Arcadia Falls

15



After I read the part where Lily and Nash became lovers, I put Lily’s journal aside. I was disappointed in her. Clearly she loved Vera, but she was also drawn to Nash and eventually she would leave Vera for him. Did she see him as a hedge against childless spinsterhood? Was she afraid of committing to an unconventional relationship? Perhaps I would find the answers in the rest of her journal, but for now I was compelled to hear Vera’s side of their story. So I turned to her letters and notebooks.
I found none of the personal confession in Vera’s papers that I had found in Lily’s journal (she spoke of Lily as her dear friend and companion, never hinting at a more intimate or physical relationship), but I found instead a strong-willed, idealistic woman dedicated to creating a haven for artists—especially women artists. Vera’s diaries for the summer of 1928 were full of plans to make the colony of Arcadia self-sufficient. “Each artist should know that she is capable of sustaining herself, rather than feel that she is the object of charity,” she wrote, “as nothing infantilizes a woman more than to feel herself dependent.”
No wonder Vera flinched whenever Lily thanked her for her generosity.
To that end, Vera planned to establish craft workshops that could produce fine handmade wares to be sold commercially: furniture, textiles, hand-bound and printed books, and pottery. It was the pottery studio that she was most enthusiastic about and that she hoped to launch first. To that end, she had invited Ada Rhodes who was a master potter; she had studied with Clarice Cliff and exhibited at the National Arts Club in New York. Vera’s notebooks were full of praise for Miss Rhodes’s expertise and sketches of designs for pots and vases that the Arcadia Pottery would produce. If Vera also hoped that Ada and Dora, who had lived together for ten years by 1928, would serve as a model for the kind of romantic friendship she wished to have with Lily, she didn’t record the sentiment.
According to the account books the pottery was the most successful of all the commercial ventures launched by the Arcadia Colony. It provided a small but steady income through the years of the Depression and the war until 1947—the year Lily died. When the summer of 1948 rolled around, the pottery didn’t reopen. In her notebook Vera recorded, The Misses Rhodes and Martin have found accommodations for their studio elsewhere.
Where? I wondered.
And what had become of the pottery studio that they had put so much work into? I noticed that ceramics was oddly absent from the present-day Arcadia School curriculum, as were the other crafts practiced at the beginning of the colony. One night at dinner, I ask Dean St. Clare about the lack of a ceramics class. She sniffs and says that when the colony turned into a school Vera felt that they should focus on the fine arts rather than arts and crafts. It seems a rather odd prejudice given the proletarian beginnings of Arcadia, but St. Clare’s attitude makes it clear that she has nothing further to say on the subject. Dymphna Byrnes catches my eye and tells me to come by later to pick up some leftover scones.
It isn’t unusual for the housekeeper to slip me leftovers. She seems to always cook more than what is needed for each meal, and she distributes the excess to the teachers and staff she deems both worthy and wanting. As a widow and single mother, I must fall under the wanting category. On this particular night, though, I’m pretty sure that Dymphna is offering more than baked goods. There’s a hot cup of tea waiting for me along with my packet of still-warm scones.
“I heard you asking about the pottery,” she says when I sit down to the tea. “You see, there was a falling-out between Ada Rhodes and Vera Beecher after Lily’s death. Ada and Dora Martin stopped teaching at the school, but they had bought a little house in town the year before. When they fell out with Vera they simply moved their studio there. It’s called Dorada Pottery and it’s still there.”
“Still there? But Ada Rhodes and Dora Martin were in their thirties when they came here in 1928. They must be long dead.”
“Dead, aye, but not so long. They both lived into their nineties and died within two months of each other—Ada first, then Dora, in 1982 or thereabouts.”
“And they lived together that whole time?”
“Oh yes, in a sweet little bungalow just off the town green with their studio in back. They adopted a niece of Ada’s who still lives there and still runs the pottery. Beatrice Rhodes. She’s seventy-three but she fires up that kiln every day and teaches a ceramics class on Saturdays at the Guild Hall. You should go visit her, it’s just past the square—” She stops when she sees my blank expression. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been to town yet?”
“Well, no, I haven’t had a chance, and with your excellent cooking and generous leftovers”—I point to the packet of scones—“I haven’t needed to.”
Although she glows at the compliment she swats me with the dish-towel. “That’s no excuse. You’ve been here a whole month now!”
I’m startled to realize she’s right. It’s already the third week of September and I haven’t left the campus once. Something about Arcadia makes you forget that the outside world exists. Even the way the school sits in its own little valley against the side of a mountain, surrounded by wooded slopes on three sides and a long vista of mountains, gives one the feeling that the rest of the world has vanished. I realize, though, that for someone like Dymphna, whose family comes from the town, it must seem snobbish to completely ignore it.
“Maybe I’ll go in this weekend,” I tell her.
She sniffs and takes a sip of her tea. “If you go into the Rip van Winkle Diner, tell my cousin Doris I sent you and ask for the apple pie.”
Charged now with a mission, I feel honor-bound to go, but first I ask Sally if she wants to join me. Since she’s moved into the dorms, I hardly see her, and when I do she’s always bent over a sketchpad, feverishly drawing. When I approach her, she hugs the pad to her chest or closes it so that I can’t see what she’s drawing. It’s frustrating because Shelley keeps telling me how much progress she’s making and—I have to admit—I’m jealous that the art teacher gets to share this new stage of Sally’s development while I’m shut out. An afternoon together away from campus seems like the perfect way to reconnect.
But when I ask her, even dangling the prospect of a trip to the malls in Kingston and a McDonald’s stop, she tells me that Clyde and Chloe have asked her to work on the preparations for the Autumn Equinox Festival. I suppose I should be glad that she’s caught up in school activities and has made new friends, but it’s a little alarming that she would turn down a shopping expedition to weave corn wreaths and sew costumes out of felt.
I drive in alone after breakfast on Saturday. Descending the mountain, I pass a farm stand selling tomatoes, corn, and squash and make a mental note to stop there on the way back. A little way back from the road stands—or rather leans—the barn where Lily and Nash met on May Eve in 1928 and where, years later, he painted her. It’s crumbling into itself now, its gray planks leaning against one another like drunken friends standing in a field. The cupola that Lily wrote of tilts to one side and looks as if it might at any moment crash through the roof. I wonder what patterns the moonlight makes in the barn these nights, what enchanted pools and eddies.
In another five minutes, I reach the village. I’m startled by how close it is and also how pretty it looks, nestled into a fold of the mountains, the kind of quaint rural village that travel guides feature on their covers. Beyond the church steeple there’s a central green with a gazebo and a bronze statue of a cloaked figure, all surrounded by white clapboard houses that drowse behind rose-covered picket fences and deep front porches. But when I park my car on the corner of Main and Elm and get out, the impression fades. The church steeple and the clapboard houses need paint, the picket fences are being held up by the weed-choked rose bushes, and the front porches list crookedly. The village green is more yellow than green, covered by an encroaching fungus where it’s not swamped by weeds. The statue is so tarnished I can’t tell if the cloaked figure is a man or a woman and the plaque underneath it has been defaced so badly I can’t read it. Clearly the once-pretty town has fallen on hard times. Walking along Main Street I pass two boarded-up shop windows and one so begrimed with dust I can’t see through it. When I come to an open shop with clean windows I’m sorry that I can see in. It’s a taxidermy shop featuring stuffed local game that also doubles as a tattoo parlor called Fatz Tatz. A reclining dentist’s chair, like something out of a Frankenstein movie, sits beneath a stuffed moose head and a suspended stuffed Canada goose. I shudder at the thought of needles piercing flesh in such unhygienic surroundings and move on, passing the town bar (the Hitchin’ Post!) and a gift shop called Seasons that sells crystals, incense sticks, and Tibetan prayer flags. Thank goodness I didn’t persuade Sally to come with me. The dearth of retail options might make her Great Neck–trained mind reel. There is, though, an art supply store that looks well stocked, and delicious bakery smells come from the Rip van Winkle Diner. Through the diner’s well-washed windows, I can see a Dymphnashaped waitress pouring coffee for a table of old men in plaid jackets.
I check the directions Dymphna gave me to Dorada Pottery and see it’s only two blocks off Main, so I decide to go there first before eating lunch at the Rip van Winkle. I turn down Maple Street (clearly the town fathers were so struck by the surrounding forests that they couldn’t think past the trees for their street names) to look for Beatrice Rhodes’s house and studio.
Away from the sadly diminished Main Street, the town regains some of its initial charm. Many of the houses still could use a fresh coat of paint, but the yards here are tidier, full of flowers, and the bones of the old houses shine through. I recognize several Dutch Colonials that must have been built when the town was first settled in the early eighteenth century, a stately Greek Revival, and then, farther down the street, several lovely Queen Anne Victorians that represent the town’s last flowering of prosperity in the early nineteen-hundreds. One of the Queen Annes has been stripped of its old paint and is in the process of receiving a new sky blue coat. A ladder leans against a steeply pitched gable above the front porch. There’s an elaborately carved relief within the gable featuring a woman’s face surrounded by swirling acanthus leaves, fruits, and flowers. Sadly, half of the woman’s face has been destroyed by the elements. Her one remaining eye stares at me balefully beneath a sunflower crown. She’s clearly some kind of nature goddess—Persephone or Pomona, perhaps. Coming through the open front door, along with the smells of fresh sawn wood and new paint, are strains of Irish folk music. Someone is renovating the house, maybe a couple from the city.
I remember that Jude and I used to talk about doing that someday. When we still lived in the city we would spend our weekends driving around upstate, looking at old farmhouses and dilapidated Victorians in forgotten Catskill towns, and dream of buying and renovating one. But when I got pregnant with Sally and Jude took a job on Wall Street, it made more sense to buy a new house in Great Neck, where the schools were good and the commute into Manhattan under an hour. “Someday when Sally graduates high school,” Jude used to say, “and I can work more from home, we’ll buy an old house to fix up in some little town upstate.”
I pause in front of the Queen Anne, inhaling the scent of freshly sanded wood and new paint. A few late-summer roses still bloom on the fence and heavy viburnum clusters are turning the color of old paper on a tree in front of the porch. Through an arbor gate I spy a deep, shady backyard that slopes down to a stream. I can imagine sitting in that backyard in a lawn chair, watching the sky go from blue to lilac to dark purple as the fireflies come out….
I pull myself out of that little domestic reverie when I realize I don’t know who would be sitting in the lawn chair next to me. Not Sally, surely. She’d be barricaded upstairs in her room plugged into computer and iPod—or at the school working on her art with Shelley Drake. And then in just under two years she’d be off to college. What would I do with a big old house like this one now? I ask myself as I continue down the street. It’s not even something I can daydream about anymore.
Two houses away is a small Craftsman bungalow painted butter yellow and covered in late-blooming roses. A sign on the front gate for Dorada Pottery directs visitors to a meandering stone path, around the side of the house, and down a flight of stone steps to a little studio that hangs over the edge of the stream. The front door is propped open by a large glazed urn planted with fragrant herbs. Smaller urns and pots surround it, some containing herbs or flowers, others holding smooth stones or shells. A wind chime hanging beside the open door moves languidly in the light breeze, its music braided into the trill of running water.
I step inside the small shop. The walls are lined with shelves holding ceramic ware in shades of green and blue, some unadorned, others painted with flowing abstract designs. The shapes are elegant and simple, their curves inviting one to touch them. I move toward a vase with a sinuous shape embedded into the clay under a matte green glaze. Its impossible to tell if the swelling curve is a flower or a woman’s hip or some other shape. I reach for it, but then hesitate, unsure if I should handle the wares in the unattended store.
“Go ahead,” a voice calls from the back of the shop. “They’re made to be touched.”
I let my hand fall on the cool, creamy glaze and turn the vase around. The swelling shape turns out to be both woman and flower: a nude figure unfolding from thick petals.
“That’s Dorada.” A woman in a dark blue linen smock, her long silver hair swept up, steps out of the back room. She’s wiping her hands on a blue-and-white-striped dishtowel, but there are smudges of clay still on her forearms, smock, and even one long gray-green swipe on her cheekbone that makes her eyes glow a deep cobalt blue.
“Dorada?” I repeat, trailing my finger along the line of the woman’s hip as it slips into the folds of the petal. Is it the name of the woman, I’m wondering? But then I recognize the name. “Oh, Dorada Ware. It’s the name of the line of pottery, not the name of a woman.”
“Well, it’s both. Actually it’s the name of two women: my aunt Ada and her partner, Dora. Dor-Ada.”
“You must be Beatrice Rhodes, then,” I say, holding out my hand. “I’m Meg Rosenthal. I teach at Arcadia and I’m writing a paper on the fairy tales of Lily Eberhardt and Vera Beecher. I came across your aunt’s name in a journal and I thought you might be able to answer a few questions.”
Beatrice Rhodes shakes my hand with a surprisingly firm grip for a septuagenarian. Her skin, though, is soft as velvet. All that time soaking in clay, I suppose.
“I’m happy to tell you whatever I can, but I came here the year before Ada and Dora stopped teaching at the school, and they didn’t have much to do with Vera Beecher after that. Lily died right about the time I arrived.”
“Did your aunt and—” I stumble for a moment, unsure of how to identify Dora’s relationship to Beatrice. The old woman smiles.
“I called them both aunt. They treated me equally as kin. But now that I’ve gotten old as they were, I think of them as Ada and Dora.”
“Did Ada or Dora ever say why they left Arcadia?”
“You mean why they left Vera Beecher’s colony, don’t you? As you see, they stayed right here in Arcadia Falls.” She holds her hands up to indicate the little studio full of their pottery, and I realize that she doesn’t just mean that they stayed in Arcadia for the rest of their lives, but that their spirits still reside here. “I still use their molds and their recipes for clay and glaze. Of course, I do my own designs as well, but when I sit down at the wheel I can still feel Aunt Ada’s hands over mine as she taught me how to throw my first pot.” She laughs and a cloud comes over her blue eyes. “It was a disaster, that first pot! A lumpen mess. But Dora said that it had the shape of my hands in it and insisted on firing it anyway. She kept it on her dresser to hold her hairpins to the day that she died.” She ducks her head to pull out a leather-bound album from beneath the counter. “Here, I’ve got pictures of all the designs we’ve made over the years.”
I politely turn the pages even though my interest is in the women and not the pots they made. They’re lovely to look at, though, long-necked vases that bloom into flowers at the rims, perfectly round bowls whose shapes echo bird’s nests or rounded river stones. I notice that a number of the designs incorporate lilies.
“Your aunts must have been very fond of Lily Eberhardt,” I say. “Do you think they left the colony because they didn’t want to be reminded of her?”
Beatrice looks at me, her blue eyes now clear as a flame. “No,” she says. “They left because they blamed Vera Beecher for her death.”