Elm Creek Quilts [06] The Master Quilter (10 page)

Judy shrugged. “It is possible to outgrow a college. You can be happy for many years, but one day, you realize you’ve gone as far as you can go. Sometimes the best and only way to pursue your research is to pursue it somewhere else.”

Gwen would hate to leave Waterford College, Elm Creek Quilts, Summer. But she was a long way from retirement and refused to be shuffled off to her rocking chair where she could work on her girlie projects while younger women like Annette were celebrated for their important work.

She had to find a middle ground. If her ongoing research wouldn’t impress the department, she would find something new, but she would not abandon quilts simply because some stuffy old men didn’t understand their significance. It was her job as an educator to make them understand.

But it wouldn’t hurt to find something that would also win her a grant.

Gwen managed to avoid Bill and Annette the next day, but she found little comfort in the sympathies of the two American Studies professors who stopped by her office once the official announcement was made. Her grad students, perhaps warned away by Jules, did not seek her out, so she left campus right after her last class. She would work at home until it was time to leave for the weekly business meeting at Elm Creek Manor. Bonnie wanted them to arrive early so she could show them the first blocks of Sylvia’s bridal quilt.

Was it any wonder Gwen preferred the energy and camaraderie of the manor to the suspicious temper of the Liberal Arts building? Elm Creek Quilts was collaborative, cooperative, and—she dared to say—matriarchal, while academia was still a rigid hierarchy despite the varying political winds that drifted across it, altering its surface without changing the deeper layers. As an idealistic student, she had thought the university was a place where the love of learning and the sharing of ideas were celebrated; now she knew that argument and backbiting were the norm, the egalitarian exchange of knowledge an afterthought.

Or maybe she was just bitter. Judy never seemed to encounter politicking and backstabbing. All she ever complained about was inadequate funding and too many boring department meetings.

The gray stone manor was a welcome sight as Gwen crossed the bridge over Elm Creek. She parked near the middle of the lot, where a patch of snow-covered grass encircled two towering, bare-limbed elms. Summer’s car was not there, but inside Gwen found Bonnie, Agnes, and Diane, and Judy soon joined them. Gwen wished Summer was there; she never failed to help Gwen put her disappointments in proper perspective. Still, Gwen joined in the usual banter and admired the blocks until Sylvia’s sudden arrival sent them scrambling. Fortunately, Sarah managed to fling the blocks into the pantry before Sylvia saw them, but her feeble cover story made Gwen cringe. Miraculously, Sylvia believed it, or pretended to, and the Elm Creek Quilters went to the parlor to begin the meeting.

Sarah began with the good news that enrollment for the coming season was up fifteen percent. “Your Photo Transfer workshop is especially popular, Gwen,” she added. “Summer and I thought it would be a good idea to offer a second session each week. If you’re up for it.”

Gwen shrugged. “Sure. Why not? Once the spring semester ends, I’ll have plenty of time.” Much more time than she had intended or hoped, but she needn’t tell Sarah that. No one but Summer and Judy knew how much she had counted on that appointment.

Not long into the meeting, Summer burst in, slipping out of her coat and full of apologies. She wore her long auburn hair in a loose knot at the nape of her neck, and if Gwen wasn’t mistaken, she had secured it with a number-two pencil. “Relax, kiddo. You’re not that late,” whispered Gwen, but Summer was too distracted by the others’ teasing to hear. Naturally they assumed she was late because of her boyfriend, which Gwen thought ridiculous until Summer confessed they were correct.

“You guys spend so much time together you might as well live together,” said Diane.

Agnes looked horrified. “Don’t suggest such a thing. She meant after you get married, dear.”

Summer blanched as Agnes patted her hand.

“Married? Are you crazy?” said Gwen. “Don’t go putting thoughts of marriage in my daughter’s head. Or of living together. My daughter has more sense than that.”

She gave Summer a reassuring grin. The other Elm Creek Quilters still felt cheated out of planning Sylvia and Andrew’s wedding, and they saw Summer as the most likely candidate for matrimony. They obviously hoped to nudge her closer to the altar so their investigation of local florists and bakeries wouldn’t go to waste. What they could not possibly understand was that Summer was just like her mother in her need for personal freedom. Summer was too wise to commit to anyone when she had so much of her own life to live first. No one would ever accuse her of either settling or settling down.

The teasing subsided when Sarah resumed the meeting. Afterward, Gwen stopped Summer before she could put on her coat. “Kiddo, can we talk?”

“About what?” said Summer, wary.

“Nothing important.” Gwen forced a smile. Clearly Summer was in no mood for a heart-to-heart. “It can wait. Can you come for supper on Sunday?”

“Can we make it the following week?” Summer tugged on her coat and wrapped her scarf around her neck. “I’m swamped until the end of January.”

Puzzled, since January was far from their busiest season, Gwen agreed and promised to make the lentil and brown rice soup Summer loved. Summer thanked her with a quick kiss on the cheek and bounded out the door, and Gwen watched her go. It was hard to believe that Gwen herself had once been so slender and lovely, but she had the photographs to prove it. Summer would accomplish much more with her life than Gwen had, though, because she was brighter and braver than Gwen had ever been.

“You must be very proud,” remarked Sylvia as she cleared away the cups and plates left over from their midmeeting snack.

“Proud beyond reason,” said Gwen with a laugh.

She stayed behind to help Sylvia tidy the room, and as they carried the dishes to the kitchen, she found herself telling the older woman about her disappointment at work. Sylvia put on a fresh pot of tea and they sat at the kitchen table while Gwen confessed the whole sorry tale.

“I spent most of my teaching career trying to convince people quilting was art,” said Sylvia when Gwen had finished. “Now you’re trying to persuade them it’s a relevant art. I suppose that’s progress of a sort.”

“At that rate, in another forty years, no one will have these arguments anymore.” Gwen stared glumly into her teacup, wishing she could read the leaves. “Just in time for my great-grandchildren.”

“The woman they chose instead—what is her field of study?”

“Media and the political process, mostly. How campaigns have changed over time, the role of debates in elections.” She forced herself to add, “I have to admit it’s interesting work.”

“I’m sure it is, but that doesn’t make your work dull or irrelevant.” Sylvia drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “I wish I could think of a quilt that figured heavily in politics, but I’m afraid nothing comes to mind. The closest I can come is the time Mrs. Roosevelt was presented with the prizewinning quilt from a contest held at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago.”

Gwen set down her teacup. “Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“That’s right. This was the biggest quilt competition ever held, before or since. Nearly twenty-five thousand quilters submitted quilts, and my sister and I were two of them.” Sylvia chuckled. “We bent the rules a little by making our quilt together. When we signed the form saying that the quilt was entirely of our own making, Claudia wrote, ‘Claudia Sylvia Bergstrom.’ That was her idea. I thought no one would believe a mother would name her child Claudia Sylvia, but they must not have noticed, because we made it to the semifinals.”

Gwen laughed. “Sylvia, I’m shocked. You cheated in a quilt competition?”

“Only in a sense,” she protested. “Keep in mind, I was only thirteen and my sister fifteen. If we combined our ages we were still younger than most of the other participants, so we decided we weren’t really cheating.”

Sylvia explained that they weren’t the only participants to interpret the rules liberally. The woman who claimed the grand prize had not put a single stitch into the quilt submitted in her name. Instead she sent the fabric and pattern to one woman who pieced the top, while another added beautiful stuffed work, and still others contributed the exquisite, sixteen-stitches-to-the-inch quilting. The winner paid her team of helpers a modest fee for their labor, but refused to share any of the prize money with them after she won. “They were poor women, too, and it was the Depression,” said Sylvia disapprovingly. “The grand prize of one thousand dollars was an enormous sum in those days, more than a year’s salary for most people. I never understood why she wasn’t more generous.”

“How does Eleanor Roosevelt figure in this story?”

“After the World’s Fair, the grand prize quilt was presented to her and kept at the White House. It has since disappeared. Now, that would be a project worth researching. I’d give a lot to know what happened to that quilt.” Sylvia sipped her tea, thoughtful. “But whatever happened to it, and however one regards the woman who won, that’s not what I think of when I recall that quilt show. The theme of the fair was ‘A Century of Progress,’ and the interpretations those quilters produced were simply remarkable. There were quilts that celebrated advances in technology, transportation, industry, women’s fight for equal rights—and remember, this was at a time when the nation was truly struggling. To see all those expressions of optimism and hope when we had so recently seen the worst of times in the Great War and were now mired in the Depression—well, it certainly impressed me, even at my age.”

“You saw the quilts? In person?”

“Yes, indeed. My father took my sister, my brother, and me to the World’s Fair that year. It was a long journey to Chicago with three children in tow. I can’t imagine what he was thinking, but I’m glad he did it.” Sylvia rose and inclined her head to the doorway. “I saved a box full of souvenirs, if you would like to see them.”

Gwen wouldn’t have dreamed of doing otherwise, so she followed Sylvia up the oak staircase to the third floor, where Sylvia gestured to the narrow set of stairs leading to the attic. She declined to accompany Gwen farther, but she described the old walnut bureau so well that Gwen found it easily, halfway down the west wing. Gwen retrieved an engraved tin box from the bottom drawer and dusted it with her sleeve as she carried it down the creaking staircase.

They went to the library, where the embers of an earlier blaze still glowed in the fireplace. Sylvia seated herself nearby, but Gwen sat on the floor at her feet, the better to spread out the box’s treasures. Inside she found brochures, ticket stubs, programs, photographs, and other items that must have been added later—newspaper articles from around the country featuring local quilt-makers whose entries had made it to the finals, advertisements from Sears Roebuck announcing their sponsorship of the contest, commercial patterns taken from prizewinning quilts, a tattered ribbon with writing in faded ink naming Claudia Sylvia Bergstrom as the first-place winner from the Harrisburg Sears.

Before long Gwen became so engrossed in examining the artifacts that she hardly remembered to thank Sylvia when the older woman rose to go to bed, telling her to stay as long as she liked. Alone, Gwen lost track of the hours as she pored over the yellowed newspaper articles and studied the show catalogue. The picture that emerged from the fragile scraps of history was not the little-known anecdote from the life of Eleanor Roosevelt that Gwen had hoped to find, but something far more intriguing. The quilts entered in the 1933 World’s Fair contest had captured the national mood during a time of extreme trial. Granted, the theme “A Century of Progress” would have encouraged more optimistic interpretations in those days than in Gwen’s ironic era, but even if the quiltmakers had been steered toward a rosier perspective, their quilts still could be considered an accurate record of how those women defined progress.

This was it, Gwen realized. This was her new book.

She surveyed the orderly groupings of souvenirs on the floor all around her. Sylvia’s treasure trove of information was surely just the beginning. If nearly twenty-five thousand quilts had been submitted, surely there were more newspaper articles about the women who had made them, more scandals like the one surrounding the dubious honor of the grand prize winner, more mysteries such as the disappearance of the winning quilt—and, of course, the quilts themselves. A few hundred or even a few thousand of them might still exist, and if their makers were still around or had left diaries behind or had told their children stories—

“Sylvia’s quilt,” Gwen suddenly exclaimed. Sylvia had shown her the souvenirs, but not the quilt she and Claudia had made. She scrambled to her feet, left the library, and hurried down the hall to Sylvia’s room. She rapped softly at the door and drew back when Andrew opened it, squinting.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

His brow furrowed. “Of course. It’s ten after one.”

“What?” She should have checked her watch. “Never mind. It can wait until tomorrow.”

“Is this a quilt thing?”

“What else would you expect at this hour? I’m sorry, Andrew. Go back to sleep.”

He shrugged as Gwen pulled the door shut softly. It was probably good she had woken him instead of Sylvia. Gwen doubted she herself could have managed so much tolerant humor in Andrew’s place. He was a rarity among his sex, the sort of man she could understand a woman wanting to marry.