Arcadia Falls (47 page)

But I know that this particular paradise comes with a price. On our last day, Sylvia suggests she take Sally school shopping alone while I have a chat with Max. I grimly sit down at the poolside table usually reserved for Max’s cronies from his days working on Wall Street. The guys are absent today, no doubt alerted to the conference Max and I are to have.

I’ve always admired Max. He put himself through college on the GI Bill and rose through the ranks of Morgan Stanley on the strength of his uncanny math abilities and chutzpah. He’s as slim as he was the day he got out of the army and has a full head of white hair. He still plays a round of golf every day to keep fit and a game of bridge to keep his mind sharp. When I look at him, I see how Jude might have aged.

“You should have told us that Jude left you with so little. We had no idea. Sylvia thought you sold up in Great Neck because you never liked it there.”

“I didn’t want you to think badly of Jude,” I tell him. “He would have hated for you to know that he mismanaged the money.”

Max nods, his shrewd brown eyes acknowledging the truth of what I’ve said, but then he raises one finger and shakes it at me. “Still, he would have hated more to see you and Sally going without.”

“We haven’t been starving,” I say. Feeling the first prickles of anger needling my skin, I take a deep breath. “We had enough after I sold the house to move upstate, and I want to teach—”

“Sure, teaching’s fine, but let’s face it, you coulda picked a better place to do it. Three deaths in the first semester. I went to some rough schools
growing up in the Bronx, but that’s meshuga. Anyways—” He waves a bronzed hand, his Columbia University ring glinting in the bright sunlight. “That’s all over now, thank God. Sylvia and I would like to give you the money to move back to Great Neck. Let Sally finish out high school there. I’m sure you can find someplace to teach on Long Island, if that’s what you want.”

“That’s very generous of you, Max, but I have to finish out the year,” I surprise myself by saying. I hadn’t realized until this moment that I need to go back—at least for the next semester. “I have a contract,” I add.

“Of course, that’s the honorable thing to do. But after that. And, of course, we’ve got a college fund for Sally. She’s a bright kid. With her art skills, she could work in advertising.”

I bite back the urge to say, Or she could be an artist. Conceding that advertising is a worthwhile career is a big step for Max Rosenthal.

“Is it all right if I take the semester to think about it?” I ask, smiling with as much charm as I can muster. “I have to talk to Sally.”

“Of course, sweetheart.” He leans forward and pats my knee. “But if I know my granddaughter, she’ll be happy to be back in the vicinity of a good mall.”

Sally does seem to enjoy being cosseted and fawned over by her grandparents. We arrive back in upstate New York with two more suitcases than we took with us. I don’t mention right away the offer of moving back to Great Neck. I’d like her to finish off the year at Arcadia with as much commitment as possible. If she knows she’s leaving I’m afraid she won’t take her classes seriously enough.

She does, though. The new drawing teacher, Emanuel Ruiz, a young graduate of The School of Visual Arts, is rigorous, talented,
and
incredibly good looking. At first I think Sally’s devotion to the class is due to his looks, but soon I realize that he challenges her in ways she’s never been before. Her figure drawings transform from cartoons to lifelike portraits and she branches out into landscape, an area she’s always avoided.

“That was a brilliant hire,” I tell Toby Potter, our new interim dean, over tea one day in March.

“I saw his work at the SVA Student Art Show last year. We were lucky to get him. I had to tell the board they could use my salary to pay him to be able to offer enough to get him here.”

“That was gallant of you,” I say.

“Not really. I knew they’d be too embarrassed to cut my salary, so I demanded raises for everyone else while I was at it.”

“Thanks for that,” I say, sipping my cup of Arcadia blend tea. “It’s come in handy.”

I’ve used the money to enroll Sally in a summer arts program at Parsons in Manhattan, my way of making up to her the months of rural shopping deprivation. I didn’t tell her—and I don’t tell Toby Potter—that I’ve got applications in at a dozen high schools on Long Island and in New York City. I feel disloyal thinking about leaving after all he’s done to rescue the Arcadia School, but I have to do what’s best for Sally.

Because even though Sally’s thriving in Emanuel Ruiz’s drawing class and doing well in most of her other classes, I’m afraid that the atmosphere at Arcadia is unhealthy. I feel it most at night alone in the cottage, reading through the notebooks Vera Beecher kept in her final years. Her dry accounts of students and teachers, supplies and projects, give me plenty of facts to supplement my thesis, but they’re not exactly inspiring. Although she strove to keep the school alive, her heart went out of it once Lily was gone. Late at night I sometimes go downstairs and sit in front of the fireplace, looking up at the shattered lilies on the tiled hearth. I think of how it hurts to find that the person you loved wasn’t who you thought they were and how that grief—the loss of the person you thought you loved—can be worse than death. I realize now that if Jude had lived I probably would have been furious at him for gambling all we had to start the hedge fund. We would have fought, but I like to think our marriage would have survived. But we never had a chance to find out. If Lily had lived, would Vera have forgiven her for her infidelity and for the child she had in secret? I would like to think that forgiveness would have allowed Vera to become a greater artist. Instead, she spent her life fossilized in that last moment of betrayal and anger.

It’s a fate I want to avoid for myself.

I try to hold on to the forgiveness I felt for Jude in the clove, but it
comes and goes, mingled with regret and pain, as transient as the first signs of spring in this cold climate. I can see that Sally is struggling with the same feelings and that a great deal of her anger toward me is displaced anger toward Jude. Instead of making me feel better, though, it makes me sad that she doesn’t have a purer memory of her father.

At least that’s how I feel until the spring art show. It’s on a day in late April full of cold sunshine that coaxes the first green buds from the sycamores and snowdrops from the forest floor. The show is held in the parlor of Briar Lodge. The student work hangs on foam board partitions, Lily Eberhardt’s painted images looking out over the watercolors and pastels. I imagine she would be proud of the school she and Vera founded. She might smile at some of the more pretentious efforts, like Tori Pratt’s portrait of a headless mannequin standing in front of a rain-slicked window entitled
Soliloquy in Blue
, but I think she’d laugh at Hannah Weiss’s portrait of herself as the evil stepmother from Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
.

“Last semester, Ms. Drake assigned us two self-portraits,” Hannah explains to me when I compliment her on the painting. “One showing how others see us, and one of how we see ourselves.”

“And this one is how other people see you?” I asked.

“That’s what I thought at first, because I thought my mother and stepfather saw me as selfish and ugly because I’m not patient enough with my little brothers. But then I realized it was really how I saw myself. This one is how I think they see me.” She points to the next painting on the wall. It’s a brightly colored cartoon of herself as Snow White surrounded by birds and forest creatures. After a minute I realize that all the characters in the picture—the deer, the rabbits, the robins and bluebirds—all have Hannah’s features.

“I like that,” I tell Hannah, laughing, “but I’d rather you saw yourself as Snow White than as a witch.”

“Oh no,” Hannah cries. “The witch is much, much cooler. Besides, Ms. Drake said not to be surprised if you kept changing your mind about which portrait is which. It’s not always easy to tell the difference between how you see yourself and how you think other people see you.”

Maybe that was Shelley’s problem, I think, leaving Hannah to look at
the rest of the show. She worried so much that people would see her as the child of a crazy woman that she became crazy. I have to admit, though, that her assignment produced some interesting results. Clyde’s two portraits show him as a pasty computer geek eating Twinkies in the glow of a video game and then as Mr. Spock from the
Star Trek
series. The headless mannequin of Tori Pratt’s painting is her “how other people see me.” Her “how I see myself” is the same setting without the mannequin, just a pile of discarded clothes lying on the floor. Chloe has done a single painting of herself looking into a mirror. The twin images are identical except that the one in the mirror has aged about fifty years. I can’t blame Chloe for feeling older than she looks after the year she’s been through.

I’m almost afraid to look at Sally’s painting. This is the project, I surmise, that she’s been hiding from me all year long. Is there something about how she sees herself that she thinks will upset me?

I see her standing in front of her paintings laughing at something with Haruko. Their heads block Sally’s portraits as I approach, but then Sally moves and I see one of them. It’s Sally standing alone in a desolate landscape underneath a lowering sky. She looks sad and pathetic and lonely. My heart contracts at the thought that
this
is how she sees herself. But then, when I get closer to the painting, I see that the label beneath it reads:
HOW OTHER PEOPLE SEE ME—ALONE.
I look to the right at its companion piece. It’s a group picture of Sally flanked by Jude and me. We both have our arms around Sally, but my face is level with hers, while Jude’s floats a little above and behind us. It’s from a photograph that Jude took of us on a trip to Florida a few years ago. He’d set up his camera with a timer and rushed to get into the shot. As a result, he had come out blurry in the photograph—and spectral in this painted version, as if his ghost were watching over Sally and me. Eyes blurring, I look down at the title of the painting:
HOW I SEE MYSELF—LOVED
.

“Do you like it?” Sally asks. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“I love it,” I tell her, slipping my arm around her waist. For once she doesn’t pull away at a public display of affection. She leans in and rests her head lightly on my shoulder for just a moment but long enough to
make me feel as loved as the woman in that painting—secure in the embrace of her family.

That feeling of being loved makes me feel strong enough to do something I’ve been putting off. A few days after the art show I go into town to see Callum Reade. I go to the station because I’m afraid that if I meet him anywhere else I’ll fall straight into his arms—and I can’t do that. I think he must recognize my reasoning when he looks up from his desk and sees me standing in his doorway. The gladness in his eyes barely reaches his mouth before he reins it in.

“I was hoping you’d come before the end of the term,” he says. He waves to the chair in front of his desk, but I shake my head and stay in the doorway.

“I got a job offer at a school in Queens,” I blurt out. “And my in-laws have offered to help us get an apartment in Great Neck.”

“I see,” he says, bowing his head to retrieve something from his desk drawer. “Is that what you’re going to do?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, trying hard to resist the urge to run my hands through his hair. “I haven’t told Sally yet. I wanted her to finish out the term first, and then I’ll ask her what she wants. I want her to have a choice.”

He looks up, his green eyes flashing. “Don’t you get a choice?”

“This
is
my choice,” I answer.

The light goes out in his eyes. He bows his head again and looks at the piece of paper he’s holding. “Then I’d better give you this now.” He holds out a crumpled sheet of paper. I have to cross the room to take it from him. When I look down I see that it’s the adoption certificate that Beatrice Rhodes gave me.

“Where—?”

“We found it clutched in Shelley Drake’s hand,” he says. “That’s how badly she wanted it.”

I nod. “Being Lily’s granddaughter must have made her feel like she belonged here. Like she had a home.”

“I guess so. I got to wondering, though, why there were two Ivy St. Clares. So I did a little research at the Andes Historical Society—that’s
where all the archives from St. Lucy’s went after the valley was inundated—and at the County Records Office. I found these.” He holds out two sheets of paper. “I think you’ll find them interesting.”

“What—?” I begin as I reach out to take the papers from him, but when he takes my hand in his I find I can’t say anything else.

“I’ll stay away until you tell me otherwise,” he says. “But I wonder if Sally would want you to make this sacrifice any more than you’d want her to sacrifice her happiness for you.” Then he lets go of my hand. With the two sheets of paper in hand, I leave before he can see the tears in my eyes.

Callum’s question haunts me on the drive back to school. I think of my grandmother sacrificing her career to raise my mother and then of my mother sacrificing her chance to go to art school so she could be secure. Would they have been happier if they had done what Lily did—sacrificing her own child to live the life of an artist with Vera? Could you lop off one half of yourself and expect the other half to thrive?

When I get home I read the two documents he’s given me and everything I thought I knew turns upside down. I spend the rest of the afternoon making phone calls and doing research online. I reread Lily’s journal far into the night. When I finish reading I look up from Lily’s journal and see the sky turning pink outside. It’s May 1—May Day. And even though I could have sworn that I’ve had enough of pagan celebrations, I decide there’s something I have to do.

I go to the dorm to wake up Sally. She’s bleary-eyed, but I hand her a travel mug full of hot cocoa and promise her doughnuts when we get where we’re going.