The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [130]
That is all, then, Iris dear. Sweet child of my heart.
My throat was tight by the time I finished reading.
There were several letters left. I still had an hour, but suddenly I wanted to get away, to read the rest of these in a private place, to be sure I had them with me and could keep them safe. For the director, however well intentioned, might lose them. Or, if Oliver ever found these, he would want to display them in a glass case in the Westrum House and add Rose as a footnote to Frank Westrum’s story. Whatever their historical value to the world, these letters were personal, first. They’d been written by a woman lost in my family, and though they hadn’t been written to me, though I’d been decades from being born when her hand had moved across these pages, I felt quite powerfully that they were somehow meant for me to find, nonetheless.
I put all the other papers back in the box. The letters I folded carefully and put into my bag. I left the historical society, waving to the curator, who was on the phone, and walked down the wide streets with their tall trees. There was a little park that overlooked a small lake that had been engineered when the canal was built to contain the falls. Underneath the tranquil water were whole streets and factories, abandoned, flooded, silent in the currents. A boat glided past, headed for the locks. I sat down on the grass, pulled another letter from my bag, and read.
14 October 1916
Dearest Iris,
Five months have passed since I saw you in the garden, and though the pain of leaving you has not gone away, the days have passed. Lately they have passed in such a way that I have become convinced that I did the right thing to leave you there. For you see, I have gone to jail again.
You know that I go with Vivian when she visits the homes of the poor. More and more, I go. These visits are not joyous. On almost every one the mother will send the children into another room or scatter them outside, and she will beg to know how she might keep from having another child. Perhaps she has seven children already; perhaps she has been told she will die if she has another. Perhaps her husband drinks and loses every job he gets, perhaps he works hard and cannot find a job, perhaps he is sick. Perhaps she is powerless, as I once was. It does not matter. For us to tell her what we know is not legal. The information we possess about the basic physiological facts of life is illegal to convey. Mr. Comstock saw to that. Vivian used to be afraid of this law. She kept silent. Then she watched a woman who had begged for information die in childbirth, and the child died, too. So now when they ask, she speaks. I do, too. There is no kindness in this law, no mercy.
Though we put ourselves at risk, we tell them what we know. When we heard that Mrs. Sanger and her sister Mrs. Byrne would open a family planning clinic, we made up our minds to volunteer. It was a windy day. Before the clinic opened, the line stretched for several city blocks. We helped hand out information. That is all we did—we handed out booklets with facts about the body. I hope, if you should ever read this letter, that you will be astonished that such simple actions should cause such great consternation and uproar. The lines grew and grew each day, but on the 26th of October the police arrived and closed the clinic and arrested us all.
Beatrice and Frank came to get us, she so quick and plump and outraged, he silent as always, standing firm and tall beside her. We walked out with them from the white-tiled cells. Mrs. Sanger will go on trial and Mrs. Byrne is still in jail and has embarked upon a hunger strike. We fear she will die but she says it makes no difference if she dies, when thousands of women die each year in childbirth