The Drowning Tree

  “And you got a good look at her then? I mean, close enough to be sure she wasn’t four months pregnant?”

  “If you’re implying …” Nathan’s voice warbles on the last word; he’s close to tears. I steal a look at Falco to see if there’s any remorse in his face but his eyes are as coldly assessing as those of the bird he’s named for—a hawk circling its prey looking for subtle movements in the grass.

  “We weren’t in a relationship, if that’s what you’re implying.” Instead of quailing under Falco’s assessing gaze Nathan has, surprisingly, pulled himself together. “And I don’t appreciate being questioned in front of Miss McKay.”

  “Then why don’t I give you that lift to the station,” Falco suggests. “If you weren’t in a relationship with Christine Webb perhaps you have an idea of who was. At least you can provide me with a list of possibilities at Columbia—other students, professors …”

  Nathan’s turned pale again, no doubt at the idea of informing on his peers and superiors.

  “Why is it important?” I ask, partly to get Nathan off the hook, partly because I’m genuinely confused. “If you think Christine killed herself why does it matter?”

  “As I mentioned earlier, we haven’t ruled out homicide. What I said was that it looked like it could have been suicide. That might be because someone wanted it to look like suicide, someone who knew that Christine took Luvox and Klonopin. There was quite a bit of coffee in her bloodstream as well; did you give her coffee at your place?”

  I shake my head. At Falco’s instigation we’ve started back down the path toward the road. When we reach the road we have to proceed single file on the narrow dirt shoulder. Nathan goes first and Falco waves me to go on ahead of him.

  “No one at the reception after the lecture remembers her having coffee either. Now, it’s possible that Christine purchased a large coffee to go at the cafe across the street before heading over to the boathouse to steal a kayak—or that someone met her at the station, or the boathouse, with a thermos for their boat trip up the Wicomico. Remember, there were two missing kayaks. What confuses me is if Christine were alone and she used the coffee to wash down a few dozen pills, where’s the coffee cup?”

  “You’re saying that a paper to-go cup couldn’t go missing in the Wicomico? Or in the Hudson if it floated downstream?” I ask, turning my head back and raising my voice to be heard over a couple of motorcycles revving their engines down Webb Road.

  “Maybe—but I don’t like that we haven’t found one. That area where you found Christine is in a protected curve of the stream. Not much current. A paper cup would have floated and gotten snagged in the water lily bed where Christine’s kayak was overturned. Same for a glass thermos …”

  “But not one of those metal thermoses,” Nathan says without turning his head. I’m surprised that he’s been able to keep up with the conversation as far ahead as he’s been.

  “True, but then it would have sunk to the bottom and our divers searched that whole area. All we found were some pieces of an old statue that had toppled in the water.”

  We haven’t quite made it back to Ruth Webb’s house but Falco stops at a dark blue Chevrolet Caprice parked on the side of the road and calls to Nathan to stop.

  “I thought I’d just go back and pay my respects to Mrs. Webb …” he says, turning in the road.

  “I’m sure Miss McKay can convey those sentiments and explain that you didn’t want to miss the train. Right?”

  Nathan looks at me so imploringly that I’d like to think of a reason to keep him out of Falco’s grasp but then I wonder why I should be so anxious to protect him. What if he did have something to do with Christine’s death?

  “So this person in the other kayak—you think it could be the father of the baby?” I ask.

  Detective Falco holds out both hands, palms turned up. “I’ll be honest with you, Miss McKay, I don’t have a lot to go on besides Miss Webb being pregnant. Some guys might not take that kind of news so well. Especially if they’re married—you’re not married, are you, Mr. Bell?”

  “No!” Nathan says so adamantly you would think the idea of marriage had never occurred to him.

  “Or engaged?”

  Nathan shakes his head.

  “Ever read a book called An American Tragedy?”

  Nathan’s been so set on denying any question put to him that he starts to shake his head at this one but then jerks his head up. “You mean the one by Dreiser?”

  “I don’t know of any other—but then I only took three or four Lit classes at John Jay. It was all I could fit into my schedule what with the demands of a double major in police science and forensic psychology.”

  “Well, you did better than I did,” Nathan says, smiling. I suppose he means the smile to be congratulatory but it looks to me—and no doubt to Falco—condescending. “The art history major at NYU kept me so busy I could hardly fit in any literature classes. What I did take had to be tied into medieval art so I’m afraid I never got much past Dante …”

  “That’s a shame; you shouldn’t neglect American literature. How about you, Miss McKay? Ever read An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser?”

  “Yes,” I say, amused in spite of myself. “In freshman English. Because it takes place in upstate New York, Penrose College considered it part of our ‘regional heritage’ along with The Last of the Mohicans and Washington Irving.”

  “Care to give us the Cliff’s Notes version?”

  “Promising young man has affair with factory girl but then has a chance to date the boss’s daughter. When the factory girl gets pregnant he doesn’t want to marry her so he takes her out rowing on a lake and drowns her.”

  “Well, I’m not engaged to anyone and I’d hardly think of Christine as a poor factory girl …”

  The effect of Nathan’s little speech is unfortunately ruined by the sight of a car full of Webb cousins cruising slowly by in a rusted-out Plymouth, plump elbows sticking out the rolled-down windows. As they pass us one of them flicks a lit cigarette out the window, which lands at Falco’s feet. The detective steps on the cigarette, grinding it out under the heel of his black shoe, and opens his car door for Nathan, confident that he’s not going to finish his sentence. The fact is, for all her apparent refinement, Christine could be second cousin to the girl in Dreiser’s story.

  AFTER DETECTIVE FALCO LEAVES WITH NATHAN I GO BACK TO THE HOUSE DETERMINED to find Amy and talk with her. Although I’ve guessed that what Amy noticed last month was Christine’s pregnancy, I want to know for sure. I search the downstairs rooms without finding her until one of the cousins tells me she’s upstairs in Christine’s old room “packing up some of Chrissie’s old stuff for the Good Will.”

  I’m amazed, while climbing the narrow back stairs to the attic room I remember as Christine’s, that Christine would have left any of her old stuff here, but even more amazed when I enter the slope-ceilinged room to find it almost unchanged since I last saw it fifteen years ago—two weeks before Christine graduated from Penrose. The same threadbare quilt on the same narrow, cast-iron bedstead—Christine had found the headboard at a flea market in Rhinebeck and painted it white—and the same art prints of Augustus Penrose’s early paintings tacked to the walls, which she’d collected over the years on visits to the Met and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Penrose College Art Gallery.

  “Aren’t you going to take these?” I’d asked on that last visit. I’d stretched myself out on the bed, becalmed by the heat of the attic room and the weight of pregnancy.

  “I’ve kind of lost my taste for all this mawkish Pre-Raphaelite stuff,” she said. “I want to study the real thing now—medieval art, not what some effete Englishmen made of it to fulfill their wet dreams. Penrose wasn’t even a real Pre-Raphaelite, or even a second-generation one like Waterhouse, he was just a bad Victorian painter with an infatuation for prepubescent nymphomaniacs.”

  I remember I’d felt somehow betrayed by her dismissal of these wan, long-haired
girls in their watery bowers. The picture I approach now is The Drowning Tree. I’ve wanted to have another look at it since Christine mentioned it in her lecture, but I haven’t had a chance because it was taken down from the Forest Hall for cleaning.… follow where your eye leads you, I hear Christine’s voice say in my head. My eye is drawn to the cascade of golden hair that falls from the head of the girl bending over the lily pool. Intertwined in her hair are beech leaves, some green, some turning yellow, and then, as her hair trails into the pool the ends begin to writhe as if the water had brought them to life. I follow these snakelike tresses deeper into the water where they loop around the face of a girl—the reflection of the girl bending over the pool. Her mouth is distended in horror as she witnesses her own transformation into something not human.

  I sink down on the bed, which creaks under my weight, feeling the same heaviness and nausea that I had the last time I was in this room—only then it was because I was pregnant. I remember feeling that I was transforming as stealthily and irrevocably as these frightened nymphs caught in the moment of metamorphosis—that my body was not my own. It had been taken over, first by Neil, and then the baby. The plans I’d made for after college had been derailed—the trip to Europe Christine and I had planned to take together after graduation, the months I’d planned to spend drawing in the great museums, and maybe art school afterward … but then I’d gotten pregnant and Neil had wanted me to have the baby and marry him. Had begged me to have the baby and marry him. And Christine had left me behind to go off to Oxford to study twelfth-century Psalters and Burgundian tapestries. She’d left me behind just as she’d left all these lovesick, shape-shifting nymphs.

  The window at the foot of the bed is swollen shut but after a short struggle it opens and lets in a little stale air. Leaning against the wall, I rest one elbow on the ledge much as I imagine Christine must have for many hours in her childhood. Because the room’s so high up I can just make out the brick towers of Briarwood and a glimpse of the river beyond.

  “Oh, my goodness, you looked so much like Christine for a moment you half scared me to death.”

  Amy is standing in the doorway, one hand to her heaving chest, the other clutching a box of trash bags.

  “I’m sorry, Amy,” I say, sliding toward the edge of the bed. Before I can get up, though, she sits down beside me. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I came up looking for you actually and then … I didn’t know that Ruth had kept the room like this.”

  “Ruth said she had no other use for the room because it got so hot in the summer and so cold in the winter, but when Beth asked once if her youngest, Doreen, could stay over here, Ruth flat out said no. I think she wanted to have a place for Christine to come home to.”

  “Did Christine understand that? Because she never mentioned it to me.”

  “I know Ruth didn’t seem like a very loving mother but she did love Christine. She just didn’t know what to make of her. Did Christine ever tell you much about her father?”

  I shake my head. “She said he died too young for her to remember him—she was only four, right?”

  “Did you know he killed himself?”

  “No, I had no idea. I’m sure Christine said it was a heart condition.”

  “That’s what we all agreed to say. Ruth was so ashamed. She came home one day from working uphill and found him in the woodshed. He’d hanged himself. You of all people must know what she had to go through—being left with a four-year-old and that kind of knowledge.”

  Amy pauses long enough for this thought to sink in: that Ruth Webb and I have something in common.

  “I think she was always afraid that Christine had inherited her father’s black moods—that’s what she called them. I’m not saying she handled it right, but I believe she did the best that she could, raising that girl on her own, working overtime up at Briarwood to make ends meet until she had the accident.”

  “Did Christine ever find out how her father really died?”

  “I’m afraid she might have. When she came up here last month she went to see Dr. Horace up at Briarwood. She asked me to set up the appointment. She said it was for some research she was doing on that window down at the college.”

  “It was part of her lecture. Eugenie Penrose’s sister was apparently an inmate at Briarwood around the turn of the century.”

  “Clare Barovier. I remember her—she was an old woman when I came to work there in the early sixties.”

  “You mean she was still in Briarwood after all those years?”

  “Oh my, let’s see, I went to work at Briarwood in ’64 and I believe Miss Barovier died two years later. She must have been over ninety and she’d been there since she was just a young woman. Many of our old-timers spent their whole lives at Briarwood. That used to be more common back before they came up with all these new drugs and the insurance companies stopped paying for such long stays—not that most of our patients needed the insurance. Most of them had wealthy families that didn’t mind paying to keep their crazy relatives out of sight.”

  Like Neil.

  “Clare Barovier was something of a legend at Briarwood,” Amy continues. “I grew up hearing stories about her. You could tell she had been a beauty, and unlike most of the poor souls there she hadn’t lost her looks entirely. She had a tower suite all to herself and private servants, and was even allowed to go out on her own for picnics and boat trips down the river.”

  “She went out boating by herself?”

  “Oh, not all by herself—I just meant she didn’t need an escort from the asylum. A relative of hers would come with his yacht and take her out. When I was little it was something of a family story that sometimes she invited children along on the boat to draw their portraits. The place is full of her sketches and watercolors of the river.”

  “She was still painting?”

  “Oh, yes, Dr. Peabody, Dr. Horace’s predecessor, encouraged artistic expression as therapy. She even taught drawing to the younger patients. We’ve always had an artistic set.”

  She sounds proud—as if she were talking about a country club or a girls’ finishing school.

  “So Christine went to Briarwood to research Clare Barovier. Why do you think she found out about her father’s suicide?”

  “Because Dr. Horace knew that Edward killed himself and I think Christine asked him about her family history. She was suddenly very interested in hereditary traits—”

  “Because she was pregnant?”

  Amy nods, seemingly unsurprised that I know about Christine’s pregnancy. “Yes, she asked me so many questions about where in England the Webbs came from and who had what diseases and what color hair that I finally told her she sounded like she planned on having a baby and the poor thing burst out crying and confessed she was. She made me promise not to tell anyone—especially Ruth—and said that was why she didn’t want to see her mother. She knew Ruth would figure it out the moment she laid eyes on her.”

  “I don’t know why—a month later I didn’t notice a thing.”

  “You don’t think you’d notice if your Beatrice was pregnant?”

  “Bite your tongue, Amy! Bea’s fifteen.”

  Amy smiles and pats my hand. “You know what I mean. A mother knows these things.”

  Would I? I wonder. I’ve always been able to tell by looking at her eyes when Bea was coming down with a cold or if someone had teased her at school. I’d watched her body change from a child’s to a young woman’s over the last few years and been amazed at the metamorphosis, seeing in the filling curves of her hips and breasts echoes of my own body. The night she got her first period I woke up with cramps of my own. There was an eerie physical bond between mother and daughter that I’d sensed, inchoately, in the first few weeks after she was born when I would watch her flail her tiny limbs and feel for a moment that I was watching my own body move. It made sense in a way. If amputees experienced feeling in their phantom limbs, why couldn’t a mother sense something in this piece of flesh that had once b
een joined to her own? I just hadn’t ever thought of the bond between Ruth and Christine as being of that nature.

  “You said she cried. Was she unhappy about being pregnant?”

  “I think she was scared.”

  “Did she say who the father was?”

  “No—I told that policeman she wouldn’t tell me—that she said there were issues. That’s how she put it. But she wasn’t despairing. I don’t believe she would have ended her life—and her unborn child’s—over it.”

  “But if she’d also just learned that her father killed himself? They say that knowing a parent committed suicide opens up the possibility for the child—makes it an option. Why would Dr. Horace tell her such a thing?”

  “I don’t know, dear, she must have asked in a way that he couldn’t not tell her the truth. He’s always been a stickler for the truth, even when a gentler approach might be called for.”

  I nodded, remembering my own meeting with Dr. Horace after Neil was first admitted to Briarwood. He’d told me that Neil had been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder with manic-depressive features. I’d clung, at first, to that word borderline, thinking that it meant that whatever Neil had wasn’t really that bad—that his condition was somehow marginal, perhaps verging on something more serious (the mania suggested by the second part of Horace’s diagnosis) but still well on the side of curable. I thought borderline meant not yet, not completely, not really. In my mind I saw Neil straddling a grassy path on the edge of a cliff—on one side was sanity, on the other the howling abyss.

  “So he’s on the border of being really sick,” I’d said to Dr. Horace, “but it’s not that bad yet. You can still make him better.”