Arcadia Falls

14


In the weeks that follow I notice that Sally spends more and more time with Chloe Dawson and the little circle she draws around her: Clyde, Hannah, Tori Pratt, and Justin Clay. It seems like an odd collection of personalities. Tori and Justin seem shallow and conventional, while Hannah Weiss is ethereal and selfless. Clyde is bright and funny but reduced to wordless adoration around Chloe. I can only guess that they’re drawn together by the shared trauma of Isabel’s death. Unlike the crowd Sally had fallen in with last year, Chloe’s circle is studious, polite, and, as far as I can tell, not into drugs or alcohol. In fact, Sally becomes less confrontational over the next few weeks, less likely to snap at me when I remind her to do her homework or pick up her room. Instead she agrees placidly with whatever I say and then goes on doing exactly what she was doing—drawing, mostly.
She draws nearly all the time. It’s as if the inchoate grief that had been bottled up inside her for the last year has been jarred loose by Isabel’s death and is coming out now in a flow of images from pencil, pen, and paint. The pictures aren’t all of Jude. She draws self-portraits and landscapes, still lifes and abstract designs. In the third week of the term she begins an oil painting of the copper beech tree as we saw it the day we arrived at Arcadia: lit by the late afternoon sun against a gray-blue storm-laden sky. The tree seemed to be glowing from the inside out, as if it possessed the secret of life.
“Your daughter’s really on fire,” Shelley says to me one morning in the Dining Hall. “I looked at her portfolio from last year and there’s nothing there remotely like what she’s doing now.”
“Thank you,” I say, as I always do when someone compliments Sally—as if I had anything to do with it. “I’m sure your instruction is responsible.”
“It’s not instruction,” she corrects me. “The stuff she’s doing can’t be taught, but I do like to think that I have a knack for tapping into the young artist’s deeper potential. Sally is unbottling, as we say. I’m just trying not to get in her way.”
I, too, try not to get in Sally’s way. In the evenings after dinner she goes to the art studio at the Lodge to work. At first I felt uneasy about her going there at night, but then I learned that she isn’t alone. A dozen or so students are usually there working late. Apparently it’s an Arcadia tradition. They all walk back to the dorms together and usually Sally calls me to ask if she can stay with Haruko, whose roommate never did show up. The one time we do fight is when she asks if she can room in the dorms full-time. There’s an empty single in Chloe and Tori Pratt’s suite.
“But they’re seniors,” I tell Sally. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to room with older kids.”
“They’re one year older! If you didn’t want me to have a dorm experience then why did you bring me to a boarding school?”
“Couldn’t you room with Haruko?” I ask instead.
Sally squinches up her face for a moment to consider this apparently brand-new idea and after a few minutes declares, “Okay. I’ll room with Haruko.”
Only later, when I find out that Haruko’s room is between Chloe and Tori’s suite and Hannah’s single, do I realize that this was her goal all along. But by then it’s too late to go back on my word.
And so I spend my evenings alone in the cottage grading papers, preparing for class … and reading Lily Eberhardt’s journal. What I discover there is that Sally isn’t the first young person to experience a sudden flowering of her imagination at Arcadia.
The apple trees were just beginning to bloom when we arrived at Arcadia in the last week of April and soon the air was full of their petals, like a warm and fragrant fairy dust that enchanted everything. We stayed in the Hall that first summer, along with the other women. Mimi Green had quit her job at the magazine so she could come (she could get by on freelance work, she said) and she’d brought two women she knew from the Village who wanted to start a pottery studio: Ada Rhodes and Dora Martin. Vera said she hoped the pottery kiln would become a place for the artists to gather in the evenings: “the heart and hearth of the colony” as she called it.
We hadn’t planned to have men—except for Virgil Nash, of course—at first. Vera and Mimi agreed that in order for a woman to truly make something of herself as an artist she must remove herself from all domestic obligations. Women were trained to subjugate their needs to men. “It’s easy for the men,” she once told me. “They can marry and gain a helpmate for their work—a wife to wash their brushes and cook their meals while they paint. But for a woman, marriage is the death of art. A man might say he’ll allow his wife to paint—even claim that he’ll encourage her—but the first time his dinner’s late or the house untidy or his precious progeny slips on the stairs, he’ll demand she give up her art for the sake of the household. No, we women must band together to support one another as artists.”
But Nash invited a number of his cronies, and so Vera decided to let them all stay in the old hunting lodge. The trophies her grandfather had mounted on the walls of slaughtered prey gave the place a masculine feel, she felt. Virgil Nash set up his studio there and said he liked to sleep close to it in case he woke up in the middle of the night seized by inspiration.
“You don’t want to meet me stumbling around the place half-naked,” he told Vera right from the start. To which Vera answered, “I sleep with a loaded shotgun beneath my bed, so I don’t think you’d like to meet me in those circumstances.”
Nash invited the painter Mike Walsh to come as well. Walsh was a big, rawboned fellow from Kansas City who sloshed paint onto giant canvases in the manner of the Expressionists. He also favored working in the middle of the night and working half-clothed. Also bunking in the Lodge were two Russian brothers, Sasha and Ivan Zarkov.
There were others there that summer, League students who came and went for a few weeks at a time. Even Gertrude Sheldon put away her jealousy and animosity to come for a fortnight. And of course there was Mrs. Byrnes, the Beecher family housekeeper, who kept house for us with help from a couple of Irish girls from the village. That was another reason, Vera said, to keep the accommodations separate: to stop the villagers from spreading rumors about us.
Whatever the reason, the separation was no hardship that summer. Rather, it lent a certain piquancy to our days. There was plenty of going back and forth. Ada and Dora set up their pottery studio down in the Lodge and that’s where drawing classes were held. So every morning, after breakfast, we girls trooped down through the apple orchard to the Lodge, our long dresses trailing in the dew, the apple blossoms falling in our hair. To announce our arrival, one of the Zarkov brothers would play a tune on his balalaika when he saw us coming and the other would sing a Russian song which he said the villagers sang on May Day. Something about maidens washing their faces with dew and meeting their true loves at sunrise.
That might have been when we first got the idea of celebrating May Day, the first of our rites. It came up one night at dinner and Mrs. Byrnes, overhearing us as she served the soup, said we wouldn’t be the first in these parts to celebrate the old rites, as she called them. She told us that the first settlers of the village had practiced the old religion. Not just May Day, which they celebrated on May Day eve and called Beltane, but Lammas—what they called Lughnasadh in her village back in Ireland—and Samhain on All Hallow’s Eve, and the Winter Solstice instead of Christmas. Vera sniffed at the idea of celebrating some Old World superstition, and said such things had nothing to do with art, but Mimi and Dora were excited by the idea.
“It’s just that you think you’ll look pretty in a white May dress,” Ada Rhodes said with a sly smile to Dora that made her blush. I’d realized since the two of them had arrived that their bond was more than mere affectionate friendship. I heard sounds like doves cooing coming from their room at night.
“Oh, let’s do it!” Mimi said. “Let’s have fun while we’re here. In the winter we’ll all have to go back to the city and our dreary jobs and have to worry about money.”
“Ah,” Virgil said, “the realm of filthy lucre! What would we do without it?”
“Of course, we’d all starve!” Mimi said. “Well, maybe not Vera here and it’s her patronage, her generosity in providing a haven for us this summer that makes it possible for us to pursue our art without worrying about making the rent or scrounging meals….”
“Hear, hear!” Virgil Nash tapped his butter knife against his salad plate and held his wineglass up to toast Vera. “To Vera Beecher. But for May queen I propose the lovely Lily.”
“And I suppose you’ll want to play the May king, Mr. Nash,” Vera said dryly.
“Only if it’s a paying job,” he answered, winking at me. “God knows I could use the money.”
We all laughed at that. It was well known that Nash was in debt up to his ears and that his paintings, although brilliant, never sold. At least not until that next winter, when everything changed for him and his portraits were suddenly in demand. It’s hard not to look back on that moment and not see poor Virgil Nash’s downfall written in it. It was during that first summer at Arcadia that Gertrude Sheldon nagged Nash into doing her portrait. He did it to make a few dollars, so he said, but it was so successful that all of Gertrude’s society friends wanted their portraits done by him thereafter. That was the work that would eventually make him both wealthy and famous, but he was forever haunted by the notion that he had given up his true vocation as an artist to become a society painter.
But I get ahead of myself. I had no presentiment of doom that night. Instead, I saw the May Eve celebration as a way of thanking Vera for bringing me here. I needed some way to express my gratitude. Since we’d arrived, I’d felt a certain reserve from her … as though she were half-frightened of me. Indeed, she seemed shy of receiving any notice of her generosity and didn’t like, I think, to be reminded of her wealth and position. For instance, when we arrived at the house I was surprised to find that although her mother had been dead for many years, she still slept in a little room next to her mother’s old room. She told me that she had stayed in it during her mother’s illness so that she could attend her at night. I thought perhaps that she wanted to leave her mother’s room as it had been, but she had it all redone for me to stay in! Each night she came to the door that communicated between the two rooms to wish me goodnight, but she would not cross the threshold.
When she came to the door that night, though, she saw I was sitting up in bed sketching. She asked me what I was drawing and I told her to come see. She came and stood by the side of my bed, but when I showed her what I’d drawn she gasped and sank down beside me. I had drawn a May Day scene, with all of us dancing on the great lawn in front of Beech Hall, but instead of a maypole we danced around the copper beech, which had come to life as an Amazon with flaming copper-colored hair streaming behind her. I’d given her Vera’s face.
“This is quite remarkable…. You’ve made so much progress since we came here …”
“It’s this place,” I told her. “It’s magic. I owe you so much for bringing me here.”
The moment I mentioned my debt to her, I felt her bristle. She rose stiffly to her feet. “You owe me nothing,” she said coldly. But then, softening as she looked back at the picture I had drawn, she said, “An imagination like yours deserves a place to flower. I am merely the gardener … the soil….”
She turned a bright shade of pink then and swiftly turned on her heel and left without even a goodnight. But when she went back to her room she didn’t shut the door between our rooms, and when she was in bed she called out her goodnight to me.
I realized that night that Vera was afraid of demanding an intimacy of me that I might feel compelled to give out of obligation to her. I mention this because I know that many people will look at the friendship we had and think that because Vera was the wealthier and older woman, she made the advances in our friendship. But that isn’t how it happened at all. I realized that night that Vera’s discriminating scruples would always keep her aloof from me. It would take some great convulsion to break down her reserve … and I began to hope that May Eve would provide that convulsion.
And so I threw myself into the planning of it. We all did. Mimi and Dora sewed the costumes I designed. Nash and Walsh went out into the woods and cut down a birch sapling to use as our maypole. Mrs. Byrnes baked and her helpers wove flower wreaths for us to wear. Word spread to other artists at the League and a few dozen arrived before the last day in April. There was a feeling in the air that we were starting something important here at Arcadia.
Instead of a dress for Vera, I designed a costume based on the picture of Robin Hood in an illustration by N. C. Wyeth. I made a green velvet tunic and matching green cloak with a fringe of purple and copper. I sewed gold and purple fringe on high leather boots and long leather gloves so that when she moved she looked like an aspen quaking in the wind. And I made a jaunty green cap adorned with a long pheasant feather. The green brought out her hazel eyes and the red highlights in her chestnut hair.
We held the festival on the last afternoon of April, the eve of May Day, as Mrs. Byrnes told us the pagan Celts celebrated it. We danced around the maypole and then sat down to a banquet which Mrs. Byrnes and the girls from the village had prepared for us. I sat beside Vera, but I felt Nash’s eyes on me. When it grew dark, we lit a bonfire on the crest of the hill above the apple orchard. When the full moon rose, it turned the orchard into a silver pool. We drank wine and sang songs around the bonfire and the Phipps-Landrews, who had recently come back from Morocco, passed around a sweet-smelling pipe filled with something that Vera said was hashish. I only took the smallest puff of it, but the smoke was in the air, mixing with the fire and the scent of apple blossoms. When I looked outside the circle of lit faces, forms seemed to be moving in the shadows. I thought it was my imagination, but then the shadows came closer and sprouted horns. One of the horned creatures pounced on Dora Martin and she screamed.
“It’s only those Russian boys,” Vera told me, wrapping her green cloak around me because I was shivering. “They’ve taken the antlers down from my grandfather’s trophy room and turned themselves into some kind of pagan creatures.”
There were more than two of them, though. One by one, the horned figures invaded the circle, pouncing on a girl, who would then leap up and flee down the hill into the apple orchard. I wasn’t sure if Vera would go along with this part of the game and I knew it was only a matter of time before one of the horned figures came for me. Already a chant had risen for the May queen to take part in the chase.
“How fast can you run, Lily?” Vera asked me, squeezing my hand. When I saw the grin on her face and the spark in her eyes I told her how I used to run races with my sisters on the farm.
“I can certainly run faster than any of these city boys,” I said.
“Good. Then meet me in the woods behind the Lodge. We’ll double back to the Hall together.”
I just had time to nod yes when a shadow of branching antlers fell across my lap. I sprang up and leapt clean across the fire. I heard gasps in my wake, but I didn’t pause to bask in my accomplishment. I ran full speed down the hill into the orchard. The ground between the trees was so thick with petals that it looked as though the orchard was covered with snow, but this snow felt silken and exuded sweet perfume against my bare feet. The air was full, too, of the giddy cries and laughter of the hunters and the hunted. To catch my breath, I hid behind a tree and watched. The shadows of the horned pursuers and the trees melted into one another until it seemed as if the trees themselves had come to life and were chasing the girls in their white dresses, who flitted like fireflies from tree to tree. But because I had on Vera’s dark green cloak I was better able to blend into the shadows. I stalked from tree to tree until I reached the edge of the woods and then I slipped into those darker shadows.
Even in the denser woods the moonlight found its way and spilled down the slim birch trunks like waterfalls of light. I heard steps behind me and guessed it was Vera come to keep our rendezvous, but something kept me moving. The moonlight was traveling up the hill and I followed it, with the sound of Vera’s footsteps behind me. I felt as though the moon was drawing both of us up and that we could climb this silver ladder into the sky. But when I reached the top of the ridge, I saw that the moonlight was a wave that crested the hill and then broke over the ridge. It became the waterfall that spilled over into the clove and filled the ravine and the valley with silver light.
In the valley below there was a barn whose old wood planks glowed silver. That’s where I would lead Vera. I knew that this was where I had been heading all along—since my childhood dreams of a fairytale heroine and from the moment I had met Vera Beecher. This was where we were meant to celebrate our marriage to each other. I had been looking for a convulsion to break her reserve and this was it: the crash of moonlight on this silvery shore.
The moonlight laid a path through the clove and to the barn, and I followed it. Later I would realize how dangerous it had been to attempt that steep path in the dark, in bare feet, after all the wine I had drunk and the hashish I had inhaled. But I felt, then, as if I were borne forward by the moonlight, like a current in a stream, and that nothing could happen to me. And besides, I could hear Vera’s footsteps behind me. If she thought it was dangerous wouldn’t she call me back?
The door of the barn was open. It was empty save for the chaff from last summer’s haying and dark except for a circle of moonlight in its center. Looking up, I saw that the moonlight fell through a circular window in the cupola above me and pooled into the circle. I recalled the story Vera had told me about the pool of Bethesda, how the angel came to whoever first stirred the water and healed her of whatever plagued her. I wanted to be healed—to be cleansed of the feelings I had for Virgil Nash so that I could come to Vera pure and whole. I walked toward the circle, wanting to feel that moonlight on my skin. When I reached the edge of the light I heard a footstep on the threshold. I shrugged off my cloak and stepped into the circle as though stepping into an enchanted pool that instantly turned my limbs into the pure white of marble. I turned around, holding my arms out to call her into the circle.
Only it wasn’t Vera on the threshold. It was Virgil Nash.