“Hello, honey,” Sarah replied, waving. The little boy grinned and hid behind the eldest girl.
“You could have one yourself, you know,” said Sylvia as she rang the doorbell.
“Please. You sound just like my mother.” Sarah rolled her eyes, but she smiled as she spoke, with no hint of the resentment that used to surface whenever her mother was mentioned. Their relationship had been strained for years, but they had reconciled while both women helped Sylvia recover from her stroke. She should take comfort in their example, Sylvia told herself. If Sarah and Carol could find a way to accept their differences, surely Andrew and his children could. She just hoped they wouldn't require an unexpected calamity to push them forward.
A woman who looked to be in her mid-eighties answered the door. “You must be Sylvia Compson,” she said, opening the door and beckoning them inside. “I'm Edna Schaeffer, as you probably guessed.”
Sylvia thanked her for allowing them to interrupt her holiday and introduced Sarah. “Did your brother-in-law have a safe trip?” she asked, surreptitiously scanning the room for the quilt.
Edna's face assumed an apologetic expression that had become all too familiar to Sylvia since she had begun the search. “He did, thank you, but I'm afraid he didn't bring your mother's quilt with him.”
“I see,” said Sylvia.
“I'm sorry, dear.” Edna patted Sylvia's arm sympathetically. “It's a long story and he wanted to tell you himself, or I would have called and saved you the trip over. Howard's been looking forward to seeing you.”
“Has he?”
“Oh, my, yes. Phil has, too, but don't worry. I'm not the jealous type.” Edna smiled and led them into the living room, where two older gentlemen and several younger men and women sat talking and watching a football game on television. The two older men stood as the women approached. “This can't be little tagalong Sylvia,” boomed the taller of the two. “What happened to all those dark tousled curls?”
“I'm afraid they're long gone.” Smiling, Sylvia shook the men's hands. “And I beg your pardon, but I was never a tagalong.”
“That's not what Claudia told us,” said the other man, his voice a quiet echo of his brother's. He had to be Philip, the younger of the two Schaeffer boys. He had always been more bashful than Howard.
“My goodness, that's right. I had forgotten you two were in the same class.” Sylvia pursed her lips and feigned annoyance. “I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that she told tales on me.”
“I was sweet on her,” said Phil, with an embarrassed shrug and a glance at his wife, who patted his arm and laughed. “I hung on every word she said, but she only had eyes for Howard.”
“Until Harold Midden came to town,” said Howard, shaking his head. “Claudia used to kiss me behind the library after school, but once she met Harold, she tossed me out like yesterday's trash.”
“She didn't,” said Sylvia, shocked. “She told us she went to the library to study.”
Howard shrugged. “We sometimes fit in a little studying afterward. Anyway, I always knew it wouldn't have worked out between us in the long run.”
“Why not?”
Edna gestured to two chairs near Sylvia and Sarah. “Why don't we all sit down and hear the whole story?”
“Our mother wouldn't be pleased if she knew we were telling you this,” said Phil ruefully as they seated themselves.
Sylvia, who had learned that some of the most important stories began with the revelation of a secret, sat back and smiled to encourage him to continue.
“I guess you know our mother disliked yours,” said Howard.
“Why, no, I never knew that,” said Sylvia, looking from one brother to the other in surprise. “I knew she didn't care for me and my sister, but neither did the entire Waterford Quilting Guild or they wouldn't have let her kick us out.”
“Didn't your mothers found the guild together?” asked Sarah. “They must have been friends at one point.”
“You never knew our mothers were enemies and we never knew they were friends,” said Phil. “We grew up hearing how awful the Bergstroms were, how selfish, how they had cost our father his life.”
“What?” exclaimed Sylvia.
“Now you can see why I knew my relationship with Claudia would never go anywhere,” said Howard. “Mother would have fainted if I had brought her home.”
“That probably added to Claudia's appeal,” teased Edna.
“Let's get back to your father,” said Sylvia. “Why on earth did your mother blame mine for his death?”
Howard and Phil exchanged a look before Howard said, “Well, first let me say that even as boys we knew our mother and her friends were jealous of your mother. We knew why, too. Your mother was the prettiest woman in Waterford, and she was so gentle and kind that of course every man and boy in town had a crush on her. She wasn't from around here, either, and that made her seem mysterious and exotic.”
“Exotic?” said Sylvia. “My mother? She was from New York, not the other side of the world.”
“To people who had never left the Elm Creek Valley,” said Phil, “New York might as well have been the other side of the world.”
“We were like all the rest,” added Howard. “We admired your mother, but we felt guilty about it because we knew we were betraying our mother.”
“She always thought our father liked your mother a little too much,” said Phil. “Not that she ever thought he cheated on her—”
“Not with my mother he didn't,” declared Sylvia. “My mother was devoted to my father. She would never have considered such a thing.”
“Our father felt the same way about our mother,” said Howard. “At least that's what our other relatives told us. I was just a boy when he died, and Phil here was just a baby.”
“How did your father die?” asked Sarah.
“In the influenza epidemic of 1918,” said Howard.
“So did several members of my own family,” said Sylvia.
Phil grimaced and nodded. “We were well aware of that. Mother never let us forget it. You see, as soon as the people of Waterford realized that the disease was coming closer, they quarantined the town.”
Sylvia nodded. Her great-aunt Lucinda had told her stories of those terrible weeks when nearly the entire family had been stricken, and Great-Aunt Maude and young Aunt Clara had died. Claudia, too, had nearly lost her life, although no one but Aunt Lucinda ever spoke of it.
“The town stayed free of the disease for a while,” said Phil. “But it didn't last, and our father was the first to catch it.”
“And the first to die,” said Howard. “He was the town mail carrier. He delivered a letter to your mother, and according to our mother, he caught the flu there.”
“Our mother fell ill next, and then it was everywhere,” said Phil. “Our mother recovered, but she was never the same. She told everyone that my father had caught the disease from the Bergstroms, and that your family had broken the quarantine in order to buy and sell your horses. If not for the greed of the Bergstroms, she said, Waterford would have been spared. The hundreds who died here would never have suffered so much as a runny nose.”
Sylvia clutched the arms of her chair. “I don't believe it,” she managed to say. “My family never would have risked other people's lives for money.”
“Of course not.” Sarah reached out and touched her arm, frowning at the Schaeffers. “With all due respect, your mother wasn't a doctor, and no one knew about viruses back then. She couldn't have known for certain where your father contracted the disease, and unless she personally witnessed the Bergstroms crossing the quarantine line, she had no right to accuse them.”
Edna held up her hands to calm them. “Please, boys, tell them the rest.”
“I'm sorry I upset you,” said Howard. “We just wanted you to hear the story we grew up with.”
“We know your family didn't bring the flu to Waterford,” said Phil. “Our father did.”
“He was delivering the
town's mail to the postal center in Grangerville when the quarantine signs went up,” said Howard. “He stayed in Grangerville, but when people began dying right and left, he got scared and beat it out of town. He holed up in a hunting shack for a while, but when he ran out of food, he came home.”
“Mother was so glad to see him that she cried,” said Phil, “but she knew he had endangered the town. She came and went as usual rather than arouse suspicions, but she made him stay indoors with the curtains drawn for four days until they were both certain he wasn't sick.”
“After that, they figured he was safe, so he acted as if he had never left Waterford,” said Howard. “A few close friends knew he had been away, but my parents invented some story about him being laid up with a sprained ankle at an outlying farm, and that in all the confusion, Gloria never received word. Only one other person knew he had knowingly crossed the quarantine line.”
“Sylvia's mother,” said Sarah.
“Exactly.”
“Our mother was horrified that she and our father had infected the town,” said Phil. “Frankly, I think it would have come anyway. The Spanish flu was so contagious and the quarantine so easily breached that it was only a matter of time. The fact is, however, that our parents introduced it into Waterford, and my mother couldn't handle the shame. She was terrified that people would find out and condemn her.”
“So instead she condemned my family,” said Sylvia.
The two men nodded.
“She regretted that all her life,” said Howard. “But once she started the lie, it got out of her control. She told herself that people would forget, but although they didn't talk much about the flu itself, everyone remembered to mistrust the Bergstroms long after they forgot the reason why.”
“We knew nothing of this until the week before she died,” said Edna. “The guilt of what she had done ate away at her for the better part of fifty years. She had bought your mother's quilt as a way to help your sister financially, and at the end of her life, her greatest concern was that we return the quilt to you.”
“She wasn't content to return it to Claudia because she was afraid your sister would just sell it again,” said Howard.
“If the secret bothered your mother for roughly fifty years, she must have passed away in the 1960s,” said Sarah. “Why didn't you return the quilt to Sylvia as your mother requested?”
Sylvia thought she knew the answer, and Phil confirmed it. “No one knew where Sylvia was. Claudia didn't know, and the rest of the Bergstrom family had either moved away or passed on. We always assumed she would return to Elm Creek Manor some day, and we planned to return the quilt to her then.”
“As the years went by, we all sort of forgot about it,” said Edna apologetically.
“Then I moved away to Iowa.” Howard frowned and shook his head. “I should have left the quilt here, but it was packed away with other things my mother had left me, and I never gave it a second thought. I found it when I was clearing out the basement after my wife passed away. I knew it ought to be in Waterford in case you came home, but I didn't want to ship it, so I decided to bring it the next time I came to visit.”
And yet here he was, without the quilt. “What happened to it?” asked Sylvia.
Edna said, “I'm sure you heard about all that terrible flooding in the Midwest a few years back.”
Sylvia could guess the rest, but she nodded.
“I lost nearly everything when the Mississippi crested,” said Howard. “I'm sorry, Sylvia, but your mother's quilt couldn't be salvaged.”
“It was so waterlogged and encrusted with mud that they didn't recognize it as a quilt,” Sylvia told Andrew when she and Sarah returned home. “They discarded it with the rest of the soiled clothes and bedding.”
“There probably wasn't anything you could have done to restore it even if they hadn't thrown it away,” said Andrew.
“Probably not,” she admitted, but she still wished they had saved it. Soiled or not, it was still the work of her mother's hands, rare and precious, if only to her.
On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Sylvia and Andrew drove west in the Elm Creek Quilts minivan, which they favored over the motor home when the twists and turns of the Pennsylvania roadways were dusted with snow. Sylvia preferred not to travel in foul weather at all, but she was impatient to pursue this lead, and the owner of the Horsefeathers Boutique had not returned her calls. Sylvia wanted to believe that the owner either never received the messages or had been too swamped by the Christmas sales rush to call her back, but it was equally likely the owner had not called because she no longer had the quilt. Sylvia would have waited another week before going to see the shop in person, but the drive to Sewickley was reasonable and her need for answers urgent.
Sylvia's anticipation grew as they approached Sewickley. She had lived there for nearly forty years, from the time she first accepted a teaching position in the Allegheny School District until the lawyer called with news of her sister's death. When Sylvia went to Waterford to settle her sister's affairs, she had planned to sell Elm Creek Manor, return to Sewickley, and live out her days there. She never imagined she would return to Sewickley only to sell her house.
She happily pointed out her former home as they passed by it on Camp Meeting Road. “Goodness, they painted it robin's egg blue,” she said, twisting in her seat and staring out the window. “When I lived there, the house was a deep brick red, with black shutters. It used to disappear into the trees.”
“No danger of that now,” said Andrew, carefully maneuvering the minivan down a steep, curving hill. Sylvia directed him to turn left on Beaver Street and into the downtown area, where several blocks of Victorian homes, shops, and restaurants were already decorated for Christmas, with colored lights in the storefronts and holly twined about the lampposts.
The familiarity of the sight warmed her, which was why the changes to her former hometown struck with unexpected surprise. Her favorite café had become a men's clothing store, she saw as they passed, and the old Thrift Drug store was now a Starbucks. “The quilt shop is gone,” she exclaimed with dismay, staring in disbelief as they passed a shoe store.
“They probably went under after you moved away,” said Andrew. “What you spend on fabric could keep three or four quilt shops in the black.”
“Just for that, I'm not treating you to lunch,” Sylvia teased. “And I know all the best places around here.”
They parked the minivan in a public lot and put on their coats and gloves, for although Horsefeathers was just around the corner, the wind blew cold and the air smelled of snow.
“I'm surprised they're allowed to use that color,” Sylvia remarked as they approached the fuchsia storefront.
“I'm surprised anyone would want to.”
“No, I mean I believe they have a board that regulates those sorts of things. At least they did when I lived here. The downtown district tries to maintain a certain aesthetic. You should have seen the uproar when McDonald's tried to move in.”
By then they were close enough to read the bright gold letters painted on the storefront window. “HORSEFEATHERS BOUTIQUE. ART FROM FOUND OBJECTS,” read Andrew. “That disqualifies your mother's quilt, since it's a lost object.”
“One person's lost is another person's found,” said Sylvia absently. Her hand was on the doorknob, but the assortment of oddities displayed in the window had captured her attention. A chandelier made of antique doorknobs. A men's trench coat pieced from velvet Elvises. Several picture frames embellished with everything from coins to insects trapped in amber. The whimsical collection had been arranged to set off each piece to its best advantage, obviously by someone quite fond of her creations.
“Whoever the owner is,” said Sylvia, pulling open the door, “she must have a sense of humor.”
Inside, the shop was almost too warm, but the heat was a welcome respite from the cold wind. Sylvia removed her hat and tucked it into her pocket, looking around in amazement. The aisles were stuffed with items
that defied description—a sculpture made from stacks of old newspapers, a refrigerator transformed into a grandfather clock, a dress sewn from small, white rectangles of fabric that appeared to have printing on them. Sylvia leaned closer for a better look, and laughed. “‘Under penalty of law this tag is not to be removed except by the consumer.’”
“That doesn't look very comfortable.”
“I don't think that's the point, do you? I'm sure the artist was making a statement.” She paused. “What sort of statement, I honestly couldn't say.”
Andrew found the price tag. “An expensive one. This will set you back six hundred bucks.”
“And here I was going to put it on my Christmas list.” Sylvia looked around the shop. She didn't see any quilts amid the clutter, but a stout woman in a purple caftan had emerged from a backroom and was making her way toward them. Her dark brown hair hung nearly to her waist and, unless Sylvia's eyes were deceiving her, her earrings were made from pasta embellished with silver paint and glitter.
“Can I help you find something?” the woman asked.
“I hope so,” said Sylvia. “Are you Charlene Murray? My name is Sylvia Compson. I left a message—several messages, actually—about an antique quilt that I believe may be in your possession.”
“A quilt?” The woman's brow furrowed, and then she brightened. “Wait. Are you the woman from Waterford?”
“Yes, that's right.”
“I'm so glad you stopped by,” exclaimed Charlene. “I meant to call you back, but I lost the sticky note with your phone number.”
“Maybe you sewed it into a pair of pants,” offered Andrew.
Sylvia nudged him. “Your associate said that the quilt sounded familiar. Did she tell you about it? It was made in the medallion style, with appliquéd elm leaves, lilacs, and intertwining vines. The hand quilting is quite superior, fourteen stitches to the inch, except in a few places where my sister and I helped.” She tried not to, but she couldn't help adding, “My stitches were nine to the inch back then. Any larger than that were my sister's.”
The Quilter's Legacy Page 24