Downstairs, my mother had left the coffee warming, a bowl of fresh blueberries in the fridge, and a note saying where she’d gone. I ate at the counter, the blueberries firm and sweet, leafing through the latest
Lake of Dreams Gazette,
which featured articles on Keegan’s Glassworks—he was standing by the furnace, the glory hole he called it, with his arm tight around Max—as well as a four-page insert on the history and evolving controversy around the depot land.
The Women’s Rights National Historic Park is in Seneca Falls, just over an hour’s drive away. It’s open on Sundays, and after I washed my few dishes, I gathered up all my notes and photocopies, along with the original documents I’d found in the cupola, and set off. It seemed unlikely that they’d still have the boxes Joan Lowry had given them, or that those boxes would shed any light on Rose and her life, but I still felt optimistic as I drove through the rolling landscape and the canal towns that had prospered a hundred years ago, when Rose was young. She had perhaps been here, too, which filled me with deep excitement. Whoever she had been, whatever she had done, her story was part of the whole, and might illuminate my own.
In Seneca Falls I stopped first at the Elizabeth Cady Stanton home, where she’d lived from 1847 until 1862. A tour was just starting. The ranger took us through the simple rooms with their wide-planked floors and deep windows, which had overlooked the flats, a booming industrial area, as well as the two acres of orchards and gardens Elizabeth Cady Stanton had overseen while raising seven children. Her husband traveled with the circuit court and was often gone; she had written of how she suffered from an intellectual hunger that the busyness of her days did nothing to alleviate.
I lingered on the lawn after the tour, imagining the Stanton children scattered in play and Elizabeth striding about in her trousers and knee-length skirts. I imagined her sitting in the parlor after her guests had departed, after her children had gone to bed, writing out the Declaration of Sentiments in the long twilight evenings of early July, and then standing up to proclaim this declaration to an audience of hundreds. It must have felt exhilarating; she must have left the Wesleyan Chapel on a wave of excitement, filled with a sense of achievement and purpose. Her beliefs and her actions had opened the way for Rose two generations later, and had made my life of study and travel possible, too. But I wondered if she’d known this. It had taken seventy-two years longer for women to earn the right to vote, and not one of the speakers at the first Women’s Rights convention in 1848 had lived to see it.
In the main park building life-sized statues—of Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself, Lucretia Mott and her sister Martha Coffin Wright, the McClintocks and the Hunts and Frederick Douglass—gathered in the lobby as if arriving for the convention 158 years ago. The ranger at the front desk escorted me upstairs to meet the archivist. Her name was Gail and she was tall, with a low voice and dark, intelligent eyes. She listened with a thoughtful expression as I explained my story and asked about the boxes.
“Well, let me check,” she said. “We deal mostly with events and artifacts connected to the 1848 convention, so if the boxes didn’t contain anything like that we probably didn’t keep them.” She pulled a ledger from a low shelf and opened it, tracing down the lines with her index finger. “Yes, okay, here it is—Joan Lowry, did you say? I have a record of three boxes donated.”
“Really? Are they still here?”
“No, I’m afraid not. We went through those boxes four months ago. We did find three items relevant to the convention, apparently, but those are being processed. The rest—let’s see. Yes, here it is. The rest we sent to the Lafayette Historical Society. We often pass things on to them. Sometimes they find illuminating items that are of no use to us. You might try there.”
“You can’t tell me what the relevant items were?”
“Not at this moment. I’m sorry. I can check for you, if you like.”
“That would be really helpful, thanks. What about these?” I asked, opening the folder and showing her the pamphlets and flyers. “Are these of any interest?”
She looked through them slowly, giving careful attention to each document.
“To me they are,” she said. “We wouldn’t keep them here—they’re from the wrong era—but you should hold on to them. Maybe check with the people who have Margaret Sanger’s papers—these articles about family planning were written by her, probably around 1912 or 1913. This is an early copy, and they’re relatively hard to find. Later they were censored by the post office. They violated the Comstock obscenity laws, which made it illegal, even for physicians, to explain the basic facts of reproductive health. Sanger went to jail. Her sister, Ethyl Byrne, did, too, and almost died from the hunger strike she undertook in protest of those laws.”
I thanked her and gave her my address and phone number in case anything turned up. Then I drove through the expansive streets with their grand houses and wide lawns to the Lafayette Historical Society. It was located in an ornate Queen Anne house with intricate trim along the roofline, well kept but in need of paint; the second step sagged as I walked to the door. I was lucky, as it turned out. Though the building was usually closed on Sundays, it was open for a genealogy class. I stepped into a foyer that had been perfectly restored, with deep mahogany wainscoting and wallpaper with a tiny green floral print on cream. A young woman with a pierced nose and lip sat behind a vast desk, reading, and she finished her paragraph before she finally put her bookmark in the page and looked up, the little diamond below her lip catching the light.
“I think I know those boxes,” she said once I’d explained what I wanted. “I was here when they dropped them off. I don’t think anyone’s gotten around to looking at them yet. Come on upstairs to the reading room, and I’ll check.”
I followed her up the staircase, wide and curved, to the second-floor reading room, which was lined with bookcases. A grandfather clock stood against one wall, ticking softly, and a wide cherry table with heavy matching chairs took up the center of the room. The windows were bare, the glass mildly warped. She disappeared up another set of stairs and came back a few minutes later with a large box. There were two more, she said. I couldn’t wait, and started going through the first one while she went up to get the others. A jumble of papers, file folders, articles: I took them out one by one.
“There you go,” she said, heaving the last box onto the end of the table and brushing off her hands. She gestured to the papers I’d placed on the table. “Nothing’s been sorted, like I said. It’s probably a lot of receipts and ledgers and cryptic notes to self. But you’re welcome to look. We close at four o’clock.”
I glanced at the clock; it was already past two o’clock. “I’ll have a quick look,” I said, and so I began.
Lydia Langhammer had been a hoarder: everything from receipts for purchases to recipes and loose clips resided in the box. I went through it all carefully without finding anything of interest.
The second box was similar, as if someone had dumped the contents of a desk and several filing drawers. Here I did find references to Rose, however, who began appearing in the ledgers as having paid for certain expenses, and to whom some of the receipts were made. These accumulated in a low pile, though after the initial excitement of seeing her name, my eagerness slowly faded. What did these bits of paper tell me, after all, that I hadn’t known before? I kept digging and sorting, mindful of the changing light in the room and the ticking of the clock. Near the bottom of the box I came upon a leather binder, tied shut with a ribbon. Another ledger, I thought, or a collection of bills, but when I opened it letters fell out, several of them, all in different sorts of envelopes but written in the same hand, a script I recognized at once from the cupola notes, sharp and slanted: Rose. With trembling hands, I opened the one on top. The paper was coarse, yellowed, the pages filled with her handwriting, the black ink faded to the color of bark. It was dated September 21, 1914.
Dear Iris,
Beautiful girl. I left you this morning. You were in the garden, making a pile from the gravel by the fish pond, wearing the dark yellow dress I made for you. You are only three years old and you are so smart. You pulled the petals from an orange marigold and scattered them on the water. Feeding the fish, you said. I held you very close. Your hair, like dandelion fluff when you were small, lies flat now, so smooth and shiny. You smelled like soap and sunshine. Then Mrs. Elliot arrived and Cora called you inside for lunch. You climbed the steps one by one—they are too tall for your little legs. You turned, laughing, to wave to me. Then you disappeared beyond the door.
Mrs. Elliot called to me to hurry but I could not. I kept looking at the porch, willing you there, but you did not come.
I used yellow ribbons on your dress. I have one tied around my wrist. It flashes beneath my cuff as I write. The other passengers don’t notice, they go on with their business. They seem very ordinary and I wonder if I seem that way myself. It makes me wonder what secrets they carry in their hearts. The old woman across from me, who gazes out the window—what is she remembering? Or the gentleman beside me, adding numbers in his ledger, or the young farmer and his wife exclaiming at the sights—what are their secrets, their dreams?
I am dressed plainly—my one suit, brown, a blouse the color of golden-rod. I sit quietly with my satchel at my feet. What do they see, looking at me? They could never imagine you, turning, laughing, to wave one last time from the stairs.
You did not know I was leaving.
It is better that way. I tell myself again and again.
I promise—I promise—I will come back for you soon.
Meanwhile, I will write every day. Maybe you will never read these letters. Maybe I will be back so quickly that you will not remember I was ever gone. Still, I will write. Someday when you are older you will have these to keep and see how much I loved you, even though today you woke up from your nap, stretching in that patch of sunlight that falls across the bed in the midafternoon, to find me gone.
They will take good care of you, I pray.
Despite the scandal, Joseph loves you, because he loved your father. And Cora, though she does not like me, dotes on children since she has none of her own.
There was a page break, and I paused. Muted voices and laughter floated up from the genealogy class. My hands were shaking a little. The story I’d imagined hadn’t included Rose leaving Iris. The note I’d found in the cupola had been dated 1925, eleven years later, when Iris would have been fourteen. It seemed Rose had never come back. I thought of my mother’s warning,
I hope you aren’t disappointed,
and realized that I might be, that Rose could turn out to be less heroic and interesting than I’d imagined. The letters fanned out against the polished cherry table. I took a deep breath, turned the page, and read on.
At the station, Mrs. Elliot gave me a poem. She copied it from a magazine. A poem for travelers, she said. The poet is a woman but she is called only HD. Mrs. Elliot always says I am thirsty for words and she gave me books. I read this poem again and again. “Wind rushes over the dunes, and the coarse salt-crusted grass answers”. I do not understand it really, yet the words say the sadness I feel.
Iris. Where are you at this moment? I named you for the flowers. They are the color of your father’s eyes. This is the story I want you to know. Your uncle cannot tell you, he doesn’t understand.
Also, he would begin with the comet, which is the wrong place to start.
The story begins earlier. An ordinary summer day. I was weeding in the vineyard. I paused to drink from the bucket. That’s when I saw the line of rising dust, the bright flashes of silver through the trees.
“What’s that?” I asked. My friend Ellen stood, too.
“I don’t know”.
“I think it’s an auto-mobile!” I was excited, I had never seen one before.
“It must belong to the Wyndhams”.
“It must”.
“Let’s go and see”.
So we left our work and ran to the village.
By the time we reached the commons people were coming from their shops and homes, shading their eyes to look. Mr. Marcus, the grocer, said it was a Rolls Royce—a Silver Ghost, he called it.
The vehicle drew closer. It made no sound at all, not even when it stopped at the village green, bright as a mirror. Everyone who looked at it saw something different reflected back—a dream of speed, of a factory job, the promise of change. Your uncle leaned over the engine. I stared at its silver hood where a small silver woman with silver wings stood about to leap, to soar.
“Do you like her?” Geoffrey Wyndham was next to me. I nodded, too shy to speak. His family owns most of the village. In the church graveyard you can see tombstones with their name all the way back to 1134. One winter we skated on the pond and Geoffrey chased me until the color of the ice changed suddenly, from opaque to clear, the darkness of the water visible. He shouted and grabbed my arm, pulled me away from that dangerous edge. Now he was tall. My chin only reached his shoulder.
“Go ahead”, he urged. “Touch her”.
So I ran my hand over her silver form.
At supper that night all we talked of was the auto-mobile. Our father sat in the middle of the conversation like a boulder in a current. Finally he dropped his fork and stood.
“There’s still work here to do, and plenty of it”, he said to Joseph. “Let’s go.”
“Ah—for what?” Joseph’s voice was rough. “Who will need wooden wheels for wagons when auto-mobiles travel twice the speed on rubber tires?”