Arcadia Falls (28 page)

“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?”

It had scared me. My hand was still over my stomach where I felt now what had been causing me those twinges. The baby inside me was moving.

“That is not my intention. The important thing is to remember
that Lucy survived and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. And like these girls here”—Sister Margaret waved her hand toward the roomful of young women—“she couldn’t keep her child with her. When she realized that the pagan chieftain’s men were upon her, she entrusted the child to the river and to God. She prayed that the river would carry her child to safety, and God answered her prayers. The child was borne downriver to a convent sacred to St. Brigit and was raised there by the nuns, where she became a great leader herself. Years later she found her way to the castle where Lucy had been taken by her seducer and heard her own mother’s confession, at which point she recognized her as her mother. The two professed themselves Christians to the court and were sentenced to death by the chieftain. They were burned at the stake together, but as the smoke rose from the pyre the mother and daughter were seen borne aloft to heaven on a cloud. My hope is that the girls who come to us will take heart from St. Lucy’s story.”

She said those last words not to Mimi, but directly to me. Her eyes were on my belly, and suddenly I felt sure that she could see past cloth and flesh straight through to the baby inside.

After dinner, one of the younger nuns escorted us silently to our room—a plain whitewashed cell with two narrow cots. The only other furniture in the room was a pine dresser and two straight-backed chairs. The sheets on the two cots were worn thin with washing but smelt like lavender. Below a plaster of Paris roundel depicting St. Lucy and her daughter surrounded by a puffy cloud with their eyes lifted to heaven, a single window faced south, overlooking the gardens that separated the convent from the barn, the girls’ dormitory, and the orphanage. Beyond the dormitory the river valley spread out below, the East Branch of the Delaware glinting in the distance. I wondered if the girls looked at it and thought of St. Lucy entrusting her baby to the River Clare. There was a creek that flowed past the convent and although
I couldn’t see it from our room, I could hear it—a murmuring gurgle like voices quarreling.

“A nun’s cell,” Mimi said when the mute nun left us.

“Would you rather stay with the unwed mothers? Or the orphans?” I asked.

Mimi snorted and lit a cigarette. “I don’t suppose it matters. It’s not like we’re going to be entertaining any male visitors out here in the back of beyond.” She waved her cigarette toward the long vista of hills and valley. The smoke wafted up to the image of St. Lucy, wreathing her like an extra layer of cloud.

“We’re probably not allowed to smoke,” I said. “You’d better put that out the window.”

“Maybe we’ll get kicked out,” she said, but she opened the window an inch anyway. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“I don’t mind,” I told her. “Actually, I kind of like it here.”

Mimi thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. I did like it at St. Lucy’s—or St. Lu’s, as the girls, like Johnnie, called it. I woke up early the next morning to the sound of cows lowing to be milked and thought for a moment that I was home in the childhood room I had once shared with my sisters. Only the lingering smell of Mimi’s cigarettes let me know that I wasn’t.

I threw on my coat over my nightgown, pulled on the fur-lined boots that Vera had given me as a going-away present, and stole outside. A low fog lay on the ground like thick cream floating on top of a milking jug. Walking through it, I felt weightless, as if borne aloft by the same cloud that rescued St. Lucy. The old gray barn leaning into the morning sun might have been built of planks from my dreams—but whether from the dairy barn of my childhood or the abandoned barn where I’d met Nash these last few months, I couldn’t have said. They both seemed equally distant and unreal to me.

When I went inside, though, the sharp smell of hay, manure, and the grassy breath of cows startled me into the present. Two girls were already up, whispering and giggling over the steady hiss
of squirting milk. They turned to me when I opened the door, their faces two pale half-moons against the dark flanks of the cows they milked. I saw their eyes skip right from my face to my belly. I hadn’t closed my coat, and my nightgown—one of the sheer white lawn gowns Vera had made to order in England—was nearly transparent. I could have said that I was one of the artists come to paint the murals, but I didn’t. I asked where the pails were kept. One of the girls—Nancy, I later learned—got up to show me. She held one hand to the small of her back when she walked. She was so small and daintily made—like a pixie in a fairy tale—that the weight of her round belly threw her off balance.

“Have you done this before?” she asked in an Irish lilt, pointing to a row of pails and stools.

I assured her that I had, setting my stool by the cow next in line to Nancy’s. I rested my head against the cow’s soft, warm flank and slid my hands down to her swollen udder. The barn was quiet. The girls were waiting to see if I had told the truth. They must be used to people lying, I thought, and maybe I had been.
Did I
still know how to do this? The girl I’d been seemed like someone else entirely. Maybe I had dreamed her up the way I dreamed up my stories, the way I dreamed myself out of my childhood home and to New York City, and the way I dreamed up Vera Beecher.

I closed my eyes and listened to the cow’s heart beating against my cheek. I imagined that the two girls were my sisters. They were my sisters in a way, weren’t they? Right now, this was where I belonged.

The cow heaved a great grassy sigh as my fingers coaxed the milk down from her udders and I let go of my breath as well. The other girl—Jean, I soon found out—laughed and said that sound always reminded her of the sound her aunt made when she put her feet to soak after a long day’s work. Nancy and I laughed, too, and we milked until our pails were full and the
cows’ udders were loose and empty. By the time I stood up, one hand against the small of my own back and one steadying myself against my cow, I felt as if I’d come home.

From that day on I spent my mornings sitting on a stool milking the cows and the rest of the day sitting on a stool sketching in the background of the mural. At meals I sat with the girls instead of at the nuns’ table. Mimi gave me a curious look when she saw where I sat—I had been able, by always wearing a voluminous smock over my dress, to hide my pregnancy from her—but joined me, relieved, I think, to be free of Sister Margaret’s company. She quickly warmed to the girls, who came, almost to a one, from the city, many from parts of Brooklyn—Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Coney Island, Brighton Beach—not far from where Mimi had grown up. Mimi cheerfully traded street names, candy stores, parks, and schools with the girls, although most of them had gone to Catholic schools.

“A lot of good it did them,” Mimi said to me one day as we worked on the mural. She had sketched in a rough cartoon of the first four stages of St. Lucy’s life we’d chosen to represent: her seduction by the pagan chieftain, her flight from his men during which she was hidden by a cloud, her childbirth during a storm, and the moment when she entrusted her newborn baby to the River Clare. The final scene, when she is reunited with her long-lost daughter and they are both carried to heaven on a cloud, was to be painted on the ceiling. It would require scaffolding, so we were leaving that for last. I was sketching the face of St. Lucy as she was cornered by the chieftain, but I was having a hard time getting her expression right.

“You think their church should have trained them better to resist advances?” I asked. I had decided to set Lucy’s seduction in a barn—not for autobiographical reasons, but because it was difficult to imagine what other kind of architecture might have existed in fifth-century Ireland. I’d have her milking a cow when the chieftain surprised her. I’d given her Nancy’s dark little face,
which looked ancient and mysterious enough to have belonged to a pagan Celt, as I remembered it from that first morning I came into the barn and found her milking. The cow was looking warily at the chieftain. I had no trouble catching the cow’s expression, but Lucy looked struck dumb in her surprise and I didn’t want her to look stupider than the cow.

“Well, yes, that would be good for a start. All this blind obedience they’re taught—to take whatever their priests tell them on faith—”

“Isn’t faith what all religion is about? Aren’t you taught that in your synagogue?”

“Faith in God, yes, but not blind faith in His representatives on earth. No, we Jews are taught to question and argue.”

“So you think a Jewish girl would argue her way out of seduction?”

Mimi sighed. She was working on the background of the flight scene; we’d decided I was better at faces while she understood perspective better. “I know my mother taught me not to put myself in situations where a man could have the advantage over me. She taught me what men expected and how to evade their attempts to have their own way….” Her voice trailed off. She was drawing the bank of the river along which Lucy ran. She’d been going out sketching the last few mornings so that she might model the River Clare on the creek that flowed past the convent. She’d managed to capture the feel of the East Branch valley even in her rough sketches.

“But?” I prompted.

“She never taught me what to do if I was the one … I mean if I felt …”

“You mean, if you wanted to be with the man?” It struck me that for all Mimi’s worldliness she was still a virgin.

“Yes,” she answered, blushing.

“Is it the driver?” I asked.

“John,” she said, managing to inject warmth into the single syllable.

“I see.”

“No, you don’t.” She laughed. “How can you? You’re in love with Vera Beecher. At least you don’t have to worry about Vera getting you with—” She turned toward me as she spoke and stopped midsentence, her eyes on my belly. I had wondered why she was the only one who didn’t see it. The girls had known immediately I was one of them, and I was sure Sister Margaret also knew. But Mimi, who shared a room with me, who saw me undress every night, had remained blind to my pregnancy. Perhaps it was because we only see what we expect to see and she didn’t expect to see a “lover of women” pregnant.

I dropped the hand that held my pencil to my swollen stomach and met her look.

“Oh, Lily!” She dropped down to the floor next to my feet. “How? Who?”

“Does it really matter—” I began, but I could already see the calculations being performed in her head.

“It’s Virgil Nash’s, isn’t it? I’ve seen the way he looks at you, only—”

“Only you thought I’d be strong enough to resist him? Well, I wasn’t. I’m no stronger than these girls here.”

“But what about Vera? Does she know?”

“No, and she never can. Please, you have to promise me.”

“You mean you plan to give the child away?”

I heard the disbelief in her voice—and the disapproval. To her credit, it was only then that she judged me. She was surprised—shocked, even—that I’d been with Nash, but she hadn’t judged me for that. But the idea of giving away the child was clearly repugnant to her.

“Sister Margaret says that all the babies born here are adopted into good families.”

“Not all. Johnnie says some come back. Sometimes the baby doesn’t ‘meet with the family’s expectations.’ God only knows what they expect. Maybe a baby who sleeps through the night, craps flowers, and recites its ABC’s at nine months.”

“What happens to the children who are sent back?” I asked.

“Well, the nuns try to find other homes for them, but the older they get, the harder it is. Everyone wants a baby, not a cranky toddler or a fractious six-year-old. The ones who don’t get adopted stay here until they’re old enough to work, then the nuns try to place them on local farms where they’re worked near to death.”

“How do you know that?”

“Johnnie told me, and he should know because he’s one of them. He was born here. His first family sent him back because they said he didn’t smile enough. They thought there was something wrong with him. The second family sent him back because he smiled too much and laughed in church. He ran off from the third when his adoptive brother tried to rape him—”

“Yes, Mimi, I understand. But most of them end up in good homes. I’ll just have to have faith that mine will. I have no other choice. I can’t keep it. Vera would never speak to me again if she knew I’d betrayed her, and then I’d be out on the streets. How could I support myself and a baby, too?”

Face softening, Mimi took my hand. She was still kneeling on the floor in front of me and I realized what an odd picture we’d make to anyone who came in right then. I looked toward the doors at the end of the chapel, but we were alone. Sister Margaret had promised that “the girls,” as she called them, wouldn’t get in our way.

“I could help you,” Mimi said. “I could get you a job at the magazine and find someone to watch the baby during the day. We could share an apartment in the Village, or in Brooklyn near my family. It’s cheaper out there, and the air’s better for a baby. My mother would help take care of the baby—”

“And when would either of us find time to take classes or make our own art?”

She sat back on her heels and stared at me. “You really think that all this”—she waved her arms at the mural we were working on —“is more important than flesh and blood?”