The Drowning Tree (17 page)

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 copying 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.

“Isn’t that where the painting of
The Drowning Tree
used to be?” I ask.

I can tell from her expression that Fay would like to accuse Christine
of making away with the painting as well as the missing notebook pages, but instead she looks embarrassed as she’s forced to concede that the painting’s absence has nothing to do with Christine.

“President Penrose sent it down to the city to be cleaned. You wouldn’t believe how filthy some of these paintings are.”

I think she’s referring to the subject matter—naked nymphs and breast-feeding trees—but then she swipes a finger along one of the picture frames. “It’s because of the candles they use during parties. President Penrose thinks it’s romantic, but it’s just plain dirty.”

I
SPEND THE REST OF THE DAY WITH
E
UGENIE’S NOTEBOOK SPREAD OPEN ON THE LIGHT
table. To gain some time and quiet—and because we’ve still got bills to pay—I send Ernesto and Robbie out on a job to reinstall a fanlight up on the Heights.

I turn on every light in the studio, but still I find it almost impossible to read Eugenie’s writing in the margins of her sketches. It’s as if the free-flowing script she employed in her youth had contracted and become brittle—like an old woman’s bones—as she grew old. After a while I give up trying to read and let her pictures tell the story. The pen-and-ink sketches are faint, too (I could curse Augustus Penrose for his damned homemade ink) but beautifully intricate. Studying them, my hand itches to be drawing and I find myself doodling on scraps of the white vellum paper we use for rubbings. I find it helps me make sense of the designs to draw them, to see how one thing turns into another in Eugenie’s exotic menagerie of plant and animal life. I recognize many of the patterns that she used in her line of domestic textiles, but I can’t imagine that some of these designs ever made it out of the sketchbook and onto the loom. They’re not exactly what the turn-of-the-century matron would use to upholster her parlor settee and chairs. Sea serpents swallowing carp, bloated octopi ensnaring dainty sea horses. There’s an undercurrent of violence in the sketches that I never noticed in the textiles. She’s linked pieces of the design together by having one
devour
the other. Or transform into the other. There’s a whole series of designs—none of which I have
ever seen rendered in cloth—of women turning into birds or trees or, sometimes, water, wind, or just pure swirls of chaos. I know that Augustus Penrose often used Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
as a source for his painting, just as J. W. Waterhouse, another second-generation Pre-Raphaelite, did. I picture Augustus and Eugenie reading Ovid together, selecting the stories of Baucis and Philemon and Iole and Dryope, for the Forest Hall. Perhaps that’s where Eugenie got the idea for these
metamorphic
tapestries that then proved too complicated to weave into cloth.

Halfway through the notebook, Eugenie stops drawing patterns and starts working on sketches for the Lady window. I wonder if Augustus put her to work on the window plans to give her a rest from designing textiles. Maybe he had found some of her recent fabric patterns disturbing—or, at least, unmarketable.

The first sketches of the window are rough cartoons. A generalized figure of a woman bent over a loom—not looking up as she does in the completed window, the details of the room around her only vaguely suggested. The window above her head is at first empty. Then, in subsequent sketches, trees and shrubbery appear, a few clouds stray into the sky. The surrounding room becomes more detailed. Bolts of cloth appear, then stacks of books, a table with a vase of flowers … a cross between a lady’s sewing room and an artist’s studio, much like the textile studios in Forest Hall. These interiors are lovingly detailed—far too detailed for representation in stained glass. Augustus must have pointed that out to her because I find, turning a page near the center of the book, a drawing with the interior scene roughly crosshatched out. Scrawled across the drawing in black ink that has not faded with time are the words, “You’ve turned my muse into a seamstress!” The handwriting’s nothing like Eugenie’s—young or old—it’s clearly Augustus’s verdict on his wife’s work.

In the drawing on the next page the interior has been simplified: The lady has looked up from her loom, and mountains have risen in the window behind her. A shaggy beech tree looms over the lily pool like a beast about to leap through the window and devour the lady. When I turn to the next page I see I’ve come to the place where the page has been torn out. The next page shows the completed drawing for the window, the glass sections blocked out and numbered according to a number key in the margin.

“If you get any closer to that drawing you’ll fall into it.”

I pull my head up and feel a sudden twinge in my back from bending over the table so long.

“Dad, you startled me. I don’t mind you using your own key—but give a person some warning when you come creeping up on them,” I say, closing the notebook.

“Ha! This from a girl who used to hear me light up a smoke from two blocks away. I hollered twice,” he protests. “These sorry excuses for guard dogs certainly heard me.”

Paolo and Francesca look up from either side of my dad’s legs, their large liquid eyes full of rebuke. Obviously they’d scampered right past me and I hadn’t noticed.

“I’m sorry, I guess I was preoccupied …”

“You were drawing.” My father moves closer to the table and takes one of the scrap sheets I’ve filled with sketches from Eugenie’s notebook. “I haven’t seen you draw like that since before you went to college. Reminded me of how you were after your mother died. Remember? You’d draw your pictures from morning to night. Your teachers complained that you drew pictures on your homework and in all your class notebooks. I told them to let you be. It was like you were drawing the pain out of yourself.”

I smile at the thought of my father facing down the teachers at Rosedale High but then the smile fades as I see the look of concern on his face. I can see he’s trying to think of something to say about Christine—that he’s connected this fit of drawing with my current grief. And who knows? It’s true I’ve drawn little except designs for windows in the last fifteen years.

“I can’t even remember what I drew back then,” I say.

“Oh, all sorts of things—unicorns and dragons, fanciful things and places that looked like they came out of fairy tales. Beautiful princesses—all with your mother’s face. Here—I’ve still got one.”

My father pulls out a worn leather wallet that’s been molded to the shape of his hip and extracts a grayish piece of newsprint folded into quarters. When he unfolds it I see it’s a pencil sketch of a woman’s face. Beneath the fanciful crown and even more fanciful hairdo I recognize
my mother’s face, forever frozen at forty-four, the age she was when she died.

“Wow, it does look like her, doesn’t it?”

My father looks at the picture and nods. Then he carefully folds it and puts it back in his wallet.

“You had a lot of talent. I never understood why you gave it up.”

Because I got pregnant at twenty-one and my husband cracked up and I had to take over your glass business to make a living
, I could say, but then, none of that was his fault. He helped me the best he could after Neil was taken away.

“I’m better off,” I tell him, meaning it. “I’d hate to be in Robbie’s shoes—living hand to mouth—hoping someone will notice my paintings. I’m happy bringing other people’s works of art back to life.”

Dad nods but I notice he is not looking at me. Instead he’s looking over my shoulder at the sketches I’ve drawn. They’re doodles mostly, sea creatures and aquatic flowers—not so different from the unicorns and dragons I drew as a child—strung together in a swirling pattern of seaweed. The swirls cascade down the paper, turning into a stream flowing between two hills. Alongside the stream is a curving path on which I’ve drawn two women walking arm in arm under a weeping beech tree. One woman has already gone under the tree, her abundant hair radiating out in serpentine coils that intermingle with the foliage, while the other turns her face to the side. The features I’ve sketched bear a crude likeness to the lady in the window and like the lady in the window she’s smiling because she is finally free from her imprisonment. She’s woven the landscape she glimpsed in the mirror and, instead of dying, escaped into a world of her own creation. A happy scene until you notice that, influenced by my visit to Forest Hall this morning, I’ve sketched a face on the tree—a woman’s face that has the same features as the lady in the window, only crying instead of smiling. The cascading branches of the weeping beech have intertwined with the hair of the woman who’s gone under the tree as if they were getting ready to drag her into the water.