The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [144]
“So these letters,” he said, reaching for a file folder he’d left on the table. “They took me by surprise. My mother, too. Her first response was that it was ridiculous, and must be a practical joke. But I gave her one to read, and she recognized Joseph Jarrett from the descriptions.
“Apparently, she knew Cora and Joseph were not her birth parents, though she’d never told any of us about that. Maybe my father knew. In any case, she never knew her father and she didn’t remember her real mother very well at all. She went away when my mother was so young, my mother came to think of Cora and Joseph as her parents—which was fine, until my mother hit her teen years and got rebellious, and the little cracks that had been there all along began to deepen. Your grandfather was born when she was fourteen, and that changed things, too.”
“In 1925,” I said. “The year they moved up to the house on the lake.”
“Was it? Yes, I think my mother lived there for a little while. There was a lot of tension. Eventually, she ran away. She moved in with a friend of friends here, and that was the saving grace, I guess. She took a job in one of the glass factories. But that was essentially the end of her connection to the Jarretts. Reading those letters was quite emotional for her, you should know. She stayed up very late last night, going over them again and again. But she wants to meet you. As I said, however, I’d like this to move slowly. And without distress to her.”
He was nervous again, talking faster.
“I understand,” I said.
A few minutes later, Carol appeared in the doorway, holding the arm of a tall woman whose hair was thin and white on her scalp, like dandelion fluff. I stood up, remembering Rose’s very first letter, how she’d described Iris’s infant hair in exactly this way. Her eyes, blue and fierce and familiar, met mine.
“Is this her?” she asked.
“This is Lucy, Mother. And her friend Yoshi. Come, let’s have a seat.” They crossed the room and sat on the opposite sofa.
Once we were all settled there was a silence, which expanded in the room. Even Ned was quiet.
“You look like your great-grandfather,” Iris said, at last.
“Do I really?”
She nodded. “It’s the eyes.”
“I have something for you,” I said. “Something that was made for you.”
I reached into my bag and pulled out the cloth, wrapped carefully in beautiful sheets of rice paper from Japan, faintly blue, with embossed white cranes. Iris took the package—her hands were long, the fingers pale and bony, slightly trembling. She opened it slowly, folding the paper carefully back. The cloth unfurled, silvery white and delicate, the row of overlapping moons along the border wrapped in the now familiar pattern of vines. It was so finely woven that, lifted and held up, it was translucent, the border along the bottom standing out more darkly than the rest. I told her the story then, as briefly as I could: the cloth with its border of moons, the cryptic letters and pamphlets locked away in the cupola, my search through historical archives, and the windows. I’d made photocopies for myself to keep, and now I handed her the binders, Rose’s binders, which held all the original letters.
“These were written to you. Written by your mother, Rose, for you.”
She let the blanket fall and smoothed it across her lap, then took the binder.
“You’ve read them?” she asked, looking up.
“I did.” Now that they were not history anymore, but connected to the life of this woman sitting across from me, I understood that it had been a kind of trespass, really, reading these letters not meant for any eyes but hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were alive, you see.”
She nodded slowly. “What do you think of her, then?”
“I think she was very brave. She had passionate beliefs, and she fought for them.”
“Is that so? I never knew her. She left when I was so small. They said she’d done something wrong and had to go, and that I should call Cora Mama, and so I did. I have one memory, lying on the sunny bed, her fingers doing the itsy-bitsy spider. I can still see them, climbing in the air. That, and a feeling