The Drowning Tree (49 page)

“It’s Christine’s,” I say. “She had it with her when I put her on the train.”

“Yes. We found it locked in one of Dr. Horace’s file cabinets. Apparently he hadn’t figured out yet how to dispose of it safely.”

He takes out a manila file folder and slides a sheet of paper across the table. It appears to be a page taken from some kind of medical report—a badly Xeroxed form with spaces for dosage amounts and blood counts, a series of numbers and dates that mean nothing to me. I realize, though, that this must be the page of blood results that Horace failed to alter and that Christine stole from Neil’s file. On the bottom of the page is a larger blank left for “comments.” Scribbled here, in handwriting I recognize as Dr. Horace’s, is a progress report on Neil’s condition.

I lay the page down and push it back toward him carelessly into a puddle of spilled coffee. “Thanks, but I don’t see what good this is to me now.” It’s like getting an invitation after the party’s over.

“I thought you’d want to know why Christine stole the file in the first place.”

He unpeels a bright yellow Post-it note from the inside of the folder and hands it to me.
Show Juno
, it says. “She wanted you to know that Neil was better.”

“She almost did show it to me,” I say, remembering that she’d reached into her bag at the station, “but then she changed her mind.”

“Do you know why?”

“I think because I told her I never wanted to feel for anyone what I had felt for Neil.” I look away from him because my eyes have filled with tears. “She stole this page from Neil’s file so she could show me that Neil was better. Neil had told her that he still loved me. She was trying to give us a second chance … Damn …”

I cover my face with my hands. I hear the scrape of Falco’s chair and when I uncover my face he’s got a glass of water for me and a clean white linen napkin that’s been soaked in cold water and wrung out like the cold compresses my mother would press to my forehead during childhood fevers.

“And that’s why Horace killed her. Because she stole that page from Neil’s files and it has the original blood work on it before he tampered with the results.”

Falco nods. “Amy Webb says that she misplaced her keys a few months ago when Christine was visiting and then they showed up a few hours later. Christine must have had copies made.”

“She was always an overzealous researcher,” I say, trying to smile, but the effort of moving my lips makes me sob again.

“Her interest in Clare Barovier wasn’t merely academic. I had a long talk with Gavin Penrose—”

“About Christine thinking she was related to him? Gavin said something about that at Astolat, but I wasn’t sure if it was true or not. It sounded kind of crazy …”

“Well, I think I understand how she came to the idea. Here—this is the page she took from Clare Barovier’s file.”

He takes out another piece of paper and hands it to me. It’s another patient progress report, only this one is much older—a yellowed page of typescript dated December 18, 1923 and signed by a Dr. Peabody, who, I remember, was Dr. Horace’s predecessor at Briarwood. I read the comments written on the bottom of the page.

“Lost baby?”

“That’s what led Christine to believe that Clare had had a baby—Augustus’s baby—in the asylum and that it had been adopted by the Webbs. It makes sense when you remember the stories Christine’s father told about taking those boat trips as a boy. And then when Christine found out she was pregnant—”

“Amy said that Christine was asking a lot of questions about the family history. She thought it was because Christine was pregnant.”

“It was. When she found out she had Tay-Sachs she wanted to know how the Protestant, English Webbs came by an Eastern European hereditary disease. She thought that maybe Clare’s father was Jewish.”

“The drawing teacher that Eugenie and Clare’s mother eloped with. And was he?”

Falco shrugs. “I have no idea. Nor do the Webbs have any idea where the gene could have come from.”

“So after all Christine’s efforts the whole thing is still a mystery.”

“That part, yes, but there’s a piece I think I’ve figured out. Only I need your help.”

“My help?”

“Yes, it’s right up your alley—a little restoration job I’ve been working on with a friend of yours.”

We drive across the river and head south on Route 9W. It doesn’t take me long to realize where we’re going and the knowledge breaks the fragile thread of interest revived in me by Falco’s revelations. When we turn into the main gate at The Beeches, the color of the copper-red trees is almost too painful to look at. I feel as if it’s my blood draining out from my body and seeping into the humid, hazy air. I slump down in my seat and close my eyes while Falco asks the groundskeeper to unlock the inner gate to the estate.

“Gavin’s been most cooperative,” he says, as we drive through the gate. “He’s hoping the local police will put in a good word for him when his case comes up for trial. And he’ll need it. Aside from
The Drowning

Tree
, he sold a Rubens and two Hudson River school landscapes. When Joan Shelley found out she called off the engagement. You know he’s resigned the presidency of the college.”

“No,” I say, half opening my eyes to sneak a look at the woods we’re driving through. We’ve passed the copper beech grove and are driving on a wide, curving road lined with sycamores. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yep, I hear that Professor Umberto Da Silva is going to act as interim president while the Board of Trustees conducts a search.”

“The college could do a lot worse than to keep him; he’d be a fine president,” I say, thinking of Professor Da Silva’s regal Roman bearing and his kindness.

“I hear he’s going to preside at the dedication of the window in September.”

I turn toward Falco, whose profile against the dappled green of the sycamores is pretty regal itself. “You hear quite a bit, don’t you? Since when are you so involved in the affairs of the college?”

He half turns his head toward me and smiles. “This case has given me a new interest in the town …” He seems like he’s going to say something else, but a sudden jolt draws his attention back to the road. The drive has come to an abrupt end at a bare, grassy rise above the river. Falco brakes and turns off the engine and we both stare ahead for a moment at the scattered stones and crumbling walls that mark the ruins of the old estate.

“Astolat,” Falco says. “There’s not much left is there?”

I shake my head.

We get out and Falco leads me down the hill, through the crumbling terraces populated by broken urns and overgrown garden beds, toward the stream and the weeping beech tree. Approaching it from higher ground, the tree looks like a giant shaggy animal grazing at the water, a saber-toothed tiger, perhaps, come to drink at a primeval watering hole, the bank of which is littered with the bleached white bones of its prey. Not bones, I see as we get closer, but pieces of marble laid out on the bank. Two men are bending over them.

One of the men straightens up and waves and I recognize Nathan Bell. He shakes Falco’s hand and then, when I put my hand out, pulls me
into an awkward hug. “I’m so glad you convinced her to come,” he says to Falco. “We found another piece of the second figure today and it works to link the two together. It’s beginning to make sense.”

“The second figure?” I ask.

“Come look,” Nathan says.

The marble pieces have been arranged on the grass like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It’s like looking at a stained-glass window before the pieces are soldered together, only because the final project here is three-dimensional it’s harder to read. Nathan crouches in the grass and touches each piece, explaining how they fit together, until slowly a picture of the two statues emerges.

The first figure half stands, half crouches, her arms thrown back as if to catch her balance. Her hair falls over her head, covering her face. In among the strands are leaves.

“What are these ridges?” I ask, fingering the rough surface of the marble.

“Bark,” Nathan says. “She’s turning into a tree, just like Bernini’s Daphne.”

“Or like the figure in
The Drowning Tree.”

“Right. We think it stood on the wall, right at the edge of the water above the second statue. It’s exactly like the scene in
The Drowning Tree
. Two women, one turning into a tree, the other below her in the water.”

“It re-creates the moment Eugenie told Clare that she was going to marry Augustus and she tried to drown herself,” I tell Nathan and Falco. “I read about it in Eugenie’s diary.”

Nathan nods. “That may be, but I don’t think the one in the water is trying to drown herself. Look—”

Nathan points to another group of fragments. There’s only a piece left of the face: a sliver of nose and eye, half a mouth opened in mid-scream. The expression in the one eye is of terror and … something else … pleading, I think. One arm is extended, the fingers splayed, as if reaching toward the figure on the shore for help. The other arm is wrapped around a piece of the statue’s torso, clutching loose folds of drapery that fall over her stomach. The gesture reminds me of something from Eugenie’s diary.

“When Clare finished telling her story about the drowning tree,” I say, “Eugenie asked if the story was from Ovid.”

“Another woman fond of her myths,” Falco says, shaking his head.

“Yes, Clare sounded impatient, too. She told Eugenie, ‘Not everything’s from a book’ and then she said …” I close my eyes, trying to remember the words from the diary and picture instead the scene it described. Clare, crouched at the edge of the water below her sister, holding one hand over her belly—“She said, ‘Here’s life, whether you see it or not.’ She was telling Eugenie that she was pregnant and that it was Augustus’s child. God, it must have killed Eugenie.”

“Enough to make her push her sister in the water,” Falco says.

I shake my head. “No … I don’t know … I think Clare did step into the water herself, but she must have thought Eugenie would save her. She was her big sister, always looking out for her, even if she was sometimes a little overbearing. But then Eugenie just stood there. She did nothing to save Clare. If Augustus hadn’t come along—I bet he was hiding someplace nearby to see how the interview went—she might have drowned. By the time he got her out of the water, though, she was having a miscarriage. Eugenie’s diary says her body was
drenched and bleeding.”

“Poor Clare,” Nathan says, looking down at the fragments of marble scattered on the grass. We’re all silent for a few moments, gazing on the white stones glistening in the sun like bones left over from some awful carnage.

I
WAS LATE FOR THE LECTURE
.

I almost didn’t go.

I had sworn that I’d never look at the lady in the window again, but I felt I owed it to Christine to look at the window one more time, now that it had been put back together the way it was meant to be. Besides, Bea wanted to go and I didn’t want her to go alone.

The day was overcast. I was glad for that. I didn’t want to see the light shining through the glass and casting lozenges of bright color onto the speaker the way it had for Christine. Professor Da Silva’s speech was brief and subdued. He alluded to a striking new interpretation of the window
that we’d all be reading soon when Christine’s research (edited by Nathan Bell) was published. It might challenge some of our preconceived ideas about the college, and about ourselves, but that’s what real scholarship is about, he said, having the vision to see things anew.

When the lecture is over I stay in my seat while the rest of the audience filters out. Sometime during the talk I’d felt Bea’s head rest on my shoulder. I didn’t want to move. How many years, I wondered, did we have left of this kind of physical closeness? I didn’t know. My own mother had died when I was not much older than Bea. I didn’t have a script for the rest of our lives together.

After a few moments, when everyone has left, Bea rises and walks up to the window. I watch her as I’ve been watching her since she came home last week, amazed at the transformation that eight weeks away has wrought in her. When she’d left at the beginning of the summer she’d been hovering on the edge between childhood and adulthood, but now the gawkiness of her long limbs is gone. There’s a grace and assurance in the way she holds herself that I’ve never seen before, a confidence in what her body and mind are capable of. She looks like a person who has settled into her own bones. What takes my breath away is how much she looks like Neil. All her life I’ve feared what she might inherit from Neil, but now I can see how much of what is good and strong in her comes from Neil: her willingness to confront life, the way she pushes herself into the current.

I can only hope that whatever she’s inherited from me serves her half as well. Last week, when I’d finally summoned up the nerve to go back to Dr. Irini Pearlman, the genetic counselor, she told me that I didn’t have the breast cancer gene. “At least not the two we’ve identified,” she’d cautioned after telling me the good news. “You should, of course, continue monthly self-exams and yearly mammograms and encourage your daughter to do the same when she’s older. Even if there’s no genetic propensity in the family, all it means is that you’re in the general risk pool—which is risky enough.”

Bea touches the plaque beneath the window and reads aloud the line of poetry that comes after Christine’s name and life span, “ ‘Here with her face doth memory sit.’ You know, the lady really does look a lot like Aunt Christine. Are you sure they weren’t related?”