The Drowning Tree

  “Isn’t that where the painting of The Drowning Tree used to be?” I ask.

  I can tell from her expression that Fay would like to accuse Christine of making away with the painting as well as the missing notebook pages, but instead she looks embarrassed as she’s forced to concede that the painting’s absence has nothing to do with Christine.

  “President Penrose sent it down to the city to be cleaned. You wouldn’t believe how filthy some of these paintings are.”

  I think she’s referring to the subject matter—naked nymphs and breast-feeding trees—but then she swipes a finger along one of the picture frames. “It’s because of the candles they use during parties. President Penrose thinks it’s romantic, but it’s just plain dirty.”

  I SPEND THE REST OF THE DAY WITH EUGENIE’S NOTEBOOK SPREAD OPEN ON THE LIGHT table. To gain some time and quiet—and because we’ve still got bills to pay—I send Ernesto and Robbie out on a job to reinstall a fanlight up on the Heights.

  I turn on every light in the studio, but still I find it almost impossible to read Eugenie’s writing in the margins of her sketches. It’s as if the free-flowing script she employed in her youth had contracted and become brittle—like an old woman’s bones—as she grew old. After a while I give up trying to read and let her pictures tell the story. The pen-and-ink sketches are faint, too (I could curse Augustus Penrose for his damned homemade ink) but beautifully intricate. Studying them, my hand itches to be drawing and I find myself doodling on scraps of the white vellum paper we use for rubbings. I find it helps me make sense of the designs to draw them, to see how one thing turns into another in Eugenie’s exotic menagerie of plant and animal life. I recognize many of the patterns that she used in her line of domestic textiles, but I can’t imagine that some of these designs ever made it out of the sketchbook and onto the loom. They’re not exactly what the turn-of-the-century matron would use to upholster her parlor settee and chairs. Sea serpents swallowing carp, bloated octopi ensnaring dainty sea horses. There’s an undercurrent of violence in the sketches that I never noticed in the textiles. She’s linked pieces of the design together by having one devour the other. Or transform into the other. There’s a whole series of designs—none of which I have ever seen rendered in cloth—of women turning into birds or trees or, sometimes, water, wind, or just pure swirls of chaos. I know that Augustus Penrose often used Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a source for his painting, just as J. W. Waterhouse, another second-generation Pre-Raphaelite, did. I picture Augustus and Eugenie reading Ovid together, selecting the stories of Baucis and Philemon and Iole and Dryope, for the Forest Hall. Perhaps that’s where Eugenie got the idea for these metamorphic tapestries that then proved too complicated to weave into cloth.

  Halfway through the notebook, Eugenie stops drawing patterns and starts working on sketches for the Lady window. I wonder if Augustus put her to work on the window plans to give her a rest from designing textiles. Maybe he had found some of her recent fabric patterns disturbing—or, at least, unmarketable.

  The first sketches of the window are rough cartoons. A generalized figure of a woman bent over a loom—not looking up as she does in the completed window, the details of the room around her only vaguely suggested. The window above her head is at first empty. Then, in subsequent sketches, trees and shrubbery appear, a few clouds stray into the sky. The surrounding room becomes more detailed. Bolts of cloth appear, then stacks of books, a table with a vase of flowers … a cross between a lady’s sewing room and an artist’s studio, much like the textile studios in Forest Hall. These interiors are lovingly detailed—far too detailed for representation in stained glass. Augustus must have pointed that out to her because I find, turning a page near the center of the book, a drawing with the interior scene roughly crosshatched out. Scrawled across the drawing in black ink that has not faded with time are the words, “You’ve turned my muse into a seamstress!” The handwriting’s nothing like Eugenie’s—young or old—it’s clearly Augustus’s verdict on his wife’s work.

  In the drawing on the next page the interior has been simplified: The lady has looked up from her loom, and mountains have risen in the window behind her. A shaggy beech tree looms over the lily pool like a beast about to leap through the window and devour the lady. When I turn to the next page I see I’ve come to the place where the page has been torn out. The next page shows the completed drawing for the window, the glass sections blocked out and numbered according to a number key in the margin.

  “If you get any closer to that drawing you’ll fall into it.”

  I pull my head up and feel a sudden twinge in my back from bending over the table so long.

  “Dad, you startled me. I don’t mind you using your own key—but give a person some warning when you come creeping up on them,” I say, closing the notebook.

  “Ha! This from a girl who used to hear me light up a smoke from two blocks away. I hollered twice,” he protests. “These sorry excuses for guard dogs certainly heard me.”

  Paolo and Francesca look up from either side of my dad’s legs, their large liquid eyes full of rebuke. Obviously they’d scampered right past me and I hadn’t noticed.

  “I’m sorry, I guess I was preoccupied …”

  “You were drawing.” My father moves closer to the table and takes one of the scrap sheets I’ve filled with sketches from Eugenie’s notebook. “I haven’t seen you draw like that since before you went to college. Reminded me of how you were after your mother died. Remember? You’d draw your pictures from morning to night. Your teachers complained that you drew pictures on your homework and in all your class notebooks. I told them to let you be. It was like you were drawing the pain out of yourself.”

  I smile at the thought of my father facing down the teachers at Rosedale High but then the smile fades as I see the look of concern on his face. I can see he’s trying to think of something to say about Christine—that he’s connected this fit of drawing with my current grief. And who knows? It’s true I’ve drawn little except designs for windows in the last fifteen years.

  “I can’t even remember what I drew back then,” I say.

  “Oh, all sorts of things—unicorns and dragons, fanciful things and places that looked like they came out of fairy tales. Beautiful princesses—all with your mother’s face. Here—I’ve still got one.”

  My father pulls out a worn leather wallet that’s been molded to the shape of his hip and extracts a grayish piece of newsprint folded into quarters. When he unfolds it I see it’s a pencil sketch of a woman’s face. Beneath the fanciful crown and even more fanciful hairdo I recognize my mother’s face, forever frozen at forty-four, the age she was when she died.

  “Wow, it does look like her, doesn’t it?”

  My father looks at the picture and nods. Then he carefully folds it and puts it back in his wallet.

  “You had a lot of talent. I never understood why you gave it up.”

  Because I got pregnant at twenty-one and my husband cracked up and I had to take over your glass business to make a living, I could say, but then, none of that was his fault. He helped me the best he could after Neil was taken away.

  “I’m better off,” I tell him, meaning it. “I’d hate to be in Robbie’s shoes—living hand to mouth—hoping someone will notice my paintings. I’m happy bringing other people’s works of art back to life.”

  Dad nods but I notice he is not looking at me. Instead he’s looking over my shoulder at the sketches I’ve drawn. They’re doodles mostly, sea creatures and aquatic flowers—not so different from the unicorns and dragons I drew as a child—strung together in a swirling pattern of seaweed. The swirls cascade down the paper, turning into a stream flowing between two hills. Alongside the stream is a curving path on which I’ve drawn two women walking arm in arm under a weeping beech tree. One woman has already gone under the tree, her abundant hair radiating out in serpentine coils that intermingle with the foliage, while the other turns her face to the side. The features I’ve sketched
bear a crude likeness to the lady in the window and like the lady in the window she’s smiling because she is finally free from her imprisonment. She’s woven the landscape she glimpsed in the mirror and, instead of dying, escaped into a world of her own creation. A happy scene until you notice that, influenced by my visit to Forest Hall this morning, I’ve sketched a face on the tree—a woman’s face that has the same features as the lady in the window, only crying instead of smiling. The cascading branches of the weeping beech have intertwined with the hair of the woman who’s gone under the tree as if they were getting ready to drag her into the water.

  THE NEXT WEEK, WHILE WAITING FOR CHRISTINE’S BODY TO BE RELEASED FROM THE morgue, I find that I can no longer cut glass. It’s something I’m generally quite good at. My father taught me the summer I was sixteen when he corralled me into working with him as a glazier’s apprentice instead of attending the summer art institute at the Rhode Island School of Design.

  “It’s not like anyone can really teach you how to draw,” he’d said, his callused hand on mine guiding the glass cutter over a smooth pane, “but a trade like this … well, you gotta get it from someone who’s got the touch, like I learned it from my father. The McKays have been cutting glass for generations. I can see already you’ve got the knack for it, just press a little harder till you hear a scratching—” The cutter made a sound like sand makes when it’s caught between your teeth. “—but not so hard so you see white coming off your blade, and always make sure your cutter’s freshly oiled, and never go over a score twice.”

  It had seemed like a million things to keep in mind at once—impossible to remember—and it was only when I stopped listening to his words and let my hand go limp under the steady pressure of his hand that I had learned to make a perfect score. Then he showed me how to break the glass along the score line by gently rocking the plate between my thumbs. The first time the glass snapped free along the curving line I’d drawn was like a miracle. “See,” my father had said, “I told you it was in the blood. You’ll make a fine glass cutter.”

  The only blood I see this week, though, is my own, as plate after plate of expensive handblown opalescent glass shatters in my hands in crazy jagged patterns that refuse to follow my score lines. The glass explodes in showers of splinters that lodge in my fingertips and under my nails, and spray far afield so that hours later I’m still picking out miniature daggers of ruby and emerald from my socks and hair. I wake up in the middle of the night to find crushed cobalt glass, like a dusting of frost, sticking to my damp skin.

  By Thursday Ernesto bans me from the studio. “The boy and me can cut the replacement pieces—why don’t you call your friend’s mother and see if she knows when the funeral is yet?”

  Ruth Webb is the last person I want to talk to but Ernesto is right—I can’t put it off any longer. As I dial the number, which I still know by heart from the many calls I made to Christine during vacations, I tell myself that at least I called the week before when I first knew Christine was missing. Still, there’s no evading the aura of disapproval that emanates from the silence on the other end of the line when I tell Mrs. Webb how sorry I am.

  “I’m sure you are, June,” she says, refusing as always to acknowledge my real name, which she once told Christine was heathen, “but it’s a bit too late for sorry, isn’t it?”

  Only Ruth Webb could turn an expression of sympathy into a confession of guilt. I have no idea of what I’m supposed to be guilty, but I’ve always known that Ruth doesn’t like me and that she held me somehow accountable for Christine’s problems. First because I indulged her daughter’s foolish ambitions to pursue an academic career (as if anyone could have swayed Christine from her chosen course once she’d made up her mind) and then for Christine’s abandonment of that career and her subsequent slide into drug use. Even when I helped get Christine into a rehab center, Ruth refused to help pay for it, insisting that it was coddling her. All she needs is a little willpower, not a country club to loll around in. It’s like the patients at Briarwood—half of them would pick themselves up if their families didn’t pay for them to wallow in the lap of luxury. That was another favorite theme of Ruth’s—the special treatment received at Briarwood. To hear her talk you’d think she was jealous of the patients there.

  “Well, I’m sorry for your loss, just the same,” I say now, knowing better than to try defending myself, “for what we’ve all lost in Christine. She was a remarkable woman. I wish you could have heard her lecture. I think Christine was really putting her life back together.”

  “Apparently not or she wouldn’t have committed a mortal sin and taken her own life.”

  “Mrs. Webb, have the police determined that as the official cause of death?”

  “I don’t have to wait for the police to tell me what I’ve known in my bones since that girl was born. She was always unhappy. Always crying for no reason. Nothing ever good enough for her. She couldn’t go to the community college just down the road like all her cousins or work at Briarwood during summers when I got her a job there. She had to go to Penrose and then live in New York City, but nothing ever made her happy.”

  I could argue, but listening to Mrs. Webb’s disparaging dirge half makes me want to jump in the river. What must it have been like to grow up with a mother so out of tune with your nature? I was luckier losing a loving and supportive mother at sixteen than having one like Christine’s.

  “Have the police said yet when they’ll release the body?”

  “Tomorrow. The funeral’s set for ten AM on Saturday. I told that Italian police officer that we had to bury her over the weekend because her aunts and cousins can’t miss work what with Briarwood laying off so many people right now.”

  I almost smile imagining Detective Falco’s response to being given such a directive from the deceased’s mother.

  “Do you want me to go to the morgue to … to ride up with her …” I falter thinking of all the times I’d given Christine a ride home over the years. My dad would let me borrow the van so we could pack up all Christine’s stuff—although truthfully she never had that much. We liked taking the van, though, because we could pull over and smoke a joint in the back. Often, as we approached her house she would suggest we pull over again and we’d just sit in the back talking, clearly putting off her arrival home. The idea of bringing her back home now, for all eternity, is almost more than I can stand.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Mrs. Webb says, “that man from the college said he’d go to the morgue and ride up in the hearse with her.”

  “You mean Gavin Penrose, the college president?” I remember Gavin saying he’d take care of these arrangements, but I’m surprised to learn that he’s personally accompanying Christine’s body from the morgue to the funeral home—and guilty at the sense of relief I have that I don’t have to do it.

  “Yes, I know what his job is. I expect he feels bad about encouraging Chrissie on that fool’s errand poking into his family’s dirty laundry …”

  “Christine was thrilled when Gavin asked her to give a lecture on the window.”

  “Well, I’m sure she was … any notice from that college …” For a moment Mrs. Webb’s voice falters and I’m reminded that beneath the constant stream of criticism and carping at her daughter’s lifestyle she must have really loved her—at least, I’ve always hoped that was the case.

  “Mrs. Webb, if there’s anything I can do to help …”

  I’m expecting a curt dismissal of my offer, but Ruth surprises me. “I do have a job ahead of me getting this house ready for the wake afterward, what with my knee and all.”

  Thirty years ago—when Christine was seven—a patient at Briarwood slammed a steel tray into Ruth’s right leg and shattered her kneecap. She’d been able to retire on full disability, but had always been bitter that nothing had been done to punish the patient. She was happiest in the days of insulin shock treatment and lobotomies, Christine always said.

  “Well, do you want me to stop at Gran
d Union and pick up anything on the way?”

  Ruth responds with a shopping list the length of my forearm. I write it all down—the liters of soft drinks, jumbo packages of chips, hot dogs, hamburger meat, Miracle Whip and Sara Lee cake—all of which sounds more like a supply list for a Fourth of July picnic than a wake—on a scrap of paper I steal from the studio. Only afterward do I notice that I’ve written the shopping list on the back of the drawing I did earlier in the week of the two Barovier sisters walking on their riverside path.

  THE SILAS B. COOKE FUNERAL HOME IS IN DOWNTOWN POUGHKEEPSIE, NOT FAR from the train station, in a neighborhood that feels even more run-down than where I live. Looking at Poughkeepsie always makes me feel discouraged about the prospects of reviving Rosedale. No matter how much federal aid is pumped into the town—and at one point in the eighties Poughkeepsie was receiving the most federal aid of any city in New York State—the town continues to look hopelessly dreary and borderline dangerous. The funeral home itself was nearly burned down a few years before by a gang of teenagers. Two of the front windows are still boarded up and someone has scrawled a d at the end of Silas’s name on the front awning—boasting that Silas Be Cooked.

  Inside, under the cloying smell of wax candles and flowers, a charred aroma still lingers. Clearly the Cookes haven’t been able to afford to renovate since the fire. In addition to the boarded-up exterior windows there’s a wall of stained-glass windows between the anteroom and the chapel that have obviously suffered serious fire and smoke damage. The panels are landscape scenes similar to ones that Tiffany made popular for use as memorial windows in churches and mausoleums in the early twenties. Called “The River of Life” or “End of Day,” these landscapes were supposed to evoke religious significance, but I’ve always thought Tiffany just loved creating flowers and streams with glass. Although they’re probably not Tiffany’s, these windows are actually quite lovely. I move closer to get a better look and see that soot has gotten between the layered plates of glass and that there are erratically curved cracks in many of the panels. Internal crazing. It happens when glass is heated quickly to a high temperature and then rapidly cooled. The tension between a cooling exterior and hot interior creates delicate, bright cracks, like phosphorescent spiderwebs. It’s almost impossible to restore glass damaged like this, but I did recently read in a conservation textbook of a process in which the cracks were infused with epoxy and then reassembled. I make a mental note to talk to the owner of the funeral parlor and head into the chapel.