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you’d like to know more about the classes you’ll be teaching.”
    “Yes.” I take a sip of what turns out to be a bracing black tea—Darjeeling, maybe?—with some kind of spice. “I’m so happy to have the opportunity to teach a folklore class.”
    “And we are glad to have you to teach it,” she says, handing me a plate of buttered brown bread and apple cake. “The minute I saw that you were writing your thesis on Vera Beecher’s fairy tales I was interested in your application. I was also interested to see that you were a fine arts major in college. Do you still draw?”
    “Not really,” I say. I pause to take a bite of the apple cake—which has delicious chunks of tart apples in a buttery yellow cake flecked with cinnamon and pecans—and to wonder if I should tell her the truth and say I gave it up when I had Sally. But I’m never sure how other women—especially women without children—will react to that, so I skip over it. “But when I went back to school I was interested in combining the study of visual arts and language.”
    “That’s exactly what we look for here at Arcadia. I enjoyed your paper on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations for his sister Christina’s poem ‘Goblin Market,’ by the way. It’s one of my favorite poems. Vera used to recite it in the evening.” St. Clare puts down her teacup, closes her eyes, and recites in a low contralto so unlike her own high-pitched voice that I have the uneasy feeling that Vera Beecher is speaking through her: “
We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits: / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots.”
She pronounces the last line with such relish that I feel a chill I haven’t felt since the first time I read Rosetti’s poem of demonic seduction.
    “I’ll certainly cover Rossetti in the nineteenth-century fiction class, as well as the Brontës, Thomas Hardy—”
    “Good, good … and for the folklore class, I would expect that in addition to the usual texts you will also use Vera Beecher’s
Tales of Arcadia
, especially since it’s the subject of your thesis—which I trust is near completion?”
    “Oh yes,” I say with what I hope sounds like conviction. The truth isthat with Jude’s death, dealing with the estate, looking for a job, and relocating I’ve done barely any work on my dissertation all year.
    “Good. Most of our teachers have their Ph.D.s, but the board and I felt that in view of your interest in Vera Beecher’s fairy tales—”
    “The fairy tales by Vera Beecher
and
Lily Eberhardt, you mean? They were written and illustrated by both women. One of the goals of my thesis has been to figure out who drew and wrote what.”
    Ivy purses her mouth, making her face look even more pinched than before. It occurs to me that interrupting my new boss while she was pointing out my professional shortcomings hadn’t been the best idea. “I think you’ll find most of the artwork was done by Vera, who was by far the superior artist of the two. As for who wrote them, Vera liked to give Lily the credit, especially after Lily died. Lily had a trove of childish tales she had heard from her mother that she liked to tell around the hearth side in the evening. It was her contribution to the community. Vera would write them down in her notebook and then later transform them into works of art. Believe me, I heard the original tales and then read the finished product. There’s no doubt who really
wrote
them.”
    “But you didn’t come here until 1945,” I say. “And you were only … what … sixteen?” I know from my research that Ivy St. Clare was one of the first scholarship students at the Arcadia School. “And Lily was here from the late twenties. How do you know the collaboration worked the same all those years?”
    “Because Vera asked me to transcribe all the early versions of the fairy tales. It’s all in the notebooks.”
    “Vera’s notebooks? I can’t wait to see them.