Elm Creek Quilts [04] The Runaway Quilt (39 page)

She tried to explain to Andrew that her mixed feelings came not from rejecting her new ancestry, if in fact it was hers. It was the uncertainty that tore at her, as well as the enormous shift in her sense of self Gerda was forcing her to make. “If I had discovered the memoir decades ago, I might feel entirely different,” said Sylvia. “I might have been able to embrace this change. But to have to come to an entirely new understanding of myself at my age . . . I don’t think I can do it.”

“You don’t have to,” said Andrew. “You are the same wonderful woman you have always been, and whether all those things I love about you came from Anneke and Hans or Joanna and Josiah Chester, your soul is still your own. You’re not just your parents, you know. You’re the sum of everything
you’ve ever done, every wish you’ve ever made, every person you’ve ever loved, and everyone who has loved you. No one can take that from you, not Gerda, not anyone. I don’t care how many darn memoirs they write.”

He broke off, embarrassed, and Sylvia stared at him, amazed by his uncharacteristic speech making. His unshakable faith in her warmed her more than he could have imagined possible, but she was too fond of him to embarrass him further by telling him so.

“Perhaps I just need more time,” she said instead, and Andrew agreed.

A week had passed when Sylvia realized she had come to accept the mystery Gerda had bequeathed her. She could only guess why the same woman who felt she was obligated to make the Bergstrom descendants “the heir of our truths, for good or ill,” would stop short of revealing the most important secret the family had ever kept, so she decided to stop trying.

She also decided to stop second-guessing every other sentence in the memoir, trying to discern which of the two women had borne her grandfather. If a certain inflection in one sentence suggested Anneke, two paragraphs later she was sure to find a description that indicated Joanna. In attempting to puzzle it out, Sylvia had read and reread the memoir so many times she thought she might be able to transcribe it from memory, backward. When she found herself speculating that perhaps Gerda and Jonathan were her great-grandparents after all and the entire memoir was Gerda’s attempt to protect her descendants from the shame of illegitimacy, she knew she had gone too far. Instead of untangling the threads of her history, she was tugging them into an ever tightening knot.

And so she gave up. Or rather, as she told herself, she acquiesced. Gerda had meant for her to know only a small measure of her history, not the whole. Since that was
more than Sylvia had possessed before reading the memoir, she would accept the gift and not question the motives of the giver.

Her heart might have rested easy, if not for the image that had once haunted Gerda and now stole into her own dreams: Joanna’s face as the slave catcher led her away, her silent and desperate plea. It jolted Sylvia awake at night, and before she could fall asleep again, a voice whispered in her thoughts:
My great-grandmother might have died far from here, alone, enslaved, despairing.

She shared all her thoughts, agonizing though some of them were, with Andrew. She cried in his arms more than once, mourning her lost surety, fuming at Gerda for leaving her so many questions. Even as a child Sylvia had been proud of herself, of her family—some might say too proud. Now she did not even feel like a Bergstrom anymore. She no longer knew what it meant to be a Bergstrom.

She accepted Gerda’s right to leave her an imperfect, incomplete family history, but that did not mean she had to like it. Nor did it mean that she would uphold the family traditions of silence and secrecy.

First, she told Sarah. As the heir to Elm Creek Manor and someone Sylvia thought of as a daughter, Sarah had the right to know. Even as Sylvia recounted Gerda’s bombshell, she felt the burden of her worries ease as her young friend shouldered some of the anxieties weighing down her spirit.

As to the question of whether Sylvia was a Bergstrom, Sarah’s firm response both surprised and comforted her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sarah, her expression making it clear that she would not accept any self-pity or brooding from her friend—so clear, in fact, that for a moment Sylvia suspected Sarah was mimicking her.

“I didn’t think I was being ridiculous.”

“Well, you are,” retorted Sarah. “Even if Joanna was
your great-grandmother, Anneke and Hans raised her son as their own. Are adopted children any less a part of the family than one’s biological offspring?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, because otherwise some of our friends wouldn’t be very happy with you. Diane’s adopted, did you know that? And Judy’s stepfather adopted her after marrying her mother. Are you going to tell them they aren’t really their parents’ children?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Then you shouldn’t do the same to Joanna’s son,” declared Sarah. “Of course you’re a Bergstrom. What a question.”

Sylvia allowed a smile. “I suppose I am.”

But what that meant, she still wasn’t sure.

With a sense of recklessness, as if to spite Gerda for providing only partial truths, Sylvia set about telling her closest confidantes what the memoir had revealed. Guard these secrets in the quiet of her own heart, indeed. It was Sylvia’s history, and she was free to do with it as she saw fit.

After speaking with Sarah, Sylvia next phoned Grace Daniels. To her astonishment, when she finished recounting Gerda’s last cryptic pages, Grace laughed and said, “Well, let me be the first to welcome you into the family.”

“I’m glad this amuses you,” said Sylvia dryly.

“I’ve always wondered why we get along so well, and now I know.”

“Why, Grace, I’m hurt. You mean to tell me we’ve been friends for more than fifteen years, and all this time—”

“I’m just teasing you.”

“Same here,” retorted Sylvia. “Although I admit I’m surprised to find myself joking about this. Gerda’s memoir has my
mind so twisted up in knots I hardly know what to think.”

“You shouldn’t blame Anneke and Gerda for keeping their secrets,” said Grace. “I’m not saying our day and age is perfect—far from it—but it was radically different then. Anneke probably thought she was rescuing Joanna’s son from an incredibly difficult and dangerous life.”

“Was she?”

Grace hesitated. “That’s not an easy question to answer.”

“Please, Grace,” urged Sylvia. “The whole truth. That’s been too scarce around here lately.”

“Well . . .” Grace sighed. “I’m torn between applauding them for adopting Joanna’s son and raising him as a member of the family, and condemning them for robbing him of his true heritage. On the other hand, I don’t know if it’s fair for me to judge them, all safe and smug in my twenty-first-century life. The most immediate consequence of his heritage would have been slavery, and I can’t wish that on anyone just to satisfy my pride. Besides, if they had sent him away with those slave catchers, he and Joanna would have been separated soon anyway, and she never would have known where to look for him.”

“They might have killed him, even, rather than be troubled with a baby on the road.”

“I doubt that,” said Grace, with an edge to her voice. “He was valuable property, remember? Josiah Chester might have made the slave catchers pay for him.”

“True enough.” Sylvia sighed. “So the Bergstroms kept him safe, thinking to reunite him with his mother, although it never happened. Still, after he grew up, they could have told him the truth.”

“They could have. Maybe they should have. But since he could pass, they probably thought it better to let him.”

“I don’t like that word,
‘pass,’” said Sylvia. “It sounds like there was some sort of test, and one either passed or one failed.”

“There was a test,” said Grace. “And even now, in the twenty-first century, when history has provided us with innumerable lessons why it’s wrong, for some people and in some places, there still is a test. To those ignorant enough to think they can judge me, I fail it every day. The ignorance of Gerda’s day not only lives on, it thrives.”

Sylvia did not know what to say.

Grace continued, gently. “You said you no longer know what it means to be a Bergstrom. Do you still think you know what it means to be black or white?”

Two days later, after the Elm Creek Quilters’ weekly business meeting, Sylvia told them how Gerda had concluded her memoir with a mystery. Her friends took in the news with intrigued amazement—except for Diane, who claimed to have guessed it the minute she heard both Anneke and Joanna were pregnant.

“You did not,” retorted Gwen, nudging Diane so hard she nearly fell out of her chair.

Diane shoved back. “I did so. I read a lot of mystery novels. Gerda’s memoir wasn’t nearly as complicated.”

“In that case,” said Sylvia, “perhaps you could put your deductive powers to work on the question of who my great-grandmother is.”

Gwen grinned at Diane. “Get to work, Sherlock.”

“Goodness,” said Sylvia, shaking her head. “They way you two get along, I wonder why you sit beside each other every week. Maybe we should assign you chairs on opposite sides of the room.”

Gwen and Diane looked at each other, and then at Sylvia, in surprise. “Are you kidding?” said Diane. “I look forward
to needling her all week.”

Gwen smirked. “The way you sew, you might mean that literally.”

The Elm Creek Quilters laughed, and Sylvia felt their mirth lifting her own subdued spirits. She could almost forget for a moment the loss she felt, thinking that if only Gerda had trusted her a little more, the question of her ancestry could have been answered conclusively. The more time that passed, the more Sylvia realized that the truth, whatever it was, was preferable to this empty space in her history.

Then Agnes’s quiet voice broke into the laughter. “I for one hope that Joanna was your great-grandmother.”

All eyes went to her. Sylvia regarded her sister-in-law, her baby brother’s widow, with surprise. “Why is that?”

“She sounds like a remarkable women. Strong, courageous, proud.” Agnes smiled affectionately across the circle of friends at Sylvia. “Whether she is your great-grandmother or not, I do believe I see her in you.”

The next day, Summer returned to the Waterford College library and the historical society’s archives, not quite sure what she was looking for. All summer she had scoured the records until she suspected she had handled nearly every scrap of paper in every file and on every shelf, and she knew the information Sylvia most wanted could not be found there. But the urgency to keep looking was too compelling to ignore. At the business meeting, Sylvia had spoken in her usual straightforward way, but Summer sensed the very real pain lingering behind her brave front. She wanted to help—all the Elm Creek Quilters did, and out of Sylvia’s hearing they had all agreed to do what they could—but she did not know where to begin.

Leaving her backpack at her usual carrel,
she studied the shelves and hoped her gaze would fall upon a record she had not yet examined, but all the titles were familiar.

Suddenly someone reached past her and pulled a book down from the shelf. “If you’re looking for something compelling, I highly recommend this one.”

Summer glanced over her shoulder to find Jeremy smiling at her. She grinned back and glanced at the title of the book he had chosen. “
A History of the Elm Creek Valley Watershed.
Sounds like a real page-turner. Does it have a happy ending?”

“The main character is really a ghost.”

Summer made an exasperated face. “Now you’ve spoiled it for me, so I don’t need to read it.” She took the book from him and returned it to the shelf.

“Let me make it up to you,” said Jeremy. “Last time we spoke, you said you wanted a look at the old local newspapers, the issues missing from the Waterford Historical Society’s collection. Are you still interested?”

“Of course. Are they here somewhere? How did I overlook them?”

“Not here. In the
Waterford Register
’s archives.”

“But they told me they couldn’t spare a staff member to help me search.”

“One of my students is an intern there, and he agreed to take you around after one of his shifts.”

“That’s wonderful,” exclaimed Summer. “When can I start?”

“This afternoon, if you’re free.” Jeremy hesitated. “There’s a catch, though.”

“What sort of catch?”

“Nothing major. I have to promise him extra credit on a homework assignment. But there’s something else.”

“That would be two catches.”

“True. But this is the most important one.”

Summer regarded him with amusement.
“Go on.”

“You have to have dinner with me.”

“I see.” She hid a smile. “Do you usually have to bribe women to have dinner with you?”

“Only very rarely.”

Summer pretended to ponder the matter. “I guess if that’s the only way I’ll get into those archives . . .” She shrugged. “Okay. But only because this friend is very important to me.”

That evening, unaware of Summer’s plans, her heart still warmed by Agnes’s words and the comforting assurances of her friends, Sylvia retired for the night hopeful that one day soon she would be able to think of Gerda’s memoir without regretting all that her ancestor had left unsaid. But first she went to the library and took pen and paper from the top drawer of the great oak desk that had belonged to her father. She wrote one letter to Rosemary, Dorothea Nelson’s great-granddaughter, to inform her that her great-grandparents had indeed closed their Underground Railroad station before the Civil War began, and why they had been forced to do so. She then wrote a second, longer letter to Margaret Alden to tell her how Gerda’s memoir had concluded, and to invite her and her mother to Elm Creek Manor to see the quilts Sylvia had found in the attic.

Perhaps together they could figure out how—or even if—the Bergstrom quilts were linked to Margaret’s.

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