The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [81]
The house was utterly still, even more silent than it had been on my last visit, and our quiet footsteps—my mother’s flats, my sandals—echoed. Stuart gave us a brief tour of the main rooms and served us tea. Then we climbed the open stairs with Oliver, lingering on the landing to take in the window of the woman with her arms full of flowers.
“She looks like you, Lucy,” my mother said softly. “Don’t you think? If your hair was different, pulled up like this, she would look a great deal like you.”
“I suppose,” Oliver said, a bit reluctantly. “I guess I can see the resemblance. But then, she might look a great deal like a great many women, if they had their hair pulled back. I’ll show you a picture of Beatrice when we come back down. He loved her very dearly, and he used her image a few times after she passed away, working from photographs. I have several photos of his daughter, Annabeth, as well. She modeled for him frequently, and we always imagined he’d used one of them for this window. I think you’ll see the resemblance.”
Oliver turned then, and took us down a narrow hallway to an interior room, windowless, with a projector set up in the back. He explained that he’d been through the slide archives of windows that were either owned by the Westrum Foundation and currently in storage, or still privately owned but whose Westrum provenance was sure and whose owners had agreed to have the windows documented. We took our seats in the middle of the room like students in a class, my mother folding her hands in her lap and me jutting my feet out, crossed at the ankles. “Sit up,” my mother admonished in a whisper, but I paid no attention.
The first image that came up on the screen was of two very large doves with gray bodies and reddish-orange heads and chests. They were facing each other; between them was a bush with dark orange berries. The window in which they appeared was square; a pattern of blocks in alternating colors ran around the edge.
“This window is still in a house in Mount Vernon, New York,” Oliver explained, his voice soft, the cone of light illuminating the dust in the air. “It was custom-made for the house in 1919, to commemorate the passenger pigeon, which had become extinct. The owner of the house was a naturalist—indeed, he had been a founding member of the Sierra Club before he moved east from California—as well as a patron of the arts. In the 1800s passenger pigeons were so profuse a flock would darken the sky like a storm, but they were zealously overhunted and their habitats were destroyed, and finally, in September 1914, the last one died in a zoo in Cincinnati. This is quite a good replica, and the colors of the glass are especially worth noting here. We hope to purchase this someday—I would like to have it in the entrance—but the current owners don’t want to part with it. Never mind—we will persist.”
He clicked through several more pictures, pausing to comment on a design feature or a point of history of each. His knowledge of his great-grandfather and everything concerning him seemed utterly inexhaustible. The room was warm, and the projector made a quiet hum. My mother pressed back a yawn, and even though I was fascinated and curious, I did, too.
“Let me hurry us along here,” Oliver said, as if he sensed the way sleep was settling on the room. “What we want is slide number eighty-nine. Numbers eighty-nine and ninety-seven, actually. Those are the operative images, the reason I contacted you, Lucy. I went through everything again after we last spoke, because it was nagging