Arcadia Falls

19


In the weeks following the disastrous autumn equinox, the campus seems plunged into mourning for the death of summer. The gold-tinged light that slants in through my classroom window bathes my students in an amber sap as if preserving them in the moment forever. The slow drift of yellow leaves from the sycamores might be tears for the dying of the sun. Perhaps my melancholy is just the natural turning inward that marks the change of seasons. Certainly I can’t complain that my students aren’t … well, studious. Even Sally, who did so badly in school last year that I was afraid she wouldn’t pass, is working hard. Whenever I see her on the lawn beneath the deep wine-colored canopy of the copper beech or in front of the fireplace in one of the lounges in Beech Hall, she bends her head down to her book or sketchpad. She still blames me for bringing Callum Reade to the autumn equinox. I can’t really argue. I blame myself as well.
If I hadn’t kissed him in the barn maybe he wouldn’t have followed me and made that scene on the ridge. And as much as it embarrasses me to admit it, I was the one who initiated that kiss. It must be an aberration of grief that made me do it. He’s not at all the kind of man I’m attracted to—gruff, bitter, clearly with a chip on his shoulder when it comes to artists, intellectuals, and New Yorkers. Certainly he’s nothing like Jude. No—it’s better that he hasn’t sought me out since the day of the equinox.
To convince myself of that, I decide to find out just why he quit the New York police force. While my class is doing research in the library, I do an Internet search on his name and come up with the story. There’s a picture of Callum Reade, looking much younger, in his uniform. OFFICER CLEARED OF WRONGDOING IN BRONX SHOOTING, the caption reads. The boy he shot had a record and a gun, which three witnesses testified they saw him pull out and aim when stopped by the police. There didn’t seem much question that Callum’s shooting him was justified, but then, below Callum’s picture is a picture of the boy. Although he was fourteen when he died, he looks about eleven in the picture. He has a wide-open smile that reveals a gap between his two front teeth, and a mischievous look in his eyes. It’s hard to imagine him wielding anything more dangerous than an MP3 player. I can’t help but wonder if this is the face Callum Reade sees when he closes his eyes at night. I know I would see it. I wonder now if he was so adamant about keeping Chloe away from the ridge because he wasn’t willing to risk being responsible for another young life lost.
I can’t blame him. I find myself watching Chloe carefully for any more signs of erratic behavior since her outburst on the ridge. But the only thing odd about her behavior is that despite the disaster of the Autumn Equinox Festival she continues to be obsessed with pagan rites. Only a few days after the equinox, I hear she’s planning a celebration for Samhain, the pagan predecessor of Halloween. I decide this time, though, that I might as well use my students’ fascination with the Wiccan calendar to my advantage. I look up Samhain in the Vivianne Crowley book I bought in Seasons and read: “Samhain is the festival of the dead in Pagan custom.” After an initial chill at this description, I find this cheering suggestion on the next page: “One way of celebrating Samhain is to build an altar to our ancestors and to find old photographs, mementos, medals and to put them in a place of honor for the festival.”
Reading this, I’m reminded of the crafts projects I used to do with Sally when she was little and the school year was fresh: the autumn leaves we ironed between sheets of wax paper, the Thanksgiving turkeys we made out of felt and pipe cleaners. I feel my hands itching to fashion something more concrete than words on a page. And so, one day in early October, I search out Shelley in her studio and ask if she’d like to collaborate on a project.
“Since I’m researching their lives already, I could make some kind of tribute to Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt. Then the students could make tributes to their own ancestors. I’ll have them write about the folklore of their families and the handed-down stories.” I’m spinning ideas as I talk, afraid that Shelley will dismiss the project as not sophisticated enough for Arcadia’s fine arts program. I realize it sounds a bit like the shoebox dioramas Sally did in the third grade. But Shelley turns away from the painting she’d been working on when I came in—another view of haunted woods—and holds the tip of her paintbrush to her lips. She looks like an allegorical figure representing the artist inspired. Just the kind of thing her grandmother might have painted.
“It’s an excellent idea. They could do portraits of an ancestor or depict a scene from a childhood memory. I’ll have them look at Frida Kahlo’s autobiographical montages.” Shelley stabs the paintbrush into her loosely knotted hair and dives down to a bookshelf from which she plucks three books in quick succession. “And we can look at some pictures of altars from the Mexican Dios de los Muertos…. I think I have some pictures in these old magazines.”
Within minutes Shelley is surrounded by glossy National Geographics splayed out around her like an aureole crowning a saint’s head. She’s forgotten all about the painting she was working on. As I’m leaving I notice Sally’s name on an index card clipped to an easel holding a covered canvas. I touch the edge of the cloth, but Shelley’s voice stops me from lifting it.
“I promised Sally I wouldn’t let anyone see her work—that’s why she’s keeping it in here. I know it must be hard that she doesn’t want to share with you, but I think we should respect her wishes, don’t you?”
The pity in her voice brings the blood to my face. “Of course,” I say without turning around. “I didn’t realize she felt so strongly about it. She’s always shown me her work before….” Everything I think to say just makes me sound more desperate and pathetic. When I turn around, though, I see that Shelley isn’t paying the slightest attention to me. She’s absorbed in an article on Roman death masks. I leave quietly, grateful that she has such a short attention span.
I’m grateful, too, for the crisp autumn air as I hurry up the hill to Beech Hall. It cools the fire in my cheeks. Why should it matter if Sally shows her paintings to Shelley Drake but not to me? The important thing is that she’s found an outlet for her grief and that she’s being productive. I’m glad she’s found a mentor. I should also be glad, I suppose, that Shelley greeted my suggestion so eagerly, but her enthusiasm has left me feeling a bit exhausted and jittery at the same time, as if I’d drunk too much coffee or stuck my finger into an electrical socket. I think of what Shelley said about her grandmother Gertrude having a breakdown after her painting was lampooned by the Fakirs at the Art Students League, and how her mother was in and out of mental hospitals all her life. Is the history of mental instability in her family the reason Shelley is so eager not to be associated with her grandmother? Certainly, Shelley’s behavior seemed a bit manic. I’ll have to work hard to keep up with her.
I spend the evening alone at the kitchen table in my cottage sorting through the hatbox full of Vera Beecher’s letters, looking for pictures and other artifacts that could be used in an altar. I bring down from my bedroom the May Day picture of Lily Eberhardt, Gertrude Sheldon, and Mimi Green. Since I read about the three women—and the May Day celebration—in Lily’s journal they’ve become more real to me. I notice now that Gertrude Sheldon has the same hectic expression in her eyes that I just saw in her granddaughter Shelley’s eyes. Lily’s expression, too, is not as purely happy as I first read it. The joy and excitement are there, but her eyes are shining as if she might break into tears at any moment. Only little Mimi Green—who comes across as more worldly and knowing in Lily’s journal—is totally unreadable, her eyes shadowed by her long bangs and the downward tilt of her head.
I find a few other pictures of that May Day—one of Virgil Nash brandishing a cardboard sword, one of the Zarkov brothers in full Russian costume playing their balalaikas—but nothing else seems to sum up the lost days of Arcadia as well as the first picture of the three women revelers. I lean it against the hatbox with its old-fashioned spray of violets. I get up, take a step back, and see that the hatbox is the perfect backdrop. It’s surrounded by a ring of old letters and notebooks that in turn are wreathed by the ivy pattern on the tabletop.
It’s a nearly perfect still life … the composition only needs something vertical. I look around the kitchen, lighting on and then dismissing in turn the half-empty wine bottle, a cracker tin, and a ceramic vase. No, it has to continue the floral motif and connect to Lily and Vera’s life. I walk into the living room and instantly spot the fleur-de-lis pattern on the fireplace tiles. Yes, that’s close, but unless I want to move the whole arrangement into the living room, it’s not practical. There was something else with a fleur-de-lis on it. I feel it hovering on the edge of memory, shimmering like old glass….
Of course! The fleur-de-lis perfume bottle that Vera gave Lily their first winter together in New York. The image is so clear in my head that I start to look for it before I recall that I only read about the bottle in Lily’s journal instead of actually seeing it.
Only I have seen one. I’d recognized the description of the bottle from ones that had belonged to my grandmother. I had played with them when I was little, filling them with colored water and lining them up on my grandmother’s windowsills in her house in Brooklyn. When she died and my mother asked if I wanted anything to remember her by, I asked for one of the perfume bottles. I know I haven’t thrown it out. It must be in one of the dozens of unpacked moving boxes.
I find it in the third box I try, wrapped in tissue paper among the china horses Sally collected when she went through her horsey stage. The glass is thick and mottled, tinged green, the fleur-de-lis pattern set into the neck. A tiny shred of gold and lavender paper clings to one side. Stamped on the bottom is the name of the pharmacy that made the perfume: PRIVET AND SLOE, APOTHECARIES, NY, NY. I hold the bottle up to my nose, hoping for the remembered scent of my grandmother, but it smells like old paper and dust. All that colored water I poured into it must have long ago washed away the last traces of perfume.
I grab one of Sally’s sketchpads and go back to the kitchen, where I place the bottle in front of the box, overlapping the photograph a little so that Lily’s outstretched arm is reflected in the mottled glass—an effect that will be hard to capture but, I immediately feel, is the heart and center of the picture. I look at the tableau for a few more minutes, then I take out my old, tattered copy of The Changeling Girl from my book bag. I flip through the pages, not sure what I’m looking for … until I see it. I lay the open book in front of the other objects. Then I sit down and do something I haven’t done for many years. I draw.
When I wake up the next morning, my hands and the bed sheets are covered in pastels. It’s as if a rain of spring flowers has fallen on my bed overnight. Lavender, madder red, pale green, and butter yellow are the predominant colors. I have a vague memory of dragging out Sally’s old pastels late last night, but it is blurry, as if I’d been drunk. But I don’t recall drinking anything and my head is clear when I get up.
The still life (it seems a strange phrase for this tribute to the dead) is lying on the kitchen table when I come downstairs. I glance at it quickly, reluctant to examine it too closely. For the first time in years I felt really transported while drawing and I’m afraid that in the cold light of day I’ll be disappointed with the results. I make coffee in a travel mug that Sally and Jude gave me two years ago on Mother’s Day, jam one of Dymphna’s leftover scones in my pocket, and slip the picture between the pages of the sketchbook I stole from Sally’s room last night. Then I head off to class before I can change my mind.
It doesn’t matter if the drawing’s any good, I tell myself on the path to Beech Hall. It’s just a model to show the class what I have in mind for their project. If it’s amateurish—as it’s almost certain to be—then that will demonstrate my willingness to be open with them. We’ll laugh over my efforts to draw after all these years.
But as I hug the sketchbook to my chest I know I don’t want them to laugh at this first effort. I know because I’m holding it as tenderly as I would carry a child. For one creepy moment I remind myself of that picture from The Changeling Girl of the peasant girl cradling the beech root wrapped in cambric, her embrace already turning the inanimate thing of pulp and sap into flesh and blood.
There are a few groans when I announce an additional project, but when I explain they can get credit in two classes and that there’s no writing involved they quiet down. I outline the idea and then, before I can chicken out, tape my drawing to the blackboard.
“As you can see, I haven’t put pencil to paper in a while, but I wanted to give you an idea—”
“You did that?” The question comes from Chloe and at first I think she’s mocking my poor effort, but then I realize she’s not.
“Wow, Ms. Rosenthal,” Hannah Weiss says, “we didn’t know you could draw, too. It’s really good … in a squicky sort of way.”
I turn to look at my own drawing. Last night I opened The Changeling Girl to the picture of the peasant girl kneeling beneath the copper beech with the root cradled in her arms. Why, I wonder now, did I choose that scene? It is certainly the strangest one in the story. And I have done nothing to make the image less strange. The picture has literally bled out onto the table. Leaves from the beech tree have scattered across the surface like blood drops. The tree’s bloodred roots snake off the page and creep among the scattered letters, their long tendrils eerily like fingers pawing through the pages, looking for something.
“I get it,” Hannah Weiss calls out. “The roots show the connection between the fairy tale that Lily Eberhardt and Vera Beecher wrote and their lives together as symbolized by their letters.”
Tori Pratt mutters something under her breath that sounds like show-off. I look harder at the picture. Was Hannah’s elaborate analysis right?
“And the beech tree, which stands for Vera, of course, is bleeding because Lily died,” Clyde Bollinger adds.
“So what does that bloody baby stand for?” Chloe asks.
I feel my own blood drain from my face at the question. Did I really draw a bloody baby? When I look at the bundle that the peasant girl cradles I see that the root is indeed red, as are all the roots of the tree. And yes, the root does have the rudimentary shape of a baby. Did I mean for it to represent the baby Lily bore and sacrificed to Vera’s ideal of the artistic life? And if I did, do I really want to explain that to my students?
Luckily, Hannah Weiss comes to my rescue. “The baby stands for the school, doesn’t it, Ms. Rosenthal? And it’s bloody because it was born out of the grief Vera Beecher felt after Lily died.”
I turn around to face the class. For once they’re more interested in my answer than in checking their e-mail and instant messages on their laptops. “That’s one interpretation,” I say guardedly. I could point out that the school was founded before Lily’s death, but Hannah’s remark has made me think of something Shelley Drake said—that Ivy St. Clare has turned the school into a reliquary to preserve “the rotting corpse of Saint Vera.” “The point is you see how much you can suggest through a drawing of inanimate objects. Do you think you can do the same with your own mementos? What objects would you pick to tell the story of your own family?”
“I have my grandfather’s pocket watch.” Clyde slips a heavy gold disk out of his jeans pocket. “My grandmother gave it to him when he joined the army, so he wouldn’t forget her.”
“That’s cool,” Hannah says, peering over Clyde’s shoulder at the watch. “I’ve got my mother’s Vassar ring. She’s always talking about me applying there.”
A few other students chime in with mementos they’ve inherited or borrowed from parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. One boy says that when his grandfather died he got all his shoes because they were both size 13. A girl says she’s got the jeans her mother wore to Woodstock. I’m delighted at the class’s enthusiasm. Perhaps this is just what we needed to break the somber mood that has pervaded the campus since Isabel’s death—and what I needed to gain back my students’ trust since I brought Sheriff Reade to the autumn equinox. I’m also touched that this group of iPod-wearing, cell-phone-obsessed teens have such a supply of sentimental objects, but then Chloe finally poses the question I’ve been waiting for.
“What if you don’t have any family keepsakes?”
“You can use pictures or draw from memory—moments from the past you recall, that teddy bear your mother threw out, or a house you lived in when you were little and haven’t seen since—” I have a sudden, jarring memory of my grandmother’s kitchen in Brooklyn, the pattern on the kitchen table, the sun coming through the windows and lighting up the perfume bottles I’d filled with colored water. I turn back to my picture, curious—and a little afraid—to see what I did with the perfume bottle in the heat of my creative fugue last night.
But the bottle is untouched by the tide of red in the rest of the picture. It stands inviolate, full of clear water, bathed in light, holding a single white lily. I see now that it’s the bottle and the white flower that balance the rest of the picture, but it’s also the pure white of the lily that makes the red of the beech tree so startling … so bloody.
I turn away from the picture to answer more questions. Will they get credit for both classes? What percent of their grade will the project represent? Does it have to be done in pastels? Could it be executed in pen? pencil? markers? charcoal? watercolor? oils? Can they use Photoshop? By the time I finish answering all the questions we barely have time to go over last night’s reading, a chapter from Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde. The hour is up before I have a chance to remind them about tonight’s reading (a chapter from Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment), and then I rush out of the room, trailed by Clyde and Hannah, who have more questions about the Dead Project, as they’ve started calling it.
I’m halfway to the Lodge when I realize that I left my picture taped to the blackboard. Although it will make me late to my seminar with the Merling twins, I turn back. I tell myself it’s because I need to give the picture to Shelley so she can use it as an example when she introduces the project to her class, but I know it’s really because I don’t like the idea of it left hanging there for anyone to see.
When I get to the classroom, though, I see that the person whom I least wanted to see the picture is standing in front of it: Ivy St. Clare.
“Who did this?” she asks without turning around when I come into the room.
“I did. It’s just a model for a project I’m having my students do—”
“You’re not making the archival material I lent you available to them, are you?”
“No, of course not. They’ll use their own family mementos.” I describe the project to the dean, but she seems unable to take her eyes off my picture. When I’m done, she points to one of the objects in the drawing.
“What’s this?”
I look closer and see she’s pointing at the green book. I start to tell her it’s Lily’s journal, but then I realize I can’t. How can I say I found the journal but didn’t tell her about it? Luckily, the gold fleur-de-lis is half-hidden by a letter lying across its cover. “Just an old book I had lying around,” I say. “I thought the color provided a nice contrast.”
St. Clare turns to me, her hooded eyes peering out of her weathered face. The intensity of her look reminds me of something, but I can’t think what. “Yes, it does,” she says finally. “You have a good eye.” Then she turns and leaves. Only then do I remember where I’d seen that look before. It was the same cold gaze with which the barn owl looked down on Callum and me.