Arcadia Falls

8


I wait to see if the dean will come in, but after a moment the ghostly figure vanishes from the glass. I’m left with the unsettling feeling of having been spied on. It’s not the way I wanted to start out my first day on the job. I shoulder my bag and decide to track the dean down at her office. If she’s been observing my class, I want to know why.
Before I get there, though, I meet Dymphna Byrnes, whose large figure effectively blocks the hallway. “There you are!” she exclaims as if I’ve been hiding from her. “Dean St. Clare sent me to give you this.” She hands me a cardboard hatbox with the name VIOLET DU LAC, MILLINER printed in faded gilt letters on a deep purple background.
“What’s this?” I ask. If Dymphna were to pull out of the box an outlandish hat and declare that Arcadia tradition demands that I wear it while teaching, I’d hardly be surprised. The Arcadia School is shaping up to be that strange. But instead she provides me with a perfectly rational explanation.
“Why, Miss Vera’s letters and journals, of course. You asked to see them, didn’t you? Well, here they are. Dean St. Clare says to be careful with them. They’re irreplaceable. And she told me to remind you that you need to give the library your reserve list by four o’clock today and not to forget the faculty tea at four-thirty.”
“Of course I won’t forget,” I say, instantly sorry for how peevish I sound. The truth is I have completely forgotten the tea and the deadline at the library. “I’d like to see the dean—”
“That’s just not possible. She personally oversees the freshman orientation all day.”
I’m about to say that she apparently had time to spy on my class, but I stop myself just in time. No need to sound paranoid as well as testy. “I guess I’ll just have to wait for the faculty meeting then.”
“The tea,” Dymphna corrects me. “The dean is quite adamant it be treated as a social occasion. She likes everyone to dress for it as well,” she adds, casting an appraising eye on my outfit. I’d chosen a slim black skirt and a pinstriped button-down shirt for my first day. It looked professional enough when I left the cottage this morning, but looking down I see that the shirt tails have slipped out of the waistband, probably because the skirt is two sizes too big. I haven’t worn it since Jude’s funeral and I didn’t think about all the weight I’ve lost until I put it on this morning. Then it was too late. All the clothes I have are two sizes too big.
“Of course I’d planned on going back home to change,” I lie. “Um … what do the teachers generally wear to tea?”
Dymphna’s brusqueness melts at my admission of wardrobe confusion. “Haven’t you got a tea dress?”
I shake my head. “Tea” hadn’t been big on the Great Neck housewife’s list of social outings, which might include soccer games, bar mitzvahs, lunch at the Americana mall, or a trip to the pedicurist. It wasn’t that women in Great Neck didn’t spend a fortune on their clothes, but if you didn’t work you could make do with a pair of well-tailored chinos, a pair of Tod’s loafers, a Burberry quilted jacket, and whatever expensive bag was in style at the moment. But then I recall that I bought a lovely floral print dress at Anthropologie for Sally to wear to Lexy’s Sweet Sixteen last summer. Sally declared it lame after wearing it once, but I hadn’t been able to throw it out. She looked so pretty in it. I’ve lost so much weight that I can probably fit into it now.
“I think I have something,” I tell Dymphna.
She looks relieved. “Well, I should hope so. A pretty lass like you. You can change when you bring Miss Vera’s papers back to your cottage for safekeeping. Don’t forget. Dean St. Clare will have your head if anything happens to them.”
But I’m not able to get back to the cottage right away. By the time I’ve finished discussing my wardrobe shortcomings with Dymphna, I have only ten minutes to get to my Senior Lit Seminar. Unfortunately, it’s in another building—Briar Lodge. So I tuck the heavy hatbox under my arm and take it with me.
The walk to Briar Lodge proves longer than the campus map led me to believe. It’s on the western side of the apple orchard, on the edge of the woods below the ridge where I’d gotten lost last night. It was Virgil Nash’s residence and studio when he came back to Arcadia. This is where he was living when Lily died. When I get to the Lodge I see that there’s a path that starts beside the building and goes up into the woods. It must lead to the ridge trail that I inadvertently took last night. I wonder if Lily took that trail to meet Nash on the night she died, and fell into the clove just as I almost had. The memory of how close I came to meeting the same fate she did makes me feel a little light-headed.
When I walk into the first-floor parlor where the class is to be held, the feeling only intensifies. Designed to take advantage of the southern exposure, the room feels like it’s made out of light, from the wide plank oak floors to the vaulted ceiling. Most striking of all are the paintings. When Dymphna Byrnes told me that Vera Beecher had ordered Nash’s painting removed from the Dining Hall I had assumed that all of his paintings had been purged from Arcadia. But that was not the case.
Three large oil paintings hang over the couch at the end of the room. They’re in Nash’s “late style,” when he was moving away from the traditional society paintings from which he’d made his living. Instead of posed, formal portraits, these are stark and vivid renderings of a woman. The center painting is a close-up of her face. Framed by lank blond hair, pale blue eyes defiantly stare straight at the viewer. The painting on the left shows the same woman standing nude in a doorway of a barn. Strips of light coming through gaps in the barn wall ripple over her body, but her face is in shadow. The last painting is of a naked woman lying on grass beneath a tree, her body dappled with late-afternoon sunlight filtered through the leaves. From the color of her hair and the angularity of her figure, I guess it’s the same woman as in the other two paintings, but since she’s turned away from the viewer it’s impossible to tell for sure.
“Lily has that effect on everybody,” a dark-haired young man seated on the couch says. “That’s why I’m sitting under her, not facing her. I’d never be able to concentrate on what you’re saying…. no offense.”
“No offense taken,” I say, taking a chair opposite the couch and putting my book bag and the purple hatbox on a low oak table. “These are amazing paintings. I’ve always heard that Nash’s late portraits of Lily were remarkable, but I’ve never seen these. I don’t think they’ve ever been reproduced.”
“Vera Beecher would never allow it during her lifetime.” This comes from a young woman seated in a straight-backed chair to my right. She pushes black-framed glasses up her nose and adds, “And Dean St. Clare has followed her wishes. In order to use them for our senior thesis we have to study them in situ.”
“Which is why we’re meeting here,” the dark-haired young man says. I look from the young woman to him and notice that they’re nearly identical—same black hair with pronounced widow’s peak, same pale skin and wide-set gray eyes.
“You two must be Rebecca and Peter Merling,” I say, taking out my roster. “You’re—”
“Twins,” they both say at the same time.
“I was going to say that you’re writing your senior project on Nash’s paintings,” I say with a small smile. “I wondered what you hope to get out of this seminar.”
Peter glances toward his sister. She raises one perfectly arched eyebrow at him and he nods as if something has been agreed on. “Becky and I are working on our senior project together: ‘Fairy-Tale Resonance in Twentieth-Century Painting and Literature.’ Miss Pernault, our adviser, suggested we look at the use of the Grimms’ fairy tale ‘Brother and Sister’ in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Witch of Exmoor.”
“Especially its animal bride motif,” Rebecca adds.
“Because of the image of the brother transformed into a deer—”
“Which is echoed in Nash’s late paintings of Lily.”
“How is the animal bride motif echoed in Nash’s painting?” I ask, mostly to interrupt Rebecca and Peter’s Tweedledum, Tweedledee performance.
The twins exchange another look and then Rebecca answers. “Look at her. At the way the light falls on her skin. Do you notice anything unusual about her?”
I look back at the paintings. In the one of Lily reclining nude beneath the tree, her skin is dappled by light falling through the leaves. The tint of the leaves has dyed her skin a tawny copper except where the light shines white. I get up and move closer.
“She looks like a deer,” I say at last. “Like a young fawn.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca says. “And in the standing pose—”
I laugh before she can finish. “The stripes of light make her look like a zebra.”
“Yes!” Rebecca and Peter say together. They sound as though they’re pleased with me. I realize that although I’m the teacher they’ve been assessing me since I walked in the door and I’ve just passed some test they had devised together. Instead of resenting them, though, I feel the warmth of being welcomed into their little circle of two.
“So you see why we’re interested in studying the animal bride stories,” Peter says. “Even though Virgil Nash abandoned the obvious trappings of fairy tales in his last portraits of Lily Eberhardt, he was still depicting her as an animal bride….”
Peter pauses to let his twin finish the sentence for him. I almost feel as if they’ve rehearsed this bit. “Which makes the fact that he killed her all the more fascinating.”
By the time I leave Briar Lodge I still feel a bit dizzy. Even after I made them explain their shocking allegation against Virgil Nash (“She died running away with him, didn’t she?” Rebecca had asked) their habit of finishing each other’s sentences was maddening. My neck has a crick in it from looking back and forth between the two of them. It was like watching a tennis match. At the very least, I’ll have to make them sit next to each other.
In comparison Junior British Lit goes well. Some of the students—Clyde Bollinger, Hannah Weiss, Fleming Sedgewood—are also in my folklore class, so I feel from the beginning that I’ve got advocates. I’m grateful to hear that many of the students have already started reading Jane Eyre. We spend the class talking about the fantasy fiction that the Bront?s concocted during their dreary childhood winters on the Yorkshire moors. When I assign them the next two hundred pages of Jane Eyre there’s not a murmur of complaint. I end the class ten minutes early so I’ll have time to get to the library to turn in my reserve lists.
The library’s gray granite tower is clearly visible looming over the copper beech tree, but, like almost everything on this campus, it turns out to be a little farther away than I’d thought. I’m beginning to realize that the paths are not designed to get you to your destination quickly, but rather to take the most scenic route. Besides, the library wasn’t originally part of the estate at all. Vera Beecher’s parents built it in the 1890s as a gift to the town of Arcadia Falls, but when Vera decided in the 1940s to found a school on the site of her childhood home she used a loophole in the lease to appropriate the building. It couldn’t have endeared the school to the town, I think, when I arrive, slightly breathless, at the top of the rise—on top of the same ridge I was on last night, only farther south—and see the town of Arcadia Falls for the first time. It lies in a cleft between two hills, hidden from the highway and most of the campus. Hidden, too, it appears, from the twenty-first century. The white church steeple, the town green, and the white clapboard houses could have come from the eighteenth century. It looks like a village forgotten by time—a place where Rip van Winkle might have laid down to take his hundred years’ nap.
I pull away reluctantly, promising myself that I’ll explore the town when I have more time, and enter the library … and leave Brigadoon behind for thirteenth-century England. Vera Beecher’s parents were ardent medievalists and followers of William Morris. They had their library built to resemble a cross between a castle and a Gothic church, complete with turreted bell tower. And as in most Gothic buildings of the Perpendicular style, my eyes are immediately drawn upward as I enter the central entrance hall, past carved stone arches and rich tapestries toward clerestory windows glazed with stained glass.
I stand in a spill of sapphire and ruby light that falls on the calm gray stone, looking up first at the carved wood ceiling, each panel engraved with the Beecher family crest. Then my eye drifts midway down the wall to the tapestries. There are four, each depicting a stately beech tree at a different season: tender green buds for spring, the full green plumage of summer, a fiery red tree at fall, and bare limbs covered with snow in winter. If not for the secular nature of the tapestries I would think I was in a church. I do feel like I’m in a place of worship, only here the gods are trees and books.
“I hope you’re here to hand in your reserve list.” The voice brings me down to the ground level, where a woman with mousy brown hair unbecomingly cut in a pageboy sits behind a long desk beneath the tapestry of the tree in winter. “You’re the last one, you know.”
“No, she’s not,” another voice announces as the front doors bang open. “That would be me. I absolutely demand my customary status as last to hand in her reserve list!” Ms. Drake floats in, her muslin smock and frizzy gray hair billowing around her. She’s waving a piece of paper in her hand.
“But you have yours all ready,” I say, pointing to the paper in her hand. “And I don’t. So really, you have to go ahead of me.”
“Aha! You must be new here. Tell me, Birdy,” the woman says to the librarian. “Is this poor shred of paper acceptable to you?”
“You know it’s not, Miss Drake. The reserve list must be entered on the reserve list form—”
“Of course it must! In triplicate, the white copy to go to you, the pink to remain with the instructor, and the yellow to go to the dean. Correct?”
“That’s right. And I distributed those forms in the interoffice mail last week, Miss Drake. You could have had them all filled out already.”
Ms. Drake sighs and shakes her head, but when the librarian turns to retrieve the forms she looks up at me and crosses her eyes. I try to swallow the laugh that bubbles up and end up coughing instead.
“It’s all the dust from all the old books,” Ms. Drake says, slapping me heartily on the back. “I’m Sheldon Drake, by the way, but everybody calls me Shelley … well, except for Miss Bridewell here. Birdy, why is it that I call you Birdy, but you never call me Shelley?”
“I’ve no idea, Miss Drake. Perhaps for the same reason that you are always the last one to turn in your reserve list. It’s our natures.”
“Hm … you mean I have slovenly habits, I suppose. Or derangement due to inhalation of toxic paint fumes.” Shelley holds up her hands and wriggles multicolored fingers. They’re spotted with paint and smell like turpentine. “Or perhaps it’s due to the artistic temperament’s tendency toward left-brainedness … or is it right-brainedness? I lean to whatever side it is that can’t remember the difference between them.”
“It’s no excuse,” Miss Bridewell says, handing each of us a stack of forms. “Shall I show you how to fill it in?” she asks me.
“I’ll show her,” Shelley volunteers. “I think even I have mastered the intricacies of the reserve list form by now.”
The librarian looks dubious, but Shelley Drake grasps me by the elbow and steers me into a small alcove off the entranceway. She upends a bag of books on the table and sits down, gesturing for me to do the same, which I do while formally introducing myself.
“The new English teacher! My drawing class was all in a twitter over you. I saw that you attended the bonfire with Sheriff Reade last night…. Oh, and you must be Sally’s mother! She’s in my Intro Drawing class. She’s got a great eye. She really should be encouraged.”
“I’ve always encouraged her—” I begin.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest you hadn’t. It’s just that I get the sense from her work that she’s holding herself back—as if she’s afraid of what might come out if she really let herself go. Just a first impression, of course, but I’d like to challenge her a bit this semester, if you don’t mind—oh, here, make sure you alphabetize your list for each class. Birdy’s a real bear for alphabetizing. Have you got the call numbers? She’ll send it back, in triplicate, if you don’t. You can look them up on the computer catalog. I write them down on my own copies of the books so I don’t forget.”
For someone who claims to be disorganized, Shelley Drake is quite efficient. She fills out her forms in about three minutes and then helps me with mine, all the while keeping up a nonstop patter about the land mines of bureaucracy to avoid at the Arcadia School. She talks so relentlessly that I don’t have a chance to ask her how, exactly, she plans to challenge Sally. When she’s finished both our forms she stands up and gives my outfit a skeptical stare.
“That won’t do for tea, you know.” She looks at her watch. “Do you have time to go home and change?
I look at my watch—Jude’s watch, which I haven’t been able to take off and which is still set on Japanese time. When I subtract an hour, I see it’s 3:45. “I’d better run. I have to bring this box back to my cottage….” I look down at the table. My canvas book bag is there, and the stack of color-coded reserve forms, but no purple hatbox.
“What’s wrong?” Shelley asks, her freckled face creased with worry.
“I’ve lost Vera Beecher’s journals.”