Arcadia Falls

2


“It’s quaint, don’t you think, like something in a fairy tale?”
But Sally is done with fairy tales for the day. “I’m not getting service,” she says. “This place does get cell phone service, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not sure,” I lie. The dean had, in fact, told me that the campus lay in a cellular dead zone, but I hadn’t had the heart to tell Sally that yet. I was hoping that if she spent a little less time texting her friends she might occasionally talk to me.
“What about wi-fi?” she asks. “I mean, you can’t drag me away from all my friends and then not give me IM.”
From the look of it, the house is more likely to have black mold and a mouse infestation than electricity and a working phone. It certainly doesn’t match the image I’ve held in my head these last few months, through each painful stage of divesting ourselves of our old lives, of a tidy white clapboard house with a front porch and a small garden. Nothing too big, I said to myself as I put our Great Neck McMansion on the market. Nothing too new, I thought as I tag-saled the Danish modern furniture Jude and I had bought at Roche-Bobois. Nothing more than I can take care of by myself, I lectured myself as I let go the housekeeper and the gardeners.
I got the nothing right. The house is built of the same rough pine as the surrounding forest and the same granite as the hillside it backs up against. The only color is the faded green and russet of the trim on the pointed eaves. The whole house is tinted the colors of a pheasant seeking to camouflage itself in the undergrowth of the forest. I have the feeling that if I blink it will disappear.
“The library will have wi-fi,” I finally think to tell Sally. “All private schools do these days.”
“Not private schools for losers.” Sally slumps farther down in her seat. She makes no move to get out of the car, and neither do I. We seem trapped in the driveway of our new home, as if thorny hedges blocked our way. Perhaps Sally thinks if she doesn’t get out I’ll put the car in reverse, drive back through the pine woods, down the sycamore-lined road, out to the county route, and to the highway. We’ll retrace our steps until we get back to Great Neck and like clever children who’ve unraveled their sweaters to mark the way home, we’ll unspool time until we’re back in our lives of a year ago. I’ll be the wife of a prosperous hedge fund manager. Not the kind of suburban housewife I despise—the ones like Lexy’s mom who spend their days gliding in their BMWs between the hair salon and Burberry’s—but one with literary interests and just enough time to nurture our talented daughter. Last September I was taking the last course requirement for my Ph.D. in English literature at City University Graduate Center. Sally was starting tenth grade. She belonged to the art club and the literary magazine and had been inducted into the National Honor Society. The hedge fund was in its third year. Jude had quit his trading job at Morgan Stanley three years before. I knew that we had borrowed heavily to start the fund—and to support the lifestyle that, Jude assured me, was necessary to look successful—but I thought it was worth it to have Jude home more and looking less stressed. He hadn’t looked so young and carefree since his sophomore year at Pratt, where we had met. He didn’t look like a man who had less than three months to live.
If I could unravel time and change that, I’d drive in reverse all the way down the New York State Thruway to Long Island.
“Why do you think it’s a school for losers?” I ask. “It has a very good reputation—especially in the arts. Its graduates go on to Ivy League colleges and the best art schools. Remember Grandma always said she wished she could have gone here?” I don’t mention that my mother was always bitter that her own mother hadn’t let her attend the Arcadia School, even after she got a full scholarship. When I heard about the job—as a last-minute replacement for a new teacher who’d gotten another job somewhere else—I felt that coming here might somehow heal that old wound. Right now we can use all the healing we can get.
Sally lets out an exasperated sigh and holds up a finger—a habit of Jude’s, this counting on fingers. “One, it starts in August.”
“That’s so the students have time to get to know one another.”
“Please, there are only six hundred students here. I’m sure they get to know each other all too well. Two, it’s full of rich, spoiled kids.”
I have to suppress a laugh that after living in materialistic, prosperous Great Neck she would worry about such a thing, but I reply soberly, “They have a scholarship program for gifted art students and only let in qualified students, whether they can pay or not. Remember, we had to send your portfolio for you to get in?” I hadn’t let Sally know how relieved I’d been when she was accepted because it meant I wouldn’t have to pay for private school or send her to the public school in the town of Arcadia Falls. “I think you’ll really like the art classes here.”
“I liked the art classes at my old school. And three, it was founded by hippie lesbian witches.”
“Witches?” I repeat only the last part because I’ve heard the accusation of hippie and lesbian already.
“I looked it up online. Do you know that there’s a legend that the town of Arcadia Falls was founded by a group of witches who were thrown out of the Dutch settlement in Kingston?”
I should be glad, I suppose, that Sally’s taking an interest in American history and that she’s bothered to try to find out anything about our new home, but I would prefer she’d chosen some other feature of the local landscape, like the history of bluestone quarrying or the short stories of Washington Irving. “That sounds like a pretty outlandish story, but even if there was some truth to it, that’s the town, not the school. The school was founded by artists—”
“Who were drawn here by the whole witchcraft thing. I’ve been looking at the Facebook profiles of the students here. They’re all into Wicca and voodoo. They even teach it here.”
“That’s the folklore class, Sally, which is why this is such a great place for me to teach. Not many high schools have classes in my field.”
“Maybe that’s because it’s a field for losers, no offense. And four, it’s almost all girls here.”
“The school went co-ed in the seventies,” I say, ignoring the hurt of my own daughter labeling the discipline I’ve devoted myself to for the last eight years as a field for losers. When did she start dividing the world up into winners and losers, anyway? And when did I land on the losing side of her score book? I can’t help but remember, though, that when I chose my specialization—fairy tales in nineteenth-and twentieth-century women’s fiction—eight-year-old Sally thought it was cool that I was going to get to use the stories I read to her at bedtime for schoolwork. So did I. “It’s sixty-forty now. Not that I think you should be worrying about boys anyway.”
“Why don’t you just lock me up in a convent?” Sally screams, her voice reaching into registers that are as painful to my ears as they must be to her vocal cords. The enclosed space of the car (A two-seater, Jude, what were you thinking?) can’t hold her anymore. She opens the passenger side door (which has made a wrenching noise since a Hummer grazed it in the Food Emporium parking lot three months ago) and steps out while issuing her last invective.
“Just because you can’t have sex anymore doesn’t mean no one else should be allowed to.”
Leaving the door open, she stomps up the weed-choked path and sits down on the cracked front step. I get out of the car to let her in. Sally’s fury has released us from the spell of inertia and that, I suppose as I approach the threshold of our new home, is probably the only kind of magic we’re going to get for a while.
Inside I find Sally poking around in the packing crates I had shipped up ahead of us.
“Pew! It smells like shop class in here!” Sally complains.
“Pine wood,” I say, opening all the windows to let out the stale, musty air. They’re the old-fashioned double-sash kind, like the ones in the first apartment Jude and I shared on Avenue B in the East Village. Jude had called them guillotine windows. These make a sound like a Frenchwoman having her head chopped off when I pry them open.
“Do we have to live with this gloomy furniture? I told you we should have kept our old stuff.”
I could point out that our massive leather sofa wouldn’t have fit into this tiny living room, but that would be calling attention to how very small the house is. The parlor is about the size of the laundry room in our old house.
“This is Arts and Crafts style,” I say instead, patting a Morris chair upholstered in a design that appears to be lettuce leaves wilting on a ground of fresh-turned soil—a dreary pattern that is unfortunately repeated in the wallpaper and curtains. A puff of dust rises from the chair like the ghost of the last person who sat in it, which must have been a few decades ago, judging from the dust that lies over everything. What had Ivy St. Clare said on the phone? I haven’t had the heart to go into Fleur-de-Lis since Vera passed. That was ten years ago. I hadn’t realized she meant no one had gone into the cottage. “The Arts and Crafts style was popular in arts colonies in the early part of the century—the twentieth century,” I correct myself before Sally can remind me that we’re not living in the twentieth century anymore. “Colonies like Roycroft, Byrdcliffe, and Arcadia made their own furniture. Some of this stuff might have been made here at Arcadia—”
“They couldn’t afford to buy furniture?”
“It was part of the ideal of the Arts and Crafts movement that the artists be able to work in practical mediums and produce their own goods. They raised sheep for wool to make their own rugs and clothes and made furniture from the native hardwoods. They even used indigenous trees and flowers in their designs. See—” I wipe a layer of grime from the armrest of the chair. “There’s a beech tree carved into this side and a lily on the other. I think the same pattern is on the fireplace,” I say, pointing to a wood carving of a beech tree on the mantel. “And on the hearth tiles.” I wipe the soot off the ceramic tiles that frame the fireplace until a crackled blue-green glaze appears. The pattern of beech tree and lily repeats across the length of the hearth, but the tiles are badly cracked. Especially the ones decorated with lilies.
“It looks like someone took a fire poker to them,” Sally says. “Probably after being driven mad by the wallpaper … Hey, isn’t there a short story about some woman who goes crazy because of her wallpaper?”
“‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” I say, delighted that Sally has remembered a bit of the nineteenth-century fiction I’m always telling her about. “I know she stayed at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock. Maybe she visited here, too.”
“Yeah, and maybe she got the idea for the book from this gross wallpaper.”
“It will look better once we clean it up and wash the curtains … maybe get some new slipcovers.” I look around at the dreary room trying to imagine it looking like anything other than an undertaker’s parlor.
“Good luck with that,” she says, grabbing a box labeled SALLY. “I’m going to go look at the bedrooms. They can’t be worse than this.”
I smile encouragingly, glad that Sally’s showing any interest in the house, but I’m afraid of what her reaction might be if she’s wrong. What if the bedrooms are worse? Suddenly I’m not up to hearing another tirade. Cowardly as it is to run from a sixteen-year-old’s displeasure, I find myself plotting my exit strategy.
“I should tell my new boss I’m here … and see if I can figure out where to get some food and cleaning supplies. Do you mind if I leave you here alone?”
“Whatever.” Sally’s voice is studiously nonchalant. We both know she’s had nightmares since Jude died. “It’s not like the place is haunted, right?”
“Of course not, sweetie,” I say quickly. It’s a measure of how frayed our relationship has become that I’m actually thrilled she’s asked me a question I know how to answer. But as I leave, I think of those battered lilies over the fireplace and wonder if the house is completely free of bad spirits.
Ivy St. Clare told me that her office in Beech Hall was an eleven-and-a-half-minute walk from Fleur-de-Lis Cottage.
“I know because I made the trip so often when Vera was still alive.” She had expelled a sigh that, even over the phone, managed to convey both grief and the fortitude she had employed over the years to bear up under it. “Vera used to say I was uncommonly light on my feet. ‘My little sparrow,’ she called me.”
She must have been. It takes me a good five minutes just to find the path. (It starts between two old oak trees that are catty-corner to your front door. You take the one that branches to the left to reach Beech Hall.) I’m on the narrow, pine-bordered path for a good fifteen minutes before I come out onto the lawn in front of Beech Hall. I pause there to take in the scene. In front of the stone and half-timbered Tudor hall, the lawn slopes down toward the copper beech Sally and I saw from the car. The late-afternoon sun turns the tree’s leaves a glossy purple—not at all the color of blood. The grass beneath it is strewn with students who, taking advantage of the late afternoon respite from the rain, are sprawled out on blankets and towels, some reading and some sitting in small circles talking. The girls—and it’s mostly girls, making me wonder if that “sixty-forty” figure has been exaggerated—are stripped down to sports bras and shorts or tank tops and rolled-up jeans. Quite a few have tattoos.
At the city colleges I’ve adjuncted at over the last few years I’ve noticed a steady increase in the amount of tattooed flesh amongst my students, but I’m surprised to see tattoos on high school kids. Would Sally deem the tattooed student body at Arcadia gross, or would she end up wanting one herself? Or, knowing Sally, both? I’ll have to decide between putting my foot down by saying no—in which case Sally will probably sneak off to Kingston and get needled in some unhygienic biker parlor—or agreeing in order to get some say over where it’s done and how much exposed skin gets inked. For about the millionth time this year I wonder what Jude would do. The interior silence that greets the question is almost more painful than his physical absence. I used to be able to predict what Jude would do in most situations. His death didn’t take that away, but what I learned in the aftermath of his death did.
When I enter Beech Hall it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness after all that sunlight and brightly colored skin. The only light comes from two narrow stained-glass windows on the second floor landing, which is directly above me. When my eyes adjust I make out a small bronze statuette of a naked woman standing in a recessed niche to my right. She’s looking over her shoulder, her long hair streaming down her back into a pool of water lilies at her feet. She seems as if she’s giving the last person who opened the door a reproachful look for letting in a draft. I don’t blame her. Even on this summer day I can feel the chill of the stone floor through my thin-soled sneakers and a draft tickles the sweat at the nape of my neck.
It occurs to me that I should have dressed better before reporting to Ivy St. Clare. The hall, as it emerges from the shadows, is imposingly formal. It’s not what I expected from a private school founded as an art colony, but then I remember that Beech Hall was originally Vera Beecher’s family home. I hadn’t appreciated the scale of her gift until now, standing in this large drafty hall, staring up at the Beecher family arms—a beech tree, of course, that’s carved in the dark wood paneling of the second-floor landing. What a refuge this must have been for impoverished artists during the Depression! Arcadia must have seemed like a paradise.
As if filling in for the parts of “impoverished artists in paradise” a cluster of girls bang through the door and swarm past me. “Excuse me,” I say as they pass by me. One of the girls flings back her waist-length black hair to reveal a heart-shaped face that looks at me with all the impassivity of a fox, but she continues past without speaking. Another, a tall blond girl, stops.
“Can I help you?” she asks in tones so polite I’m momentarily startled into muteness. When was the last time one of Sally’s friends spoke to me so politely? Then she does another amazing thing. She looks right at me. Direct eye contact.
“Yes, thank you, I’m looking for the dean’s office.”
“You must be the new English teacher,” she says, extending her hand. “I’m Isabel Cheney. I’m going to be in your folklore class. I’ve done all the reading already and I’m looking forward to it.”
“Isabel!” A voice calls from the upper landing. It’s the girl with the foxlike face. “Stop sucking up and come on. Ms. Drake is waiting to make the adjustments to our costumes. Unless you want to be tripping over yours, you’d better hurry up.”
“My costume already fits fine, Chloe, because I’m not a midget.”
The girl on the landing—Chloe—scowls. “But we still have to hand in our paper, too.”
“I’ve got our paper right here.” Isabel holds up a bright orange folder. “I’m just going to show Ms. Rosenthal to the dean’s office and then I’ll meet you in the Reading Room.”
Chloe casts a lingering look at the orange folder, as if she’d like to swoop down and pluck it out of Isabel’s hands, but then she throws up her hands, utters the teenager’s favorite rejoinder—“Whatever!”—and turns away from us.
“Sorry,” Isabel says, turning back to me.
“Really, you don’t have to take me. I don’t want to make you late for—” I’m about to say class, but then I realize that classes haven’t started yet.
“It’s just the fitting for First Night and, as I said, my dress already fits. Chloe’s just pissed because I won’t show her the paper we were supposed to do together, but that I did all the work on. She’s afraid she might have to answer questions about it, but she should have thought about that when she let me do all the work.”
We pass through a long echoing hall set up with easels, go up a short flight of stairs, along a corridor lined with glass-fronted cabinets that I imagine were once meant to hold the family china but are now full of art supplies, down another short flight of stairs, and across a small parlor where a fair-haired girl is curled up on a rose velvet settee sound asleep. Charcoal sketches of nude figures are scattered on the floor beneath her, their shadowy limbs intertwined in a dreamlike orgy. “Wow,” I say, “I am glad you’re showing me the way. The house seems to be set out like a maze.”
“That’s because the Beechers were a secretive family,” she tells me. “They suffered persecution in England for their religious beliefs and when they immigrated to Massachusetts, Hiram Beecher was accused of witchcraft. That’s why they settled here on the edge of the wilderness and that’s why they built their houses with twisting hallways and secret hiding places in case they needed to hide from persecution.”
“You’re quite the historian,” I say.
Isabel beams with pleasure. “I love history! I plan to double major in history and poli-sci at Brown or Cornell. I’m working on a senior thesis on the history of Arcadia.”
We’ve come to a pair of wide oak doors, which I assume must, finally, lead to Ivy St. Clare’s office. “I’ve been researching the history of Arcadia, too,” I say. “Perhaps we can compare notes.”
“Yes, I read the article you published on the historical sources of Lily Eberhardt’s fairy tales. I liked it … but … well, I think you’ll change your mind about the real meaning of the fairy tales when you’ve learned more about her life.”
“Well,” I say, a little taken aback by her presumption, “that’s why I’m here.” I give her a tight smile that I hope disguises the chagrin I feel at being corrected by a teenager. It’s the arrogance of youth, I remind myself, she’ll find out soon enough that life isn’t just about doing well in school and being right … and that not everybody will respond as kindly to her smugness. “Thank you for showing me the way here,” I add with more genuine warmth.
“My pleasure,” she says. “Good luck with the dean. She can be a little intimidating.” With that last warning, Isabel Cheney turns around and goes back the way we came. I watch her go, envying the certainty of her youthful confidence—the confidence of thinking that everything will go according to one’s plans. I could use a little of that confidence now as I knock on my new boss’s door.