Arcadia Falls (31 page)

“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.

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.