The Drowning Tree (2 page)

“When I approached the table here below the window I always imagined that the Lady looked down at me askance,” Christine continues. “ ‘Oh, so you’ve finally seen fit to join us,’ I imagined her saying. I believe I endowed her with the voice of Miss Colclough, my sophomore Chaucer professor.” Christine pauses for another ripple of knowing laughter. Miss Coldclaw—as we called her—was legendary for her withering comments and draconian teaching methods. “In fact, over the
years, as I studied below her I endowed the Lady in the Window with many roles—muse, companion, judge. But of course these were my own projections. What we’ve come to consider today is who she really is, what she has to tell us—the class of 1987—about ourselves, and why it’s so important that we save her from decay.”

Christine turns slightly and tilts her head up, meeting the gaze of the figure in the glass as if she had been passing on the street and recognized a friend at a second-story window. Throughout the lecture she turns like this to address the Lady as if they were contemporaries—and truly, even though Christine is dressed in a spare, sleeveless black shift (Prada, I think) and the Lady is robed in a medieval gown of embroidered damask (ruby glass acid-etched with a millefleur pattern and layered with white drapery glass), there is a kinship between the two women. There’s something in the curve of their spines—Christine’s when she leans back to look up at the window, the Lady as she arches her back away from her loom to look up from her labors—that echoes each other. They’ve got the same yellow hair. The Lady’s by virtue of a medieval metallurgical process called silver stain, Christine’s thanks to a colorist on the Upper East Side. The Lady’s abundant Pre-Raphaelite locks, though, are loose, while Christine’s long blond hair is twisted in a knot so heavy that when she bows her head back down to her notes her slender neck seems to pull against the strain. I realize, from that strain and from how thin she’s gotten, what a toll this lecture has taken on her and instantly forgive her for not making time to see me these last six or seven months—the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other since college.

“No doubt we all heard the same story on the campus tour. The window was designed by Augustus Penrose, founder of the Rose Glass Works and Penrose College, in 1922 for the twentieth anniversary of the college’s founding and it depicts Augustus’s beloved wife, Eugenie. As we all know, Penrose College grew out of The Woman’s Craft League, which Eugenie had created for the wives and daughters of the men who worked in her husband’s factory.”

A college born from a glorified sewing circle
, is how Christine put it once, a bit too loudly, at a freshman tea. But of course she doesn’t say that to this assembly of women in their tailored linen skirts and pastel silk blouses, their Coach bags and sensible Ferragamo shoes. Penrose College may have
originated from a socialist dream of aiding women from the underclasses, but it soon became a bastion of East Coast wealth and privilege.

“But before we accept that the Lady in the Window is merely a celebration of the medieval craftswoman,” Christine continues, “let’s review the social and artistic background of Augustus Penrose. His family owned a glass works in England, Penrose & Sons, in Kelmscott, a small village on the Thames River near Oxford, which supplied medieval-quality glass for stained-glass designers, including William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite artist who also happened to live in Kelmscott. Young Augustus was particularly influenced by the opinions of William Morris, who believed that integrity ought to be restored to the decorative arts. When Simon Barovier, a wealthy factory owner from the north, purchased Penrose & Sons, he encouraged young Augustus in his artistic pursuits—and so did Barovier’s daughter, Eugenie, who fell in love with Augustus. As you know, the two married, and were sent by old Simon over to this country in the 1890s to found an American branch of the glass works. Augustus and Eugenie wanted to do more, though, than run a glass factory. Influenced by Morris’s ideas, they were soon in the vanguard of the Arts & Crafts Movement …”

Now that Christine has moved onto the firmer ground of her expertise in art history I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. I realize how nervous I am for her—how much I want this lecture to be a success for her—a comeback.

Back in college, Christine had a sort of glow about her—a radiant energy that drew people to her. We all believed she would go on to great things—even when she eschewed a PhD in favor of a job at a New York gallery and freelance writing on the arts. We thought then that she’d write a brilliant book or at least marry one of the famous artists she was often seen with at gallery openings. By the tenth reunion, when none of these things had happened and she got so drunk that she passed out during the Farewell Brunch, that glow of promise began to fade. Her name disappeared from the class notes; when I ran into people from the college who had known her, they would ask after her with a solicitous edge of concern in their voices as if expecting to hear the worst. Sometimes, I suspected,
hoping
to hear the worst.

Many were surprised, then, when the programs for the fifteenth
reunion arrived with the announcement that Christine would be delivering the lecture on the Lady window, which the class of 1987 had elected to restore as their class gift. I wasn’t, though, because I’d seen Christine through rehab four years ago and urged her to apply for a Penrose Grant, which supported alumnae who wanted to switch careers ten to twenty years out of college (the “second-chance” grant we often called it, a perfect prize for Christine, who always managed to pull her act together at the last minute and shine brilliantly) so that she could go back to graduate school. I even suggested she make the window the subject of her thesis and when McKay Glass won the bid to do the restoration of the window—the first really big conservation project we’ve gotten since I convinced my father to expand into stained-glass restoration—I suggested to the college that Christine deliver this lecture. So you couldn’t really blame me for being nervous for her.

While Christine’s lecturing on the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts & Crafts Movement (material I’ve heard before), I let my mind wander and my gaze shift to the window itself—brilliant now in the late afternoon sun. The upper half is dominated by a large rounded window—a window within a window—which frames a green pool carpeted with water lilies and shaded by a weeping beech. The view of mountains in the distance is the same as the view we would see if the window were clear—the deeply wooded hills of the Hudson Highlands on the western bank—still forested because Augustus Penrose bought up all the land on that side of the river for his mansion, Astolat. When Astolat burned down in the 1930s he and Eugenie moved back to Forest Hall, their house on this side of the river. All that’s left of Astolat are the water gardens that Penrose designed—the centerpiece of which was a lily pool similar to the one depicted in the window.

Although the window is executed in opalescent glass and uses techniques made popular by Tiffany and LaFarge in the 1880s, the Lady herself could well be from a medieval window. Of course, as Christine is explaining now, the Pre-Raphaelites were in love with the Middle Ages—and in love with beautiful women with long flowing hair and expressions of abandon. This one has just looked up from her work. As she arches her back you can feel the strain of the long hours she has spent bending over her loom. A flush of color—skillfully produced by sanguine, a hematite-based paint used since the sixteenth century to enhance flesh tones—rises
from her low-cut bodice up her long neck to the plane of her high cheekbones. It makes you wonder what she’s been dreaming of over her loom.

“What I always wondered,” Christine is saying now, “is why she is looking away from the window and why she has such a rapturous expression on her face. Her expression suggests some kind of revelation. Who is this weaver supposed to be? Remember that Augustus rarely painted his beloved Eugenie just as
Eugenie
. As the Pre-Raphaelite painters he admired had before him, Augustus often chose to depict his model in the guise of a figure from literature.”

Christine presses a button on the speaker’s dais and a slide screen unrolls on the wall to the right of the window and fills with an image of a young girl bending over a lily pool, her cascading hair turning into heavy branches that trail into the water, a sheath of bark just beginning to creep up her slim legs. “In fact, the only other work without a known mythological source is this one,
The Drowning Tree
, which seems to echo the tales of transformation Penrose was so fond of. He painted Eugenie as Daphne turning into a laurel as she flees from Apollo—”
The Drowning Tree
fades and is replaced with the more familiar image of the running girl sprouting leaves from her fingertips, “—and as the nymph Salmacis merging in her sacred pool with Hermaphroditus, and Halcyone turning into a kingfisher with her drowned husband …”

Christine clicks through one picture after another, naming each mythological or literary figure as the image appears and fades. She goes so quickly that the faces begin to blur together until we are left with the impression of one face—one woman appearing in many guises. Which is, of course, the impression Christine has been trying to create. They are all Eugenie—whether frightened as Daphne, lusting like Salmacis, or in the throes of shape-shifting like Halcyone. When the screen goes dark an image of that face—radiant, haloed by bright red-gold hair—seems to burn on the blank screen for just an instant, glowing like the face in the stained-glass window.

“W
HO, THEN, IS SHE—OUR LADY IN THE WINDOW?
W
HY, AFTER ALL THESE TALES
of transformation, would Augustus choose to depict Eugenie as some
anonymous weaver in his last known portrait of her? To answer that question I ask you to notice the ‘window’ at her back. Many people have assumed that the landscape in the window depicts a view of the Hudson Highlands where Penrose built his grand estate, Astolat. But if you look carefully at the arrangement of ridges in the landscape,”—the flickering red arrow of Christine’s laser pointer skims over the ridgelines in the window—“and compare them to the arrangement of hills in the actual landscape”—a photograph of the view across the river appears on the slide screen—“you will notice that the ridges are actually reversed. This is not a window—it’s a mirror reflecting a window.

“And in what medieval story is a beautiful young maiden condemned to look at life only in its reflection? Why ‘The Lady of Shalott’ of course, Tennyson’s version of an Arthurian legend. You probably remember it from Miss Ramsey’s Nineteenth-century Lit class.”

What I remember from Miss Ramsey’s class was having to memorize Tennyson’s endless ode to friendship, “In Memoriam.” But as Christine outlines the story, “The Lady of Shalott” comes back to me: the enchanted maiden in her island tower, prohibited from looking directly at the world, weaving what she sees reflected in a mirror set opposite the window.…

I look at the river landscape in the window and then at the scene unfolding in the Lady’s loom. If this were the Lady of Shalott, they would be identical, but they are not. In fact the loom is blank. She seems to be weaving plain, unfigured cloth.

Still, Christine makes a good argument for identifying the Lady in the Window with the heroine of Tennyson’s poem. The name Augustus Penrose gave his mansion—Astolat—is an alternate name for Shalott. The pose of our Lady is similar to that of several Pre-Raphaelite Ladies of Shalott, as Christine demonstrates through a series of slides. She even has an explanation for why the scenes in the window and on the loom don’t match. According to Eugenie Penrose’s design notebook, the original painted panes for those sections were cracked during firing and had to be replaced by plain colored glass in order for the window to be ready in time for the library’s dedication.

I make a mental note to ask Christine for a copy of Eugenie’s notebook—it
might come in handy during the restoration—and turn my focus back from the slides to Christine.

“If we accept that the Lady in the Window is the Lady of Shalott the next question you are probably asking yourself is why? Why choose a doomed medieval damsel as a subject for a window in a women’s college? When Vassar has a window depicting Elena Cornaro, the first woman PhD, why is it we have a maiden
literally
trapped in an ivory tower? What was Augustus Penrose thinking?

“Eugenie Penrose left us only one clue in her notebook. Although more craftswoman than artist, Eugenie used her considerable skills as a draftswoman to turn Augustus’s paintings into cartoons for stained glass. Under her own sketch of the window she has written: ‘Here with her face doth memory sit.’ It’s a line from Dante Gabriel Rossetti—one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters much admired by Augustus Penrose. Why, though, would she say this about her own portrait? It suggests to me that the figure of the lady reminded Eugenie of someone else, and I believe that someone was her sister, Clare.”

Here Christine pauses to catch her breath.

“Perhaps you didn’t know that Eugenie had a sister; not many people do. Clare was her half sister, the child born out of wedlock when Eugenie’s mother ran away from Simon Barovier, but taken back into the family when the mother died. Clare was eight years younger than Eugenie and had always been physically—and mentally—frail.”

The screen to the right of the window fills with a sepia image of two girls standing in front of a river beneath a large shaggy tree—a weeping beech I think. I recognize the taller woman as Eugenie, but only because she’s got the same severe hair style that she wears in every picture I’ve ever seen of our illustrious founder. The other woman in the picture is almost identical to her sister except for her hair, which cascades loosely around her shoulders. Something about the photograph seems familiar. At first I think it’s because it’s the same setting as the one in the painting
The Drowning Tree
, the tree in the background the same weeping beech, but then I realize it’s also because the contrast between the two women in the photograph—one prim and reserved, the other ethereal with her flowing hair—echoes the differences I’ve been noticing between the
Christine I remember from college and the woman who’s delivering the lecture. And yet, as Christine tells the story of how Clare came with Eugenie and Augustus when they left for America, and how by the time the threesome arrived in New York, Clare was suffering from some sort of delusional hysteria, I can see that she’s enjoying the story’s shock value—just as the old Christine would.