The Drowning Tree (15 page)

I
SLEEP LATE THE NEXT MORNING AND AWAKEN TO THE SMELL OF LEAD SOLDER
. Coming down the stairs I see Ernesto at the light table bent over a tray of glass, and Robbie at another workbench soldering a crack in one of the ruby-red folds of the Lady’s dress. From my vantage point on the steps I can see that Robbie’s solder line is smooth and even, a perfect silver band, as delicate and shiny as scar tissue. Robbie has a steady hand, patience, and a great eye for color; he’d make an excellent stained-glass conservator. I know, though, that his real ambition is to be a painter. This is just a summer job between semesters at Parsons. When he graduates he plans to share an apartment with three or four other students over in DUMBO or Williamsburg, paying the rent with graphic arts jobs while hoping to be discovered by the art world. I wonder whether if we could get funding to
turn the factory into an art center—with studios and stipends for working artists—young artists like Robbie would stick around Rosedale.

“Good work,” I tell Robbie, walking by him to the coffeemaker. He doesn’t lift his head but I can see the edges of his Plexiglas mask lift as he smiles. I don’t want to make him nervous so I take my cup of coffee over to the light table to see what Ernesto’s doing. Spread out on the lit surface are pieces of glass cut into the low curving shapes of hills and mountains. Each piece is a slightly different shade of green, blue, or purple. Assembled together they make up the hills in the inset window—or mirror, if Christine was right in her interpretation—above the Lady’s head. The landscape’s the most complicated part of the restoration because Penrose used a plating technique to create the illusion of depth, layering separate sheets of glass on top of one another so that the lily pool appears bottomless, the branches of the weeping beech dense and shadowy, and the mountains seem to recede into a misty distance of sky and cloud. Of course we numbered and diagrammed each piece before taking them apart, but I notice that Ernesto’s not looking at the blueprint I drew up. Instead he’s moving the pieces around on the table with the intent focus of a kindergartner assembling a picture puzzle.

“I think they got this wrong,” he says when I sit down on the high stool next to him.

“Who got it wrong?”

“Mr. Penrose … or whoever he paid to put together these mountains. They got it backward.”

“You mean because they’re not in the same order as the real mountains on the other side of the river? My friend Christine said in her lecture that was because it’s actually a mirror reflection of the window. See, if you rearrange them—” I try to arrange the mountains the way Christine had suggested they should go, but when I’m finished they don’t look at all right. “Anyway, it’s not supposed to be a photo-perfect rendition of the Hudson Highlands, just a suggestion of the landscape across the river …”

Ernesto shakes his head. “Then why is this piece in the back—” He holds up the plate of green glass. “—green?”

The thick glass he’s holding up in the light from the window is
streaked through with a number of colors—iridescent swirls of purple and plumes of peacock blue—even a wavy line of palest aqua, but it is predominantly green.

“Uh … because the hills are forested and trees are green?” I suggest. The truth is I have no idea what Ernesto’s getting at. Although a loyal employee and a brilliant hot-glass worker, his English is a little shaky and some of his ideas can be a bit fanciful.

“All these hills got trees, girl,” he says, shaking his head. It could be the opening line of a spiritual.
All these hills got trees, girl, all God’s children’s got
 … “But it’s only the closest one where you can see the trees. The ones farthest always look blue—” He holds up another mountain. There’s still some green in this glass, but more blue, mostly dark blue except for another wavy line of pale aqua. “—and the really far away ones look purple.” He holds up a darker piece of glass, peaked in the center and hued a rich shade of grape. “So why’d he put the green mountains in the back?”

“He did?”

Ernesto nods and takes his eyes off the glass for the first time to wink at me. “There’s something more. You see these wavy lines of water blue at the ends of these mountains and in the middle of this purple one?” Ernesto picks up another piece of glass and traces a wavy line of pale glass with his long delicate finger. Most of us who work with glass have a million tiny scars on our hands but Ernesto’s hands are immaculate. “That’s dichroic glass, girl.”

“Dichroic? What’s that?” I hear Robbie’s voice ask. He’s put down his solder gun and come up behind me.

“Mr. Tiffany invented that and liked to use it in his lamps, but Mr. Penrose copied it off him. See, you put this glass down on the table and turn off the light. “Now you see it—” Ernesto points to Robbie to switch the light box off. “Now you don’t.” The wavy aqua line is gone.

“Cool,” Robbie says. “It’s like a secret message in the glass.” He says it like a boy who’s just found a decoder ring in his Cracker Jacks.

“I sat under this window for four years,” I say, “I never noticed a dichroic pattern.”

“ ’Course you didn’t, girl, because someone messed up on these
mountains. See, here’s how they were.” Ernesto sets to work layering the glass according to the blueprint of how they were assembled when we took the window down. When he’s done he motions for Robbie to switch on the light box but still there’s no sign of the wavy line. “The light can’t shine through because there’s all these dark pieces over the pattern. Turn that light off again, Robbie boy.” Deftly, Ernesto rearranges the glass mountains with the green mountain in front, then the blue one, and then the rest of the mountains receding into the distance. When he’s done he’s created a landscape of mountains tapering down into a valley in the middle. Ernesto takes a step back and then makes a few minute adjustments to the position of the glass. “See, now you got a valley, but it’s like a valley in a drought, no water flowing through it. But then the light come—” Ernesto lifts up his hand with the grandeur of an Old Testament prophet and Robbie reaches down to switch on the light box. “—and the light set the rivers to flowing.”

Where the foothills of the mountains had a moment ago been cloaked in darkness a stream now appears—a snaky line of pale blue leading the eye from the water lily pool toward the purple mountain in the distance. It’s as if the light had uncovered a secret passageway leading into the heart of the distant hills.

A
FTER
E
RNESTO’S DISCOVERY
I
DECIDE TO PAY
G
AVIN
P
ENROSE A VISIT
. T
HE EXCUSE
that I formulate driving up the hill toward the college is to tell him about the dichroic pattern Ernesto’s discovered in the landscape panel—but what I’d really like to know is how the college plans to handle the news of Christine’s death and whether there will be a memorial service on campus. Driving up College Avenue is a little like watching a home repair show in accelerated motion. The shabby Victorians that surround my neighborhood neaten up: sagging porches straighten out, gaps in gingerbread trim are filled in, and faded paint grows bright. Perhaps a shade too bright. The faculty members who have bought and refurbished these old houses seem to think they’re in San Francisco. They also seem to have been seized by a mania for flags so that I feel as I approach the college gates as if I were part of a parade. When I pass under the gates—beneath
the wrought-iron motto “Spectemur Agendo”—“Let us be judged by our actions”—the transformation from decaying factory town to the hallowed groves of academia is complete. The grass on this side of the gate is actually greener, the sun that bathes the red bricks of Forest Hall and the clean gray granite of the library’s gothic tower seems to shine a little brighter—it’s almost as if the very air were different. Sharper. And while that air has always made me feel a little light-headed—still the townie trespassing on private property—I know that to Christine it was the elixir of life. She loved the college. Coming to Penrose transformed her life. She would want a memorial service here, not at a dour funeral home in Poughkeepsie.

I park in a visitor slot in front of Forest Hall, right next to a pale green Jaguar which I recognize as Gavin’s, and enter the stately, tiled foyer. When Augustus Penrose designed the house for Eugenie and himself he also envisioned it as a showplace for his art collection and a communal gathering place for artists. When I went to Penrose College, students were invited in for a weekly tea, a tradition most of my classmates regarded as hokey and boring. Christine, however, loved it and compelled me every Friday to put on a skirt and go with her. It occurs to me as I enter the tiled foyer that it would be the ideal location for Christine’s memorial service—better than the chapel even—because it was, after all, Christine’s favorite place on campus.

It’s not hard to see why. Although eclectic in its architecture and decoration—combining Gothic, Moorish, and Japanese features—the cruciform design with its open courtyard at the center creates a harmonious whole. The central courtyard is paved with a pale green marble that matches the green leaf pattern in the domed skylight and the ceramic capitals of the columns that support the skylight. The floral design in the capitals—a mixture of water lilies and wild irises—is echoed in a pattern of water lily pads that surrounds a large glass vase at the center of the fountain. The vase itself is a pale iridescent lavender etched with irises. Water rising up from the center of the fountain slowly seeps over the edge of the glass vase and spills into a narrow canal that leads from the fountain down the main hall—the Forest Hall, as it’s called—which gives the building its name.

Passing the dining hall, where I watched Christine bask in the success of her lecture a little over a week ago, I follow the narrow stream of water down that hall toward Gavin’s office. It’s called the Forest Hall because of the series of paintings on the wall—all of which are set in a deeply wooded forest. The first paintings appear to be nature studies of a forest of widely spaced trees but, as you go farther down the hall, the trees crowd together, their leaves darken, their branches knot and twist like fingers clenching and reaching out.

Walking down the hall I feel as if someone is shadowing my steps in the painted wood. It’s more than just my morbid imagination. Penrose painted the trees anthropomorphically so that you’d feel you were being followed even before you saw hints of figures hiding in the trees: a wisp of drapery snagged on a branch, a hand resting on the boll of a giant beech. Soon the forest is populated with figures from Greek mythology who, for one reason or another, were turned into trees. There’s Baucis and Philemon, the elderly couple whose reward for their hospitality to Zeus is eternal life intertwined together as two trees, and Daphne at the moment when the River God, her father, grants her wish to turn into a laurel to evade Apollo’s embrace.

After Daphne comes a series of paintings that have always simultaneously repelled and fascinated me. In the first one a woman crouches at the edge of a pool, holding a baby in one arm and reaching for a flower floating on the water with her other hand. Another woman sits on the shore watching. In the next painting, the woman reaching for the flower has drawn back her hand, which is covered with blood. There’s a look of horror on her face that I’ve always found frightening. In the next scene you see why she is so horrified: as a sheath of bark creeps up the woman’s body she tries to suckle the baby to her breast, but the baby’s mouth touches only smooth, impermeable bark.

Gross!
is what half the girls at Penrose say when they happen to pass by this tableau. Christine loved it, though. “The one nursing the baby is Dryope. She’s being punished because she picked a forbidden lotus flower,” Christine told me. “The one with her arms around her is her sister, Iole. Dryope begged her to take her baby to raise and always warn him to ‘beware of pools and never pick blossoms from trees’! Sound advice we should all follow.”

I can very nearly picture Christine shaking her finger as she delivered this last bit. When I asked her why all the women in the paintings—even Dryope and her sister—looked alike she said because they were all portraits of Eugenie. But then the Lady in the Window was supposed to be Eugenie. If Christine’s right about the lady in the window, might some of these other portraits also be of Eugenie’s sister Clare? I look closely at the faces of Dryope and her sister, and wonder if the one imprisoned in the bark might be Clare, and the one watching her sister’s fate might be Eugenie.

“There you are! I was just calling you.” I’m startled out of my examination of the painting by a voice from behind me. When I turn around I see it’s Fay, her thin gray hair held back on her head by a phone headset. For a moment I think she must be talking to someone on the phone instead of me because there’s no reason why she should be expecting me, but then she grabs my elbow and steers me toward the president’s office at the end of the hall.

“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 …”