The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [109]
Suzi had reached the chapel door. She was wearing black jeans and a simple black shirt with a white clerical collar. The ministers of my youth would have been men, dressed like Oliver, and they would have driven cars like the one he had arrived in, too—sleek, quiet, and black. Suzi, however, had a blue compact car and used her bicycle around town.
“Well, that was quite a trek,” Oliver said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe off his shoes. Keegan caught my eye and we both smiled.
“Totally cool,” Zoe said. “How long has this place been locked up?”
“Since 1941,” Suzi said, taking a key from her jacket pocket. It was ornate, made of iron, probably fashioned at Dream Master. Our great-grandfather or grandfather might have made this key, but I didn’t say so. “No one really expected it to be closed for this long. But as far as I know, no one’s been in here since, not until they came to uncover the windows.”
The key stuck, and Suzi jiggled it; finally it caught, and the door, stripped of its paint by years of weather, swung open. One by one, we stepped across the threshold into the musty stillness of the chapel. Except for a few pews at the back, the sanctuary was still intact, as it had been when the last services were held so many decades ago. The floor, beneath a layer of softening dust, was tile. The room smelled of cold, damp, and mildew. But I noted these details only later.
What captured me, what captured us all, were the windows.
In the darkness of the chapel—there was no other light—the windows seemed to float. Like the Wisdom window, the colors were bright and vibrant, the images stylized and elongated in the Art Nouveau style. Each window had the familiar border of vine-encrusted spheres along the bottom, iridescent white against the jewel tones that surrounded them. No matter how much I’d hoped and even expected to see it on these windows, the pattern riveted me even as the others began to disperse through the sanctuary, Suzi to the closest window in the west wall, Zoe trailing behind her, and Keegan and Oliver to the east windows, where the early morning light was strongest.
“Oh, it’s certainly Frank’s work,” Oliver said, his voice both excited and proprietary. “Exquisite work, just breathtaking.” He turned in a circle, taking in all the windows. “What a find this is for the Westrum Foundation. What an absolute treasure.”
He turned back to the closest window and began to look at the detail. A sense of possessiveness flared through me, too. I didn’t think of these as Frank’s windows. To me, they belonged to Rose. I couldn’t bear the thought that she might be obscured, cast as a footnote to Frank Westrum.
Oliver and Keegan began to speak in low, charged voices, talking about the nature of the glass, the quality of the leading, remarking on how well preserved the windows were, how clean—the wooden panels that had protected them all these decades had only just been removed. The reporter was taking rapid notes. “You see,” Oliver said, trying unsuccessfully to mask how thrilled he was. “You see this pattern right here, and here—this is the Westrum trademark, these are his windows, that is certain.”
Maybe so, I thought. But they also belonged to Nelia, who had paid for them. And in some way I was only beginning to understand, they belonged to Rose.
The words of her letters were still so present, all the love and loss of her early life. I walked around the chapel once, taking in the images. Suffused with light, the glowing windows cast color across the floor, across our faces and our hands. Luminous colors, the yellow of marigolds, the red of blood, the vibrant dark green of late summer grass. I walked from window to window studying the figures. A woman, pensive, holding an alabaster jar, stood beside Jesus, who was seated at a table, a silvery light around him. In the next window, two women, both visibly pregnant, spoke together in a garden. In the third, a woman turned from a cave, her hands open, her skin pale and radiant, her expression filled with wild amazement. In the last window