The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  “The questions about your recovery. I want to know how you’re doing.” I pour the water and pasta into a colander and step back as a wave of steam rises from the sink.

  “I told her the truth—that the Pieridine has been a miracle for me, but that there were no guarantees. It hasn’t cleared Phase II testing yet and it’s only been field tested at less than a dozen facilities. Since it’s a new drug there aren’t any long-range studies on its effectiveness over time. I told her I was trying to make the most of the clarity it’s given me while I can.”

  I pour the drained pasta back in the large pot and put it back on the stove on a low light. Neil pours the sautéed onions into it and then holds the bowl of eggs and cheese over the pot. This is the tricky part of making carbonara. Getting the eggs to cook just enough so that the sauce clings to the pasta without clumping or curdling. I nod for him to start pouring. I stir.

  “What about her last question?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the yellow sauce as it thickens around the thin, nearly transparent noodles.

  “You mean what would I do if it stopped working?”

  I nod. I hear Neil sigh, but I don’t look up.

  “I told her I couldn’t go back. That I’d rather die than go back to how I was before.”

  WE EAT OUT ON THE ROOFTOP, THE FOOD LAID OUT ON A TABLE MADE FROM AN OLD Rose Glass packing crate, a dozen candles lining the railing. Francesca lies under Neil’s chair with her head resting on his foot, but Paolo roams back and forth restlessly, disdainful of the bacon treats Neil offers him.

  “You know we’ve got a Gatsby-Daisy thing going on,” he says, gesturing with his wineglass toward the dark hills across the river. (Another miracle of Pieridine, I’ve learned, is its compatibility with moderate alcohol consumption.) “The place where I’m living is almost directly across the river from here only it’s just below that hill. If I climbed straight up from my back door I could put out a green light and signal to you.”

  “I thought all that land belonged to Astolat,” I say, deliberately choosing not to enlarge on his reference to Fitzgerald’s star-crossed lovers. What amuses me, actually, is that he’s made himself Daisy in the analogy.

  “The Beeches is the old gatehouse. Penrose donated it to Briarwood before he died to be used an an outpatient facility—a sort of halfway house for us recovering loonies. We’re not allowed to wander around the estate—”

  “I bet that hasn’t stopped you.”

  “Actually, Astolat is sealed off behind another wall beyond the gatehouse. A fifteen-foot stone wall with iron spikes and broken glass on top. The only person who goes onto the estate is Gavin Penrose. Some of the older residents of The Beeches say he roams the grounds at night looking for buried treasure.”

  “Buried treasure?” I ask skeptically.

  “Yeah, well, these are mental patients telling these stories. The caretaker told me that Penrose did in fact shoot at something he thought was a trespasser once, only it turned out to be a raccoon. Makes you wonder who’s crazy.”

  I smile at the image of Gavin nervously prowling his grandfather’s estate. “Why do you think he’s so anxious to keep people off the grounds?”

  “The caretaker says it’s to avoid lawsuits—you know, someone stumbles into an old basement, breaks a leg, and sues—but it does seem a little paranoid. Christine said she thought Penrose was a little crazy himself near the end of his life. The disposition of the estate was bizarre. Besides leaving The Beeches to Briarwood he stipulated that the rest of Astolat couldn’t be sold or open to the public until fifty years after his death. Christine had tried to get permission to tour the grounds, but she said Gavin Penrose refused.”

  “I guess that’s why she was so intrigued when she heard Bea say you could get onto the grounds from the water. I wonder what she wanted to see so badly that she’d risk crossing the river in a kayak in the middle of the night.”

  Neil shrugs and gets up, dislodging Francesca’s head from his foot. She follows him to the railing, where he moves a few candles aside so he can sit on the top rail. It makes me nervous to see him balanced above the sheer drop to the train tracks, but I resist saying anything. It’s the type of warning that always used to make him angry and would push him toward doing something even more reckless.

  “She probably just wanted to see the ruins of Astolat. I would, too. You say you can paddle right up the Wicomico?”

  “Uh-huh. We didn’t get very far the day we found Christine, but Bea says there’s a spot farther upstream where you can beach and get out to walk around.”

  There’s an awkward pause during which I wonder if I should suggest we do just that. Somehow we’ve managed to get through most of the evening without reference to the future. To our future. I guess a kayaking trip would be a neutral enough outing for us to take, but the thought of it opens up so many potentially uncomfortable situations—renting the kayaks from Kyle, my dad hearing about it, not to mention actually being out on the water with Neil again and revisiting the scene of Christine’s death. So instead of suggesting we make the trip I ask if he wants another slice of tiramisu.

  Immediately, something in his face that had been open closes. It’s the way he used to look at the end of my visits to Briarwood when he realized that I hadn’t come to take him home.

  “No thanks,” he says, sliding off the railing, “actually I’d better get going. We sort of have curfew—a voluntary curfew, they call it, whatever that means.”

  I walk him down the side stairs and around to the front of the factory. Francesca comes with us, but Paolo stays on the stairs howling. It’s the first time I’ve seen the dogs more than six feet apart from each other.

  “I’d better go back up,” I say, “before he wakes up the whole neighborhood.”

  Neil looks up and down the deserted street, at the abandoned storefronts and disreputable-looking boardinghouses, the only sign of life the neon shamrock over Flannery’s bar across from the train station. It doesn’t look like a neighborhood that is easily disturbed.

  “Thanks for dinner, Juno. I thought I’d never taste anything as good as your carbonara again.”

  It’s such a simple compliment that I immediately regret not asking to see him again—for missing that moment. “Maybe we could do it again sometime …” I say weakly, ashamed at how my voice trails off.

  “Look,” he says, “I understand that you can’t just open up your life and let me in after all these years. And you shouldn’t have to deal with people talking about us … but there is something I wanted to do with you … a favor I wanted to ask you and it wouldn’t involve being here, so we could get used to each other before dealing with other people’s opinions …”

  He takes a step forward and touches my face. His wording has reminded me of the Latin poem I translated for Portia, the one where Catullus tells his girlfriend that they shouldn’t care about the opinions of others and then asks her for a thousand kisses, so many that no evil person would ever be able to count their number.

  “We could do it at The Beeches,” he says. “There’s plenty of room and light …”

  “Do what?” I manage to ask, my voice so trembly that Francesca, who’s wedged herself in between us, looks up at me and whimpers.

  “Pose for me,” he says. “I want to paint you one more time, only this time not as some character from a story, but as yourself.”

  I drop my hand onto Francesca’s head and rub one of her silky ears in between my fingers. “Okay,” I tell him, “I can do that.”

  THE NEXT DAY, THOUGH, WHEN I COME DOWNSTAIRS INTO THE STUDIO, I DON’T HAVE the slightest idea how I’m going to explain to my father and my crew why I need to be gone two or three mornings a week. But then my father presents me with a perfect solution, albeit a solution caused by the misfortune of others.

  “I got a call early this morning from Brother Michael up at St. Eustace’s. They had a fire last night.”

  “Oh no, was anyone hurt?” McKay Glass had restored the windows at the C
hapel of St. Eustace’s, a girls’ school on the northeast shore of Lake Champlain, two years ago. I could still picture the twelve lancets depicting St. Eustace hunting a stag, and a rose window modeled on the one at Chartres. Brother Michael and I had had many long conversations about medieval stained glass and about handling troubled teenaged girls—St. Eustace’s was a reform school for girls so incorrigible that the school’s nickname was St. Useless.

  “No, it was only in the chapel and in the middle of the night. They got it out before there was too much damage to the walls and roof, but the windows started cracking an hour later. He’s afraid they’re going to fall to pieces. I told him the fact that they’d been recently restored would help—”

  “But they should be stabilized right away.”

  “I told him he should shore them up with plywood on both sides and that I’d get back to him. I warned him, though, that we were in the middle of a job and I wasn’t sure how soon we could get up there, but that even if we couldn’t do it we’d call with a referral by noon today.” My father pauses for breath and then adds, “He thanked me and said he hoped we could do the repair since we already had a feel for the windows.”

  He pushes his hair back, takes a sip of coffee, and waits for what I’m going to say. Looking at him—at his neatly pressed khakis and blue work shirt and his trim gray hair—I’m impressed with how well he’s handled the situation. Years ago, when he was still drinking, he would have either agreed to take the job before looking at the rest of his workload or said no because he was too hungover to make the drive.

  “Well, let’s figure out how much longer we’ve got on the Lady and whether we can fit in a trip to St. Eustace’s,” I say. “It would be a great experience for Robbie.”

  We spend the next hour looking at all stages of the restoration of the Lady window and estimating the work left to be done. The window is reassembled except for some of the plating behind the glass in the lily pool and in the upper branches of the weeping beech, all of which should take only another week or so. Then we map out a plan for handling the fire-damaged windows at St. Eustace’s. It seems like we’ve got plenty of time to handle that job and still have most of August to finish and reinstall the Lady window.

  “I think I should stay here, though,” I say, “to take care of the dogs and answer any questions Gavin might have about the progress we’ve made on the Lady window. Maybe I can work up the nerve to show him the dichroic pattern and how we’ve altered the assemblage of the window.”

  “Are you sure, honey?” my dad asks. “Won’t you be lonely without us?”

  “I’ll survive,” I say, putting my arm around my dad’s shoulder. “I’ve got Paolo and Francesca.”

  AND SO I START SITTING FOR NEIL A COUPLE OF HOURS EACH MORNING. “I MIGHT AS well take advantage of the break,” I tell him the first day I come to The Beeches. “Once the guys come back we’ll be busy reinstalling the window.”

  “And once I get started I know I won’t want to stop,” he says, setting out his paints, “and I only want the early morning light for this painting.”

  Before climbing the hill behind The Beeches—so named for the copse of ancient copper beeches that stand behind the old gatehouse—Neil gave me a tour of the house, which has none of the dreariness one might associate with the term “halfway house.” Its rooms are spacious and airy, each resident has his or her own sitting room fitted out with handsome mission-styled furniture and thick, Persian rugs, and the meals are served in a glassed-in sunroom facing the magnificent violet-leaved trees. There is, though, something marginal about the house in the way it straddles the entrance to the estate and how its stone walls merge into the estate walls—all hewn out of the same blue-gray fieldstone. “It’s not a real gateway, though,” Neil explains as he sets up his easel on the crest of the hill just above the second stone wall. “The outside walls enclose the inner wall around Astolat.”

  “Like a moat,” I say.

  “A moat of trees,” Neil says. “These beeches are my favorite, especially in the early morning when the sun comes through them from the east. Look at the colors—in the center of the tree and at the crown the leaves are mostly green with just a faint purple mottling, but on the outer branches at the bottom the new leaves are deep violet and when the sun shines through them there’s this halo of crimson—” He’s squeezing purple and red paint onto his palette. “—that reminds me of your hair.”

  “My hair? I know it’s pretty unmanageable, but I thought I’d gotten it a little neater than these shaggy old trees.” It’s always been a bit of a sore point to me, my wild kinky mass of hair that resists combs and conditioners and seems to weave itself into tangles and knots while I sleep as if it had a will of its own.

  “The color,” he says, “the way it turns red when you stand with the sun at your back, but then it’s this dark eggplanty purple in the dark. That’s why I want to paint you here, with the beeches behind you, and the sun coming through the leaves just touching you around the edges … like that,” he says, looking up and then, moving forward, touching me lightly on the chin to tilt my face a little to the left and on my shoulder to angle my body slightly to the right. He’s already gotten that abstracted look he gets when he starts to paint, his eyes moving rapidly over the surface of things, charting the play of light over their contours the way a sailor studies the surface of water to gauge depth and wind direction. I’d noticed, long ago, that his eyes would change colors rapidly while he was painting, as if the pigments on his brush seeped down the thin stalk of his paintbrush, though his veins, and into his irises. Today they’re dark blue, almost violet, like the copper beech leaves in the shadows.

  “Like that?” I ask when he’s given me the last adjustment and stepped back.

  “Like that,” he says stepping behind his easel. “Now don’t move a muscle.”

  When I first sat for Neil the commandment to stay still had driven me crazy. Instantly, every nerve in my body had rebelled, every pore itched, the blood had ceased to flow to my extremities, and currents of electricity had flared up in my hands and feet. Eventually, though, I had learned to let the stillness settle over me and how to sit so as not to cut off circulation to my limbs. I’d come to enjoy being the object of attention while, at the same time, nothing was demanded of me.

  Now I find these hours we spend together in the mornings while he paints and I sit in the cool, dusky shadows of the beech trees oddly soothing. We don’t talk. I’m not supposed to move my mouth; he’s too engrossed in what he’s doing. He looks at me, I look at him and sometimes, after many hours, our eyes meet as if we’d just come upon each other on the street and we both smile. That’s when we take a break.

  I join him on his side of the easel and he pours me some coffee from a thermos and takes out sandwiches and fruit while I look at what he’s painted so far. Another change. He used to never let me see a painting before it was finished.

  “It doesn’t bother me now,” he says after the first couple of days. “I’d like to know what you think.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say truthfully. “It looks like I’m part of the forest, like my face is rising up out of the trees and I’m a part of everything around me because it’s all connected by the light.”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted,” he says, biting into an apple. “That’s just how I pictured it.”

  We stop when the light reaches the top branches of the trees—a little before noon each day. Sometimes we take a walk then, through the woods and around the inner perimeter wall. He hasn’t brought up the idea of kayaking into Astolat again and neither have I, but I have to admit that taking these walks has made me curious about what’s on the other side of the wall.

  “Did you walk here with Christine?” I ask during the second week of sittings.

  “Yeah, she wanted to see if there was any way into Astolat. I think she was disappointed that I hadn’t found a way to get over the wall, but I told her I drew the line at crossing iron spikes and broken
glass.”

  I don’t tell him that I’m also surprised at his caution—he’d scaled far more imposing and treacherous barriers back in college—nor do I ask him if he would draw the line at crossing the river with her in a kayak in the middle of the night. I don’t ask because although I can believe he would have made the trip across the river with her I can’t believe he would have left her there to drown. Even when he purposely capsized our boat all those years ago—when he was out of his mind—he hadn’t, in the end, left. He’d held one of my hands to the side of the capsized boat while I’d kept Bea’s head above water with the other hand. It was only after the Coast Guard fished us out that he’d disappeared beneath the surface of the river.

  In the evenings I stand out on my roof and look across the river to the crest of the hill where the sun, just as it sets, lights the tops of the beeches into flares of bright copper. Not Daisy’s green light, perhaps, but a beacon of sorts, a signal in the night sky.

  In bed I read Eugenie’s journal, finding in her accounts of posing for Augustus an unsettling parallel to my days with Neil.

  It is a curious experience, posing for a painting. To be looked at but not have one’s gaze met, as if one were invisible or one’s spirit had left one’s body.

  One one one

  I say one, but the sensation is of being two.

  After I have sat for many hours (Augustus is anxious to have the series done for Sir R—and collect his fee so that he can finance a certain event—and so he has asked me to sit for as long as I can manage it) and after I have passed through a not altogether unpleasant tingling sensation in my limbs and into a numbness (a bit like getting used to cold water) there comes a moment when I can feel my spirit lifting away from my flesh—departing my body right out the top of my head, where it hovers, attached only by a gossamer thread finer than my embroidery silk—looking down at its cast-off shell. I can see not only myself but Augustus and Clare.