The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [110]
“They are exquisite,” Suzi said softly, coming to stand beside me. Her face was flushed and animated, and it struck me that she was moved by the windows, that for her they were not simply an artifact of the past or a clue to a forgotten life but a connection with the stories themselves, with whatever mystery they attempted to catch. What Suzi seemed to be experiencing in this chapel was something that resonated from my past, the sense that there was something numinous present, real and potent, that I could not understand. Rose, too, must have felt this. She must have felt it strongly to want to be a priest at a time when that was impossible, to have helped create this extraordinary chapel full of windows. I thought she would have liked seeing the Reverend Suzi here. Maybe she would have understood even me, with all my doubts and wrong turns and seeking.
“It’s the same glass,” Keegan was saying across the chapel. “It has the same tonalities and composition as in the Wisdom window. I’m sure, even without an analysis. Just look at the consistency of the color. These windows were clearly all made at the same time, for the same commission, don’t you agree? I wonder—when would you place them, Oliver, in the Westrum work?”
Oliver didn’t answer immediately, but stood with his arms folded, considering. Suzi’s footsteps echoed softly as she moved from one window to another.
“It’s difficult to say. In terms of craft, they’re late examples. But in terms of design, he’s using this Art Nouveau style that he liked so much as a young artist. They certainly recall his youth. I know you have dates on receipts and so forth, but even so these windows are out of character for the work he did at the end of his life. Actually, they’re like nothing else I’ve seen of his, ever.”
I walked across the back of the chapel, past where the Wisdom window would be hanging if it were here, to the east wall. The figures in the four windows on the other wall all featured women, too. The first was familiar, a woman kneeling at the edge of a river, pulling a basket from the water to the shore; that story, the rescue of Moses, I vaguely remembered. The next window depicted a young woman in a sun-struck field, presenting a bushel full of grain to an older woman; the third showed a woman pulling water from a well and offering a cup to the haloed figure of Jesus. Jesus was in the final window, too, sitting across from a woman who listened to him avidly, while behind her another woman stood, holding a basket of fruit.
I studied these images, trying to recollect the stories, taken back to my days in Sunday school, the air full of the scent of paste, the rustle of paper, the teachers’ voices as they read out loud. But we hadn’t read most of these stories, I didn’t think. All I seemed to remember were tales of floods and battles and fleeing through the desert. Aside from Eve, the only woman I remembered was Mary in her pale blue robes; we had all wanted to be her during the Christmas play, even though she didn’t have any lines.
I walked slowly from window to stunning window. They depicted such ordinary moments, really—women carrying grain or jars or baskets of fruit; women in a garden, by a river or a well, at a grave—even as they dazzled in their beauty and harmonious design, filling the chapel with shifting shapes of color. There was a cumulative power in the images, too, all these women in pivotal moments of their lives, moments infused with spiritual longing or celebration or fulfillment. In the windows of my childhood church, most of the images had been male; Jesus was male, and the disciples were, too, and the language used in the service had referenced only men. Here, that had been turned upside down. I walked from window to window again, feeling my perspective shift. For the first time ever, I could imagine myself into