Arcadia Falls (29 page)

I looked at the mural. The figures and the background were
only outlines waiting to be filled in. They looked like ghosts flitting through an otherworldly landscape, shades wandering through Hell. Perhaps Mimi was right. But then my eye fell on the portrait of Saint Lucy I was working on. I’d been trying all morning to get her expression just right, to capture the moment she realizes she’s been trapped by the chieftain, that there’s no escape. I’d caught the look of surprise in her eyes, but I needed something else. Then I saw what to do. When the chieftain comes in he startles the cow and she kicks over the pail. Lucy is reaching for it as she looks up and sees the chieftain—and her fate. Her hand is arrested above the pail; the milk has already spilled.

I leaned forward and quickly sketched in the new lines over the old. This time I somehow managed to capture in her eyes fear and surprise, but also resignation. She sees her fate, the good and the bad, and she knows she’s powerless to change it.

When I’d gotten it just right, I turned to answer Mimi, but she’d already gotten to her feet and gone back to filling in the landscape. I’d given her my answer.

Once Mimi knew my secret, I went to see Sister Margaret. I’d never been in her office before, and I was surprised to find it rather grand, with a big mahogany desk in front of an arched window. When I entered, she was standing in front of the window, which afforded a beautiful view of the valley. She dragged her eyes away from the view when she heard me come in and instantly her sharp blue eyes—the same color as the distant mountains—focused on my belly. She’d already guessed, of course. She held out her hands, inviting me to come closer, and when I reached her she surprised me by laying her hands over my belly.

“The baby will come by Christmas, will it not?” she asked.

“A bit later,” I said, counting back. “January, I think.”

Sister Margaret shook her head. “I think it will be by Christmas, dear. And are you sure you don’t want to keep it?”

“I’m not married, Sister.” I thought this was an easier answer than explaining about Vera and the demands of the artistic life.
She didn’t say anything for a minute and then she nodded and turned away from me, letting her hands fall to her side.

“As you think best. We’re very careful about the families the babies go to.” I thought about Johnnie’s experiences but didn’t say anything. “Are you able to continue working on the mural?”

“Oh yes,” I assured her. “We’ve worked out that Mimi will do the upper parts that require standing on a ladder and I’ll do the lower parts so I can sit. Then, when the scaffolding for the ceiling is built, I’ll be able to work lying down. Like Michelangelo. A pregnant Michelangelo.” I regretted my stupid joke the minute it was out of my mouth, but Sister Margaret didn’t seem offended. She gestured toward the valley below us, to where the East Branch flowed toward the Delaware River.

“God moves in a mysterious way,” she said. “Just as He sends the little streams to meet the great ones and sends them all to the ocean, I’m sure there’s a reason He sent you here to paint Saint Lucy and that your kinship with her will guide you. I’m sure you will do a beautiful job.”

Perhaps it was Sister Margaret’s faith in me that inspired the work I did that fall. Or perhaps I really did have some special feeling of kinship with this fifth-century Irish girl. I only know that when I painted her face I felt transported. Hours would pass and I’d wake as though from a long sleep to find myself sitting in front of a completed section of the mural. Mimi said it was the best work I’d ever done. “I suppose it’s because of you two sharing the same circumstances and all.”

I thought Mimi would get over her anger toward me, but she remained as cold as the mountain stream that flowed past the convent. Toward the end of October, I asked Sister Margaret if I could stay in the dorm with the other girls. I didn’t give a reason and she didn’t ask for one. She assigned me the bed next to Nancy’s. It was the last in the row and next to a window overlooking the stream that ran into the valley. I heard the sound of
water when I went to sleep—a comforting sound and something to listen to when someone cried at night.

It was mostly the new girls who cried, the ones who’d just arrived. “They miss their mothers,” Nancy told me.

I was shocked to see how young some of them were. One girl, Tilly (the girls weren’t supposed to tell their last names), was only fourteen. She was in service in a big house on Fifth Avenue in New York City. She almost gave away the name of the family before Jean stopped her with a hiss and a slap.

“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, though, 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.”