. How was the trip?” he asked, putting his books on the desk—even as a teenager, he’d been reading about boats.
“Good,” I said.
My mother added, “Yes. It was moving.”
Blake nodded but didn’t comment. At first I worried that he was still upset about the decision to tell the Stones what we’d discovered, but when he spoke again, he changed the subject. “Well, I stopped by because I have some news.”
We went downstairs to the dining room and sat at the big round oak table. I’d polished the wood with lemon oil before Yoshi came, so it gleamed softly in the light from the two high leaded windows.
“So,” Blake said. “I talked to Art. It was pretty tense. He didn’t confirm or deny, at the end of the day. But I’ve had some time to think about things. I want you to know that I quit. I left this morning. I cleaned out my desk and left.”
“He let you go?” my mother asked. “Just like that?”
“He tried to talk me out of it, but his heart wasn’t in it. There was some vandalism on the Fourth of July. I don’t know if you heard that. Some damage, things knocked off the shelves, mostly just a dumping of papers. He’s still trying to put things in order.” Yoshi had discreetly taken a seat in the living room, where he was looking at a magazine; he glanced up at this, our eyes met, and he gave a slight shrug. Blake continued. “He’s been going through a lot of old papers and things as a result. I think he’s been pretty weighed down by the past, and by worry over how this Landing business is going to turn out. Long story short, no—he didn’t have much to say.”
“Well, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” my mother, said, holding up her hands. “Both of my grown children are now unemployed.”
“What about Avery?” I asked. “Is she okay with this?”
Blake laughed. “Yeah, she’s much more okay than I am, actually. She’s always been a risk taker, and she figures things will work out. Anyway, I still have my pilot’s job,” he added. “You know, running the cruises.”
“I think Avery’s right,” I said. Though Yoshi and I were no closer to jobs and had no idea where we’d end up living next, I’d started seeing that the change could be a good one for us both. Plus, not looking to the future so much had made the present moment all the more vivid.
“Glad you’ve got such a great attitude,” Blake said.
I smiled. “Well, both Yoshi and I are unemployed, so to keep myself sane I’ve decided that worry is a waste of energy. Yoshi’s going to make curried noodles for dinner. Want to stay?”
“Sounds good.”
We pulled out the Chinese checkers and played until the sun began to set.
The meeting with the lawyers had been set for four o’clock the next afternoon. It didn’t end until close to six. My mother pulled into the driveway, gravel popping under her tires. I met her on the back steps.
“Well?” I said. “Blake must have called three times already. What happened?”
“Let’s go sit on the patio,” she said.
So we did. Yoshi stayed upstairs, working on the job search, while my mother explained what had happened. It seemed the will was valid, and Iris did indeed have a claim on the estate. But so much time had passed that her claim could be challenged, and though the will had been properly signed and notarized, no one knew for certain how it had ended up in the wall. If my grandfather had put it there, it was fraud. If my great-grandfather had done it, it was a change of heart. Iris was aware of all of this. Ned had also done enough research to understand the complexities of what was going on with the depot land, and with Art’s desire to buy my mother out and annex this property to lots along the marsh with his upscale development in mind. He knew about the temporary stays on the sales initiated by the Iroquois and by the conservation groups.
“So they came up with a rather amazing plan,” my mother said. “They asked that the land remain ours, but that a legal document be drawn up so that it can never be developed. Something like the Forever Farms program—have you heard of that? Their whole family has been involved for years with the Nature Conserva
ncy, and so they know all about this process. If everyone agrees, I can keep this land and this house as long as I want, and then sell it to the conservancy if I ever desire to leave. But I can’t sell to anyone else, and I can’t develop it myself. Art would have to agree to contribute the adjacent acres he’s purchased as well. Essentially, what they’re suggesting would preserve the marshes. Your father would have loved that. The white deer would be protected, and all the wildlife, because this would involve quite a lot of acreage. Plus, this plan would allow for Oliver and the church to keep the chapel intact, which they’ve been lobbying hard to do. The idea is that it would be used for services and weddings and so forth again. It would be preserved and maintained as an artistic heritage site under the auspices of the Westrum Foundation, but independent of both the Westrum House and the conservancy.”
“So—that’s quite a plan. What’s not to like?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It seems like there must be a catch, but I can’t see one, and neither could the lawyer. We’re all going to think it over. But I think this deal was offered in goodwill. I think they have no desire to end up in court.”
“But why would they do this? I mean, the land is worth a lot of money. I just don’t understand why they’d let it go.”
My mother shook her head. “I don’t know, of course. But Iris is ninety-five years old. She doesn’t need the money. Her sons have done very well, and they’re both pushing seventy. And after that it starts to become a lot of arguing in court about money that’s going to people who have almost no connection to the events that set all this in motion. They’d have made a different decision fifty years ago, I’m sure. But now—now they’d rather have this land given in their name, and ours. It’s a beautiful thing to do, if it’s real.”
It was real, it turned out, and in the end they hammered out a deal. Art was the last to agree, but knowing that he’d lost my mother’s land changed his sense of urgency about the remaining lots along the marshes. Plus, though he never acknowledged what he’d told me about the night my father died, I remembered his expression as I left, and I knew it must haunt him still. Perhaps his desire to develop that land in the first place had been an attempt to erase what had happened there. Though he never spoke of it again, I will always believe he signed the papers to assuage his sense of guilt.
