22
I have to run to make my seminar with the Merling twins. It’s all I can do to concentrate on the day’s reading—Angela Carter’s twentieth-century version of Cinderella, “Ashputtle.” Carter is one of my favorite authors, and this is one of my favorite stories, but the gruesome details seem especially troubling to me today. It’s a twist on the classic absent mother story in which the orphaned heroine receives supernatural help from her dead mother in the form of animal helpers, magic talismans, and fairy godmothers. In Carter’s version, though, the mother’s ghost enters the body of a bird that mutilates itself so that her daughter will have a dress to wear to the ball, and, in the final scene, the dead mother rescues her daughter from the ash-pit only to invite her to step into her coffin.
“I stepped into my mother’s coffin when I was your age,” the mother says to Ashputtle.
“I take that to mean that we’re doomed to repeat our mothers’ mistakes,” Peter Merling says. “The mother who has died in childbirth condemns her own child to marriage and childbirth and, thus, death.”
“But why doesn’t the mother come back and tell the daughter to flee—live some other life that doesn’t lead to entrapment and death?” Rebecca asks, her tone unusually emotional. “All this bloody sacrifice for your child—what good is it if you’re condemning your child to the same cycle of sex and death?”
I think of Lily Eberhardt’s decision to leave her child with nuns so that she could pursue an independent life. Then I think of my own grandmother, who gave up her ambitions to be a mother and then wouldn’t let her own daughter go to art school even though she’d been offered a scholarship. And when she tried to make some sort of reparation—leaving me the money to go to art school—I ended up leaving to have a baby. It’s like a family curse, Chloe had said. It seems to me right now that it’s the curse of all mothers and daughters. We sacrifice to give them what we didn’t have, but all we’ve done is to show them that’s all a woman can do: sacrifice herself or sacrifice her child. It all leads to the same place.
But I can hardly say that to Rebecca and Peter Merling. Instead I let them out early and go looking for Shelley. She’s in her studio arranging objects on a table.
“You’ve inspired me,” she says. “I haven’t done a still life in ages. I’m going to do my own Dead Project.”
“I wish the students hadn’t latched on to that name for it,” I say, looking at the objects that Shelley has chosen to represent her ancestors. It’s a peculiar assortment. She’s chosen a copy of her grandmother’s painting Ancient Priestess Worshipping at the Feet of Artemis and the parody of the painting that was in the Fakirs show. There are a number of references to the Art Students League and to the early days of the Arcadia Colony: a poster for the 1926 Annual League Costume Ball, a wreath of faded dried daisies that looks like the ones that Gertrude, Mimi, and Lily wore in the May Day picture I included in my own still life, a vase that has the Dorada emblem stamped on its side, and a faded scarf embroidered with gold fleur-de-lis. Shelley’s tableau is clearly meant to evoke the artistic legacy of her grandmother, but I’m surprised that several of the objects she’s chosen ridicule Gertrude. Then I recall how disdainful Shelley has been of her grandmother’s talent, how eager she was to distance herself from Gertrude Sheldon’s style and her history of mental illness. It strikes me that the Sheldon family relationship to art is even more cursed than my own.
“What’s this?” I ask, picking up a small brass disk. “It looks like a saint’s medal. Was your grandmother Catholic?”
“She converted to Catholicism while traveling in Italy the year before my mother was born. It drove her parents wild! Which is why she did it, of course. She claimed that she only was able to conceive my mother after praying at a Catholic shrine in Siena.”
I recall from Lily’s journal that Mimi Green said Gertrude had written her from Europe saying she had gotten pregnant after taking the waters at Baden-Baden, but I don’t say anything. I’m certainly not going to tell Shelley that I’ve got Lily’s journal. But it does make me think of something. “Do you have anything your grandmother wrote about the early days of Arcadia?”
“I’ll have to take a look. My grandfather Bennett burned most of her diaries and letters when she died. Her paintings and drawings, too.”
“Really? That’s awful.” The idea of a piece of original artwork—a one-of-a-kind—destroyed has always struck me as particularly awful.
“Well, they really weren’t any good. The only things that survived were some floral still lifes and her datebooks—endless calendars full of visiting schedules, afternoon teas, charity galas, and dinner parties. I did find some papers once that she’d hidden in an old sewing box. I’ll look through those and see if there’s anything worthwhile. Is there anything particular that you’re interested in?”
“I wondered if your grandmother was still in touch with Vera and Lily when Lily died in 1947, and if she wrote anything about it.”
“I’ll look,” Shelley says again, turning back to the objects on the table which she begins to rearrange. “Through my mother’s things, too.”
“Your mother?”
“Fleur Sheldon. She was one of the first students here and she stayed at Arcadia over the Christmas holidays that year. So she would have been here when Lily died. I’ll check my mother’s diaries to see if she wrote about it. No one burned her things, no doubt because she led such a boring life no one thought there could possibly be anything scandalous in them.”
On my way up to Beech Hall I spot Sally sitting with Chloe on the lawn beneath the copper beech. Although both girls have their sketchpads balanced on their knees, they aren’t drawing. Their heads are bent together, Chloe’s dark hair falling against Sally’s deep auburn. It’s a lovely scene, the deep purple of the copper beech and the chocolate and gold of the girls’ hair all remind me of the palette of the Impressionist painter édouard Vuillard. I’m tempted to stop and sketch—maybe I’ll take up painting again next—when the scene is ruined completely and irrevocably. Sally looks up and I see that her face is blanched with pain. Unable to help myself, I hurry toward her.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, scanning her body as if she were two and had just fallen on the playground. It’s all I can do not to start patting her for broken bones.
“It’s you!” Sally cries. “You told your whole class that you dropped out of art school because you got pregnant with me.”
“I did not!” I sink to my knees to get closer to her and glance at Chloe. I remember how she had stared at me in class. I had been about to tell the class that I dropped out because I got pregnant. It is as if she had read my mind. She seems to now as well, smiling a small secret smile as the blood rushes to my face.
“Chloe’s lying.” I regret the words as soon as they’re out of my mouth.
Chloe frowns. “I only told Sally that you dropped out of art school your junior year. We counted back and figured out it would have been about the time you got pregnant with Sally.”
“Was that the reason?” Sally asks.
Her eyes are wide and shining, glassy with tears. “Honey,” I say, reaching for her hand. “It was more complicated than that. You have to understand—”
She snatches her hand away and scrambles to her feet. “I understand perfectly. You’re jealous I have the chance to do what you couldn’t.”
She’s gone before I can say anything else, Chloe running after her, but really, what else can I say? As much as I love Sally, as much as any mother loves her daughter, isn’t it the dirty truth at the bottom of every fairy tale that there’s a little bit of the evil stepmother inside every mother?
I teach my next class in a fog, glad that Chloe’s not in it. How could I have so baldly accused a student of lying? What if she goes to Dean St. Clare and reports the conversation? But worse than the thought of getting in trouble with the dean is the memory of the betrayal in Sally’s eyes. I’ve always known that someday Sally would put together the dates of her conception and my leaving art school, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
At the end of class I find I can’t face the idea of going back to the cottage by myself. I’m afraid I’m turning into the evil witch who would live in such a place. So instead I climb the hill to the library, preferring to face the draconian Miss Bridewell rather than my own reflection in the mirror. When I ask her if she has all the newspaper accounts covering the death of Lily Eberhardt, she looks at me as if I’ve asked her to perform some impossible task like sorting out stacks of wheat and barley.
“We don’t have them sorted as such,” she says primly. “You’ll have to do the legwork. It’s all on microfilm and the microfilm is kept in the basement.”
“Actually,” a student aide with strawberry blond hair who’s been ordering books on a cart beside Miss Bridewell’s desk interrupts, “I pulled all those microfilms for a student who was doing research on Lily Eberhardt’s death earlier in the year.”
“But surely you reshelved those by now, Lynn.” Miss Bridewell removes her glasses to glare at the poor library aide. Remarkably, the girl seems unaffected by the librarian’s basilisk stare.
“Of course I did, Miss Bridewell, but it occurred to me that someone else might be interested in the same topic, so I made up a list of the pertinent references complete with the microfilm call numbers.” The intrepid aide opens a file drawer and deftly pulls out a file folder. “Here it is,” she says, handing me the sheet.
“That’s great,” I say, beaming at the girl (someone has to, I figure; Miss Bridewell is still looking at her, aghast).
“Well, then, if that’s all you need, I have work to do,” Miss Bridewell says.
“Um, if you could just tell me where the microfilm is kept—”
“I’ll show her,” the aide offers. “I’m done with this cart and I have to take it downstairs anyway.”
Miss Bridewell reluctantly gives permission for the aide to accompany me and even concedes to me riding down with her in the employee elevator. “Thank you, Lynn,” I say when the elevators doors slide shut between us and Miss Bridewell’s icy stare.
“Actually, it’s Glynn. I’ve been working in the library for three years now. Miss Bridewell signs my timesheets and she’s a woman who knows the Dewey Decimal System by heart, but somehow she doesn’t see the G at the beginning of my name.”
“People are funny that way. They don’t see what they don’t expect to see. Glynn’s a pretty name, though.”
“Thanks. My grandmother’s maiden name was McGlynn. My mom just got rid of the ‘Mc.’ She says a girl doesn’t need the ‘Mc’ anyway because it means ‘son of and that it made up for me taking my father’s last name.”
“Your mother’s quite the feminist.”
“Yeah,” Glynn says as the elevator door opens, “she’s pretty cool. Here we are. The microfilm machine is over here. If you like, I can pull those rolls for you.”
“I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with Miss Bridewell,” I say, trying not to wish that Sally were more like this polite young woman who thinks her mother is cool.
“Please,” she says, rolling her eyes, “she never comes down here. She says the dust aggravates her asthma. Besides, as I said, I pulled those rolls not long ago so they’ll be easy for me to find.”
“That would be great,” I say, sitting down at the machine. While she’s gone I take out a pen and notebook. Then I play with the knobs, trying to remember how to use the archaic machine. I haven’t had to look up anything that wasn’t archived on the Internet in a long time.
Glynn returns with a stack of tiny boxes. She takes one out and, without waiting for me to confess my inability, shows me how to load it into the machine. Then she shows me how to make copies by feeding coins into a slot on the side of the machine. She waits to see if I’m able to find the first story on her list and then tells me she’ll be down here if I need her. I listen to her retreating footsteps echoing through the stacks of books and then focus on the Kingston paper’s account of Lily Eberhardt’s death. It’s dated January 8, 1948, and the headline reads: LOCAL ARTIST FOUND DEAD OF EXPOSURE AFTER WORST SNOWSTORM SINCE 1888. Poor Lily. Her death seemed little more than a side story to the weather. I scan backward through the preceding week and see that the storm, which began on the evening of December 26, was indeed a dramatic event for the village of Arcadia Falls. The area was without electricity for more than a week. The Hudson River was jammed with ice floes from Albany to New York City and train service was suspended.
No wonder it took them so long to find Lily’s body.
I make a copy of the January 8 article and look for the next one on Glynn’s list. This one, dated January 10, at least gives a fuller account of Lily’s death and includes her full name in the headline. LILY EBERHARDT, BELOVED CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHOR, DIES IN BLIZZARD.
Lily Eberhardt, whose illustrated fairy tales have delighted children for many years now, was found dead last week in Witte Clove in Arcadia Falls, New York, a mile from the artists’ colony where she lived and worked. Her companion and patroness, Vera Beecher, explained to the local police that Miss Eberhardt had left her residence early on the evening of December 26 just as the snow was beginning to fall.
She was meeting Mr. Virgil Nash in order to travel down to New York City by train to attend an opening for Mr. Nash’s paintings at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. Miss Beecher didn’t know that her friend had failed to meet Mr. Nash at the train station until receiving a letter from Mr. Nash on January 7 that made it clear Miss Eberhardt was not with him, at which point searchers were dispatched to look for Miss Eberhardt. Because she was known to use the path that ran through Witte Clove to travel to the village, that area was searched first.
I notice that no mention is made of Nash and Lily meeting in the barn. Nor does the reporter comment on the oddity of a woman walking on a dangerous path at night to catch a train in a village four miles from her home.
The searchers who found her said that she was buried under two feet of snow. “She must have become disoriented in the storm and was overcome with exhaustion,” Mr. Pickering of the Arcadia Falls Fire Department conjectured. “We get a few like this every big snowfall.”
Locals remember that in the blizzard of 1888
I scroll to the end of the story to see if there’s anything more about Lily, but the rest is dedicated to previous deaths (a Palenville woman who died six feet from her house, a doctor from Troy who died trying to attend a childbirth) and to comparisons between this snowfall and the legendary blizzard of 1888. Only at the very end does the reporter give the date and time for a memorial service to be held for Lily at Beech Hall.
Miss Vera Beecher requests that no flowers be sent. Donations may be made to the Lily Eberhardt Scholarship. Please address all inquiries to Miss Beecher’s personal assistant, Miss Ivy St. Clare.
Interesting, I think. Ivy was only nineteen and already she was Vera Beecher’s personal assistant.
After copying the article, I look down at the sheet that Glynn gave me and see that there’s one more story on this roll of microfilm. I scroll ahead and find it, dated January 15, 1948.
Ernest T. Shackleton, Medical Examiner for the Albany County Coroner’s Office, announced today that Miss Lily Eberhardt did not die of hypothermia as had been conjectured, but from a contusion to her skull. Miss Eberhardt, a local artist and children’s book author, was found buried beneath several feet of snow after the record-making blizzard on December 26. It was assumed that she had died of exposure to the elements, but instead she sustained severe trauma to the head and bled to death while she lay in a steep ravine only a mile from her home.
“Her death is still a result of the snowstorm,” said Miss Ivy St. Clare, the assistant director of the Arcadia Colony where Miss Eberhardt lived and worked. “She fell in the snowstorm and died. It’s a senseless tragedy either way.”
“The world has lost a talented artist and I have lost my best friend,” Miss Beecher (who declined to be interviewed for this article) said at the memorial service last week. Many notables from the New York art world were present, including Gertrude Sheldon, founder of the Sheldon Museum. A bronze statue that Virgil Nash had made depicting Miss Eberhardt, called The Water Lily, stood next to the casket, and a telegram from Mr. Nash was read at the service. “Lily Eberhardt was a gifted artist whose work has always been an inspiration to me. In more recent years, she has inspired me by posing for me. She has been my muse and my friend and will be sadly missed.” Mr. Nash had sailed to Europe and so was not able to attend.
What a jerk, I think, yanking the microfilm out of the machine so roughly that a piece crackles and breaks near the end of the roll. I immediately look around to see if anyone has observed me destroy school property, but the library basement seems to be completely deserted. I feel ashamed at my outburst but still angry at Nash. His muse! If he’d gone to check on Lily when she didn’t meet him at the barn he might have found her in the clove before she bled to death. What a self-centered a*shole! “Most artists are,” I can hear my grandmother saying. “Believe me, you’re better off marrying a reliable workingman like your grandfather Jack, a man who supported his family through the Depression, rather than a flighty artist who’ll spend the grocery money on paint and canvas.” She wouldn’t have been surprised at Virgil Nash leaving Lily to an unknown fate in the snow while he rushed to catch his train to New York so he wouldn’t be late for his big show.
The idea of Lily dying as she did suddenly makes me feel cold in this damp, dreary basement. I fish a sweater out of my book bag, wrap it around my shoulders, and load the next spool of film, determined to read the rest of the articles quickly without getting lost in my thoughts. Which isn’t hard. The coverage of Lily’s death in the city papers focuses on her artistic accomplishments and the history of the Arcadia Colony, most of which I already know, but it’s interesting to see how the contemporary press regarded the colony and Lily.
“Lily Eberhardt was one of the most renowned artists of the colony,” a New York Herald Tribune reporter wrote. “She will be remembered for her haunting fairy tales and evocative illustrations, but also for the portraits and statues of her by Mr. Virgil Nash which were recently displayed at the National Arts Club (see review December 27, 1947).”
Ha, I think. Lily’s reputation would, in fact, not fare as well as the reporter’s expectations. Her fairy tales would go out of print and what credit was given them would go to Vera Beecher. As for Nash’s portraits of her, they hung here at Arcadia in near obscurity. The statue he’d done of her (no doubt the same one that stood by her casket) now gathers dust in an unlit alcove. It reminds me of something else my grandmother used to say: “Artists always think they’ll buy themselves immortality with their art, but there’s nothing more fickle than fame. Your children are your immortality—not some scribbles on paper or canvas.”
I haven’t learned anything of importance and the whole story has left me depressed. I put the last roll back in its box and take it and the others back to Glynn. I find her in a carrel in the far corner of the stacks, curled up comfortably in an old easy chair, her feet tucked beneath her, reading the fifth Harry Potter book.
“Did you find what you needed?” she asks, unfurling herself from her cozy nook.
“I think so. Thanks for your help. It was resourceful of you to think of making that list.”
She smiles at the compliment, unused, I imagine, to getting any from the ill-tempered librarian. “I figured once I’d gone to the trouble of looking up the articles I might as well make a record of them. I didn’t think Isabel would be the last one doing that research. Oh gosh, that sounds morbid doesn’t it? Given that it was the last research Isabel ever did.”
“Isabel? You mean Isabel Cheney was the one who last looked at these articles?”
“Uh huh. In fact, she came in here the day she died.”