The Lake Of Dreams Part 14

I didn't answer, and we drove the rest of the way in silence. It was still raining when we arrived at the Westrum House. We huddled beneath our umbrellas under the dripping portico as the bell sounded deep in the empty rooms. It was several minutes before we heard footsteps; then Oliver fumbled with the keys for a little while longer before the door finally swung open. If he was surprised to find I wasn't alone, he didn't show it, but graciously shook hands with us both. He stepped back, pulling the door wide open, and ushered us inside.

The house was utterly still, even more silent than it had been on my last visit, and our quiet footsteps-my mother's flats, my sandals-echoed. Stuart gave us a brief tour of the main rooms and served us tea. Then we climbed the open stairs with Oliver, lingering on the landing to take in the window of the woman with her arms full of flowers.

"She looks like you, Lucy," my mother said softly. "Don't you think? If your hair was different, pulled up like this, she would look a great deal like you."

"I suppose," Oliver said, a bit reluctantly. "I guess I can see the resemblance. But then, she might look a great deal like a great many women, if they had their hair pulled back. I'll show you a picture of Beatrice when we come back down. He loved her very dearly, and he used her image a few times after she pa.s.sed away, working from photographs. I have several photos of his daughter, Annabeth, as well. She modeled for him frequently, and we always imagined he'd used one of them for this window. I think you'll see the resemblance."

Oliver turned then, and took us down a narrow hallway to an interior room, windowless, with a projector set up in the back. He explained that he'd been through the slide archives of windows that were either owned by the Westrum Foundation and currently in storage, or still privately owned but whose Westrum provenance was sure and whose owners had agreed to have the windows doc.u.mented. We took our seats in the middle of the room like students in a cla.s.s, my mother folding her hands in her lap and me jutting my feet out, crossed at the ankles. "Sit up," my mother admonished in a whisper, but I paid no attention.

The first image that came up on the screen was of two very large doves with gray bodies and reddish-orange heads and chests. They were facing each other; between them was a bush with dark orange berries. The window in which they appeared was square; a pattern of blocks in alternating colors ran around the edge.

"This window is still in a house in Mount Vernon, New York," Oliver explained, his voice soft, the cone of light illuminating the dust in the air. "It was custom-made for the house in 1919, to commemorate the pa.s.senger pigeon, which had become extinct. The owner of the house was a naturalist-indeed, he had been a founding member of the Sierra Club before he moved east from California-as well as a patron of the arts. In the 1800s pa.s.senger pigeons were so profuse a flock would darken the sky like a storm, but they were zealously overhunted and their habitats were destroyed, and finally, in September 1914, the last one died in a zoo in Cincinnati. This is quite a good replica, and the colors of the gla.s.s are especially worth noting here. We hope to purchase this someday-I would like to have it in the entrance-but the current owners don't want to part with it. Never mind-we will persist."

He clicked through several more pictures, pausing to comment on a design feature or a point of history of each. His knowledge of his great-grandfather and everything concerning him seemed utterly inexhaustible. The room was warm, and the projector made a quiet hum. My mother pressed back a yawn, and even though I was fascinated and curious, I did, too.

"Let me hurry us along here," Oliver said, as if he sensed the way sleep was settling on the room. "What we want is slide number eighty-nine. Numbers eighty-nine and ninety-seven, actually. Those are the operative images, the reason I contacted you, Lucy. I went through everything again after we last spoke, because it was nagging at me so, once I saw the woman in the photo you'd taken of the window Keegan Fall had found. Here we are." He stopped clicking through the images, which had rushed by in a blur of shape and color, settling on a long, rectangular window.

The image of this woman was stylized. She was tall and thin, and she gazed down at her cupped hands. Her auburn hair, piled on top of her head, escaped in tendrils; her dress was deep blue, falling to her ankles, with an empire waist. Her toes were straight, and her hands and face, her arms and feet, were a pearly opalescent white. She was looking down at three pale blue eggs in her palms and her eyes seemed almost closed.

"I don't know," I said. "The angle is so different, it's hard to say if she's the same woman or not."

"I have to agree," my mother said. "She seems a little bit generic. Maybe the similarities are in the artist's style?"

"Yes, yes, I know," Oliver said, both excited and a bit impatient. "In this one, I'm not looking so much at the face. You're right, it's ambiguous, maybe yes, she's the same one, maybe no. But I think she is the same woman, and this is why: look at the pendant she is wearing. Look at the bracelet on her left wrist. They are the same."

He was right. The pendant was oval, like the eggs, a nugget of dark blue lapis lazuli resting against her pale chest. The bracelet, too, was a deep vibrant blue, made of oval-shaped beads strung together. I'd been concentrating so much on the face and the flowers in the other windows that I hadn't really paid attention to the jewelry and couldn't remember if it had appeared in those or not. But Oliver knew. He clicked to the next slide, which was of the woman in the stairwell. The bracelet was not visible beneath the flowers in her arms, but the lapis lazuli pendant clearly was.

"You see," he said, and then clicked again to an image of the Joseph window, which Keegan had sent at Oliver's request. Here, the woman was much smaller, but the resemblance of her stance and facial shape and features to the women in the other two windows was very strong, and Oliver was right-she wore the lapis lazuli pendant, too.

"Now, one more," Oliver went on, after giving us a minute to absorb the image. "This last one is a very recent acquisition, a couple of months ago. I found it at an auction, actually, an estate sale right here in Rochester, just a few miles away. The proximity of course makes me think that the owners must have known Frank Westrum, at least professionally, but the executrix of the estate didn't seem to have any information. She's the niece or grandniece of the owner of the house, quite elderly herself. I asked her to check, but she phoned a few days later to say she had nothing that connected the window to Westrum-or to anyone, for that matter. So, we are going on style."

He clicked to the final image.

This window was large and, like the window in the stairwell, featured the now familiar image of the woman. Here, she stood on steps, one sandaled foot pointing down to the next stair. She wore a tunic, caught tightly at the waist, fastened at one shoulder and leaving the other one bare. She was looking at something out of the frame, smiling, her hands lifted as if to catch something falling from the sky-raindrops, or snow, or the rays of the sun. She wore no pendant, but the dark blue bracelet hung from her wrist. A tangle of vines and flowers climbed the side of the window, scattering dark red petals and blossoms on the stairs around her feet.

"Roses," I said. "She's walking on roses."

"I suppose it could be," Oliver said. "They might be climbing roses, or maybe they're clematis. Still, I concede roses as a possibility. The trouble, though, is that there's no concrete evidence that Frank Westrum knew Rose Jarrett personally. None whatsoever."

"Maybe he didn't," my mother suggested. "Maybe she just modeled for him."

"Unlikely. He didn't typically work with hired models. He liked to work with people he already knew."

I looked back at Oliver, who was studying the image on the screen.

"You said you talked to the executrix of the estate?"

"I did," he said, s.h.i.+fting his gaze to me. "As I said, I was quite specific about connections to Frank Westrum. I took photos of his other windows to show her, but she had nothing to share."

"But I wonder if you asked her about Rose."

Oliver ran one hand through his hair and shook his head. "No, of course not. This was weeks ago. I didn't even know about Rose. But I really don't think it would have mattered."

"Well, I think it could. It's a stone unturned."

"Well, by all means look into it, then," he said curtly, and moved on through the slides. He didn't believe in Rose, I could tell. That she'd existed, yes, but not that she'd mattered at all to Frank Westrum or these windows.

I watched Oliver, whose hair was thinning, and who, despite his careful and elegant attire, looked tired in the light from the projector. Blake's dismissal of his pa.s.sionate interest in the past did make me wonder, for the first time, why Oliver had invested his whole life in preserving the reputation of his famous ancestor. He was so deeply invested in the family history he'd pieced together that he wouldn't welcome any disruptions to his vision of the world. He'd asked me here to learn something, I felt sure of that, but I wasn't sure what he wanted to know. Clearly, it didn't really have to do with Rose.

Oliver turned off the slide machine.

"There's one more place I want to show you," he said. "If you have enough time?" When I nodded he said, "Good, I'm glad. This is off the tour, of course. I seldom take anyone to Frank's studio, but I'd like you two to see it."

Oliver led us down the stairs and through a narrow hallway that opened onto the back porch, where he handed each of us a compact umbrella. The path to the carriage house was made of pebbles that s.h.i.+fted under our feet as we hurried through the spitting rain. Oliver held his bright blue umbrella high, and the wings of his bow tie, a dark gold, fluttered as he ran. We followed him through wide doors, pausing in the empty open s.p.a.ce that smelled of dust and old leaves, the concrete floor cold beneath our soles.

"It's upstairs," Oliver said, shaking the rain off his umbrella and waiting for us to do the same. Then we climbed a narrow flight of stairs to the studio. The s.p.a.ce was wide open, one large room without walls, flooded with light from the windows and a central cupola. Even on this rainy day it was bright. Several easels stood at one end of the s.p.a.ce, and at the other was a kind of sitting area with a cl.u.s.ter of winged chairs around a low table. The center of the room was taken up by a grand workbench with mult.i.tudinous narrow drawers. Oliver beckoned us over, and slid some of the drawers open to reveal fragments and panes of brightly colored gla.s.s and layers of translucent drafting paper.

"This is where he worked," Oliver said. "He designed this studio himself, renovating this old carriage house, which didn't burn in the fire, while the main house was being built. This was in 1920. He was grief-stricken at the loss of Beatrice, and I think he simply couldn't stand to stay in New York City once she was gone. You can see how organized he was, everything arranged by year. It's been an invaluable resource as we've worked to reconstruct his creative process. Now, here's what I wanted especially to show you." Oliver pulled open another of the long, narrow drawers and took out a framed photograph of a woman. She was tall, her hair hidden by a cloche hat with a flower over the left ear. She was standing outside, turning to look back over her shoulder, laughing, carefree and appealing.

"This is Annabeth Westrum, my grandmother," Oliver said. "It was taken in 1923, in the garden out front, beneath the wisteria trellis, which had just been installed. Here's another one, a frontal view, taken on the same day. It was her wedding day. She was twenty-six. You see the resemblance, I'm sure, to the women in the windows. I have always felt quite certain that she was the muse, as it were. The model."

I studied the photos, Annabeth's long face, her laughing eyes gazing across the decades. I could see what Oliver meant. In a very general way, she did resemble the figure in the window; it was a natural conclusion to draw. Yet I wasn't quite convinced, nor did I really want to be. After a polite moment, I handed the photos to my mother and wandered the perimeter of the studio, pausing by the easels. Had Rose ever been here, standing in the clear light while Frank Westrum sketched her? My mother and Oliver were talking, their voices low and steady, first about the photos, and then about the contents of the drawers. Oliver had gone through those marked 1936 to 1938, the years when Frank would have been working on the chapel windows, but he'd found no sketches, no prototypes. Odd, Oliver said, it was very odd; all the other commissions had a clear paper trail. Beautiful, my mother murmured more than once, the papers rustling as she sifted through them. I ran my hand along the frame of an easel, imagining Frank Westrum, precise, contained, meticulous, standing here, his pencil flying over the paper as he drew her.

"Lucy," my mother called. "Look at these!"

She was standing over a pencil drawing of wild irises with their narrow, swordlike leaves, their pendulant, opulent blossoms. "Look, there's a whole sheaf of them," my mother said. "Irises mostly, but also a couple of sketches of roses." Before I could speak, she turned to Oliver and added, "Rose had a daughter, you know. A daughter named Iris. I think Frank Westrum must have known her, don't you?"

Oliver's expression closed up a little bit, growing inward, and thoughtful. I had the same plummeting feeling I'd had after telling him about the windows in the first place. I'd hardly had a chance to look at the sketches-fields of irises, banks of them, a single iris in a vase-before he gathered them up again and slid them back into the drawer labeled 1938. "Well, that's very interesting, I have to say. You hadn't told me. Even when you saw the window in the landing, you didn't mention it."

"Does it really matter?" I asked, because I could see that it did, that the mention of Iris had triggered some memory or piece of knowledge he didn't want to share.

"Oh, probably not."

He glanced at his watch and suggested that we spend a few more minutes with the windows themselves before we had to leave. I didn't object, turning this new piece of the mosaic over in my mind as Oliver hurried us down the stairs. It was clear to me that Frank Westrum and Rose had been close, though the evidence was only anecdotal, only a few sketches and a sheaf of irises in a window.

At the open doors of the carriage house we paused. The rain was pounding down outside, splas.h.i.+ng in the puddles that had begun to collect in the gravel.

"My umbrella," I said. "I left it upstairs. I'll catch up in a second."

I ran back upstairs-my umbrella was by the easel where I'd left it when my mother called me over to see the sketches. And though I hadn't done this by design, I couldn't help myself-I went back to the worktable and pulled out the drawer labeled 1938. There were nearly a dozen sketches, the penciled lines smeared in places. He'd been playing with the contrast between the sharp leaves and the lush flowers in drawing after drawing. I didn't dare to take them, and when I heard Oliver coming up the stairs I slid the drawer shut again in a rush of panic and left.

Back in the museum, Oliver was very attentive to my mother, witty and charming, telling stories about the place the Westrums had liked to vacation in the Thousand Islands. I walked from window to window as they talked, half listening, looking for any further evidence of Rose, wondering what Oliver was holding back from us. It was physical, almost, my desire to know who she was and how she had lived, what had ever happened to her and to her daughter. From this point in time, almost a hundred years later, the events of her life looked fixed, determined. And yet, in her brief notes I had recognized a restless pa.s.sion that seemed familiar, mirroring my own seeking, my own questions. My great-grandfather's story had been long established by the time I was born, and I'd never had the sense that he'd questioned his choices or made a single mistake. Yet here was this ancestor, hidden from view all these years, who seemed more like me. I was more determined than ever to track down Rose-to know her story, to understand how her story had helped to shape my own.

Before we left, Oliver gave me the contact information for the executrix of the estate-her name, Joan Lowry, as well as her address; he even gave me directions to the house nearby where the estate auction had been-probably because he was so sure I'd turn up nothing more than he had. He wrote the information on an index card, holding the pen oddly with the tips of his fingers, copying the address carefully from a Rolodex on the credenza-no BlackBerry for Oliver-and handed it to me, asking in an offhand way what day we planned to view the chapel.

"Wednesday at nine o'clock," I replied, regretting the words even as I spoke them, feeling I'd somehow walked into a trap. Maybe this was why I'd been invited.

"Oh, good," he said. "Keegan mentioned it would be happening soon, but your Reverend Suzi hasn't let me know when. Maybe she didn't get my messages. That's fine, though, that date. I'll put it in the calendar right now. And I suppose I'll see you then."

He held out his hand and I shook it.

My mother's hand he kissed, saying that he'd been enchanted, which made her laugh in a fl.u.s.tered way.

"He's slippery," I said as we opened our umbrellas-it was raining hard again-and made our way down the wide stone steps. "He probably arranged this whole meeting just to get that information about the viewing."

My mother slipped into the pa.s.senger seat. "Sweetheart," she said. "I don't think so. You're starting to sound a little paranoid. I thought he was charming."

She shut the door and I started the car, letting it warm up for a moment, wiping away the condensation that had begun to gather on the winds.h.i.+eld.

"He was certainly charming to you. He likes you, I think."

My mother smiled, but didn't reply.

"Anyway, I'm not paranoid. I'm suspicious. Wary. There's a difference."

"Suspicious of what, though?" My mother looked up from the damp pamphlet in her hands. "I mean, really, Lucy, what difference does it make if Oliver Parrott ends up with these windows? Maybe they belong here. After all, it is a museum. It's not like he's selling them on the black market or grinding them up."

"I don't know," I said slowly. I opened the map and searched for the address Oliver had given us. "I feel possessive about Rose, I guess. It's personal for me, probably in the same way Frank Westrum is personal for Oliver. To find this woman, Rose, who was part of the family story, but never included-well, it matters to me, that's all. She She matters to me. Plus, I think Oliver knows more than he's revealing. Did you notice how he reacted when you told him about Iris? I wish you hadn't done that." matters to me. Plus, I think Oliver knows more than he's revealing. Did you notice how he reacted when you told him about Iris? I wish you hadn't done that."

"Why in the world not? I didn't notice anything strange at all. It was fine."

"I don't want him to know everything we know," I said. "I just don't trust him, that's all."

"Oh, Lucy. That's ridiculous. Well, I hope you can find out what happened," my mother said. "And I hope you aren't disappointed if you do."

I gave her the map and the directions and she navigated us through the city. We drove by a tall brick town house just a few blocks away, where Oliver had found the windows. Then we headed out of town. Joan Lowry's retirement community was just off the highway, in a modern three-story building with porches made of dense plastic formed to resemble wood and windows with plastic strips made to resemble panes. It was an a.s.sisted living unit, where you lived in your own apartment as long as your health was good, though the nursing home was right there, in another building, should the need arise. It made logical sense, but I didn't like to think about it.

We found Joan in good spirits. She was in her own apartment, and when the desk clerk called upstairs and explained who we were, she said she'd be glad to see us right away. My mother and I took the elevator up to the third floor and walked down a hallway with wide wooden railings along each wall until we reached number 354. Joan opened it almost before we'd finished knocking, a slight woman with thick gray hair and stylish gla.s.ses. She was dressed in blue polyester pants and a dark blue sweater, st.u.r.dy shoes. Her apartment was small, painted a neutral beige, filled with furniture she must have taken from her old house, a velvet couch and a ma.s.sive entertainment center across from it, a heavy round table with carved legs, set for one. She made a pot of tea and insisted that we sit on the sofa while she carried the pot and cups to the coffee table on a wooden tray. I glanced around as she poured, her hands shaking slightly. There were Scottish terriers with red bows everywhere-in framed prints, stenciled onto the wall in a border, in the fabric of the curtains, statues perched along the windowsills.

"Aren't they cute?" she asked wistfully when I remarked on them. "I used to have a little Scottie. I always had one, actually, but when the last one died I didn't get another. No pets in this place," she explained, sitting across from us in a wingback chair. "Though I do think Mr. Kitteredge down the hall is hiding a cat."

My mother and I sipped at our tea while she talked, filling us in on the residential gossip. I was grateful to my mother, who managed to keep the conversation focused. I saw why Oliver had felt frustrated, and kept trying to steer her into conversation about her aunt. Her great-aunt, it turned out.

"It must have been quite a task to settle the estate," I said. "We've been going through a few boxes at our own house this morning, and I'm already exhausted."

"Oh," she said. "It nearly did me in, I can tell you. There were boxes and boxes and more boxes of things-in the attic, in the bas.e.m.e.nt, in the extra rooms. She was a pack rat. All sorts of memorabilia, everywhere. She never married, so there was no one else to see to it all. And she had been so active, in so many different things. Plaques from this and certificates from that. Plus, I had all the stuff from her former housemate; all of her boxes were in the attic, too."

I put my cup down carefully on its saucer. "Did you say she had a housemate?"

"Yes, from ages ago. She died a long time back. In the 1940s, I think. But all her things were still there."

"Do you remember her name?"

"Oh, yes, her name was Rose. They were great friends, apparently. Even at the end of her life, my aunt used to speak of her. They were radicals together, you see. Free spirits, thumbing their noses at convention, that sort of thing. My aunt was something of a black sheep in the family," she confided. "You know, never marrying, having a career. In those days, it wasn't the done thing. She was making a statement, at least that's how other people felt. Really, though, she was just living her own life. She said she liked me because I showed some spirit, and when I went to college she sent me money for books every semester. We kept up a correspondence."

"She sounds remarkable."

"Indeed, she was. She was a suffragette, you know, and the first woman in this county to cast her vote in 1920. There was an article about her in the newspaper." She gave a wave of her hand. "I saved it here somewhere."

"I wonder," I said, trying to sound more casual than I felt, "what happened to all those things that belonged to Rose?"

Joan pressed her hands together for a second. "Well, let me see. I had the auction people come-they took the stained-gla.s.s windows, for instance, that your Mr. Parrott was so keenly interested in having. They took all the biggest furniture, too. Then I had a great big garage sale. You know, pots and pans, gla.s.sware. My neighbor Bobbie Jean helped me get it organized. She's good at that sort of thing, a little bossy, but she means well. And after everything was gone, there were still boxes and boxes of papers. Bobbie Jean took them all. She said she was dropping them off at the Women's Rights National Park in Seneca Falls. Because you realize my aunt, Lydia Langhammer, was arrested once and thrown in jail overnight. I remember how she used to like to tell that story. It was something she and Rose had in common, too. One of the reasons they were such good friends."

I'd been letting the commentary wash over me, listening for key words, and at this I interrupted.

"You mean Rose was arrested, too?"

"Well, yes. I think that's what Aunt Lydia said. More than once, as I recall. Aunt Lydia used to call Rose the fire to her oil. Or maybe it was the oil to her fire. It's terrible, you never think to write these things down and then later they're just gone. Poof!"

I let my breathing slow, forced myself to be calm as I asked the next question.

"I wonder-did they take those boxes full of papers? The Women's Rights National Park?"

"As far as I know, they did. Bobbie Jean didn't say otherwise. More tea?" she asked, as she saw me glance at my mother.

"No, thanks so much."

"I'm afraid we have to get going," my mother added.

"I wish you'd have more tea. I wish you'd stay a little longer."

"We're already late. It was so nice of you to see us, though."

She walked us to the door, talking all the while, and didn't stop even when we'd stepped out into the hall. Finally, I put my hand on her arm. She glanced down and paused in the stream of words.

"Thank you," I said. "I'll let you know if we find out anything."

And before she could start talking again we were striding down the hall. I took the steps two at a time, and burst out into the cool, damp air. The rain had stopped and the sky, though overcast, was lighter.

"She seems very lonely," my mother said.

"I know," I said, glad for my skin, my clear eyes, but aware of how fleeting youth is. There had been a photo of Joan as a young woman on the wall above the table; she'd once been just as strong and agile as I was now.

We took the highway back, pa.s.sing the signs for Geneva, Seneca Falls, Waterloo, winding through the countryside on local roads for the last few miles. There were deep puddles in the gravel driveway, and rain dripped from the foliage, so dense around the fence. The bucket on the porch was overflowing; inside, the boxes waited, their contents strewn across the living room floor.

"It's this hour I don't like," my mother said. "This, and when the wind is up, that's the other time this house seems like a hostile place."

"You'd be happier somewhere smaller?"

"Absolutely," she said, turning on the lights. "A maintenance-free condo, that's what I have in mind. It's beautiful here, but sometimes this house feels like my enemy."

That night I lay awake for a long time, listening to the steady rain on the roof, thinking over the events of the day, so excited about the boxes at the Women's Rights National Historic Park that I couldn't sleep, worried because I hadn't heard from Yos.h.i.+ in two days, except for his brief e-mail. When I called him, he was packing, heading for his flight, so we didn't talk long; he'd be in Jakarta by evening. I closed the phone and lay awake in the darkness, remembering my argument with Blake, what he'd said about change, wondering what it was I'd set in motion, and whether I'd be glad, at the end, that I had.