The Drowning Tree (38 page)

“Pose for me,” he says. “I want to paint you one more time, only this time not as some character from a story, but as yourself.”

I drop my hand onto Francesca’s head and rub one of her silky ears in between my fingers. “Okay,” I tell him, “I can do that.”

T
HE NEXT DAY, THOUGH, WHEN
I
COME DOWNSTAIRS INTO THE STUDIO
, I
DON’T HAVE
the slightest idea how I’m going to explain to my father and my crew why I need to be gone two or three mornings a week. But then my father presents me with a perfect solution, albeit a solution caused by the misfortune of others.

“I got a call early this morning from Brother Michael up at St. Eustace’s. They had a fire last night.”

“Oh no, was anyone hurt?” McKay Glass had restored the windows at the Chapel of St. Eustace’s, a girls’ school on the northeast shore of Lake Champlain, two years ago. I could still picture the twelve lancets depicting St. Eustace hunting a stag, and a rose window modeled on the one at Chartres. Brother Michael and I had had many long conversations
about medieval stained glass and about handling troubled teenaged girls—St. Eustace’s was a reform school for girls so incorrigible that the school’s nickname was St. Useless.

“No, it was only in the chapel and in the middle of the night. They got it out before there was too much damage to the walls and roof, but the windows started cracking an hour later. He’s afraid they’re going to fall to pieces. I told him the fact that they’d been recently restored would help—”

“But they should be stabilized right away.”

“I told him he should shore them up with plywood on both sides and that I’d get back to him. I warned him, though, that we were in the middle of a job and I wasn’t sure how soon we could get up there, but that even if we couldn’t do it we’d call with a referral by noon today.” My father pauses for breath and then adds, “He thanked me and said he hoped we could do the repair since we already had a feel for the windows.”

He pushes his hair back, takes a sip of coffee, and waits for what I’m going to say. Looking at him—at his neatly pressed khakis and blue work shirt and his trim gray hair—I’m impressed with how well he’s handled the situation. Years ago, when he was still drinking, he would have either agreed to take the job before looking at the rest of his workload or said no because he was too hungover to make the drive.

“Well, let’s figure out how much longer we’ve got on the Lady and whether we can fit in a trip to St. Eustace’s,” I say. “It would be a great experience for Robbie.”

We spend the next hour looking at all stages of the restoration of the Lady window and estimating the work left to be done. The window is reassembled except for some of the plating behind the glass in the lily pool and in the upper branches of the weeping beech, all of which should take only another week or so. Then we map out a plan for handling the fire-damaged windows at St. Eustace’s. It seems like we’ve got plenty of time to handle that job and still have most of August to finish and reinstall the Lady window.

“I think I should stay here, though,” I say, “to take care of the dogs and answer any questions Gavin might have about the progress we’ve made on the Lady window. Maybe I can work up the nerve to show him the dichroic pattern and how we’ve altered the assemblage of the window.”

“Are you sure, honey?” my dad asks. “Won’t you be lonely without us?”

“I’ll survive,” I say, putting my arm around my dad’s shoulder. “I’ve got Paolo and Francesca.”

A
ND SO
I
START SITTING FOR
N
EIL A COUPLE OF HOURS EACH MORNING
. “I
MIGHT AS
well take advantage of the break,” I tell him the first day I come to The Beeches. “Once the guys come back we’ll be busy reinstalling the window.”

“And once I get started I know I won’t want to stop,” he says, setting out his paints, “and I only want the early morning light for this painting.”

Before climbing the hill behind The Beeches—so named for the copse of ancient copper beeches that stand behind the old gatehouse—Neil gave me a tour of the house, which has none of the dreariness one might associate with the term “halfway house.” Its rooms are spacious and airy, each resident has his or her own sitting room fitted out with handsome mission-styled furniture and thick, Persian rugs, and the meals are served in a glassed-in sunroom facing the magnificent violet-leaved trees. There is, though, something
marginal
about the house in the way it straddles the entrance to the estate and how its stone walls merge into the estate walls—all hewn out of the same blue-gray fieldstone. “It’s not a real gateway, though,” Neil explains as he sets up his easel on the crest of the hill just above the second stone wall. “The outside walls enclose the inner wall around Astolat.”

“Like a moat,” I say.

“A moat of trees,” Neil says. “These beeches are my favorite, especially in the early morning when the sun comes through them from the east. Look at the colors—in the center of the tree and at the crown the leaves are mostly green with just a faint purple mottling, but on the outer branches at the bottom the new leaves are deep violet and when the sun shines through them there’s this halo of crimson—” He’s squeezing purple and red paint onto his palette. “—that reminds me of your hair.”

“My hair? I know it’s pretty unmanageable, but I thought I’d gotten it a little neater than these shaggy old trees.” It’s always been a bit of a sore point to me, my wild kinky mass of hair that resists combs and
conditioners and seems to weave itself into tangles and knots while I sleep as if it had a will of its own.

“The color,” he says, “the way it turns red when you stand with the sun at your back, but then it’s this dark eggplanty purple in the dark. That’s why I want to paint you here, with the beeches behind you, and the sun coming through the leaves just touching you around the edges … like that,” he says, looking up and then, moving forward, touching me lightly on the chin to tilt my face a little to the left and on my shoulder to angle my body slightly to the right. He’s already gotten that abstracted look he gets when he starts to paint, his eyes moving rapidly over the surface of things, charting the play of light over their contours the way a sailor studies the surface of water to gauge depth and wind direction. I’d noticed, long ago, that his eyes would change colors rapidly while he was painting, as if the pigments on his brush seeped down the thin stalk of his paintbrush, though his veins, and into his irises. Today they’re dark blue, almost violet, like the copper beech leaves in the shadows.

“Like that?” I ask when he’s given me the last adjustment and stepped back.

“Like that,” he says stepping behind his easel. “Now don’t move a muscle.”

When I first sat for Neil the commandment to stay still had driven me crazy. Instantly, every nerve in my body had rebelled, every pore itched, the blood had ceased to flow to my extremities, and currents of electricity had flared up in my hands and feet. Eventually, though, I had learned to let the stillness settle over me and how to sit so as not to cut off circulation to my limbs. I’d come to enjoy being the object of attention while, at the same time, nothing was demanded of me.

Now I find these hours we spend together in the mornings while he paints and I sit in the cool, dusky shadows of the beech trees oddly soothing. We don’t talk. I’m not supposed to move my mouth; he’s too engrossed in what he’s doing. He looks at me, I look at him and sometimes, after many hours, our eyes meet as if we’d just come upon each other on the street and we both smile. That’s when we take a break.

I join him on his side of the easel and he pours me some coffee from a thermos and takes out sandwiches and fruit while I look at what he’s
painted so far. Another change. He used to never let me see a painting before it was finished.

“It doesn’t bother me now,” he says after the first couple of days. “I’d like to know what you think.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say truthfully. “It looks like I’m part of the forest, like my face is rising up out of the trees and I’m a part of everything around me because it’s all connected by the light.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted,” he says, biting into an apple. “That’s just how I pictured it.”

We stop when the light reaches the top branches of the trees—a little before noon each day. Sometimes we take a walk then, through the woods and around the inner perimeter wall. He hasn’t brought up the idea of kayaking into Astolat again and neither have I, but I have to admit that taking these walks has made me curious about what’s on the other side of the wall.

“Did you walk here with Christine?” I ask during the second week of sittings.

“Yeah, she wanted to see if there was any way into Astolat. I think she was disappointed that I hadn’t found a way to get over the wall, but I told her I drew the line at crossing iron spikes and broken glass.”

I don’t tell him that I’m also surprised at his caution—he’d scaled far more imposing and treacherous barriers back in college—nor do I ask him if he would draw the line at crossing the river with her in a kayak in the middle of the night. I don’t ask because although I can believe he would have made the trip across the river with her I can’t believe he would have left her there to drown. Even when he purposely capsized our boat all those years ago—when he was out of his mind—he hadn’t, in the end, left. He’d held one of my hands to the side of the capsized boat while I’d kept Bea’s head above water with the other hand. It was only after the Coast Guard fished us out that he’d disappeared beneath the surface of the river.

In the evenings I stand out on my roof and look across the river to the crest of the hill where the sun, just as it sets, lights the tops of the beeches into flares of bright copper. Not Daisy’s green light, perhaps, but a beacon of sorts, a signal in the night sky.

In bed I read Eugenie’s journal, finding in her accounts of posing for Augustus an unsettling parallel to my days with Neil.

I let the page slip onto the floor with the others that have fallen there and look for the continuation of that particular entry but there isn’t
any—the next entry is dated several weeks later and Eugenie has resumed her usual crisp, practical tone. Already she’s making an inventory of dresses and underclothes and shawls—
winter and summer
—as if preparing for a long voyage. Has Augustus proposed? Have they made their plan to go to America? Have they told Clare? And what about those landscape drawings of Clare’s? Is she still trying to please her soon-to-be brother-in-law with those drawings of the same scene—the same scene she would one day be painting again and again in a sequestered room on the other side of the ocean, the tower room of the mental institution where she’d live out the rest of her life? No wonder Augustus’s last portrait of her was in the role of the Lady of Shalott: a woman doomed to see the world through the distorted lens of a mirror and fruitlessly copy what she saw there until the mirror cracked. How fitting that he chose to paint her on glass, sitting in front of the very landscape that so haunted her.

As I fall asleep that night I can almost feel, as Eugenie described, my spirit slipping free of my body, shrugging off the burden of flesh like one of Eugenie’s winter shawls, the thread connecting spirit to body stretched thin as the coil of copper wire Augustus used to weld together his portrait of glass.