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By Root 1189 0

gazing across the decades. I could see what Oliver meant. In a very general way, she did resemble the figure in the window; it was a natural conclusion to draw. Yet I wasn’t quite convinced, nor did I really want to be. After a polite moment, I handed the photos to my mother and wandered the perimeter of the studio, pausing by the easels. Had Rose ever been here, standing in the clear light while Frank Westrum sketched her? My mother and Oliver were talking, their voices low and steady, first about the photos, and then about the contents of the drawers. Oliver had gone through those marked 1936 to 1938, the years when Frank would have been working on the chapel windows, but he’d found no sketches, no prototypes. Odd, Oliver said, it was very odd; all the other commissions had a clear paper trail. Beautiful, my mother murmured more than once, the papers rustling as she sifted through them. I ran my hand along the frame of an easel, imagining Frank Westrum, precise, contained, meticulous, standing here, his pencil flying over the paper as he drew her.

“Lucy,” my mother called. “Look at these!”

She was standing over a pencil drawing of wild irises with their narrow, swordlike leaves, their pendulant, opulent blossoms. “Look, there’s a whole sheaf of them,” my mother said. “Irises mostly, but also a couple of sketches of roses.” Before I could speak, she turned to Oliver and added, “Rose had a daughter, you know. A daughter named Iris. I think Frank Westrum must have known her, don’t you?”

Oliver’s expression closed up a little bit, growing inward, and thoughtful. I had the same plummeting feeling I’d had after telling him about the windows in the first place. I’d hardly had a chance to look at the sketches—fields of irises, banks of them, a single iris in a vase—before he gathered them up again and slid them back into the drawer labeled 1938. “Well, that’s very interesting, I have to say. You hadn’t told me. Even when you saw the window in the landing, you didn’t mention it.”

“Does it really matter?” I asked, because I could see that it did, that the mention of Iris had triggered some memory or piece of knowledge he didn’t want to share.

“Oh, probably not.”

He glanced at his watch and suggested that we spend a few more minutes with the windows themselves before we had to leave. I didn’t object, turning this new piece of the mosaic over in my mind as Oliver hurried us down the stairs. It was clear to me that Frank Westrum and Rose had been close, though the evidence was only anecdotal, only a few sketches and a sheaf of irises in a window.

At the open doors of the carriage house we paused. The rain was pounding down outside, splashing in the puddles that had begun to collect in the gravel.

“My umbrella,” I said. “I left it upstairs. I’ll catch up in a second.”

I ran back upstairs—my umbrella was by the easel where I’d left it when my mother called me over to see the sketches. And though I hadn’t done this by design, I couldn’t help myself—I went back to the worktable and pulled out the drawer labeled 1938. There were nearly a dozen sketches, the penciled lines smeared in places. He’d been playing with the contrast between the sharp leaves and the lush flowers in drawing after drawing. I didn’t dare to take them, and when I heard Oliver coming up the stairs I slid the drawer shut again in a rush of panic and left.

Back in the museum, Oliver was very attentive to my mother, witty and charming, telling stories about the place the Westrums had liked to vacation in the Thousand Islands. I walked from window to window as they talked, half listening, looking for any further evidence of Rose, wondering what Oliver was holding back from us. It was physical, almost, my desire to know who she was and how she had lived, what had ever happened to her and to her daughter. From this point in time, almost a hundred years later, the events of her life looked fixed, determined. And yet, in her brief notes I had recognized a restless passion that seemed familiar, mirroring my own seeking, my own questions. My great-grandfather’s story