The Wedding Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Thanks to Agnes, it wasn’t. “Your timing couldn’t be better. Does this mean you know something that could help us save Union Hall?”

  “I think so. Have you read Abel Wright’s fifth book?”

  “No, only the second. Agnes has read the first, and I was going to start the third today.”

  “You might want to skip ahead to the fifth. In one of the essays about halfway through the book, Wright discusses ownership of land and property, especially the ownership of community assets, and how that can raise families out of poverty. He describes how the women of Water’s Ford incorporated in order to maintain control of a grand hall constructed for the purpose of hosting fund-raising events to benefit local soldiers and veterans. Then, almost as an aside—because for all of his accomplishments, Wright was a modest man—he suggests that he was the architect and the construction foreman.”

  “He says he built Union Hall?”

  “Not single-handedly, of course.” Jeremy hesitated. “And he doesn’t come right out and say it. He uses a lot of passive voice in that section, as if he expected his reader to know who the architect and foreman was, so it would have been unnecessary and perhaps even boastful for him to name himself. Keep in mind that he was writing for a contemporary audience. He wasn’t thinking of what a reader more than a hundred years in the future might need explained.”

  “Abel Wright built Union Hall,” said Sarah decisively. “It makes perfect sense. In 1863, he wanted to serve his country, but men of color weren’t permitted to enlist yet. Naturally he would use his skills to serve another way.”

  “That’s a logical conclusion,” said Jeremy, “especially if you take into consideration that he helped build the first library in Creek’s Crossing several years before that, and the architectural styles are similar. Anyone familiar with Abel Wright’s publications and the literary conventions of the time would take the statements in his essay to mean that he designed and built Union Hall. However, I don’t know if anyone meeting that description sits on the city council.”

  “You can be our expert witness. You can tell them.”

  “I’d be happy to,” he said. “Anna and Gina would love an excuse to visit Elm Creek Manor. Just tell me when you need me.”

  “It might be as soon as next week. Can you get a sub to take over your classes?”

  “Probably, and if I can’t, I’ll just cancel them. What are they going to do, fire me?”

  Sarah was glad to hear humor in his voice. “It’s their loss, Jeremy.”

  “Anna says the same thing, but you know, it’s my loss too. Aside from the departmental politics, I like it here. My students are bright and motivated. We like our house and we have great neighbors. Gina loves her school and she has nice friends there. Anna’s personal chef business is doing okay—not fantastic, but okay. We aren’t looking forward to starting over somewhere else.”

  “It’ll be all right,” she said, hoping it was the truth. She asked him to give her love to Anna and Gina, and they hung up.

  Quickly she showered, dressed, and had a bite to eat at the free continental breakfast served in the lobby. After packing and checking out, she made one last trip to Special Collections to find and photocopy the passage from Abel Wright’s fifth book that Jeremy had mentioned. Then, after stopping by the campus bookstore to buy Nittany Lions sweatshirts for Matt and the twins, she drove home.

  Matt welcomed her with kisses, and after telling him what she had learned, she spent most of the afternoon on the phone with her friends, sharing her discoveries and hearing the story of Agnes’s triumph over and over, with each narrator offering some new detail the others had not known. Sarah was very proud of her friend, and when Agnes announced another workday and brainstorming session at Union Hall, Sarah promised to be there.

  The next day, as she helped Leslie repair the red velvet curtain that had once hung proudly above the main stage, she asked about the first library in Creek’s Crossing, the one Abel Wright had helped build.

  Leslie looked puzzled. “I wasn’t aware that Abel Wright was involved in the library’s construction—but of course, I didn’t know he had built Union Hall either. Unfortunately, the original building was torn down in the 1950s after the new library was built on Second Street.”

  “Don’t tell me; let me guess,” said Sarah dryly, working her needle through the plush, heavy velvet. “They built condos on the site.”

  “You’re almost right,” said Leslie, smiling. “It was student apartments.”

  “I guess I can’t blame Krolich this time.”

  “No, he would’ve been only a teenager then, perhaps younger. His predecessor arranged that sale.”

  Sarah froze with her needle stuck in the velvet. “You mean University Realty handled the transaction?”

  “They called themselves College Realty in those days, but yes, it was the same company.” Leslie sighed and brushed lint from the heavy folds draped over her lap. “Same company, very different sense of civic responsibility. Before the original library was razed, they took care to preserve important artifacts—the cornerstone, several brass plaques engraved with the names of generous donors, a framed declaration by the town council celebrating the library’s tenth anniversary—things of that sort. They kept some for themselves, but others they donated to the historical society. Some of them are on display here, others”—she nodded to the ceiling to indicate the upstairs galleries, where dozens of unsorted storage boxes remained—”others are still packed away.”

  “They saved the cornerstone?” asked Sarah.

  Leslie nodded. “They incorporated it into the foundation of the new library. It’s on the north side of the front entrance, opposite the cornerstone for the new building.”

  “Does the old cornerstone include any information other than the date the first library was built?”

  “I think it has only the year, but don’t quote me on that,” said Leslie. “I see it so often I don’t really pay attention. If you’re curious, why don’t you stroll over there and take a look? It’s no more than a five-minute walk.”

  “I think I will,” said Sarah, pushing herself to her feet and promising to return soon.

  The day was cold and overcast, with strong gusts of wind that warned of a storm approaching. Sarah pulled up the hood of her jacket and tucked her hands into her pockets as she made her way a few blocks west of Union Hall to the Waterford Public Library. She found the old, preserved cornerstone exactly where Leslie had told her it would be, but she was disappointed that it provided the year of its dedication, 1850, and nothing more.

  She studied the cornerstone, thinking, then headed back to Union Hall. Halfway there, she took her cell phone from her pocket and called Jeremy. He answered on the second ring, and after asking him how his job search was faring—not well, he said, but he was trying to stay optimistic—she got to the point. “How did you know Abel Wright built the first library in Creek’s Crossing?” she asked. “He didn’t refer to it in his second book, the Underground Railroad memoir, and that was the one that covered the year 1850. Unless I missed it.”

  “You didn’t miss it,” said Jeremy. “Thanks to his characteristic modesty, he didn’t mention it. I stumbled across that detail in a book published by the town chamber of commerce in the early twentieth century. The title was something like Waterford: The First Hundred Years, and it was meant to commemorate the town’s centennial. It wasn’t a best seller by any definition, not even in the Elm Creek Valley. Apparently there was some controversy over what year actually marked the centennial, which isn’t surprising, considering the various names the town has gone by. Some people apparently refused to buy the book for that reason alone.”

  “The authors included a photo of the library in the book?”

  “Yes, as well as a photo of a plaque that apparently had been mounted inside the front entrance. The names of the library board, the first librarian, and many of the people who had a hand in the construction were engraved upon it. I noticed Abe
l Wright’s name right away because it was the last one, and it was the only name out of alphabetical order.” He paused. “That leads me to believe his name was added later, but I don’t have a good explanation for why.”

  Sarah thanked him, wished him luck, and hung up. She wondered what had become of that plaque, whether it had been given to the Waterford Historical Society and was in one of the upstairs galleries awaiting discovery—or whether it was locked away in a vault at the new offices of University Realty, where Krolich might have seen it, and perhaps other documents and artifacts alerting him to the historical and cultural significance of Union Hall.

  The cloudburst struck when she was half a block from Union Hall. The wind drove icy drops into her face as she ran the rest of the way, holding her hood closed with one hand, darting up the front stairs and through the tall double doors. Inside, she stood on the mat and caught her breath, brushing rainwater from her jacket and hair as she scanned the foyer walls. Her gaze rested upon the engraved copper plaques on the walls flanking the doors; she had noticed them on her first visit, when they were still tarnished and dull, not polished and gleaming as they were now. Most of the plaques had been polished, anyway; a few were partially covered by the enormous mahogany antique curio cabinet. Heavy and dark and stuffed with mementos, it didn’t suit the light elegance of its surroundings. Sarah suspected that someone had put it there because the foyer was the only first-floor room other than the theater large enough to accommodate it, and hauling it upstairs to one of the galleries would have been out of the question.

  Sarah wiped her wet feet on the mat, studying the incongruous curio cabinet and mulling over her conversation with Jeremy. Then she drew closer. The floor had been mopped and polished, but she could still make out the faint scuff marks on the gray-blue marble leading from the wall beside the door to the theater, the only room on the lower level larger than the foyer—

  The marks led not from the wall to the theater, she realized with a start, but from the theater to the wall.

  The curio cabinet was pushed back as far against the wall as it could go, leaving only a dark, narrow space about a quarter of an inch wide behind it. Pressing her cheek to the wall, Sarah peered into the crevice, and in the shadow she could barely make out the shapes of more small copper plaques like the others she had already seen—and one significantly larger.

  Sarah knew the curio cabinet would be too heavy for her to move, but she couldn’t resist shoving it with her shoulder just in case. When it didn’t budge, she called Leslie out from the theater and hurried upstairs to the east gallery to round up a few more volunteers. With the help of two pairs of furniture slides Patricia kept in her desk drawer, they managed to move the heavy cabinet away from the wall.

  Then they discovered what the curio cabinet had concealed—a tarnished bronze plaque chronicling the provenance of Union Hall. The Union Quilters who had conceived and executed the project were listed, and Sarah felt a thrill of excitement as she read the names, which included Dorothea Nelson, Gerda Bergstrom, Anneke Bergstrom, Constance Wright, and several other women whom she recalled from Gerda’s memoir. And then, at once, they all saw the name of the architect and foreman of construction—Abel Wright.

  Armed with that information, at the council meeting two weeks later it was easy to persuade the city council not to exercise their right of eminent domain and to deny Gregory Krolich’s bid to purchase the property. When questioned, he denied any knowledge of how the curio cabinet happened to be right in front of the plaque bearing the crucial information the historical society had sought. Neither Patricia nor Leslie nor any members of the society could recall exactly when or why it had been moved from the theater to the foyer, but they knew the cabinet had been in its current location for years. No one had questioned the move. Everyone had assumed another member of the society had done it for some good, albeit unknown, reason.

  A few days later, Patricia produced photos taken at an event held in 1988 to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Union Hall—and one photo clearly showed the recently discovered plaque in the background, with the mahogany curio cabinet nowhere in sight. The Waterford Historical Society had invited business and civic leaders from the town and representatives from the college to an open house, hoping to launch a capital campaign to restore the building and transform it into a museum. Though the event generated a great deal of interest and promises of help, their attempts to raise funds languished in the recession of the early 1990s, when they were forced to put their plans on hold indefinitely. When Sarah learned that representatives from University Realty had attended, she surmised that Krolich surely had been one of them. While attending the event, he could have noticed the plaque, recognized Abel Wright’s name from the Creek’s Crossing Library artifacts owned by his company, and secretly returned later with his own personal brute squad to move the curio cabinet. He had concealed the truth and bided his time, confident that with each passing year, Union Hall would become less valuable in the eyes of the community, until the time was right for him to seize it.

  Unfortunately Sarah never could prove her suspicions, but it was enough for her that justice was served in other ways. A few weeks after the city council decreed that they would not condemn Union Hall, an alert clerk at a local used bookstore called the police when a young man in a Waterford College sweatshirt tried to sell them six books, each more than a century old and bearing the stamp of the Rare Books Room on a flyleaf. Under questioning, the student confessed that “some guy in a suit” had paid him one hundred dollars to steal the books and hold on to them for a few months until he could dispose of them in his own hometown hundreds of miles away. It was fortunate indeed for the historical society that the student had needed beer money before semester break, that he had seen the books as a source of quick cash, and that he could pick Krolich out of a lineup. Charged with felony theft, Krolich agreed to a plea bargain to avoid a seven-year prison term and was instead sentenced to nine months in a medium-security prison, a thousand hours of community service, and restitution. His reputation ruined, his career in a shambles, Krolich left the Elm Creek Valley to appear on a reality television show in one last vain attempt to restore his credibility before he disappeared into obscurity.

  Krolich was still in prison when the long-abandoned capital campaign to restore Union Hall began anew. Media coverage of the effort eventually reached Thomas Wright II, Abel’s great-grandson and director of the Abel Wright Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the author’s legacy and promoting literary and history education in the public schools. After visiting Union Hall and viewing relics from his great-grandfather’s past that he had not known existed, Thomas Wright II gave the historical society’s project the full support of Abel Wright Foundation, contributing one million dollars to the restoration fund and promising, once the renovations were complete, to donate Abel Wright’s personal papers and possessions to them as well. To spare the Waterford Historical Society the financial burden of maintaining the acclaimed collection, the foundation would also endow a chair in Waterford College’s Department of History. In addition to the usual duties of tenured faculty, the Abel Wright Professor of American History would be responsible for maintaining the Abel Wright archive and promoting his legacy through teaching, scholarship, and service.

  As the author of the definitive biography of Abel Wright and the expert whose knowledge had helped thwart the attempts to condemn Union Hall, Jeremy was at the top of the short list of candidates for the newly endowed position. A year after losing his bid for tenure in Virginia—and just in time to officiate the ceremonies honoring Union Hall’s appointment to the National Register of Historical Places—Jeremy returned to Waterford College as a full professor, to the delight of his former graduate adviser and the rest of the faculty. For weeks after he, Anna, and Gina moved back to Pennsylvania, he went about his new duties with an expression of joyous disbelief, as if he had forgotten what it was to be happy and secure in his work and he did not
expect it to last—and yet day after day, it did.

  If anyone was happier than Jeremy, it was Anna, restored to her role as head chef of Elm Creek Quilts. And no one was happier—or more relieved—to see Anna back in her beloved kitchen at Elm Creek Manor than Sarah, who had missed her friend terribly and was thankful beyond measure to be spared the annual task of searching for her replacement. She had learned all too well that no one could fill Anna’s place except Anna herself—although in recent years, both Sarah and Anna had agreed that Gina and James would be able successors and might even surpass their mothers.

  “Mom?”

  Sarah tore her gaze away from Union Hall—beautiful, honored, and in danger no more—to find James standing in the entranceway, “Creek’s Crossing, Penn” engraved in stone above his head.

  “Mom?” he said again. “Are you okay?”

  She smiled. “Yes, sweetheart. I was just lost in thought. I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

  “Are you coming in?” He smiled back, but he looked puzzled, and perhaps even concerned. “We’re dressed and awaiting inspection.”

  “I’m coming,” she said, and followed him inside.

  Chapter Six

  Inside the shop, the young men looked handsome and sophisticated in their formal suits, but their jokes and playful teasing reminded Sarah of the young boys they had once been. Because their wedding would take place in the afternoon, Caroline and Leo had chosen traditional morning dress for the men’s attire, gray cutaway coats that slanted from waist to thigh and fell to the knee in back; striped trousers, also gray; white dress shirts with folded collars; gray waistcoats; and four-in-hand neckties. Matt and Leo’s father were similarly attired, and as the tailor and his assistants took measurements and pinned seams, Sarah and Leo’s mother alternately admired the men, teased them for admiring themselves in the full-length mirrors, and threatened to make them dress up more often, since they all looked so handsome in their fine clothes.