The Drowning Tree (27 page)
Authors: Carol Goodman
Tags: #Mentally Ill, #Psychological Fiction, #Class Reunions, #Fiction, #Literary, #College Stories, #Suspense, #Female Friendship, #Thrillers, #Suspense Fiction, #Mystery Fiction, #Women Art Historians, #Universities and Colleges, #Missing Persons
“He was jealous of Tiffany,” Ernesto concluded when he laid out all the pieces on the light table.
“Oh, he hated Tiffany,” my father concurred. “He claimed that Tiffany stole the idea of this landscape from him.”
“But it’s such a simple landscape,” I pointed out, “a stream flowing through some mountains into a pool …”
“If you look at Tiffany’s memorial windows he often used the same image.” Robbie, who had been hanging on the edge of the conversation, came over with an art book held open to a picture of Tiffany’s window “Magnolia and Irises,” which I’d seen a dozen times at the Met. He flipped forward a few pages to one called “Autumn Landscape.” In both windows there are mountains in the distance, and a stream, although in “Magnolia and Irises” there’s no pool and in “Autumn Landscape” the stream seems to start at the base of the mountains instead of transversing the mountains. “According to this book, the passage of the river through the mountains and into a pool is supposed to stand for the life of the dead person that the window is commemorating, and it says Tiffany used plating to create depth and three-dimensionality.”
“Yeah, Penrose wanted to do the same thing, only better and with more layers of glass,” Ernesto said, “and he wanted to create a dichroic pattern just like Tiffany did in his lamps only on a bigger scale.” Ernesto pointed to the section of the mountain landscape in our window that he reassembled last week to produce a stream flowing through the mountains. The problem was that if we reassembled the rest of the landscape by following the blueprint of how it had been originally assembled the stream died out just below the mountains before it reached the lily pool.
“It looks like it just dries up,” Ernesto complained. “That can’t be how it’s meant to be.”
The area where the stream “dried up” though was in among the rocks and boulders that led to the lily pond. It was built out of hundreds of tiny pieces of glass, and when I started trying to rearrange them they threw off the rest of the composition.
“I say we put it together the way it was,” my father suggested. “No one will be the wiser. You said you never mentioned the dichroic pattern to Gavin Penrose.”
“No,” I agreed. “I forgot to. But still, I’d like to try to see if I can figure out how it was originally laid out. If I can’t do it, we’ll put it back the way it was.”
So for the next couple of days, while Ernesto and Robbie work on
copper foiling the lady’s dress, and my dad works on her hair, I sit on a high stool at the light table shifting through pieces of glass, some no bigger than my thumb, looking for a pattern that only shows up under light. I can’t help remembering that the elements of the landscape I’m working on are not only similar to those Tiffany windows in Robbie’s book, they’re also almost identical to the scene in
The Drowning Tree
and the sketches I saw in Clare Barovier’s room at Briarwood. The pool itself, with its water lilies and reeds and weeping beech, recalls to me the place where I found Christine. And so, as I lift up rippled blue shards, which turn dark in my hand away from the light, I picture Christine paddling her boat through the black water of the Wicomico and wonder why she went there and whether she really went there to die. Plucking a creamy petal from its green oval pad I think of her pregnant and remember that last question she asked me at the train station—whether I agreed with Dante’s line:
Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving
. Was Christine in love with someone—the father of her child?—who had abandoned her to have the baby by herself? What had Detective Falco said—someone who was married and so wouldn’t welcome the news? Is that why Christine had asked me all those questions about raising Bea on my own? And what had I told her? That you were never free of fear once you were a mother.
I try, while rearranging the mottled gray and purple rocks that border the pool, to imagine the moment when she pulled her pill organizer out of her pocket and began swallowing one pill after another until she felt her blood begin to thicken and slow—
Till her blood was frozen slowly and her eyes were darkened wholly
… was how Tennyson described the Lady of Shalott’s death drifting down the river—but I find it hard to believe she would take her life and the life of her unborn child just because she was afraid of being alone.
Besides, the Lady of Shalott had at least written her name on her death-boat so that Lancelot would know her. Why hadn’t Christine left any message for me? Or for her unfaithful lover, the father of her child? Or had she? Maybe she’d crafted a message out of her own lifeless body as Dido had, as Christine said in her lecture,
by staining the night sky with her own funeral pyre
.
I idly sift the smooth green beech leaves through my hands like so
much sand.
Suicide
, I say to myself, pouring them into one hand,
accident
, into the other hand,
murder
, I spill them out on the lit table and study the pattern they form for clues like a gypsy reading tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. If the father of Christine’s child was married—or engaged to marry some rich woman like the character in Dreiser’s book—he might be threatened by Christine’s pregnancy, especially if she’d gone to him and demanded he marry her. It’s a role, though, that I have trouble picturing Christine in, but then I remember what Fay Morgan said about Christine and Gavin Penrose arguing before her lecture. Could Gavin be the father of Christine’s child? But Gavin isn’t married, and although it would probably be a fruitful source for gossip at the college, the news that he’d gotten an alum pregnant probably wouldn’t be worth killing someone to keep secret.
Several times a day I think of calling Detective Falco, but what would I tell him? That the place where Christine died resembles a picture drawn by a crazy woman who died fifty years ago? I can only hope that the evidence he’s sorting through is more substantial than the bits of colored glass I’m playing with. By the end of each day all I have for my questions is a sore back from leaning over the table and, when I close my eyes and press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, the colors from the glass shards I’ve been handling swirl in my head like treacherous eddies and form a cool pool I’d like to dive into.
The heat doesn’t help. In the week after Christine’s funeral we have a spell of hot days unrelieved even by the summer squalls that roll down off the Highlands and, more often than not, knock out the power. By late afternoon it grows so close and hot in the studio that I tell Ernesto, Robbie, and my dad to go home and then I climb the spiral staircase to my loft, where the rain lulls me into a deep sleep. Sometimes when I awake the sun has come out for a brief appearance just before setting, catching the raindrops on the skylights so that my high-pitched roof seems to be glazed in a glass blown from diamonds instead of silica and soda.
Without Bea, the evenings feel as empty as the loft. The clicking of the dogs’ nails on the hardwood floors as they trail me from room to room echoes in the cavernous space. They eye me hopefully for a walk but I don’t want to go out in case Bea calls. Instead, I let them out in the courtyard and then I eat dinner standing at the kitchen counter, idly rearranging items on our bulletin board. I’ve tucked the postcard advertising Neil’s
show next to Bea’s crewing schedule and the college’s pool hours and take-out menus and dentist checkup reminders—as if Neil’s show were one more detail in our busy suburban lifestyle. I’ve also tacked up the genetic counselor’s card that Fay Morgan gave me and toward the end of the week I actually call to make an appointment so that I can feel like I’ve accomplished
something
.
The genetic counselor tells me, in a heavy Eastern European accent, that luckily she’s just had a cancellation for tomorrow at one o’clock. Can I make it? In other words, can I take time off from my busy schedule of playing tiddledywinks with stained-glass pieces and pacing the loft each night? In fact, when I consult my calendar I see that the only conflicting “event” for tomorrow is Neil’s opening, which is from 2:30 to 5:00. Although I hadn’t decided whether or not to go, I realize now that I’ve been thinking about the show with dread. I can still tell Bea that I found out her father is out of the hospital and doing better and then let her decide if she wants to see him. I take Neil’s card down and toss it in the garbage and write the appointment on the calendar. When I tell the genetic counselor I can make it she says that she’ll fax me a list of questions about my family history that I should fill out and bring with me. The phrase
family history
reminds me that the last time I heard it was when Dr. Horace referred to the history of suicide in Christine’s family. The idea that you could carry something like that inside you all your life—a propensity to suicide or a gene that incites your cells to riot into cancer—is so depressing that when I hear the fax machine come on downstairs I grab a bottle of wine and go out onto the rooftop.
I stretch out in one of the torn and sagging lawn chairs and read the diary pages I found in the stone grooves of the Lady window until the light fades from the western sky. The voice of the young Eugenie Barovier—measured, proper, and a little stiff—is oddly soothing even as the thread within her daily narrative of endless rounds of calls and teas and charity visits to factory girls is the increasingly volatile behavior of her willful younger sister.
July 3, 1892. Went to call on the Markhams. Clare wore her yellow silk and tea-green bonnet. I wore the plain muslin that I’d hemmed for Clare, but to which I have now added a border as she’s
grown tired of it. Miss Markham complimented Clare on her artistic sensibility in choosing colors and Clare responded, “Art isn’t about choosing a dress—it’s about caring enough for what you choose to risk everything.”
July 16, 1892. Went walking along the banks of the river with Mr. Penrose. He sketched Clare sitting by the lily pool and told us the story of Syrinx, the nymph whom Pan pursued and who prayed to be turned into a reed to escape him. I commented that if the Greek gods would behave themselves better these poor girls wouldn’t have to keep turning themselves into trees and vegetables. Clare laughed at me and said at least Pan would always remember Syrinx because he chose the reed to fashion into his pipe. “She became a vehicle for his art,” she said. Mr. Penrose was kind enough to say that there were many ways to serve art, which I took as a compliment to my labors as he has, of late, entrusted me to mix his colors for him
.
It’s a curious dance these three performed along the banks of the Thames (clearly the model for the setting in so many of the paintings). A dance choreographed by Ovid, Dante, and Tennyson. Each
role
that Penrose chose for Clare to model seemed to say something about his feelings for her—at least she must have read it that way. Finally, he asked Eugenie to pose.
August 15, 1892. Today Mr. Penrose asked me to pose! I was not sure at first that I could bear to be stared at for so long, but he wants to do a series of paintings of Dryope and her sister, Iole, so he really does need the two of us. At first I was to be Iole, but then he felt that I ought to be Dryope because I’m the taller and when Iole clasps her sister as she turns into a tree the composition demands that Dryope be the taller of the two
.
All this made perfect sense, but I could see that Clare was annoyed to be chosen as the secondary figure, but then Mr. Penrose pointed out to her that Iole is the one telling the story. That seemed to appease her
.
Then he told us the story so we could understand our parts (and to keep our minds off our aching limbs, no doubt!)
.
“Dryope and her sister—half sister, actually, just like you two—go down to a pool, Dryope carrying her year-old baby. She picks a water lotus to give to her son, but as she plucks it Iole sees blood dripping from the blossom. She learns from some peasants that the flower is actually the nymph Lotis who was transformed to avoid capture by Priapus
.
“Again, if only the gods would leave these nymphs in peace …”
“Please, Miss Barovier, I’m doing your face now; you’ll have to be quiet,” he said. I noticed that Clare smiled at that because I had so often told her she ought not to keep talking while Mr. Penrose was painting her
.
“As I was saying … although she prays for the nymph’s forgiveness it’s too late. She begins to turn into a lotus tree herself as her sister looks on helplessly. She’s still holding her baby to her breast as the bark engulfs her, but she tries to suckle it nonetheless. Finally, she knows she must hand over her baby to her sister before the transformation is complete or else the baby will be smothered inside the bark. That’s the moment I want to paint. The moment she gives the baby to her sister. Her parting words of advice to Iole are to warn her young son, ‘Let him beware of pools and never pick blossoms from trees, but fancy every bush a goddess in disguise.’ ”
I thought the story a bit sordid, but I said nothing because I was not supposed to talk while posing
.
Clare would barely speak to me on the walk home but would persist in greeting every piece of shrubbery on the path as “a goddess in disguise.”
I laugh out loud at this last bit, which I’ve just barely been able to make out in the fading light. I find myself liking Clare. She reminds me, perhaps not surprisingly, of Neil. Greeting every bush as “a goddess in disguise” was the kind of thing Neil would do. When we’d walk around the campus—often at dawn after he’d thrown pebbles at my dorm room
window to wake me up—he’d lay his hand on the trunk of a tree and press his ear against the smooth bark.
“You can hear the beat of the tree’s heart,” he’d say.
Or we’d sit in the middle of a pine grove and listen to the sound the wind made moving through the trees. “Can’t you hear them whispering?” he’d ask. “If only we could understand what they’re saying.”
“Maybe it’s just that they speak a different language,” I said once. After that he drew pictures of trees with human faces, bark lips pursed to tell their secrets to one another. Then he wrote a poem called “The Language of Trees,” which went