The Drowning Tree (6 page)

“Juno,” Christine reaches forward and brushes back a strand of my hair that’s come loose from the ponytail I wrangled it into before her lecture and tucks it behind my ear.
Pre-Raphaelite hair
, Christine always too-generously called my unruly masses of dark red curls. “You don’t have to be a snob on my account. The man doesn’t have to have a PhD or wear a business suit to be a great guy. It seems to me you’ve spent altogether too much time alone since Neil. You deserve someone wonderful.”

“Nothing’s happened yet. I mean with Bea around, I just didn’t think it was appropriate.”

“Come on, you’ve been a single mother for … what?… thirteen years? I know you date. What about that curator from the Frick?”

“I used to see him on weekends when Bea stayed with my dad, but he got a better job offer in Chicago and wanted me to move.”

“And?”

“Well, I couldn’t very well leave the glass business when I’ve spent all this time building it up and uproot Bea from her school … besides, I just didn’t feel
that
much for him. Not enough to disrupt our lives.”

“Have you felt that much for anyone since Neil?”

It’s the second time she’s brought up Neil tonight and I have to quell the desire to tell her to mind her own business. But if anyone has a right to ask me about Neil, it’s Christine. When things fell apart—
when Neil fell apart
—it was Christine who stayed with me day and night until I was able to get out of bed and start taking care of Bea again. It was Christine who convinced me to move back in with my father, revive the glass business, and go to community college at night to get a business degree.

I shake my head. “No. To tell you the truth I’m not sure I ever want to feel that much for anyone again. You remember what I was like when I fell in love with Neil—it was like the rest of the world turned gray and he was the only part in color—like one of those windows that’s all in grisaille except for the central figure. Sometimes I wonder now if that weird glow Neil gave off wasn’t his madness.”

“But what if Neil was well again, do you think …” I miss Christine’s next few words in the blast of the whistle from the approaching train. When the noise subsides her head is bent and she’s rummaging inside her bag and again I miss something she says because she’s talking into the bag instead of to me. It sounds like she’s saying something about the dogs.

“What about the dogs?” I ask as she straightens up. She’s got her hand on a file folder, as if she’s going to take it out, but then she seems to change her mind and slides it back into the satchel.

“No, I meant Dante’s Paolo and Francesca,” she says, “I was thinking of another line from
The Inferno
. Something Francesca says to Dante, ‘Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving …’ Do you think that’s true? That if you love someone enough they’ll have no choice but to return your love?” Christine has turned to face me in the open door of the train and I almost laugh at the absurdity of it—what a question to ask on the threshold of a departing train!—but when I see how serious she looks I don’t laugh. I think for just a moment about how much I loved Neil, and how I hoped and believed that as long as I loved him that much everything would turn out all right. That my love would save him from going crazy. What can I say? The only truthful answer I have isn’t the one she wants to hear.

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I tell her.

She smiles but I can see she’s disappointed. She starts to say something but another commuter brushes past her and she shrugs her shoulders. “I’d better find a seat,” she says.

When the door closes I move in the same direction on the platform that I saw Christine head in inside the train. During college we often saw each other off at this train station—on holidays when Christine went home to Poughkeepsie, or when I was going down to the city to visit Neil—and whoever was left on the platform would always wait and wave. “Just like in those old wartime movies,” Christine would say, “when the heroine runs along the side of the train and the hero waves from the window.” Would she remember now?

When I see her through the window I think she has forgotten. She looks suddenly very tired, like all the currents of energy that have kept her afloat today had drained out of her. This is the way she looks, I realize, when she doesn’t think anyone is looking at her—as if it were the gazes of others that held her aloft. It frightens me to see her this way because I know that for Christine moments of excitement and triumph have always been followed by periods of desolation. She looks now as if a heavy weight has descended on her. Then she sees me and her brow smooths, her blue eyes ignite, and for a moment she looks as if that weight has been lifted. It’s only for a moment, though. By the time she lifts her hand to wave to me her eyes are empty and unfocused, as if she were looking not at me, but at someone over my shoulder.

I wave to her and try to mouth a better answer to her question because I’ve thought of one that’s not quite a lie, but then the lights flicker inside the train and instead of Christine I see my own reflection in the dark glass. Still, I stand on the platform, waving until the train pulls out, because even if I can’t see her, I’m hoping she might still be able to see me.

I
SPEND
M
ONDAY OVERSEEING THE REMOVAL OF THE
L
ADY WINDOW
. U
SUALLY
Ernesto and my father handle this part on their own, but on a project this big I think it’s a good idea for me to be there. I’ve also asked Robbie—a recent Parsons graduate who’s apprenticing with us—to photograph the window before and after we take it down. Lead came that looks perfectly good in situ can deteriorate rapidly in the removal process. I want to make sure that when I present the bill to Gavin Penrose we have a detailed record of every stage of the restoration.

It turns out that we need all our hands just to dig the putty out of the stone slots holding the window.

“Man,” Robbie says after a half hour applying hammer and chisel to
the hardened putty, “they were making sure this window wasn’t going
no place.”

“Augustus Penrose didn’t do anything halfway,” my father answers, his voice, even though he’s on the scaffolding working with his back to me, ringing clear in the vaulted space. On the other side of the window is a watery shadow: Ernesto, who is working on the outside of the window removing the exterior putty.

“Dad, you’re not wearing your mask,” I say.

He swerves around so quickly that the scaffolding rocks on the uneven stone floor, and he grins at me. “How’d you know that with my back to you?”

I look up from the bottom edge of the window and smooth away a film of dust from the Lady’s dainty red and gold slippers. “From your voice—it’s not muffled.”

“Would you listen to that, Robbie! She could tell from the sound of my voice! When she was little she knew from my footsteps on the front stoop whether I’d stopped off at Flannery’s on the way home.”

“You’d take off your work boots so as not to wake Mom when you’d been drinking,” I say, striking the hammer until a plume of flesh-colored dust fans out over the glass. “If you don’t care about your own health—” I point to the mask still dangling around his neck “—think of the bad example you’re setting for Robbie here.”

Dad starts to laugh but it gets stuck in his throat and turns into a cough. “There,” he says, pummeling his chest with his fist until he’s surrounded by an aura of putty dust, “there’s your example for you, Robbie boy, wear your mask while working with this stuff if you don’t want to end up a broken-down old man like me.”

“You look pretty good, Mr. McKay, for a man your age.”

“Mebbe for a hundred-year-old man,” Dad grumbles, turning back on his ladder. I can tell he’s pleased, though. He’s vain about his appearance, my sixty-year-old dad, about his full head of hair that’s still more black than gray—at least when it’s not covered with putty dust—his good teeth and his arm and chest muscles still strong from a lifetime of lifting and installing heavy plate-glass windows. I only wish he’d take as much care of his insides as he does his outer appearance: he still isn’t wearing the mask. “Which is how old I feel when someone calls me Mr. McKay. Call me Gil, son.”

“Okay, Gil,” Robbie replies, “did you really know Augustus Penrose?”

“Sure did. Now there was a man old as Methuselah. He was already in his eighties when I started cutting glass in his studio, but he still put in a full day of work. If he didn’t like how you were doing something he’d take the cutter right out of your hand and do it himself. Going on ninety and his hands were steady as bedrock. Cool, too. He could stand next to a twenty-five-hundred-degree furnace and not break a sweat. Man had ice water in his veins.…”

“Robbie, maybe you ought to go outside and help Ernesto—” I start to suggest, anxious over what colorful Gus Penrose story my father might launch into, but Ernesto comes in through the side door at just that moment to tell us that he’s managed to free all the exterior putty in the time it’s taken the three of us to scrape out the interior putty. He’s already got the wirecutters in his hand and is ready to cut the tie wires from the saddle bars supporting the window. I hold up my hand with five fingers splayed. “Give us five minutes,” I tell him.

“Are we clear?” I ask my father and Robbie. Dad runs his chisel around the top and right-hand side of the window, Robbie checks the left-hand side and I swipe the shallow bottom groove with my gloved hand. All clear. I give Ernesto the thumbs up and he proceeds to cut the tie wires. The window shivers slightly with each cut and I look up at the Lady’s face to check for any panes coming loose. That would be the hardest glass to replace—the finely painted portrait of Eugenie—or is it, as Christine suggested in her lecture yesterday, Eugenie’s sister, Clare?
The mad sister
. For the first time today I look at the window not as a set of technical problems—of cracks and deteriorating lead came, bowing and crizzling—but as a portrait. The Lady’s yellow hair spills over her shoulders more wildly than I recalled. Her left hand grasps a hank of the abundant tresses almost as if she were pulling her own hair. I’ve never noticed how firm that grip looks and now—with the window shaking in its setting—I have the impression that she’s trying to clutch onto something. She does look a bit mad—or at least desperate.

When the wires are all cut we all prepare to slide the window into the deeper slot on the right side. She sticks at first, then makes a grating sound like a soft moan which, when the glass clears the left groove and
Ernesto carefully tilts the window into the room and we lift her out of her stone setting, turns into a long sigh as a gust of warm air snakes in under her robes. I almost imagine that I hear her skirts rustling—and then I see that it’s just some old newspaper that must have been stuffed in the grooves and sealed in the putty fluttering down to the floor. I let out my own breath as the three men lay her down gently on a plywood pallet and stoop to gather the shredded paper.

“We’ll clean that up,” my dad says. “Don’t you have to pick up Bea from school?”

I look down at my watch and am amazed to see it’s almost three. It’s taken seven hours to release the Lady. “Damn, I don’t even have time to go home and take a shower. I promised Bea I’d take her shopping …”

I look down at my clothes, which are covered with a fine dust that is mostly putty but also some lead from the decaying cames. I’m always lecturing the guys on washing up after handling lead.
If you don’t want to end up brain-dead by forty
.

“Use the showers down by the gym,” Ernesto suggests. “Don’t you keep a locker there for when you go swimming?”

One of the perks of teaching a stained-glass class here at night is that I get to use the campus pool. “Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ve got some exercise clothes in the car. Can you guys handle the rest of this?”

Ernesto and my dad exchange an amused look. Robbie is already sweeping the dust off the floor. I start to toss the papers in my hand into a loose garbage bag when I notice that in among the shredded newspapers are heavy cream-colored sheets folded into quarters. I unfold one and hold it in the light that’s now flooding through the gaping hole in the wall. The light’s almost too bright—bleaching the old paper clean—but I can just make out fine pencil lines, a sketch of a face, and an intricate tiny script running along the edge of the paper like a mouse scurrying along the rim of a baseboard.

“Look at these,” I say, holding the pages out to the men.

“Looks like discarded sketches for the window—got jammed in with the putty—saw something like it in that window we did down in Irvington,” Ernesto says.

“Might be a message,” my dad says.

“A message?” I ask. My dad doesn’t usually wax so mystical.

“From the previous craftsman,” he explains, “to the restorer. Which would be you, Junebug. Medieval craftsmen did it all the time. Notes on how and when the glass was made, what kind of caming was used. Then when the window was restored they’d stuff some notes in on what they did so the next restorer would know what was original, what was restored.”