“Right. Of course, we don’t know for sure that she did ask—”
“Christine wasn’t one to leave a question unasked when it came to her research.”
“But she never mentioned this to you? She didn’t ask you what you knew about Penrose’s financial situation?”
“No—” I finally look away because what I think I see in those calm, gray eyes is sympathy—as if he knows how much I want to make Gavin the one responsible for Christine’s death, and why. As if he can see every touch of Neil’s hands on my flesh as easily as he can see the scratches on my fingertips. I pick up a glass paperweight just to feel its cool roundness in my palm and smooth out the folded newspaper that it had been weighing down—a section from the Times listing gallery shows with one at the Queen Gallery on Arts & Crafts painters circled in red. “You don’t really think it’s Gavin, do you? You don’t think he’s the one responsible for Christine’s death?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet. If she were having an affair with him I think she’d have his picture up there.” Falco points to the wall behind me—the right inner wall of the alcove, which is plastered with photographs. A lot of them, I notice right away, are of me—some from college and some with Beatrice. Some of the ones from college have Neil in them, but these aren’t the only pictures of Neil. When Christine helped me move out of the apartment I lived in with Neil I’d given her a box of pictures I had of Neil. I’ll burn these if I keep them, I told her, and Bea might want them some day. Will you keep them for me? I never expected her to hang them up though.
“This is what you really wanted me to see, isn’t it?”
“I just want you to be careful,” he says.
“It doesn’t prove they were seeing each other. She might have felt something for him—” Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving, she’d said at the train station that last night. Had she been talking about Neil? Did she think if she loved him long enough he’d have to love her back? “—but that doesn’t mean he reciprocated the feeling.”
Falco’s eyes darken from pale gray to slate, like the river just before a storm. “I think you should look at this.” He turns around and takes down a calendar from the left-hand wall of the alcove. It’s the Tiffany calendar that I bought at the Met and gave Christine for Christmas. He opens it to May. On the third Saturday Christine has drawn a little tree.
“You said Neil used a stamp with a beech tree to sign his paintings. Does that look like the same symbol?”
“It’s just a tree … I mean, it might be—” I look closer at the little drawing. There’s no point in lying because it would be easy enough for Falco to find one of Neil’s old paintings and compare the stamp he used to this design. “Okay, yeah, it looks like the design Neil used, but this is in May. We know they saw each other in May.”
Falco flips the page back to April. There are five trees. Then he turns back to March. There are too many trees for me to count at first glance—a whole forest of trees that starts to blur as if a mist had risen from the forest floor.
“I’m sorry, Juno,” Falco says, covering my hand with his, “but I thought you’d better know. I got the lab results back today. The baby was Neil’s.”
“IT DOESN’T MEAN HE KILLED HER.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
“It still could have been Gavin Penrose. Maybe he didn’t like being asked all these questions about his family history and his finances. Maybe he had something else to hide. Maybe she was sleeping with him, too—”
On that last conjecture—my third maybe—my voice cracks and I press my fingertips into my eyelids to keep the tears back. They come anyway, seeping into the little cuts until my fingertips burn. Falco looks sadly toward the scene on the lamp, as if gravely disapproving of the shepherds and milkmaids’ antics. When the worst is over, he hands me a clean white handkerchief, neatly folded in quarters.
“I’m sorry,” he says when I have dried my eyes, “that you had to learn about it here in your friend’s apartment, but I wanted you to realize that this wasn’t a onetime thing—”
Falco gestures at the pictures of Neil and the calendar with its swelling grove of trees. They were seeing each other every couple of days in March. Christine must have taken the train past the factory each and every time—unless she drove.
“How was she getting over there to see him?” I ask, sniffling into my handkerchief. “She didn’t have a car and the train only runs on the east side of the river.”
“Why do you assume she went there?” Falco asks, his voice soft and reluctant.
The notion startles me out of my chair. I turn around to face the bed and the sight of it propels me into the living room, Falco so close on my heels that when I wheel around he nearly collides with me.
“How could you have brought me here? Did you really think I could stay here after learning about … them?”
“I’ll drive you back.”
I look around at my own paintings of Neil, done fifteen years ago and stamped with the little green bird that he designed. “You knew the paintings were mine, didn’t you? You just wanted me to tell you about Neil’s tree stamp so I couldn’t deny it was his sign in Christine’s calendar. What you said about having information on Gavin Penrose’s involvement was just a lie to get me here to confirm your hunch.”
“No, Juno, I still consider Gavin a suspect, but I thought you ought to know about Neil and Christine for your own sake.” He reaches for my hand and grazes the cuts on my fingertips ever so lightly, but I can feel his touch travel through my broken skin and pour into my veins like molten glass. I look up at him and then look away, unable to bear the look of pity in his eyes. It’s clear from the way he looks at me that he knows everything—not just that Neil and I are lovers but how much I’ve allowed myself to fall in love with him again.
“I have to get out of here,” I tell him, turning in a full circle as if I’d forgotten where the front door was.
“I’ll take you back. I can leave the key with the doorman for Amy—”
I’d forgotten about Amy.
“No. Why should she have to suffer for my stupidity? I’ll stay. I’ll start packing tonight.” I look around the room as if I can’t wait to start peeling the paintings off the wall. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll stay here all night until the walls are bare and all traces of Christine’s life are erased from inside these rooms and then I’ll start erasing all traces of her from inside my heart.
“If you’re sure that’s what you want,” he says, handing me the keys to the apartment, “maybe it would be safer for you to stay here tonight.”
“Why? Because you think Neil might hurt me?” I’m about to say that he’d never do such a thing when I realize the absurdity of making that statement about a man who once tried to drown me. “He’s better now,” I say instead.
“Maybe,” Falco says. “You have to admit that sleeping with your best friend and then lying about it doesn’t speak all that well for his stability. And he seemed awfully excitable when I spoke with him at The Beeches. This drug he’s on, Prozine—”
“Pieridine,” I correct him, “it’s named for the Greek muses.”
“I don’t care if it’s named for Zeus himself, it’s still in trial. It might have side effects we don’t know anything about yet …”
“Do you have any reason to believe that?” I ask.
I can see him hesitate, as if trying to decide whether or not to tell me something. “Look,” he says finally, “all I’m suggesting is that you take the night to absorb what you’ve learned before going back—” He hesitates again and then finishes, “before going back home. Okay?”
I nod, mostly because I’m tired of the argument and scared of what else he might say. I guess that instead of “back home” he’d been about to say “before you go back to Neil.” I suspect that he’s giving me this night in the city to absorb what I’ve learned and store up a little self-control because even with all I’ve learned I may not be able to resist seeing Neil again.
Mostly I quit arguing because I can’t tell him the night away isn’t necessary. I’m more afraid that one night won’t be enough.
I WAIT TEN MINUTES AFTER FALCO LEAVES AND THEN LEAVE, TOO. ALTHOUGH I’M determined to spend the night in the apartment I need a break. Some air and a brisk walk. Walking on crowded city streets, though, fails to release all the rage and grief I’m feeling so I head east toward Central Park and enter the park on 86th Street near the Great Lawn. I walk south, glad of the shade and privacy the wooded paths offer; not so glad of the memories that the carefully landscaped terrain sparks.
During our last year at Penrose, after Neil had gone back to Columbia, Christine and I rode the train down almost every weekend to visit him in the apartment he shared with four other students on 104th and Broadway. We slept on couches or the floor and during the day we’d escape the overcrowded apartment by heading over to the park. Always the three of us. Looking back, I’m amazed at how much I took Christine’s presence for granted. I’d never asked for more time alone with Neil or resented her being with us. Instead I remember feeling that Christine’s company somehow steadied us—like the third leg on a tripod.
We’d often end up in the Ramble, that jumble of boulders and meandering paths that feels like a miniature woodland within the larger park. We’d wander there for hours and then settle into a secluded spot. Neil loved to sketch the trees, many of which twisted into improbable shapes or were so covered by vines and creepers that they’d been transformed into shaggy beasts and looming specters. While Neil drew the trees, I drew him. Christine read, sometimes reading aloud bits of Ovid and Dante to us.
As I follow the web of paths my thoughts twist back on themselves as often as the paths do. I keep picturing the three of us together back in college and then imagining Neil and Christine together these last few months. Every time I approach this picture in my mind I step back from it, but no matter what direction I take in my thoughts it’s what I return to. Neil and Christine walking through the beech woods at Astolat, or here in Central Park—if he came to visit her in the city, why not?—or rowing up the Wicomico to the pool underneath the weeping beech. It’s as if I’m executing the steps of some complicated courtly dance in which the two of them shadow my every step.
And it’s not just the three of us that I see in the dance. I can’t help but think how much we resemble another threesome: Augustus Penrose and the two Barovier sisters. Two women and a man, both women in love with the man, one pushed aside. I picture the three of us—Neil, Christine and I—lined up across from Penrose and the two sisters. Who would stand across from whom? Neil and Penrose, Eugenie and I.… I wonder if Christine noticed the resemblance while researching the window. If so, maybe she’d identified with Clare as the one pushed aside by the two lovers.
I’ve been wandering in the maze so engrossed in my thoughts that I’ve lost track of where I am, when I come out suddenly at the bridge that crosses the lake. Lovely Bow Bridge, unfurling like a ribbon over the green water, designed by Calvert Vaux, the same landscape architect who designed the grounds of Briarwood. Who knew when we wandered these paths all those years ago that Neil would end up following ones laid out by the same designer—only for mental patients instead of urban recreationists?
The position of the dancers in my head shifts. Now instead of Clare and Christine standing across from each other I imagine Neil and Clare—the two who ended up in the same psychiatric hospital. And who’s my partner in this new dance? Who do I see as I walk across the bridge to the other side of the lake? Augustus, who loved Clare and kept visiting her? Or Eugenie, who abandoned her sister and left her to live out her life in an insane asylum?
Coming out of the woods I find myself at Bethesda Terrace. I cross to the fountain and look up at the bronze angel who holds her hands above the fountain—the Angel of Waters she’s called, carved by Emma Stebbins in 1873. Vaux’s original idea for the fountain was that it be dedicated to love, but Stebbins chose the biblical angel whose touch turns the pool of Bethesda into healing waters, perhaps because the woman she loved was dying of breast cancer and they’d tried water cures to heal her. What better token of love than the power to make whole again? How many times had I lain next to Neil while he slept, stroking his brow, willing my touch to banish the bad dreams I knew roiled below the surface, willing my fingers to leach out the madness inside him?
But eventually I gave up. I’m not Augustus, I think. He’s not the partner I see standing across from me. He kept visiting Clare until he died, he still loved her, just as Christine still believed in Neil and loved him so much that she hoped one day he’d have no choice but to return her love.
And he had.
Standing beneath the outspread hands of the angel, I wish it were Christine that I’m crying for and not my own selfish loss. That I wasn’t like spiteful Eugenie, so jealous of her sister’s hold on her husband that she broke the panes that filled the loom when she saw that the story they told was of her sister’s descent into madness. She must have known that Augustus visited Clare and still loved her and that the window was a tribute to her and she couldn’t bear for the world to see it.
I think of Christine on the train platform. Did she want to tell me about what had happened between her and Neil? That he was better and that they loved each other? But then I told her that I hadn’t been able to love anyone since Neil and she changed her mind. How could she take the one man I’d ever loved away from me just when he was well again? I imagine her taking the kayak and crossing the river, paddling across the dark water to the weeping beech and swallowing the pills until she fell asleep and tipped into the water. Could she have killed herself because Neil had rejected her or was she leaving him free to be with me?
I stir the water in the pool with the tips of my fingers. The cold water stings the cuts on my hand but I also feel something knitting together, some tear deeper than the ones on my fingers beginning to heal.
I walk out of the park on the East Side and wander over to Madison to find a place to eat. I haven’t eaten anything since that cinnamon brioche Falco gave me and it’s nearly dinnertime. I see a coffee shop on the next corner heading south, but before I get to it my attention is caught by something in a gallery window—just a flicker of green that I catch out of the corner of my eye, like a flash of green water. I stop and look through the window, past my own reflection and toward the painting on the rear wall of the gallery and for a moment I feel the same horror that the figure in the painting of the The Drowning Tree must feel when she sees herself transformed. My face in the window appears to be superimposed on the tree in the painting, my body encased in bark. I stand frozen on the sidewalk—as if my body had actually turned to wood and my legs had grown roots—while pedestrians surge around me as unmindful of me as though I had indeed become one of the ornamental shade trees planted behind metal gates along the avenue.
What pulls me out of my stupor is the name on the window: The Queen Gallery. This is the gallery show on Arts & Crafts painters that Christine had circled in the Times.
I open the door and the air inside the gallery is so cold on my damp skin that I immediately begin to shiver. Still, I walk straight toward the painting on the back wall, ignoring the forced smile of the slim young woman dressed in a pink knit suit behind the reception desk. I stop a few feet away from the painting so I can take it all in. The canvas is huge, much bigger than the other paintings in Forest Hall, but I do remember it now from my college days. I can even hear Christine’s voice in my ear—my own personal art history audio tour—telling me about it.
This was one of Penrose’s first paintings of a woman turning into a tree. Critics believe it’s what started him on the series of Ovid-inspired paintings, only no one’s been able to identify the myth it’s based on.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it? It’s by Augustus Penrose, a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite who was later associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.” Christine’s voice is replaced by the modulated tones of the woman in pi
nk. She fingers a long rope of pearls as she talks, balancing daintily on a pair of high-heeled navy sandals emblazoned with interlocking C’s that match the interlocking C’s dangling from her ears. A flamingo in Chanel.
“Notice the anthropomorphic handling of the tree and the way her hair, as it turns into the cascading branches of the weeping beech, intertwines with the reeds in an organic Art Nouveau motif …”
“Is this painting for sale?” I ask, so abruptly that she stops midsentence and teeters on her heels, clutching her pearls as if for support. “And if so, who’s the seller?”
“The owner wishes to remain anonymous but any offers can be tendered through the gallery.” She flicks her eyes over me, either trying to assess my spending power by my wardrobe (clearly my J. Crew sundress and flat sandals aren’t earning me many points) or looking for a concealed weapon. I must be staring at the painting as if I’d like to slash it.
“Is the gallery owner here?” I ask.
“She’s in a meeting, but if you leave your number—”
“Look,” I say, “I’m a trustee of Penrose College—” One of those
starchy blue bloods who happens to have an eccentric liking for inexpensive catalog clothing. “—and this painting is, I believe, the property of the college, which means it shouldn’t be for sale at all. Unless you’d like me to call the police—”
“I’m afraid you must be mistaken,” Ms. Flamingo says, shifting her weight from foot to foot as if she suddenly had to go to the bathroom. “The owner of the gallery is herself a trustee of the college—”
“Is there a problem, CeCe?”
CeCe. No wonder she’s so fond of the Chanel logo!
I turn to see who’s spoken and find myself facing Regula Howell, looking cool and stately in another one of her striking folkloric ensembles—a sleeveless black knit dress embroidered with gold passementerie scrolls and matching gold spirals encircling her wrists, neck, and upper arm. She looks, actually, more like an Etruscan priestess than a gallery owner—and then I get it. Regula—Queen.