The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [51]
Wow. I put the pages down on the table as if they were flaming. Well, the librarian had warned me about the tone. Just before she wrote this book, Cornelia Elliot had been voted out of the leadership of the group she’d helped to form; younger women had bristled at her old-fashioned and sometimes autocratic ways. She’d been swept aside by a wave of history, and she was understandably angry. I scanned through the rest of the pages, looking for dates or events that were relevant to Rose.
I didn’t find any. Nor did I find any references to Frank Westrum. Instead, most of the text focused, as she had stated in her introduction, on her involvement with the suffrage movement, particularly the events she had orchestrated after she moved to The Lake of Dreams from New York City. Her husband, a physician, loved the natural beauty of the area, but for Cornelia, who loved the amenities of the city, the experience had been a trial. She had compensated by becoming deeply immersed in her social justice work, and it seemed, in the subtext, that the more her activities had irritated her husband, the better she had liked them.
The suffrage march she had organized in October 1914, inspired by the march in Washington the previous year, took up a full chapter and was written about with great vigor and delight. Cornelia Elliot described the marchers, spirited and determined despite the unpredictable and sometimes hostile crowds. She seemed thrilled to have been arrested and thrown in jail, not only for marching but also for distributing information about human physiology and family planning, which was illegal under the Comstock laws at the time.
Distributing information about family planning. I found the note Rose had written when she’d read that simple pamphlet and locked her door to look at herself in a mirror for the first time ever. How shocked she had been by facts that seemed so ubiquitous to me, so basic! Had Rose known Cornelia Elliot then? Had she gotten the pamphlet from her? Had they ever talked about these matters? The note seemed private to me, something Rose had written but never meant to send.
I paused and did an Internet search for Cornelia Elliot, but turned up nothing more than I already knew. Then I tried Vivian Branch, her older sister. This time I found several entries, including one that noted the gift of her collection of papers to Serling College. I wrote a quick e-mail to Special Collections at Serling College, asking if there was any correspondence that might illuminate Cornelia Elliot’s life as well as her sister’s. Then, because I was starting to feel overwhelmed by all the swirling dates, I took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote down all the names and facts I knew:
Westrum, Frank, 1868-1942
Westrum, Beatrice Mansfield, 1873-1919
Jarrett, Cora, 1887-1958
Jarrett, Joseph, 1894-1972
Jarrett, Rose, 1895-????
Jarrett, Iris, born 1911
Suffrage March in Washington, 1913
Suffrage March, The Lake of Dreams, 1914
Dream Master founded, 1919
Womens suffrage granted, 1920
Iris leaving, 1925
My grandfather born, 1925
Windows finished, 1938
Depot built, chapel closed, 1940
Arthur born, 1952
My father born, 1953
I sipped my wine, considering. The air smelled so clean; buoys clanked faintly. Voices floated across the lawn and into the room. I gathered up the papers and put the pile on the liquor cabinet by the stairs, next to my stack of books. Outside, Blake was helping my mother from his boat onto the dock, holding her good hand while she gained her balance. Then he reached to help