The Lake of Dreams (19 page)

“She’s your great-grandmother, this Rose?”

“No. My great-grandfather’s sister. I guess that would make her my great-great-aunt? We never heard about her. I think there was a scandal.”

“Sure you want to know?”

I considered this because it echoed so clearly my own apprehension, my initial sense that the past might have been covered up for very good reasons. “You know, I really do. I’m not sure I can explain exactly why. Just that it feels like an important piece is missing from my family. I mean, if the scandal had to do with Rose being a suffrage leader, then that’s remarkable. We could use some more heroic women in the family.” As I said this I thought of my own struggles all these decades later, pale in comparison and yet real enough, especially for a woman in science. Times when I’d been interrupted in the middle of a presentation, or given all the paperwork to finish, a kind of corporate housekeeping, or had been excluded in a routine way from important conversations outside of work.

We talked for a little longer about his travel plans, and then Yoshi said he had to go. There were reports he had to look over before he could relax. He took a long drink, looking tired, I thought, sapped.

“You should get some sleep.”

“I will. Once these reports are done, I’m going to crash in front of the TV. Mrs. Fujimoro asked after you, by the way. She noticed you were gone.”

I remembered the press of her hand, the earth trembling beneath our feet.

“How is she? How are the earthquakes?”

“There was a biggish one yesterday. When I came home the bookcase had fallen over, and the rest of the plants in the kitchen.”

“I can’t say I miss the earthquakes,” I said. “I miss you, though.” And I did, thinking of the long June dusks there, the walks we’d take sometimes in the evening, by the sea.

“I wish you were here,” Yoshi said, his voice wistful.

“Soon,” I said. “Love you.”

“Likewise,” he said, and before I could give him a hard time about his lack of romantic impulses, he’d switched off Skype, and the screen went dark.

Downstairs, I had a quick breakfast with my mother, then drove her into town. We were a little formal with each other, guarded. She said Blake had seemed glad to talk about the baby, though he’d asked her to keep it quiet because Avery had been planning to announce it more formally.

“Does he know I told you?” I asked as I dropped her off at the bank.

She winced a little. “Well, maybe. I didn’t say so, but maybe he guessed. He seemed a little taken aback at first that I already knew. But Lucy, I really don’t think it will be a problem.”

I watched her hurry up the steps in the rain, clenching a plastic coat around her to protect her cast.

From there I drove to Rochester, first on local roads, winding through the countryside, cows grazing in the fields like black-and-white clouds, the new corn trembling in the steady rain. Route 20 connects the northern tips of all the lakes, roughly following the route of the old Erie Canal. It travels through the nineteenth-century towns strung like beads along the tips of the lakes, so beautiful and faded, having grown and prospered a hundred years ago when the streets were unpaved and full of horses, barges floating down the canal and stopping at these ports to load crates of glass or garments, pumps or rope, fresh from the assembly lines. Now, with so many factories closed and so many businesses having left, the towns were stately but worn, some thriving with tourists, some with their windows empty or boarded up or given over to transitory businesses that offered fast cash advances against payday. Their outskirts trailed on for miles, full of strip malls and fast-food chains.

The Westrum House didn’t open until two o’clock, so I stopped to visit the Sonnenberg Gardens in Canandaigua, and I had lunch there, too. Then I got on the highway into Rochester and found my way downtown. The Frank Westrum House was tucked away on a street full of tall brick homes, hidden by a row of overgrown forsythia bushes. The path was made of flagstones leading past the bushes and through a garden full of nooks and alcoves, hidden benches, and wisteria trailing from trellises. The house was immediately distinct, two stories, built in a style reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, with lots of horizontal lines and windows everywhere. It was so quiet that I worried that despite the hours posted on the Web site the house wouldn’t actually be open. Yet when I finally walked up to the entrance—a portico, really, with several long beams extending over the stoop—a little sign with red cursive letters said
OPEN
. I stepped into the hall, called out, “Hello.” My voice echoed.

Newspaper articles, framed and hung along the wall, documented the history of the house, and I studied these as I waited. The neighborhood had been built in 1873, and the brick houses along the street dated from that time. However, there had been a fire on this site in 1910, one house kindling another and both fires raging most of a night, burning the houses to their shells. No one died in these fires, but the families lost everything. The lots sat empty until Frank Westrum bought them in 1920 and began building this house, which had taken him the better part of a decade to complete due to scarce funds. The final framed article talked about the restoration of the house in the 1960s, when it was purchased from private owners and the search for the glass art of Frank Westrum to fill it had begun.

There were distant footsteps, hurrying, and then a tall man clad in khakis and a white shirt stepped into the hallway. He had short, wavy flaming-red hair that made me think of the fires that had burned here, and his skin was pale, freckled. His name tag said STUART MINTER in thick block letters. Stuart was about my age, and he gave a nervous smile as he approached, speaking so quickly he was almost hard to follow.

“Hello and welcome, sorry to make you wait. It’s usually a pretty quiet time of day, so I wasn’t really expecting—well, sorry, as I said. Did you come to take the walking tour?”

“Yes, I would like to do the tour,” I said. “But I have some questions for you first.” I told him about the windows I’d seen in The Lake of Dreams, each with their distinctive rows of moons and densely woven vines and flowers along the bottom.

“Here’s the motif. Does it look familiar at all?” I asked, bringing the digital image up on my phone. “It’s a little hard to see. But the church had documentation—an original receipt—that indicated Frank Westrum made these windows on commission in 1938.”

Stuart Minter took the phone and studied the image. “No,” he said, finally. “We have nothing like that here, nor have I ever seen that motif in the Westrum archives. I’d remember it, I’m quite sure. It’s unusual, isn’t it? But even with this image—it’s very fuzzy—I can see trademarks of Westrum’s work in the window. Look, there’s this distinctive pattern of leading. You can just barely make it out, but if you look closely you can see how the pieces of stained glass come together here and there in a kind of flower shape. You’ll see this again as you take the tour, as well. That pattern is in every Westrum window, something of a signature, as the audio guide points out.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, making a mental note to mention this detail to Keegan. “Is there any way to trace how Frank Westrum came to make these particular windows on commission? Do you have those records here?”

He bit his lip lightly, thinking. “I don’t know, but the archives are pretty extensive. I’ll check while you’re looking around, if you want.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Not a problem.” He smiled. “It’s rather exciting, isn’t? Something unexpected to liven up the day, anyway.”

Stuart gave me an iPod with the audio tour, along with a map of the Westrum House and its exhibits, then disappeared back down the same corridor he’d emerged from, marked STAFF ONLY, his footsteps fading. The house was not large, but it was open, empty of furniture and with extensive windows against which the art glass of Frank Westrum hung, casting colorful patterns on the opposing walls, the ceilings, and the floors. I started the audio and walked from piece to piece, through bands of light and color, learning about Westrum’s life, his childhood, his brief but significant apprenticeship with John La Farge, his equally significant break with his mentor, his marriage and two children, the death of his wife, and his move upstate. Clearly, from his windows, Frank Westrum had entertained a passion for water; the stained-glass scenes were full of its calm sheen or swirling currents or white-tipped waves. He’d liked vines, too, which tended to climb the long sides of glass panes he’d made to flank doors, and he liked flowers of all kinds. Much of his work was architectural, transoms or narrow panels to be inset above picture windows. In the middle of his career, he had experimented with geometric shapes as well, a counterpoint to the lush and intricately patterned scenes of his early work. In a series of square windows he had worked with green and blue and the white glass shaped into diamonds and triangles, arrowhead points.

There was something very calming about his work. In part it was the effect of the room itself, its white walls and vast windows everywhere. But it was also the glass art, with its radiant colors, its images of earth and leaves and water, the human figures in their flowing clothes, the geometric patterns with their soothing continuity and order.

The audio tour took me through the four downstairs rooms, and then instructed me to return to the foyer and travel down a short hallway. I did this, still glancing at the pamphlet, but I stopped, transfixed, when I reached the base of the stairway. Its open risers backed to a wall of glass; there was light everywhere. An enormous stained-glass window hung in the landing, radiant gold and green, purple and vermilion, pale blue and dark amber. It depicted a woman walking on a path of bluish-gray pebbles in a garden, holding a sheaf of many-colored long-stemmed flowers in her arms. Her hair was loose, falling to her shoulders in a dark cascade. Her simple dress was a golden green, falling to her toes, tightly belted at the waist in a darker green. Her feet were bare, her eyes cast toward the flowers, and her arms, her face, were done in a soft white glass that made her seem to glow, like the flowers in my mother’s old moon garden. I noted the flowered leading pattern that Stuart had mentioned in the lower left corner, and again in the edge of her sleeve. However, what held me still was her stance, the way she stood half-turned, gazing outward as if she recognized someone beyond the frame. Her face was familiar, too, rather long, her downcast eyes large, dark blue. I got my camera out and scrolled quickly through the saved images until I reached the one I’d taken of the Joseph window. Yes, one woman stood out amid the others, turned just this way, her face the same shape, though the image was much smaller, of course. Cupping my hand over the screen to darken it, I glanced from the phone to the stairwell with a growing sureness and excitement. Yes, I felt certain—these two images, in two very different scenes, had used the same woman as a model.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and a moment later Stuart appeared with several green file folders in one arm, running a hand through his flash of dark red hair, looking a little worried that he’d left me alone for so long.

“She’s exquisite, isn’t she?” he said, pausing beside me. “This window came from a private collection in New York City, quite undocumented. We think it’s from rather late in the Westrum opus. He must have done it during his retirement; certainly after he moved to Rochester. At least that’s the speculation among art historians.”

I nodded, slipping my phone back into my purse. I didn’t want to tell Stuart, not yet anyway, about my own discovery.

“She’s incredibly striking. Not beautiful exactly, but very unusual. You don’t know who the model was?”

“Unfortunately, no. We don’t know much about that period of Westrum’s life. He’d fallen out of favor and retreated here for the last twenty-some years of his life, after his wife died. No one was paying much attention to his work, sadly enough. We assume this woman was someone from the family who commissioned the window, but that’s only a guess. It may also have been Westrum’s daughter, Annabeth. The colors are particularly powerful in this piece, do you agree?”

“Yes. And I see the pattern in the leading.”

“That’s right. Here’s the other thing I just love in this window—look at the gradations of color in the flowers. It’s the spectrum of the rainbow, red to violet. Which is a wonderful visual pun, because the flowers are irises, and of course in Greek mythology Iris was the goddess of the rainbow.”

“That is wonderful to know,” I said quietly, trying to hide the thrill of excitement, electric and alive, that ran through me as he pointed out the flowers.
If Iris is to leave your household . . .
“Did you find anything interesting in the files?” I asked, nodding at his folders.

“Well, yes and no. Come back to the desk and I’ll show you.”

I followed him through the narrow hallway to the console, where he opened the folders and spread out the papers. There was a copy of the letter of receipt and thanks from the church for the chapel windows, clipped to a series of other letters.

“These are the commission requests,” Stuart said. “I only had a chance to glance at them quickly. You’re welcome to look further, of course. But the windows seem to have been ordered by a V. W. Branch in 1936. The address is in New York City, so Westrum probably knew him there. There’s not much more information—just a detailing of the dimensions, some sketches of the images requested, that sort of thing.”

I looked through the letters, all typed, all signed in black pen by V. W. Branch.

“Not him,” I said. “Her. V. W. Branch is probably Vivian Whitney Branch, an early feminist.” I was trying to speak very calmly, but I felt the sort of excitement you feel when the pieces of a puzzle are about to come together and make sense. “She had a sister, Nelia Elliot, who lived in The Lake of Dreams. That’s probably the connection to the chapel windows. Nelia Elliot was active in the suffrage movement, too.”

I went through all the papers carefully, one by one, hoping for a more tangible link to Rose, but I didn’t find anything.