The Drowning Tree (13 page)

When I’ve pumped in enough quarters to start all the machines I stick the pages in my bag and walk down the street to Cafe Galatea, or Gal’s as the locals call it, an Italian bakery that’s one of the few surviving downtown businesses. Housewives and society matrons from the Heights still stop off at Gal’s after dropping their husbands off at the train station, to pick up cannolis and biscotti for bridge luncheons and Italian cheesecake and tiramisu for dinner parties. In an hour, when late mass lets out at St. Al’s there’ll be an after-church crowd, but for now there are only two old men playing chess at a corner table and a teenage boy who, between sips of black espresso, is stealing glances at the beautiful girl behind the counter.

“Ciao, Portia, Come stai?”

“Bene, Zia Juno.”
I’m not really Portia’s aunt—I think we’re second cousins actually. After my mother died my father avoided her family, and most of them repaid the favor. Because Portia’s just a few years older than Bea, though, I’ve stayed more in touch with her and her mother—who was my mother’s favorite cousin.

“Any news from Penrose?” I ask. Portia shakes her head and sighs. She’d been wait-listed at the college a month before. I know it’s her first choice and I can’t help thinking that if only I had graduated I might have more pull in getting her in.

“E tuo amico? Chi e?”
I ask after ordering an amaretto cappuccino and a hazelnut biscotti to go.

Portia rolls her lovely almond-shaped eyes up toward the stamped tin ceiling and tells me, in Italian, that he’s a new kid in school and that her English teacher assigned them to do a project together on
The Merchant of Venice. “E’ sempre qui.”

I glance over at the poor love-struck boy. It’s obvious why he’s here all the time. He’s smitten with Portia. The patches of red streaking his acne-pitted skin, though, must be coming from more than his proximity to his beloved. I notice that’s he’s reading
La Vita Nuova
in the original Italian and guess the cause of his blushes. I quickly scribble on a Cinzano coaster, “I think he understands Italian,” and slide it across the bar to where Portia’s lowering the press to make my cappuccino.

“Shit,” Portia says in English and loudly enough to draw the attention of the two chess players.

“Scusi, Zii, mi sono bruciato il dito sul macinino da caffe.”
Portia points to the offending machine and holds up the supposedly burnt finger. I notice, as I leave, that the boy is grinning into his Dante.

I take my coffee and biscotti to a bench outside facing the river, remembering only after I sit down that I haven’t washed my hands since handling the lead-contaminated clothes. Fortunately, Portia’s put the biscotti in a bag so I put it aside and take out the coffee, being careful not to touch the rim of the blue and white to-go cup with its stylized rendering of the Parthenon. I take a sip, savoring the combination of rich, bitter espresso beans and the sweet almond amaretto. Christine told me once
that she was forever ordering amaretto lattes from Starbucks and forever being disappointed because they never got the combination right like Gal’s did.

I push away the thought of Christine and take out the folded pages from my bag—figuring I might as well handle them now before I wash my hands. The first page—the one I looked at in the library last week—is covered with sketches of a woman’s face. I remember that Ernesto thought they were probably discarded sketches for the window, and the face depicted does resemble the face of the lady of the window even though none of the details of costume or setting are the same. Still, the curve of her cheek, the way her head tilts to one side, even, in one sketch, the way the woman’s fingers trail through her own hair, all recall the image in the window. So I’m surprised when I turn the page sideways and see that the writing there is dated June 21, 1892—three years before the Penroses came to America and thirty years before the window was installed at Penrose. Could the window actually be based on sketches that Augustus Penrose did thirty years earlier when he was still in England?

I hold the page up to the light to make out the minute handwriting. The overall effect of the penmanship is of some intricate embroidery pattern. Even though it’s small, each letter is precisely rendered—as if the writer had just taken a class in calligraphy—and I’m able, once I stop looking at it as decoration, to make out what it says.

At the last line I shiver despite the warm sun on my back. What a chilling presentiment of Clare Barovier’s future madness! I can’t help wondering if it was some hint of that madness that caused Augustus Penrose to see her as the perfect model for his Lady of Shalott.

I turn to the next page to see if the entry is continued but find a new date—several days later—at the top of the page. I flip through the rest of the pages and find that they’re densely crammed with Eugenie’s small, precise handwriting—the only sketches are those on the first page. What I’ve got here are pages from Eugenie Penrose’s diary from the day she met Augustus Penrose through the first weeks of their acquaintance—courtship, actually, because even though this first entry gives no hint of it (she makes it sound as if Clare were the object of Penrose’s interest) I know from what I’ve read about the Penroses that they married only three months after they met and left almost immediately for America. The only journals that the college has, though, date from after the founding of the college. These pages—which I very nearly destroyed!—represent an incredible find for the college archives. I suppose I should be excited, but all I can think about is that the person who would have been most interested in Eugenie Penrose’s girlhood diary is dead.

I
N MY DREAM
I
HEAR SOMEONE COMING UP THE STEPS FROM THE RIVER
. I
THINK IT’S
Neil—it’s always Neil—but when I open the door I see it’s Christine.

“We have to talk,” she says. She’s wearing the same slim black sheath, leather jacket, and knee-high boots she wore to give her lecture.

“Of course,” I say, following her out onto the roof. She sits down in the torn vinyl lawn chair and I start to drag the rusted metal chair toward her but she holds up a hand.

“I need something to drink first.”

So I go into the loft and retrieve a bottle of water from the fridge but when I look for glasses I see that they’re all dirty. Dozens of Ernesto’s long-stemmed goblets are bobbing in dirty dishwater.

I hold one under the spigot, delicately sponging away the gray water, but just when I’ve gotten it clean the glass shatters in my hand. I fish another one out of the murky water but it, too, implodes under the lightest pressure from my fingertips. One after another, each glass crumples in my hands until I’ve gone through a dozen of Ernesto’s lovely goblets and the gray dishwater is tinged pink with my own blood.

Finally I open the cabinet above the sink and take out two jelly glasses decorated with faded Disney characters: Ursula from
The Little Mermaid
and Maleficent from
Sleeping Beauty
. I fill the stubby glasses with sparkling water and take them out to the rooftop. Christine has let down her hair and I notice that she’s intertwined long green-and-white-striped ribbons through the damp locks. I hand her the Ursula glass and sit down next to her. She turns to me but just as she begins to talk we both hear someone knocking on the side door.

“He must have followed me,” she says.

I turn back to tell her that he can wait but already the dream is fading, the long green ribbons in her hair—no, not ribbons, but grass, long strands of the striped zebra grass that grows at the bottom of the Hudson—are melting like glass canes twisted in the furnace. I reach out to touch her arm and her skin shatters like Ernesto’s goblets. I find myself in my own bed in a tangle of clean laundry and inert greyhounds—Paolo nested in the crook of my knees, Francesca curled up at my ankles—listening to a pounding in my head.

I lie perfectly still, eyes closed, willing myself back into the dream to hear what Christine had come to tell me, but though I can see her face it’s like an image on a videotape that’s been paused. It has no power to speak. The only thing I hear is the pounding—which I realize now is actually someone knocking at the side door.

When I lift myself out of bed I see that the sky is a pale overcast lavender that could be dawn or dusk. I can’t remember when I went to sleep or what day it is. All I remember is that Christine is dead.

I open the metal door a crack, half expecting to find one of the drowned apparitions of my dreams, but it’s only Kyle carrying a sack of groceries tucked under one arm and a bottle of wine in the other.

“I didn’t know if you’d still feel up to dinner but I figured you could use the company,” he says. “Were you working downstairs?”

“No, I was sleeping. I didn’t get much sleep last night. What time is it?”

Kyle tries to turn the hand that’s wrapped around the grocery bag, but it’s obvious that he can’t see around the bag to the watch. It’s equally obvious that I should be stepping back to let him in, taking the bag, or at least the wine, out of his hands, and then moving forward to … what? Kiss him on the cheek? On the mouth? I’m as confused about what stage we are in as I am about the time and the day. For the last few weeks Kyle and I have been hovering on the edges of romantic attraction. We’ve brushed up against each other at crew matches, gotten drunk after Bea’s gone to bed, and once, after one of my lessons at the college pool, made out in the sports equipment closet. I think we both expected this to be the night we’d end up in bed.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I completely forgot about dinner … the house is a mess and I didn’t get a chance to go shopping—”

“Juno,” he cuts in, “your best friend just died. I’m not here to be entertained; I’m here to take care of you.”

I meet his gaze and see nothing but innocent compassion there. I could be looking at Francesca or Paolo when they want to be taken for a walk. He’s wearing a Creedence Clearwater Revival T-shirt, and his dark, shoulder-length hair falls loosely forward as he leans toward me.
A boy
, I find myself thinking, even though he’s the same age as I am. It’s only because I had Bea so young that men—and women for that matter—my own age often seem so much younger.

I take the bottle of wine from him and lean forward to press my cheek against his, catching as I do a sweet earthy smell that reminds me at first of the river until I recognize it as marijuana.

“I got some organic mesclun at the farmer’s market,” he says, setting the grocery bag down on the kitchen counter, “and three kinds of wild mushrooms for soup. Have you ever had kombu?”

I shake my head and start rummaging through the silverware drawer for a corkscrew. Of course I realized before this that Kyle smoked pot and it’s not as if I hadn’t indulged in plenty of illegal substances in college. It’s just that with Bea to raise I’ve tried to stay away from any drugs stronger than a glass of wine and the occasional Advil.
How else
, I’ve asked myself over the years,
could I tell her with a straight face—literally—to “just
say no”?
And given what happened to Bea’s father under the influence of drugs, I think it’s a pretty good idea for Bea to stay away from them.

“It’s seaweed,” Kyle tells me when I find the corkscrew, “harvested off the coast of northern Japan and sun-dried right on the beach. I’m going to use it to make a dashi—a stock for the soup. It’s excellent for digestion and the immune system.” Kyle opens a plastic bag and pulls out something that looks like a dried plant stalk bent in half. He holds it up for me to inhale its sweet, low-tide smell.

“You have to take care of yourself when you’re grieving, Juno,” he says, laying the flat, broad blade of seaweed into a bowl of water. “Christine was very important to you.”

“I think if I hadn’t met Christine I would have spent my four years of college in the library or in my dorm room,” I say turning the screw in the cork. “After my mother died I retreated into this hole. Christine pulled me out of it. She’d lost a parent, too. Her father died when she was little and her mother’s always been a miserable person—shit,
Christine’s mother
. Detective Falco said he was notifying her, but I should call to find out what she’s doing about a funeral …”