Arcadia Falls Read Online Free PDF Page A

pleasure,” she says. “Good luck with the dean. She can be a little intimidating.” With that last warning, Isabel Cheney turns around and goes back the way we came. I watch her go, envying the certainty of her youthful confidence—the confidence of thinking that everything will go according to one’s plans. I could use a little of that confidence now as I knock on my new boss’s door.

A soft but penetrating voice from inside calls, “Enter.”
    As I cross the threshold into Ivy St. Clare’s office I have two conflicting impressions at once. One is that I’ve walked into a crowded party; the other is that the room is empty. I quickly see that my first impression comes from the murals. Monumental figures of women dressed in medieval robes line the walls. Some play musical instruments, while others carry sketch pads or artists’ palettes. One sits at a loom, while another kneels beside a chunk of marble, a mallet raised to strike the stone. At the center of the painting, directly above the desk chair, a golden-hairedwoman holds a pen in one hand and a sketchbook in the other. She looks straight out at the room as if she were about to draw the viewer’s portrait. The Muse of Drawing, I remember, recognizing the work as
The Arts
, a famous mural painted by Vera Beecher in the 1940s. It’s a smaller version of the one she was commissioned to paint for a college in Pennsylvania. I’ve seen photographs of both versions, but none had captured how the figures fill the room, making it seem inhabited even though the chair behind the massive oak desk and the two seats in front of it are empty.
    I glance over at the windows, imagining that my new employer must have slipped out to play a trick on me. Perhaps it’s another initiation rite, like not giving coherent road directions. But then I detect a slight bulge in the heavy drapes.
    “Dean St. Clare?” I say to the drapery, which happens to be of the same wilted lettuce print as the curtains in my cottage. “I’m Meg Rosenthal.”
    “Yes, yes, just give me a moment. I’ve almost got her.”
    I step forward and a little to the right to find a diminutive woman curled up on the ledge of a bay window, legs tucked beneath her, with a fat sketchpad balanced on her knees. Her head is bent to the pad, a wing of perfectly white hair concealing her face. I look out the window to see what she’s drawing and find that after all the twists and turns Isabel led me through we’re somehow facing the front lawn again. Most of the students have vanished from it, except for one girl who has fallen asleep lying on her side, facing the copper beech. Her long strawberry blond hair spills over the grass like a cascade of autumn leaves.
    I look down at the sketchpad and see that Ivy St. Clare has perfectly caught the line of the girl’s hip, the splay of her long legs, and the fall of her hair—all framed against the massive tree towering above her. In the drawing, though, there are other shapes sharing the lawn with her—hips and elbows and shoulder blades roiling just below the surface of the grass. The image is so powerful that when I look back out the window I half expect the scene to be suddenly populated by the artist’s imaginary cohorts. The lawn, of course, is empty, but now I see the origin of those underground figures. The roots of the beech tree snake across the lawn,here and there breaking the surface of the grass and then diving back underneath. Once you look at the scene as the artist has drawn it, it’s hard not to see them as bodies beneath the ground.
    “There! I think I’ve captured it as best I can for now. The sun’s gone behind a cloud.” She shivers and cranks closed one of the two narrow casement windows that flank the wide central window. Then she flings the pad down on the ledge and looks up. The white hair falls back to reveal a wizened face, the color and texture of a walnut shell, that seems too small for the large brown eyes that stare up at me. When