Arcadia Falls by Carol Goodman Read Free Book Online

Virgil Nash had killed himself. Then she started eating again.”
    “Really? Are you sure that was the reason?”
    Dymphna pauses in her cutting and buttering of bread, both knives arrested in mid air. “My mother told me she called her to her office that day and told her to take down a painting of Nash’s that hung in the dining room. ‘I’ll not have the work of a suicide hanging over our girls,’ she said to her. And that night she came down to dinner for the first time since Miss Eberhardt’s death and ate everything put in front of her. My mother never had no trouble with her appetite again.”
    Dymphna rests both knives on the counter and brushes crumbs from her apron. She wraps the buttered bread in wax paper and puts it and the plastic vat of stew into a canvas sack that she hands to me. “There’s nothing like revenge to sharpen the appetite.”
    I leave Dymphna’s kitchen laden with foodstuffs. Before I could get out she’d added an apple cake, a dozen apples, a tin of oatmeal, coffee beans, and a quart of milk to my sack. I feel a little like the girl in Rossetti’s poem who returns from the Goblin Market with forbidden fruits to tempt her sister’s appetite. As I’m walking through the front door of Beech Hall, Chloe Dawson brushes by me in a cloud of white fabric. In addition to her own dress she has another white dress draped over her arm.
    “Chloe,” I say as she rushes by, “stop a minute, please.”
    She turns around and I see that her heart-shaped face is swollen and tearstained.
    “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about what happened. I never meant to get you and Isabel in trouble.”
    “It’s not your fault,” she says, “it’s Isabel’s. She
wanted
to do the research paper by herself. Now we’re both going to get Fs on the paper. Do you know what that will do to my GPA? I’ll never get into an Ivy now. Have you seen her, by the way?”
    “No,” I say, scanning the lawn. “But there seem to be some students gathering over there under that tree.”
    “Yeah, that’s First Night. Maybe she’s there.”
    “Honey,” I say, putting my hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you forget about the fight with Isabel and your GPA for tonight and have a good time?”
    “That’s exactly what I plan to do, Ms. Rosenthal,” she says with a brilliant smile. “I plan to have a good time getting back at Isabel.”
    I walk back to the cottage chilled by Chloe Dawson’s gleeful anticipation of revenge. I’ve certainly witnessed competitiveness and nastiness among the girls at Sally’s high school. Last year a few girls posted insults and embarrassing pictures on the Internet. The Burn Thread, as it became known, was the subject of half a dozen assemblies and letters home from the principal. I’d hoped, though, that the Arcadia School, which promoted “the collaborative spirit” on its website, would be free of such mean-spiritedness.
    But then there’s a long history of betrayal and rivalry at Arcadia, from its beginnings when Vera Beecher met Virgil Nash in New York in the 1920s when he was a poor but promising artist teaching at the Art Students League. When he lost his job there—over an incident in which he allowed one of his students to pose nude—Vera Beecher invited him to come to her childhood home at Arcadia to start an artists’ colony with her and a handful of other students, including Lily Eberhardt, in whom Vera was rumored to have taken a particular interest. It was also rumored that Virgil Nash and Lily Eberhardt had had an affair. Nash left the colony abruptly after its first summer. His career after that had gone in an unexpected direction. He’d become a society portraitist, patronized by a rich clientele. He became wealthy but dissolute, a man who had traded his talent for commercial rewards. In the late forties, though, he had returned to Arcadia and painted a series of portraits of Lily Eberhardt, which were altogether different from his society portraits.