It was as if the air left the room. Father turned without speaking and went into the shop. Joseph rose and followed him. A few minutes later the argument began. We cleared the table, not speaking, as the words rose and ebbed and rose again.
It is night now, I can hardly see to write. The young couple has gone to the dining car. The old woman took off her hat and ate a beef sandwich spread carefully on a cloth napkin she unfolded from her bag. The accountant next to me has begun to doze. For a time we passed endless rows of houses and flats, moving so slowly that I caught glimpses of people eating dinner at their kitchen tables, or reading in a chair, or reaching to close their curtains. Then we picked up speed as the flats ended and factories began. Then it was dark again. I ate a roll, trying not to notice the scent of roast meat.
Time is different when you travel. This night is less like last night, when I lay awake in our little room, listening to your soft breathing, than it is like the night years ago when Joseph and I were traveling to this new land. On that trip I woke each time we stopped, lights and voices from the stations drifting down the darkened aisles.
Joseph was sleeping, his eyelashes dark against his cheeks, his coat folded carefully beneath his head. He looked like the carefree brother I knew before our troubles, before he changed, and I changed, and everything we knew was lost. The train moved on then, into the night, taking us closer to our new lives. I closed my eyes, matching my breathing to my brother’s. When I woke the sun was golden on the new wheat, on the dark blue lakes.
You are there still, in that place. My hand aches from this writing, my heart from the steady turn of the wheels.
Love from your mother, Rose
I sat back in the chair, still holding the fragile paper with its careful, slanted handwriting. Toward the end of the page the letters became wider and more wobbly, and twice the words ran off the page entirely. The pages trembled in my hand and I put them down, pressing my palms to my face and running my fingertips along the arch of my eyebrows, down my cheeks and the curve of my neck.
Everything changed with this letter. The story that had shaped my entire life and the lives of everyone I knew had changed.
He would begin with the comet, which is the wrong place to start
.
Then what had happened, I wondered, to make them flee everything they had known? What were the troubles that put them on that train, Rose with my great-grandfather, dreamy and carefree in his sleep? I flipped through the remaining envelopes in the binder. I imagined Rose bent over these pages, writing in the dimming light, her heart tightened with loss.
The little clock on the mantel struck four, delicate tones falling through the air, muffled in the carpet. A moment later the light footsteps of the curator sounded on the stairs. Without letting myself think what I was doing, I slipped the remaining letters back into the leather binder and shoved this into my bag. Blocks away, the town clock started ringing the hour, and then she was in the doorway, the low afternoon light catching on the silver hoops that climbed her ears.
“Wow, how many earrings do you have?” I blurted out, nervous; the letters were visible inside my bag, if she thought to look.
Startled, she touched her pierced lobes, then smiled.
“Eight in the left ear, nine in the right. Last week I pierced my navel, too. I haven’t quite gotten up the nerve to do my tongue.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
She smiled a little wearily, as if she heard the question often. “Not so much. The very tops of my ears, a little. How did the research go? Did you find anything?”
“A letter,” I said, tapping the unfolded pages on the table. “Amid lots of other papers. It has some references that are useful. I wonder—could I take it for a few days?”
“I’m sorry.” She shrugged, then crossed the room and picked the letter up. I didn’t want her to touch it, and kept my hands clasped in my lap with great effort as she scanned the lines. “It hasn’t been cataloged, you see. Probably I shouldn’t have let you see it at all. Is it important?”
“To me it is. To my family. Probably not to history—you know, with a capital
H
. It’s personal, that’s all. That’s why I’d like to borrow it.”
“Sorry. Really—I would if I could.”
“Okay. I’ll come again tomorrow.”
“Sorry, we’re not open tomorrow. Usually we are, but because of this class, we’re not. It’s kind of an experiment, to see which days get the most traffic. We’ll be open Wednesday and Friday, though, nine to one.”
Slender filaments of panic fanned out around my heart; there was one more box I hadn’t seen at all, but Wednesday was the day Keegan had arranged to see the chapel on the depot land. Friday was the soonest I could come back. But I smiled and shrugged, sensing that it would be better not to make too big a deal of this.
“Ah—that’s too bad. No exceptions?”
She hesitated, glancing from the boxes and back. “I would, you know, but I’m leaving town. I’m going camping with my boyfriend.” She roused a little, curious now, and read the last part of the final page out loud. “ ‘You are there now, in that place. My hand aches from this writing, my heart from the steady turn of the wheels.’ Sounds like a love letter.”
“It is, kind of. A mother to her daughter, actually.”
“Are you sure it’s not important? Maybe I should call the director.”
“Oh, no, don’t bother. Really.” I stood up, making myself step away from the boxes with their tantalizing contents. “Like I said, it’s nothing earth-shaking. Not important to anyone but me. I can wait, though I can’t come until Friday. What time did you say?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“I’ll be here.”
I crossed the room and started down the stairs before her, holding my bag close to me, my left hand running down the carved and polished railing. She followed me to the door with its panes of etched glass; the lock, I noticed, was electronic, well beyond my expertise. I really would have to wait.
The car was stifling hot and smelled of dust, having been sitting in the sun all afternoon; I opened the window to the lake breeze. My stomach growled—I hadn’t stopped to eat all day, I realized. Still, I slipped the second letter from its envelope.
Across the street, the door of the museum opened. The curator came out, slipping on sunglasses. She paused to make sure the door was locked behind her and hurried down the steps toward her adventure, car keys dangling from her left hand. She walked swiftly, passing one Victorian home after another, slipped into a lemon-colored VW convertible, and drove away.
I imagined Elizabeth Cady Stanton walking these very same streets with her children in tow, words like an undercurrent in her mind, rising up, pressing, as she bought flowers or stopped for sugar and eggs, hurrying home and leaving her packages scattered on a table as she made some swift notes, catching the idea that was pressing itself, necessary, essential, jotting down the words I’d read earlier that day: “We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us. . . . Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.” Children, calling in the background until she sighed, put her pen down, and went to them. I imagined her standing on the street corner with Susan Anthony and the scandalous Amelia Bloomer in the daring split skirt that allowed her the ability to move unconstricted—scandalous, all of them, Elizabeth, Susan, and Amelia, three young women with their fierce intelligence and their dreams, talking together on an ordinary summer day.
I turned the letter over in my hands. Rose Jarrett stood behind that veil of time as well, traveling in her brown suit and yellow blouse—where, exactly? Why had she left her brother and gone off without her child? In the midst of what scandal had she fled? It worried me, not knowing what had happened to them both. And I wondered, also, with a growing sense of anger, why I’d spent my life not knowing Rose Jarrett had existed, when I might have learned from her life something about how to live my own, something beyond the bright fleeting streak of a comet and the parameters of life fixed in place. I had so many questions. How had she come to influence Frank Westrum’s beautiful windows, those mosaics of glass filled with light, and to write these passionate letters? The historical society was quiet behind its wrought-iron fence, holding its secrets fast.
A breeze flowed into the car, smelling of water. I thought of my little charges in Japan, our walks beside the sea, the words I had taught them—
wave, water, stone
—and the words they had not understood:
someday, little ones, your grandchildren may even drink your tears
. I unfolded the second letter, written on a ledger page with faint blue stripes and columns, and began to read.
15 September 1914
Dearest Iris,
What a gloomy letter I wrote last night. But I woke feeling better.
My accountant’s head drifted to my shoulder as he slept. He was so embarrassed. He has given me a blank page torn from his book of numbers to apologize. He lives in Poughkeepsie and he does accounts for a paper company. That sounds like a dull life, but he seems happy. He told me all about the city. He has a house there and has never married. He looked at my hand and saw no ring and began to ask more questions. Briefly, I imagined setting up housekeeping in his tidy house. Then I told him about your father, fighting in France. Missing there.
He nodded, as if I’d moved a set of numbers from one column to another. He went back to work. I ate two apples from my bag.
Mrs. Elliot can see the window of your room from her house. She promised to watch over you. She promised to give you the blanket. I wove it at night when I knew I must leave. Joseph was gruff and did not say good-bye, but he left a note in my pocket with five dollars. I could buy an egg for breakfast, but I will save it instead. Each penny brings me closer back to you. I am not to worry, Mrs. Elliot said. Her friends are kind and will meet me at the station. I am not to worry, but I do.
The tracks are close to the river, a muddy silver blue. There was a river near our village, too, it flooded almost every spring. For a few strange days and miraculous days we could catch fish in the streets and set the withy baskets in the fields for eels.
I must finish my story. I was walking along this river with a basket of eggs when Geoffrey Wyndham drove over the rise. Joseph was beside him.
“Rose Jarrett!” Geoffrey called, stopping the vehicle beside me. He laughed, sunlight falling through his straw hat and making patterns on his face. He invited me to have a ride. I nodded yes and climbed into the back of the silver machine.
“Hold on to your hats”, Geoffrey said, though Joseph and I weren’t wearing any hats. Then we drove.
The speed! We flew, the landscape blurring into long smears of gold and green and blue. I gripped the seat, black leather, wind pulling my hair loose, making my eyes water. I had never gone so fast, or imagined it possible.
At last Geoffrey stopped next to a broken stone fence, woven with weeds and tumbling out of its shape. He turned around, one arm on the back of the seat, smiling.
“Scared?”
I nodded, I still couldn’t speak. Geoffrey laughed and got out of the car, reaching to give me his hand. I took it and stepped down out of the silver car like a girl in a story.
“I wasn’t scared”, Joseph said. “It was like flying”.
“Flying—yes. Just so. Do you see that?” Geoffrey asked, pointing to ruins in the midst of the shimmering green fields. “It used to be a monastery, long ago. Henry VIII had it sacked. They built it here because when the floods come during the summer sea the place becomes an island, sometimes for weeks. I wanted to see it”.
He started off. Joseph went with him and I followed. The sun was hot. Twice, we disturbed dragonflies in the tall grass, they rose up in great clouds and drifted away.
The abbey made us quiet. The roof was gone, but some walls were still standing. Geoffrey slipped between the wire fences and disappeared into a corridor. Joseph hurried after him. I followed more slowly. The stones beneath my feet were dusty and smooth. Rain had streaked the stone walls. Old leaves littered the floor.
The page ended, and there wasn’t another one in the envelope. I pulled the other letters from my purse, worried that the second page might still be in the box, or lost altogether. I was avaricious for the story by now, half here in the hot Impala, half in the Silver Ghost of a hundred years ago, bumping over dirt roads to the ruins of the abbey. It must have felt so astonishing to ride in a car for the very first time, though they were probably going only ten or fifteen miles an hour. Whatever sadness was to come, Rose wouldn’t have known it in this moment of exhilaration, this sunny day filling up with an adventure. I sorted through the letters as if they were playing cards. Toward the middle of the stack a page matching the page in my lap jutted out of another envelope. I pulled it out and opened it, sighing with relief to find it continued the story.
We turned a corner. Stairs rose, ending in the blue sky. Through gaps in the wall we glimpsed the grassy fields, moving in the wind. We reached a large room with a vast fireplace. Geoffrey stood in the middle, looking around. His cheeks had reddened in the sun. “I can almost imagine the monks”, he said. “Can’t you?”
“This place is too quiet”, Joseph said.
“That’s because it has a secret. My uncle told me. He says everyone who comes here has to tell their secrets, too”.
“What’s your secret, then?” I asked. Though I could hardly speak before, in this place I was free, as if all the invisible lines between us had fallen away. I could say anything.