24
“You stay here,” I say, trying to make my voice sound firm and confident. I squeeze Sally’s hand and then reach across her to open the glove compartment before remembering that the flashlight isn’t there anymore. “I’ll check it out.”
“But Mom, what if it’s a burglar?”
“It’s probably one of the housemaids that Dymphna’s sent over.”
I don’t really think Dymphna’s sent anyone at this time of night, but I don’t want Sally to be too scared—or to follow me into the house. I get out of the car, checking to make sure both doors are locked, and approach the house, wishing I at least had the flashlight to wield as a weapon. Even without a weapon though, if there’s an intruder inside, I’ll do whatever I have to to keep him or her from getting to Sally. I slide the key into the lock, but before I can turn it the door swings open to reveal Ivy St. Clare, wrapped dramatically in a dark shawl.
“There you are at last! We’ve been waiting for you to return. Is your daughter with you? Sheriff Reade said you had collected her.”
I’m so taken aback by the sight of Dean St. Clare in my house that I don’t answer. I peer past her into the living room and see Shelley Drake and Chloe Dawson sitting across from each other in the lettuce green chairs. Chloe looks as wilted as the leaves in the upholstery.
“How did you get into my house?” I ask the dean. “And what are you doing here?”
She adjusts the wrap over her shoulders and sniffs. “I still have my key from when I used to do little errands for Vera. As for what we’re doing here—Sally and Chloe have broken school rules by going into the village at night and going into a drinking establishment. It’s my policy to address miscreants of joint crimes together and in the same manner, but since that man wouldn’t release Sally into Miss Drake’s custody we’ve had to wait for you to get back with her. You wouldn’t want your daughter to receive special treatment, would you?” St. Clare’s glance shifts from my face to something over my right shoulder. I turn and see that Sally’s come to the doorway. She’s not looking at me, though; she’s looking at Chloe who’s mouthing some silent message.
“I don’t expect her to receive special treatment, but I’ve already talked to her and I think I can handle it from here.”
“That’s all very well and good, but our rules state that there are consequences for misbehavior. Vera always insisted that the students perform some work for the communal good of the school. Miss Drake and I thought that it would be appropriate for the girls to clean up from dinner tonight and for each night this week.”
“Now?” I ask. “You want them to start”—I look down at my watch—“at ten o’clock at night?”
“Yes, well, if we’d been able to collect Sally earlier they would have already been done. Still, there’s plenty of time for them to finish and I did expressly tell Dymphna to leave the cleaning.”
“But I wanted to talk some more to Sally—” I begin, turning to her. If I expect her to look grateful for my intervention I’d be disappointed. She’s staring at a spot on the ceiling, ignoring me. Any connection we began to make on the drive back from town has vanished.
“Do you want Miss Dawson to do all the work herself, then?” the dean asks.
“Mom, that wouldn’t be fair. Let me go with Chloe. I’m perfectly ready to scrub some dishes.”
“I’ll make sure they get back to the dorm all right,” Shelley says, speaking for the first time. She gives me a small smile, glancing nervously at the dean to see if she’s looking, but Ivy’s attention is fixed on the mantel above the fireplace. I feel a guilty flush steal over me as I recall what’s hidden there, and I have to forcibly remind myself that Ivy St. Clare doesn’t know about the hiding place behind the carved panel. I turn back to Sally, catching Shelley’s eye as I do.
“Is that what you want, Sally?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I guess it’s what I have to do. Can I change, though? Someone spilled beer on my jeans in that skanky bar.”
Dean St. Clare nods and then, when Sally’s gone upstairs, turns to me. “I hope you understand why this is necessary. If Sally learns that she can hide behind you she’ll have a very hard time here. And, if you don’t mind me saying, Sally is a very troubled young girl.”
“She lost her father a year ago,” I respond, the blood rushing to my face.
St. Clare gives me a pitying look. “I grew up an orphan. My mother abandoned me at birth and God knows if my father even knew I existed. The first family who adopted me returned me. I could have spent my life making excuses for bad behavior, but instead I determined to make something of myself. You’ve got to let Sally realize that for herself.”
“Of course I understand that, and I admire what you’ve been able to accomplish. But you did have help. Lily Eberhardt and Vera Beecher gave you a second chance when they gave you the scholarship to study here.”
“That’s true, but it was never a free ride. I knew from the minute I stepped foot on the grounds that I’d have to work to earn a place here. And I have worked every day of my life to maintain that place. You have no idea what I’ve had to do.” She’s holding herself so rigid the skin seems stretched taut over the bones of her face. Her hands are coiled into fists and her collarbones stand out as sharp as stone ledges. It’s as if something inside her were struggling to be free of the thin layer of flesh and blood. Something sharp cracks and for a second I think it’s Ivy herself, held so taut that she’s snapped like a branch in the wind, but it’s only Shelley fiddling with one of the pokers by the fireplace.
“Sorry,” she says. “It looked like it was about to fall.”
I glance nervously at the mantel, afraid that the secret compartment has sprung open and disgorged Lily’s journal and all its secrets of Ivy’s orphaned past, but it’s securely closed. I turn to find Sally coming down the stairs in sweatpants and Jude’s Pratt sweatshirt (she must have been dying to get out of Callum Reade’s), tying her hair back in a workmanlike ponytail. As she lowers her arm I catch a glimpse of red and green on her right wrist. I assumed that Callum had gotten to Fatz Katz before Sally could get a tattoo, but stepping forward and grabbing her wrist I see I assumed wrong.
“It’s no big deal, Mom. And don’t start in about hepatitis. Fatz uses sterile needles.”
It’s a tiny rosebud—about the most innocent image she could have chosen—but still I feel just as I did when I saw the scars left over from the chicken pox she had when she was three, like life was leaving its mark on her all too soon.
After they leave I prowl around the cottage like a mother cat who’s had her kittens taken from her. I walk from room to room, unable to rid myself of the idea that Sally’s in danger. I try to reassure myself that Shelley Drake will keep an eye on the girls, but Shelley, although well-intentioned, is a bit of a flake. In Sally’s room, I pick up Callum Reade’s discarded sweatshirt and clutch it to my chest as if I could fill it with Sally again. Instead I inhale the scent of wood shavings and lemon oil, the same scent I’d caught on him the day at the barn. Shivering, I pull the sweatshirt on and go back downstairs.
I head straight to the fireplace and open the secret compartment. Lily’s journal is right where I left it. It was ridiculous to think that after going undetected for forty years Ivy would stumble upon it now. Still, I didn’t like having her so close to the hiding place. It makes me realize how disappointed I’d be if the journal was taken from me before I got a chance to finish it. I take the journal out, curl up on the living room couch, bundled in Callum’s sweatshirt and one of my grandmother’s old afghans, and settle in to read, determined to get to the end of Lily’s story at last.
Our lives in Fleur-de-Lis were full of little surprises. Vera delighted in giving me small presents and in finding ways to make me happy. She had made good on her promise to buy a printing press and that fall she invited a printer from the city, Bill Adams, to teach us how to print our own books. Anita Day from the Guild of Book Workers came for the next three summers to teach us bookbinding. In the fall of 1930 we published our first book, The Changeling Girl, in an edition of one hundred copies. We were still new to the process and made so many mistakes that only seventy were worth keeping. We sent them out that year to friends for Christmas presents. Vera thought the story was appropriate to the times and to the economic hardships that so many were experiencing. In our Christmas card (also printed on our new press) Vera wrote, “I hope you will enjoy this little story about a poor girl who helps her family through hard times and finds happiness in good, honest work.” I was glad that was all Vera saw in the story.
In the card we sent to Mimi Green, who had married Johnnie and moved back to Brooklyn, I wrote an extra note. “You’ll perhaps see something else in this story.”
We didn’t hear back from Mimi—not even a thank-you note—which annoyed Vera, who, for all her championing of the unconventional artistic life, was a stickler for the conventions of good manners. “You see what happens when women marry and have children,” Vera said, striking Mimi off our Christmas list. “They abandon all their old friends.”
“Gertrude hasn’t abandoned us,” I pointed out mischievously.
“If only she would,” Vera groaned. Having a healthy baby girl in the spring of 1929 had done nothing to make Gertrude Sheldon more maternal or stable. When she came back from Europe, she’d retreated with the child to the Sheldon’s country estate on an island in Maine, telling everyone that her daughter’s constitution was delicate and couldn’t risk the contagion and heat of New York City. Later there were rumors that Gertrude had actually spent the summer in a sanatorium and that she was suffering from nervous exhaustion following her confinement. She was still in seclusion the following summer, which also annoyed Vera—not because she missed Gertrude’s presence, but because Gertrude had lured Virgil Nash to her home in Maine. We heard she had promised him her patronage, and Nash did indeed become wealthy from painting portraits of the Sheldon family and their circle.
I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to face Nash. Even when Gertrude returned to Arcadia a few years later, Nash stayed away. Perhaps he was avoiding me, or perhaps he was embarrassed by the paintings he was doing. His society portraits had made him rich, but they were facile and flattering. He must have felt the gap between him and his fellow artists widen as many of our friends’ fortunes declined in the coming years.
Vera told me in the beginning of 1930 that she’d lost a great many of her holdings in the stock market and that she would have to give up the New York town house, but that if I was willing to practice some basic economies, we could still afford to live simply at Arcadia all the year round. I told her that nothing would make me happier than to spend the whole year at Arcadia. In truth, I enjoyed the economies forced upon us. At last I could be useful to her! I knew how to cook and clean and grow vegetables. I even convinced her to get a cow and some hens so that we could produce our own milk and eggs.
Many of our artist friends were not as fortunate as we were, and so we gave them a home in the summer, a place that would relieve them of the day-to-day struggle to survive, where they could still draw and paint and make pottery and books and furniture. There were many who survived off the goods they produced at Arcadia during those summers.
And so, although I was not ignorant of the need around us, I have to admit that the decade of the thirties was the happiest time of my life. We had enough while many did not, we had the means to help our friends a little, we had our work, and, most of all, Vera and I had each other. It was Vera now who received commissions for important murals—for post offices and banks, colleges, and even one state capitol. I was her assistant and her model, but after the chapel of St. Lucy’s I never again wanted to work on such a large scale.
“I am content with my fairy tales,” I told her, “and my drawings of my make-believe places.” It was true: I was happy.
Until the day I learned about Ivy.
Of course I had thought about her. Sister Margaret had been right about that. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t wonder where she was, what sort of family had taken her, what she looked like. But I knew that the rules of St. Lucy’s strictly forbade any of the mothers to make inquiries concerning the babies they gave up. I knew, too, that it was a foolish wish. What if she wasn’t happy? Or worse, what if she had gotten sick and died? So many children did in those years. Gertrude was always talking about the dangers of polio, meningitis, measles, and a host of other illnesses that could carry off a child if a mother didn’t enforce the most stringent sanitary practices in her household. I wasn’t sure if I wished my child a mother like Gertrude, who kept her daughter physically safe but turned her into a fretful neurotic, or a more loving, but relaxed mother who might not anticipate every ailment. However, once I had the thought in my head that Ivy could have died, I had to know.
In the summer of 1944 Vera received a commission to paint a mural for a women’s college in northeastern Pennsylvania. When we arrived there I saw that the college was not far from St. Lucy’s. I told her one day that I wanted to visit the convent to see the mural that Mimi and I had done to see how it was holding up. “I’d like to get some good photographs,” I told her. I was afraid she’d offer to go with me, but I made sure that I picked a day when the models for the frieze she was working on were there so she couldn’t leave. Vera was clearly annoyed that I wouldn’t be there to mix her paints, but I’d found a replacement.
“But no one knows how to get the colors right but you,” she complained.
I assured her that I’d left the precise formulas with my replacement (an art student at the college who seemed levelheaded) and left before Vera could think of any other objections. As I traveled east on the same train line I had taken in the other direction sixteen years before, I thought about how dependent on me Vera had grown over the years. It was not that I minded doing things for her—I would have gladly laid down my life for her—but it saddened me to see a woman of her strengths grown petulant and demanding. She ought to have some other outlet for her domineering spirit.
It was then that I began to conceive in my mind the idea of a prepatory school for the arts. We had long attracted young artists who came for the summer to study with our more experienced artists, but it was a haphazard arrangement that occupied only a few months of the year. There was no consistency of instruction, no organized course of study, no philosophy. After a summer or two, many of the most talented young women drifted away, married, had children, and gave up their art, or treated it as a hobby to fill an idle hour instead of their vocation. I felt that we—Vera and I and Arcadia—could do better. If we formed ourselves into a school we could really prepare young artists—especially young women, I couldn’t help but think—to support themselves. We would teach the fine arts, of course, but also illustration, graphic design, textiles, printing, bookbinding … the decorative arts that could provide a practical income while also making the world a more beautiful place. By the time I arrived at Easton, I had mapped out a plan for the Arcadia School of the Arts. I had already decided that there would be a scholarship program for poor girls who exhibited remarkable talents in the arts.
The town of Easton felt oddly deserted when I alighted at the train station. A driver met me at the station and drove me up to St. Lucy’s in a rattling and rusted old Buick instead of Johnnie’s pony cart. He told me the town had been given its death sentence.
“The buildings are all to be razed and burned down to make way for the new reservoir,” he said. “They’d have started on it already if not for the war, but it’s only a matter of time now. This whole valley will be underwater in another ten years.”
“What about St. Lucy’s?” I asked, thinking of the girls who found their way here from the city. Where would they go if St. Lucy’s was gone? What would happen to the orphans?
“St. Lu’s is right on top of the taking line, but it’s not likely the city will want a bunch of nuns perched over their water supply. There’s talk of moving it to the other side of the mountain, but Sister Margaret, the old nun who runs the place, don’t like the idea. She says the place was chosen because it was like the spot in Ireland where the original St. Lucy put her baby in the river. She says that if St. Lucy could entrust her only child to the waters, she can entrust the convent to these waters. She refuses to make plans to move. Frankly, I think the old bird—no disrespect meant,” he said, crossing himself, “has gone a bit touched in the head.”
I was alarmed at the driver’s description of Sister Margaret. I had hoped that she would be able to tell me what had become of my baby. But then, maybe it was better if she didn’t remember me too well, since it was not permitted for the unwed mothers of St. Lucy’s to ask after their lost babies.
By the time I arrived at St. Lucy’s I had devised a plan. I would tell Sister Margaret that my benefactor, Vera Beecher, had decided that her new school would save a spot for any child born at St. Lucy’s. I would need a list of children born there from, say, 1927 to 1930, with their birthdates and present addresses. I should be able to figure out from her birthdate the present location of my daughter.
When I came to stand on the threshold of the convent door, though, I found that I was frightened. I was afraid of what I might learn about my child’s fate. As the driver carried my suitcase inside, I went instead into the little chapel of St. Lucy’s, the one that Mimi and I had painted. I remembered that Sister Margaret had said that many of the girls went into the chapel first to collect themselves before entering the convent. That was why she’d thought it was so important that the paintings there should be inspirational and comforting.
There was one person in the chapel when I entered it. I thought at first that she must be one of the pregnant girls, praying to the saint for guidance, but then I saw that she was only a child and that she wasn’t praying. She was drawing.
She was an ugly little thing in a threadbare flannel jumper that hung loosely to her bare and scabby knees, worn over a starched white shirt buttoned high around her thin neck. Her short black hair looked like it had been hacked into the shape of a bowl. She was hunched over her sketchpad and I thought at first that she might be deformed—a hunchback, perhaps, or a polio survivor. I walked up behind her quietly so as not to startle her. When I looked over her shoulder at her drawing, though, all of her imperfections faded into nothingness. The scene she had chosen to sketch was of St. Lucy giving her child to the River Clare. Not only had she captured the likeness of what I had painted years ago, but she had made it into something new—something better. She’d managed, as I had not, to imbue the face of the saint with a combination of love, despair, and hope. The mother’s and baby’s eyes were locked on each other with a force that seemed unbreakable.
“You’ve done that beautifully,” I said. “You have a wonderful way of capturing gesture and expression.”
The girl did not seem to register that I’d spoken. She went on drawing, meticulously cross-hatching the shadow of St. Lucy as she knelt by the river. Perhaps she was deaf, I thought, or simple-minded. But when she finished shading in St. Lucy’s shadow, she looked up at me with dark eyes as black and sharp as the point of her pencil.
“I’ve had my whole life to get this bit right,” she said in a high-pitched, slightly nasal, voice. “I should hope I’d gotten it down by now.”
“You need other models,” I said, smiling. “And better paper and pencils.” I noted that the paper she drew on was coarse and her pencils sharpened down to tiny nubs. “I think I can help.”
I held out my hand to her. “I’m Lily Eberhardt, and my friend Vera Beecher and I are starting a school for girls like you.”
The girl tucked her pencil behind her ear and put her cold and grimy hand in mine without smiling. “I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Eberhardt. My name’s Ivy St. Clare, and I think you’ll find that there aren’t too many girls like me.”