The Lake of Dreams (34 page)

“Oh, I agree. He clearly made these windows with great delicacy and intention. Some of his best work, I would have to say. He must have had a great affection for her.”

“I think so, too.” Remembering Oliver’s reticence in the studio, I decided not to tell him about Rose, that I’d found her letters, that I’d learned so much more. I didn’t want him to know about Iris, either, how she’d been left behind, how all Rose wanted was to earn enough money to come back and claim her daughter.

Zoe and I sat down. Suzi took a seat ahead of us and turned, sliding her elbow over the smooth wooden edge of the pew.

“This Rose Jarrett, who was she? Do you know anything more? Because if I was curious about her before, I’m just consumed with curiosity now.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Zoe said. “Lucy says we’re related, but I’ve never heard of her. And these windows are so beautiful, but I don’t know what they mean. Can you tell us?”

I was glad she had asked so I wouldn’t have to admit my own ignorance. I hadn’t gone to church since I was seventeen.

“I can tell you something about the windows,” Suzi said. “As beautiful as they are, they’re powerful, too. The west wall—it’s a wall of prophets, really. All four windows. The first image is Elizabeth talking to Mary. I’m sure you can see that they’re both pregnant—Elizabeth, who thought she was past child-bearing age, with John the Baptist, and Mary, a young woman, unmarried, with Jesus. Elizabeth has given a prophecy to Mary about her child, and in this window, Mary’s speaking, she’s saying the Magnificat, which is prophetic, too, and which talks about justice for the poor. Two women, two prophets, their children about to be born, their lives about to change in ways they can’t imagine or control.

“Now, the next window, this woman with the scroll, is Hulda. She’s from the Hebrew Scriptures. It’s a wonderful story—when the king found ancient documents hidden in the temple walls, he consulted Hulda, who was a prophet, to find out what they meant. There were plenty of male prophets around, but he chose Hulda, for her wisdom and her compassion. See how she’s standing on the temple steps, holding the scrolls, the crowd gathering to hear what she says?

“This next one I just love,” she went on, nodding to the radiant woman turning from the cave. “That’s Mary Magdalene. Look at her expression—the amazement, and the fear. The story is so familiar that I don’t know if anyone really hears it anymore. But imagine if a person you loved had died, and you went to the cemetery and saw that person again. That’s Mary Magdalene’s story—she’s the person to whom the Resurrection was first revealed, the one charged with telling others. Very little attention has been paid to the fact that the first person to witness the Resurrection was a woman, but it’s so. As I said, your great-great-aunt really intrigues me with her choices.”

We were quiet for a minute. I wasn’t thinking of the windows, really, but rather of my father on the day they’d carried his body to the shore.

“I thought that was Mary Magdalene in the last window,” I said, finally. “I thought she was the woman holding the jar.”

“No. It’s not entirely clear who the woman with the alabaster jar is. There are different ideas. But it’s probably not Mary Magdalene.”

I hesitated to ask, but I had to. “You said the women on this wall were prophets, but wasn’t Mary Magdalene—you know—a fallen woman?”

“Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute,” Suzi said. She spoke calmly but also forcefully. “That’s the story you grew up hearing, probably. Around the fourth century one of the early popes conflated all women into one fallen woman, and that image has stuck. But it’s not true. It’s not anywhere in the Scriptures. This woman, too, with the alabaster jar, has been mislabeled that way for centuries. This story appears in all four Gospels, which underscores its importance, but only in Luke is she described, in a very nonspecific way, as a sinner—a term which, when you think about it, applies to everyone. In John she’s identified as Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus. Yet, like Mary Magdalene, she’s been labeled as a prostitute for centuries. It’s a diversion, I think, a smoke screen. Because if they call her a prostitute, she can be dismissed, and the rest of the story can be dismissed, too. No one has to look any deeper into the narrative. No one seeing this woman standing before Jesus with her jar full of nard, pouring it over his head, has to say, Look, look at this: anointing a king is the action of a prophet. Yet it’s true, and that is exactly what she’s doing.”

We studied the woman, her flowing hair, her robes flowing, too, the alabaster jar cradled in her hands.

“It’s such a moment of emotional intimacy,” Suzi went on. “Sometimes I try to imagine it: the room fills up with the fragrance of the nard, and she pours it over his head. She anoints him. The disciples protest—she’s wasting money—but Jesus defends her. ‘This story will be told in remembrance of her’—that’s what Jesus says. Yet here we are, millennia later, and we don’t tell her story. We don’t even have her name.”

“A forgotten woman,” I said. I thought of Rose, who was no prophet, no saint, just an ordinary young woman walking home in the quiet darkness along the rutted dirt road, the summer air soft on her arms, the strange comet light changing everything. She slipped quietly into the garden, in through the kitchen door and up into the little room where she lay awake all the rest of that night, running the events over in her mind. Everything would be different now, she knew that, but she did not yet know just how. She still believed the story she had entered was her own.

Except for a piece of fabric, she would have disappeared.

“Rose Jarrett wanted to be a priest,” I said. “Even though she knew she couldn’t, that was her secret dream.”

“Really?” Suzi, who had been studying the western wall of windows, turned to look at me again, her expression interested, curious. “Well, that explains some things about the windows. But it must have been frustrating—even heartbreaking—for her. This was in the 1930s?”

“No, when she was younger. It was around 1910, 1914.”

“I see. What did she do then?”

“It’s a sad story. She got involved with the wrong person. He was older, and he had power over her family, but I think she convinced herself it was love. She was young, fifteen. He was wealthy, and he left her when he learned she was pregnant. A sad story, and an old one, too. She came to this country with almost nothing. I don’t know what happened next, or how she came to know Frank Westrum.”

“That is sad,” Suzi said. “I wonder if she knew women were priests in the early church. There’s lots of evidence to support it.”

“I don’t think so. I think she felt she was trespassing even to suggest it. She stole a chalice,” I added. “A silver chalice from the church, because she had no money.”

I said this quickly, glancing away as I spoke. I don’t know what I expected—shock or anger or dismissal—but Suzi just nodded.

“She must have been very frightened, to have done that.”

“I think she was. It haunted her later.”

I folded my arms. The air in the chapel was damp and stale and chilly. I wished I’d brought a sweater. Thinking of the images of all these women, all this beautiful art, locked away for decades, I was filled with a sudden sense of emptiness. What, I wondered, had become of all the people who had filled this chapel on that final Sunday morning? What had happened to the whispered prayers and hopes and grief and dreams of this community, now so completely vanished? What had happened to Rose?

“What about the other windows?” Zoe asked. “Are they all prophets, too?”

Keegan and Oliver had drifted to the back of the chapel, where they were talking as intently about glass and dates and Frank Westrum as we were about the lives of these women. The photographer was moving from window to window, taking multiple shots of each.

“Some are. They’re all very interesting. I was thinking about it earlier, trying to see the thread connecting them. Here’s what I see: they are all strong women who weren’t afraid to challenge conventional thinking. For instance, that’s the Pharaoh’s daughter, pulling Moses from the river in defiance of her father’s orders. Next to her is Ruth, presenting the grain she has gleaned in the fields to her mother-in-law, Naomi. When their husbands died they went against expectations for widows and supported each other. There’s the Samaritan woman at the well, giving water to Jesus, and crossing all sorts of ethnic, gender, and cultural lines to do so. Again, like Mary Magdalene, she’s the one who’s given the story to tell. Then, in the final window, there’s the story of Mary and Martha, which you may already know—it’s the one where Martha complains that Mary isn’t helping with the housework, and Jesus stands up for Mary, saying it’s all right for her to take off her apron and sit down. To listen. It may not sound like much, but remember that we’re talking about a culture that didn’t value women as anything more than house-keepers, property. And yet here’s Jesus, talking with Mary, taking her seriously. It’s so radical. Revolutionary, really—a total inversion of the expectations of the time. Some scholars also think that these two women may not be sisters at all, but rather two women who had important roles in the community that formed around Jesus. It wasn’t at all uncommon for women to have leadership roles in the early church, though again, that’s been obscured.” Suzi turned back to me then, resting her chin on her hand. “So Lucy—do you know anything more about Rose, or how these windows came to be?”

“Not really. I’m trying to find out,” I said. I was remembering my dream, the figures stepping out of the windows into the room. I had the sense that it could happen; these women with their bowls of fruit and bushels of grain and alabaster jars were so vividly present. Perhaps this was exactly what Rose and Cornelia and Vivian and Frank had hoped the chapel would do. I was stirred by the windows and I didn’t want to leave.

It seemed none of us did. Zoe stood and went to look more closely, but Suzi and I sat for a time in silence. Finally, I leaned forward and said, “It’s so beautiful. Compelling, too. But it makes no logical sense, any of it.”

Suzi nodded, her gaze still on the windows. “No, it doesn’t. But I don’t think logic has much to do with it. I love that beautiful line from Ezekiel, about replacing a heart of stone with a heart of flesh. That makes no literal sense either, though we understand it in metaphor. For me, that’s the power of the stories—that you can’t quantify them. That they keep opening up and revealing something new.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I almost told her about what happened the night my father died, how I’d run into him in the garden and he’d asked me to go fishing, how maybe it would have changed everything if I had.

Instead, I talked about Rose. “You know,” I said. “She made mistakes, yes, but she was so young. She was just trying to find her way. It seems so unfair that she lost everything she loved.”

“Do you know how her life ended?” Suzi asked.

“No, I don’t. I’m afraid it might have been tragic.”

“I don’t know about that. You may be right, but I look around at these windows, and what I see is beauty, and joy, and a kind of deep awareness of these stories. A kind of creative, generative peace, as well. To me it seems she wasn’t stuck in loss. She grew. She turned at least some of what she lost, and what she suffered, into beauty.”

I didn’t say anything, and we sat for a few minutes longer, until Suzi stood, saying she needed to get back for a meeting. We walked from the chapel into the bright clear light of the day. Keegan and Oliver were already outside, and the photographer had gone. A breeze from the lake moved through the tall grass, filling it with waves, like a sea, fluttering the tops of the distant trees. Our little group began to disperse, Suzi and Oliver making their way, deep in conversation, through the grass to where the cars were parked at the entrance. Zoe stood uncertainly at the entrance, then reached into her purse and flipped open her phone. I thought of all the moments in my own life when such a gesture would have been a nice hedge against awkwardness, and I thought of Rose, alone in the train station, trying not to attract attention, pulling out her pen to write a letter. I asked Zoe if she needed a ride, but she shook her head, and when she snapped the phone closed she said that her mother was on her way. Then she started back through the fields, her long legs disappearing in the grass. I lingered for a moment, thinking how young she looked.

Keegan had been talking to the archaeologists; now he came over and touched my arm. “Hey,” he said. “Pretty amazing in there.”

I nodded, still filled up with the images of all those women in the windows. “It was. It was totally spectacular.”

“Suzi’s pretty cool, isn’t she? She lets me come in and just sit in the sanctuary sometimes, when I’m not working. I like that. I guess I like the silence. It seems real somehow, not like that angry shouting kind of religion you get on the news.” He laughed a little, shook his head. “I’ve got this cousin Becky. I don’t think you ever met her. She lives in Orlando and she came to visit once—before my mother died. And my mother made her this beautiful dinner, a dessert with some kind of elegant cake soaked in Grand Marnier. So Becky is eating the cake and really liking it, and she asks for the recipe and my mother is explaining, and the next thing you know Becky is up from the table and in the bathroom spitting out the cake because of the Grand Marnier. Now, see, I just don’t get that. I don’t see how sucking the joy out of every aspect of life can be pleasing to anybody’s god.”

“Me, either,” I said, thinking of the peace I’d always felt in church as a child, and thinking also of a hike I’d taken with Yoshi to a temple in the mountains that was built of dark wood, with a graceful, swooping roof, the sound of running water in the distance.

“Anyway, this is a real treasure. The windows are totally unique. Did you see Oliver? He was practically swooning.”

“I saw him,” I said. “He seemed very excited, very—covetous. I bet he’s planning an addition to the Westrum House already. Does the glass need much repair?”

“A little. Not much. It’s in surprisingly good shape. Here,” he added, taking my hand. “This was finished, so I brought it.”