Part 16 (1/2)

”Rose Jarrett!” Geoffrey called, stopping the vehicle beside me. He laughed, sunlight falling through his straw hat and making patterns on his face. He invited me to have a ride. I nodded yes and climbed into the back of the silver machine.

”Hold on to your hats”, Geoffrey said, though Joseph and I weren't wearing any hats. Then we drove.

The speed! We flew, the landscape blurring into long smears of gold and green and blue. I gripped the seat, black leather, wind pulling my hair loose, making my eyes water. I had never gone so fast, or imagined it possible.

At last Geoffrey stopped next to a broken stone fence, woven with weeds and tumbling out of its shape. He turned around, one arm on the back of the seat, smiling.

”Scared?”

I nodded, I still couldn't speak. Geoffrey laughed and got out of the car, reaching to give me his hand. I took it and stepped down out of the silver car like a girl in a story.

”I wasn't scared”, Joseph said. ”It was like flying”.

”Flying-yes. Just so. Do you see that?” Geoffrey asked, pointing to ruins in the midst of the s.h.i.+mmering green fields. ”It used to be a monastery, long ago. Henry VIII had it sacked. They built it here because when the floods come during the summer sea the place becomes an island, sometimes for weeks. I wanted to see it”.

He started off. Joseph went with him and I followed. The sun was hot. Twice, we disturbed dragonflies in the tall gra.s.s, they rose up in great clouds and drifted away.

The abbey made us quiet. The roof was gone, but some walls were still standing. Geoffrey slipped between the wire fences and disappeared into a corridor. Joseph hurried after him. I followed more slowly. The stones beneath my feet were dusty and smooth. Rain had streaked the stone walls. Old leaves littered the floor.

The page ended, and there wasn't another one in the envelope. I pulled the other letters from my purse, worried that the second page might still be in the box, or lost altogether. I was avaricious for the story by now, half here in the hot Impala, half in the Silver Ghost of a hundred years ago, b.u.mping over dirt roads to the ruins of the abbey. It must have felt so astonis.h.i.+ng to ride in a car for the very first time, though they were probably going only ten or fifteen miles an hour. Whatever sadness was to come, Rose wouldn't have known it in this moment of exhilaration, this sunny day filling up with an adventure. I sorted through the letters as if they were playing cards. Toward the middle of the stack a page matching the page in my lap jutted out of another envelope. I pulled it out and opened it, sighing with relief to find it continued the story.

We turned a corner. Stairs rose, ending in the blue sky. Through gaps in the wall we glimpsed the gra.s.sy fields, moving in the wind. We reached a large room with a vast fireplace. Geoffrey stood in the middle, looking around. His cheeks had reddened in the sun. ”I can almost imagine the monks”, he said. ”Can't you?”

”This place is too quiet”, Joseph said.

”That's because it has a secret. My uncle told me. He says everyone who comes here has to tell their secrets, too”.

”What's your secret, then?” I asked. Though I could hardly speak before, in this place I was free, as if all the invisible lines between us had fallen away. I could say anything.

Geoffrey spoke up slowly, a faraway look in his eyes. ”I want to go to India”, he said. ”I'm to go to Cambridge next year, then work here with my father, but I don't want that life. I want to see the world. I'm joining the Royal Navy as an officer instead. That's my secret”.

Joseph began to speak almost before Geoffrey finished. ”I'm going to America. I have a cousin there, and when I raise ten pounds, he'll sponsor me”.

I was startled. I knew who he meant. Once a year our mother's cousin sent us a bundle of knickknacks and candy, sometimes coins. She kept his brief letters in the kitchen drawer.

”Is it true?” I asked.

Joseph looked at me. ”If you tell, Rose, I'll make you sorry”.

”Rose won't tell”, Geoffrey said. He tossed a pebble into a corner. ”She won't, because she'll share a secret, too. What is it that you dream of, Rose? Tell us. Do you want to be a princess?”

I don't know what made me answer as I did. Perhaps it was the silence, the layers of the past that seemed to well up from the stones, the years of prayers that had been spoken here.

”A priest”, I said, without even thinking, but as I said the words I knew they were true. ”I would like to stand up in the church and say the words, and be a priest”.

A long silence followed, wind moving in the sunny air.

Then they laughed.

”A priest!” Joseph repeated, scornful. ”Don't be daft”.

”Girls can't be priests”, Geoffrey agreed, though more kindly.

My cheeks flamed and I didn't speak. I hadn't known how deep this longing was until I spoke it. Though I had always understood that it was beyond rules or even words, how I felt when I walked into the silent church to mend the robes or repair the altar cloths-more alive, more listening, than I ever felt in other places.

I paused in the reading and looked out the window, watching two young men on bicycles travel down the quiet street and disappear around the corner. What Rose had put into words was something I'd felt, too, something I'd been thinking about since I'd seen the Wisdom window with its beautiful rendition of creation. Now I was more convinced than ever that Rose was connected to those windows, remembering their vivid colors, the swirl of wind, the sense of divine life and motion in the world: ruah, ruah, breath, spirit. breath, spirit.

”All right”, Geoffrey said. He leaned against the stone wall. ”I'll tell you another story. Once there was a beautiful woman from a n.o.ble family. She fell in love with a man who had no prospects and was sent away. A few years later she visited this very monastery and was shocked to find her beloved had become a monk. They started to meet in secret”. He paused here, lowered his voice. ”When they were discovered, she was sealed up in a wall right here, alive”.

Now Joseph was as quiet as me. He was staring at Geoffrey Wyndham's soft leather boots. I knew just what he was thinking-not about the horror of the story, which I didn't believe, but about the n.o.ble girl, the man who had no prospects, the ruin of it all. My shame deepened, for our boots, Joseph's and my own, were old work boots, cracked and muddy. We had no prospects either.

We listened to the wind move in the gra.s.s.

”I'm leaving”, Joseph said. He walked past the broken stairs and disappeared into the corridor. When I went to follow him, Geoffrey caught my arm. There were dry leaves under my feet and the sky opening above.

”Don't be angry”, he said. ”I think you're too pretty to be a priest, that's all”. Then he leaned down swiftly and kissed me. I was startled by the feeling, like flowers opening to the sun, and I did not pull away.

”That's my real secret”, he whispered, his breath in my ear, his cheek against mine. ”A secret only for you, Rose Jarrett”.

This is how it began, then, a year before the comet.

It is nearly noon. My accountant has gone. He gathered up his things and bowed slightly in my direction before he disappeared into the crowd. He slept so soundly, his head resting on my shoulder. I feel a little sad to think that I will never see him again, or know what happens to him or probably, once I leave this train, ever think of him again.

There is more, but it must wait.

This letter was not signed, but ended with a penciled drawing of a rose.

I ran my fingertips along its upper edge. This is how it began, then, a year before the comet This is how it began, then, a year before the comet. So much for my great-grandfather's luminous dream, which we believed had started everything. So much for the family history, drawn in a straight line from one generation to the next-history that did not even mention Rose. I felt as I'd so often felt in j.a.pan, waking to earthquakes in the middle of a summer night, as if the world were an unsteady place, about to split wide open. I thought of the beautiful cloth with its row of vine-encrusted moons trembling with the breeze from the lake.

My mother had found that cloth wrapped in plain paper, hidden in the lining of my great-grandfather's trunk, with the handwritten note inside. Whatever answers these letters provided, the questions they raised were even greater. For now I could imagine Rose sitting in a cold parlor in the middle of the night, weaving, her breath visible, her fingers growing numb. I could imagine all this, but not why she had left, or how the blanket had pa.s.sed through the years, unopened, ignored. As much as I wondered what had happened to Rose, I wondered also what had happened to her child.

I glanced at my watch. It was already after five. I'd been sitting in the car reading these letters for almost an hour. There were more, but I felt I'd taken in as much as I could for the moment. I slipped the pages back into their plain envelopes and the envelopes back into the binder, which I left on the seat beside me. Then I turned the key in the ignition and drove out of town, traveling on the local roads again, my windows open to the breeze, trying to sort through everything I'd learned, to refocus my lens on the world.

When I reached The Lake of Dreams there was a regatta and the streets were crowded with cars and tourists. There was a detour away from the lake, and on an impulse I turned down the outlet street. The Green Bean was full, people standing on the sidewalk with buzzers in their hands, waiting for a table; clouds of laughter and voices poured from the patio by the water and drifted across the road to me. The gla.s.sworks was busy, too.