by Kim Edwards
“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 sp
oke, 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.”
Sunlight poured in through the wall of windows and fell through Iris’s thin white hair, the wisps like scraps 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 classmates 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 glass 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, passed 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, passing 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 passed. 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.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ned said. “It was an accident. And he wasn’t hurt.”
“No. He was laughing. He was so little he didn’t understand danger.”
I was thinking of Max, standing over the rushing water, turning back to smile at me as if nothing were the matter at all.
“What did you do?” Yoshi asked. “After you left, what did you do? Where did you go? It must have been hard, you were so young.”
“Yes. It was hard. Though when you’re young you don’t think about that so much. You don’t realize you’re setting a pattern for your life. They found me—I was staying with a friend—and when I said I didn’t want to come back to the house, they sent me here, to Elmira, to a Mrs. Stokley, who needed a boarder. So I went. I took a job in one of the glass factories. I wanted to be a teacher, but of course I didn’t have the training. When I was twenty-one, I met John Stone at a company picnic. He was an engineer, like Ned. He was flying a kite that day.”
“My father,” Ned said. “They were married for fifty-seven years.”
“And you never saw Joseph again? Neither your uncle or your
cousin?”
She shook her head. “My cousin, no. My uncle did come to visit. Just once. It must have been near the end of his life, goodness knows—I was in my fifties. He brought a photo from his childhood, and he took me to lunch, and he indicated that I’d be remembered when he died. I didn’t put much faith in it, of course. And of course, since I never heard another thing about it, I knew I’d been right.”
While we’d been talking, the door in the foyer had opened and shut again, softly, and a young woman dressed in shorts and a white tank top had taken a seat on the step down into the living room, resting her chin on her hand and listening intently. She had long hair pulled back in a ponytail. As the conversation paused, Carol introduced her as Julie, their youngest daughter.
Julie smiled and said hello. I replied, taking her in. Since Ned and my father were second cousins, Julie and I must be third cousins, if there were such a thing. Even if there were, did it matter? That was the sort of cousin you might not know about even if you grew up in the same town. She was tall, not quite as tall as me, but nearly so. I stood and she shook my hand.
“So you’re a hydrologist,” she said. “That’s so interesting.”
“I like it.”
“And you work in Japan?”
“Well, not exactly.” I glanced at Yoshi. “We were living in Japan, but we’re on leave right now. Thinking about the next thing, whatever it might be.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve done my share of that.”
“Julie is a teacher,” her father said. “But she has a passion for animals. She rescues them. That’s her real love.”
I didn’t know what to say—in this way we were not at all alike. I wondered if her apartment was full of stray cats.
“Exotics,” Julie said, as if reading my mind. “I rescue exotic animals whose owners didn’t know what they were getting into and finally abandoned them. So far I’ve adopted a boa constrictor, two monkeys, and three iguanas. The monkeys aren’t at home, of course—there’s a great facility in Kentucky that takes them.”