The Lake of Dreams (43 page)

THE NEXT DAY YOSHI WAS FEELING PRETTY RESTED, SO WE took him to see Niagara Falls. It was about a two-hour drive, so we left early in the morning, and we did it all, standing on the edge of the magnificent, roaring falls, putting on raincoats and taking a boat ride up the river into the clouds of mist at their base. We had a drink in the revolving restaurant at the top of the tower, where Yoshi toasted the day and my mother toasted Yoshi and his visit. We got back to The Lake of Dreams quite late, and my mother had to work early the next day. She was gone by the time I got up, but she left a fresh pot of coffee, and a note wishing us a wonderful day. Her handwriting was so similar to mine, a little cramped and hurried, and I was glad that things between us had eased, that somehow discovering these new facets of the past had brought us closer than we’d been in years.

When Yoshi finally came downstairs, we took our breakfast out to the dock and sat there in the sun, breaking off pieces of the olive bread I’d bought at The Green Bean and spreading them with hummus, tossing crumbs to the ducks that darted in to sweep them from the surface of the lake. The coffee was strong and I poured it over ice. We drank and talked. After a while, I got the canoe out and we paddled in an unhurried way along the shore, admiring the beauty of the undeveloped land, the chapel in the distance, red and white and gray against the greenery. We went far enough that the construction site came into view, the earth stripped down to bedrock in places, piled in bleak, ugly mounds. I thought of the walk I’d taken with Keegan, the mystery and silence of the forest and the land left untouched, a kind of wildness that was growing rarer in the world.

“I’m glad you spoke up about the bridge project,” I said. “Even if it means we’re broke. It was the right thing to do.”

Yoshi rested his paddle across the boat and shook his head. “I don’t know. It was exhilarating at the time. But later I wondered. I mean, it’s not like me, is it? So rash.”

“You thought about it. We talked about it, a little. So it wasn’t rash. Besides, I don’t care,” I said, and the strange thing was, it seemed I didn’t anymore. Whatever need to achieve had been driving me to this point in my life seemed to have dissipated, like water easing through the stones on the shore. It had to do with settling things with Keegan, I knew that. And somehow, it had to do with Rose as well, with the way she’d lived her life, so unconcerned with the things that had focused the other part of her family, the descendants of her brother—money and status, the shiny evidence of success. We hadn’t known about her, which was telling, but she’d have been considered a failure if we had: unmarried, with no visible accomplishments, a woman who’d left her child in the care of others. Yet I admired her, and knowing about her life had changed the way I thought about my own. Rose had made mistakes, to be sure, but she’d had the strength to live by her own convictions, to know what she wanted and to try to get it, even when her culture put up one obstacle after another. And her love for Iris was so present in all the letters, even though she’d had to leave her. “I don’t care about the job,” I said again. “I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time for both of us to do something new.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I was thinking about that work we did in Jakarta for the orphanage. I was thinking it would be nice to do something good in the world. Even if we have to give up some of the perks.”

We drifted, floating. The lake was calm, the water touching the sides of the boat and retreating in clear ripples.

“I guess we could look around,” he said. “Surely there must be some good a couple of science geeks could do.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

I pushed the paddle into the reeds, seeking to float into deeper water, and the motion startled two herons, who rose up suddenly from where they’d been hidden in the marsh, lifting on their powerful wings, their legs trailing behind them as they gained purchase on the sky. We watched them soar, and rise above the trees, and float away.

“This is such a beautiful place,” Yoshi said.

It was beautiful a few hours later, too, when we got into the Impala and drove through the countryside I knew by heart, down the low ridge between the lakes to the outskirts of Elmira, going to meet Iris. I’d expected a house something like the historical society house: nineteenth century, full of heavy furniture and antimacassars and little glass dishes with stale hard candy. It was Iris’s voice, I suppose, its querulous quality, that had me picturing this. So I was shocked, driving up, to find myself traveling down a long gravel driveway toward a contemporary house, full of windows overlooking a wooded lot. I parked beneath an ancient ginkgo tree with its fan-shaped leaves, and admired the clean lines of wood on the patio, the stone walls and endless glass.

The woman who opened the door was about my mother’s age, thin, her hair dyed a light, even brown.

“Are you Lucy?” she asked. Her hand was dry, fleeting, in mine. “Come in, please. I’m Carol, Iris’s daughter-in-law. And this is my husband, Ned.”

Ned was tall, genial, with sparse gray hair and a warm smile and no trace of the family eyes. His were brown, and shadowed.

He shook my hand, too. “I’m the oldest,” he said. “My brother, Keith, is in Florida. My mother lives here; she has a separate apartment that’s attached to the house. She spends part of the winter down south with Keith. So it works out.”

He was talking fast, nervous, I realized, and Carol put one hand on his arm, a gesture that seemed to travel through him like a wave, calming him. He looked at her and smiled.

“This is Yoshitaka Aioki,” I said.

To my surprise Ned gave a slight bow and said,
“Konichiwa,”
and Yoshi, after a moment’s surprise, replied in Japanese, and then the three of them were conversing in an easy, delighted way, the language moving too quickly for me to follow very well. But I gathered that Ned and Carol had spent many years living just outside of Kyoto.

“Ned was sent there by his company,” she said, turning to me, switching to English. “We thought we’d stay four years at most. But we fell in love with the place, and ended up being there for fifteen years, right up until Ned retired. Come on in,” she went on, gesturing to the living room, which opened off the stone foyer, a room with a tall ceiling and a sweeping wall of windows overlooking the trees. “As you can see, we brought home a lot of souvenirs.”

At first, though, I couldn’t see. The room was furnished very simply, with low white couches and wooden tables. Then I noticed the beautiful collections of tea and sake sets on the shelves that flanked the fireplace, and the Hiroshige prints framed and hanging on the far wall.

“Have a seat,” Ned said, settling himself on one of the low stuffed chairs as Carol left the room.

Yoshi and I perched on the edge of a white sofa. “Thanks. This room is beautiful. So simple and elegant.”

Ned smiled. “Believe it or not, we have a tatami room upstairs.”

We talked about Japan for a few more minutes; mostly Ned talked while I watched him, looking in vain for any family resemblance. Like my father, Ned had been drafted, but the war had ended before he was sent to Vietnam. He had stayed on in the army for four years, learning to repair airplane engines, which fascinated him so much he got a degree in engineering once he was discharged. He met Carol the day before his thirtieth birthday when she sat down next to him on a bus. They had three children, all grown; only the youngest, Julie, who was about my age, was still living in the area.

“So these letters,” he said, reaching for a file folder he’d left on the table. “They took me by surprise. My mother, too. Her first response was that it was ridiculous, and must be a practical joke. But I gave her one to read, and she recognized Joseph Jarrett from the descriptions.

“Apparently, she knew Cora and Joseph were not her birth parents, though she’d never told any of us about that. Maybe my father knew. In any case, she never knew her father and she didn’t remember her real mother very well at all. She went away when my mother was so young, my mother came to think of Cora and Joseph as her parents—which was fine, until my mother hit her teen years and got rebellious, and the little cracks that had been there all along began to deepen. Your grandfather was born when she was fourteen, and that changed things, too.”

“In 1925,” I said. “The year they moved up to the house on the lake.”

“Was it? Yes, I think my mother lived there for a little while. There was a lot of tension. Eventually, she ran away. She moved in with a friend of friends here, and that was the saving grace, I guess. She took a job in one of the glass factories. But that was essentially the end of her connection to the Jarretts. Reading those letters was quite emotional for her, you should know. She stayed up very late last night, going over them again and again. But she wants to meet you. As I said, however, I’d like this to move slowly. And without distress to her.”

He was nervous again, talking faster.

“I understand,” I said.

A few minutes later, Carol appeared in the doorway, holding the arm of a tall woman whose hair was thin and white on her scalp, like dandelion fluff. I stood up, remembering Rose’s very first letter, how she’d described Iris’s infant hair in exactly this way. Her eyes, blue and fierce and familiar, met mine.

“Is this her?” she asked.

“This is Lucy, Mother. And her friend Yoshi. Come, let’s have a seat.” They crossed the room and sat on the opposite sofa.

Once we were all settled there was a silence, which expanded in the room. Even Ned was quiet.

“You look like your great-grandfather,” Iris said, at last.

“Do I really?”

She nodded. “It’s the eyes.”

“I have something for you,” I said. “Something that was made for you.”

I reached into my bag and pulled out the cloth, wrapped carefully in beautiful sheets of rice paper from Japan, faintly blue, with embossed white cranes. Iris took the package—her hands were long, the fingers pale and bony, slightly trembling. She opened it slowly, folding the paper carefully back. The cloth unfurled, silvery white and delicate, the row of overlapping moons along the border wrapped in the now familiar pattern of vines. It was so finely woven that, lifted and held up, it was translucent, the border along the bottom standing out more darkly than the rest. I told her the story then, as briefly as I could: the cloth with its border of moons, the cryptic letters and pamphlets locked away in the cupola, my search through historical archives, and the windows. I’d made photocopies for myself to keep, and now I handed her the binders, Rose’s binders, which held all the original letters.

“These were written to you. Written by your mother, Rose, for you.”

She let the blanket fall and smoothed it across her lap, then took the binder.

“You’ve read them?” she asked, looking up.

“I did.” Now that they were not history anymore, but connected to the life of this woman sitting across from me, I understood that it had been a kind of trespass, really, reading these letters not meant for any eyes but hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were alive, you see.”

She nodded slowly. “What do you think of her, then?”

“I think she was very brave. She had passionate beliefs, and she fought for them.”

“Is that so? I never knew her. She left when I was so small. They said she’d done something wrong and had to go, and that I should call Cora Mama, and so I did. I have one memory, lying on the sunny bed, her fingers doing the itsy-bitsy spider. I can still see them, climbing in the air. That, and a feeling about how it was to have her in the room. But that’s all I have, and for a long time I simply didn’t think about her.”

She paused, and Ned reached over and put a reassuring hand on her arm before she went on.

“It wasn’t until you and your brother were born, Ned, that I started to remember and wonder what had happened. You were my children and I was her child, and so of course I wondered. But by then it was too late. I remember the house in town, where we lived before she went away. There was linoleum on the kitchen floor and a woodstove there, and we heated the other rooms by the fireplace. It was very cold in the winter, and my room faced the northwest, so sometimes I woke up to find the light all strange, dim, and I’d realize that the drifts had gone right up over the windows. They said she had done something wrong, but I always felt I must have caused it somehow. That I must have been bad enough to make her leave.”

“Oh, no. No,” I said, while Iris wiped her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault at all. Your mother was sent away because she marched for the right to vote. And got arrested. There was a huge suffrage march in Washington in 1913; others happened all across the country in response, and Rose, your mother, joined the one that happened in The Lake of Dreams. She was warned against it, but she was moved to do it anyway when the parade passed the house. She went to jail, and then they wouldn’t take her back. Cora and her first husband, I mean. Your uncle, my great-grandfather, tried to help, but he didn’t have much to give then, either. Leaving you was not her choice.”

Iris nodded, but still didn’t speak. I gestured to the letters on her lap. “She came back for you,” I added. “You’ll read what happened. She came back a year or so later and met you in the garden of the house in town, and you talked. She wrote about this, in one of her letters.” I paused here, because I didn’t want to tell Iris that she hadn’t recognized her own mother. “You can read them,” I said. “There’s so much more. She loved you so much.”

There was silence before Iris finally spoke, her voice soft and a little tremulous. “It is very hard for me to accept it,” she said. “Very hard. I can understand it, now that I am older. I can see that perhaps she had to do it. Sometimes there are circumstances we can’t control. And yet. She left. I grew up without her.”

I started to speak, but Ned held up his hand to silence me. For a few moments we all sat quietly. Iris’s lips trembled, but she didn’t cry.

“Not entirely without her,” Carol said finally. “You knew Rose Westrum, didn’t you? So you see, she came back, even if you didn’t know it was her. Probably she thought it best, by then. It seems she watched over you all her life.”