The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  One of the men straightens up and waves and I recognize Nathan Bell. He shakes Falco’s hand and then, when I put my hand out, pulls me into an awkward hug. “I’m so glad you convinced her to come,” he says to Falco. “We found another piece of the second figure today and it works to link the two together. It’s beginning to make sense.”

  “The second figure?” I ask.

  “Come look,” Nathan says.

  The marble pieces have been arranged on the grass like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It’s like looking at a stained-glass window before the pieces are soldered together, only because the final project here is three-dimensional it’s harder to read. Nathan crouches in the grass and touches each piece, explaining how they fit together, until slowly a picture of the two statues emerges.

  The first figure half stands, half crouches, her arms thrown back as if to catch her balance. Her hair falls over her head, covering her face. In among the strands are leaves.

  “What are these ridges?” I ask, fingering the rough surface of the marble.

  “Bark,” Nathan says. “She’s turning into a tree, just like Bernini’s Daphne.”

  “Or like the figure in The Drowning Tree.”

  “Right. We think it stood on the wall, right at the edge of the water above the second statue. It’s exactly like the scene in The Drowning Tree. Two women, one turning into a tree, the other below her in the water.”

  “It re-creates the moment Eugenie told Clare that she was going to marry Augustus and she tried to drown herself,” I tell Nathan and Falco. “I read about it in Eugenie’s diary.”

  Nathan nods. “That may be, but I don’t think the one in the water is trying to drown herself. Look—”

  Nathan points to another group of fragments. There’s only a piece left of the face: a sliver of nose and eye, half a mouth opened in mid-scream. The expression in the one eye is of terror and … something else … pleading, I think. One arm is extended, the fingers splayed, as if reaching toward the figure on the shore for help. The other arm is wrapped around a piece of the statue’s torso, clutching loose folds of drapery that fall over her stomach. The gesture reminds me of something from Eugenie’s diary.

  “When Clare finished telling her story about the drowning tree,” I say, “Eugenie asked if the story was from Ovid.”

  “Another woman fond of her myths,” Falco says, shaking his head.

  “Yes, Clare sounded impatient, too. She told Eugenie, ‘Not everything’s from a book’ and then she said …” I close my eyes, trying to remember the words from the diary and picture instead the scene it described. Clare, crouched at the edge of the water below her sister, holding one hand over her belly—“She said, ‘Here’s life, whether you see it or not.’ She was telling Eugenie that she was pregnant and that it was Augustus’s child. God, it must have killed Eugenie.”

  “Enough to make her push her sister in the water,” Falco says.

  I shake my head. “No … I don’t know … I think Clare did step into the water herself, but she must have thought Eugenie would save her. She was her big sister, always looking out for her, even if she was sometimes a little overbearing. But then Eugenie just stood there. She did nothing to save Clare. If Augustus hadn’t come along—I bet he was hiding someplace nearby to see how the interview went—she might have drowned. By the time he got her out of the water, though, she was having a miscarriage. Eugenie’s diary says her body was drenched and bleeding.”

  “Poor Clare,” Nathan says, looking down at the fragments of marble scattered on the grass. We’re all silent for a few moments, gazing on the white stones glistening in the sun like bones left over from some awful carnage.

  I WAS LATE FOR THE LECTURE.

  I almost didn’t go.

  I had sworn that I’d never look at the lady in the window again, but I felt I owed it to Christine to look at the window one more time, now that it had been put back together the way it was meant to be. Besides, Bea wanted to go and I didn’t want her to go alone.

  The day was overcast. I was glad for that. I didn’t want to see the light shining through the glass and casting lozenges of bright color onto the speaker the way it had for Christine. Professor Da Silva’s speech was brief and subdued. He alluded to a striking new interpretation of the window that we’d all be reading soon when Christine’s research (edited by Nathan Bell) was published. It might challenge some of our preconceived ideas about the college, and about ourselves, but that’s what real scholarship is about, he said, having the vision to see things anew.

  When the lecture is over I stay in my seat while the rest of the audience filters out. Sometime during the talk I’d felt Bea’s head rest on my shoulder. I didn’t want to move. How many years, I wondered, did we have left of this kind of physical closeness? I didn’t know. My own mother had died when I was not much older than Bea. I didn’t have a script for the rest of our lives together.

  After a few moments, when everyone has left, Bea rises and walks up to the window. I watch her as I’ve been watching her since she came home last week, amazed at the transformation that eight weeks away has wrought in her. When she’d left at the beginning of the summer she’d been hovering on the edge between childhood and adulthood, but now the gawkiness of her long limbs is gone. There’s a grace and assurance in the way she holds herself that I’ve never seen before, a confidence in what her body and mind are capable of. She looks like a person who has settled into her own bones. What takes my breath away is how much she looks like Neil. All her life I’ve feared what she might inherit from Neil, but now I can see how much of what is good and strong in her comes from Neil: her willingness to confront life, the way she pushes herself into the current.

  I can only hope that whatever she’s inherited from me serves her half as well. Last week, when I’d finally summoned up the nerve to go back to Dr. Irini Pearlman, the genetic counselor, she told me that I didn’t have the breast cancer gene. “At least not the two we’ve identified,” she’d cautioned after telling me the good news. “You should, of course, continue monthly self-exams and yearly mammograms and encourage your daughter to do the same when she’s older. Even if there’s no genetic propensity in the family, all it means is that you’re in the general risk pool—which is risky enough.”

  Bea touches the plaque beneath the window and reads aloud the line of poetry that comes after Christine’s name and life span, “ ‘Here with her face doth memory sit.’ You know, the lady really does look a lot like Aunt Christine. Are you sure they weren’t related?”

  “I don’t think so, honey.”

  She turns, the look of disappointment on her face making her look like a child again. She would like, I know, to make sense out of Christine’s death. She has been able, at least, to take some comfort in the fact that her father died saving my life—but Christine seems to have died for nothing. “It just seems like such a waste,” Bea says. “That she died trying to find out something that turned out to be untrue.”

  “I think she started out looking through those files to prove she was Clare’s granddaughter,” I say. “Her own family had given her so little that she wanted to belong to something else. But then when she found your father’s file and learned he was doing so much better she wanted me to know. She thought that maybe we—me and your dad and you—could be a family again. So, in a way, that’s what she died trying to do. In the end, I think we were the people she really loved—we were her family.”

  WHEN BEA LEAVES TO FIND PORTIA AT THE RECEPTION, I STAY A LITTLE LONGER, SITting below the window in just about the same spot where I met Christine for the first time. I close my eyes and pray for inspiration.

  “I hear that anyone who studies under this window gets an A on their paper,” a voice says. “I’m hoping for a little inspiration on a report I’m writing.” I open my eyes and look up into Daniel Falco’s clear, gray eyes. “What are you working on?” he asks.

  “A question,” I answer.

  “Just one?”

&n
bsp; “A hard one,” I say. “It’s something Christine asked me on the train platform. She asked if I agreed with this line from Dante.”

  “Oh, Dante, my favorite. Such good punishments. The criminal justice system could learn a lot from him. Which line?”

  “ ‘Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving’ …”

  “Oh yeah, that one. Francesca, right?”

  “Yes.” I’ve ceased being surprised at the detective’s command of literature. “What do you think? Do you agree with her that when you’re loved you have no choice but to love back?”

  He shrugs and looks up at the window. The cloud cover must be lifting outside because the window is now full of late afternoon light. The light opens up a path in the mountains and releases a stream that tumbles into the pool beneath the weeping beech and churns up the water. As the light flickers behind the tree you can make out the form of a woman trapped within the bark. Any moment she will free herself from her long imprisonment. The figure below her in the water holds both arms up toward her as if beckoning her sister to join her in the pool. Just before the light fades I catch the look in her eyes and I’m almost sure, this time, that what I see is forgiveness.

  “What did you say?” I ask. I’d been so busy looking at the window that I’d missed Falco’s answer.

  “I said there’s plenty of unrequited love around.”

  I sigh. “Yeah, that’s what I was going to say to Christine.” I don’t mention that I’d thought of another answer before she got on the train.

  “But then, you know,” Falco continues, looking down at me, “all Dante’s saying is that once you’re beloved you’ve got to love someone. He doesn’t say who you’ve got to love. It could mean that when you’ve been loved once, you’ll love again, because … you know … you’ve been taught how.” He turns back to the window and goes on, his voice sounding suddenly shy. “I guess that sounds pretty silly.”

  “No,” I say. What I don’t tell him is that it’s exactly the answer I’d thought of when the train pulled out. “I don’t think it sounds silly at all.” I look up at Falco’s back, framed against the darkening window. When he turns and looks at me the only light in the room seems to be coming from his eyes.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CAROL GOODMAN is the author of The Seduction of Water and The Lake of Dead Languages. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Greensboro Review, Literal Latté, The Midwest Quarterly, and Other Voices. After graduating from Vassar College, where she majored in Latin, she taught Latin for several years in Austin, Texas. She then received an M.F.A. in fiction from the New School University. Goodman currently teaches writing in New York City. She lives on Long Island.