The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [61]
The Westrum House didn’t open until two o’clock, so I stopped to visit the Sonnenberg Gardens in Canandaigua, and I had lunch there, too. Then I got on the highway into Rochester and found my way downtown. The Frank Westrum House was tucked away on a street full of tall brick homes, hidden by a row of overgrown forsythia bushes. The path was made of flagstones leading past the bushes and through a garden full of nooks and alcoves, hidden benches, and wisteria trailing from trellises. The house was immediately distinct, two stories, built in a style reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, with lots of horizontal lines and windows everywhere. It was so quiet that I worried that despite the hours posted on the Web site the house wouldn’t actually be open. Yet when I finally walked up to the entrance—a portico, really, with several long beams extending over the stoop—a little sign with red cursive letters said OPEN. I stepped into the hall, called out, “Hello.” My voice echoed.
Newspaper articles, framed and hung along the wall, documented the history of the house, and I studied these as I waited. The neighborhood had been built in 1873, and the brick houses along the street dated from that time. However, there had been a fire on this site in 1910, one house kindling another and both fires raging most of a night, burning the houses to their shells. No one died in these fires, but the families lost everything. The lots sat empty until Frank Westrum bought them in 1920 and began building this house, which had taken him the better part of a decade to complete due to scarce funds. The final framed article talked about the restoration of the house in the 1960s, when it was purchased from private owners and the search for the glass art of Frank Westrum to fill it had begun.
There were distant footsteps, hurrying, and then a tall man clad in khakis and a white shirt stepped into the hallway. He had short, wavy flaming-red hair that made me think of the fires that had burned here, and his skin was pale, freckled. His name tag said STUART MINTER in thick block letters. Stuart was about my age, and he gave a nervous smile as he approached, speaking so quickly he was almost hard to follow.
“Hello and welcome, sorry to make you wait. It’s usually a pretty quiet time of day, so I wasn’t really expecting—well, sorry, as I said. Did you come to take the walking tour?”
“Yes, I would like to do the tour,” I said. “But I have some questions for you first.” I told him about the windows I’d seen in The Lake of Dreams, each with their distinctive rows of moons and densely woven vines and flowers along the bottom.
“Here’s the motif. Does it look familiar at all?” I asked, bringing the digital image up on my phone. “It’s a little hard to see. But the church had documentation—an original receipt—that indicated Frank Westrum made these windows on commission in 1938.”
Stuart Minter took the phone and studied the image. “No,” he said, finally. “We have nothing like that here, nor have I ever seen that motif in the Westrum archives. I’d remember it, I’m quite sure. It’s unusual, isn’t it? But even with this image—it’s very fuzzy—I can see trademarks of Westrum’s work in the window. Look, there’s this distinctive pattern of leading. You can just barely make it out, but if you look closely you can see how the pieces of stained glass come together here and there in a kind of flower shape. You’ll see this again as you take the tour, as well. That pattern is in every Westrum window, something of a signature, as the audio guide points out.”
“That’s very interesting,” I said, making a mental