The Lake Of Dreams Part 24

The voice on the phone was low, unfamiliar, and rather clipped.

"I'm Ned Stone," he said. "I'm Iris Stone's son. I understand you called my mother earlier today."

I took a breath, thinking of my mother's concerns. Who knew, really, who these people were? "Yes, h.e.l.lo. My name is Lucy Jarrett."

"That's what my mother said. She wasn't quite clear, though, on what you wanted."

"Oh-well, I don't want anything, really. I've found some information about Rose Jarrett, about your mother's family. Some letters that were written to your mother. So I was calling to see if she could shed some light on them. And to tell her they exist."

He cleared his throat. I tried to imagine how old he might be. If Iris was ninety-five, he could be well into his sixties.

"I have to tell you, my mother was quite upset about your call. Unnerved is a better word. She left home when she was quite young, and it wasn't a happy situation, though I don't know the details. My mother hasn't had a particularly easy life. I don't want her to be unsettled at the end of her years by whatever you think you have to tell her. And frankly, I'm sorry to have to say this, but calling out of the blue like this, with such strange news-it makes me wonder about your intentions, if you don't mind my saying so."

"I understand," I said. "I'll do whatever I can to ease your mind." I repeated the story then, my father and grandfather and great-grandfather, the letters, finding Iris. I did the genealogy in my head, even as I spoke. Ned Stone would be my father's second cousin. When he didn't reply right away, I went on-the church records, the windows, Frank Westrum, the letters I'd discovered in the dusty box of the Lafayette Historical Society. "It's just that we never had this part of the story in our family, we never knew Rose or your mother even existed. I was so excited to find her. Plus, I thought she might want to see these letters."

There was a pause then, and I tried to imagine the man on the other end of the line, who sounded careful and tailored and very precise, the sort of person who would have a home office with thick, sound-absorbing carpet and framed diplomas hanging on the wall.

"You've read them?"

"I have."

"Would you find them upsetting if you were my mother?"

I hesitated. The last days had been very exciting, but they had been unsettling, too. The old story, the story I'd learned by heart all my years of growing up, had held a certain comfort, had given the world a weight and stability, and the discoveries I'd made had shaken my sense of who I was even as it altered my understanding of the world. Would I trade this knowledge? No. In fact, I wanted more, I wanted it all. Yet it hadn't been easy knowledge, and I didn't know how it might feel to have your world turned over when you were ninety-five years old.

"Actually, I think they might be upsetting," I said, sitting down on the sofa, looking out the windows at the dark lake. "I guess it would depend on if you wanted to know the truth, or at least another facet of the story, or if you wanted to keep the story you've always believed."

He hesitated.

"All right," he said, finally. "Tell me what you think you know."

So I told him that Rose was his grandmother, that his mother hadn't known her.

There was a long silence.

"That's very shocking," he said. "If I believe you, that's hard to absorb."

"The letters are very beautiful. They tell the story better than I can."

"Why don't you send them?" he suggested at last. "Send copies of the letters to me. I'll have a look, and then I'll get back to you about this."

"I'll scan the first two and send them right now," I offered, groping in my purse for a pen. I wrote his e-mail address on the back of a grocery receipt.

After I sent the letters off with a short note, I drank a gla.s.s of wine on the patio with my mother, lingering in the deepening dusk, the night. I wondered if I'd done the right thing and my mother shrugged.

"No taking it back now," she said. "You'll just have to wait and see."

I didn't have to wait long, as it turned out. Within two hours, just before midnight, he called me back.

"All right," he said. "My mother is ninety-five years old, you understand, and I don't want her distressed. If things get distressing for her, or even if she's tired, you'll have to leave. But she lives with me, and I've talked to her, and she'd like to meet you, and you can visit us on Monday afternoon if you'd like."

"I can be there," I said, writing the address on the back of my hand, the ballpoint digging into my skin. "That's fine, then. I'll be there at two o'clock on Monday."

Chapter 17.

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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 antimaca.s.sars and little gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s.

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 spa.r.s.e 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 Yos.h.i.taka Aioki," I said.

To my surprise Ned gave a slight bow and said, "Konichiwa," "Konichiwa," and Yoshi, after a moment's surprise, replied in j.a.panese, 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. and Yoshi, after a moment's surprise, replied in j.a.panese, 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 j.a.pan 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 gla.s.s 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 j.a.pan, 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 trespa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 rea.s.suring 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances 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."

Sunlight poured in through the wall of windows and fell through Iris's thin white hair, the wisps like sc.r.a.ps of mist against her pale scalp. Her eyes were just like mine, like Blake's, that vivid blue. The skin was stretched thin over the bones of her hands.

"Yes. I knew Rose Westrum. She was a friend of the people who took me in. She sent me a note just after I was married, saying she had known my family. I never answered her. Why would I? Why would I dredge up all that past?

"I'd run away, you see, when I was fourteen. That's the year that your grandfather was born. My mother-Cora-was not young. She must have been in her forties by then. She must have given up the idea of having children. I remember the kind of surprised silence that settled over the house when we knew she was pregnant. Still, I wasn't paying very much attention. I'd come home from school and bring her tea on a tray, and I had to do the shopping. Everything was quite still and suspenseful all autumn long. But the baby was born healthy. He was a very sweet and docile baby, and I liked taking care of him.

"Cora was a very gentle mother to him. Very loving. She'd been the same to me when I was a child-indulgent, really-but as I grew older we fought. She said I was willful, a blunderer. It's true that I was clumsy, and larger than she liked, and that I outgrew my clothes so quickly. Sometimes she reminded me that she had taken me in when my mother left. So I'd feel beholden and do what she wanted. And I suppose it's true that I was willful, as she claimed. I had ideas about my life, and dreams and wishes, just like any young person does, and she found me forward, too radical in my thinking. She'd press her lips together so hard they nearly disappeared in a little line. I was not good, I made a game of seeing how many times a day I could make her do this.

"I suppose there had been talk of my future before the baby was born, but that was suspended, too. Everything hung still, frozen like vapor in the winter air. I was nearly fifteen, when he was born, and many of my cla.s.smates had already left school to take work in the factories along the outlet. It wasn't uncommon in those days, you have to understand, for people to leave school. Almost everyone did. I didn't know a single girl who went to college. They were needed on the farms or to help earn money. Or they fell in love and got married.

"So that summer after Joseph was born I took a job in the knitting factory downtown, partly to get out of the house. It was as if I'd disappeared from the face of the earth, anyway. At least that's how I felt. I was young still, so maybe I was just envious. I tried hard to be useful, certainly, to please them. But when he was born I felt like an old doll, set aside. That factory is long gone now, of course, but it used to sit on the outlet across from the gla.s.s insulator factory. I remember because I could look out the big windows, across the water, and see all those people working at their machines like I was working on mine, and I wondered if they were bored, like me, and if they had dreams of other lives, the way I did. I couldn't look long, though. I couldn't be distracted from my own machine. It would be costly to make a mistake and even dangerous. My first day Mrs. Tadley got a finger caught in her knitting machine and there was blood everywhere, and then there was a meeting to warn us not to do the same. She had ruined five sweaters' worth of yarn.

"My machine made socks. It was shaped in a circle and the needles all around it flashed so quickly my eyes couldn't follow them. The sock came out from below and I cut it free, pa.s.sed it to the right so the next person could sew the toe and send it on. At first it took all my attention to fit my rhythm to the swift pace of the machine, but later my hands moved almost by themselves, so I could look around a little. There was Sally Zimmerman in the next seat, head bent, running one sock after another through the machine to seal the toes, and beyond us were the windows and light filtering in through the clattering noise and the filaments of dust and fabric that filled the air. At night I'd brush my teeth and spit out blue threads. My ears and my nose gathered lint, as well.

"The days were long and I worked every day but Sunday. I'd walk the few blocks home so tired I could barely move my feet, and fall into bed. Later that summer, we moved to the lake house.

"This is what caused all the trouble, in the end.

"I was so tired, you see. Just asleep on my feet, most of the time. But I always got up and tried to help around the house. Sometimes I'd go out and sit by the lake in the sun and listen to the waves and maybe fall asleep.

"One afternoon Cora had to go out, and she came to the dock and told me to listen for the baby and get him up if he cried, she would be home within two hours. The sun was warm and I'd dozed off, I suppose, for I woke up hearing his cries, thin and small, floating over the lawn. He was teething, and fussy, and so I got him a bottle and changed him and brought him outside, where Cora had a play area set up under the willow tree, right near the water. Is it still there, I wonder, that tree? It is? Those low branches swept over the lawn and the leaves were also so beautiful, but such a mess when they fell. He liked to sit there and play, pa.s.sing toys from one hand to the other, and after half an hour or so he'd slump over and start to cry. So I settled him in the shade with his toys. I was right there. I had my book. I sat down in the lawn chair and read about five sentences. The sun was so warm. I remember the sound of the waves. I closed my eyes.

"I don't know what woke me up, or how much time had pa.s.sed. I sat up, feeling groggy, and looked over at the blanket beneath the tree. It was empty. I kept looking at it, panic so great it froze me in place, but then I heard a sound and turned. He was ten months old and he'd figured out how to crawl. I didn't know, I'd been away, working. I hadn't been paying attention. While I'd slept he'd crawled to the edge of the water, crawled in. The waves were touching his chin. He was laughing, but then he slipped and fell face-first. I jumped up and ran to him. It was probably the longest minute of my life. He wasn't crying or anything, just moving his hands in the water, floating, but his face was down. I swept him up in my arms, I was shaking.

"I didn't see Cora right away. She was standing by the barn, shading her eyes, a terrible look on her face. She'd seen it all. So. That was the beginning of the end for me. She never forgave me, or believed it was an accident. Eventually, I ran away."