Arcadia Falls (18 page)

I spend the rest of the class discussing the changeling story in European folklore. I start by reading them a story from the Grimms in which a child is removed from its crib. In its place is left a changeling with a thick head and staring eyes who would do nothing but eat and drink. When the mother seeks advice from a neighbor she’s told to boil water in two eggshells in front of the baby. If the baby laughs, she’ll know it’s a changeling. As soon as the mother sets the eggshells filled with water over the fire, the changeling says:

Then the baby laughed so hard that he rolled out of his high chair. Finally, a band of elves appeared with the mother’s rightful child. They gave it to the mother and took away the changeling.

The class laughed at the story, as I had hoped they would. I told other stories just like this one, some of which employed different tests to expose the changeling. Many of the tests were designed to surprise the creature
into speech, but some were harsher and involved putting the changeling into a fire.

“But what if it was a real baby?” Hannah asks, her eyes wide.

“Then it would call out to its mother to be saved. But in all of these stories the creature turns into smoke and goes out a hole in the ceiling, or changes into its real shape and runs out the door. Still, it’s a good question.
What if it was a real baby
? And why do you think people told these stories?”

“To explain why a baby might change all of a sudden?” Hannah, again, provides the answer even if it is in the form of a question. “I mean, babies sometimes change, right? My youngest halfbrother seemed fine until his second birthday and then we found out he was autistic.”

“Absolutely,” I say, wondering if this is why Hannah seems so personally connected to this subject. “Autism is one of a number of developmental disorders that might explain what happens in these tales. Asperger’s, cerebral palsy, brain damage from a fall or fever. A seemingly healthy baby becomes listless. Perhaps it’s not getting enough to eat. In a number of the tales, the changeling is insatiable. It eats and eats but fails to grow. Imagine a poor family, a mother who’s not getting enough food to produce adequate milk, a baby who cries and cries and can’t be comforted. What’s to be done?”

“You mean they might abandon the baby?” Hannah asks, appalled.

“Many cultures practiced infanticide. Of course it’s a horrifying thought, so how better to mask it than by creating a myth about changeling babies? It’s not a real baby, the story reassures the mother, it’s an impostor, a
demon
. And in order to get her own baby back, she must sacrifice the changeling.”

“But in real life, that’s not what would happen. There was no
real
baby to get back,” Chloe Dawson points out.

“Of course not,” I say. “But the sacrifice of a baby who wasn’t thriving might mean the survival of older children, or the possibility of the mother having another—healthier—child. The story masks a harsh reality, as many of these stories do. For the next class, I want you to read ‘Cinderella’ and think about what social circumstances that story
masks.” They scribble the assignment in their notebooks as the eleven o’clock bell chimes. As they file out, I hear several of them talking about the lesson and about other fairy tales. I was afraid that the changeling stories might be too morbid a topic for today, but I see that I’ve succeeded in getting them to think about the stories in a different way,
and
I’ve managed to get them thinking about something other than Isabel Cheney’s death. The only one not talking is Chloe Dawson.

“Chloe,” I say as she attempts to slink by me, “could I have a word with you?”

She flinches as if I’d slapped her. Clyde Bollinger stops halfway through the door and turns back. “You’re not going to ask her more questions about Isabel, are you? She already told the sheriff that she didn’t see Isabel after she went into the woods. Can’t you all just leave her alone?” He finishes by giving Chloe an adoring look. When, I wonder, did Clyde Bollinger become Chloe Dawson’s champion? It seems an unlikely pairing. “I have no intention of interrogating Chloe. I just want a word with her.
Alone.”

Clyde bristles at my emphasis on the last word. “I’ll save a place for you at lunch,” he says, and then lopes away, but not before giving Chloe a glance filled with a naked longing that instantly transports me back to the first time I saw Jude in Drawing class at Pratt. I remember feeling as if I’d seen him before even though I knew I hadn’t. It was as if I’d
invented
him out of all the inchoate longings of my teen years. How had Lily put it? That Vera Beecher was the girl in the stories she’d been telling all her life.

“You wanted to talk to me?” Chloe asks. To my embarrassment, Chloe has come out of her reverie more quickly than I.

“I just wanted to ask how you were doing. You look like you’ve been crying. I know it must be especially hard for you since you and Isabel worked on that project together—”

“But we didn’t really,” she says, cutting me off. “Isabel liked to do things on her own. It’s not like we were tight or anything. So really, you don’t have to worry about me. In fact, I wish everyone would just stop worrying about me.” She concludes so emphatically I can’t think of anything
else to say, except for the last resort of clueless adults everywhere: “Well, if you decide you want to talk about anything—”

She’s out the door before I can finish, leaving me feeling like the girl in Rumpelstiltskin after she guessed the wrong name.

I hurry toward Briar Lodge for my next class, but when I get there I find a note from the Merling twins telling me that they had to leave campus for a “family emergency.” I’m annoyed that they didn’t e-mail me to save me the trip, but then I remember that Sheldon Drake said that her studio is in the Lodge. Since seeing the May Day picture with Gertrude Sheldon last night I’ve been wondering how Shelley Drake is related to her—and if she knows anything about the early days of the colony that would be useful.

I find the studio at the back of the Lodge in a sunlit, high-ceilinged room. Although I expected to find the studio full of students, the room is unoccupied. The entire west wall is a glass window that frames a view of the woods. Right now the woods look placid and innocent, but later in the day they’ll fill with the long shadows I saw yesterday. That must be when Shelley paints, I think, because the large painting on the easel is of the woods in the late afternoon. Standing in front of the canvas, I’m transported back to yesterday when we first began the search for Isabel. Carpeted with dried pine needles, the forest floor glows an eerie gold, broken into tawny stripes by the long shadows of the trees that reach toward the viewer. Perhaps that’s what makes this painting so unnerving. The shadows seem to be reaching out from the canvas, like long fingers that will wrap around your neck and pull you into the grasp of something lurking behind the trees.

“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.”