Arcadia Falls

by Carol Goodman

“It’s not done.” The nearness of the voice makes me jump. Spinning around, I see Shelley Drake, wearing a muslin smock and holding a paintbrush, standing only a foot behind me.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” I say to explain my nerves. Somehow I don’t want her to know that it’s her painting that has set me on edge.

  “I never wear shoes when I paint,” she replies, pointing down to her bare feet. “It makes me feel grounded.”

  “Oh,” I say, unsure of how to respond to such a peculiar confession. I turn back to the painting, thinking that having invaded her studio, I should say something about her work. The art has only become more disturbing, though, as if its shadows had used the minute my back was turned to creep a little closer. “It’s scary,” I say, opting for the truth. “Did you do this after we found Isabel?”

  “No.. actually I was working on it yesterday morning. When they found her body out there …” She lifts her chin to indicate the woods, but because the easel stands between her and the window she could be referring to the woods in the painting just as easily as the real ones behind the window. “Well, I had the feeling that I’d painted this because her body was out there.”

  “You had a suspicion?”

  “A premonition. I have them sometimes and they emerge in my paintings. Things I paint sometimes come true.” She must see the skepticism on my face because she shrugs and laughs. “I’m sure it’s just a subconscious thing. Or what Jung would call the collective unconscious. If I really had that power I’d try my luck in the stock market.”

  This at least reminds me of what I wanted to ask her. “I wondered if you were related to the art patron Gertrude Sheldon. I came across a photograph of her last night and I thought I detected a resemblance.”

  “She was my grandmother—but I hardly think I look like her!”

  I’m taken aback by the vehemence of her reaction. Clearly, she doesn’t consider a family resemblance flattering. “Perhaps it was the similarity of names that made me think you were related. And you’re both artists—”

  “You don’t think I paint like her?”

  I recall that according to Lily, Gertrude Sheldon was the butt of everyone’s jokes at the League. “I’ve never even seen her work,” I answer.

  “Well, that’s a relief. I’d hate to think my work looked anything like hers.” She walks to a shelf, takes down a large clothbound book with faded lettering on its spine, and hands it to me open to a color plate. “This is Gertie’s Ancient Priestess Worshipping at the Feet of Artemis.” The painting shows a scantily clad girl laying flowers at the feet of a corpulent woman dressed in flowing robes. The goddess is gazing skyward with an abstracted look on her face, meant, I imagine, to invoke otherworldliness but suggesting peevishness instead. The colors are muddy, the anatomy awkward, and the composition clumsy. I try to think of something nice to say about it. “The flowers are well done,” I say.

  Shelley laughs. “Yes, Gertie could do flowers! She should have stuck to floral still lifes. In fact, she did after a League artist lampooned her painting in the 1921 Fakirs show.”

  I recall that the Fakirs was what the League artists called the show they put on each year to raise money. They would lampoon the work of more established artists, or even each other’s, to provoke interest and, perhaps, to make their own artistic preferences known.

  She flips the page to show an almost identical painting of a young girl kneeling at the feet of a matron, only here the girl is dressed in a maid’s uniform and she’s holding a nail file and scissors. A thought bubble, rising from the matron’s distracted face holds the words, “I think I’ll have Cook make a jelly for dessert.” I have to suppress the urge to laugh. The lampoonist has captured the worst features of the original and magnified them to comic effect.

  “I’ve read it was considered an honor to be lampooned by the Fakirs,” I say.

  “Gertie was not honored. She tried to make her husband, Bennett Sheldon, buy the painting—no doubt so she could destroy it—but instead Vera Beecher bought it. My grandmother was so upset about the incident she had a breakdown and had to check into a sanatorium for a few months—the first of many such ‘retreats.’ She loathed Vera and Lily after that, and Virgil Nash, too, because he took their side. She thought Vera founded Arcadia to compete with her plans to found a museum in the city.”

  “According to something I was reading last night, Arcadia was founded because Virgil Nash was fired from the League over an incident when Lily modeled for a Life Drawing class.”

  “Yes, well, that’s the story Lily liked to tell because it put her beloved Vera in a better light. That the high-principled Miss Beecher founded this place on principles of artistic freedom. Now, if you don’t mind, I left my class sketching en plein air in the apple orchard so that I could steal a little time to finish this.”

  “Of course,” I say, thinking that it seems a bit unfair to her students, but then maybe that’s how a real artist manages to get her work done. “They must be a very self-directed class,” I say.

  “I find if you give them the right direction they do quite well on their own. I told them about the final project today—a special assignment I give each year. Sally seemed quite taken by it. I think you’ll find that she grows in some unexpected ways this term.”

  “I’m glad she’ll have you to guide her,” I say, smiling and trying to ignore the little pang of jealousy I have at the thought of someone else having that role in Sally’s life. I turn to go, but then something else occurs to me. “Does it bother anyone in your family that you’re teaching here? I mean, considering the hostility between your family and the Beechers.”

  Shelley laughs. “They hate it. Which is one of the main reasons I do it.”

  I leave her standing in front of her painting, arms hanging limply at her sides, head tilted in contemplation. It’s as if she were waiting for the shadows to tell her what to do next.

  I head back up to Beech Hall, noticing on my way Shelley’s drawing students scattered through the apple orchard, each holding a sketchpad on his or her lap. The ground is still wet so they’re sitting on rain ponchos. The sky is still overcast. The outlines of the apple trees are blurry and indistinct—hardly the best models for drawing. The air certainly isn’t very clear. I wonder if Shelley would have told the class to draw outside if she hadn’t wanted to work herself.

  I see Haruko and stop to look at her drawing. She’s drawn an anthropomorphic tree picking the fruit off its own boughs and stuffing them into its mouth. “I love that,” I tell her truthfully. “What was your assignment?”

  Haruko grins. “Draw whatever we see in the mist. This is what I see. But then,” she confides, “it might just be because I’m hungry.”

  I laugh and continue up the hill. When I pass Hannah she presses her sketchpad to her chest so I can’t see what she’s working on, but says hello brightly.

  “I hope today’s subject wasn’t upsetting to you,” I say, encouraged by her greeting to stop. “It must have been hard for your family finding out your brother is autistic.”

  She nods. “Yeah, my mom and stepfather have three other kids so it’s really hard for my mom to spend time working with him. That’s why she and my stepfather thought it would be better if I came here.”

  “Oh.” I’m not sure what else to say. It seems colossally selfish to me to send one child away for the sake of another, but then, what do I know about dealing with a handicapped child? Hannah must see the look of pity on my face because she smiles ruefully. “It’s okay,” she tells me, “I really like it better here.”

  What a brave, generous girl, I think, walking on to the top of the hill where I find Sally sitting with Chloe Dawson. I wonder why she’s with the older girl instead of her new friend Haruko, but then I guess it doesn’t really matter. Sally’s drawing so quickly and furiously on her sketchpad that it’s unlikely she knows who she’s next to. Her back is to me as I come up behind her. I don’t intend to sneak up on her, but she’s so absorbed in w
hat she’s drawing that she doesn’t hear me approaching. I shouldn’t peek, but I can’t help wondering what subject has so inspired her. I look over her shoulder and down at her pad. What I see there takes my breath away. She’s drawn a portrait of her father—Jude as I can barely stand to remember him, his face radiant with love, but slightly blurry and out of focus, as if he were slowly fading into the mist.

  In the weeks that follow I notice that Sally spends more and more time with Chloe Dawson and the little circle she draws around her: Clyde, Hannah, Tori Pratt, and Justin Clay. It seems like an odd collection of personalities. Tori and Justin seem shallow and conventional, while Hannah Weiss is ethereal and selfless. Clyde is bright and funny but reduced to wordless adoration around Chloe. I can only guess that they’re drawn together by the shared trauma of Isabel’s death. Unlike the crowd Sally had fallen in with last year, Chloe’s circle is studious, polite, and, as far as I can tell, not into drugs or alcohol. In fact, Sally becomes less confrontational over the next few weeks, less likely to snap at me when I remind her to do her homework or pick up her room. Instead she agrees placidly with whatever I say and then goes on doing exactly what she was doing—drawing, mostly.

  She draws nearly all the time. It’s as if the inchoate grief that had been bottled up inside her for the last year has been jarred loose by Isabel’s death and is coming out now in a flow of images from pencil, pen, and paint. The pictures aren’t all of Jude. She draws self-portraits and landscapes, still lifes and abstract designs. In the third week of the term she begins an oil painting of the copper beech tree as we saw it the day we arrived at Arcadia: lit by the late afternoon sun against a gray-blue storm-laden sky. The tree seemed to be glowing from the inside out, as if it possessed the secret of life.

  “Your daughter’s really on fire,” Shelley says to me one morning in the Dining Hall. “I looked at her portfolio from last year and there’s nothing there remotely like what she’s doing now.”

  “Thank you,” I say, as I always do when someone compliments Sally—as if I had anything to do with it. “I’m sure your instruction is responsible.”

  “It’s not instruction,” she corrects me. “The stuff she’s doing can’t be taught, but I do like to think that I have a knack for tapping into the young artist’s deeper potential. Sally is unbottling, as we say. I’m just trying not to get in her way.”

  I, too, try not to get in Sally’s way. In the evenings after dinner she goes to the art studio at the Lodge to work. At first I felt uneasy about her going there at night, but then I learned that she isn’t alone. A dozen or so students are usually there working late. Apparently it’s an Arcadia tradition. They all walk back to the dorms together and usually Sally calls me to ask if she can stay with Haruko, whose roommate never did show up. The one time we do fight is when she asks if she can room in the dorms full-time. There’s an empty single in Chloe and Tori Pratt’s suite.

  “But they’re seniors,” I tell Sally. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to room with older kids.”

  “They’re one year older! If you didn’t want me to have a dorm experience then why did you bring me to a boarding school?”

  “Couldn’t you room with Haruko?” I ask instead.

  Sally squinches up her face for a moment to consider this apparently brand-new idea and after a few minutes declares, “Okay. I’ll room with Haruko.”

  Only later, when I find out that Haruko’s room is between Chloe and Tori’s suite and Hannah’s single, do I realize that this was her goal all along. But by then it’s too late to go back on my word.

  And so I spend my evenings alone in the cottage grading papers, preparing for class … and reading Lily Eberhardt’s journal. What I discover there is that Sally isn’t the first young person to experience a sudden flowering of her imagination at Arcadia.

  The apple trees were just beginning to bloom when we arrived at Arcadia in the last week of April and soon the air was full of their petals, like a warm and fragrant fairy dust that enchanted everything. We stayed in the Hall that first summer, along with the other women. Mimi Green had quit her job at the magazine so she could come (she could get by on freelance work, she said) and she’d brought two women she knew from the Village who wanted to start a pottery studio: Ada Rhodes and Dora Martin. Vera said she hoped the pottery kiln would become a place for the artists to gather in the evenings: “the heart and hearth of the colony” as she called it.

  We hadn’t planned to have men—except for Virgil Nash, of course—at first. Vera and Mimi agreed that in order for a woman to truly make something of herself as an artist she must remove herself from all domestic obligations. Women were trained to subjugate their needs to men. “It’s easy for the men,” she once told me. “They can marry and gain a helpmate for their work—a wife to wash their brushes and cook their meals while they paint. But for a woman, marriage is the death of art. A man might say he’ll allow his wife to paint—even claim that he’ll encourage her—but the first time his dinner’s late or the house untidy or his precious progeny slips on the stairs, he’ll demand she give up her art for the sake of the household. No, we women must band together to support one another as artists.”

  But Nash invited a number of his cronies, and so Vera decided to let them all stay in the old hunting lodge. The trophies her grandfather had mounted on the walls of slaughtered prey gave the place a masculine feel, she felt. Virgil Nash set up his studio there and said he liked to sleep close to it in case he woke up in the middle of the night seized by inspiration.

  “You don’t want to meet me stumbling around the place half-naked,” he told Vera right from the start. To which Vera answered, “I sleep with a loaded shotgun beneath my bed, so I don’t think you’d like to meet me in those circumstances.”

  Nash invited the painter Mike Walsh to come as well. Walsh was a big, rawboned fellow from Kansas City who sloshed paint onto giant canvases in the manner of the Expressionists. He also favored working in the middle of the night and working half-clothed. Also bunking in the Lodge were two Russian brothers, Sasha and Ivan Zarkov.

  There were others there that summer, League students who came and went for a few weeks at a time. Even Gertrude Sheldon put away her jealousy and animosity to come for a fortnight. And of course there was Mrs. Byrnes, the Beecher family housekeeper, who kept house for us with help from a couple of Irish girls from the village. That was another reason, Vera said, to keep the accommodations separate: to stop the villagers from spreading rumors about us.

  Whatever the reason, the separation was no hardship that summer. Rather, it lent a certain piquancy to our days. There was plenty of going back and forth. Ada and Dora set up their pottery studio down in the Lodge and that’s where drawing classes were held. So every morning, after breakfast, we girls trooped down through the apple orchard to the Lodge, our long dresses trailing in the dew, the apple blossoms falling in our hair. To announce our arrival, one of the Zarkov brothers would play a tune on his balalaika when he saw us coming and the other would sing a Russian song which he said the villagers sang on May Day. Something about maidens washing their faces with dew and meeting their true loves at sunrise.

  That might have been when we first got the idea of celebrating May Day, the first of our rites. It came up one night at dinner and Mrs. Byrnes, overhearing us as she served the soup, said we wouldn’t be the first in these parts to celebrate the old rites, as she called them. She told us that the first settlers of the village had practiced the old religion. Not just May Day, which they celebrated on May Day eve and called Beltane, but Lammas—what they called Lughnasadh in her village back in Ireland—and Samhain on All Hallow’s Eve, and the Winter Solstice instead of Christmas. Vera sniffed at the idea of celebrating some Old World superstition, and said such things had nothing to do with art, but Mimi and Dora were excited by the idea.

  “It’s just that you think you’ll look pretty in a white May dress,” Ada Rhodes said with a sly smile to Dora that made her blush
. I’d realized since the two of them had arrived that their bond was more than mere affectionate friendship. I heard sounds like doves cooing coming from their room at night.

  “Oh, let’s do it!” Mimi said. “Let’s have fun while we’re here. In the winter we’ll all have to go back to the city and our dreary jobs and have to worry about money.”

  “Ah,” Virgil said, “the realm of filthy lucre! What would we do without it?”

  “Of course, we’d all starve!” Mimi said. “Well, maybe not Vera here and it’s her patronage, her generosity in providing a haven for us this summer that makes it possible for us to pursue our art without worrying about making the rent or scrounging meals….”

  “Hear, hear!” Virgil Nash tapped his butter knife against his salad plate and held his wineglass up to toast Vera. “To Vera Beecher. But for May queen I propose the lovely Lily.”

  “And I suppose you’ll want to play the May king, Mr. Nash,” Vera said dryly.

  “Only if it’s a paying job,” he answered, winking at me. “God knows I could use the money.”

  We all laughed at that. It was well known that Nash was in debt up to his ears and that his paintings, although brilliant, never sold. At least not until that next winter, when everything changed for him and his portraits were suddenly in demand. It’s hard not to look back on that moment and not see poor Virgil Nash’s downfall written in it. It was during that first summer at Arcadia that Gertrude Sheldon nagged Nash into doing her portrait. He did it to make a few dollars, so he said, but it was so successful that all of Gertrude’s society friends wanted their portraits done by him thereafter. That was the work that would eventually make him both wealthy and famous, but he was forever haunted by the notion that he had given up his true vocation as an artist to become a society painter.

  But I get ahead of myself. I had no presentiment of doom that night. Instead, I saw the May Eve celebration as a way of thanking Vera for bringing me here. I needed some way to express my gratitude. Since we’d arrived, I’d felt a certain reserve from her … as though she were half-frightened of me. Indeed, she seemed shy of receiving any notice of her generosity and didn’t like, I think, to be reminded of her wealth and position. For instance, when we arrived at the house I was surprised to find that although her mother had been dead for many years, she still slept in a little room next to her mother’s old room. She told me that she had stayed in it during her mother’s illness so that she could attend her at night. I thought perhaps that she wanted to leave her mother’s room as it had been, but she had it all redone for me to stay in! Each night she came to the door that communicated between the two rooms to wish me goodnight, but she would not cross the threshold.