“Don’t go shaming your employer’s household,” she said, and then added in a lower whisper: “It wasn’t the master of the house who got you—” She pointed toward Tilly’s belly.
“Oh no,” Tilly said, her eyes wide with shock at the idea. “It were the grocery delivery boy, Tom. He said I wouldn’t have a baby if I said three Hail Marys while we did it.”
Jean clucked her tongue. “And you believed him?”
“Aye, only I never did get to say them three Hail Marys. He was done before I’d gotten through the second.”
Jean clamped a hand over her mouth and fell back on her bed laughing. Nancy tried to keep a straight face, but when she caught my eye we both started giggling. Even Tilly joined in, holding her small round belly as if to shield the baby inside from the joke that had been made at its father’s expense. I felt bad about laughing at poor Tilly—I hadn’t even needed a lie to convince me to give in to Virgil Nash, just a little moonlight—but I noticed that she didn’t cry that night. She’d been accepted into the sisterhood of fallen women, as Jean referred to us. It happened with each new girl. Once she felt a part of the group she stopped crying. Whenever a new girl showed up, the girls stayed up later that night, gossiping and telling stories to distract the newcomer from the strangeness of the place. Soon I was the one telling the stories. I told the fairy tales I’d made up for my sisters and new stories I made up as I went along.
One night, I started a story with “There once was a girl who liked to pretend she was lost until the day she really lost her way.” It was the beginning of the story I had told Vera the first night she came to me, but the story grew into something else this time. The girl found a witch in the forest who showed her how to send a likeness of herself back to her family. The girls thought the witch sounded like Sister Margaret and I let them think it was her. When I told the part about the girl being too lazy to wash the root in running water, a few of them sighed. Who of us hadn’t made mistakes? And look where it had gotten us: far from our homes and loved ones. I knew then that I’d tied a knot into the story. How would the girl in the story get home? That’s what they were waiting to hear. They sat three to a bed, their knees drawn up to their chins so that their white flannel nightgowns made little tents under their crossed arms. In the moonlight, they looked like caterpillars folded inside their cocoons. Outside I could hear the creek flowing past the dormitory, swollen from a week of heavy rain. I felt bad then, but I couldn’t go back. And wasn’t that what all of us feared? That we could never go back? We weren’t the same girls who’d left our homes. I’d seen that when I stood at the edge of my parents’ farm and knew I couldn’t return. Would I feel that when I went back to Vera after this?
I tried to give them a different kind of ending. One that acknowledged how changed we would be but that suggested possibilities for the future. And the child we would leave behind? She—or he—would find its own home, accepted into some facsimile of the families we had left.
When I came to the end of the story, the dormitory was silent. I couldn’t see their faces because the moon no longer shone through the window. Nor could I hear the creek. Had my story put the whole world to sleep? But when I looked out the window, I understood. It was snowing. The girls unfolded their legs under their nightgowns like caterpillars breaking out of their cocoons and flitted, mothlike, to the windows where we watched the snow fill up the stream bed, muffling its voice, and then fill the whole valley, shutting us off from the world outside. We stood there until our feet grew cold and then one by one the girls went back to their beds. As each one passed I felt their fingertips lightly graze against my arms and hands. Nancy kissed my cheek and whispered, “Thank you.”
I fell into a deep sleep but was woken sometime before dawn by voices. Standing by Tilly’s bed were Sister Margaret and another nun holding a lantern. Someone was crying. I thought it was Tilly, but when I stood up and got close enough to see her face I saw she had gone past crying. Her face was contorted into a wrinkled ball, like an apple that’s dried up in the sun. It was the young nun crying as she and Sister Margaret tried to lift Tilly out of bed. When Sister Margaret saw me there standing frozen on my feet, she clucked her tongue and pointed to a dark bloody knot in the sheets.
“As long as you’re up, you can be of use and clean that up. Bring the sheets to the kitchen and tell Sister Ursula to burn them. Can you do that?”
I nodded then and quickly bundled the sheets in a ball, trying not to look at what lay inside. But I’d already seen the twisted length of red cord, like a rope dipped in carmine. Like the changeling root in my story. I carried the bundle to the kitchen and handed it over to Sister Ursula, a fat, good-natured nun from Ireland who gave the girls extra servings of pudding. When I told her what Sister Margaret had ordered, she asked me whose sheets they were.
“Tilly, the new girl,” I said.
Sister Ursula clucked her tongue and laid the bundle on the fire. “Poor thing. Perhaps it will be better for her this way.”
Then she seemed to recall whom she was talking to and crossed herself. She poured me a hot cup of tea from a kettle on the stove, but the smell of the tea mixed with the burning sheets curdled my stomach. I ran outside and vomited into the new-fallen snow. I couldn’t bear to go back into the kitchen, so I went to the barn. It was early to milk, but the cows didn’t mind. I just wanted to lay my head against their sides and breathe in the grass and manure smell of them until the smell of blood was gone. I milked all six cows. Jean and Nancy were surprised when they found me, but they said nothing.
I finished the face of St. Lucy giving birth in a storm that day. The story goes that she left her finger marks on a rock she clutched. She still had Nancy’s features, but I gave her the expression I’d seen on Tilly’s face.
“You’ll scare the girls,” Mimi told me when she saw the painting.
“It’s better than lying to them,” I answered.
“I heard about the girl who miscarried,” Mimi said then. I could tell she was trying to make up for not talking to me all these weeks. “Poor thing.”
“At least she won’t have to live with the pain of not knowing what happened to her child,” I said.
Mimi put down her brush and knelt by my side. “I’m sorry I said those things to you, Lily. We all make mistakes. I know you’re only doing what you think is best. And after all, some poor woman who can’t have a child will be grateful. Look at Gertrude Sheldon. She’s been trying to have a baby for years.”
“Oh please, don’t wish that fate on my baby. Imagine what kind of mother Gertrude would make!”
“You’re right,” Mimi said, shaking her head, “but don’t worry. I had a letter from Gertrude last week in which she hints that the waters of Baden-Baden have done the trick and she’s finally pregnant.”
“Well, good for her,” I said. “Did she say anything about Vera?”
“Yes, she said that Vera was disgusted with Baden-Baden and all talk of babies and that she had gone to England to study pottery with Clarice Cliff. Haven’t you had a letter?”
“We agreed not to write. So as to give ourselves the freedom of mind as well as geography.”
“That sounds like something Vera would say.” Mimi squeezed my hand and got to her feet. “From what Gertrude says, I suppose you were right. Vera wouldn’t do very well with a baby. I only hope she’s worth it.”
I pointed to the mural. “This is worth it. This is what I’m good at, Mimi. This and telling stories. Not babies. The child deserves a mother who really wants it.”
I could see tears standing in her eyes. She leaned down and gave me an awkward embrace. I hugged her to me tightly and patted her back, as if I were comforting her. I didn’t tell her that when I saw that twisted red thing that came out of Tilly I’d thought: that’s what’s inside me. A changeling created out of dreams and pulp. A monster bred by a monstrous mother who wanted nothing more than to be rid of her own child and go back home.
When my baby was born, th
ough, it wasn’t a monster at all. She wore a splash of blood on the side of her head like a dancer would wear a rose tucked behind her ear, but otherwise she was pink and white all over. Not a gnarled root, but a plump, perfect baby. She took my breath away.
When they came to take her, I asked if I could hold her awhile. I saw the nuns exchange a look, but Sister Margaret came and said they should let me.
That night, Mimi came to the infirmary and asked if I was sure. She looked as if she was afraid I’d be angry with her for asking again, so I took her hand so she would know I wasn’t. I drew her near so she could see the baby. “Look how beautiful she is,” I said. “Feel how strong her grip is.” I slid my hand out from under the baby’s so that her fingers clasped Mimi’s instead of mine. “They cling like ivy. That’s what I’ve asked Sister Margaret to call her. Oh, I know she’ll have a different name when she’s adopted, but I don’t want her to be without a name while she waits. And for a last name they’ll name her after St. Lucy’s daughter, who was carried safely away by a river. Ivy St. Clare, that’s the name I’ll remember her by.”
I stare for a long time at the name Lily gave her baby. When I finally look up, I see that the sky is lightening outside my window. I’ve stayed up all night reading and I’ve only gotten through half of Lily’s journal. I turn to the next page and read:
When I returned to Arcadia, I found that Vera had built for us a little cottage, which she called Fleur-de-Lis in my honor. “I name this house for you,” she said, standing on the threshold holding a single white lily like a baton. “My Lily of the valley, my pure Lily, my Lily among the thorns.” Then she waved me inside with the lily and showed me the cottage, pointing out each and every detail. She’d designed it herself to be neat and trim as a ship’s cabin and she had it fitted out with all manner of hidden cubbies and secret pigeonholes in which she hid surprises for me to find.
Hidden cubbies and secret pigeonholes like the one behind the panel on the fireplace where I’d found the journal. If Vera had designed it, then why hadn’t she found the journal there? Or had she found it and then put it back? But if she had found it, why had Ivy thought it was lost?
All the unanswered questions make me restless. I get up, still clutching the journal in my hands, and pad barefoot into the hall. I come to rest in the doorway of Sally’s empty room, feeling a pang at her absence but also a reminder of the last months of my pregnancy. We’d moved out to the house in Great Neck (Jude’s parents, thrilled that he’d given up art for Wall Street, had loaned us the money for a down payment), but we hadn’t had time to buy furniture yet. I would wander through the empty rooms trying to imagine what our lives were going to be like there. The only room we’d really furnished was the nursery. I’d stand on the threshold, my hand resting on my swollen stomach, and try to picture the child inside growing up in this pretty pink-and-white room. There was something about the stillness of the house in the middle of the night that seemed timeless, and yet also full of all time, as if the empty, moonlit rooms held our future as well as our past.
How often, I wonder now, had Lily wandered through this house at night wondering what had become of the child she gave up? She’d given the baby a name so that she could think of her. Did she know the child still carried that name? Did she know the baby had stayed at the orphanage? For she must have, since she kept that name. Lily must have found out at some point and brought Ivy here.
I recall from my research that Ivy St. Clare came to Arcadia in 1945 when she was sixteen years old as part of a new scholarship program. I’d been sure that the program was initiated by Lily, but on my first day here Ivy had insisted that it was Vera who had chosen her, not Lily. Now I’m surer than ever that it was Lily. She must have found out that her child was still living at St. Lucy’s and contrived the scholarship program as a way to get Ivy to Arcadia without arousing Vera’s suspicions. But then she let Ivy believe it was Vera who had chosen her. Why? And why hadn’t she ever told Ivy that she was her mother?
The answers might well be in the book I’m holding in my hand, but I can’t finish reading it now. It’s already past dawn. I hear mourning doves cooing outside Sally’s open window. I turn and walk down the stairs, cradling the book in my arms as if it is a child I’m trying to protect. Ivy must have known that there was something in Lily’s journal of import to her. She accused Dora and Ada of stealing the journal after Lily’s death. When she saw my still life she focused on the green book. Did she recognize it as Lily’s long-lost journal? Did she believe me when I had told her the book in my still life was one of my own? If she didn’t, she would come looking for it—and I didn’t want her to find it until I finished reading.
I stand in front of the fireplace looking at the central panel. Vera must have known where to look once she got the note from Lily … unless Vera never got the note. Ivy said she had given Vera the note, but what if she hadn’t? What if she’d only told Vera that Lily had run off and kept the note with its endearments and pledge of eternal love? If Vera hadn’t read it, then she wouldn’t have known where to look for the journal. And if Ivy had read the note …
I open the book and reread the note. You are my heart, I read. I have left my story for you in the heart and hearth of our lives together. I had immediately assumed that she meant the hearth of the cottage—as Vera would, I imagine, since she knew about the secret panel—but there was someplace else I’d read that phrase. I flip through the journal and find it in Lily’s description of the early days of the colony. Vera said she hoped the pottery kiln would become a place for the artists to gather in the evening—the heart and hearth of the community.
If Ivy had heard the kiln referred to that way she may have thought Lily was leaving her journal with Dora and Ada. And that was why Ivy went to them looking for it. She didn’t know about the secret panel in the hearth.
One thing’s for sure. If Ivy hadn’t found the journal here over sixty years ago, she wasn’t going to find it here now. I open the panel and slide the journal back into its hiding place and then close the panel, brushing my fingers over the carving of the tiny baby nestled in the roots. No wonder Lily put the journal here—she’d hidden the secret of her lost child in the roots that hid the changeling baby.
I’m surprised to see how excited my students are about the Dead Project, as they’re all calling it now. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet many have already gotten their parents to send digital copies of old photographs. They seem eager to share their pictures, so I shelve the discussion of Bettelheim for another day and ask them to hold up their photos and tell the stories behind them.
Many of the pictures are of families on vacations or graduation shots or wedding portraits. Their stories are fairly straightforward. But some quickly become more complicated.
“This is my mother’s graduation picture from Vassar.” Hannah holds up a picture of a dark-haired girl with her own Botticelli features standing with two other girls in dark robes on a lawn beneath a bright red maple tree.
“Wow, she’s really beautiful,” Tori Pratt says. “But you know,” she adds, “that’s not a graduation picture. My mom went to Vassar and she has a picture of herself in her robe, but without that white collar thingy they wear, and she says that’s how you can tell it’s convocation, not graduation. It’s something students do at the beginning of their senior year. And look, the leaves on this tree are red. This picture was taken in the fall, not spring when they hold graduation.”
“Huh,” Hannah says looking closer at the picture and furrowing her brows. “I’m pretty sure she said it was her graduation picture.”
“Maybe she mixed them up,” I suggest.
“Maybe,” Hannah echoes, her brow still furrowed. “I’ll have to ask.”
Clyde, too, presents a story that seems to shift as he tells it. The picture he’s chosen is one of his grandfather as a young man in an army uniform. He’s clean-shaven, his hair cropped short. He looks so young it’s hard to believe anyone would send him off to w
ar.
“He signed up right after Pearl Harbor,” Clyde says. “My grandma says everybody did. And she always tells how she went out and got him this pocket watch so he’d take it with him and not forget her. But you know, last night I was thinking about that story and I looked at the date on my grandfather’s watch. It says, ‘To Harold from Sarah, June 3, 1942.’ But Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941. So what was he doing for those six months?”
“Can you ask them?” Hannah asks.
Clyde shakes his head. “They’re both dead. I e-mailed my mother last night, but she said she had no idea. She said Poppa had always told that story about joining up right after Pearl Harbor and Grandma had always told the story about giving him the watch, but no one had ever looked at the two pieces to see that they didn’t match.”
“Because those stories were part of your family’s folklore,” I say. “You don’t question the details. They take on the aura of legend. Although the story may change with each telling, certain phrases are always repeated. Like ‘Back in my day, we had to walk to school—”
“Or ‘When I was your age,’” Hannah interrupts, “‘we couldn’t look things up on the Internet, we had to go the library.’”
“And we had to walk to it through five feet of snow,” Clyde adds.
“Yeah,” Tori Pratt chimes in, “my grandmother is always going on about how little they had in the Depression compared to all the stuff we have now. And then she always says, ‘We didn’t have much, but we had each other.’” Tori’s voice goes up an octave and quavers to imitate her grandmother. She rolls her eyes but smiles, and I find myself returning her smile, glad to see Tori’s world-weary veneer crack a bit.
“My grandmother,” I say, “always started her stories with ‘Back in my day a woman was supposed to choose between marriage and work.’ She always said it was good my mother had a stable job, like teaching. Grandma had worked at a magazine before she’d met my grandfather, but she gave it up when she got married. She’d say …” I close my eyes to recall the exact words. Instantly I’m seated at the green-and-white Porceliron table in my grandmother’s Brooklyn Heights kitchen. I’m drawing in one of the blank sketchbooks my grandmother seemed to have in endless supply. “‘When I had your mother I gave up my job even though it was the Depression and Jack and I had precious little to live on.’”