never seen these. I don’t think they’ve ever been reproduced.”
“Vera Beecher would never allow it during her lifetime.” This comes from a young woman seated in a straight-backed chair to my right. She pushes black-framed glasses up her nose and adds, “And Dean St. Clare has followed her wishes. In order to use them for our senior thesis we have to study them in situ.”
“Which is why we’re meeting here,” the dark-haired young man says. I look from the young woman to him and notice that they’re nearly identical—same black hair with pronounced widow’s peak, same pale skin and wide-set gray eyes.
“You two must be Rebecca and Peter Merling,” I say, taking out my roster. “You’re—”
“Twins,” they both say at the same time.
“I was going to say that you’re writing your senior project on Nash’spaintings,” I say with a small smile. “I wondered what you hope to get out of this seminar.”
Peter glances toward his sister. She raises one perfectly arched eyebrow at him and he nods as if something has been agreed on. “Becky and I are working on our senior project together: ‘Fairy-Tale Resonance in Twentieth-Century Painting and Literature.’ Miss Pernault, our adviser, suggested we look at the use of the Grimms’ fairy tale ‘Brother and Sister’ in Margaret Drabble’s novel
The Witch of Exmoor.”
“Especially its animal bride motif,” Rebecca adds.
“Because of the image of the brother transformed into a deer—”
“Which is echoed in Nash’s late paintings of Lily.”
“How is the animal bride motif echoed in Nash’s painting?” I ask, mostly to interrupt Rebecca and Peter’s Tweedledum, Tweedledee performance.
The twins exchange another look and then Rebecca answers. “Look at her. At the way the light falls on her skin. Do you notice anything unusual about her?”
I look back at the paintings. In the one of Lily reclining nude beneath the tree, her skin is dappled by light falling through the leaves. The tint of the leaves has dyed her skin a tawny copper except where the light shines white. I get up and move closer.
“She looks like a deer,” I say at last. “Like a young fawn.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca says. “And in the standing pose—”
I laugh before she can finish. “The stripes of light make her look like a zebra.”
“Yes!” Rebecca and Peter say together. They sound as though they’re pleased with me. I realize that although I’m the teacher they’ve been assessing me since I walked in the door and I’ve just passed some test they had devised together. Instead of resenting them, though, I feel the warmth of being welcomed into their little circle of two.
“So you see why we’re interested in studying the animal bride stories,” Peter says. “Even though Virgil Nash abandoned the obvious trappings of fairy tales in his last portraits of Lily Eberhardt, he was still depicting her as an animal bride….”
Peter pauses to let his twin finish the sentence for him. I almost feel as if they’ve rehearsed this bit. “Which makes the fact that he killed her all the more fascinating.”
By the time I leave Briar Lodge I still feel a bit dizzy. Even after I made them explain their shocking allegation against Virgil Nash (“She died running away with him, didn’t she?” Rebecca had asked) their habit of finishing each other’s sentences was maddening. My neck has a crick in it from looking back and forth between the two of them. It was like watching a tennis match. At the very least, I’ll have to make them sit next to each other.
In comparison Junior British Lit goes well. Some of the students—Clyde Bollinger, Hannah Weiss, Fleming Sedgewood—are also in my folklore class, so I feel from the beginning that I’ve got advocates. I’m grateful to hear that many of the students have already started reading
Jane Eyre
. We spend the class talking about the fantasy fiction that the Brontës concocted during their dreary
“Vera Beecher would never allow it during her lifetime.” This comes from a young woman seated in a straight-backed chair to my right. She pushes black-framed glasses up her nose and adds, “And Dean St. Clare has followed her wishes. In order to use them for our senior thesis we have to study them in situ.”
“Which is why we’re meeting here,” the dark-haired young man says. I look from the young woman to him and notice that they’re nearly identical—same black hair with pronounced widow’s peak, same pale skin and wide-set gray eyes.
“You two must be Rebecca and Peter Merling,” I say, taking out my roster. “You’re—”
“Twins,” they both say at the same time.
“I was going to say that you’re writing your senior project on Nash’spaintings,” I say with a small smile. “I wondered what you hope to get out of this seminar.”
Peter glances toward his sister. She raises one perfectly arched eyebrow at him and he nods as if something has been agreed on. “Becky and I are working on our senior project together: ‘Fairy-Tale Resonance in Twentieth-Century Painting and Literature.’ Miss Pernault, our adviser, suggested we look at the use of the Grimms’ fairy tale ‘Brother and Sister’ in Margaret Drabble’s novel
The Witch of Exmoor.”
“Especially its animal bride motif,” Rebecca adds.
“Because of the image of the brother transformed into a deer—”
“Which is echoed in Nash’s late paintings of Lily.”
“How is the animal bride motif echoed in Nash’s painting?” I ask, mostly to interrupt Rebecca and Peter’s Tweedledum, Tweedledee performance.
The twins exchange another look and then Rebecca answers. “Look at her. At the way the light falls on her skin. Do you notice anything unusual about her?”
I look back at the paintings. In the one of Lily reclining nude beneath the tree, her skin is dappled by light falling through the leaves. The tint of the leaves has dyed her skin a tawny copper except where the light shines white. I get up and move closer.
“She looks like a deer,” I say at last. “Like a young fawn.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca says. “And in the standing pose—”
I laugh before she can finish. “The stripes of light make her look like a zebra.”
“Yes!” Rebecca and Peter say together. They sound as though they’re pleased with me. I realize that although I’m the teacher they’ve been assessing me since I walked in the door and I’ve just passed some test they had devised together. Instead of resenting them, though, I feel the warmth of being welcomed into their little circle of two.
“So you see why we’re interested in studying the animal bride stories,” Peter says. “Even though Virgil Nash abandoned the obvious trappings of fairy tales in his last portraits of Lily Eberhardt, he was still depicting her as an animal bride….”
Peter pauses to let his twin finish the sentence for him. I almost feel as if they’ve rehearsed this bit. “Which makes the fact that he killed her all the more fascinating.”
By the time I leave Briar Lodge I still feel a bit dizzy. Even after I made them explain their shocking allegation against Virgil Nash (“She died running away with him, didn’t she?” Rebecca had asked) their habit of finishing each other’s sentences was maddening. My neck has a crick in it from looking back and forth between the two of them. It was like watching a tennis match. At the very least, I’ll have to make them sit next to each other.
In comparison Junior British Lit goes well. Some of the students—Clyde Bollinger, Hannah Weiss, Fleming Sedgewood—are also in my folklore class, so I feel from the beginning that I’ve got advocates. I’m grateful to hear that many of the students have already started reading
Jane Eyre
. We spend the class talking about the fantasy fiction that the Brontës concocted during their dreary
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