I open my eyes and find that my audience has grown. Ivy St. Clare has come into the doorway and is listening to my story.
“But then as I got older and I was more interested in art, she’d say: ‘Your grandfather kept his job during the Depression because he was a bookkeeper. People always need bookkeepers, but art they can do without. The magazines laid off the illustrators and advertising staff. You can’t eat art,’ she’d always end by saying.”
The class laughs at the last line and I realize I’d slipped into my grandmother Miriam’s Brooklynese. “I grew up with both these stories, endlessly repeated, but never once did I ask my grandmother, ‘Which was it? Did you give up your job in advertising to raise a family or did you lose your job in the Depression?’ And I never wondered why, if she thought being an artist was such a bad career move, she gave me sketchpads and crayons on every birthday.”
“Weird,” Chloe says.
“Can you ask her now?” Hannah asks.
“She died when I was seventeen. And that was another strange thing. In her will she left me a small bequest to go to art school. She was specific that it be art school. My mother was ticked off. At first I thought it was because she’d left the money to me, but I overheard her telling some of her teacher friends when they paid a shivah call that what really irked her was that my grandmother and grandfather had refused to let her go to art school even when she got a scholarship.”
“Damn,” Clyde says, “no wonder she was pissed.”
“So did you go to art school?”
“Yes,” I say, “I started at Pratt….” I falter, recalling only now where this story ends. “But I dropped out my junior year.” I don’t add that I quit because I got pregnant with Sally.
“It’s like a family curse,” Chloe says. “Three generations of frustrated women artists.”
I try to laugh off the comment—it sounds so melodramatic!—but then I see the disapproving expression on Ivy St. Clare’s face and think of what I learned about her origins last night. If she knew that her mother abandoned her in an orphanage so that she could pursue an artistic life, what might she have to say about family curses?
“Well,” I say, “maybe that’s why I came to Arcadia. To break the family curse.”
“Do you think it’s wise to use your own personal history in the classroom?” Dean St. Clare asks me when my students have left.
“I’m asking them to use their personal history. I think it’s only fair that I’m willing to model the assignment by using mine.”
“Did you get your ideas about teaching from your mother? I hadn’t realized she was a teacher.”
“She taught third grade for more than thirty-five years. She was a master of the shoebox diorama and the Palmer Method of penmanship.”
“Really?” the Dean asks. “The Palmer Method? That’s what the nuns taught us. I would think that it would have been out of fashion by the time your mother was around.”
“She was old-fashioned,” I say, not wanting to get into the fact that my mother had me so late in life. Instead I try to turn the focus on her. “You were taught by nuns? At a Catholic school?”
“At a Catholic orphanage, to be precise. That’s where I was when Vera Beecher rescued me by giving me the scholarship to come here.” She touches the pin she always wears. “It’s a saint’s medal,” she says, noticing me staring at it. “St. Lucy and her daughter, St. Clare, rising to heaven on a cloud. The nuns gave it to me when I left. Vera said it ought to reflect who I had become, not just where I came from, so she learned metalworking so she could set it in a wreath of ivy for me.”
“You see, that’s what I was trying to get across to the class today. We all carry myths from our family history—”
“As I just told you, I don’t have a family history. I was raised in an orphanage.”
“But of course you do. Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt were your family. You’ve told me twice now that Vera Beecher ‘rescued’ you. That’s your story—”
“Are you saying I made it up?” Ivy St. Clare’s small wrinkled face appears even more pinched than usual. Her hands are coiled into tight fists. Perhaps I’ve gone too far, but there’s no way out now but to go farther.
“No, of course not. What I’m saying is that you’ve accepted a version of your story because it’s what you’ve always believed to be true: that Vera Beecher chose you for that scholarship. But mightn’t it have been Lily who actually chose you?”
“Lily Eberhardt told me herself that Vera chose me,” Ivy says, shaking her head.
“From what I know about Lily—from what I’m learning about her through Vera’s diaries and their letters,” I add quickly so she doesn’t ask me again about Lily’s journal, “she gave Vera credit for everything she did. She idolized Vera.”
“You’re wrong,” Ivy says. “It was Vera who idolized Lily. So much so that it crushed her when Lily ran away. I saw Vera on the night that Lily left to meet Virgil Nash. She was mad with grief. She ran after her in a blizzard, wearing nothing but a robe and slippers—” Ivy chokes back her next words in a gargled rasp, as if her anger was strangling her.
“Vera followed Lily out into the storm?” I ask. “I thought you said that you were at the cottage all night with her and that Vera didn’t realize that Lily had died in the clove until weeks later.”
“I didn’t say she followed her all the way to the clove. I caught up to her and made her come back to the cottage. I stayed with her for the rest of that night. We sat up by the fire. Vera couldn’t sleep. She kept hoping that Lily would return. At dawn, when she realized that she wasn’t coming back, she took up the fire poker and smashed the tiles above the fireplace. She was never the same after that. Lily had crushed her. So don’t ask me to believe that Lily was the one who saved me from the orphanage. I’d rather have rotted in St. Lucy’s than think I owe my salvation to that woman.”
She waits a moment, as if daring me to argue, and then turns on her heel and leaves. I watch her go, speechless, wondering how much worse Ivy St. Clare would feel if she knew that the woman who destroyed her idol was her own mother.
I have to run to make my seminar with the Merling twins. It’s all I can do to concentrate on the day’s reading—Angela Carter’s twentieth-century version of Cinderella, “Ashputtle.” Carter is one of my favorite authors, and this is one of my favorite stories, but the gruesome details seem especially troubling to me today. It’s a twist on the classic absent mother story in which the orphaned heroine receives supernatural help from her dead mother in the form of animal helpers, magic talismans, and fairy godmothers. In Carter’s version, though, the mother’s ghost enters the body of a bird that mutilates itself so that her daughter will have a dress to wear to the ball, and, in the final scene, the dead mother rescues her daughter from the ash-pit only to invite her to step into her coffin.
“I stepped into my mother’s coffin when I was your age,” the mother says to Ashputtle.
“I take that to mean that we’re doomed to repeat our mothers’ mistakes,” Peter Merling says. “The mother who has died in childbirth condemns her own child to marriage and childbirth and, thus, death.”
“But why doesn’t the mother come back and tell the daughter to flee—live some other life that doesn’t lead to entrapment and death?” Rebecca asks, her tone unusually emotional. “All this bloody sacrifice for your child—what good is it if you’re condemning your child to the same cycle of sex and death?”
I think of Lily Eberhardt’s decision to leave her child with nuns so that she could pursue an independent life. Then I think of my own grandmother, who gave up her ambitions to be a mother and then wouldn’t let her own daughter go to art school even though she’d been offered a scholarship. And when she tried to make some sort of reparation—leaving me the money to go to art school—I ended up leaving to have a baby. It’s like a family curse, Chloe had said. It seems to me right now that it’s the curse of all mothers and daughters. We sacrifice to give them what
we didn’t have, but all we’ve done is to show them that’s all a woman can do: sacrifice herself or sacrifice her child. It all leads to the same place.
But I can hardly say that to Rebecca and Peter Merling. Instead I let them out early and go looking for Shelley. She’s in her studio arranging objects on a table.
“You’ve inspired me,” she says. “I haven’t done a still life in ages. I’m going to do my own Dead Project.”
“I wish the students hadn’t latched on to that name for it,” I say, looking at the objects that Shelley has chosen to represent her ancestors. It’s a peculiar assortment. She’s chosen a copy of her grandmother’s painting Ancient Priestess Worshipping at the Feet of Artemis and the parody of the painting that was in the Fakirs show. There are a number of references to the Art Students League and to the early days of the Arcadia Colony: a poster for the 1926 Annual League Costume Ball, a wreath of faded dried daisies that looks like the ones that Gertrude, Mimi, and Lily wore in the May Day picture I included in my own still life, a vase that has the Dorada emblem stamped on its side, and a faded scarf embroidered with gold fleur-de-lis. Shelley’s tableau is clearly meant to evoke the artistic legacy of her grandmother, but I’m surprised that several of the objects she’s chosen ridicule Gertrude. Then I recall how disdainful Shelley has been of her grandmother’s talent, how eager she was to distance herself from Gertrude Sheldon’s style and her history of mental illness. It strikes me that the Sheldon family relationship to art is even more cursed than my own.
“What’s this?” I ask, picking up a small brass disk. “It looks like a saint’s medal. Was your grandmother Catholic?”
“She converted to Catholicism while traveling in Italy the year before my mother was born. It drove her parents wild! Which is why she did it, of course. She claimed that she only was able to conceive my mother after praying at a Catholic shrine in Siena.”
I recall from Lily’s journal that Mimi Green said Gertrude had written her from Europe saying she had gotten pregnant after taking the waters at Baden-Baden, but I don’t say anything. I’m certainly not going to tell Shelley that I’ve got Lily’s journal. But it does make me think of something. “Do you have anything your grandmother wrote about the early days of Arcadia?”
“I’ll have to take a look. My grandfather Bennett burned most of her diaries and letters when she died. Her paintings and drawings, too.”
“Really? That’s awful.” The idea of a piece of original artwork—a one-of-a-kind—destroyed has always struck me as particularly awful.
“Well, they really weren’t any good. The only things that survived were some floral still lifes and her datebooks—endless calendars full of visiting schedules, afternoon teas, charity galas, and dinner parties. I did find some papers once that she’d hidden in an old sewing box. I’ll look through those and see if there’s anything worthwhile. Is there anything particular that you’re interested in?”
“I wondered if your grandmother was still in touch with Vera and Lily when Lily died in 1947, and if she wrote anything about it.”
“I’ll look,” Shelley says again, turning back to the objects on the table which she begins to rearrange. “Through my mother’s things, too.”
“Your mother?”
“Fleur Sheldon. She was one of the first students here and she stayed at Arcadia over the Christmas holidays that year. So she would have been here when Lily died. I’ll check my mother’s diaries to see if she wrote about it. No one burned her things, no doubt because she led such a boring life no one thought there could possibly be anything scandalous in them.”
On my way up to Beech Hall I spot Sally sitting with Chloe on the lawn beneath the copper beech. Although both girls have their sketchpads balanced on their knees, they aren’t drawing. Their heads are bent together, Chloe’s dark hair falling against Sally’s deep auburn. It’s a lovely scene, the deep purple of the copper beech and the chocolate and gold of the girls’ hair all remind me of the palette of the Impressionist painter Édouard Vuillard. I’m tempted to stop and sketch—maybe I’ll take up painting again next—when the scene is ruined completely and irrevocably. Sally looks up and I see that her face is blanched with pain. Unable to help myself, I hurry toward her.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, scanning her body as if she were two and had just fallen on the playground. It’s all I can do not to start patting her for broken bones.
“It’s you!” Sally cries. “You told your whole class that you dropped out of art school because you got pregnant with me.”
“I did not!” I sink to my knees to get closer to her and glance at Chloe. I remember how she had stared at me in class. I had been about to tell the class that I dropped out because I got pregnant. It is as if she had read my mind. She seems to now as well, smiling a small secret smile as the blood rushes to my face.
“Chloe’s lying.” I regret the words as soon as they’re out of my mouth.
Chloe frowns. “I only told Sally that you dropped out of art school your junior year. We counted back and figured out it would have been about the time you got pregnant with Sally.”
“Was that the reason?” Sally asks.
Her eyes are wide and shining, glassy with tears. “Honey,” I say, reaching for her hand. “It was more complicated than that. You have to understand—”
She snatches her hand away and scrambles to her feet. “I understand perfectly. You’re jealous I have the chance to do what you couldn’t.”
She’s gone before I can say anything else, Chloe running after her, but really, what else can I say? As much as I love Sally, as much as any mother loves her daughter, isn’t it the dirty truth at the bottom of every fairy tale that there’s a little bit of the evil stepmother inside every mother?
I teach my next class in a fog, glad that Chloe’s not in it. How could I have so baldly accused a student of lying? What if she goes to Dean St. Clare and reports the conversation? But worse than the thought of getting in trouble with the dean is the memory of the betrayal in Sally’s eyes. I’ve always known that someday Sally would put together the dates of her conception and my leaving art school, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
At the end of class I find I can’t face the idea of going back to the cottage by myself. I’m afraid I’m turning into the evil witch who would live in such a place. So instead I climb the hill to the library, preferring to face the draconian Miss Bridewell rather than my own reflection in the mirror. When I ask her if she has all the newspaper accounts covering the death of Lily Eberhardt, she looks at me as if I’ve asked her to perform some impossible task like sorting out stacks of wheat and barley.
“We don’t have them sorted as such,” she says primly. “You’ll have to do the legwork. It’s all on microfilm and the microfilm is kept in the basement.”
“Actually,” a student aide with strawberry blond hair who’s been ordering books on a cart beside Miss Bridewell’s desk interrupts, “I pulled all those microfilms for a student who was doing research on Lily Eberhardt’s death earlier in the year.”
“But surely you reshelved those by now, Lynn.” Miss Bridewell removes her glasses to glare at the poor library aide. Remarkably, the girl seems unaffected by the librarian’s basilisk stare.
“Of course I did, Miss Bridewell, but it occurred to me that someone else might be interested in the same topic, so I made up a list of the pertinent references complete with the microfilm call numbers.” The intrepid aide opens a file drawer and deftly pulls out a file folder. “Here it is,” she says, handing me the sheet.
“That’s great,” I say, beaming at the girl (someone has to, I figure; Miss Bridewell is still looking at her, aghast).
“Well, then, if that’s all you need, I have work to do,” Miss Bridewell says.
“Um, if you could just tell me where the microfilm is kept—”
“I’ll show her,” the aide offers. “I’m done with this cart and I have to take it downstairs anyway.”
Miss B
ridewell reluctantly gives permission for the aide to accompany me and even concedes to me riding down with her in the employee elevator. “Thank you, Lynn,” I say when the elevators doors slide shut between us and Miss Bridewell’s icy stare.
“Actually, it’s Glynn. I’ve been working in the library for three years now. Miss Bridewell signs my timesheets and she’s a woman who knows the Dewey Decimal System by heart, but somehow she doesn’t see the G at the beginning of my name.”
“People are funny that way. They don’t see what they don’t expect to see. Glynn’s a pretty name, though.”
“Thanks. My grandmother’s maiden name was McGlynn. My mom just got rid of the ‘Mc.’ She says a girl doesn’t need the ‘Mc’ anyway because it means ‘son of and that it made up for me taking my father’s last name.”
“Your mother’s quite the feminist.”
“Yeah,” Glynn says as the elevator door opens, “she’s pretty cool. Here we are. The microfilm machine is over here. If you like, I can pull those rolls for you.”
“I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with Miss Bridewell,” I say, trying not to wish that Sally were more like this polite young woman who thinks her mother is cool.
“Please,” she says, rolling her eyes, “she never comes down here. She says the dust aggravates her asthma. Besides, as I said, I pulled those rolls not long ago so they’ll be easy for me to find.”
“That would be great,” I say, sitting down at the machine. While she’s gone I take out a pen and notebook. Then I play with the knobs, trying to remember how to use the archaic machine. I haven’t had to look up anything that wasn’t archived on the Internet in a long time.