The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  “The psychiatric hospital? Christine said she lived just down the hill from it. Her mother worked there, right?”

  “Until she was injured. Her aunt Amy and aunt Beth still work there. Their mother was head cook there for thirty-five years. It’s kind of a family legacy to work at Briarwood.”

  “They must have a lot of sympathy for the mentally ill.”

  I turn my head sharply in Nathan’s direction to see if he’s joking but he looks perfectly sincere. How well had he known Christine, anyway, I wonder. Certainly, she’d never mentioned him to me. “Christine used to say it gave them someone to feel superior to, but whenever I heard Ruth talk about Briarwood it was more as if she envied the patients. She always spoke as if they were all lollygagging around some country club, faking their symptoms of insanity so they didn’t have to put in an honest day’s work. ‘I’d have me a nervous breakdown, too,’ she’d say, ‘if I thought it’d get me breakfast in bed and bubble baths for the rest of my life.’ ”

  “Do the patients really get breakfast in bed?”

  “Only when they’re being force-fed through their nasal passages. As for the bubble baths—I know that years ago they practiced a kind of hydro-shock therapy by dunking patients into ice-cold tubs. It’s no Club Med, but the buildings and grounds are beautiful. Look, you can just see the rooftop of the main building from here.”

  We’ve come to a split in the road where the private drive to the hospital proceeds uphill through two massive stone pillars, and the county route plunges downhill into a scraggly hollow flanked by an auto repair shop and a home hair salon called Shear Beauty. I pull the car over to the dirt shoulder and point out a turreted tower just above the tree line.

  “It looks like a castle in a fairy tale,” Nathan says.

  “Yeah,” I say, pulling back onto the road and heading downhill, “the evil witch’s castle.”

  EVEN THOUGH WE LEFT BEFORE THE REST OF THE WEBBS, THEY’VE MANAGED TO BEAT us back to the house.

  “I thought you’d never get here with the food,” Ruth says by way of greeting after Nathan and I have hauled all the grocery bags up the quarter-mile driveway from the road (the driveway is blocked by three vehicles—a rusted-out gold Duster, a Pacer, and a pickup truck sitting on concrete blocks—that don’t appear to have been moved since Christine’s college days). When I glance into the front sitting room on my way to the kitchen it doesn’t look like anyone is in danger of starving. Two aunts and several young people who I recognize as Christine’s cousins wave forks laden with coffee cake in our direction as Nathan and I take turns bringing in the bags. In the kitchen we find an array of Corning casserole dishes that would have turned Augustus Penrose green with envy that he’d failed to follow his competitor, Corning Glass, into household dishware. If he had, Rosedale would be a thriving town right now.

  When we’ve finished unloading the food I look around for Ruth again, but find, instead, Amy sitting on a back porch that’s been converted into a TV room. She pats the spot on the love seat beside her and I remember that I still haven’t found out from her why Christine didn’t see her mother when she came to visit Briarwood last month. I sit down next to Amy and instantly sink into a deep hollow in the old sofa. I’m hauling myself up onto a firmer perch when Nathan comes out of the kitchen holding two plates of food and, seeing me, rushes to my side like a drowning man swimming to shore. He squeezes himself onto the love seat, which was hardly big enough for me and Amy, and hands me a plate full of potato salad, doughnuts, and hot dogs wrapped in Pillsbury dough.

  “Christine’s aunt Beth said I had to try a little of everything,” he says with a desperate look in his eyes. “She made me take two plates. You’ll eat some, won’t you?” He’s holding up one of the doughy blobs and looking at it as if it might explode. From the bright yellow mustard stains on his skinny tie I guess that his fears aren’t unwarranted.

  Amy reaches over me and takes both plates out of our hands. She manages to extricate herself from the viselike love seat with surprising grace for such a large woman. “I’ll just take these to the front room where Beth’s children are watching TV. You two young people want to talk among yourselves.”

  “But I thought he was Chrissie’s young man,” Aunt Beth says, coming into the room with another platter of pigs in blankets to replace the plates Amy has removed. Guiltily, Nathan takes a bite of the hot dog still in his hand. “Though I must say you look a hair young to have been taking Chrissie out.”

  “I wasn’t—” Nathan stammers through a mouthful of hot dog. A jet of mustard—bright as cadmium yellow paint—squirts out of the pillowy dough as if it had been secreted there under high pressure. Nathan futilely tries to intercept the fallout with a paper napkin so thin (it looks like the kind sold in bulk to institutions and I suspect it’s come to the Webb household courtesy of Briarwood’s supply closet) it instantly dissolves as if bathed in acid.

  “But then I read in People magazine that older women have started going after the younger men because all the ones their own age have been taken already,” Beth says, taking Amy’s vacated place on the love seat. Nathan has turned such a bright red that along with the spots of French’s mustard dotting his shirt and pants he looks like he’s contracted some kind of exotic jungle fever since entering the Webb household.

  “That’s what comes of taking so long to finish school and putting off getting married. I never did understand why Chrissie needed to go to school for so many years and if she were going to go back to school again why she couldn’t have gone for a certificate in something she could get a job in. Like my Alice has gone for her occupational therapy license so she can get to the next pay level uphill …”

  “Uphill?” Nathan whispers in my ear.

  “Up at Briarwood,” I explain, trying to keep my voice low, but Beth can’t help but hear me since she’s practically sitting in my lap.

  “Did you see it on your way in?” Beth asks, straightening her spine and patting her teased and lacquered hair.

  “Yes, Juno pointed it out to me. It’s quite an impressive building. Gothic revival, I would think …”

  “It was built by Frederick Clark Withers,” Beth answers proudly. I can see that Nathan is surprised to hear the name of the famous English architect come out of the same mouth that just swallowed three pigs in blankets whole. He’s made the mistake many do on first meeting Christine’s family of underestimating them. They’re not stupid—just uninterested in anything outside of a five-mile radius of the little hamlet that surrounds the hospital. They are experts, though, on anything to do with Briarwood and the luminaries connected to it. I once heard Amy, for instance, compare the benefits of insight-oriented therapy to reality-adaptive psychotherapy on schizophrenics—the subject of a research study that Briarwood had participated in during the eighties. (Neither did them any good, she’d concluded, there’s nothing you can do for those poor souls but keep them clean and out of harm’s way.)

  “And Calvert Vaux designed the grounds,” Beth continues, “the same fellow as worked on Central Park.” As she pronounces the landscape architect’s name to rhyme with “sew” I can feel Nathan, who’s slipped down into my hollow on the couch, tense and murmur the correct pronunciation, which rhymes with “fox.” Before he can say it again more loudly (the aunts hate to be corrected on anything to do with Briarwood) I put a hand on his bony knee.

  “You know, Nathan really ought to see the grounds while he’s here. Can you still get onto the bridle path through the side gate?”

  Beth nods. “Yes, as long as you stay on that path no one will bother you and the boy ought to see it if he’s interested in architecture. New York City’s not the only place to see famous buildings.”

  By the time I’ve gotten us free of the love seat’s bony grip and declined Beth’s offer of packing us a picnic lunch for “our hike” I feel as if I’ve busted out of jail. The air outside, although warm, feels like balm after breathing in the aunts’ Lucky Strikes.

  �
�The path’s a quarter mile up the road. I hope you don’t mind an uphill hike.”

  “Are you kidding? After all the pork fat I’ve consumed? Do you think those doughnuts were fried in lard? And were those actually pork rinds? I didn’t think anyone ate those north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And what were those crunchy things in the potato salad … no, never mind, I don’t want to know. It’s not that I’m kosher, but I’ve actually never seen that many pork products at one meal before. God, do I sound like a horrible snob?”

  Nathan stops so abruptly that I bump into him and nearly shove him into the path of an oncoming SUV. The shoulder is narrow here because of the ten-foot-tall brick wall that surrounds the grounds of the hospital.

  Before I can think of a kind way to answer Nathan’s question he answers it himself. “I do, don’t I? I’m making fun of Christine’s family at her own wake.”

  “It’s okay. Christine would be the first to join in.” I put my hand on Nathan’s elbow and steer him off the road toward a gate in the brick wall that’s so overrun by vines and bramble I almost missed it. It’s obvious that the bridle path hasn’t been used in years. “She couldn’t stand her family.”

  “I know it sounds awful to say, but I can’t imagine someone as refined as Christine coming from this kind of background. Is it possible she was adopted?”

  I laugh. “Christine admitted that it was a cherished childhood fantasy that she didn’t really belong to the Webbs. But then in the fifth grade her class learned about blood types and she found out she was AB negative—which is pretty rare. She asked her mother what her blood type was and found out it was the same. Then when her mother figured out why she was asking she lifted up her shirt and showed Christine her caesarian scar and told her, ‘Don’t you ever think I didn’t give birth to you after what you did coming out of me.’ ”

  “Lovely.” Nathan bats at an encroaching vine that has reached out to snag his shirt cuff. Poor Nathan. Now he’s got blood as well as mustard on what is probably his one good shirt.

  “Yeah, well to give Mrs. Webb some credit it must have felt crummy to know your own daughter would prefer not to be related to you. I don’t think Ruth knew what to make of Christine—she must have seemed like a changeling.” The word, with its fairy tale connotations of demon offspring swapped at birth, makes me shiver. Or maybe it’s just that it’s cold here in this tunnel-like path hidden from the sun. The overgrown state of the path makes me realize how much time has gone by since I walked here with Christine and that saddens me, too. It’s as if the past we shared together has already been encroached upon by her death.

  “You’d think she’d have a little more sensitivity considering she worked in a psychiatric hospital.” As if the words had summoned up the place, the path opens up to a clear knoll from which we can see, across a sloping green lawn, the rambling brick building that’s the main ward of the hospital, and the Hudson River below it. There’s a bench here where Christine and I used to sit and where I came after my last visit with Neil. In memory of our mother, Elizabeth “Binky” Soames reads the plaque set into its slatted back. I point it out to Nathan as we sit down.

  “Christine called it the Binky bench. She always said you couldn’t blame the woman for ending up uphill when everyone called her Binky.”

  “Ending up uphill?”

  “That’s what her mother and aunts said when someone was institutionalized here. They’d ended up uphill. Christine said it was kind of a childhood threat, her family’s version of the boogie man. Any sign of eccentric behavior—like drawing or daydreaming or talking to yourself—and her mother would say if you keep that up you’ll end up uphill. I don’t think working here made the Webbs sensitive to the victims of mental illness. You probably have to be a little callous not to go crazy yourself. But for all their hardness, I suspect the things they saw here scared them. Unfortunately, it just made Christine afraid that she really was crazy. She told me once that that was the thing she feared most—losing her sanity.”

  “Do you think she would kill herself if she thought that was happening?”

  The question, coming so suddenly, startles me. And yet it’s what everyone at the funeral and down at the Webb’s house must be thinking. I suspect it’s the conclusion Detective Falco shared with Ruth at the funeral and that it’s what Amy was going to tell me at the funeral—that Christine avoided her mother because she was having some sort of breakdown.

  “I don’t know, maybe. There were times—four years ago before she went into rehab and for a period back in college—that she seemed almost infatuated with the idea of suicide. She and my ex-husband Neil had this sort of running joke where they’d compete over who was the most likely to end up killing themselves.”

  Nathan winces.

  “I know, but they had a literary precedent. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton used to argue over martinis at the Ritz Hotel about who was most suicidal. When Plath killed herself Sexton wrote a poem accusing Sylvia of stealing her death from her. Neil and Christine loved that.”

  “So what happened to your ex-husband? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  I lift my chin in the direction of the gothic pile of brick. “He’s here at Briarwood. At least, I think he still is.” I think again of that fleeting shadow I saw through the windows at Silas B. Cooke’s. What would Neil make of Christine’s death? Would he remember that grudge match they had in college? But looking at the hospital—at its barred windows and gated doors like some medieval castle sealed off from the world—I can’t imagine how he would even hear about her death, and before Nathan can ask me what I’m sure will be a series of prying questions about Neil I go back to Christine. After all, this is her day. I’ll have time to think of Neil later.

  “But I don’t see why Christine would have committed suicide now. She seemed like she was getting her life back together. She almost had her degree …”

  “You know she’d switched concentrations again.”

  “I know she switched from medieval art to nineteenth-century painting last year.”

  “She’d just switched again—to early-twentieth-century decorative arts. She said it was because of researching the Penrose window.”

  “But that would have set her back at least another year.”

  “It’s not that unusual. People take decades to get their doctorates. But there was something so intense in Christine when she was focused on something that it was unsettling when she switched gears so abruptly—”

  I knew what he was talking about. Neil had been like that, too. One minute you’d have his complete attention, and the next he had disappeared, gone to work on a painting.

  “—her thesis adviser confessed that he was worried about her. She’d missed appointments with him over the last few months and she wasn’t keeping up with her teaching responsibilities. He said she was in danger of losing her scholarship money if she didn’t get her act together.”

  “He said that to Christine?”

  Nathan nods, his gaze on the river and the hills in the distance. “Just last week.”

  “Damn. It probably sounded to Christine like one of her mother’s threats. ‘If you don’t shape up you’ll end up uphill.’ ”

  “Maybe that’s what she thought her choices were.”

  “What?”

  Nathan lifts his chin toward the sprawling brick building just like I did a moment ago to indicate Neil’s abode. “Look at the two things she grew up with that had any beauty—a psychiatric hospital—” He turns his head toward the river. “—and the river. Maybe she decided to choose the river because she thought that otherwise she might end up in the hospital.”

  ON OUR WALK BACK DOWN THE BRIDLE PATH NATHAN AND I LAPSE INTO SILENCE. IT feels appropriate after the conversation we’ve just had about Christine as a way of honoring her in the chapel-like stillness of the woods. At least I hope that’s what Nathan’s doing. I, regrettably, have gone back to thinking about Neil.

  The reason the glimpse of the shadow behind the windows
at Cooke’s made me think of him, I’ve realized, is that it’s so much like the first glimpse I ever had of him.

  I usually tell people that I met Neil the spring semester of my junior year in Professor Da Silva’s Dante class, but that isn’t precisely true. I met him—or perhaps I should say, caught my first sight of him—during Christmas break that year at the Cloisters museum in Manhattan. Christine had called me the first week of the new year and begged me to meet her on the southbound train on what turned out to be the coldest day of the year.

  We got off at the Marble Hill station and walked across the 225th Street bridge and down Broadway toward Fort Tryon Park. It was a good two-mile hike through icy city streets, and it began to snow as we entered the park. I’d been to the Cloisters once before on a school field trip on a muggy day in June but I’d found it hard to lose myself in the feeling of being in a medieval monastery. There’d been too many high school kids making lewd jokes about the grotesque demons and beasts carved into the column capitals. But on that day with Christine, trudging across the snow-covered terrain of Fort Tryon Park on cold, tired feet, I could imagine, when I caught sight of the stone towers, that Christine and I were two of Chaucer’s pilgrims looking for sanctuary at the monastery.

  We had the place pretty much to ourselves. Christine was disappointed that the Cuxa Cloister—the largest cloister at the center of the museum—had been glassed off against the cold weather, but I loved the way the sun came in through the glass panes, warming the mottled pink Carrara marble. While Christine paced around the square, I settled against a column in the northwest corner of the arcade and took out my sketchbook. While I drew she kept up a running commentary on the figures carved into the marble capitals, pointing out particularly grotesque demons.

  “Have you ever wondered,” she asked from the far end of the arcade, “why the most religious people are most fascinated with hell?”

  I shrugged. It didn’t seem like the kind of conversation to shout across a public space, even though we appeared to be alone in the cloister.