The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  “Mr. Penrose has been asking me to get in touch with you all morning. Your assistant at your studio claimed you didn’t have a cell phone where I could reach you. Is that true? You really ought to have a number where you can be reached at all times.” I’m about to explain that I don’t get many stained-glass emergencies, but Fay’s still talking, her words keeping time with the sharp click of her heels on the tiled floor as we fly past the thickening trees in the paintings. “What if the school were trying to reach you because something had happened to Beatrice, for instance, or your father had a heart attack or fell off a stepladder while installing a window …”

  I’d like to think of some way of halting Fay’s litany of disaster but I can’t think of any. She’s right; I guess I should have a cell phone, but she won’t even let me get a word in edgewise to tell her I agree with her. Soon enough, though, we’ve come to the sliding screens at the end of the hall. Panels of thorny vines and roses embroidered on pale green silk are set into frames of honey-colored oak. One of Eugenie’s patterns, no doubt. The forest has turned into the overgrown thicket surrounding the bower of Sleeping Beauty. Fay slips her hand into a recessed groove to slide open a panel but then turns to me, her back to the screen and lowers her voice. “I just want you to know,” she whispers, “that when I said all those things about Christine the other day I had no idea she was already dead. I feel very strange about the whole thing.”

  “You couldn’t have known, Fay; none of us did.”

  “Yes, but it was almost as if I had a presentiment of what was to come. Remember I told you about the pills she was taking? If I had taken them from her maybe she wouldn’t be dead now.”

  “I know how you feel,” I tell Fay, “but there probably wasn’t anything any of us could have done.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you feel the worst of all of us—since you were the last to see her alive and her best friend and all. If anyone could have saved her … well, as you say, there was probably nothing you could have done. I wish you’d tell Mr. Penrose that—he’s been beside himself since he got the news yesterday after morning services. I can’t help but think it was a bit tactless for that policeman to track us all down at church yesterday morning, especially since it’s most likely a suicide—”

  “I’d like to talk to Gavin,” I interrupt. Although the chances are that the suicide theory is right, I find I’m tired of hearing it from Fay. There’s something almost gloating in the way she brings it up. “That’s why I’m here. Can I go in now?”

  “Let me just tell him you’re here,” she says. She slides the screen open just wide enough for her to step backward through the narrow space and slides it closed again so quickly I’m unable to catch even a glimpse of the inner sanctum. I’m left staring at the pattern of thorns and roses until another panel—not the one Fay went through—opens and Fay slips halfway out.

  “Mr. Penrose will see you now,” she says, gesturing for me to enter through the side panel.

  I go in and hear the whisper of the oak-framed panels sliding closed in their grooves. If the hallway felt like a path through the woods, this room is the sacred grove in the heart of the forest. The furniture is simple and unobtrusive—a mission-style library table for a desk, two Morris chairs, and a low settee upholstered in the same thorns-and-roses pattern as the screens, only here on green velvet instead of silk. Painted on a wide panel beneath the windows is a frieze of Sleeping Beauty drowsing on a bed of thorns. The glass in the windows above her is thick and greenish, stippled with delicate bubbles, and unfigured except for a narrow panel of falling leaves on either side. I’ve been in this room a half dozen times—including the time when I was asked by the president (Gavin’s father, Arthur Penrose) to take a voluntary leave of absence while I had Bea—and I’ve always found it a peaceful place. Even on that occasion, I was lulled into a sense that the college really had my best interest at heart (you don’t want to be studying for finals in your condition) by the soft palette of green and gold and the subtle hints of decaying foliage everywhere. The light, filtered through the antique glass, is gentle, but when Gavin rises from behind his desk to greet me I can see even in this dim light how haggard he is.

  “Juno,” he says, coming around his desk and reaching for my hand. “I still can’t believe she’s gone.” To my surprise he takes my hand and pulls me into his arms, where he holds me, tight against his crisp white shirt, for several long moments. Although I’ve known Gavin Penrose since I was in college here I’ve never so much as kissed him on the cheek.

  After several minutes—long enough for me to inhale the sandalwood in his cologne and admire the Morris pattern in his tie—he takes a step back and holds me at arm’s length.

  “You must be devastated,” he says, “Christine told me how close you were. She said you were like the sister she never had and better than the mother she did have.”

  I nod, unable to trust myself to speak. It’s Gavin, though, who looks devastated. His pale olive skin has turned sallow, the shadows under his eyes are deep as bruises. I remember now that I wondered last week if he and Christine were romantically involved.

  Something in how I’m looking at him must suddenly make Gavin feel uncomfortable, because he drops his hands from my arms and turns from me, gesturing toward the low couch.

  “Please, sit down, let me ring Fay for some tea; you must be exhausted. I know I haven’t slept.”

  I take the seat but turn down the offer of tea, guiltily remembering that I actually slept well last night—no more drowned visitors for a change—and ate two of the French crullers Ernesto had brought. Gavin, slumped next to me on the couch, is the one who looks like he hasn’t slept or eaten.

  “I guess you spent a lot of time with Christine while she was researching her lecture,” I say, feeling oddly ill at ease with the evidence of Gavin’s grief. I don’t know whether I should be treating him like something more than Christine’s last boss.

  “Yes, she was very thorough; once she got an idea she was like a pit bull, she wouldn’t let go.” Thorough and pit bull don’t sound like terms of endearment but the way Gavin says them, with a fond smile and slight shake of the head, I suppose they might be. “That’s why I feel so bad. You see, we argued that morning before the lecture.”

  “But I saw you with her after the lecture, talking about that Titian painting in the dining hall. You didn’t seem to be arguing then.”

  Gavin runs a hand through his hair—thick, dark hair with a buoyant wave and only a touch of gray at the temples—and bows his head. I’ve heard lots of people compare his looks to John F. Kennedy Jr., but to me he’s always looked more like the pictures of Mario Lanza on the records my mother used to listen to.

  “Oh that! You know that’s not a real Titian. Christine was explaining to me how my grandfather should have known it was a fake.”

  I smile, remembering that that was exactly what I had assumed she was doing.

  “Thank God we’d made it up by then,” he says, “and I got a chance to tell her what a remarkable job she’d done. And to thank her for sparing my family some of the less savory details …”

  “You mean about Clare Barovier’s time in a mental hospital?”

  Gavin hesitates for a moment and then nods his head.

  “Yes. There were some details about my great-aunt’s internment at Briarwood that I felt would reflect badly on the family and, by extension, the college. Did you notice how she paused when she got to the part in her lecture about Briarwood? I think that she’d decided to leave out the details we’d discussed.” I remember thinking that she’d paused to spare me some unpleasant memories. Maybe she was protecting both of us. Gavin lifts his head out of his hands and reaches across the few inches between us on the couch to squeeze my hand. “You of all people must understand. You don’t want Bea to live under that shadow.”

  “Did you know that your great-aunt Clare had been institutionalized?”

  “Know is perhaps too straightforward a word for how inform
ation travels in my family. I always suspected there was something, some secret the grown-ups were trying to keep from us. There were whispers and hints about hereditary madness and innuendoes of insanity. And my mother was always extremely overprotective of me—although that may have been because she’d lost two children in infancy before she had me. When I told her that I wanted to take a year off between college and graduate school to live in Paris and paint she warned me that there was a strain of madness in my grandmother’s family that could be set off by delving too deeply into the artistic side.”

  “God, how archaic!” Even as I shake my head in disapproval, though, I’m picturing Neil standing in front of his last portrait in the Halcyone series, scraping paint off with his palette knife until he pierced the canvas. Would he have had that last episode if he hadn’t pushed himself so hard?

  “Did you have your year in Paris?”

  Gavin smiles ruefully—it makes him look younger and I remember him driving up to the dorm in his sports car. He looked like he was leading the perfect life—not some proxy life he’d been pushed into by the family. How could you ever really tell if people were happy? Or so desperately unhappy that they might want to die?

  “I went for the summer but my mother had done her job well. The specter of ‘Crazy Aunt Clare’ hovered over my canvases like some spiteful incubus. I came back in the fall in time to start Wharton. No loss to the art world, I’m sure. I still paint a little for my own amusement, but I’m glad I don’t have to make a living at it.”

  I’m not sure what to say. I’ve never seen any of Gavin’s paintings so I can’t really offer a judgment. It seems sad for him to have been diverted from his artistic pursuits, but looking at him, healthy and sane if a little sleep deprived, and imagining the life Neil’s lived half an hour up the river at Briarwood, I can’t help but wonder if Gavin’s mother wasn’t right.

  “But enough of my faded dreams, eh? We’ve got Christine’s memorial service to think about. That policeman said her body should be released by the end of the week, so I called her mother this morning and told her that I would make the arrangements for her to be moved to a funeral home in Poughkeepsie. I’ve already arranged for flowers to be sent from the college and diverted the check Christine was owed for her lecture to her mother—not strictly legal, but I figured the poor woman could use help with the funeral expenses while Christine’s estate is pending—I understand the family’s not well off.”

  “No, they’re not. Christine’s father died when she was only four and Mrs. Webb had an accident and went on disability not long after that. I’m sure Mrs. Webb appreciates all you’re doing, but …”

  “It’s the least we can do. I thought, too, that when the window’s done in the fall we could have a little ceremony in Christine’s honor. Something private—I think Christine would have liked that.”

  I’m about to say that what Christine would really like is a memorial service here at the college. The last place she’d want to end up—dead or not—is back with her mother in Poughkeepsie. But Gavin is already standing up and walking toward the screens that Fay, as if she heard us coming, has slid open. I’m out in the hall, in the painted forest of trees, before I realize that I didn’t even get a chance to tell him about the pattern Ernesto found in the window.

  IF I HAD HAD ANY THOUGHTS, THOUGH, OF GOING BACK INTO GAVIN’S OFFICE, FAY’S stance in front of its entrance would have dissuaded me. After sliding the screen closed she stands, her rigidly straight back to the embroidered screen, and folds her arms across her flat chest. An image of that long scar snaking out from beneath her towel in the sauna flashes through my mind and I take a step back. I can tell Gavin about the dichroic pattern in the glass some other time—it seems profane, at any rate, to talk business while Christine’s body still lies at the morgue. Fay, though, must see my hesitation.

  “I hope there’s nothing else you need to bother Mr. Penrose about this morning,” she says, stepping past me toward her own small office just off the main hall. “This tragedy has taken quite a toll on him. I try to absorb the worst of it, but there’s only so much that I can do.”

  “I’m sure he values your—” I stop because the word that I’d been about to use was interference and I’m not sure what other word to use for the fierce protectiveness she has for her boss. Cerberus at the gates of hell is what comes to mind. “I’m sure he values all that you do,” I finish lamely, following her into her tiny office. It’s hardly more than an alcove recessed off the main hall behind another sliding screen (like many designers of the Arts & Crafts movement Eugenie and Augustus were heavily influenced by Japanese art)—this one embroidered with a pattern of falling leaves to fit in with the forest mural. Fay sits down behind a desk piled high with orderly stacks of papers and, looking up, gives me one of her rare smiles.

  “It’s little enough after all Mr. Penrose has done for me. Do you know that last year when I needed my operation the college’s insurance provider refused to pay for it?” Fay lays the edge of her hand against her breastbone, her hand curled into a sickle shape. “Mr. Penrose personally called up the insurance company and threatened to change the entire college to another provider if they didn’t pay for my surgery.”

  “No, I had no idea. That’s shocking that they wouldn’t pay for breast cancer surgery …”

  “Oh, I didn’t have cancer. I found out last year I have the gene for it. The surgery was prophylactic. The insurance company would have had me wait to get the cancer when it might be too late.”

  “Wow.” I remember well from my mother’s experience how physically devastating that surgery was and I’m stunned at the thought of opting to have it … how had Fay put it?… prophylactically. It seems either extremely brave or slightly insane. “I didn’t know you could find that out …”

  Fay, who had begun to sort some papers from one pile to another, looks back up at me. “Didn’t your mother die of breast cancer?”

  I nod. “She got it when she was only forty, but I don’t think anyone else in the family had it …” My voice trails off as I realize that I’ve had so little contact with my mother’s family since she died that I really don’t know that for sure.

  “Well, you should find out and be tested right away. Here, let me give you the card where you can go.” Fay opens the top drawer of her desk and out of a jumble of pens, erasers, paper clips, breath mints, tea bags, and Post-it notes extracts a business card. Under the name of a hospital in Poughkeepsie I read: Division of Medical Genetics.

  “Well, I’ll think about it,” I say, tucking the card into the outside flap of my purse. What I’m really thinking, though, is that this is the last thing I feel like dealing with now. Fay lets out a long sigh that ends in a little tsk. I can tell she’s gearing up to tell me all the reasons why I should immediately call the number on the card, backed no doubt with statistics and case studies that will scare the hell out of me. It’s the last news I want to hear right now so I try desperately to think of something to divert her. Casting my eyes over the piles on her desk I notice a large album covered with embroidered silk just to my right.

  “I recognize this pattern,” I say, a bit inanely. “Isn’t it one of Eugenie’s?” I run my hand over the silk, feeling, where the cloth is worn, the cardboard underneath. The colors have faded but I can just make out a pattern of olive-green water lilies floating amid trailing copper branches on a violet background.

  Fay is staring at me as if I were crazy, but then I think of something that will make at least a little sense out of my rambling. “Is this the notebook that Christine used for her lecture? The one you were supposed to copy for me?”

  Something shuts down in Fay’s face and I feel sorry for it. She was trying to give me lifesaving advice and I’ve put her in her secretarial place.

  “I’ve tried to photocopy it, but it’s not so simple. You can see for yourself how fragile the document is. I can’t just hand it over to photocopying and let some work-study student splay it out on the copy
ing machine.” Fay fairly sputters on the word splay, giving a force and violence to the word that horribly calls to mind what’s being done to Christine’s body in the morgue. “And the ink Eugenie used has faded to near invisibility. Augustus was experimenting with handmade vegetable dyes at the time and this was one of his less successful attempts.” Fay carefully opens the album to the first page. At first I think the page is blank but then I notice a faint pattern of wavy lines—subtle as a fingerprint—on the cream-colored paper. In fact, it’s the same pattern of water lilies and branches that’s on the cover. Peering closer, I notice that the branches, as they twine around the water lilies, turn into snakes. I pull back, as startled by the hidden snakes in the design as if a real one had crawled out of the clutter on Fay’s desk, and laugh nervously at my own response. Fay looks at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  “These sketches could be extremely useful in restoring the Lady window,” I say in an attempt to restore my dignity.

  “I already told you, I can’t make an adequate copy.”

  “Then I’ll take the original. I promise I’ll be careful.”

  “That’s what your friend said and look what happened.”

  For a second I think she means that Christine’s death was somehow a result of her taking the notebook, but then Fay opens the book to the middle and points to a ragged edge close to the spine. “These pages have been torn out recently. You can’t tell me Eugenie Penrose did it. It was Christine Webb.”

  I shake my head. “Christine would never …,” I start to say, but then I remember how far Christine was willing to go when she wanted to know something. “You’re right,” I tell Fay, “I can’t expect you to take the responsibility for letting such valuable archival material out of the office. I’ll have to ask Gavin if I can borrow it.”

  I have only to angle my body in the direction of Gavin’s office for Fay to concede. “That’s entirely unnecessary.” She comes out from behind the desk to hand me the notebook, placing herself between me and Gavin’s office. “Just make sure you take better care than your friend did,” she says, following me into the hall. Again Fay’s warning seems to suggest that Christine’s drowning was somehow a direct result of her bad treatment of Eugenie’s notebook. I’m about to tell her that she needn’t worry, that I have no plans to mistreat the notebook or go kayaking by myself when I notice a blank spot on the wall next to the painting of Iole and Dryope.