Arcadia Falls

20



As soon as my last class is over, I rush back to the cottage, ignoring the tempting aroma of fresh-baked scones from Dymphna’s kitchen. I really must have been in some sort of trance last night to carelessly include Lily’s journal in my still life. If Beatrice Rhodes’s memory is right, Ivy St. Clare has been looking for that journal since Lily died. Of course I could just tell her that I found the journal in the cottage, but I’d have to explain why I didn’t mention it right away, and she might ask me to hand it over to her. I don’t want to give it up until I get to the end of Lily’s story. I can only hope that the dean believed me when I said that the book in the picture was mine.
I’m relieved to find the journal where I left it on the kitchen table with the hatbox and the perfume bottle, but I’m also unnerved to think how easy it would have been for Ivy St. Clare—or anyone else, for that matter—to come into the house and take it. From now on, I’ll have to keep it someplace safer. I promise myself I’ll only read it by myself in the cottage. I start that night, staying up into the early hours of the morning, reading Lily’s account of her winter at St. Lucy’s Orphanage and Home for Unwed Mothers.
When I told Vera that I had gotten a job working on the murals of St. Lucy’s with Mimi Green, she was not nearly as angry as I thought she would be. She pressed her lips together and folded her hands in her lap—two gestures I’d begun to recognize as her way of reining in her temper—but when she spoke her voice was calm and cool.
“And you undertook obtaining this commission without seeking any help from me?”
I knew she was hurt, but she’d phrased her complaint in a way that offered me a way to save face. She always did. It was one of the things I love about her. She hated to be cornered and so she did no cornering herself.
“You’ve always stressed to me the virtues of independence and self-sufficiency. I thought you’d be proud.”
“And so I am.” Her lips curved into a tight smile. “I only wonder if it’s the best venue for your talents: a religious theme and in such a remote part of the country. I might have gotten something better for you.”
“I’m sure you could have, but then I wouldn’t have gotten it myself. Mimi says she’s speaking to a friend at Harper’s Bazaar about photographing the murals when they’re done.”
Vera sniffed. “Well, if you’re really going to do it I might as well have a word with someone at Vanity Fair.”
I knew then that she’d relented, but my worries weren’t over. That night she took down her atlas of New York State and found the little town of Easton where St. Lucy’s was located.
“Why, it’s not far from here at all,” she exclaimed. “An hour’s drive by motor car at the most, and you could even go by train.”
With a sinking heart, I looked at the spot her finger pointed to on the map. Mimi had been vague about St. Lucy’s location, but that was because she was a city girl and to her upstate New York was one endless vista of dairy farms and picturesque settings for her drawings. But I recognized where St. Lucy’s was at once, along the shore of the East Branch of the Delaware River, not far from the farm where I grew up.
“You could easily spend weekends here,” Vera announced, slamming shut the heavy atlas with a conclusive thud. “I’m sure you’ll be glad of a comfortable bed and a good meal after bunking with the nuns all week.”
What could I say? If I objected, she would feel I was trying to escape her. I spent the next few days debating between inventing another commission that would take me farther away and confessing my condition. One thing was certain: if I waited much longer my decision would be made for me. By mid-September Vera was already commenting on my plumped state. “The soft life has filled you out,” she said as we walked toward the lodge. “Perhaps living with the nuns will be slimming.”
“Ah, but I’ll have Mrs. Byrnes’s good cooking every weekend.”
“About that,” Vera began, linking her arm in mine. We’d come to the great copper beech tree on the lawn. The leaves had turned a deeper purple in the last weeks but had not yet begun to fall. The beech was one of the last trees to lose its leaves in the autumn. By the time they began to fall, I would already be away. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to stay right there at Arcadia and watch the leaves and then the snow fall, and to feel the baby growing inside of me, with Vera beside me. But even as I was turning toward Vera to tell her, she had gone on.
“Would you feel very hurt if I went away this winter? You could still come on the weekends, of course. Mrs. Byrnes will be watching the house—”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Gertrude has asked me to accompany her to Europe.”
“But I thought she was going with her husband.”
Vera shrugged. “Have you ever met Bennett Sheldon? He’s the dullest, most tiresome man alive. I think Gertrude’s afraid she’ll go crazy without some other conversation for six months. And she wants my advice in collecting art for her new museum. I thought I’d begin a small collection for us here at Arcadia in order to provide models for our artists.”
“I thought you couldn’t stand Gertrude.” My voice came out shrill. Vera turned to me with a startled look on her face.
“I can’t. You know how I despise dilettantes. But she does know all the best art dealers in London and Paris. You’re not jealous, are you, my dear?”
I was surprised to see her look soften toward me. I had always believed she despised jealousy, as she despised most weaknesses, but now she was smiling and drawing me closer to her. “My darling Lily, my pure Lily. You know there is no one else for me. You have nothing to fear. But if you would like to come with us, you know nothing would make me happier.”
I could feel the rapid beating of her heart beneath the stiff cloth of her dress. Her arm around me tightened. I knew then that she’d planned this revelation to make me jealous and to lure me into going with her. It did not make me love her any less. If anything, it made me love her more. It was the first time I’d ever seen her do anything truly weak. And she’d done it for me. For love of me.
I returned her embrace and murmured into her neck. “How could I ever fail to trust you, Vera? Your very name is truth. Go to Europe. Bring back your treasures. I’ll be here waiting for you.”
Mimi wanted to go home to Brooklyn first to visit with her family, and so we arranged that we would meet at St. Lucy’s in the last week of October. I decided that I would use the time to visit my family in Roxbury.
I hadn’t visited since leaving for the city. I had sent letters and money all along but I’d been wary of returning to my family, afraid they’d see how far I’d grown from them. I should have been most frightened now with a secret that really could be read in my flesh, in my thickening waist and swelling breasts, but perhaps that was the reason, after all, that I went. Perhaps I had some idea that there was still a place for me and my unborn child in the home where I was born.
My parents’ farm was on the outskirts of the village of Roxbury, sheltered in a hollow with rich meadows watered by the East Branch of the Delaware River. When I got off the train in Roxbury, the trim white houses seemed to reproach me with their provincial superiority. By the time I got to the white farmhouse I was almost ready to turn around and walk back to the train station. I stopped in the shade of an old weeping beech and leaned against it, suddenly light-headed at the sight of my old home. From there I watched as my sisters and mother came in and out, walking from the house to the barn, carrying pails to the barn for the milking and then the breakfast scraps and corn for the chickens. I watched my sister Rose, grown into a tall, fine woman, fetch water from the well and I watched my father, grown old since I had left, come home from the fields for his dinner. He’d gained a helper—the young man who’d proposed to me and married Marguerite—as well as a new dog who didn’t catch my scent as I stood beneath the weeping beech, hidden behind a green curtain of leaves. I stood there so long that I felt I’d become a part of the tree. My limbs were as numb as if they had turned to bark, my head as heavy as if weighted down with a mane of leaves, my feet as immobile as if they had grown roots. I almost wished that I could become part of the tree, because then I could stay here always and be a part of the rhythm and flow of the farm’s daily life. That was the only way, I saw now, that I’d ever again be a part of it. They didn’t need me. I would only bring shame to them if I came to them now, pregnant and unmarried.
I shook off my languor by remembering Vera and the life that awaited me back at Arcadia. It seemed so far away, as if I would have to climb mountains to find it again, but I would never get there if I didn’t start out. It felt like I was ripping my own flesh to move away from that tree, but when at last I pried myself away I felt I had broken the last bond I had to my old life.
I walked back to the train station and took the train on to Arkville, where I found a boardinghouse to stay in for the rest of the week. I waited there until Mimi joined me. She looked refreshed from her visit to her family, full of stories and packages of baked goods I’d never heard of before—mandelbrot and rugelach. She asked me how my visit had gone, and I shrugged and made up stories about my sisters, which I almost believed.
The next morning, we took the Delaware & Northern through a pristine country of rolling green hills populated by cows and low-lying mists that rose off the river and dewed the windows of our rail car. We were the only passengers to detrain at Easton, a pretty town with a white church and a dozen white clapboard houses on the banks of the East Branch of the Delaware. While we sat on our trunks waiting we watched a group of boys fishing in the fast-flowing river. When we inquired of one about the orphanage he responded by running away as if he were afraid we had plans to make him an orphan. Finally, when we were considering taking the next train back to Arkville, we heard the wheels of an approaching conveyance and out of the mists there appeared, in order: a mud-splashed pony, a hooded and hunched over driver, and a cart that might have once been painted white but was now the color of the same mud that covered the pony. The driver, a sullen young man whose face, even when he pushed back his hood, was half-hidden under a deep brimmed cap, greeted us with the words “You must be the new girls from the city.” He proceeded to lift our trunks into the back of the wooden pony cart, which was redolent of hay and manure. When it became clear that we were also expected to ride in the back of the cart, Mimi balked.
“I’m not riding in that, mister.”
The man tipped back his hat revealing close-set dark eyes and a beaky nose. “Oh, you’re not, are you? Then you’d better start walking. St. Lu’s is halfway up that mountain there.” He gestured with his thumb to a hummocked slope that rose out of the pearl gray river mists only to be enveloped by a dark cloud that threatened rain. In the narrow strip of land between mist and cloud, I could make out a few white buildings clinging to the side of the mountain. As Mimi and the cart driver squared off, rain began to fall.
“I don’t mind riding in the cart,” I said. “I grew up on a farm so I’m used to it,” I told the man, who I now saw was really only a boy of eighteen or nineteen. “There’s room in the front for my friend, isn’t there?”
The boy rolled his eyes, shrugged, and then performed an elaborate bow, doffing his hat and sweeping an arm to the plywood board that comprised the front seat of the cart. “After you, m’lady,” he said. While Mimi struggled up onto the front seat, he helped me into the back of the cart, muttering under his breath about people who put on airs and thought themselves above their station.
The smell was really quite strong and I thought at first that along with the rocking of the cart it might make me sick, but I found that if I relaxed into the rhythm it wasn’t so bad. We were climbing a steep dirt road. Facing backward, I saw the river snaking through the valley below, the green hills rolling in waves that were crested by the white foam of the ever-present mist. I felt as though I were being borne up above the sea. I thought of Vera on her ship traveling to Europe, and although I missed her I felt at peace for the first time in many months. No one would find me here. I had found a refuge. I heard Mimi laughing and I gathered that her amusement was over our driver’s mistake. He’d thought we were two unwed mothers coming to St. Lucy’s (St. Lu’s, as he called it, as if it were a place you’d come to lose yourself) to have our babies in secret. Mimi enjoyed correcting him, telling him we were artists commissioned to paint the new murals for the chapel. The boy—Johnnie, I soon learned was his name—was profuse in his apologies, but I was glad he had made the mistake. It made me feel a little less that I had come to this place under false pretenses.
I soon discovered that the remoteness of St. Lucy’s was no accident.
“Many of our girls come from the finest Catholic families,” Sister Margaret, the head of the orphanage, informed us at dinner that night. We had been given seats at her table, which was on a raised dais in the cavernous dining room. “We give them privacy and a chance to return to their old lives, cleansed of their sins.”
“Don’t they miss their babies?” Mimi asked in between bites of roast beef. Vera needn’t have worried about me losing weight here. The food was excellent.
Sister Margaret looked up from her plate. She wasn’t having the roast beef. A few potatoes and beets were on her plate, but I hadn’t seen her touch them. I wondered if she were an ascetic. It was hard to tell how thin she was under her black habit, but her face was long and bony, her skin as white as the wimple that framed it, and her blue eyes burned with the intensity of a fanatic. I was surprised that Mimi had dared to ask such a question of her. But she answered it calmly.
“Yes, of course they do. I imagine they think about them every remaining day of their lives. But it is our hope that their faith in God comforts them and that, in a lesser sense, their faith in us to place the children in good homes also sustains them. We hope that in contemplating the life of St. Lucy, who was, like them, an unwed mother and who placed her child in the hands of God, they will find reassurance. That is why I’ve chosen to have her life depicted in the chapel, where many of the girls stop first when they come to us. I assume you’ve read the material I sent on St. Lucy’s life.”
“I have,” I said, grateful to talk about something other than missing babies. I’d been so preoccupied with hiding my pregnancy and with how I could have the child in secret that I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what it would feel like to hand the baby—my baby—over to a total stranger. The thought brought an unexpected pang, a sharp cramp deep down in my stomach. “I confess that I wasn’t familiar with her life even though I was raised a Catholic.”
“St. Lucy is not well known,” Sister Margaret replied, “but our order has venerated her for more than fifteen hundred years, since her martyrdom in fifth-century Ireland when she was known by her Irish name, Luiseach. Her life is particularly inspiring for the young women who come here.”
“She was raped, wasn’t she?” Mimi asked.
“Raped or seduced, history doesn’t distinguish, but really, don’t they amount to nearly the same thing? Her seducer was a pagan chieftain. How could the poor girl defend herself against a man of such power? Many of the young women who come here are seduced by powerful men, or at least by men who enjoy exerting power over those weaker than them.”
“I suppose,” I said, cringing at another twinge in my belly, “that if a saint fell victim to such seduction, there is forgiveness for a mere girl who does the same.”
“Exactly,” Sister Margaret said, studying me closely. “That is the message I bring to my girls. The directors are not always happy with my ways. They would have me punish them for their transgressions, to make their lives here harder, but I know too well that they have enough hardness and trials to come.”
“You mean childbirth?” Mimi asked. “I read in your saint’s story that poor Lucy gives birth on a cliff in the middle of a thunderstorm and that she gripped a boulder so hard that she left her finger marks in it. We’ll paint that if you like, but don’t you think it’ll scare the girls?”
It had scared me. My hand was still over my stomach where I felt now what had been causing me those twinges. The baby inside me was moving.
“That is not my intention. The important thing is to remember that Lucy survived and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. And like these girls here”—Sister Margaret waved her hand toward the roomful of young women—“she couldn’t keep her child with her. When she realized that the pagan chieftain’s men were upon her, she entrusted the child to the river and to God. She prayed that the river would carry her child to safety, and God answered her prayers. The child was borne downriver to a convent sacred to St. Brigit and was raised there by the nuns, where she became a great leader herself. Years later she found her way to the castle where Lucy had been taken by her seducer and heard her own mother’s confession, at which point she recognized her as her mother. The two professed themselves Christians to the court and were sentenced to death by the chieftain. They were burned at the stake together, but as the smoke rose from the pyre the mother and daughter were seen borne aloft to heaven on a cloud. My hope is that the girls who come to us will take heart from St. Lucy’s story.”
She said those last words not to Mimi, but directly to me. Her eyes were on my belly, and suddenly I felt sure that she could see past cloth and flesh straight through to the baby inside.
After dinner, one of the younger nuns escorted us silently to our room—a plain whitewashed cell with two narrow cots. The only other furniture in the room was a pine dresser and two straight-backed chairs. The sheets on the two cots were worn thin with washing but smelt like lavender. Below a plaster of Paris roundel depicting St. Lucy and her daughter surrounded by a puffy cloud with their eyes lifted to heaven, a single window faced south, overlooking the gardens that separated the convent from the barn, the girls’ dormitory, and the orphanage. Beyond the dormitory the river valley spread out below, the East Branch of the Delaware glinting in the distance. I wondered if the girls looked at it and thought of St. Lucy entrusting her baby to the River Clare. There was a creek that flowed past the convent and although I couldn’t see it from our room, I could hear it—a murmuring gurgle like voices quarreling.
“A nun’s cell,” Mimi said when the mute nun left us.
“Would you rather stay with the unwed mothers? Or the orphans?” I asked.
Mimi snorted and lit a cigarette. “I don’t suppose it matters. It’s not like we’re going to be entertaining any male visitors out here in the back of beyond.” She waved her cigarette toward the long vista of hills and valley. The smoke wafted up to the image of St. Lucy, wreathing her like an extra layer of cloud.
“We’re probably not allowed to smoke,” I said. “You’d better put that out the window.”
“Maybe we’ll get kicked out,” she said, but she opened the window an inch anyway. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“I don’t mind,” I told her. “Actually, I kind of like it here.”
Mimi thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. I did like it at St. Lucy’s—or St. Lu’s, as the girls, like Johnnie, called it. I woke up early the next morning to the sound of cows lowing to be milked and thought for a moment that I was home in the childhood room I had once shared with my sisters. Only the lingering smell of Mimi’s cigarettes let me know that I wasn’t.
I threw on my coat over my nightgown, pulled on the fur-lined boots that Vera had given me as a going-away present, and stole outside. A low fog lay on the ground like thick cream floating on top of a milking jug. Walking through it, I felt weightless, as if borne aloft by the same cloud that rescued St. Lucy. The old gray barn leaning into the morning sun might have been built of planks from my dreams—but whether from the dairy barn of my childhood or the abandoned barn where I’d met Nash these last few months, I couldn’t have said. They both seemed equally distant and unreal to me.
When I went inside, though, the sharp smell of hay, manure, and the grassy breath of cows startled me into the present. Two girls were already up, whispering and giggling over the steady hiss of squirting milk. They turned to me when I opened the door, their faces two pale half-moons against the dark flanks of the cows they milked. I saw their eyes skip right from my face to my belly. I hadn’t closed my coat, and my nightgown—one of the sheer white lawn gowns Vera had made to order in England—was nearly transparent. I could have said that I was one of the artists come to paint the murals, but I didn’t. I asked where the pails were kept. One of the girls—Nancy, I later learned—got up to show me. She held one hand to the small of her back when she walked. She was so small and daintily made—like a pixie in a fairy tale—that the weight of her round belly threw her off balance.
“Have you done this before?” she asked in an Irish lilt, pointing to a row of pails and stools.
I assured her that I had, setting my stool by the cow next in line to Nancy’s. I rested my head against the cow’s soft, warm flank and slid my hands down to her swollen udder. The barn was quiet. The girls were waiting to see if I had told the truth. They must be used to people lying, I thought, and maybe I had been. Did I still know how to do this? The girl I’d been seemed like someone else entirely. Maybe I had dreamed her up the way I dreamed up my stories, the way I dreamed myself out of my childhood home and to New York City, and the way I dreamed up Vera Beecher.
I closed my eyes and listened to the cow’s heart beating against my cheek. I imagined that the two girls were my sisters. They were my sisters in a way, weren’t they? Right now, this was where I belonged.
The cow heaved a great grassy sigh as my fingers coaxed the milk down from her udders and I let go of my breath as well. The other girl—Jean, I soon found out—laughed and said that sound always reminded her of the sound her aunt made when she put her feet to soak after a long day’s work. Nancy and I laughed, too, and we milked until our pails were full and the cows’ udders were loose and empty. By the time I stood up, one hand against the small of my own back and one steadying myself against my cow, I felt as if I’d come home.
From that day on I spent my mornings sitting on a stool milking the cows and the rest of the day sitting on a stool sketching in the background of the mural. At meals I sat with the girls instead of at the nuns’ table. Mimi gave me a curious look when she saw where I sat—I had been able, by always wearing a voluminous smock over my dress, to hide my pregnancy from her—but joined me, relieved, I think, to be free of Sister Margaret’s company. She quickly warmed to the girls, who came, almost to a one, from the city, many from parts of Brooklyn—Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Coney Island, Brighton Beach—not far from where Mimi had grown up. Mimi cheerfully traded street names, candy stores, parks, and schools with the girls, although most of them had gone to Catholic schools.
“A lot of good it did them,” Mimi said to me one day as we worked on the mural. She had sketched in a rough cartoon of the first four stages of St. Lucy’s life we’d chosen to represent: her seduction by the pagan chieftain, her flight from his men during which she was hidden by a cloud, her childbirth during a storm, and the moment when she entrusted her newborn baby to the River Clare. The final scene, when she is reunited with her long-lost daughter and they are both carried to heaven on a cloud, was to be painted on the ceiling. It would require scaffolding, so we were leaving that for last. I was sketching the face of St. Lucy as she was cornered by the chieftain, but I was having a hard time getting her expression right.
“You think their church should have trained them better to resist advances?” I asked. I had decided to set Lucy’s seduction in a barn—not for autobiographical reasons, but because it was difficult to imagine what other kind of architecture might have existed in fifth-century Ireland. I’d have her milking a cow when the chieftain surprised her. I’d given her Nancy’s dark little face, which looked ancient and mysterious enough to have belonged to a pagan Celt, as I remembered it from that first morning I came into the barn and found her milking. The cow was looking warily at the chieftain. I had no trouble catching the cow’s expression, but Lucy looked struck dumb in her surprise and I didn’t want her to look stupider than the cow.
“Well, yes, that would be good for a start. All this blind obedience they’re taught—to take whatever their priests tell them on faith—”
“Isn’t faith what all religion is about? Aren’t you taught that in your synagogue?”
“Faith in God, yes, but not blind faith in His representatives on earth. No, we Jews are taught to question and argue.”
“So you think a Jewish girl would argue her way out of seduction?”
Mimi sighed. She was working on the background of the flight scene; we’d decided I was better at faces while she understood perspective better. “I know my mother taught me not to put myself in situations where a man could have the advantage over me. She taught me what men expected and how to evade their attempts to have their own way….” Her voice trailed off. She was drawing the bank of the river along which Lucy ran. She’d been going out sketching the last few mornings so that she might model the River Clare on the creek that flowed past the convent. She’d managed to capture the feel of the East Branch valley even in her rough sketches.
“But?” I prompted.
“She never taught me what to do if I was the one … I mean if I felt …”
“You mean, if you wanted to be with the man?” It struck me that for all Mimi’s worldliness she was still a virgin.
“Yes,” she answered, blushing.
“Is it the driver?” I asked.
“John,” she said, managing to inject warmth into the single syllable.
“I see.”
“No, you don’t.” She laughed. “How can you? You’re in love with Vera Beecher. At least you don’t have to worry about Vera getting you with—” She turned toward me as she spoke and stopped midsentence, her eyes on my belly. I had wondered why she was the only one who didn’t see it. The girls had known immediately I was one of them, and I was sure Sister Margaret also knew. But Mimi, who shared a room with me, who saw me undress every night, had remained blind to my pregnancy. Perhaps it was because we only see what we expect to see and she didn’t expect to see a “lover of women” pregnant.
I dropped the hand that held my pencil to my swollen stomach and met her look.
“Oh, Lily!” She dropped down to the floor next to my feet. “How? Who?”
“Does it really matter—” I began, but I could already see the calculations being performed in her head.
“It’s Virgil Nash’s, isn’t it? I’ve seen the way he looks at you, only—”
“Only you thought I’d be strong enough to resist him? Well, I wasn’t. I’m no stronger than these girls here.”
“But what about Vera? Does she know?”
“No, and she never can. Please, you have to promise me.”
“You mean you plan to give the child away?”
I heard the disbelief in her voice—and the disapproval. To her credit, it was only then that she judged me. She was surprised—shocked, even—that I’d been with Nash, but she hadn’t judged me for that. But the idea of giving away the child was clearly repugnant to her.
“Sister Margaret says that all the babies born here are adopted into good families.”
“Not all. Johnnie says some come back. Sometimes the baby doesn’t ‘meet with the family’s expectations.’ God only knows what they expect. Maybe a baby who sleeps through the night, craps flowers, and recites its ABC’s at nine months.”
“What happens to the children who are sent back?” I asked.
“Well, the nuns try to find other homes for them, but the older they get, the harder it is. Everyone wants a baby, not a cranky toddler or a fractious six-year-old. The ones who don’t get adopted stay here until they’re old enough to work, then the nuns try to place them on local farms where they’re worked near to death.”
“How do you know that?”
“Johnnie told me, and he should know because he’s one of them. He was born here. His first family sent him back because they said he didn’t smile enough. They thought there was something wrong with him. The second family sent him back because he smiled too much and laughed in church. He ran off from the third when his adoptive brother tried to rape him—”
“Yes, Mimi, I understand. But most of them end up in good homes. I’ll just have to have faith that mine will. I have no other choice. I can’t keep it. Vera would never speak to me again if she knew I’d betrayed her, and then I’d be out on the streets. How could I support myself and a baby, too?”
Face softening, Mimi took my hand. She was still kneeling on the floor in front of me and I realized what an odd picture we’d make to anyone who came in right then. I looked toward the doors at the end of the chapel, but we were alone. Sister Margaret had promised that “the girls,” as she called them, wouldn’t get in our way.
“I could help you,” Mimi said. “I could get you a job at the magazine and find someone to watch the baby during the day. We could share an apartment in the Village, or in Brooklyn near my family. It’s cheaper out there, and the air’s better for a baby. My mother would help take care of the baby—”
“And when would either of us find time to take classes or make our own art?”
She sat back on her heels and stared at me. “You really think that all this”—she waved her arms at the mural we were working on —“is more important than flesh and blood?”
I looked at the mural. The figures and the background were only outlines waiting to be filled in. They looked like ghosts flitting through an otherworldly landscape, shades wandering through Hell. Perhaps Mimi was right. But then my eye fell on the portrait of Saint Lucy I was working on. I’d been trying all morning to get her expression just right, to capture the moment she realizes she’s been trapped by the chieftain, that there’s no escape. I’d caught the look of surprise in her eyes, but I needed something else. Then I saw what to do. When the chieftain comes in he startles the cow and she kicks over the pail. Lucy is reaching for it as she looks up and sees the chieftain—and her fate. Her hand is arrested above the pail; the milk has already spilled.
I leaned forward and quickly sketched in the new lines over the old. This time I somehow managed to capture in her eyes fear and surprise, but also resignation. She sees her fate, the good and the bad, and she knows she’s powerless to change it.
When I’d gotten it just right, I turned to answer Mimi, but she’d already gotten to her feet and gone back to filling in the landscape. I’d given her my answer.
Once Mimi knew my secret, I went to see Sister Margaret. I’d never been in her office before, and I was surprised to find it rather grand, with a big mahogany desk in front of an arched window. When I entered, she was standing in front of the window, which afforded a beautiful view of the valley. She dragged her eyes away from the view when she heard me come in and instantly her sharp blue eyes—the same color as the distant mountains—focused on my belly. She’d already guessed, of course. She held out her hands, inviting me to come closer, and when I reached her she surprised me by laying her hands over my belly.
“The baby will come by Christmas, will it not?” she asked.
“A bit later,” I said, counting back. “January, I think.”
Sister Margaret shook her head. “I think it will be by Christmas, dear. And are you sure you don’t want to keep it?”
“I’m not married, Sister.” I thought this was an easier answer than explaining about Vera and the demands of the artistic life. She didn’t say anything for a minute and then she nodded and turned away from me, letting her hands fall to her side.
“As you think best. We’re very careful about the families the babies go to.” I thought about Johnnie’s experiences but didn’t say anything. “Are you able to continue working on the mural?”
“Oh yes,” I assured her. “We’ve worked out that Mimi will do the upper parts that require standing on a ladder and I’ll do the lower parts so I can sit. Then, when the scaffolding for the ceiling is built, I’ll be able to work lying down. Like Michelangelo. A pregnant Michelangelo.” I regretted my stupid joke the minute it was out of my mouth, but Sister Margaret didn’t seem offended. She gestured toward the valley below us, to where the East Branch flowed toward the Delaware River.
“God moves in a mysterious way,” she said. “Just as He sends the little streams to meet the great ones and sends them all to the ocean, I’m sure there’s a reason He sent you here to paint Saint Lucy and that your kinship with her will guide you. I’m sure you will do a beautiful job.”
Perhaps it was Sister Margaret’s faith in me that inspired the work I did that fall. Or perhaps I really did have some special feeling of kinship with this fifth-century Irish girl. I only know that when I painted her face I felt transported. Hours would pass and I’d wake as though from a long sleep to find myself sitting in front of a completed section of the mural. Mimi said it was the best work I’d ever done. “I suppose it’s because of you two sharing the same circumstances and all.”
I thought Mimi would get over her anger toward me, but she remained as cold as the mountain stream that flowed past the convent. Toward the end of October, I asked Sister Margaret if I could stay in the dorm with the other girls. I didn’t give a reason and she didn’t ask for one. She assigned me the bed next to Nancy’s. It was the last in the row and next to a window overlooking the stream that ran into the valley. I heard the sound of water when I went to sleep—a comforting sound and something to listen to when someone cried at night.
It was mostly the new girls who cried, the ones who’d just arrived. “They miss their mothers,” Nancy told me.
I was shocked to see how young some of them were. One girl, Tilly (the girls weren’t supposed to tell their last names), was only fourteen. She was in service in a big house on Fifth Avenue in New York City. She almost gave away the name of the family before Jean stopped her with a hiss and a slap.
“Don’t go shaming your employer’s household,” she said, and then added in a lower whisper: “It wasn’t the master of the house who got you—” She pointed toward Tilly’s belly.
“Oh no,” Tilly said, her eyes wide with shock at the idea. “It were the grocery delivery boy, Tom. He said I wouldn’t have a baby if I said three Hail Marys while we did it.”
Jean clucked her tongue. “And you believed him?”
“Aye, only I never did get to say them three Hail Marys. He was done before I’d gotten through the second.”
Jean clamped a hand over her mouth and fell back on her bed laughing. Nancy tried to keep a straight face, but when she caught my eye we both started giggling. Even Tilly joined in, holding her small round belly as if to shield the baby inside from the joke that had been made at its father’s expense. I felt bad about laughing at poor Tilly—I hadn’t even needed a lie to convince me to give in to Virgil Nash, just a little moonlight—but I noticed that she didn’t cry that night. She’d been accepted into the sisterhood of fallen women, as Jean referred to us. It happened with each new girl. Once she felt a part of the group she stopped crying. Whenever a new girl showed up, the girls stayed up later that night, gossiping and telling stories to distract the newcomer from the strangeness of the place. Soon I was the one telling the stories. I told the fairy tales I’d made up for my sisters and new stories I made up as I went along.
One night, I started a story with “There once was a girl who liked to pretend she was lost until the day she really lost her way.” It was the beginning of the story I had told Vera the first night she came to me, but the story grew into something else this time. The girl found a witch in the forest who showed her how to send a likeness of herself back to her family. The girls thought the witch sounded like Sister Margaret and I let them think it was her. When I told the part about the girl being too lazy to wash the root in running water, a few of them sighed. Who of us hadn’t made mistakes? And look where it had gotten us: far from our homes and loved ones. I knew then that I’d tied a knot into the story. How would the girl in the story get home? That’s what they were waiting to hear. They sat three to a bed, their knees drawn up to their chins so that their white flannel nightgowns made little tents under their crossed arms. In the moonlight, they looked like caterpillars folded inside their cocoons. Outside I could hear the creek flowing past the dormitory, swollen from a week of heavy rain. I felt bad then, but I couldn’t go back. And wasn’t that what all of us feared? That we could never go back? We weren’t the same girls who’d left our homes. I’d seen that when I stood at the edge of my parents’ farm and knew I couldn’t return. Would I feel that when I went back to Vera after this?
I tried to give them a different kind of ending. One that acknowledged how changed we would be but that suggested possibilities for the future. And the child we would leave behind? She—or he—would find its own home, accepted into some facsimile of the families we had left.
When I came to the end of the story, the dormitory was silent. I couldn’t see their faces because the moon no longer shone through the window. Nor could I hear the creek. Had my story put the whole world to sleep? But when I looked out the window, I understood. It was snowing. The girls unfolded their legs under their nightgowns like caterpillars breaking out of their cocoons and flitted, mothlike, to the windows where we watched the snow fill up the stream bed, muffling its voice, and then fill the whole valley, shutting us off from the world outside. We stood there until our feet grew cold and then one by one the girls went back to their beds. As each one passed I felt their fingertips lightly graze against my arms and hands. Nancy kissed my cheek and whispered, “Thank you.”
I fell into a deep sleep but was woken sometime before dawn by voices. Standing by Tilly’s bed were Sister Margaret and another nun holding a lantern. Someone was crying. I thought it was Tilly, but when I stood up and got close enough to see her face I saw she had gone past crying. Her face was contorted into a wrinkled ball, like an apple that’s dried up in the sun. It was the young nun crying as she and Sister Margaret tried to lift Tilly out of bed. When Sister Margaret saw me there standing frozen on my feet, she clucked her tongue and pointed to a dark bloody knot in the sheets.
“As long as you’re up, you can be of use and clean that up. Bring the sheets to the kitchen and tell Sister Ursula to burn them. Can you do that?”
I nodded then and quickly bundled the sheets in a ball, trying not to look at what lay inside. But I’d already seen the twisted length of red cord, like a rope dipped in carmine. Like the changeling root in my story. I carried the bundle to the kitchen and handed it over to Sister Ursula, a fat, good-natured nun from Ireland who gave the girls extra servings of pudding. When I told her what Sister Margaret had ordered, she asked me whose sheets they were.
“Tilly, the new girl,” I said.
Sister Ursula clucked her tongue and laid the bundle on the fire. “Poor thing. Perhaps it will be better for her this way.”
Then she seemed to recall whom she was talking to and crossed herself. She poured me a hot cup of tea from a kettle on the stove, but the smell of the tea mixed with the burning sheets curdled my stomach. I ran outside and vomited into the new-fallen snow. I couldn’t bear to go back into the kitchen, so I went to the barn. It was early to milk, but the cows didn’t mind. I just wanted to lay my head against their sides and breathe in the grass and manure smell of them until the smell of blood was gone. I milked all six cows. Jean and Nancy were surprised when they found me, but they said nothing.
I finished the face of St. Lucy giving birth in a storm that day. The story goes that she left her finger marks on a rock she clutched. She still had Nancy’s features, but I gave her the expression I’d seen on Tilly’s face.
“You’ll scare the girls,” Mimi told me when she saw the painting.
“It’s better than lying to them,” I answered.
“I heard about the girl who miscarried,” Mimi said then. I could tell she was trying to make up for not talking to me all these weeks. “Poor thing.”
“At least she won’t have to live with the pain of not knowing what happened to her child,” I said.
Mimi put down her brush and knelt by my side. “I’m sorry I said those things to you, Lily. We all make mistakes. I know you’re only doing what you think is best. And after all, some poor woman who can’t have a child will be grateful. Look at Gertrude Sheldon. She’s been trying to have a baby for years.”
“Oh please, don’t wish that fate on my baby. Imagine what kind of mother Gertrude would make!”
“You’re right,” Mimi said, shaking her head, “but don’t worry. I had a letter from Gertrude last week in which she hints that the waters of Baden-Baden have done the trick and she’s finally pregnant.”
“Well, good for her,” I said. “Did she say anything about Vera?”
“Yes, she said that Vera was disgusted with Baden-Baden and all talk of babies and that she had gone to England to study pottery with Clarice Cliff. Haven’t you had a letter?”
“We agreed not to write. So as to give ourselves the freedom of mind as well as geography.”
“That sounds like something Vera would say.” Mimi squeezed my hand and got to her feet. “From what Gertrude says, I suppose you were right. Vera wouldn’t do very well with a baby. I only hope she’s worth it.”
I pointed to the mural. “This is worth it. This is what I’m good at, Mimi. This and telling stories. Not babies. The child deserves a mother who really wants it.”
I could see tears standing in her eyes. She leaned down and gave me an awkward embrace. I hugged her to me tightly and patted her back, as if I were comforting her. I didn’t tell her that when I saw that twisted red thing that came out of Tilly I’d thought: that’s what’s inside me. A changeling created out of dreams and pulp. A monster bred by a monstrous mother who wanted nothing more than to be rid of her own child and go back home.
When my baby was born, though, it wasn’t a monster at all. She wore a splash of blood on the side of her head like a dancer would wear a rose tucked behind her ear, but otherwise she was pink and white all over. Not a gnarled root, but a plump, perfect baby. She took my breath away.
When they came to take her, I asked if I could hold her awhile. I saw the nuns exchange a look, but Sister Margaret came and said they should let me.
That night, Mimi came to the infirmary and asked if I was sure. She looked as if she was afraid I’d be angry with her for asking again, so I took her hand so she would know I wasn’t. I drew her near so she could see the baby. “Look how beautiful she is,” I said. “Feel how strong her grip is.” I slid my hand out from under the baby’s so that her fingers clasped Mimi’s instead of mine. “They cling like ivy. That’s what I’ve asked Sister Margaret to call her. Oh, I know she’ll have a different name when she’s adopted, but I don’t want her to be without a name while she waits. And for a last name they’ll name her after St. Lucy’s daughter, who was carried safely away by a river. Ivy St. Clare, that’s the name I’ll remember her by.”