Arcadia Falls

13


When I wake up the next morning, my dream of Arcadia as a drawing seems to have come true. Fog shrouds the woods surrounding my cottage, turning the view from my bedroom window into a lightly smudged charcoal sketch. Lily’s journal lies on my nightstand, a lilac ribbon marking where I stopped reading last night. I touch the worn cloth cover, recalling the last lines I read: We came to paradise already carrying the seeds of its destruction. And yet, she and Vera had lived here happily for nineteen years before disaster struck. What kind of love triangle smoldered so long before bursting into flames? I pick up the book. In the still of the fog-locked house, I have the feeling that all I have to do is open it to populate this cottage—and the surrounding woods and the campus—not only with the three main players in that drama, but all the fairytale maidens and monsters that Vera and Lily created together.
And as soon as I turn to the marked place in the book I do hear the creak of a door opening downstairs, and a voice shouting … but it’s not a character out of one of Vera and Lily’s stories. It’s Sally.
She’s already in her room by the time I get out into the hall, pulling jeans and T-shirts out of her suitcases. “You’re not dressed yet?” she asks when she sees me standing in her doorway. “You’re going to be late for class.”
It’s exactly what I’ve said to her every morning for the last year. Have we changed places overnight? “Um, I wasn’t sure there would be class,” I say.
“They announced at breakfast that classes would be held as usual,” Sally says, finally settling on a T-shirt silkscreened with images of little girls in short dresses, Mary Janes, and bobby socks. Across the back is the name of the band the Vivian Girls.
“You’ve been to breakfast?” I ask, more stunned at that news than at the dean’s decision to hold classes on the day after a student’s death. Sally has refused breakfast for the last year, claiming that it made her nauseated to even think about food before noon.
“Sure, everybody goes,” Sally responds distractedly as she rejects one pair of jeans in favor of a seemingly identical pair. “They’ve got waffles and blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup. Hannah says that they make their own maple syrup in the spring and everybody helps. Anyways, I’d better go. I promised to meet Haruko before art class to show her my cartoons.”
She’s gone before I can ask how she’s dealing with Isabel Cheney’s death, but really, it’s not necessary. Clearly, she’s fine. I can only hope that the rest of my students are doing so well.
In Folklore class I start out by asking if anyone has anything they want to share about Isabel. After a moment of silence, Hannah Weiss raises a timid hand. “I feel bad that I never got to know her better. She was always working so hard—”
“What you really feel bad about is that you didn’t like her better,” Tori Pratt says.
“That’s not fair,” Hannah cries, blushing. “I didn’t dislike her, it’s just that she was a hard person to get to know.”
“She was,” Clyde says from behind the curtain of his hair. He’s hunched so far over that I can’t make out his eyes. But then he rakes the hair off his face and I see that those eyes are bloodshot and ringed with dark circles. He seems to have taken Isabel’s death especially hard. “You had the feeling when you talked to her that she was planning her future. And you weren’t in it. It’s funny that she wanted to study history.”
A pall of silence falls over the class. Perhaps they’re all thinking—as I am—about what a waste it is: a smart, talented girl with her whole future ahead of her, gone because of a careless slip. Or perhaps they’ve just run out of things to say. I’m about to go on with today’s lesson when Chloe, who’s been silent so far, raises her hand. She looks even worse than Clyde, her greasy, unbrushed hair hanging lank around her face, her eyes rimmed with red.
“Yes, Chloe?” I ask.
“I wrote a poem,” Chloe says in a small voice. “I call it ‘The Death of Summer.’”
“Would you like to read it?” I ask.
Chloe nods and opens her laptop. The machine chimes as it powers up—like a bell tolling for Isabel’s death.
“‘The Death of Summer,’” she reads.
Indifference kills in this cold world: a flower
ignored by rain in early spring will die,
and even in midsummer heat, a sigh
of love’s ephemeral, dies with the hour.
And when love’s just a glance, brief touch, mere smiles,
and cruel fate kills, love’s never harvested,
but love yet lives in memory; we’re wed
now, all of us, by youth’s tremors and trials
and will remain so in our lifelong thoughts,
the same way sunshine often floats
on rivers, streams, amidst the breezestrewn air,
in sudden aftermath of violent storms.
There is a dark side to us, cruelty warns,
but also art and love. If we could dare.
The class is silent when she’s done. “That’s lovely, Chloe,” I say at last, although in truth there’s something about the poem I find unsettling. Perhaps it’s the idea of the bond between the two girls lasting for eternity. After all, they hadn’t even seemed to like each other.
“We should have some kind of memorial,” a girl whose name I’ve forgotten says. “With poems and songs and art about Isabel. After all, this is supposed to be a school for the arts.”
Others chime in, volunteering suggestions for projects honoring Isabel’s memory: a slide collage of pictures of her, a compilation of her favorite songs, poems written in her honor.
“We should have it on the autumn equinox,” Chloe says.
I’d have thought they’d all have had enough of pagan ceremonies, but a murmur of consent moves through the room. Chloe jots down notes and takes names of volunteers. Clearly she’s become the leader of this new group, just as she was the leader of the First Night festival. If I don’t say anything, the rest of the class will become a meeting of the Equinox Club.
“I’m glad you’ve all found a way of expressing your loss over Isabel,” I say loudly enough to capture their attention. “Using words and images to reframe real life seems to be a tradition at Arcadia.” I’m thinking of what I read in Lily’s journal last night, how she had seemed to first invent Vera and then herself out of the stories she told and drew for her sisters, and then how she had spent her last months at Arcadia trying to make sense of her life by writing it all down in her journal. In between she had coauthored fairy tales like The Changeling Girl. Had that, too, been a way of telling her story? Had the fairy tale told how Lily had left her old life behind on the dairy farm for the life of an artist in the city? And if that were true, had Vera Beecher been the witch?
“Yesterday I told you that your first assignment for the term was to find out what in Vera Beecher’s and Lily Eberhardt’s lives led them to tell the changeling story as they did. Your second assignment is to write your own changeling story. If you could exchange your life with someone else’s, would you? Whose life would you choose? Would you ever want to go back to your old life? You might want to think about how the changeling story describes the death of an old life in exchange for the birth of something new.”
“The way the summer goddess dies and is reborn as the autumn goddess?” Chloe asks.
“Something like that,” I say. Although I’m reluctant to subscribe to the pagan theology that seems to be so popular here at Arcadia, I can see how it might help them to deal with Isabel’s death to think about it in these terms. Would it have helped Sally accept her father’s death? I wonder. Maybe not, but it might help her accept that the old life we had with Jude is gone. “Certainly it’s an idea you can explore,” I conclude.
I spend the rest of the class discussing the changeling story in European folklore. I start by reading them a story from the Grimms in which a child is removed from its crib. In its place is left a changeling with a thick head and staring eyes who would do nothing but eat and drink. When the mother seeks advice from a neighbor she’s told to boil water in two eggshells in front of the baby. If the baby laughs, she’ll know it’s a changeling. As soon as the mother sets the eggshells filled with water over the fire, the changeling says:
Now I am as old
As the Wester Wood,
But have never seen anyone cooking in shells!
Then the baby laughed so hard that he rolled out of his high chair. Finally, a band of elves appeared with the mother’s rightful child. They gave it to the mother and took away the changeling.
The class laughed at the story, as I had hoped they would. I told other stories just like this one, some of which employed different tests to expose the changeling. Many of the tests were designed to surprise the creature into speech, but some were harsher and involved putting the changeling into a fire.
“But what if it was a real baby?” Hannah asks, her eyes wide.
“Then it would call out to its mother to be saved. But in all of these stories the creature turns into smoke and goes out a hole in the ceiling, or changes into its real shape and runs out the door. Still, it’s a good question. What if it was a real baby? And why do you think people told these stories?”
“To explain why a baby might change all of a sudden?” Hannah, again, provides the answer even if it is in the form of a question. “I mean, babies sometimes change, right? My youngest halfbrother seemed fine until his second birthday and then we found out he was autistic.”
“Absolutely,” I say, wondering if this is why Hannah seems so personally connected to this subject. “Autism is one of a number of developmental disorders that might explain what happens in these tales. Asperger’s, cerebral palsy, brain damage from a fall or fever. A seemingly healthy baby becomes listless. Perhaps it’s not getting enough to eat. In a number of the tales, the changeling is insatiable. It eats and eats but fails to grow. Imagine a poor family, a mother who’s not getting enough food to produce adequate milk, a baby who cries and cries and can’t be comforted. What’s to be done?”
“You mean they might abandon the baby?” Hannah asks, appalled.
“Many cultures practiced infanticide. Of course it’s a horrifying thought, so how better to mask it than by creating a myth about changeling babies? It’s not a real baby, the story reassures the mother, it’s an impostor, a demon. And in order to get her own baby back, she must sacrifice the changeling.”
“But in real life, that’s not what would happen. There was no real baby to get back,” Chloe Dawson points out.
“Of course not,” I say. “But the sacrifice of a baby who wasn’t thriving might mean the survival of older children, or the possibility of the mother having another—healthier—child. The story masks a harsh reality, as many of these stories do. For the next class, I want you to read ‘Cinderella’ and think about what social circumstances that story masks.” They scribble the assignment in their notebooks as the eleven o’clock bell chimes. As they file out, I hear several of them talking about the lesson and about other fairy tales. I was afraid that the changeling stories might be too morbid a topic for today, but I see that I’ve succeeded in getting them to think about the stories in a different way, and I’ve managed to get them thinking about something other than Isabel Cheney’s death. The only one not talking is Chloe Dawson.
“Chloe,” I say as she attempts to slink by me, “could I have a word with you?”
She flinches as if I’d slapped her. Clyde Bollinger stops halfway through the door and turns back. “You’re not going to ask her more questions about Isabel, are you? She already told the sheriff that she didn’t see Isabel after she went into the woods. Can’t you all just leave her alone?” He finishes by giving Chloe an adoring look. When, I wonder, did Clyde Bollinger become Chloe Dawson’s champion? It seems an unlikely pairing. “I have no intention of interrogating Chloe. I just want a word with her. Alone.”
Clyde bristles at my emphasis on the last word. “I’ll save a place for you at lunch,” he says, and then lopes away, but not before giving Chloe a glance filled with a naked longing that instantly transports me back to the first time I saw Jude in Drawing class at Pratt. I remember feeling as if I’d seen him before even though I knew I hadn’t. It was as if I’d invented him out of all the inchoate longings of my teen years. How had Lily put it? That Vera Beecher was the girl in the stories she’d been telling all her life.
“You wanted to talk to me?” Chloe asks. To my embarrassment, Chloe has come out of her reverie more quickly than I.
“I just wanted to ask how you were doing. You look like you’ve been crying. I know it must be especially hard for you since you and Isabel worked on that project together—”
“But we didn’t really,” she says, cutting me off. “Isabel liked to do things on her own. It’s not like we were tight or anything. So really, you don’t have to worry about me. In fact, I wish everyone would just stop worrying about me.” She concludes so emphatically I can’t think of anything else to say, except for the last resort of clueless adults everywhere: “Well, if you decide you want to talk about anything—”
She’s out the door before I can finish, leaving me feeling like the girl in Rumpelstiltskin after she guessed the wrong name.
I hurry toward Briar Lodge for my next class, but when I get there I find a note from the Merling twins telling me that they had to leave campus for a “family emergency.” I’m annoyed that they didn’t e-mail me to save me the trip, but then I remember that Sheldon Drake said that her studio is in the Lodge. Since seeing the May Day picture with Gertrude Sheldon last night I’ve been wondering how Shelley Drake is related to her—and if she knows anything about the early days of the colony that would be useful.
I find the studio at the back of the Lodge in a sunlit, high-ceilinged room. Although I expected to find the studio full of students, the room is unoccupied. The entire west wall is a glass window that frames a view of the woods. Right now the woods look placid and innocent, but later in the day they’ll fill with the long shadows I saw yesterday. That must be when Shelley paints, I think, because the large painting on the easel is of the woods in the late afternoon. Standing in front of the canvas, I’m transported back to yesterday when we first began the search for Isabel. Carpeted with dried pine needles, the forest floor glows an eerie gold, broken into tawny stripes by the long shadows of the trees that reach toward the viewer. Perhaps that’s what makes this painting so unnerving. The shadows seem to be reaching out from the canvas, like long fingers that will wrap around your neck and pull you into the grasp of something lurking behind the trees.
“It’s not done.” The nearness of the voice makes me jump. Spinning around, I see Shelley Drake, wearing a muslin smock and holding a paintbrush, standing only a foot behind me.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” I say to explain my nerves. Somehow I don’t want her to know that it’s her painting that has set me on edge.
“I never wear shoes when I paint,” she replies, pointing down to her bare feet. “It makes me feel grounded.”
“Oh,” I say, unsure of how to respond to such a peculiar confession. I turn back to the painting, thinking that having invaded her studio, I should say something about her work. The art has only become more disturbing, though, as if its shadows had used the minute my back was turned to creep a little closer. “It’s scary,” I say, opting for the truth. “Did you do this after we found Isabel?”
“No.. actually I was working on it yesterday morning. When they found her body out there …” She lifts her chin to indicate the woods, but because the easel stands between her and the window she could be referring to the woods in the painting just as easily as the real ones behind the window. “Well, I had the feeling that I’d painted this because her body was out there.”
“You had a suspicion?”
“A premonition. I have them sometimes and they emerge in my paintings. Things I paint sometimes come true.” She must see the skepticism on my face because she shrugs and laughs. “I’m sure it’s just a subconscious thing. Or what Jung would call the collective unconscious. If I really had that power I’d try my luck in the stock market.”
This at least reminds me of what I wanted to ask her. “I wondered if you were related to the art patron Gertrude Sheldon. I came across a photograph of her last night and I thought I detected a resemblance.”
“She was my grandmother—but I hardly think I look like her!”
I’m taken aback by the vehemence of her reaction. Clearly, she doesn’t consider a family resemblance flattering. “Perhaps it was the similarity of names that made me think you were related. And you’re both artists—”
“You don’t think I paint like her?”
I recall that according to Lily, Gertrude Sheldon was the butt of everyone’s jokes at the League. “I’ve never even seen her work,” I answer.
“Well, that’s a relief. I’d hate to think my work looked anything like hers.” She walks to a shelf, takes down a large clothbound book with faded lettering on its spine, and hands it to me open to a color plate. “This is Gertie’s Ancient Priestess Worshipping at the Feet of Artemis.” The painting shows a scantily clad girl laying flowers at the feet of a corpulent woman dressed in flowing robes. The goddess is gazing skyward with an abstracted look on her face, meant, I imagine, to invoke otherworldliness but suggesting peevishness instead. The colors are muddy, the anatomy awkward, and the composition clumsy. I try to think of something nice to say about it. “The flowers are well done,” I say.
Shelley laughs. “Yes, Gertie could do flowers! She should have stuck to floral still lifes. In fact, she did after a League artist lampooned her painting in the 1921 Fakirs show.”
I recall that the Fakirs was what the League artists called the show they put on each year to raise money. They would lampoon the work of more established artists, or even each other’s, to provoke interest and, perhaps, to make their own artistic preferences known.
She flips the page to show an almost identical painting of a young girl kneeling at the feet of a matron, only here the girl is dressed in a maid’s uniform and she’s holding a nail file and scissors. A thought bubble, rising from the matron’s distracted face holds the words, “I think I’ll have Cook make a jelly for dessert.” I have to suppress the urge to laugh. The lampoonist has captured the worst features of the original and magnified them to comic effect.
“I’ve read it was considered an honor to be lampooned by the Fakirs,” I say.
“Gertie was not honored. She tried to make her husband, Bennett Sheldon, buy the painting—no doubt so she could destroy it—but instead Vera Beecher bought it. My grandmother was so upset about the incident she had a breakdown and had to check into a sanatorium for a few months—the first of many such ‘retreats.’ She loathed Vera and Lily after that, and Virgil Nash, too, because he took their side. She thought Vera founded Arcadia to compete with her plans to found a museum in the city.”
“According to something I was reading last night, Arcadia was founded because Virgil Nash was fired from the League over an incident when Lily modeled for a Life Drawing class.”
“Yes, well, that’s the story Lily liked to tell because it put her beloved Vera in a better light. That the high-principled Miss Beecher founded this place on principles of artistic freedom. Now, if you don’t mind, I left my class sketching en plein air in the apple orchard so that I could steal a little time to finish this.”
“Of course,” I say, thinking that it seems a bit unfair to her students, but then maybe that’s how a real artist manages to get her work done. “They must be a very self-directed class,” I say.
“I find if you give them the right direction they do quite well on their own. I told them about the final project today—a special assignment I give each year. Sally seemed quite taken by it. I think you’ll find that she grows in some unexpected ways this term.”
“I’m glad she’ll have you to guide her,” I say, smiling and trying to ignore the little pang of jealousy I have at the thought of someone else having that role in Sally’s life. I turn to go, but then something else occurs to me. “Does it bother anyone in your family that you’re teaching here? I mean, considering the hostility between your family and the Beechers.”
Shelley laughs. “They hate it. Which is one of the main reasons I do it.”
I leave her standing in front of her painting, arms hanging limply at her sides, head tilted in contemplation. It’s as if she were waiting for the shadows to tell her what to do next.
I head back up to Beech Hall, noticing on my way Shelley’s drawing students scattered through the apple orchard, each holding a sketchpad on his or her lap. The ground is still wet so they’re sitting on rain ponchos. The sky is still overcast. The outlines of the apple trees are blurry and indistinct—hardly the best models for drawing. The air certainly isn’t very clear. I wonder if Shelley would have told the class to draw outside if she hadn’t wanted to work herself.
I see Haruko and stop to look at her drawing. She’s drawn an anthropomorphic tree picking the fruit off its own boughs and stuffing them into its mouth. “I love that,” I tell her truthfully. “What was your assignment?”
Haruko grins. “Draw whatever we see in the mist. This is what I see. But then,” she confides, “it might just be because I’m hungry.”
I laugh and continue up the hill. When I pass Hannah she presses her sketchpad to her chest so I can’t see what she’s working on, but says hello brightly.
“I hope today’s subject wasn’t upsetting to you,” I say, encouraged by her greeting to stop. “It must have been hard for your family finding out your brother is autistic.”
She nods. “Yeah, my mom and stepfather have three other kids so it’s really hard for my mom to spend time working with him. That’s why she and my stepfather thought it would be better if I came here.”
“Oh.” I’m not sure what else to say. It seems colossally selfish to me to send one child away for the sake of another, but then, what do I know about dealing with a handicapped child? Hannah must see the look of pity on my face because she smiles ruefully. “It’s okay,” she tells me, “I really like it better here.”
What a brave, generous girl, I think, walking on to the top of the hill where I find Sally sitting with Chloe Dawson. I wonder why she’s with the older girl instead of her new friend Haruko, but then I guess it doesn’t really matter. Sally’s drawing so quickly and furiously on her sketchpad that it’s unlikely she knows who she’s next to. Her back is to me as I come up behind her. I don’t intend to sneak up on her, but she’s so absorbed in what she’s drawing that she doesn’t hear me approaching. I shouldn’t peek, but I can’t help wondering what subject has so inspired her. I look over her shoulder and down at her pad. What I see there takes my breath away. She’s drawn a portrait of her father—Jude as I can barely stand to remember him, his face radiant with love, but slightly blurry and out of focus, as if he were slowly fading into the mist.