Authors: Carol Goodman
Arcadia Falls (32 page)
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 asshole! “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.”
T
he sun is already setting when I come out of the library. The clocks were set back last weekend and I’m not used yet to the earlier dusk. I hurry along the ridge trail, not wanting to be caught in the woods in the dark, especially not on the part that goes past the clove, where one misstep could send me skittering down to the rocks below. When I reach the clearing above the clove, though, the view is so spectacular that I have to stop for a moment to watch the sun sink in the west, turning the mountains into waves of blue and indigo and the clouds above them into strips of pink and lavender, like a higher range of celestial mountains. The scene is
so reminiscent of the last picture in
The Changeling Girl
that when I turn back east to face the campus, I half expect to find all the landmarks of that fairy tale place: the farm the peasant girl grew up on, the orchard of gnome trees, the bloodred beech that harbors changelings in its roots, and the witch’s cottage in the pine woods. And I do—it’s all there. Briar Lodge is the farm; the apple trees are the gnomes; the great copper beech, ablaze in the last rays of the sunset, looks as if its roots are drinking blood; and, peeking out between the dark forest of pines, is the chimney of the cottage where I live, Fleur-de-Lis. The witch’s cottage.
I looked at the picture in that book so often when I was little that it feels like home. Better than home, it’s the home I always dreamed of. I suppose that’s why the story exerted such a pull on my imagination. Perhaps every little girl fantasizes sometime or another that her real family is someplace else, that these strangers raising her are not her real parents and someday she will be returned to her genuine birthright—the kingdom she has lost. If I indulged in that fantasy more often than other children, perhaps it was because of the bareness of life in my grandmother’s tiny Brooklyn house with its postage stamp–size yard bound by concrete sidewalks and the daily routine hemmed in by my mother’s teaching hours and my grandmother’s economies. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my grandmother and mother; it was just that I sometimes felt as though we were refugees living in exile from our true home. And while I knew that they loved me, they sometimes seemed frightened of what I might become. Like the changeling girl, I belonged elsewhere. When I learned that the place in my favorite fairy tale was real—and that my mother had almost gone to school there—I knew I’d have to go there someday. Maybe I’d hoped that here Sally and I would find a peace together that my own mother and I had never found. Instead, Arcadia has only driven us farther apart.
As the last light from the sun leaches out of the west, a full silver moon rises above the fringe of pine trees in the east and I turn toward the cottage. I can’t think of it as home. It certainly doesn’t look like one. It still smells musty and unlived in when I open the door tonight. Since Sally moved into the dorm, the only cooking I’ve done is microwaving
the frozen meals I buy at the Stop & Shop on Route 30 and heating Dymphna’s scones in the toaster oven.
Maybe if I made a real meal, I think, opening the refrigerator, the place would begin to feel like home. But there’s nothing but a bag of apples, half a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheddar I bought last week at the farmer’s market, and I’m too tired and dispirited to drive into town to do shopping. While I watch a Lean Cuisine revolve in the microwave, I promise myself that this weekend I’ll go to the farmer’s stand and buy fresh vegetables. I’ll insist Sally have dinner here once a week. I’ll lure her with her favorite foods and I’ll somehow make her understand that I’ve never regretted for an instant having her instead of finishing art school.
I’m just taking out the tray when the phone rings. I’m so startled by the old-fashioned clang of it that I drop the tray, spilling boiling hot sauce on my hand—on the same spot, in fact, that’s tender from when Chloe doused me with hot wax.
I pick up the phone and cradle it between my ear and shoulder while running cold water over my hand. I can barely hear the wispy voice on the other end over the rush of water.
“—in class. I thought you’d want to know.”
“What? Who wasn’t in class? Who is this?”
“Oh, sorry, it’s Toby Potter. Your daughter’s in my Art History class. Lovely girl. So much potential. A bit distracted, perhaps …”
“I’m sorry, Toby, is this a progress report?”
“A progress report? Oh no. Sorry, didn’t I say? Sally wasn’t in class this afternoon, and she was scheduled to do her oral report on Fragonard today. Then when I was driving into town—I live in town, you know, we must have you over someday—I saw her hitchhiking with Chloe Dawson—”
“Hitchhiking?” I ask, appalled. I instantly picture Sally climbing into a derelict van filled with homicidal maniacs.
“Yes. Luckily I picked them up before anyone else could. I gave them a very stern lecture. After all, it’s not the sixties anymore—”
“And where did you take them?” I ask, hoping against hope that he deposited them on campus.
“They asked to be let off in town—said they were going to the art supply store, but I couldn’t help noticing as I turned the corner that they were heading into our town pub, the Hitchin’ Post.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly. Anyway, I came right home to call you. I hope you don’t think I’m interfering.”
“Not at all. I appreciate it. I’m heading out the door to go get her right now.”
I hang up and grab my purse and keys, my hand still dripping wet and stinging. It stings all the way into town, but I grip the steering wheel all the harder, preferring the physical pain to the thought of Sally sitting at a bar next to some sex offender. Already some pervert could be luring her out to the back parking lot. Although I once would have trusted her intelligence and judgment, it’s clear that she’s so pissed off at me these days that she might do anything to get back at me—for what, I’m not even sure anymore. It goes beyond bringing Callum Reade to the equinox or telling the class about dropping out of art school. Last year I’d begun to wonder if she somehow blamed me for her father’s death, but lately it feels like she blames me for being alive when he isn’t.
