The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [102]
I could unlock the oak door to the church just as well as Joseph. The metal whispers a language of its own. The rows of pews fell away into the shadows and the high, arched windows caught a faint light. I had polished every pew and swept every corner, and my stitches were woven into the white cloths on the altar. I sat down in the velvet-covered bishop’s chair. Always before I had sensed something beyond the familiar in this place, something silent and just out of sight but present, welling up. But that night I was so heartsick I could feel nothing else.
I stayed a long time. Slowly, more light came into the church. The stained-glass windows began to come alive. The silver chalice and plate, set out for communion, were visible, like faraway planets, two silver circles, small and large. I had prepared the altar often enough to know what they said on the bottom: “A Gift from the Wyndham Family”. I stood and picked up the chalice. It was heavy in my hands. I ran my fingers lightly across the letters, scratches in the silver. Passage to leave he had given me, yes, but nothing else, and nothing for our child, for you. The silver rim of the chalice caught the faint light. It would be nothing to them, I told myself, to replace one cup. And so I added one more mistake to those I had already made. I slipped the cup beneath my apron, and I walked out the door.
This letter ended abruptly, with no signature, no drawing. I sat back on the window seat. I’d been so engrossed that I hadn’t noticed the dwindling light, but the sun had begun to dip behind the opposite shore and there was a faint coolness in the air. I gathered up my papers and carried them down to my room, where I spread them out on the painted floor—Rose’s letters in one pile, Joseph’s in another, the photocopied documents and the pile of papers from the cupola in the third.
I was so moved by Rose’s letter that I read it again rather than starting another, imaging her waiting on the dusk-covered lawn outside the grand house while the negotiations that would determine her life went on without her; imagining her loneliness in the church, and the chalice heavy in her hand. It made me think of the days right after my father died when I’d felt the same lost way. I was remembering the window in Keegan’s studio, too, the Joseph window, which had a chalice hidden in the sack of grain, and the crowd full of unnamed women, trying to puzzle out how it connected to the letters Rose had written. I’d looked up the story about Joseph and the coat of colors out of curiosity. He was tossed into a pit because his siblings were jealous of him. He ended up in Egypt, in exile, interpreting dreams. When a famine came, the brothers who had thrown him into the pit came to ask for food, not knowing who he was. He gave them grain, but he also tricked them by having the cup he used for divination hidden in their sacks; when they came back to return the cup, he accused them of theft. Interested, I’d also read Grail stories, and the bones of both narratives seemed very close—disharmony, a land in famine, a quest for healing, and a silver cup or bowl.
Maybe that window was personal, I realized, thinking of Rose sent into an exile of her own, starting a new life in a strange country, exiled again by some sort of scandal, forced to leave her daughter. Maybe that’s why it had never been installed. I couldn’t know exactly where she saw herself in this story or what, if anything, she had meant to say by choosing it. Maybe it was just the image of the chalice she had liked. I wondered what had happened to the one she’d taken. I wondered what had happened to Rose.
I opened the next letter, dated April 11, 1938. It was from Frank Westrum.
My darling Rose,
The windows progress so