The Lake of Dreams

by Edwards, Kim

  “It was just bug spray,” she said, and sighed.

  “You know what? I’m pretty sure you’re better off without him.”

  A phone rang, and as she answered it I went up the curving staircase. The last big box was waiting on the walnut table with the others, as promised. Light filtered in through the lace curtains and made patterns on the polished wood. The air smelled of dust and old paper. Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they’d never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling—receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone.

  I was methodical this time, not digging aimlessly, but making little stacks according to type. Downstairs the door opened and closed, voices drifting; the phone rang. I sipped my cold coffee, and searched.

  I had my eyes open for a binder like the one in which I’d found the other letters, but it wasn’t until halfway through the last box that I found several more envelopes, this time held together with two ancient rubber bands that crumbled when I tried to pull them off. The handwriting on the top one was familiar, Rose’s sharp and slanted script, and my scientific training was no help to me then; my hands trembled. I scanned through them quickly, not stopping to read, not yet, aware of the time. More notes, ledgers, birthday cards from friends, and, every now and then, another letter. I set these aside as I found them. When the box was finally empty, I settled back in the chair and began to read.

  30 April 1915

  Dearest Iris,

  Today is your 4th birthday. Joseph writes that you are well. He sent me a little drawing you made, the figure of a person with two big eyes and stick legs. There was also a cat, which must be Shadow, because you have drawn him with a black crayon. And you wrote your name, the letters so big, in dark blue, the same color as your eyes. Good for you! I will see you soon, I am saving the money to come and see you. To make a life for you here.

  Since it hurts my heart to imagine you there without me, I will write to you about this life here, which is so different than any life I have ever lived or imagined. The people here are not like any I have known. They come and go, so many. People gather here almost every evening to debate the issues of the day. They are so passionate, arguing about the plight of workers and the situation of women. They are artists and nurses, teachers and even some lawyers, musicians, too. Books and ideas fill the rooms. Sometimes the fierce discussions transform into music and singing, or recitations. A few actors come, and sometimes the baker from next door, and the woman whose husband oversees a museum. In this company I am often quiet. I can hardly keep up with the swift wit, the arguments. But no one minds. People drift over to talk. I feel I have many friends here.

  I made a new friend last week. Her name is Beatrice. She came to me during one of the evenings when they were acting out a skit in the living room. She is petite, the mother of four children, the oldest not much younger than I am, and she is almost as quiet as I am in a crowded room. Her eyes are dark and sparkle with life and follow everything. She told me that I have an interesting face and quite extraordinary eyes, that she had been observing me for some time. Her husband is an artist and she thinks he would like very much to paint me. He would pay me to model and it would not be much work, and I could do it easily even after my long days. Thankfully, I am not in the factories. Vivian heard of an elderly woman who needed a companion, and so I spend my days in her grand house, walking the miles back here in the evening, glad for any weather after the hours and hours inside, bent over whatever tasks she gives me.

  Because I want the money so, because it would bring me closer to you, I said yes about the modeling. The artist is Frank Westrum. She acted as if I should have heard of him, but of course I have not.

  When I asked Vivian if this would be a good and honest thing to do, she said quite emphatically that it would be, indeed it was an honor.

  I must tell you of Vivian. I have been in this city for six months now and she has become my good friend. At least, I hope we are friends, because I admire her so. I am grateful to her, also. This is her house, you see, and many people live here, and we share resources and the work. Vivian is much younger than Mrs. Elliot, maybe even ten years. Her mother died when she was born and her father died while she was still in school. This is the family home. I think she once lived a very merry life, with parties and gowns and dinners and theater. And yet she was moved by work she had done to help the poor, the women she met who could hardly afford to feed their children. So after a time she began to study nursing, and to hold these salons. She knows everyone. Twice a week she goes out to the poorest of the poor, to their dim homes, crowded and spare yet often immaculate, tending to their illnesses, leaving without pay.

  I know, because sometimes I go with her.

  It is very difficult to see such suffering. And yet it is a relief in some way, for I see how desperate lives can be, and feel thankful for my own. I feel I was right to leave you in my brother’s home, in comfort, in safety, however much it grieves me still.

  Now it is late, so late, I am tired. Sleep well, sweet birthday girl, and dream of

  Your loving mother, Rose.

  I put the letter down on the table. So, I’d been right; she had modeled for him, if not in the studio in Rochester, then earlier, in New York City. I wondered if their relationship had been more than artist and model. Beatrice was her friend, and I didn’t want to imagine that Rose had betrayed her. I understood Oliver a little bit better in that moment, the fierce attachment he’d formed to Frank Westrum and his reluctance to have that persona challenged in any way. I found my phone and pulled up the picture I’d kept, the one of the Joseph window in Keegan’s studio. The image was so small, but I stared at it, trying to decipher the woman’s features, wondering if it was Rose, and if so, what she had been thinking as she stood in his silent studio, letting him draw her image late into the night.

  The next was a card, white stock, with the initials CWE in gold script.

  2 May 1916

  My dear Rose,

  I hope this letter finds you as well as I left you after my visit. It gladdens my heart a great deal to see you are happy in your new life, and to know that your brave stand for the rights of women did not end completely badly. I promised to write to you of Iris, and I am happy to report that she is very well. I saw her yesterday, playing in the front yard with dolls made out of fabric, and when I paused and spoke to her she spoke to me so nicely, with fine manners and, I am delighted to say, a lively and curious intellect as well. She is thriving. You would be proud. I will check on her from time to time and write with any news. Meanwhile, rest your heart—she is safe and very well.

  Yours truly, Nelia

  Another brief letter, in the familiar bold handwriting.

  17 May 1916

  Dear Sister,

  Iris had her 5th birthday in the garden. Cora baked a cake that looked like a flower, gold and white icing and yellow custard in the center. We had lemonade. Iris has a new purple dress and new shoes, too. Cora put away her mourning clothes last month. I work the farm but I am looking into starting a lock business. I have a knack with locks.

  Mrs. Elliot told me she saw you. She said you are fine. I have a hard time listening to that woman. She is still causing all sorts of trouble about the vote. I am studying to become a citizen and you should, too.

  Joseph

  10 September 1916

  Dear Sister,

  Your letter arrived and I am glad to know Mother and Father are well. Ellen wrote to me, too. I married Cora yesterday. It has been a year since Jesse died, we have waited. I asked Cora but she doesn’t think you should return to this house. I was hop
ing this was Jesse’s view, but it is hers, too. I am sorry. I am sorry I did not see you, too. I did not establish an account with the money you sent because there have been expenses, for clothes and new shoes and also books. I have spent wisely. Iris is happy, she plays in the garden all the time.

  Joseph

  The next letter in the pile was thick, written by Rose and dated earlier that same summer, written on thin paper with garlands of light blue flowers—forget-me-nots, I realized—framing the corners.

  June 1916

  Dearest Iris,

  I saw you today, playing outside. You are so grown up! Your hair is so long—and you had grown tall. But I knew it was you. I stood beneath the oak tree in Mrs. Elliot’s front yard, and I watched you. I can hardly describe how full and happy my heart was in that moment.

  It had been almost a year and a half since I had seen you. Finally, I had saved enough money to visit. It was the modeling that made it possible. It was hard to sit in the studio evening after evening, for it was cold in the winter and stifling in the summer, and I had to hold every muscle very still, even when I was about to faint with fatigue. Watch your eyelids, he’d warn, hold your chin a little higher, and I would do my best. He is a kind man, if somewhat gruff and abrupt, and my friend Beatrice is kind, too. Sometimes she teaches me design, for she studied before she married and she is very, very good.

  So I sat, and worked, and saved, and I came to see you.

  It is June, the first bloom of summer, but it was chilly when I arrived. Like spring, like March, instead. I meant to see Joseph, of course, and to pay a visit to Cora, whose name is Jarrett now, though she does not feel like a sister. It was overcast and you had taken out all your winter things again—the blue coat and the pale blue hat and mittens I had fashioned to send to you at Christmas. I left my suitcase on Mrs. Elliot’s porch and walked across the street, so impatient to see you, to touch you. The mittens were falling from your hands, dangling from your wrists on the little strings I had made, and your hat was off, too, bouncing against your back, and your coat swinging open, because it really was not very cold, revealing your sunshine dress. The hollyhocks were blooming, their soft bell shapes hanging from the tall stems, and you picked some and began to shape them into dolls—an unopened bud for the head, the blooming flower for a skirt. We used to do this together, I taught you how. You were intent, and did not look up until I squatted down beside you. Then you pushed your hair from your face and smiled.

  “I’m making dolls”, you said. “Do you want to help?”

  “Yes, I’ll help. They’re very pretty”.

  “My mother taught me”, she said, and this pierced me with joy, because even though you did not know me right away, you certainly remembered.

  “Your mother loves you so much”, I said.

  “I know. She’s pretty and she made me these mittens”.

  “Those are very nice mittens”, I said, and I remembered sitting downstairs, knitting those mittens for your little hands, while conversations swirled around me.

  “I got them in my stocking. They were put away. Mama says I may play with them awhile, but I must put them back, I mustn’t get them dirty”.

  I waited for a heartbeat, two, then three, taking in the meaning of your words.

  “Who said you must put the mittens away?”

  “Mama said. Mama Cora. Did you come to see her? She’s in the kitchen, making bread”.

  “No”, I said, and then I could not say more.

  You finished your flower doll and handed it to me.

  “I made it for you”, you said. “You are a pretty lady”. And then you stood up and ran off, laughing.

  I let you go, your pale blue mittens flashing against the folds of your coat.

  I had to pause. I stood up and walked to the window, which overlooked the expansive front lawn, and watched cars travel up and down the street. I was filled with compassion for Rose, squatting on the damp ground with the daughter who did not know her, and there was nothing to do with this emotion because Rose was gone, long dead. I thought of my great-grandfather, whose story had seemed so seamless from our vantage point in history, struggling in his early years to start Dream Master Locks, taking care of a child who was not his own, married to a woman with endless aspirations for their lives. Close-up, their lives were as complex and chaotic as my own, full of mistakes and disappointments and good intentions gone awry. I felt duped, for I’d believed in the clear-cut heroic arc of my great-grandfather’s life, and I’d known nothing of Rose, erased from the family lore as surely as if she hadn’t existed. I went back to the letters to find out what she’d done next.

  When you left I walked and walked, far out of the village and down the rutted country lanes, the flower doll wilting in my hand. I found myself at the edge of the lake. Foam made a lacy trim to the cold gray water. I wept. I had not imagined this. You were always so present that I never imagined I was all the time fading from your mind.

  I want you to know how I struggled. I sat down on a large stone, waves lapping near my toes, and tried to think what I should do. I could see two possibilities. I could go back to the house and announce that you were mine and take you with me back to the city. Vivian would make a place and so would the others. No one would ask about your father, they would assume he had died in the war.

  But what would you do, while I was at work? And I must work. And how would you feel about my tiny attic room? Would Cora let you go, or would she argue that I was unfit, because I’d been to jail, because of the work I do with Vivian, traveling among the poor?

  What life could I give you? A life of the mind, rich with artists, laboring their creations—you would have that. You would be loved, certainly. But there are no other children in this house. And however deep the pleasures are for me in this community, would it be fair to bring you here, to bring you up here? For I have been to jail, it is true. Many others have, too. We are marked with our pasts, and with our present convictions. Almost weekly, I walk through streets of desperate poverty. I climb dark and narrow stairs to flats where so many children linger in the shadows. They do not go to school because there is not enough money to buy them all clothes, and they are afraid, perhaps because their mother is ill and expecting another child whose birth she might not survive, or because their father has been hurt in an accident and cannot work. Whatever slender thread of hope they have is fraying with every second. They work in the factories, these children, girls of 11 or 12 already hunched over machines, boys hauling wheelbarrows full of coal to fuel the furnaces, or they make flowers of cloth until they drop.

  Would I have you there, in the midst of this?

  Also, though I do not love this work of Vivian’s, I know it is important. And when I do it, I feel whole.

  The lake was a cold gray-blue. I kept seeing you, running across the lawn, your beautiful mittens flashing. Anger churned within me. I tried to let it go. To still myself, and think what would be best. One thing I knew was this: to act rashly, out of anger, would be wrong. I wanted to be sure that my love for you was something that did not put my own feelings first, but rather looked from the outside, as a stranger might, and considered what would be the best for you, my beautiful and beloved daughter.

  For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love, or not at all.

  I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil. This is what I had come to understand, going with Vivian through the turmoiled streets, into the buildings where people suffered, where they died, and where grief and anger infected those who loved them as surely as any illness did, as insidious as any virus. I used to have a simpler idea. I used to think there was good and there was evil, that Geoffrey Wyndham was evil because he left me, left us. I thought his family was evil, too, because they lived carefree in the grand house while others labored on their land and hardly had enough to eat and were nothing in their eyes.

  This is what I used to think, that some people were sim
ply good and others were not, and that I, of course, was good. But now I think instead that evil is a force in the world, a force that seeks, and it finds its way into our lives through anger and loss, through sadness and betrayal, like mold on bread, like rot on an apple, it takes hold.

  I was angry in the ruins when they laughed, shutting a door on the way I loved God and loved the church. I was blinded by anger when I stole the chalice because it bore the name of people who had hurt me.

  And I was possessed by anger to think that Cora had let you forget me, had erased me—your mother—from your life.

  I could have picked you up and boarded the train and made a life for you here.

  But you were happy, well cared for.

  It was my own brother who would raise you.

  And Cora, though I do not admire her, though she does not like me, loves you.

  I sat on the boulder on the edge of the lake for a long time. My legs were numb when I finally stood. I walked all the way back to town, gravel on the edges of the road crackling beneath my boots. Mrs. Elliot made me sit by the fire, and when I told her the decision I had reached, she did not scold me or try to change my mind, but only put her arm around my shoulders and said, Dear Rose, I am sorry to have brought this terrible sadness into your life. And I replied it was not she who brought it, but my own decisions, every time. And that is true.

  I wrote to Joseph. I enclosed all the money I had saved for you. And in the morning I got up and carried my bag to the station. I traveled all day and all night and I did not sleep. The handle of the suitcase cut into my hand as I walked. I welcomed that pain because it was real, it was physical, and I knew it would someday end.