“Ms. Howell,” I say, hoping she didn’t hear my lie about being a Penrose trustee, “I didn’t realize that this was your gallery. I came in because I recognized this painting by Penrose, The Drowning Tree. I’m just surprised to see it here on sale. Doesn’t it belong to the college?”
“Miss McKay, isn’t it? You’ve made a very understandable mistake. Not all of Augustus Penrose’s paintings were left to the college. Some were left to the family—”
“So Gavin’s the owner?”
“I didn’t say that; the owner wishes to remain anonymous.”
“Oh,” I say, taking another step toward the painting. The two reproductions I’ve seen recently—the print in Christine’s old bedroom and the postcard in her apartment—failed to do the painting justice. Unlike the frail nymphs Penrose usually favors, this figure is monumental. Her torso, emerging from its sheath of bark, is powerful, stomach muscles tensed as she leans over the pool, her arms breaking free from the stranglehold of branches to balance herself above the water. The painting doesn’t show, I suddenly realize, a woman turning into a tree, but one breaking free of the imprisoning bark. I follow the sweep of hair into the water and find the face of a girl hidden in the ripples. The girl’s look of horror and fear does not seem to match the aggressive posture of the woman above her. In fact, the figure in the water, I can see now, is lifting her arms up, while the arms of the tree-woman are held back. The figure in the water isn’t a reflection at all. It reminds me of something—the hand reaching up … I close my eyes and see, instead of the beech tree’s branches trailing in the water, Christine’s hair swaying in the clear water, a white marble hand reaching up from the bottom of the pool.
“Of course,” I say aloud, “the statue in the water.”
“What statue in the water?” Regula asks.
“Nothing,” I say, taking a step backward toward the exit. “I’m sorry I misunderstood who owned the painting. Of course if you say it’s owned by Gavin …”
“I didn’t,” she begins, turning as pink as CeCe’s suit. “I tried to explain that to Christine …”
“So she did come here,” I say. “I see. Well, that’s all I really need to know for now.” I hold out my hand to shake Regula’s but she seems to be too busy hating herself for giving away that last little bit of information to notice. So I give a little wave to her—and to CeCe—and step out onto the street, where I hail a cab to take me back to Christine’s apartment.
THE CAB TAKES ME BACK THROUGH CENTRAL PARK, THROUGH A TUNNEL OF LATE summer greenery. Staring at the reflection of leaves on the cab window, I picture the face under the water in the painting, looking up through the water at the looming specter of that terrifying tree-woman. When I get to Christine’s apartment I go straight to her desk, where I’ve left the postcard of The Drowning Tree. Although it’s hard to make out the details in the poor-quality reproduction, the original is seared into my brain.
Clearly the scene depicts some kind of horrible encounter between two women. Although I still don’t understand it completely, I suspect that the painting holds the key to what happened between Clare and Eugenie and that Christine thought so, too. I imagine that after she tracked the painting down to Regula’s gallery she would have met with Gavin. Perhaps that’s what they argued about before her lecture—either over the impropriety of selling a piece of college property or over what Christine thought the painting revealed about Augustus and the two sisters. Either way, Gavin would have felt threatened by what Christine had learned. All Christine would have wanted, though, would have been to learn more.
I close my eyes and again I picture Christine as I saw her last, suspended in the water above the submerged marble statue. That must be what she wanted to see. She must have guessed that the statue would reveal what happened between Eugenie and Clare. So she used what she already knew to bribe Gavin to take her across the river.
Poor Christine, I think, so obsessed with her research that she couldn’t see any danger to herself.
I pause in my packing—I’ve decided to take some of Christine’s files and pictures back with me—surprised that all my anger at Christine has faded. A few hours ago I was ready to rip her apartment apart in my rage over her sleeping with Neil and now all I feel is pity. I look down at my fingers, half expecting that those wounds, too, will have been healed by the water in Bethesda fountain, but the scratches, of course, are still there. I run my thumb along my fingertips, testing for pain, but all I feel is a little tingle on the surface and a stone-cold reservoir of intent under my skin to find out what happened to Christine.
I’ll take the train back tonight and first thing in the morning I’ll ask Kyle to take me across the river. I’m certain that Christine would only have gone across the river with Gavin if she believed that the statue submerged in the pool below the weeping beech would tell her what happened among Eugenie, Penrose, and Clare. If I can find what she was looking for I might understand why she went with Gavin and then I’ll be able to explain it all to Falco. If I can find some link between the scene in the painting that Gavin is selling—perhaps illegally—at the gallery and the real-life scene of Christine’s death, he’ll have to believe that it was Gavin and not Neil who killed her.
I SPEND THE NEXT FEW HOURS GOING THROUGH CHRISTINE’S PAPERS, SEARCHING FOR something else that might implicate Gavin in Christine’s death, but find nothing. What I do find are all the letters I wrote to her when she was at Oxford in a file labeled “Juno” and another file labeled “Beatrice” with every drawing that Bea had ever given her over the years. Although I’m anxious to get back home I find it hard, when it comes time, to leave the apartment. It’s the last time I’ll see it; the last time I’ll be surrounded by Christine’s things. When I finally do leave I stand in the hall a moment and then go back in, go into the living room, and take down the painting I’d done of Christine and me and Neil together in the Rose Garden. I’d copied it from a photo that was taken the day Neil and I were married. With the canvas tucked under my arm, I head down to Grand Central.
By the time I get a taxi, and the taxi makes it through traffic to the station, I just barely make the 6:29 train. When the train comes out of the tunnel the sun is already low in the sky, the buildings casting long shadows, and I’m reminded of those Sundays when Christine and I would come back late from the city and I would dash to the library to finish my schoolwork. It makes me want to be doing something, so I take out Eugenie’s journal pages from my overnight bag and read the last few entries. All but the very last one are curiously brief.
Today Augustus asked me to share with him the labors of his life. “We share a vision,” he said to me, “and will do great things together.” Since he’d already sought and received Papa’s consent it only remained for us to tell Clare …
I puzzle over Eugenie’s tone, which seems cool for a woman who’s received a proposal from a man she obviously loved. Was it only Victorian reserve? Or was there something in Penrose’s proposal that disappointed her—some lack of ardor or a too-stolid pragmatism? Or was she afraid of Clare’s reaction?
Clare took the news with all appearance of calm, only asking what would become of her. I told her what Augustus and I had discussed and how generous and resourceful he’d been in using his connections to obtain for her a teaching position …
Teaching position? So the original plan had not been to bring Clare along with them to America. I wonder whose idea the teaching position had really been. Apparently Clare wondered, too.
I’ve just had a very distressing talk with Clare in which she accused me of poisoning Augustus against her and of stealing his affections. She appears to be under the delusion that he’d been courting her all along. I begin to fear for her reason.
Looking out the window at the river under a darkening sky, I wonder how far to trust Eugenie’s assessment. Was Clare really losing her mind or was it just easier to believe that Clare was mad than to suspect that her fiancé was only marrying her for her money when he
really loved her penniless sister? Apparently it was Augustus, after all, who chose to bring Clare with them to America.
Augustus suggests that we bring Clare to America with us in the hope that a change of scene will restore her reason. I’m afraid that he doesn’t know her as well as I do—after all, he hasn’t lived through her variations in mood and episodic fancies as I have. He believes her present agitation to be an aberration and the sunny, cheerful disposition he encountered when we first made his acquaintance to be her “true self.” What he doesn’t understand is that the girl he saw at first is but a reflection of the one he sees now and no more substantial than a shimmer on the water’s surface. The real girl lurks below the water’s surface, a shadow wraith, waiting to drag her unsuspecting victims into the depths.
I look away from the page, chilled by this last image Eugenie has drawn. It’s an eerie rendering of the manic-depressive: charming and sparkling when she’s in her manic stage, but capable of sucking the world around her into her own shadows when she descends into depression. But what also strikes me is how Eugenie’s luridly fanciful image of Clare as a water-demon waiting to drag her unsuspecting lovers to a watery death echoes the image in The Drowning Tree.
In the second-to-last entry, written on the eve of her wedding day, Eugenie tried one last time to reconcile her sister to her marriage.
I took her to the pool below the weeping beech because I thought the pastoral setting with its fond associations might soothe her nerves. It seemed at first to be working. She let down her hair and allowed me to comb it as I had when she was little while she told me one of the fanciful tales she so loves.
“Here’s a story,” she said, bowing her head so that I could work my comb into the tangles at the base of her neck. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful wood nymph who lived by a pool in the forest in a grove of trees that were sacred to her. One day she saw a mortal youth sitting by the pool drawing pictures of the trees and because he seemed to love the trees that were sacred to her she fell in love with him. But before she could reveal herself to him, he saw her sister, and she put a spell on him and forced him to believe himself in love with her. Together the youth and the wicked sister prepared to leave the grove. The wood nymph, in her grief, let down her hair and leaned over the pool knowing that the weight of her hair would drag her to the bottom of the pool, but at the very moment she dived into the water the gods of the woods took pity on her and turned her into one of the trees she so loved—a weeping beech tree that forever trails its branches in the water like the drowning girl. So you see, she’s always drowning but never wholly drowned. The tree, from that day on, was called the drowning tree.”
“That’s a pretty story,” I told Clare, working my fingers into one of the knots at the nape of her neck. “Is it from Ovid?”
She looked out at me from under her hair and it gave me a start—she looked like a girl who’s been strangled in the grasses that grow beneath the water. Like the drowning girl in her story. “Not everything’s from a book, Eugenie,” she said, clutching her hands over her stomach as if she were in physical pain. “Here’s life,” she cried, “whether you see it or not.”
She tried to stand up then but my ring—the ring dear Augustus had given me—caught in her hair and she let out a cry when the hair tore away in my hand. I tried to soothe her, but she looked at me as if I were a stranger—oh, it was a look to chill the bones! I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred—and then she turned from me and, lifting her skirts as if she were alighting from a carriage, stepped into the pool.
It happened so quickly I couldn’t move. I stood on the bank, frozen to the spot, as if I had become the tree in Clare’s story. I could see, beneath the clear water, Clare’s face as she sank deeper into the pool and she—awful to say!—could see me. I think it was her look that kept me rooted to the spot. Those blue eyes of hers! How they burned! I believe that I was mesmerized by them into a kind of waking sleep. Why else would I not have lifted a hand to help my own sister? She had put a spell on me to render me helpless to save her so she could accomplish her purpose—to drown herself!
And then something brushed past me. I thought for a moment it was some enormous black bird swooping down out of the beech tree to skim the surface of the pool, but it was Augustus. He told me later that he heard Clare’s cry—from when my hand got stuck in her hair—and came running. Thank goodness he did because he was able to drag Clare’s drenched and bleeding body out of the water onto the shore and breathe life back into her. I shudder to think what might have happened if he hadn’t been nearby.
The conductor calls the stop that’s right before Rosedale, so I fold up the journal pages and tuck them into one of Christine’s file folders. There’s only one more page and it seems to be about making arrangements to leave for America. It must have been clear after the incident under the beech tree that Clare would have to go to America with them. I don’t envy Eugenie’s position—forced to be a caretaker to an unstable sister infatuated with her new husband, but neither can I trust her explanation of her failure to prevent Clare’s suicide attempt. Maybe she was paralyzed with fear while her sister struggled in the water, but surely to Clare it looked as if her sister stood coldly by while she drowned. And wouldn’t it have looked that way to Augustus as well? Perhaps that was why Eugenie decided to hide these pages in the stone grooves of the window. The wonder is that she didn’t destroy them altogether. Who would want a reminder of that moment? How must she have felt, then, when her husband chose that very scene to depict in the window that was supposed to honor her?
I remember that Christine said in her lecture that the reason the glass panes in the lady’s loom didn’t match the ones in the landscape scene in the window was because they’d been broken at the last minute. By whom? Could it have been Eugenie herself who broke them because they too clearly re-created that scene between her and Clare?
I pull out the pages that Christine had torn from Eugenie’s notebook and find the sketches Eugenie did of the window. There on the loom is the scene from The Drowning Tree—the tree-woman hovering over the lily pool as another figure struggles in the water. I look up from the picture and meet my own gaze in the glass window—reflective now that it’s fully dark outside—and realize what Augustus meant by designing the window as he did. The Lady of Shalott looks away from the shadows and sees the truth for the first time. He wanted Eugenie to acknowledge what she—and he, by not stopping her—had done all those years ago. They’d condemned Clare to a life of madness and then locked her up so they wouldn’t have to live with the reminder of their sins. Only Augustus hadn’t been able to forget Clare and he wouldn’t let Eugenie forget either.
It’s not a pretty story. And not a story Gavin Penrose would have wanted Christine to tell in her lecture. No wonder he agreed to take her across the river in exchange for leaving it out of her lecture.
As the train stops the lights in my car flicker and then go out. My reflection in the window is replaced by a clear view of the Rosedale Station, the figures on the platform emerging behind the dark glass like faces rising out of dark water. I remember that for Christine, too, the lights had briefly gone out before the train left. She would have looked for me and seen.…
Gavin Penrose.
For a moment I think I’ve conjured him up out of my speculations, but there he is—in the flesh—standing on the platform.
Although there are half a dozen explanations for what Gavin might be doing at the station, what I suddenly fear is that Regula called and told him about my appearance at the gallery and that I’d accused him of stealing The Drowning Tree and then blurted out something about “the statue in the water.” He knows I must have put the pieces together and he’s waiting for me—just as he must have waited on the platform for Christine after I saw her off. I have no intention, however, of meeting him on the platform.
I PICK UP MY BAGS AND WALK THROUGH THE CARS, HEADING SOUTH UNTIL I’VE reached the last one. When I get off I immed
iately walk behind the train, crossing two sets of tracks and ducking behind the raised platform on the west side of the station.
I stop there, my heart beating so hard I think for a moment it’s the vibration of an oncoming train. I used to walk the tracks all the time when I was in high school, but it’s been years since I’ve done it and I’ve spent so much time lecturing Bea against the practice that I’m amazed that I’m still breathing at all.
Although I know that I should leave while the northbound train is still obstructing the view from the opposite platform I’m curious to see if Gavin’s still there and whether he’s met anyone getting off the train. When the train pulls out I flatten myself against the edge of the platform and peer cautiously around the corner. At first I think the opposite platform is empty but then I see him, standing directly across from me, looking over the tracks and toward the riverfront park. The only reason he can’t see me is because I’m in the shadow of the platform.
He takes out a cell phone and punches in a number. Maybe he was meeting someone who’s missed the train, but then why would he be looking toward the park? How many of the people whom Gavin would be meeting are likely to have vanished into the park between the station and the glass factory? The answer is one: me.
The realization that my improbable suspicion may not be so improbable after all sets my heart to pounding once again. I’m trembling so hard now I’d like a Halcion myself, but then I realize that it’s not me that’s trembling, it’s the ground. The southbound train is pulling into the station.
Whatever Gavin’s doing at the station, I have no intention of running into him. As soon as the train stops I head toward the park, hoping that Kyle has stayed late at the boathouse. The building, though, is dark. Even the light on the landing is out. Kyle’s often complained that the local teenagers use the park street lamps for target practice—much in the same way that kids threw stones at the factory windows when I was in high school.
The Drowning Tree Page 32
