Arcadia Falls

by Carol Goodman

  When she came to the door that night, though, she saw I was sitting up in bed sketching. She asked me what I was drawing and I told her to come see. She came and stood by the side of my bed, but when I showed her what I’d drawn she gasped and sank down beside me. I had drawn a May Day scene, with all of us dancing on the great lawn in front of Beech Hall, but instead of a maypole we danced around the copper beech, which had come to life as an Amazon with flaming copper-colored hair streaming behind her. I’d given her Vera’s face.

  “This is quite remarkable…. You’ve made so much progress since we came here …”

  “It’s this place,” I told her. “It’s magic. I owe you so much for bringing me here.”

  The moment I mentioned my debt to her, I felt her bristle. She rose stiffly to her feet. “You owe me nothing,” she said coldly. But then, softening as she looked back at the picture I had drawn, she said, “An imagination like yours deserves a place to flower. I am merely the gardener … the soil….”

  She turned a bright shade of pink then and swiftly turned on her heel and left without even a goodnight. But when she went back to her room she didn’t shut the door between our rooms, and when she was in bed she called out her goodnight to me.

  I realized that night that Vera was afraid of demanding an intimacy of me that I might feel compelled to give out of obligation to her. I mention this because I know that many people will look at the friendship we had and think that because Vera was the wealthier and older woman, she made the advances in our friendship. But that isn’t how it happened at all. I realized that night that Vera’s discriminating scruples would always keep her aloof from me. It would take some great convulsion to break down her reserve … and I began to hope that May Eve would provide that convulsion.

  And so I threw myself into the planning of it. We all did. Mimi and Dora sewed the costumes I designed. Nash and Walsh went out into the woods and cut down a birch sapling to use as our maypole. Mrs. Byrnes baked and her helpers wove flower wreaths for us to wear. Word spread to other artists at the League and a few dozen arrived before the last day in April. There was a feeling in the air that we were starting something important here at Arcadia.

  Instead of a dress for Vera, I designed a costume based on the picture of Robin Hood in an illustration by N. C. Wyeth. I made a green velvet tunic and matching green cloak with a fringe of purple and copper. I sewed gold and purple fringe on high leather boots and long leather gloves so that when she moved she looked like an aspen quaking in the wind. And I made a jaunty green cap adorned with a long pheasant feather. The green brought out her hazel eyes and the red highlights in her chestnut hair.

  We held the festival on the last afternoon of April, the eve of May Day, as Mrs. Byrnes told us the pagan Celts celebrated it. We danced around the maypole and then sat down to a banquet which Mrs. Byrnes and the girls from the village had prepared for us. I sat beside Vera, but I felt Nash’s eyes on me. When it grew dark, we lit a bonfire on the crest of the hill above the apple orchard. When the full moon rose, it turned the orchard into a silver pool. We drank wine and sang songs around the bonfire and the Phipps-Landrews, who had recently come back from Morocco, passed around a sweet-smelling pipe filled with something that Vera said was hashish. I only took the smallest puff of it, but the smoke was in the air, mixing with the fire and the scent of apple blossoms. When I looked outside the circle of lit faces, forms seemed to be moving in the shadows. I thought it was my imagination, but then the shadows came closer and sprouted horns. One of the horned creatures pounced on Dora Martin and she screamed.

  “It’s only those Russian boys,” Vera told me, wrapping her green cloak around me because I was shivering. “They’ve taken the antlers down from my grandfather’s trophy room and turned themselves into some kind of pagan creatures.”

  There were more than two of them, though. One by one, the horned figures invaded the circle, pouncing on a girl, who would then leap up and flee down the hill into the apple orchard. I wasn’t sure if Vera would go along with this part of the game and I knew it was only a matter of time before one of the horned figures came for me. Already a chant had risen for the May queen to take part in the chase.

  “How fast can you run, Lily?” Vera asked me, squeezing my hand. When I saw the grin on her face and the spark in her eyes I told her how I used to run races with my sisters on the farm.

  “I can certainly run faster than any of these city boys,” I said.

  “Good. Then meet me in the woods behind the Lodge. We’ll double back to the Hall together.”

  I just had time to nod yes when a shadow of branching antlers fell across my lap. I sprang up and leapt clean across the fire. I heard gasps in my wake, but I didn’t pause to bask in my accomplishment. I ran full speed down the hill into the orchard. The ground between the trees was so thick with petals that it looked as though the orchard was covered with snow, but this snow felt silken and exuded sweet perfume against my bare feet. The air was full, too, of the giddy cries and laughter of the hunters and the hunted. To catch my breath, I hid behind a tree and watched. The shadows of the horned pursuers and the trees melted into one another until it seemed as if the trees themselves had come to life and were chasing the girls in their white dresses, who flitted like fireflies from tree to tree. But because I had on Vera’s dark green cloak I was better able to blend into the shadows. I stalked from tree to tree until I reached the edge of the woods and then I slipped into those darker shadows.

  Even in the denser woods the moonlight found its way and spilled down the slim birch trunks like waterfalls of light. I heard steps behind me and guessed it was Vera come to keep our rendezvous, but something kept me moving. The moonlight was traveling up the hill and I followed it, with the sound of Vera’s footsteps behind me. I felt as though the moon was drawing both of us up and that we could climb this silver ladder into the sky. But when I reached the top of the ridge, I saw that the moonlight was a wave that crested the hill and then broke over the ridge. It became the waterfall that spilled over into the clove and filled the ravine and the valley with silver light.

  In the valley below there was a barn whose old wood planks glowed silver. That’s where I would lead Vera. I knew that this was where I had been heading all along—since my childhood dreams of a fairytale heroine and from the moment I had met Vera Beecher. This was where we were meant to celebrate our marriage to each other. I had been looking for a convulsion to break her reserve and this was it: the crash of moonlight on this silvery shore.

  The moonlight laid a path through the clove and to the barn, and I followed it. Later I would realize how dangerous it had been to attempt that steep path in the dark, in bare feet, after all the wine I had drunk and the hashish I had inhaled. But I felt, then, as if I were borne forward by the moonlight, like a current in a stream, and that nothing could happen to me. And besides, I could hear Vera’s footsteps behind me. If she thought it was dangerous wouldn’t she call me back?

  The door of the barn was open. It was empty save for the chaff from last summer’s haying and dark except for a circle of moonlight in its center. Looking up, I saw that the moonlight fell through a circular window in the cupola above me and pooled into the circle. I recalled the story Vera had told me about the pool of Bethesda, how the angel came to whoever first stirred the water and healed her of whatever plagued her. I wanted to be healed—to be cleansed of the feelings I had for Virgil Nash so that I could come to Vera pure and whole. I walked toward the circle, wanting to feel that moonlight on my skin. When I reached the edge of the light I heard a footstep on the threshold. I shrugged off my cloak and stepped into the circle as though stepping into an enchanted pool that instantly turned my limbs into the pure white of marble. I turned around, holding my arms out to call her into the circle.

  Only it wasn’t Vera on the threshold. It was Virgil Nash.

  After I read the part where Lily and Nash became lovers, I put Lily’s journal aside. I was disappointed in her. Clearly s
he loved Vera, but she was also drawn to Nash and eventually she would leave Vera for him. Did she see him as a hedge against childless spinsterhood? Was she afraid of committing to an unconventional relationship? Perhaps I would find the answers in the rest of her journal, but for now I was compelled to hear Vera’s side of their story. So I turned to her letters and notebooks.

  I found none of the personal confession in Vera’s papers that I had found in Lily’s journal (she spoke of Lily as her dear friend and companion, never hinting at a more intimate or physical relationship), but I found instead a strong-willed, idealistic woman dedicated to creating a haven for artists—especially women artists. Vera’s diaries for the summer of 1928 were full of plans to make the colony of Arcadia self-sufficient. “Each artist should know that she is capable of sustaining herself, rather than feel that she is the object of charity,” she wrote, “as nothing infantilizes a woman more than to feel herself dependent.”

  No wonder Vera flinched whenever Lily thanked her for her generosity.

  To that end, Vera planned to establish craft workshops that could produce fine handmade wares to be sold commercially: furniture, textiles, hand-bound and printed books, and pottery. It was the pottery studio that she was most enthusiastic about and that she hoped to launch first. To that end, she had invited Ada Rhodes who was a master potter; she had studied with Clarice Cliff and exhibited at the National Arts Club in New York. Vera’s notebooks were full of praise for Miss Rhodes’s expertise and sketches of designs for pots and vases that the Arcadia Pottery would produce. If Vera also hoped that Ada and Dora, who had lived together for ten years by 1928, would serve as a model for the kind of romantic friendship she wished to have with Lily, she didn’t record the sentiment.

  According to the account books the pottery was the most successful of all the commercial ventures launched by the Arcadia Colony. It provided a small but steady income through the years of the Depression and the war until 1947—the year Lily died. When the summer of 1948 rolled around, the pottery didn’t reopen. In her notebook Vera recorded, The Misses Rhodes and Martin have found accommodations for their studio elsewhere.

  Where? I wondered.

  And what had become of the pottery studio that they had put so much work into? I noticed that ceramics was oddly absent from the present-day Arcadia School curriculum, as were the other crafts practiced at the beginning of the colony. One night at dinner, I ask Dean St. Clare about the lack of a ceramics class. She sniffs and says that when the colony turned into a school Vera felt that they should focus on the fine arts rather than arts and crafts. It seems a rather odd prejudice given the proletarian beginnings of Arcadia, but St. Clare’s attitude makes it clear that she has nothing further to say on the subject. Dymphna Byrnes catches my eye and tells me to come by later to pick up some leftover scones.

  It isn’t unusual for the housekeeper to slip me leftovers. She seems to always cook more than what is needed for each meal, and she distributes the excess to the teachers and staff she deems both worthy and wanting. As a widow and single mother, I must fall under the wanting category. On this particular night, though, I’m pretty sure that Dymphna is offering more than baked goods. There’s a hot cup of tea waiting for me along with my packet of still-warm scones.

  “I heard you asking about the pottery,” she says when I sit down to the tea. “You see, there was a falling-out between Ada Rhodes and Vera Beecher after Lily’s death. Ada and Dora Martin stopped teaching at the school, but they had bought a little house in town the year before. When they fell out with Vera they simply moved their studio there. It’s called Dorada Pottery and it’s still there.”

  “Still there? But Ada Rhodes and Dora Martin were in their thirties when they came here in 1928. They must be long dead.”

  “Dead, aye, but not so long. They both lived into their nineties and died within two months of each other—Ada first, then Dora, in 1982 or thereabouts.”

  “And they lived together that whole time?”

  “Oh yes, in a sweet little bungalow just off the town green with their studio in back. They adopted a niece of Ada’s who still lives there and still runs the pottery. Beatrice Rhodes. She’s seventy-three but she fires up that kiln every day and teaches a ceramics class on Saturdays at the Guild Hall. You should go visit her, it’s just past the square—” She stops when she sees my blank expression. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been to town yet?”

  “Well, no, I haven’t had a chance, and with your excellent cooking and generous leftovers”—I point to the packet of scones—“I haven’t needed to.”

  Although she glows at the compliment she swats me with the dish-towel. “That’s no excuse. You’ve been here a whole month now!”

  I’m startled to realize she’s right. It’s already the third week of September and I haven’t left the campus once. Something about Arcadia makes you forget that the outside world exists. Even the way the school sits in its own little valley against the side of a mountain, surrounded by wooded slopes on three sides and a long vista of mountains, gives one the feeling that the rest of the world has vanished. I realize, though, that for someone like Dymphna, whose family comes from the town, it must seem snobbish to completely ignore it.

  “Maybe I’ll go in this weekend,” I tell her.

  She sniffs and takes a sip of her tea. “If you go into the Rip van Winkle Diner, tell my cousin Doris I sent you and ask for the apple pie.”

  Charged now with a mission, I feel honor-bound to go, but first I ask Sally if she wants to join me. Since she’s moved into the dorms, I hardly see her, and when I do she’s always bent over a sketchpad, feverishly drawing. When I approach her, she hugs the pad to her chest or closes it so that I can’t see what she’s drawing. It’s frustrating because Shelley keeps telling me how much progress she’s making and—I have to admit—I’m jealous that the art teacher gets to share this new stage of Sally’s development while I’m shut out. An afternoon together away from campus seems like the perfect way to reconnect.

  But when I ask her, even dangling the prospect of a trip to the malls in Kingston and a McDonald’s stop, she tells me that Clyde and Chloe have asked her to work on the preparations for the Autumn Equinox Festival. I suppose I should be glad that she’s caught up in school activities and has made new friends, but it’s a little alarming that she would turn down a shopping expedition to weave corn wreaths and sew costumes out of felt.

  I drive in alone after breakfast on Saturday. Descending the mountain, I pass a farm stand selling tomatoes, corn, and squash and make a mental note to stop there on the way back. A little way back from the road stands—or rather leans—the barn where Lily and Nash met on May Eve in 1928 and where, years later, he painted her. It’s crumbling into itself now, its gray planks leaning against one another like drunken friends standing in a field. The cupola that Lily wrote of tilts to one side and looks as if it might at any moment crash through the roof. I wonder what patterns the moonlight makes in the barn these nights, what enchanted pools and eddies.

  In another five minutes, I reach the village. I’m startled by how close it is and also how pretty it looks, nestled into a fold of the mountains, the kind of quaint rural village that travel guides feature on their covers. Beyond the church steeple there’s a central green with a gazebo and a bronze statue of a cloaked figure, all surrounded by white clapboard houses that drowse behind rose-covered picket fences and deep front porches. But when I park my car on the corner of Main and Elm and get out, the impression fades. The church steeple and the clapboard houses need paint, the picket fences are being held up by the weed-choked rose bushes, and the front porches list crookedly. The village green is more yellow than green, covered by an encroaching fungus where it’s not swamped by weeds. The statue is so tarnished I can’t tell if the cloaked figure is a man or a woman and the plaque underneath it has been defaced so badly I can’t read it. Clearly the once-pretty town has fallen on hard times. Walking along Main Street I pass two boarded-up shop
windows and one so begrimed with dust I can’t see through it. When I come to an open shop with clean windows I’m sorry that I can see in. It’s a taxidermy shop featuring stuffed local game that also doubles as a tattoo parlor called Fatz Tatz. A reclining dentist’s chair, like something out of a Frankenstein movie, sits beneath a stuffed moose head and a suspended stuffed Canada goose. I shudder at the thought of needles piercing flesh in such unhygienic surroundings and move on, passing the town bar (the Hitchin’ Post!) and a gift shop called Seasons that sells crystals, incense sticks, and Tibetan prayer flags. Thank goodness I didn’t persuade Sally to come with me. The dearth of retail options might make her Great Neck–trained mind reel. There is, though, an art supply store that looks well stocked, and delicious bakery smells come from the Rip van Winkle Diner. Through the diner’s well-washed windows, I can see a Dymphnashaped waitress pouring coffee for a table of old men in plaid jackets.

  I check the directions Dymphna gave me to Dorada Pottery and see it’s only two blocks off Main, so I decide to go there first before eating lunch at the Rip van Winkle. I turn down Maple Street (clearly the town fathers were so struck by the surrounding forests that they couldn’t think past the trees for their street names) to look for Beatrice Rhodes’s house and studio.