The Drowning Tree (29 page)

“Oh, Aunt Juno, can you help me translate something?”

“
Certo, bella
. Something for school?”

“Not exactly.” Portia’s skin, which is as clear and delicate as milk glass, turns bright pink. She glances down at the paper without handing it over to me.

“You took Latin, right?” she asks.

“Four years. It was mandatory at Penrose back then.”

“Then can you tell me what this line means?”

She holds out a piece of paper that’s been folded so intricately it’s like an origami crane. The purpose of these folds, apparently, is so that only a few lines of pale blue handwriting show. It would be easier for me to take the paper from her, but clearly she doesn’t want me to read anything but the few lines in question.

“Da mi basia mille,”
I read.

“I get that part because it’s like Italian. It says, ‘give me a thousand kisses,’ right?”

I nod, keeping my eyes on the page to spare poor Portia any further embarrassment. She’s blushing so violently now that it’s like some foreign presence is moving under her skin trying to get out. A pink-plumed bird about to erupt from her long white limbs.

“Deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,”
I read aloud.

“A lot of numbers?”

“That’s right. I remember this poem from sophomore Latin. Catullus
is asking his girlfriend to give him a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, and then a second hundred—”

“In other words, a lot of kisses.”

“Yeah, that’s his basic point.”

“Then what’s this word
—conturbabimus?
It’s not something dirty, is it?”

I laugh and am immediately sorry. Portia seems to be in actual pain. “No, not at all. He says that when they have made many thousands of kisses they’ll mix them all up, so that they won’t know how many there are and no bad person will be able to know and be jealous that so many kisses exist.”

“Oh. That’s kind of sweet, really.” Portia draws the folded paper back into her lap and holds it there with both hands as if frightened it might stretch out its little paper wings and fly away.

“Uh, is this from the boy I saw in here a few weeks ago? The one from your English class?”

Portia nods and, leaning closer to me, whispers a name, “Scott Heeley.” I remember the tall, awkward-looking boy with his copy of Dante and imagine him copying out poems in Latin for the pretty Italian girl in his class. I remember the last time someone wrote down a poem for me. I take a sip of the bitter coffee, scalding my tongue, and tell Portia that yes, it’s really very sweet indeed.

A
NNEMARIE IS UP TO HER ELBOWS IN FLOUR, DUSTING A COMPLICATED-LOOKING CAKE
pan and knocking the excess out on the wooden counter. She holds her hands up, like a surgeon who’s just scrubbed, and gives me a kiss on the cheek. Her cheek against mine feels soft as velvet and when she steps back I find myself looking into eyes the same gold-flecked brown as my mother’s. She’s the same age that my mother would be if my mother had lived.

“
Cara!
I heard about your poor friend, Christina. What a horrible tragedy. Do they really think she took her own life?”

I sit down on a stool and brush away some flour from the edge of the table. “That’s what it looks like, only I don’t know … I find it hard to believe.”

Annemarie shakes her head, scrapes a mixing bowl full of yellow batter into the cake mold, and slides the pan into a hot oven. I notice that there’s a pile of crumbled cake on the breadboard. “Who can ever imagine such a thing? A young woman, with her whole life ahead of her. What could have driven her to such despair?”

“She was pregnant,” I say.

“Dio mio,”
she says, crossing herself and leaving dabs of flour on her forehead and on either side of her full bosom. “That’s even worse. It’s not like fifty years ago when a girl had to crawl away in shame. Look at you! How well you’ve done raising Beatrice on your own!”

I tell Annemarie that I appreciate her condolences for Christine’s death, but that I’ve got to ask her a few questions before I go to this doctor’s appointment in Poughkeepsie.

“You’re not sick,” she says, pressing her floury hands to my forehead.

“No, no, nothing like that. I’ve just decided to have this test for the breast cancer gene—because of Mom—and I need some information about the family.”

Annemarie moves a hand from my forehead to my cheek, her eyes pinned to mine. The coronas of gold around her pupils seem to expand like little solar flares. “Tell me the truth,
cara
, have you found something—” she touches her other hand to her breast, “—a lump?”

“No, no, I swear,
Zia
, nothing. A woman at the college told me she had the test and that there are things you can do to prevent getting cancer if you have the gene. I thought I ought to find out—for Bea’s sake. I probably don’t even have it. No one else in the family’s had breast cancer, have they?”

Annemarie drops her hand from my face and wipes it on her apron. She moves over to a large steel sink and washes and dries her hands. Then she sits down with her clean hands folded in her lap. I notice that there are half a dozen molds waiting to be filled with cake batter. It must be some complicated cake she’s cooking up for tonight, but the way she sits there you would think she has nothing to do but to tend to my problems.

“Well, my mother’s sister, Angela—so your great-aunt—had a lump removed when she was fifty and she said it was nothing, but my mother said she thought it might have been cancer. Angela died when
she was sixty-three and no one ever said what from. You see, my mother’s generation didn’t even say the word cancer without making the sign for the evil eye. They just didn’t talk about it.”

I take out the questionnaire from my purse and fill in the information about Angela—such as it is—in the space for maternal grandmother’s siblings. “This is going to sound funny,” I say, feeling as shy as Portia with her love poem asking this question, “but do we have any Jewish relatives?”

Annemarie shakes her head. “Not that I’ve ever heard.”

“Okay, anyone else with cancer?”

“My mother-in-law’s cousin—but that’s no blood relative to you. No, most of the women in our family live pretty long. It was a shock to everyone when your mother passed so young.”

I look up at Annemarie and see that her soft brown eyes are shiny with tears. She’s the second person I’ve made cry today and it’s not even noon yet.

“I’m sorry for bringing up bad memories,
Zia
, I know how close you were to my mother. She always said you were her favorite cousin.”

Annemarie lifts a corner of her apron up to wipe her eyes. A timer goes off and she moves to the oven to remove a large round pan. When she upends the pan the cake that slides out is shaped like a giant flower. The other molds, I now notice, are shaped like leaves. “It’s all right,
cara,”
she says, filling one of the leaf pans with the smooth yellow batter, “you have to ask your questions. I just hope that the answers you get bring you peace.”

D
RIVING TOWARD
P
OUGHKEEPSIE
I
KEEP HEARING
A
NNEMARIE’S LAST WORDS, BUT
instead of applying them to the medical questions I’ve answered for today’s appointment I think about the questions I have about Christine’s death. Would their answers give me peace? Would knowing why she died the way she did make it any easier to do without her?

For the first time since I recognized Christine in that figure floating in the water, I feel the full weight of losing her.
My best friend
. In many ways, my only friend. Although I’m friendly with a number of the mothers of Bea’s friends, most of them are at least ten years older than I am.
There was no one I thought to call to come with me to this appointment. If she were alive, I would have called Christine and she, after telling me I was overreacting and worrying too much, would have gotten on the next train to go with me. She’d gone with me when Neil was first admitted to Briarwood and to the ER with me when Bea got a concussion from falling off her bike when she was seven. I’d gone with her when she decided to get an AIDS test eight years ago and when she’d gone into rehab. So why hadn’t she called me when she found out she was pregnant?

I glance across the highway toward the shining strip of river and the hills on the other side. Beyond those hills I can just make out the cliffs of the Shawangunks, an area famous for rock climbing. Neil had taken both of us several times and always Christine had been fearless. I can’t imagine what would have made her so afraid to tell me that she was pregnant—unless she’d been afraid to tell me who the father was.

T
HE GENETIC COUNSELING OFFICE IS IN A MEDICAL OFFICE BUILDING ADJACENT TO A
shopping center on Route 9 just south of the Mid-Hudson Bridge. When I check in the receptionist collects the questionnaire I’ve filled out and tells me the geneticist will have to review it before seeing me. Then she asks if I want to put this on my insurance. I’ve already retrieved my insurance card, but the way she’s phrased the question gives me pause. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder what my insurance provider’s reaction might be to the news that I have a gene predisposing me to breast cancer.

“You don’t have to decide now,” she tells me when she sees me hesitate, “you can discuss it with the counselor. Help yourself to tea or coffee and have a seat.” She gestures toward a tray set up with two silver urns and a plate of pastries and bagels. Helping myself to a cup of chamomile tea (I’m a little jumpy from the espresso), I sit down on a couch upholstered in a green and lavender chintz that matches the wallpaper and lampshades. The carpet is a restful shade of pale green and so plush that I’m tempted to slip out of my sandals. In fact, settling into the deep, soft cushions, I’m tempted to take a nap. The faux-Victorian decor has obviously been designed to lull nervous women into a soporific trance. Even the framed Alma-Tadema prints of scantily draped women lolling around
on cushions suggest that we are here to join a seraglio instead of waiting to have our blood taken and our genes scanned for fatal imperfections. Or our babies’ genes. I notice that three out of the four other women in the waiting room are pregnant.

I sit and read a story in an old issue of
Rosie
about the actress Fran Drescher’s bout with uterine cancer. Bea and I used to love watching
The Nanny
and I have to restrain myself from asking everyone in the waiting room if they know how the actress is doing now. Then I read an essay in
More
about a woman whose best friend has breast cancer, which sends me sniffling to a Kleenex box covered in a crocheted tea cozy. Everything here feels cushioned, as if to blunt the blow of potential bad news. Finally I decide I’m better off checking in with the Barovier sisters than reading any more magazine stories.

“Miss McKay?”

I look up, startled out of Eugenie’s little lecture on interior decorating, at a woman who, in a lavender smock and flowered dirndl skirt, could
have walked out of Eugenie’s journal. Her long black hair, pulled back into a loose braid, and large dark eyes could belong to one of the Pre-Raphaelite models.

“I’m Irini Pearlman. We spoke on the phone. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but I’m ready for you now.”

As I rise she puts out her hand to shake mine but as I place my hand in hers I stumble a little in the thick carpeting and she enfolds my hand in both of hers to steady me. I imagine for a minute that she’s going to hold my hand all the way into her office, but she lets go after gently squeezing my hand and gestures for me to walk in front of her down a corridor lined with more Alma-Tadema prints—these of girls lounging on a marble terrace above the sea.

Irini Pearlman’s office is slightly less frilly and feminine than the waiting room. The prints here are tasteful watercolor botanicals. The drapes and the two upholstered chairs in front of her desk where we sit are plain cream-colored linen—a fabric that reminds me, for some reason, of that muslin dress Eugenie altered for Clare and then realtered for herself.

“I’ve reviewed your family history and drawn up a quick chart showing the genetic risk factors we would be testing for,” Dr. Pearlman says, indicating a sheet on a clipboard that she holds out for me. “Obviously, the major cause for concern is the presence of early breast cancer in a primary relation—your mother—” She points to a circle she’s drawn and inked in. “And then we have the great-aunt—” she points to another circle, this one half-darkened with a question mark above it, “—but we’re not even sure whether the lump she had removed was malignant or benign …”

“No, and as I wrote down there’s just not a whole lot of information on that side. My mother’s cousin, Annemarie, said the women could barely pronounce the word cancer without making the sign for the evil eye.”

“Yes, in my family, too, the aunts would spit and say a prayer against the
kaynohara
. Not an uncommon attitude in the old country, but it makes my job a little harder. I have to say, though, that from this it doesn’t seem like you have much to worry about—”