21
I stare for a long time at the name Lily gave her baby. When I finally look up, I see that the sky is lightening outside my window. I’ve stayed up all night reading and I’ve only gotten through half of Lily’s journal. I turn to the next page and read:
When I returned to Arcadia, I found that Vera had built for us a little cottage, which she called Fleur-de-Lis in my honor. “I name this house for you,” she said, standing on the threshold holding a single white lily like a baton. “My Lily of the valley, my pure Lily, my Lily among the thorns.” Then she waved me inside with the lily and showed me the cottage, pointing out each and every detail. She’d designed it herself to be neat and trim as a ship’s cabin and she had it fitted out with all manner of hidden cubbies and secret pigeonholes in which she hid surprises for me to find.
Hidden cubbies and secret pigeonholes like the one behind the panel on the fireplace where I’d found the journal. If Vera had designed it, then why hadn’t she found the journal there? Or had she found it and then put it back? But if she had found it, why had Ivy thought it was lost?
All the unanswered questions make me restless. I get up, still clutching the journal in my hands, and pad barefoot into the hall. I come to rest in the doorway of Sally’s empty room, feeling a pang at her absence but also a reminder of the last months of my pregnancy. We’d moved out to the house in Great Neck (Jude’s parents, thrilled that he’d given up art for Wall Street, had loaned us the money for a down payment), but we hadn’t had time to buy furniture yet. I would wander through the empty rooms trying to imagine what our lives were going to be like there. The only room we’d really furnished was the nursery. I’d stand on the threshold, my hand resting on my swollen stomach, and try to picture the child inside growing up in this pretty pink-and-white room. There was something about the stillness of the house in the middle of the night that seemed timeless, and yet also full of all time, as if the empty, moonlit rooms held our future as well as our past.
How often, I wonder now, had Lily wandered through this house at night wondering what had become of the child she gave up? She’d given the baby a name so that she could think of her. Did she know the child still carried that name? Did she know the baby had stayed at the orphanage? For she must have, since she kept that name. Lily must have found out at some point and brought Ivy here.
I recall from my research that Ivy St. Clare came to Arcadia in 1945 when she was sixteen years old as part of a new scholarship program. I’d been sure that the program was initiated by Lily, but on my first day here Ivy had insisted that it was Vera who had chosen her, not Lily. Now I’m surer than ever that it was Lily. She must have found out that her child was still living at St. Lucy’s and contrived the scholarship program as a way to get Ivy to Arcadia without arousing Vera’s suspicions. But then she let Ivy believe it was Vera who had chosen her. Why? And why hadn’t she ever told Ivy that she was her mother?
The answers might well be in the book I’m holding in my hand, but I can’t finish reading it now. It’s already past dawn. I hear mourning doves cooing outside Sally’s open window. I turn and walk down the stairs, cradling the book in my arms as if it is a child I’m trying to protect. Ivy must have known that there was something in Lily’s journal of import to her. She accused Dora and Ada of stealing the journal after Lily’s death. When she saw my still life she focused on the green book. Did she recognize it as Lily’s long-lost journal? Did she believe me when I had told her the book in my still life was one of my own? If she didn’t, she would come looking for it—and I didn’t want her to find it until I finished reading.
I stand in front of the fireplace looking at the central panel. Vera must have known where to look once she got the note from Lily … unless Vera never got the note. Ivy said she had given Vera the note, but what if she hadn’t? What if she’d only told Vera that Lily had run off and kept the note with its endearments and pledge of eternal love? If Vera hadn’t read it, then she wouldn’t have known where to look for the journal. And if Ivy had read the note …
I open the book and reread the note. You are my heart, I read. I have left my story for you in the heart and hearth of our lives together. I had immediately assumed that she meant the hearth of the cottage—as Vera would, I imagine, since she knew about the secret panel—but there was someplace else I’d read that phrase. I flip through the journal and find it in Lily’s description of the early days of the colony. Vera said she hoped the pottery kiln would become a place for the artists to gather in the evening—the heart and hearth of the community.
If Ivy had heard the kiln referred to that way she may have thought Lily was leaving her journal with Dora and Ada. And that was why Ivy went to them looking for it. She didn’t know about the secret panel in the hearth.
One thing’s for sure. If Ivy hadn’t found the journal here over sixty years ago, she wasn’t going to find it here now. I open the panel and slide the journal back into its hiding place and then close the panel, brushing my fingers over the carving of the tiny baby nestled in the roots. No wonder Lily put the journal here—she’d hidden the secret of her lost child in the roots that hid the changeling baby.
I’m surprised to see how excited my students are about the Dead Project, as they’re all calling it now. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet many have already gotten their parents to send digital copies of old photographs. They seem eager to share their pictures, so I shelve the discussion of Bettelheim for another day and ask them to hold up their photos and tell the stories behind them.
Many of the pictures are of families on vacations or graduation shots or wedding portraits. Their stories are fairly straightforward. But some quickly become more complicated.
“This is my mother’s graduation picture from Vassar.” Hannah holds up a picture of a dark-haired girl with her own Botticelli features standing with two other girls in dark robes on a lawn beneath a bright red maple tree.
“Wow, she’s really beautiful,” Tori Pratt says. “But you know,” she adds, “that’s not a graduation picture. My mom went to Vassar and she has a picture of herself in her robe, but without that white collar thingy they wear, and she says that’s how you can tell it’s convocation, not graduation. It’s something students do at the beginning of their senior year. And look, the leaves on this tree are red. This picture was taken in the fall, not spring when they hold graduation.”
“Huh,” Hannah says looking closer at the picture and furrowing her brows. “I’m pretty sure she said it was her graduation picture.”
“Maybe she mixed them up,” I suggest.
“Maybe,” Hannah echoes, her brow still furrowed. “I’ll have to ask.”
Clyde, too, presents a story that seems to shift as he tells it. The picture he’s chosen is one of his grandfather as a young man in an army uniform. He’s clean-shaven, his hair cropped short. He looks so young it’s hard to believe anyone would send him off to war.
“He signed up right after Pearl Harbor,” Clyde says. “My grandma says everybody did. And she always tells how she went out and got him this pocket watch so he’d take it with him and not forget her. But you know, last night I was thinking about that story and I looked at the date on my grandfather’s watch. It says, ‘To Harold from Sarah, June 3, 1942.’ But Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941. So what was he doing for those six months?”
“Can you ask them?” Hannah asks.
Clyde shakes his head. “They’re both dead. I e-mailed my mother last night, but she said she had no idea. She said Poppa had always told that story about joining up right after Pearl Harbor and Grandma had always told the story about giving him the watch, but no one had ever looked at the two pieces to see that they didn’t match.”
“Because those stories were part of your family’s folklore,” I say. “You don’t question the details. They take on the aura of legend. Although the story may change with each telling, certain phrases are always repeated. Like ‘Back in my day, we had to walk to school—”
“Or ‘When I was your age,’” Hannah interrupts, “‘we couldn’t look things up on the Internet, we had to go the library.’”
“And we had to walk to it through five feet of snow,” Clyde adds.
“Yeah,” Tori Pratt chimes in, “my grandmother is always going on about how little they had in the Depression compared to all the stuff we have now. And then she always says, ‘We didn’t have much, but we had each other.’” Tori’s voice goes up an octave and quavers to imitate her grandmother. She rolls her eyes but smiles, and I find myself returning her smile, glad to see Tori’s world-weary veneer crack a bit.
“My grandmother,” I say, “always started her stories with ‘Back in my day a woman was supposed to choose between marriage and work.’ She always said it was good my mother had a stable job, like teaching. Grandma had worked at a magazine before she’d met my grandfather, but she gave it up when she got married. She’d say …” I close my eyes to recall the exact words. Instantly I’m seated at the green-and-white Porceliron table in my grandmother’s Brooklyn Heights kitchen. I’m drawing in one of the blank sketchbooks my grandmother seemed to have in endless supply. “‘When I had your mother I gave up my job even though it was the Depression and Jack and I had precious little to live on.’”
I open my eyes and find that my audience has grown. Ivy St. Clare has come into the doorway and is listening to my story.
“But then as I got older and I was more interested in art, she’d say: ‘Your grandfather kept his job during the Depression because he was a bookkeeper. People always need bookkeepers, but art they can do without. The magazines laid off the illustrators and advertising staff. You can’t eat art,’ she’d always end by saying.”
The class laughs at the last line and I realize I’d slipped into my grandmother Miriam’s Brooklynese. “I grew up with both these stories, endlessly repeated, but never once did I ask my grandmother, ‘Which was it? Did you give up your job in advertising to raise a family or did you lose your job in the Depression?’ And I never wondered why, if she thought being an artist was such a bad career move, she gave me sketchpads and crayons on every birthday.”
“Weird,” Chloe says.
“Can you ask her now?” Hannah asks.
“She died when I was seventeen. And that was another strange thing. In her will she left me a small bequest to go to art school. She was specific that it be art school. My mother was ticked off. At first I thought it was because she’d left the money to me, but I overheard her telling some of her teacher friends when they paid a shivah call that what really irked her was that my grandmother and grandfather had refused to let her go to art school even when she got a scholarship.”
“Damn,” Clyde says, “no wonder she was pissed.”
“So did you go to art school?”
“Yes,” I say, “I started at Pratt….” I falter, recalling only now where this story ends. “But I dropped out my junior year.” I don’t add that I quit because I got pregnant with Sally.
“It’s like a family curse,” Chloe says. “Three generations of frustrated women artists.”
I try to laugh off the comment—it sounds so melodramatic!—but then I see the disapproving expression on Ivy St. Clare’s face and think of what I learned about her origins last night. If she knew that her mother abandoned her in an orphanage so that she could pursue an artistic life, what might she have to say about family curses?
“Well,” I say, “maybe that’s why I came to Arcadia. To break the family curse.”
“Do you think it’s wise to use your own personal history in the classroom?” Dean St. Clare asks me when my students have left.
“I’m asking them to use their personal history. I think it’s only fair that I’m willing to model the assignment by using mine.”
“Did you get your ideas about teaching from your mother? I hadn’t realized she was a teacher.”
“She taught third grade for more than thirty-five years. She was a master of the shoebox diorama and the Palmer Method of penmanship.”
“Really?” the Dean asks. “The Palmer Method? That’s what the nuns taught us. I would think that it would have been out of fashion by the time your mother was around.”
“She was old-fashioned,” I say, not wanting to get into the fact that my mother had me so late in life. Instead I try to turn the focus on her. “You were taught by nuns? At a Catholic school?”
“At a Catholic orphanage, to be precise. That’s where I was when Vera Beecher rescued me by giving me the scholarship to come here.” She touches the pin she always wears. “It’s a saint’s medal,” she says, noticing me staring at it. “St. Lucy and her daughter, St. Clare, rising to heaven on a cloud. The nuns gave it to me when I left. Vera said it ought to reflect who I had become, not just where I came from, so she learned metalworking so she could set it in a wreath of ivy for me.”
“You see, that’s what I was trying to get across to the class today. We all carry myths from our family history—”
“As I just told you, I don’t have a family history. I was raised in an orphanage.”
“But of course you do. Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt were your family. You’ve told me twice now that Vera Beecher ‘rescued’ you. That’s your story—”
“Are you saying I made it up?” Ivy St. Clare’s small wrinkled face appears even more pinched than usual. Her hands are coiled into tight fists. Perhaps I’ve gone too far, but there’s no way out now but to go farther.
“No, of course not. What I’m saying is that you’ve accepted a version of your story because it’s what you’ve always believed to be true: that Vera Beecher chose you for that scholarship. But mightn’t it have been Lily who actually chose you?”
“Lily Eberhardt told me herself that Vera chose me,” Ivy says, shaking her head.
“From what I know about Lily—from what I’m learning about her through Vera’s diaries and their letters,” I add quickly so she doesn’t ask me again about Lily’s journal, “she gave Vera credit for everything she did. She idolized Vera.”
“You’re wrong,” Ivy says. “It was Vera who idolized Lily. So much so that it crushed her when Lily ran away. I saw Vera on the night that Lily left to meet Virgil Nash. She was mad with grief. She ran after her in a blizzard, wearing nothing but a robe and slippers—” Ivy chokes back her next words in a gargled rasp, as if her anger was strangling her.
“Vera followed Lily out into the storm?” I ask. “I thought you said that you were at the cottage all night with her and that Vera didn’t realize that Lily had died in the clove until weeks later.”
“I didn’t say she followed her all the way to the clove. I caught up to her and made her come back to the cottage. I stayed with her for the rest of that night. We sat up by the fire. Vera couldn’t sleep. She kept hoping that Lily would return. At dawn, when she realized that she wasn’t coming back, she took up the fire poker and smashed the tiles above the fireplace. She was never the same after that. Lily had crushed her. So don’t ask me to believe that Lily was the one who saved me from the orphanage. I’d rather have rotted in St. Lucy’s than think I owe my salvation to that woman.”
She waits a moment, as if daring me to argue, and then turns on her heel and leaves. I watch her go, speechless, wondering how much worse Ivy St. Clare would feel if she knew that the woman who destroyed her idol was her own mother.