The Drowning Tree (42 page)

“Why? Because you think Neil might hurt me?” I’m about to say that he’d never do such a thing when I realize the absurdity of making that statement about a man who once tried to drown me. “He’s better now,” I say instead.

“Maybe,” Falco says. “You have to admit that sleeping with your best friend and then lying about it doesn’t speak all that well for his stability. And he seemed awfully excitable when I spoke with him at The Beeches. This drug he’s on, Prozine—”

“Pieridine,” I correct him, “it’s named for the Greek muses.”

“I don’t care if it’s named for Zeus himself, it’s still in trial. It might have side effects we don’t know anything about yet …”

“Do you have any reason to believe that?” I ask.

I can see him hesitate, as if trying to decide whether or not to tell me something. “Look,” he says finally, “all I’m suggesting is that you take the night to absorb what you’ve learned before going back—” He hesitates again and then finishes, “before going back home. Okay?”

I nod, mostly because I’m tired of the argument and scared of what else he might say. I guess that instead of “back home” he’d been about to say “before you go back to Neil.” I suspect that he’s giving me this night in the city to absorb what I’ve learned and store up a little self-control because even with all I’ve learned I may not be able to resist seeing Neil again. Mostly I quit arguing because I can’t tell him the night away isn’t necessary. I’m more afraid that one night won’t be enough.

I
WAIT TEN MINUTES AFTER
F
ALCO LEAVES AND THEN LEAVE, TOO
. A
LTHOUGH
I’
M
determined to spend the night in the apartment I need a break. Some air
and a brisk walk. Walking on crowded city streets, though, fails to release all the rage and grief I’m feeling so I head east toward Central Park and enter the park on 86th Street near the Great Lawn. I walk south, glad of the shade and privacy the wooded paths offer; not so glad of the memories that the carefully landscaped terrain sparks.

During our last year at Penrose, after Neil had gone back to Columbia, Christine and I rode the train down almost every weekend to visit him in the apartment he shared with four other students on 104th and Broadway. We slept on couches or the floor and during the day we’d escape the overcrowded apartment by heading over to the park. Always the three of us. Looking back, I’m amazed at how much I took Christine’s presence for granted. I’d never asked for more time alone with Neil or resented her being with us. Instead I remember feeling that Christine’s company somehow steadied us—like the third leg on a tripod.

We’d often end up in the Ramble, that jumble of boulders and meandering paths that feels like a miniature woodland within the larger park. We’d wander there for hours and then settle into a secluded spot. Neil loved to sketch the trees, many of which twisted into improbable shapes or were so covered by vines and creepers that they’d been transformed into shaggy beasts and looming specters. While Neil drew the trees, I drew him. Christine read, sometimes reading aloud bits of Ovid and Dante to us.

As I follow the web of paths my thoughts twist back on themselves as often as the paths do. I keep picturing the three of us together back in college and then imagining Neil and Christine together these last few months. Every time I approach this picture in my mind I step back from it, but no matter what direction I take in my thoughts it’s what I return to. Neil and Christine walking through the beech woods at Astolat, or here in Central Park—if he came to visit her in the city, why not?—or rowing up the Wicomico to the pool underneath the weeping beech. It’s as if I’m executing the steps of some complicated courtly dance in which the two of them shadow my every step.

And it’s not just the three of us that I see in the dance. I can’t help but think how much we resemble another threesome: Augustus Penrose and the two Barovier sisters. Two women and a man, both women in love with
the man, one pushed aside. I picture the three of us—Neil, Christine and I—lined up across from Penrose and the two sisters. Who would stand across from whom? Neil and Penrose, Eugenie and I.… I wonder if Christine noticed the resemblance while researching the window. If so, maybe she’d identified with Clare as the one pushed aside by the two lovers.

I’ve been wandering in the maze so engrossed in my thoughts that I’ve lost track of where I am, when I come out suddenly at the bridge that crosses the lake. Lovely Bow Bridge, unfurling like a ribbon over the green water, designed by Calvert Vaux, the same landscape architect who designed the grounds of Briarwood. Who knew when we wandered these paths all those years ago that Neil would end up following ones laid out by the same designer—only for mental patients instead of urban recreationists?

The position of the dancers in my head shifts. Now instead of Clare and Christine standing across from each other I imagine Neil and Clare—the two who ended up in the same psychiatric hospital. And who’s my partner in this new dance? Who do I see as I walk across the bridge to the other side of the lake? Augustus, who loved Clare and kept visiting her? Or Eugenie, who abandoned her sister and left her to live out her life in an insane asylum?

Coming out of the woods I find myself at Bethesda Terrace. I cross to the fountain and look up at the bronze angel who holds her hands above the fountain—the Angel of Waters she’s called, carved by Emma Stebbins in 1873. Vaux’s original idea for the fountain was that it be dedicated to love, but Stebbins chose the biblical angel whose touch turns the pool of Bethesda into healing waters, perhaps because the woman she loved was dying of breast cancer and they’d tried water cures to heal her. What better token of love than the power to make whole again? How many times had I lain next to Neil while he slept, stroking his brow, willing my touch to banish the bad dreams I knew roiled below the surface, willing my fingers to leach out the madness inside him?

But eventually I gave up.
I’m not Augustus
, I think.
He’s not the partner I see standing across from me
. He kept visiting Clare until he died, he still loved her, just as Christine still believed in Neil and loved him so much that she hoped one day he’d have no choice but to return her love.

And he had.

Standing beneath the outspread hands of the angel, I wish it were Christine that I’m crying for and not my own selfish loss. That I wasn’t like spiteful Eugenie, so jealous of her sister’s hold on her husband that she broke the panes that filled the loom when she saw that the story they told was of her sister’s descent into madness. She must have known that Augustus visited Clare and still loved her and that the window was a tribute to her and she couldn’t bear for the world to see it.

I think of Christine on the train platform. Did she want to tell me about what had happened between her and Neil? That he was better and that they loved each other? But then I told her that I hadn’t been able to love anyone since Neil and she changed her mind. How could she take the one man I’d ever loved away from me just when he was well again? I imagine her taking the kayak and crossing the river, paddling across the dark water to the weeping beech and swallowing the pills until she fell asleep and tipped into the water. Could she have killed herself because Neil had rejected her or was she leaving him free to be with me?

I stir the water in the pool with the tips of my fingers. The cold water stings the cuts on my hand but I also feel something knitting together, some tear deeper than the ones on my fingers beginning to heal.

I walk out of the park on the East Side and wander over to Madison to find a place to eat. I haven’t eaten anything since that cinnamon brioche Falco gave me and it’s nearly dinnertime. I see a coffee shop on the next corner heading south, but before I get to it my attention is caught by something in a gallery window—just a flicker of green that I catch out of the corner of my eye, like a flash of green water. I stop and look through the window, past my own reflection and toward the painting on the rear wall of the gallery and for a moment I feel the same horror that the figure in the painting of the
The Drowning Tree
must feel when she sees herself transformed. My face in the window appears to be superimposed on the tree in the painting, my body encased in bark. I stand frozen on the sidewalk—as if my body had actually turned to wood and my legs had grown roots—while pedestrians surge around me as unmindful of me as though I had indeed become one of the ornamental shade trees planted behind metal gates along the avenue.

What pulls me out of my stupor is the name on the window: The Queen Gallery. This is the gallery show on Arts & Crafts painters that Christine had circled in the
Times
.

I open the door and the air inside the gallery is so cold on my damp skin that I immediately begin to shiver. Still, I walk straight toward the painting on the back wall, ignoring the forced smile of the slim young woman dressed in a pink knit suit behind the reception desk. I stop a few feet away from the painting so I can take it all in. The canvas is huge, much bigger than the other paintings in Forest Hall, but I do remember it now from my college days. I can even hear Christine’s voice in my ear—my own personal art history audio tour—telling me about it.

This was one of Penrose’s first paintings of a woman turning into a tree. Critics believe it’s what started him on the series of Ovid-inspired paintings, only no one’s been able to identify the myth it’s based on
.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it? It’s by Augustus Penrose, a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite who was later associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.” Christine’s voice is replaced by the modulated tones of the woman in pink. She fingers a long rope of pearls as she talks, balancing daintily on a pair of high-heeled navy sandals emblazoned with interlocking C’s that match the interlocking C’s dangling from her ears. A flamingo in Chanel.

“Notice the anthropomorphic handling of the tree and the way her hair, as it turns into the cascading branches of the weeping beech, intertwines with the reeds in an organic Art Nouveau motif …”

“Is this painting for sale?” I ask, so abruptly that she stops midsentence and teeters on her heels, clutching her pearls as if for support. “And if so, who’s the seller?”

“The owner wishes to remain anonymous but any offers can be tendered through the gallery.” She flicks her eyes over me, either trying to assess my spending power by my wardrobe (clearly my J. Crew sundress and flat sandals aren’t earning me many points) or looking for a concealed weapon. I must be staring at the painting as if I’d like to slash it.

“Is the gallery owner here?” I ask.

“She’s in a meeting, but if you leave your number—”

“Look,” I say, “I’m a trustee of Penrose College—”
One of those

starchy blue bloods who happens to have an eccentric liking for inexpensive catalog clothing
. “—and this painting is, I believe, the property of the college, which means it shouldn’t be for sale at all. Unless you’d like me to call the police—”

“I’m afraid you must be mistaken,” Ms. Flamingo says, shifting her weight from foot to foot as if she suddenly had to go to the bathroom. “The owner of the gallery is herself a trustee of the college—”

“Is there a problem, CeCe?”

CeCe. No wonder she’s so fond of the Chanel logo!

I turn to see who’s spoken and find myself facing Regula Howell, looking cool and stately in another one of her striking folkloric ensembles—a sleeveless black knit dress embroidered with gold passementerie scrolls and matching gold spirals encircling her wrists, neck, and upper arm. She looks, actually, more like an Etruscan priestess than a gallery owner—and then I get it. Regula—Queen.

“Ms. Howell,” I say, hoping she didn’t hear my lie about being a Penrose trustee, “I didn’t realize that this was your gallery. I came in because I recognized this painting by Penrose,
The Drowning Tree
. I’m just surprised to see it here on sale. Doesn’t it belong to the college?”

“Miss McKay, isn’t it? You’ve made a very understandable mistake. Not all of Augustus Penrose’s paintings were left to the college. Some were left to the family—”

“So Gavin’s the owner?”

“I didn’t say that; the owner wishes to remain anonymous.”

“Oh,” I say, taking another step toward the painting. The two reproductions I’ve seen recently—the print in Christine’s old bedroom and the postcard in her apartment—failed to do the painting justice. Unlike the frail nymphs Penrose usually favors, this figure is monumental. Her torso, emerging from its sheath of bark, is powerful, stomach muscles tensed as she leans over the pool, her arms breaking free from the stranglehold of branches to balance herself above the water. The painting doesn’t show, I suddenly realize, a woman turning into a tree, but one breaking free of the imprisoning bark. I follow the sweep of hair into the water and find the face of a girl hidden in the ripples. The girl’s look of horror and fear does not seem to match the aggressive posture of the woman above her.
In fact, the figure in the water, I can see now, is lifting her arms up, while the arms of the tree-woman are held back. The figure in the water isn’t a reflection at all. It reminds me of something—the hand reaching up … I close my eyes and see, instead of the beech tree’s branches trailing in the water, Christine’s hair swaying in the clear water, a white marble hand reaching up from the bottom of the pool.

“Of course,” I say aloud, “the statue in the water.”

“What statue in the water?” Regula asks.

“Nothing,” I say, taking a step backward toward the exit. “I’m sorry I misunderstood who owned the painting. Of course if you say it’s owned by Gavin …”

“I didn’t,” she begins, turning as pink as CeCe’s suit. “I tried to explain that to Christine …”

“So she did come here,” I say. “I see. Well, that’s all I really need to know for now.” I hold out my hand to shake Regula’s but she seems to be too busy hating herself for giving away that last little bit of information to notice. So I give a little wave to her—and to CeCe—and step out onto the street, where I hail a cab to take me back to Christine’s apartment.