Arcadia Falls

12



The first time I saw Vera Beecher at the Art Students League I thought, “But I know her, she’s the girl in the stories I’ve been telling: the maiden in the tower, the queen of the forest, the enchanted damsel.”
Not that she’d be everybody’s idea of a fairytale princess. Her face was square and strong-jawed, not heart-shaped and dimpled like the heroines of the fairy tales in the illustrated Grimm’s my oma brought over from the old country. Her hair was brown—nut brown, I called it to myself—not the spun gold flax of Rapunzel. And she was tall, more like a Valkyrie or an Amazon than Cinderella or Rose Red. But as the light from the studio windows fell on her, I recognized her as the heroine of my stories—the ones I had been telling and drawing as long as I could remember. Instead of being surprised, I remember thinking that it made sense I would find her here. After all, it was my storytelling and drawing that had led me to the Art Students League in New York City in the fall of 1927.
I grew up on a dairy farm in Delaware County, New York, in the town of Roxbury, the eldest of five girls. Because my mother was needed to help with the milking, it fell to me to watch the younger ones while doing my chores. I saw that the children minded me best when I told them a story. Each morning, while I stoked the fire and stirred the oatmeal, I would begin one of the fairy tales that I’d read in Grimm’s and tell it piece by piece all day through, so that the little ones did everything I said and followed me about to hear the story till its end. Before long I began making up my own stories and fitting them up with pieces of our lives. The cow Posey would become an enchanted fairy godmother and the farmer’s son in the next dale would be the prince of a great kingdom. My sisters, Rose, Marguerite, Iris, and Violet (my mother had a weakness for floral names), would each in turn feature as the heroine of the story. In the evenings as we sat around the fire sewing the girls asked me to draw pictures to go with the stories and I happily obliged.
But a funny thing happened when I began to draw the characters of my stories. The heroines looked nothing like my sisters or like me. We were all blond and small and would have done well enough for fairy princesses with a little cleaning up and nicer clothes, but the women I drew were regal and tall, slim but sturdy. They looked, to me, like they wouldn’t wait in a tower for a prince to rescue them or sleep in a castle for a hundred years until the huntsman hacked his way through the briars. They—or, rather, she, because I soon saw she was the same woman in each story—looked as though she could wield a sword herself. And so she did. My heroine mounted her own steed and rode off looking for adventures. After my sisters fell asleep, I stayed up late into the night drawing the pictures to go with the stories I had made up during the day. Each story would end the same way: my heroine standing on a ridge overlooking the next valley, a dark silhouette against a rose and lilac sunset.
The day the farmer’s son from the next dale asked me to marry him, I packed up all my drawings and my best dress and boarded the train that took our milk to the city. I left a note promising my parents that when I found work I would send money back to make up for my labors on the farm. To my sisters, I promised I would send them more stories. I told them all that I was very sorry, but I had to find the girl in my stories. When I saw Vera Beecher for the first time, I knew that I had.
She was, I soon learned, already a heroine to many at the Art Students League. Mimi Green, who worked at the magazine where I’d found some work doing fashion illustrations, told me that Vera Beecher had studied in Paris and won prizes for her work. Virgil Nash, the League’s most famous teacher—and the handsomest, the girls all swooned over him and said he looked like Rudy Valentino—always singled Vera out for praise and held her work up as an example to the rest of us. That made some of the students speak against her, especially the men, who, for all the equality the League boasted of, still considered themselves the only serious artists. Everyone knew what Eugene Speicher had said to young Georgia O’Keeffe when she wasn’t eager to pose for him: “It doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going to be a great painter and you will probably end up teaching painting in some girls’ school.”
Even though Eugene Speicher was proven wrong, a lot of the teachers still treated the women students as inferior. They resented the debutantes and socialites who came to the League to fill up their days and hobnob with “the bohemians,” women like Gertrude Sheldon who was married to one of the richest men in New York, Bennett Sheldon, but spent her days at the Art League taking classes and flirting with the teachers. And she couldn’t even draw well. The other girls made fun of Gertrude. They said the reason she wasted her time with art was because she couldn’t get pregnant and her husband had grown tired of her. But no one made fun of Vera Beecher. She came from a wealthy family, too, but she was talented and she never used her wealth or position to gain unfair advantage over the other students. Mimi told me that when Vera won the William Randolph Hearst Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago she had insisted that her prize money be given to the artist who had come in second because he was in more financial need than she was. She taught art classes to poor children on the Lower East Side and volunteered at an orphanage in the Bronx.
Saint Vera, Mimi called her one night when we were riding the subway downtown to a party in the Village. I knew Mimi meant it as an insult, but a picture flew into my head of Vera Beecher as Joan of Arc. That night I stayed up drawing a sketch of her in that role. The next day in Life Drawing I positioned my easel so I might surreptitiously draw Vera Beecher instead of the model. (In those days, it was the custom at the League for senior students to take the first row, nearest the model, while newcomers such as myself hung back in the last rows.) I drew her as the young martyr when she first hears the voice of God calling her. She stood in a ray of sunlight, her fine, broad forehead bathed in light. When Mr. Nash came by to look at my work, I saw his eyes traveling from my drawing to Vera and back again. I was afraid he’d say something to embarrass me or be angry I wasn’t drawing the model—a voluptuous vaudeville dancer named Suzie. Instead he commended my sense of line. It was the first compliment I ever received from the great Mr. Nash and I nearly burst out laughing when I caught Mimi looking cross-eyed at me.
But if I thought I’d been spared embarrassment, I was wrong. I watched in horror as Nash walked straight over to Miss Beecher and whispered in her ear something that made her turn in my direction. He had told her! I crimsoned with mortification. I would have fled the room right then, only when her gray eyes met mine I suddenly couldn’t move. I felt like a field mouse trapped in the barn owl’s gaze. But even as I trembled, a part of my brain was thinking how lovely it would be to draw Vera Beecher as gray-eyed Athena! How well the owl’s helmet would sit upon that noble brow! Even as she put down her pencil and approached me, I remained transfixed.
She came and stood behind me. The room had become unnaturally quiet. The usual chatter and gossip had ceased; even the whispering of pencils on paper had died down to nothing. All I could hear was my own heart beating and the sound of her breath.
“Is that really how I look?” she asked.
I thought she was criticizing, but when I looked over my shoulder at her I saw that her eyes were shining. “Yes,” I said with a confidence born from her eyes—from the way she looked at my work. “That’s how you look to me.”
She smiled then and introduced herself—as if I didn’t know who she was!—and after a few minutes went back to her easel. But at the end of the class she caught up to me and asked where I was walking to. Embarrassed to give my address—I was living in a room at the Martha Washington Hotel on East Twenty-ninth Street—I told her I was walking to Central Park to sketch.
“What a marvelous idea!” she said. “May I join you?”
It wasn’t a marvelous idea at all; it was a very cold day. But of course I said that I’d be honored to have her company. We entered the park at Fifty-ninth Street, through the Merchants’ Gate, and followed the path past the dairy—which was so clean and pretty that it resembled no dairy I had ever seen—and through the Promenade. It had rained earlier in the day and then the temperature had dropped, freezing the water droplets that hung from the bare limbs of the great elm trees on either side of the Promenade. The sun came out as we walked beneath them, and Vera gasped and grabbed my hand.
“Look, how beautiful! Like trees carved of crystal. They remind me of the Sycamore Drive at Arcadia.”
I asked her what Arcadia she spoke of, and she told me about her childhood home—hers since both her parents had died eight years ago in the ’flu epidemic. She spoke of it as an enchanted land she had been exiled from. I wondered aloud why she didn’t live there all the time.
“All it lacks,” she told me, “is the right sort of company. I have thought sometimes of inviting a few like-minded artists to come spend the summer there and of engaging an instructor to give classes in drawing and painting en plein air.” She looked at me with those placid gray eyes that seemed to see everything. “Perhaps you would want to come, since you are so dedicated to drawing out of doors.” She tapped the sketchbook which I held pressed against my chest and I blushed to remember the excuse I had given for our present stroll—and that we had yet to stop and draw anything!
“Yes, I do love drawing from nature….” I stammered and then, casting my eyes around for a suitable subject, found the perfect one. “But today I wanted to draw her.” We had come to the end of the Promenade, to the upper terrace overlooking the lake and the Angel of the Waters fountain. I pointed to the angel. “I saw her the first week I was in the city and have come here often since, whenever I feel alone.”
“Ah,” Vera murmured as we walked down the steps to the lower terrace. “‘Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called Bethesda … and whoever then first after the troubling of the waters stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.’ You’ve picked the right place to come to be healed.” We sat on the rim of the empty basin and looked up at that grave bronze face. I took out my sketchpad and began to draw. “Do you know her story?” Vera asked.
“You mean the angel’s story?” I asked.
“No, the sculptress’s story.”
When I shook my head she went on. As she spoke I kept my eyes on the bronze face above me, but I could feel the gaze of the flesh-and-blood woman beside me. “The sculptress was Emma Stebbins, who studied in Rome under John Gibson. There she met and formed a deep attachment to the actress Charlotte Saunders Cushman. They lived together very happily until Charlotte became ill with a cancer of the breast….” I could see out of the corner of my eye that Vera had lain her hand over her own breast as she talked of Charlotte’s illness, and I felt a corresponding tug in my own breast as if she had touched me there. “Emma took loving care of her, taking her to spas for water cures. I am sure that’s what she was thinking of when she sculpted this statue—that she made it in thanks for Charlotte’s cure.”
“Was she cured?”
“Yes, but sadly, Charlotte died of pneumonia three years after Emma made this statue.”
I turned to her then, my own hand flying to my heart. I felt as if I’d been hit there and that all the air had been driven out of my lungs. “What became of Emma?” I asked.
“She lived another six years,” Vera answered. “But she never made another sculpture.”
I turned back to my drawing, unsure of what to say in the face of such love and grief. I wondered what it felt like to care that much for someone and what it would feel like to be loved like that. Although the farmer’s son had asked me to marry him, he had switched his attentions to my sister Margeurite soon after I left. My mother had written to tell me that they would be married in the spring. It hadn’t hurt me. I could barely remember what his face looked like. I looked down at my sketchpad and saw that instead of the features of the statue, I had drawn, once again, Vera’s face.
“I see why you are drawn to her,” Vera said.
I hugged the sketchpad to my chest, afraid she’d see what I had done, but she was pointing at the angel’s left hand. I looked up and noticed for the first time what she held in it. “A lily,” Vera said. “Sign of purity.” She put her hand over mine and I felt her touch course through me down to the core of my being. “We’d better go,” she said. “Your hands are as cold as ice.”
From then on we walked in the park after class, no matter how cold. If it rained or snowed we sat beneath the Arcade and sketched the patterns in the ceiling tiles. Vera said she wanted to make tiles like them for a cottage at Arcadia.
She often spoke of Arcadia and drew pictures of it for me, so that I began to feel as if I knew the place. She told me about the Sycamore Drive and the old stand of woods on the western ridge, which had been there since before the first European settlers had come to the mountains. The villagers had superstitions about the woods which Vera laughed at, but I noticed that she knew each tree that grew at Arcadia and spoke of them as though they were old friends. She may have laughed at the idea of tree spirits, but she seemed to revere them as much as any druid ever had. The tree she loved the best, though, was a great copper beech that stood on the main lawn. I drew a picture of it with Vera’s own features imprinted in the bark and entitled it Vera, Druid Priestess of the Beeches. She drew me as a lily, my head nodding over my easel, my eyes drooping, half-asleep.
We sent these little drawings back and forth in class and soon others noticed. I heard them whispering, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that the girls giggled when Vera brought me presents: scent from the apothecary Privet and Sloe in thick green glass bottles stamped with fleurs-de-lis, nosegays of violets, a hat trimmed with lilies of the valley in a purple hatbox. One of the girls who had gone to a woman’s college said Vera was my smash. Even Virgil Nash noticed and made jokes about how close we set up our easels together and how all our portraits turned into pictures of each other.
“Miss Eberhardt,” he said one day with an elaborate, drawn-out sigh, “you might as well come up here and pose because you are all Miss Beecher will draw anyway.”
Gertrude Sheldon tittered and said something to another girl that made her blush. I saw Vera growing angry and was afraid she’d make a scene. It was her one flaw, my poor darling, her temper. And I knew that Gertrude Sheldon particularly irritated her. I think it was because Vera was, quite unfoundedly, afraid that what people said about Gertrude was true of her: that she was a rich, idle woman who was only playing at art.
“Very well,” I said, putting my pencil down. “I will.”
The class was perfectly silent as I walked to the front of the room. The model had come in, but she hadn’t disrobed yet. I climbed onto the raised dais where a musty old settee draped in moth-eaten shawls served as background and pedestal for our models. Turning to face the room, I was surprised at how different it looked from this perspective, as if I had climbed a high mountaintop and was looking down upon a valley. It reminded me of the finales I had drawn in my fairy tales, the heroine silhouetted against the setting sun. Instead of a sunset, an embroidered Chinese shawl hung behind me, but I imagined I had become the heroine of my old stories. The girl who was not afraid.
I took off my muslin smock and began to unbutton my dress.
“Miss Eberhardt …” Virgil Nash began, approaching the dais. “The rules state …”
“That Life Drawing class be provided with a model. Does it say who that model should be?” I asked, all the time undoing the buttons down the front of my dress. “Am I any different from Suzie, here? Are any of us?” My hands were shaking, but my voice was steady. I thanked God that I had recently given up wearing a corset … and then smiled to think what an odd thing that was to thank God for! It was the smile that saved me. I saw it reflected in Vera’s face. Her gaze held mine as I peeled back my shirtwaist and camisole in one movement. I let them fall loosely around my waist as I sat on the settee and faced the class. Vera was the first to pick up her pencil and begin to draw. I kept my eyes on her for the rest of the class and imagined that she and I were alone in the room. That’s what kept my spine straight and my chin held up for the next hour. She gave me the strength. No one spoke. Even Virgil Nash had taken up pencil and begun to draw instead of circulating and critiquing. The room was filled with the soft whicker of pencil on paper. It sounded like snow falling through pine trees. I felt as though I had become a tree, a great white pine standing in the forest, snow sifting through my needled boughs….
I could have stayed there forever. The hour ended sooner than I thought it would. Only when I tried to stand did I realize I had lost all feeling in my legs. Vera came to my rescue and held my muslin smock up in front of me as I fumbled the buttons of my shirtwaist. She carried my sketchpad for me and whispered in my ear that I must come to her house for tea. She was afraid I’d catch a chill if I didn’t. I readily agreed, but as we were leaving Mr. Nash asked me to stay a moment “for a word.” I nodded to Vera that it was all right and said that I’d meet her downstairs.
I expected a lecture and was prepared to tell him that I’d never do it again, but instead he turned his easel around so that I could see the drawing he’d begun. What I saw took my breath away. While Vera had drawn me as her drooping lily, Virgil Nash had captured how I felt up there on the dais. He’d drawn me as the girl from my stories, the heroine I’d made up and come to the city looking for.
“I’d like to finish this,” he said. “Would you consider posing for me privately?”
It did not occur to me to say no.
As it turned out, it was the least that I could do for Mr. Nash. When it came out (I’ve always suspected that it was Gertrude Sheldon who complained to the board) that he had allowed a student to disrobe and model in class, he was fired. Vera was so incensed that she withdrew her membership from the League and proposed to Mr. Nash that they form their own art school. Her home at Arcadia Falls would be the perfect setting. He readily agreed.
I’ve always wondered if his decision was influenced by the fact that I would be there. By then Vera had asked me to come to Arcadia, not just as a fellow student, but as her companion. Should I have suspected that Nash’s interest in me went beyond the aesthetic? Should I have told Vera not to include him in our “sylvan idyll”? Would things have been different if Vera and I had gone to Arcadia without him? Perhaps. But the seeds were sown that day I peeled away my outer layers in front of the Life Drawing class. What Vera saw was her lily—a symbol of purity held by an angel. I’m not sure that Virgil Nash saw me more clearly, but he saw me as I liked to think of myself and I wasn’t willing to give that up. Not even for Vera. We came to paradise already carrying the seeds of its destruction, but I’m afraid that is the way of all paradises.
Beneath this line, Lily had drawn a small fleur-de-lis signaling the end of this first section. It seems like a good place to stop for the night. I go upstairs, hugging the journal to my chest, place it on the nightstand, and turn off the light. I listen to the wind in the pine trees that surround the cottage. It is gentler than last night’s keening. Tonight it sounds like pencils on paper, and I fall asleep with the strange notion that all of Arcadia Falls is a pencil drawing and each night it draws itself anew.