Arcadia Falls

4


I follow Ivy St. Clare back through the rose parlor, from which the sleeping artist and her charcoal sketches have vanished, and then up a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor.
“This was the Beecher family’s winter parlor,” she announces as she opens the double oak doors. “Vera loved to read here on snowy days.” The scene inside the parlor might be a pageant entitled “Snowy Day.” Girls in white dresses lounge on settees and chintz upholstered chairs. Swaths of transparent tulle lie on the floor or are draped over tables and bookshelves. In the center of all this white froth Isabel Cheney stands still as a statue in a long white Empire-waist dress while a woman with silvery hair—Ms. Drake, I assume—kneels at her feet. Isabel looks every bit a goddess, but the woman at her feet is not worshipping her—she’s letting down the hem.
“I don’t understand,” Isabel is saying as we enter. “The length was perfectly fine yesterday.”
“Maybe you grew another inch.” The comment comes from the dark-haired fox-faced girl I saw earlier—Chloe. She’s draped across a love seat, her white dress spread out around her so no one else can sit next to her. She’s surrounded by a circle of girls sitting on the floor and balancing on the arms of the love seat who giggle at her next remark. “Around the waist, that is.”
“Is that why you two failed to clean Fleur-de-Lis in time for Ms. Rosenthal’s arrival?” The dean’s crisp voice cuts across the laughter. “Because you were wasting time arguing?”
Isabel Cheney looks from the dean to me, her face pinking with embarrassment. Although I’ve only just met her I feel I’ve betrayed her trust.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chloe says. “I cleaned upstairs. Isabel was supposed to be cleaning the downstairs, but when I came down I found her with her nose in a book as usual.”
“You said you’d clean the downstairs if I did the whole research paper for our group!” Isabel counters.
“You would have done it all yourself anyway since you think you’re smarter than anyone else.”
“Girls!” Dean St. Clare’s voice silences the girls. “You were both responsible for the cleaning of the whole cottage and you were supposed to work on that research paper together. Here at Arcadia we are not allowed to barter chores.”
“But Dean St. Clare, I’ve done some really interesting original research—” Isabel begins, but Ms. Drake stands up and interrupts her.
“Dean St. Clare,” she says, removing a pin from her mouth. “I’m afraid this is all my fault. I’ve pushed the girls to work so hard on First Night. And Isabel has done such a good job researching the old festivals here. Perhaps if you take a look at her paper—” The woman leans down to retrieve an orange folder—the same one I saw Isabel Cheney carrying earlier—from a chair, but Dean St. Clare holds up one hand.
“I’m sure Miss Cheney has done an admirable research job—she always does—but that is not the point. This school was founded on the spirit of collaboration and cooperation. Women helping women to achieve their artistic goals. And you two”—she levels an icy stare on Isabel and then Chloe—“have utterly failed. I have half a mind to replace you in tonight’s festivities—”
“That’s not fair!” Chloe stands up, her too-long white dress poofing out around her. She looks really upset. “Isabel got to be the goddess since last May. She’s stepping down tonight and I’m just starting. So it’s not an equal punishment.”
Goddess? I think, beginning to wonder what sort of festival is planned for tonight. I remember that the founders of Arcadia put on elaborate festivals—May Day dances and winter solstice pageants—but I didn’t know they were still celebrated. Maybe Sally was right about this school being a little off.
“Perhaps if the girls agreed to come by tomorrow to clean,” I say, “and I can get those journals later.”
Dean St. Clare looks at me as if she has not only forgotten my presence but who I am. Then she shakes herself. “Those are both good ideas, Ms. Rosenthal. I’ll collect the material you need and have it ready for you tomorrow. And you two—Chloe and Isabel—come downstairs to my office. I’m not done with you yet.”
“Chloe still needs her dress altered,” Ms. Drake says. “Why don’t you take Isabel first and I’ll send Chloe down as soon as I’m done with her?”
“Very well,” the dean says. She suddenly looks tired. “Come with me, Isabel. And Ms. Rosenthal, don’t forget to stop by the kitchen for the food Dymphna is packing for you.”
She turns to lead the way back to her office with Isabel in tow. I follow because otherwise I’ll have no idea how to find the kitchen again. I stay back a few yards, though. When the dean turns a corner Isabel turns to me. “I’m really sorry about the cottage not being cleaned,” she says.
“I’m really sorry I said anything, Isabel.”
She grins at me. “It’s okay. I’m used to being in trouble. The kitchen’s just down this hall, by the way.” She turns to go and I watch her straighten her shoulders as she follows the dean. I hope I haven’t gotten her in too much trouble. She is, after all, the first friend I’ve made here.
In the kitchen I find Dymphna standing at a massive cast-iron stove, ladling stew into a plastic container. “Please, that’s way too much,” I tell her.
“Don’t argue, she’ll only give you more.”
The voice comes from a man sitting at a butcher block table against the far wall of the kitchen. He’s wearing a navy blue windbreaker emblazoned with a shield that reads ARCADIA FALLS SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. He looks up from a bowl of stew and smiles crookedly at me. His face is lined enough to mark him as a man in his forties, but the glint in his pale green eyes is boyish.
“Dymphna’s like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Always trying to fatten you up.”
“Aye, leave off, Callum Reade, why do you come out here if you’re not after my cooking. I know it’s not my beauty,” Dymphna says in an aggrieved voice, hiding the smile on her broad face by leaning down to smell the stew.
“Ah, you underestimate your charms, Dymphna, you witch.” He lifts the bowl to his lips and tips the last bit down his throat, stands up, and brings the bowl over to the sink. I notice the glint of a sheriff’s badge under the jacket and, when he leans into the sink, the dull metal gleam of a pistol handle at his waist. “But I’m afraid I’m here tonight to see your boss. She free now?” He looks toward me and I realize he’s asking me, not the cook.
“Um, she just called a student into her office,” I say, wondering why the town sheriff is on the campus. Has there been a crime?
“Which student?” the sheriff asks.
“Isabel Cheney.”
“Really?” The sheriff exchanges a look with the cook. “What did she do? Tongue-lash the opposing team in debate club? Hack into the school’s computer and sabotage Chloe Dawson’s GPA?”
“She and Chloe Dawson were supposed to clean my cottage and they didn’t. What is it between those two girls? They were at each other’s throats.”
“Beats me,” the sheriff says, running his hands through his hair until it stands up straight from his scalp like fresh-mown wheat. “I’m just a small town sheriff, not an adolescent psychologist. But I’ll tell you this—I wouldn’t get between those two when they go at it.” He winks at me and shoulders his way out the swinging door.
“Are the local police always so involved with the school?” I ask looking down at the large plastic vat of stew to hide the blush I can feel heating my face. I can’t remember the last time a man winked at me.
“Well, there was some trouble at the First Night festival last year. Now the dean likes to enlist the cooperation of the sheriff beforehand. Besides, Callum Reade likes to keep an eye on things. Here.” She hands me the large container of stew.
“That’s really too much,” I try to tell her again but she shakes her head.
“You can freeze what you don’t eat tonight. You’ve got a growing girl and”—she gives me a quick up and down look and shakes her head again—“you look like you haven’t had a decent meal in a while yourself.”
“I haven’t had much of an appetite since my husband died last fall,” I say, surprising myself with my own honesty. The only one in Great Neck who’d noticed the ten pounds I’d lost was a mother at a field hockey game who asked what my secret was. Grief, I’d wanted to tell her, and the stacks of bills I can’t pay, and finding out that my daughter’s college fund was spent a year ago without my consent. Instead I had told her I’d cut down on carbs. But to plump, motherly Dymphna I say now, “Everything just tastes like dust.”
She clucks her tongue while pulling a loaf of bread out of a tin bread box. “That’s how Miss Vera took on when Miss Eberhardt died back when my mother was head housekeeper here. Wouldn’t touch nary a crust for a fortnight,” she said. She begins cutting thick slices of the brown, grain-flecked bread with a serrated knife in her right hand while using her left to slather each slice with butter from an earthenware crock: a balletic display of coordination I’m tempted to applaud. “My mother said that she nearly starved herself to death, and that she wasn’t really herself for a whole year—not until she got the news that Virgil Nash had killed himself. Then she started eating again.”
“Really? Are you sure that was the reason?”
Dymphna pauses in her cutting and buttering of bread, both knives arrested in mid air. “My mother told me she called her to her office that day and told her to take down a painting of Nash’s that hung in the dining room. ‘I’ll not have the work of a suicide hanging over our girls,’ she said to her. And that night she came down to dinner for the first time since Miss Eberhardt’s death and ate everything put in front of her. My mother never had no trouble with her appetite again.”
Dymphna rests both knives on the counter and brushes crumbs from her apron. She wraps the buttered bread in wax paper and puts it and the plastic vat of stew into a canvas sack that she hands to me. “There’s nothing like revenge to sharpen the appetite.”
I leave Dymphna’s kitchen laden with foodstuffs. Before I could get out she’d added an apple cake, a dozen apples, a tin of oatmeal, coffee beans, and a quart of milk to my sack. I feel a little like the girl in Rossetti’s poem who returns from the Goblin Market with forbidden fruits to tempt her sister’s appetite. As I’m walking through the front door of Beech Hall, Chloe Dawson brushes by me in a cloud of white fabric. In addition to her own dress she has another white dress draped over her arm.
“Chloe,” I say as she rushes by, “stop a minute, please.”
She turns around and I see that her heart-shaped face is swollen and tearstained.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about what happened. I never meant to get you and Isabel in trouble.”
“It’s not your fault,” she says, “it’s Isabel’s. She wanted to do the research paper by herself. Now we’re both going to get Fs on the paper. Do you know what that will do to my GPA? I’ll never get into an Ivy now. Have you seen her, by the way?”
“No,” I say, scanning the lawn. “But there seem to be some students gathering over there under that tree.”
“Yeah, that’s First Night. Maybe she’s there.”
“Honey,” I say, putting my hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you forget about the fight with Isabel and your GPA for tonight and have a good time?”
“That’s exactly what I plan to do, Ms. Rosenthal,” she says with a brilliant smile. “I plan to have a good time getting back at Isabel.”
I walk back to the cottage chilled by Chloe Dawson’s gleeful anticipation of revenge. I’ve certainly witnessed competitiveness and nastiness among the girls at Sally’s high school. Last year a few girls posted insults and embarrassing pictures on the Internet. The Burn Thread, as it became known, was the subject of half a dozen assemblies and letters home from the principal. I’d hoped, though, that the Arcadia School, which promoted “the collaborative spirit” on its website, would be free of such mean-spiritedness.
But then there’s a long history of betrayal and rivalry at Arcadia, from its beginnings when Vera Beecher met Virgil Nash in New York in the 1920s when he was a poor but promising artist teaching at the Art Students League. When he lost his job there—over an incident in which he allowed one of his students to pose nude—Vera Beecher invited him to come to her childhood home at Arcadia to start an artists’ colony with her and a handful of other students, including Lily Eberhardt, in whom Vera was rumored to have taken a particular interest. It was also rumored that Virgil Nash and Lily Eberhardt had had an affair. Nash left the colony abruptly after its first summer. His career after that had gone in an unexpected direction. He’d become a society portraitist, patronized by a rich clientele. He became wealthy but dissolute, a man who had traded his talent for commercial rewards. In the late forties, though, he had returned to Arcadia and painted a series of portraits of Lily Eberhardt, which were altogether different from his society portraits. He was just beginning to receive acclaim for his new work when Lily died—killed when she fell into a ravine during a snowstorm. According to the local gossip picked up by the press she’d been on her way to meet Nash and run away with him. Two weeks later her body was found buried in the snow. A year later Nash killed himself, many believed over grief at the death of his muse.
When I see the lights of the cottage at the end of the path I imagine Lily Eberhardt setting off from there in the middle of the blizzard. I’ve always wondered why she would have risked the storm. Had she been that desperate to get away? Had she been afraid Nash would leave without her?
I’m thinking so hard about Lily Eberhardt that when a white-clad figure flits between the trees ahead of me I stop dead in my tracks, sure I’ve conjured her ghost. The apparition—if that’s what it is—stops, too, then glides off the path into the woods and disappears. I hurry to the end of the path and scan the trees but all I see is a slim white birch tree tilting among the surrounding pines. Is that what I saw? It must be, I think as I leave the woods. If it was a person why would they hide from me? I can’t quite banish the feeling, though, that I’ve summoned Lily’s ghost.
When I walk into the cottage I go straight to the fireplace and look at the cracked tiles. Vera had the cottage built for Lily. Fleur-de-Lis is a reference to the flower Lily was named for. The two women made each other tokens of the other’s name—tiles decorated with lilies and beech trees, cabinets engraved with those symbols, tapestries and rugs woven with interlocking tree and flower patterns. Examining the tiles above the fireplace again it’s clear that only the ones decorated with lilies have been cracked. Did Vera do this when she learned that her protégée—and, some believed, lover—had announced that she was leaving? If so, it might have been that final act of violence that drove Lily out into the storm.
I shiver thinking of poor Lily wandering lost in the middle of a snowstorm and dying by herself in the cold. When I can’t stop shivering I realize why I’m so cold. I left all the windows open and the afternoon, waning toward evening, has become chilly. I’d forgotten that even summer evenings this far north can be cold. Dymphna’s stew will be a welcome comfort.
I call Sally’s name while unpacking the food in the kitchen. She doesn’t respond, but then that could be because she’s plugged into her iPod, asleep, or just ignoring me. Pausing to listen, I hear the faint sound of music coming from upstairs—something by the Decemberists, I think. So she’s not plugged in, but listening to music on her laptop. Hopefully while unpacking. I head toward the stairs but stop myself. The therapist we saw in Great Neck said that repeatedly calling for Sally when she didn’t answer me just enabled her helplessness. “Just put dinner on the table and let it get cold if she doesn’t come down for it,” she had told me. I’ve watched a lot of food congeal—and Sally grow thinner—over the last year. Still, I might as well unpack the boxes marked “kitchen” and get dinner ready before calling again.
Although I sold off all the good china on eBay and left the high-end appliances with the house, I’ve kept most of the everyday china and cookware. It didn’t have good resale value, I figured. Who would want someone else’s used pots and pans with the ghosts of past meals clinging to them? What stranger would want to braise pork chops on the tarnished copper-bottomed saucepan with the burn on its rim from when Jude stole up behind me while I was sautéing shallots and kissed me so long I let them burn? I can still smell the charred onion when I lift the pan from its nest of packing paper—a smell as intimate as the memory of sex. It would be like selling our marriage sheets. And how could I sell the blue-glazed Le Creuset casserole, a housewarming present from my mother, chipped on the lid from when I dropped it during a fight? It was in the apartment on Avenue B, two weeks after I had told Jude I was pregnant. He came home and announced that he’d dropped out of the MFA program at Pratt and taken a trading job with Morgan Stanley.
“Good thing I’m good at math as well as art,” he said just as I lifted the lid off the casserole. I looked down at the coq au vin I’d spent half the day making from a recipe in Julia Child and felt suddenly queasy. Morning sickness, I thought, even though it was night. When I picked up the pot to bring it to the table my arms went limp. It fell to the stained linoleum, splattering wine sauce and chicken bones everywhere.
“Shit, Meg,” Jude said, surveying the carnage, “if this is how you react to my first real job I’d better not bring home a Christmas bonus.”
As I pour Dymphna’s stew into the pot I touch the place where the iron shows through the blue glaze. Whenever I look at it I wonder what I might have said to change things. Should I have offered to get an abortion? Should I have told him we’d scrimp by on an art teacher’s salary? Or that surely with his talent he’d be a famous artist someday? Should I have suggested we borrow from his parents? Or move to the country and raise goats for a living? Should I have recognized the look in his eyes as defeat and not pretended that giving up his dreams to support me and our unborn child was a good idea?
I turn on the gas under the chipped pot, but it hisses without catching. It takes me a long moment of smelling gas to realize that the stove is so old it needs a match to start. There’s a box of Diamond Tips in a rusted tin box screwed into the cabinet right above the range. I light one and step back as the flame lashes out like a cornered cat.
My hands are still shaking as I start unpacking the everyday china: the blue-and-white Marimekko Jude bought at the Scandinavian Design store our first married Christmas together. What a kind man, I had thought. The average guy his age would have spent his Christmas bonus on stereo equipment or a bigger TV set, not plates and bowls and saucers for his hugely pregnant wife who had burst into tears the week before because the paper plates she ate on made her think she wasn’t grown up enough to be a mother. I still remember how bright and cheerful it all looked laid out for Christmas breakfast. And even though the white glaze is scratched and the blue rims have faded it’s all still here—service for eight. “For our growing family,” Jude had said. Now it seems like a lot of crockery for just me and Sally.
I lay plates and bowls on the table and fish out spoons and knives from the jumble of flatware (the good silver went in February to pay the heating bill), and then sink down onto a spindly kitchen chair that creaks under my weight. A wave of exhaustion settles over me like the lead apron the dentists make you wear when you get your teeth X-rayed. How am I going to unpack all these boxes when every single cup and saucer carries the weight of all the mistakes I’ve made? Checking first to see that Sally hasn’t come downstairs, I lay my head down on the table.
It’s surprisingly cool. I’d thought the top—white with a trim of green leaves and brown pinecones—was painted wood, but with my cheek on its smooth surface I realize it’s actually enameled steel. My grandmother had a table like it in her Brooklyn kitchen. It had two folding leaves like this one that could be let down and then, when you sat underneath it, you felt like you were in a little house. The scalloped edges of the leaves looked like the trim on the cottages of fairy tales. A word was stamped on the underside of the table: Porceliron. I had thought it sounded like a fantasy kingdom, but my grandmother told me it was the brand name of the table because the top was iron coated with an enameled layer of porcelain. That was why I loved those Le Creuset pots when I grew up; they had that same odd marriage of delicate porcelain over hard steel. Right now the cool surface of the table feels like my grandmother’s hand on my forehead when I had a fever. The aroma of some herb in Dymphna’s stew steals out of the pot on the stove and I feel the fatigue lift off me just a little. Enough to get me to my feet. I’ll go get Sally and serve us dinner on our old scratched dishes. Hot stew and homebaked bread with coffee and apple cake for dessert. We’ll be okay, I say to myself for what might well be the millionth time since Jude died. We’ll get through this.
The narrow stairs are pitched so steeply I can feel the muscles in the backs of my legs pinching by the time I reach the second floor. What a strange little house. Nothing about it—windows, door frames—seems to be built according to any standard. It feels like a child’s playhouse put together from odd bits and pieces. The steps creak and bow in the middle. The newel post at the top of the stairs is carved in the shape of an owl. The second-floor hall slopes down to a narrow window seat squeezed under the sharply pitched eaves. Peering through one open door I see an empty bedroom that’s all angles and corners. Good thing I ditched our old bedroom set—nothing would have fit. Besides, it looks like there are cabinets and shelves built into all those nooks and crannies.
It’s charming in a way, and I find myself hoping as I knock on the second bedroom door that Sally has found it so. Probably it’s a good sign that she’s shut herself into her new room. This could mean she’s settling in. I knock again, louder, in case she’s plugged in to her iPod or fallen asleep, but the only sound coming from behind the door is the Clash singing “London Calling.” She must be asleep. I turn the knob—tarnished brass with some design of vines and leaves—and open the door.
Whatever image I’d had in my head of Sally settling in is instantly vanquished by the bare mattress and unopened boxes on the floor. The only light in the room comes from Sally’s open laptop where her screen-saver cycles through images of outer space. Nebulae bloom and gas giants explode in the time it takes me to realize that the room is empty. Sally’s gone.