Arcadia Falls

by Carol Goodman

  I’m halfway to the Lodge when I realize that I left my picture taped to the blackboard. Although it will make me late to my seminar with the Merling twins, I turn back. I tell myself it’s because I need to give the picture to Shelley so she can use it as an example when she introduces the project to her class, but I know it’s really because I don’t like the idea of it left hanging there for anyone to see.

  When I get to the classroom, though, I see that the person whom I least wanted to see the picture is standing in front of it: Ivy St. Clare.

  “Who did this?” she asks without turning around when I come into the room.

  “I did. It’s just a model for a project I’m having my students do—”

  “You’re not making the archival material I lent you available to them, are you?”

  “No, of course not. They’ll use their own family mementos.” I describe the project to the dean, but she seems unable to take her eyes off my picture. When I’m done, she points to one of the objects in the drawing.

  “What’s this?”

  I look closer and see she’s pointing at the green book. I start to tell her it’s Lily’s journal, but then I realize I can’t. How can I say I found the journal but didn’t tell her about it? Luckily, the gold fleur-de-lis is half-hidden by a letter lying across its cover. “Just an old book I had lying around,” I say. “I thought the color provided a nice contrast.”

  St. Clare turns to me, her hooded eyes peering out of her weathered face. The intensity of her look reminds me of something, but I can’t think what. “Yes, it does,” she says finally. “You have a good eye.” Then she turns and leaves. Only then do I remember where I’d seen that look before. It was the same cold gaze with which the barn owl looked down on Callum and me.

  As soon as my last class is over, I rush back to the cottage, ignoring the tempting aroma of fresh-baked scones from Dymphna’s kitchen. I really must have been in some sort of trance last night to carelessly include Lily’s journal in my still life. If Beatrice Rhodes’s memory is right, Ivy St. Clare has been looking for that journal since Lily died. Of course I could just tell her that I found the journal in the cottage, but I’d have to explain why I didn’t mention it right away, and she might ask me to hand it over to her. I don’t want to give it up until I get to the end of Lily’s story. I can only hope that the dean believed me when I said that the book in the picture was mine.

  I’m relieved to find the journal where I left it on the kitchen table with the hatbox and the perfume bottle, but I’m also unnerved to think how easy it would have been for Ivy St. Clare—or anyone else, for that matter—to come into the house and take it. From now on, I’ll have to keep it someplace safer. I promise myself I’ll only read it by myself in the cottage. I start that night, staying up into the early hours of the morning, reading Lily’s account of her winter at St. Lucy’s Orphanage and Home for Unwed Mothers.

  When I told Vera that I had gotten a job working on the murals of St. Lucy’s with Mimi Green, she was not nearly as angry as I thought she would be. She pressed her lips together and folded her hands in her lap—two gestures I’d begun to recognize as her way of reining in her temper—but when she spoke her voice was calm and cool.

  “And you undertook obtaining this commission without seeking any help from me?”

  I knew she was hurt, but she’d phrased her complaint in a way that offered me a way to save face. She always did. It was one of the things I love about her. She hated to be cornered and so she did no cornering herself.

  “You’ve always stressed to me the virtues of independence and self-sufficiency. I thought you’d be proud.”

  “And so I am.” Her lips curved into a tight smile. “I only wonder if it’s the best venue for your talents: a religious theme and in such a remote part of the country. I might have gotten something better for you.”

  “I’m sure you could have, but then I wouldn’t have gotten it myself. Mimi says she’s speaking to a friend at Harper’s Bazaar about photographing the murals when they’re done.”

  Vera sniffed. “Well, if you’re really going to do it I might as well have a word with someone at Vanity Fair.”

  I knew then that she’d relented, but my worries weren’t over. That night she took down her atlas of New York State and found the little town of Easton where St. Lucy’s was located.

  “Why, it’s not far from here at all,” she exclaimed. “An hour’s drive by motor car at the most, and you could even go by train.”

  With a sinking heart, I looked at the spot her finger pointed to on the map. Mimi had been vague about St. Lucy’s location, but that was because she was a city girl and to her upstate New York was one endless vista of dairy farms and picturesque settings for her drawings. But I recognized where St. Lucy’s was at once, along the shore of the East Branch of the Delaware River, not far from the farm where I grew up.

  “You could easily spend weekends here,” Vera announced, slamming shut the heavy atlas with a conclusive thud. “I’m sure you’ll be glad of a comfortable bed and a good meal after bunking with the nuns all week.”

  What could I say? If I objected, she would feel I was trying to escape her. I spent the next few days debating between inventing another commission that would take me farther away and confessing my condition. One thing was certain: if I waited much longer my decision would be made for me. By mid-September Vera was already commenting on my plumped state. “The soft life has filled you out,” she said as we walked toward the lodge. “Perhaps living with the nuns will be slimming.”

  “Ah, but I’ll have Mrs. Byrnes’s good cooking every weekend.”

  “About that,” Vera began, linking her arm in mine. We’d come to the great copper beech tree on the lawn. The leaves had turned a deeper purple in the last weeks but had not yet begun to fall. The beech was one of the last trees to lose its leaves in the autumn. By the time they began to fall, I would already be away. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to stay right there at Arcadia and watch the leaves and then the snow fall, and to feel the baby growing inside of me, with Vera beside me. But even as I was turning toward Vera to tell her, she had gone on.

  “Would you feel very hurt if I went away this winter? You could still come on the weekends, of course. Mrs. Byrnes will be watching the house—”

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Gertrude has asked me to accompany her to Europe.”

  “But I thought she was going with her husband.”

  Vera shrugged. “Have you ever met Bennett Sheldon? He’s the dullest, most tiresome man alive. I think Gertrude’s afraid she’ll go crazy without some other conversation for six months. And she wants my advice in collecting art for her new museum. I thought I’d begin a small collection for us here at Arcadia in order to provide models for our artists.”

  “I thought you couldn’t stand Gertrude.” My voice came out shrill. Vera turned to me with a startled look on her face.

  “I can’t. You know how I despise dilettantes. But she does know all the best art dealers in London and Paris. You’re not jealous, are you, my dear?”

  I was surprised to see her look soften toward me. I had always believed she despised jealousy, as she despised most weaknesses, but now she was smiling and drawing me closer to her. “My darling Lily, my pure Lily. You know there is no one else for me. You have nothing to fear. But if you would like to come with us, you know nothing would make me happier.”

  I could feel the rapid beating of her heart beneath the stiff cloth of her dress. Her arm around me tightened. I knew then that she’d planned this revelation to make me jealous and to lure me into going with her. It did not make me love her any less. If anything, it made me love her more. It was the first time I’d ever seen her do anything truly weak. And she’d done it for me. For love of me.

  I returned her embrace and murmured into her neck. “How could I ever fail to trust you, Vera? Your very name is truth. Go to Europe. Bring back your treasures. I’ll be here waiting
for you.”

  Mimi wanted to go home to Brooklyn first to visit with her family, and so we arranged that we would meet at St. Lucy’s in the last week of October. I decided that I would use the time to visit my family in Roxbury.

  I hadn’t visited since leaving for the city. I had sent letters and money all along but I’d been wary of returning to my family, afraid they’d see how far I’d grown from them. I should have been most frightened now with a secret that really could be read in my flesh, in my thickening waist and swelling breasts, but perhaps that was the reason, after all, that I went. Perhaps I had some idea that there was still a place for me and my unborn child in the home where I was born.

  My parents’ farm was on the outskirts of the village of Roxbury, sheltered in a hollow with rich meadows watered by the East Branch of the Delaware River. When I got off the train in Roxbury, the trim white houses seemed to reproach me with their provincial superiority. By the time I got to the white farmhouse I was almost ready to turn around and walk back to the train station. I stopped in the shade of an old weeping beech and leaned against it, suddenly light-headed at the sight of my old home. From there I watched as my sisters and mother came in and out, walking from the house to the barn, carrying pails to the barn for the milking and then the breakfast scraps and corn for the chickens. I watched my sister Rose, grown into a tall, fine woman, fetch water from the well and I watched my father, grown old since I had left, come home from the fields for his dinner. He’d gained a helper—the young man who’d proposed to me and married Marguerite—as well as a new dog who didn’t catch my scent as I stood beneath the weeping beech, hidden behind a green curtain of leaves. I stood there so long that I felt I’d become a part of the tree. My limbs were as numb as if they had turned to bark, my head as heavy as if weighted down with a mane of leaves, my feet as immobile as if they had grown roots. I almost wished that I could become part of the tree, because then I could stay here always and be a part of the rhythm and flow of the farm’s daily life. That was the only way, I saw now, that I’d ever again be a part of it. They didn’t need me. I would only bring shame to them if I came to them now, pregnant and unmarried.

  I shook off my languor by remembering Vera and the life that awaited me back at Arcadia. It seemed so far away, as if I would have to climb mountains to find it again, but I would never get there if I didn’t start out. It felt like I was ripping my own flesh to move away from that tree, but when at last I pried myself away I felt I had broken the last bond I had to my old life.

  I walked back to the train station and took the train on to Arkville, where I found a boardinghouse to stay in for the rest of the week. I waited there until Mimi joined me. She looked refreshed from her visit to her family, full of stories and packages of baked goods I’d never heard of before—mandelbrot and rugelach. She asked me how my visit had gone, and I shrugged and made up stories about my sisters, which I almost believed.

  The next morning, we took the Delaware & Northern through a pristine country of rolling green hills populated by cows and low-lying mists that rose off the river and dewed the windows of our rail car. We were the only passengers to detrain at Easton, a pretty town with a white church and a dozen white clapboard houses on the banks of the East Branch of the Delaware. While we sat on our trunks waiting we watched a group of boys fishing in the fast-flowing river. When we inquired of one about the orphanage he responded by running away as if he were afraid we had plans to make him an orphan. Finally, when we were considering taking the next train back to Arkville, we heard the wheels of an approaching conveyance and out of the mists there appeared, in order: a mud-splashed pony, a hooded and hunched over driver, and a cart that might have once been painted white but was now the color of the same mud that covered the pony. The driver, a sullen young man whose face, even when he pushed back his hood, was half-hidden under a deep brimmed cap, greeted us with the words “You must be the new girls from the city.” He proceeded to lift our trunks into the back of the wooden pony cart, which was redolent of hay and manure. When it became clear that we were also expected to ride in the back of the cart, Mimi balked.

  “I’m not riding in that, mister.”

  The man tipped back his hat revealing close-set dark eyes and a beaky nose. “Oh, you’re not, are you? Then you’d better start walking. St. Lu’s is halfway up that mountain there.” He gestured with his thumb to a hummocked slope that rose out of the pearl gray river mists only to be enveloped by a dark cloud that threatened rain. In the narrow strip of land between mist and cloud, I could make out a few white buildings clinging to the side of the mountain. As Mimi and the cart driver squared off, rain began to fall.

  “I don’t mind riding in the cart,” I said. “I grew up on a farm so I’m used to it,” I told the man, who I now saw was really only a boy of eighteen or nineteen. “There’s room in the front for my friend, isn’t there?”

  The boy rolled his eyes, shrugged, and then performed an elaborate bow, doffing his hat and sweeping an arm to the plywood board that comprised the front seat of the cart. “After you, m’lady,” he said. While Mimi struggled up onto the front seat, he helped me into the back of the cart, muttering under his breath about people who put on airs and thought themselves above their station.

  The smell was really quite strong and I thought at first that along with the rocking of the cart it might make me sick, but I found that if I relaxed into the rhythm it wasn’t so bad. We were climbing a steep dirt road. Facing backward, I saw the river snaking through the valley below, the green hills rolling in waves that were crested by the white foam of the ever-present mist. I felt as though I were being borne up above the sea. I thought of Vera on her ship traveling to Europe, and although I missed her I felt at peace for the first time in many months. No one would find me here. I had found a refuge. I heard Mimi laughing and I gathered that her amusement was over our driver’s mistake. He’d thought we were two unwed mothers coming to St. Lucy’s (St. Lu’s, as he called it, as if it were a place you’d come to lose yourself) to have our babies in secret. Mimi enjoyed correcting him, telling him we were artists commissioned to paint the new murals for the chapel. The boy—Johnnie, I soon learned was his name—was profuse in his apologies, but I was glad he had made the mistake. It made me feel a little less that I had come to this place under false pretenses.

  I soon discovered that the remoteness of St. Lucy’s was no accident.

  “Many of our girls come from the finest Catholic families,” Sister Margaret, the head of the orphanage, informed us at dinner that night. We had been given seats at her table, which was on a raised dais in the cavernous dining room. “We give them privacy and a chance to return to their old lives, cleansed of their sins.”

  “Don’t they miss their babies?” Mimi asked in between bites of roast beef. Vera needn’t have worried about me losing weight here. The food was excellent.

  Sister Margaret looked up from her plate. She wasn’t having the roast beef. A few potatoes and beets were on her plate, but I hadn’t seen her touch them. I wondered if she were an ascetic. It was hard to tell how thin she was under her black habit, but her face was long and bony, her skin as white as the wimple that framed it, and her blue eyes burned with the intensity of a fanatic. I was surprised that Mimi had dared to ask such a question of her. But she answered it calmly.

  “Yes, of course they do. I imagine they think about them every remaining day of their lives. But it is our hope that their faith in God comforts them and that, in a lesser sense, their faith in us to place the children in good homes also sustains them. We hope that in contemplating the life of St. Lucy, who was, like them, an unwed mother and who placed her child in the hands of God, they will find reassurance. That is why I’ve chosen to have her life depicted in the chapel, where many of the girls stop first when they come to us. I assume you’ve read the material I sent on St. Lucy’s life.”

  “I have,” I said, grateful to talk about something other than missing babies. I’d been so pre
occupied with hiding my pregnancy and with how I could have the child in secret that I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what it would feel like to hand the baby—my baby—over to a total stranger. The thought brought an unexpected pang, a sharp cramp deep down in my stomach. “I confess that I wasn’t familiar with her life even though I was raised a Catholic.”

  “St. Lucy is not well known,” Sister Margaret replied, “but our order has venerated her for more than fifteen hundred years, since her martyrdom in fifth-century Ireland when she was known by her Irish name, Luiseach. Her life is particularly inspiring for the young women who come here.”

  “She was raped, wasn’t she?” Mimi asked.

  “Raped or seduced, history doesn’t distinguish, but really, don’t they amount to nearly the same thing? Her seducer was a pagan chieftain. How could the poor girl defend herself against a man of such power? Many of the young women who come here are seduced by powerful men, or at least by men who enjoy exerting power over those weaker than them.”

  “I suppose,” I said, cringing at another twinge in my belly, “that if a saint fell victim to such seduction, there is forgiveness for a mere girl who does the same.”

  “Exactly,” Sister Margaret said, studying me closely. “That is the message I bring to my girls. The directors are not always happy with my ways. They would have me punish them for their transgressions, to make their lives here harder, but I know too well that they have enough hardness and trials to come.”

  “You mean childbirth?” Mimi asked. “I read in your saint’s story that poor Lucy gives birth on a cliff in the middle of a thunderstorm and that she gripped a boulder so hard that she left her finger marks in it. We’ll paint that if you like, but don’t you think it’ll scare the girls?”