The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  “Okay.” I readjust my shawl over my shoulders and turn to get out of the car, but Daniel puts his hand on my arm.

  “Do you want me to walk you in? It looks pretty dark in there.”

  “No, thanks, I’ve got the dogs.”

  I LET PAOLO AND FRANCESCA OUT IN THE COURTYARD FOR A BRIEF RUN AND THEN crawl into bed. As exhausted as this long day has left me, though, I know it will be a while before I can sleep. I take out the entry from Eugenie’s journal that I had started reading earlier today in the doctor’s office and pick up where I’d left off, with Eugenie’s little speech on interior decorating.

  Think of how a mood is changed by our surroundings—how more harmonious is the life lived among beautiful things.

  I think of the house I just left, Forest Hall, where Eugenie lived out her life in the shadow of all those paintings of her and her sister whom she never saw again even though she was just up the river living in her own tower room, surrounded by paintings of a lonely pool that must have reminded her of that spot where the great painter Augustus Penrose first painted her. Had either woman found solace or comfort in their surroundings?

  Clare remained unpersuaded by my reasoning and angry with me for bringing up Mr. Penrose’s penury. “You and Papa, all you ever care about are livings and interest on investments,” she said, walking on ahead of me.

  Poor Clare. It’s hard on her that Papa has settled a comfortable income on me, but not on her. Of course, Papa doesn’t mean to play favorites but, as he’s explained to me, if he gave Clare an independent income then her father might reappear and attempt to influence Clare. We both know how generous Clare is, how susceptible to impressions. When I asked if I could make a small gift to her from my own income he showed me how that, too, would be rash.

  “Think of how your future husband might regard such an arrangement,” he counseled me.

  I replied that any man I would consider marrying would not begrudge my sister a share in my fortune. To which Papa answered that in that case I could wait until I was married to make whatever arrangements my husband and I found suitable.

  I could hardly argue with that line of reasoning and, besides, I found all this talk of an imaginary husband disconcerting. I have, until of late, dismissed the thought of marriage as something belonging to natures other than mine. Clare has always been the romantic one, the one enamored of old-fashioned tales of knights and ladies. Lately, though, I’ve begun to envision a kind of marriage removed from those fairy tales of love—a marriage based on mutual interest and dedication to honest work.

  But perhaps that is as much a fairy tale as the old stories of knights and ladies. I beguile myself with these foolish fancies when I should be sleeping. I remember how I used to laugh at Clare’s notions of love as a sickness that could rob one of sleep and even sanity, and now I’m the one …

  Well, best to put my pen down and call it a night before the light at my window makes me a liar and calls it day.

  I let the journal pages drop onto the floor with the rest that have fallen there and close my eyes. Eugenie’s timid intimations of love have much the same effect on me as Gavin’s toast to his fiancée—I would be touched if the shadow of a third person wasn’t thrown over the sentiments. Could Eugenie not have known that Clare was falling in love with Augustus Penrose? Even from my vantage point—over a hundred years later—her feelings are clear to me. I can imagine, as well, that Augustus returned her feelings, but courted Eugenie because she was the heiress and he needed her father’s money to save his family’s glass business and provide the funds to start a new business in America. I wonder if it was Augustus’s proposal to Eugenie that tipped Clare over into madness.

  I picture the two sisters in the Dryope paintings—the one reaching over the water to pluck a forbidden flower and the other safe on shore, watching with horror as her sister draws back a bloody hand. The last thought I have before falling asleep is that the painting should be the other way around. It should be Clare reaching for the bloody lotus, and Clare who turns into the tree while her sister watches in horror.

  In my dream I’m wheeling the serving trolley across the courtyard in Forest Hall—only the president’s house has become a real forest. I can sense the trees looming above me and hear the water falling into a deep pool and feel the rough ground beneath my feet, but I have to keep my eyes on the cake to keep it steady. I come to a clearing in the forest where everyone has gathered: Gavin and Joan and Regula Howell and Fay, and also Neil and Dr. Horace and, cutting the cake instead of Portia, Christine. She sinks a silver knife into the cake and I see that beneath the white frosting the filling is a deep carmine red.

  “It’s a new recipe,” Christine tells me, laying a slice of the red and white cake on a plate. “I call it Lotus Cake. For forgetting.”

  I pass out the plates and watch as not just Gavin and Joan, but everyone begins to feed each other mouthfuls of cake. Dr. Horace and Neil, Fay and Regula, Detective Falco and a woman in white whom I realize, after a moment, isn’t a woman. She’s the statue of Juno from the garden. I turn back to Christine, who’s holding a forkful of cake out to me. I watch as a drop of the filling splatters the ground. I look back at the crowd and see that all their mouths are stained with blood.

  I wake up with a metallic taste in my mouth and a pounding in my head. When I stumble into the bathroom and scoop water from the faucet to drink, a drop of blood falls from my lip. Even though I know that I must have bitten my lip in my sleep I can’t help but feel like the girl in Ovid’s story—that I’ve crossed some forbidden line and my cells have already begun to wreak some irrevocable transformation to my flesh.

  I TRY IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS TO PRETEND THAT I’M NOT WAITING FOR NEIL TO CALL but even the dogs have taken to flinching when the phone rings in anticipation of my lunges to pick it up. On one such mad dash I knock over and break a lancet window that Robbie had just finished cleaning for a church in Rhinebeck.

  Fortunately, everyone assumes that it’s Bea I’m waiting to hear from.

  “You’re just like your mother,” my father says to me on Tuesday—three days since I saw Neil at the gallery opening. “When you went on an overnight with the Girl Scouts she couldn’t sleep a wink. She made me drive all the way out to the Frost Valley YMCA camp and sit in a pickup outside your bunk till the next morning. The camp director thought I was a child molester and snuck up on me with a six-gauge shotgun. We ended up sharing a six-pack and playing pinochle until sunrise.”

  My father chuckles to himself, the sound muted by the face mask he’s wearing to filter the fumes of solder and flux. While Robbie and I have already finished resoldering the figure of the lady, he and Ernesto are still working on the landscape section. Because the work on the landscape is too complex for Robbie, I’ve given him the task of developing the pictures that he’s taken to document the restoration. I could chip in myself, but since my dream the smell of metal—either from the lead solder when it’s melting or from my hands after I’ve handled the lead—makes me nauseous. I’ve spent the last three days—when I’m not leaping to answer the phone—drafting a letter to Gavin Penrose explaining why we’ve chosen to reassemble the window differently from how it was originally assembled.

  “I should have run it by him,” I say, not for the first time this week. “We might have to take it apart and redo the whole thing if he doesn’t approve the reconstruction.”

  “There’s nobody who’s going to look at this window and not see this was the way it was meant to be,” Ernesto says. “And you’ve got Eugenie’s notebook to back you up.”

  I have found sketches in Eugenie’s design notebook that support our reconfiguration of the glass. Her sketches of the landscape clearly resemble the picture created by the dichroic pattern in the glass that had been obscured by the previous arrangement of the panes. What I can’t figure out is why the window was assembled incorrectly in the first place. Each time Ernesto and my father finish another layer of the reconstruction Ernesto calls Robb
ie and me over, first turning the light table off, and then switching the light on so we can see the hidden stream of water spring to life and pour into the pool, which ripples now with colors and patterns that had been invisible before. I’m peering into the layers of glass at a pattern that seems to be emerging when the phone rings and for once I let Robbie answer it.

  “It’s for you,” Robbie says, handing me the cordless phone.

  For a moment the voice on the other end seems to be underwater, but then I realize it’s because my ears are ringing. I’ve given myself a slight touch of vertigo by staring too long into the rippled layers of glass. I walk away from the window and from the three men in the studio and shake my head to clear the ringing sound, and when I hear that it’s Neil, I keep walking with the phone, up the spiral staircase and out onto the roof.

  “Hey, sorry, I couldn’t hear you down in the studio, someone was running the glass grinder.”

  “If you’re busy …”

  “No, no, I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I had my session with Dr. Horace on Monday and … well, he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about me seeing you.”

  I can’t think of anything to say—both because I’m oddly hurt that Dr. Horace might consider me an impediment to Neil’s recovery and because I’m amazed that Neil would be so receptive to that kind of authoritative input.

  “Shit,” Neil says after a long period of silence, “maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.”

  “No, it’s okay. I don’t want anything to interfere with how well you’re doing. If Dr. Horace thinks—”

  “Oh, to hell with Dr. Horace,” Neil breaks in. “I want to see you. What are you doing tonight?”

  I tell Neil the truth, that I’m not doing anything tonight. I’m relieved that he’s suggested night so I don’t have to worry about him running into my father and I’m also relieved—and maybe a little alarmed—at how much, in his dismissal of his doctor’s advice, he suddenly sounded like his old self.

  WHEN I COME DOWN THE SPIRAL STAIRS FIVE SETS OF EYES LOOK UP AT ME—THE three men and both greyhounds.

  “Who was that?” my father asks. From the way Robbie and Ernesto quickly look away I guess that the three of them have been talking about me. For a minute I think my dad knows it was Neil on the phone, but then I realize that he’d have no way of knowing that I’m back in touch with him. My jittery nerves have no doubt affected him and he’s worried that it’s bad news about Bea.

  “It was Annemarie—” I remember midsentence that Robbie picked up the phone and heard a man’s voice, “—Annemarie’s husband, Ray,” I clumsily amend. I feel like I’m fifteen again, making up some story about going to the library when I’m really planning to meet Carl Ventimiglio down behind the boathouse. “He had some questions about financial aid. You know Portia got into Penrose.”

  “No kidding. That’s great.” He looks genuinely pleased and relieved. I wonder if it’s just that he’s worried about Bea or if he has something else on his mind.

  “Yeah, Ray wanted to know if I’d help her with some of the forms. I thought I’d take a walk over to Gal’s.” At the word walk Paolo and Francesca’s ears perk up. Poor things. Since Bea’s been gone they’ve gotten most of their exercise in the courtyard. “I’ll take the dogs,” I say clicking my tongue for them to come, “and I’ll bring back some coffees and pastries.”

  I run back upstairs to get the leashes with the dogs close at my heels. On my way down I overhear my father saying “that policeman” and Ernesto answering something about the party at the college. So that’s what’s gotten my father worked up—not worrying over Bea—someone told him I went to Gavin’s engagement party with Daniel Falco and he’s worried that … what? That I’m in trouble with the police? That I’m having an affair with the detective? It must be the latter. Most fathers would be happy that their unmarried thirty-seven-year-old daughter was dating a clean-cut, gainfully employed guy like Daniel Falco, but given my past history in choosing men I guess I can’t blame my father for being leery of my judgment.

  WHEN I GET OUTSIDE THE DOGS STRAIN ON THEIR LEADS TOWARD THE RIVERSIDE PARK and the boathouse—an area I’ve been avoiding since Kyle came over the night I found Christine’s body or, as I’ve come to think of it, the night of the seaweed incident. I can’t avoid him forever, I think, letting the dogs pull me toward the water. And besides, he’s probably out on the water.

  When we get to the park I unleash the dogs and let them run along the shoreline. Trailing behind them I think about the little lie I’ve just told my father and realize how hard it will be to tell him that I’m back in touch with Neil. No matter how I think of ways to introduce the subject—Bea’s been asking about her father or I hear they’ve got some great new antipsychotic drugs—I keep picturing my father’s face the night he came to the police station to collect Bea and me after “the accident.” That’s what he thought it was: an accident. When the police officer explained that Neil was being held on charges of assault I saw the look of fear on his face turn into pure horror.

  It was my fault that Neil’s mental instability came as such a surprise to him. I’d done everything I could to hide Neil’s deteriorating mental state from him. It hadn’t been hard. My father had been drinking heavily since my mother’s death. By the time I’d gotten pregnant and married Neil he spent most of his day down at Flannery’s bar. The joke in town was that Gil McKay broke more windows than he fixed. If he’d continued going the way he was going I have no doubt that he’d be dead by now, but the night he brought Bea and me back to his house he’d poured every ounce of alcohol down the drain.

  “It’s not your fault,” I’d said, watching him pour a fifth of Jameson’s into the sink. “I didn’t want you to know how bad he was.”

  “My daughter and granddaughter are living with a homicidal maniac and I don’t know a thing about it?” he said. “Your mother would have my head. Besides, if you two are going to stay here I’ve got to set a better example for little Bea.”

  And he had. He’d joined AA and hadn’t taken a drink since that night. How in the world, I wonder now, was I going to tell him that Neil was better now. And what if we started seeing each other …?

  I stop abruptly and stare out at the river, dazzled by the late afternoon light on the water. What in the world are you thinking? I ask myself. I can’t actually be thinking of seeing Neil or entering into a relationship with him. “You must be crazier than he is,” I say aloud to the dogs, who, hearing my voice, come bounding over, wet and muddy, both of them holding the same stick.

  “Than who is?” The voice startles me so much I turn around and take two steps backward into the shallow water. It’s Kyle. The dogs, obviously remembering him, lay their stick down at his feet and prance around him.

  “Shit, Kyle, you scared the hell out of me. I didn’t hear you.” I look down and notice he’s barefoot. I also notice that I’m standing in two inches of water.

  “Sorry, this is my place of work—such as it is.” He gestures to the boathouse, which looks as empty and forlorn as it did back in my high school days.

  “Business slow?” I ask. “I’d have thought you’d be out on a day this nice.”

  “Yeah, funny how a drowning and a police investigation can dampen the public’s ardor for kayaking.” He smiles with his mouth but not his eyes and pushes his loose hair out of his face. It looks a little grayer than I remember it.

  “But it wasn’t like Christine was a client. She stole your kayak—”

  “Yeah, well, word gets around that the police are asking you questions and then someone must have got a hold of the story about the boy in Colorado. Here, look at this.” Kyle takes out a folded piece of paper from the pocket of his fleece vest. I unfold it and see that it’s a newspaper article downloaded from the Internet about the white-water rafting accident in Steamboat Springs.

  “I found this tacked to the boathouse door last week. The same article was forwarded
to my whole mailing list. Two tour groups canceled this week.”

  “Oh, Kyle, I’m so sorry. I swear I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “I didn’t say I thought it was you, Juno. Someone must have done a Google search on my name and came up with this. Anyone could have done that, but hacking into my mailing list would require a little more expertise. As I remember, you’re not exactly a computer whiz.”

  Kyle smiles again—this time it’s a smile that does reach his eyes—and I find myself smiling back. Bea had told him a few months ago that I was going to hire someone to design a Web site for McKay Glass, and Kyle, because he’d worked for a computer company back in Colorado, had offered to do it himself for free.

  What a nice man, I think to myself after we’ve said good-bye and I’m heading toward Gal’s with my two damp greyhounds, Who could be trying to do him harm?

  AS IF TO SUBSTANTIATE MY LIE TO MY FATHER, I FIND PORTIA SLUMPED OVER A stack of papers that I deduce from the pained expression on her face can only be financial aid forms. Annemarie is standing behind her polishing the cappuccino maker. She’s rubbing so hard it’s as if she believed the copper machine was a magic lantern that might produce enough money to send Portia to Penrose.

  “You mean because we own our own house you’re not eligible for certain kinds of aid?” she’s asking as I come in.

  “They assume we could borrow on the house—”

  “Well, then, we’ll borrow on the house.”

  “No, Mama, you worked so long to pay off the mortgage. We’ll think of something else. Here’s Aunt Juno; she’ll have an idea.”

  Annemarie turns around and both women look at me with the same kind of beseeching gaze the dogs gave me when I tied them up on the porch outside.

  “Let me take a look at those,” I offer even though I seriously doubt I’ll be able to find some hidden source of money in the labyrinth of financial language. Annemarie comes around the counter and bustles me over to a table while telling Portia to get me coffee and biscotti and whatever else I want. Some panini? A little minestrone?