The Drowning Tree Read online

  BY CAROL GOODMAN

  The Lake of Dead Languages

  The Seduction of Water

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2004 by Carol Goodman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goodman, Carol.

  The drowning tree / Carol Goodman.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-47845-0

  1. Universities and colleges—Fiction. 2. Women art historians—Fiction. 3. Female friendship—Fiction. 4. Missing persons—Fiction. 5. Class reunions—Fiction. 6. Mentally ill—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.O566D76 2004

  813′.6—dc22 2004047638

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sulphur River Literary Review Press to reprint the poem “The Language of Trees” from Talk Between Leaf and Skin: Poems by Lee Slonimsky (2002). Reprinted by permission of Sulphur River Literary Review Press, Austin, Texas.

  v3.1

  For Lee, beloved

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their continued support and good advice I wish to thank my agent, Loretta Barrett, and my editor, Linda Marrow, who knew when to offer praise, when to offer criticism, and when to offer dessert. Thanks, too, to Nicholas Mullendore at Loretta Barrett Books and Arielle Zibrak at Ballantine Books for all their help.

  Thanks, as always, to my loyal circle of first readers: Barbara Barak, Laurie Bower, Cathy Cole, Gary Feinberg, Emily Frank, Wendy Rossi Gold, Laura Lipton, Mindy Siegel Ohringer, Scott Silverman, and Sondra Browning Witt.

  For their expert advice, I’d like to thank Dr. Robert Dicker, Evie T. Joselow, Ph.D., Julie L. Sloan, and Ray Clagnan at the Gil Studio, Inc. Any mistakes or liberties I may have taken with the facts are solely my responsibility.

  I couldn’t have written this book without the love and patience of my family. All my love and gratitude to Lee, Maggie, Nora, Mom, Bob, Larry, Nancy, Katy, and Andrew.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  About the Author

  THE RIVER FEELS WIDER FROM THE SHALLOW BOAT, THE HUMPBACKED HILLS OF THE Hudson Highlands looming like the giants Dutch sailors believed dwelled there.

  “Just put the water behind you,” he says.

  I can’t see the man in the boat behind me, and I don’t want to risk my precarious balance turning to see him.

  “You’ve been through the drill,” he goes on.

  And I have. Six weeks practicing in the indoor pool under the watchful eye of the kayaking instructor, tipping myself into blue chlorinated water and rolling up again, gasping, into the humid air, all in one long indrawn breath. I’ve practiced it until it’s become second nature, but it’s one thing to turn over in the clear, warm pool water and another to imagine myself hanging upside down in the cold gray water of the Hudson, trapped in the currents.…

  “This is where the current is most dangerous,” the voice says. “The Dutch called it World’s End.”

  “I know,” I say, and then, because there’s something about the voice that has made the back of my neck prickle, I start to turn, searching the sweep of water behind me for the kayaking instructor—dark, long-haired Kyle, who coaches my daughter’s crew team as well—and instead catching the flash of blond hair gleaming between the stone-gray sky and the glittering skin of water. In that moment before the sky and water switch places I see him, and I’m not afraid; I’m glad. He’s come back. After all these nights of seeing him in my dreams, he’s really come back … but then I’m under the water, hanging suspended from the boat.

  I reach for the cord that attaches my spray skirt to the rim of the kayak to free myself, but my hand grazes, instead, something smooth and slimy—long tentacles that reach up from the bottom of the river and have swamped my little boat. The hands of all those drowned sailors reaching up from their wrecks to pull down one more shipwrecked soul. When I open my eyes I see it’s only the broad-bladed zebra grass that grows at the bottom of the Hudson, but then, looking through the tangle of greenery, I see something else emerging from the depths, a face, haloed by bright hair.…

  I awake, gasping in the dry air of my bedroom as if still drowning. Sun is streaming through the glass skylights above my bed, filtering through the pattern of green vines that I set into the glass, casting a snarl of green reflections onto the sheets. I can hear, from the next room, the sound of my daughter getting ready—she has an early crew meet today—and the sound of the dogs’ nails on the tiled floors of the loft. Today is Christine’s lecture, I remind myself, which is probably why I had the dream. Or maybe this dream of hanging upside down in the Hudson—this new variation of the dream I have every night—comes from my fear over Bea’s impending summer rafting trip out west.

  I swing my legs over the side of the bed, throwing the twisted sheets back, trying to shed, as well, the residue of the dream. How long will they go on? It’s been thirteen years since I last saw Neil—and fourteen years since we both nearly drowned in the river—and I still dream about him every night, and because he told me once that he believed that we could visit each other in our dreams, I always have the feeling that that is what he’s doing—coming to me in my dreams each night. And what really frightens me, I think as I look down at the stripes of green light that coil around my arms and legs, is that a part of both of us was left behind at the bottom of the river, where the zebra grass grows over the bones of shipwrecked sailors, at world’s End.

  I WAS LATE FOR CHRISTINE’S LECTURE.

  I almost didn’t go. I wouldn’t have gone if she hadn’t especially asked me to come. The force of her preference was as irresistible now as it had been nearly twenty years ago when of all the girls at Penrose College she chose me to be her best friend. So even though I’d made a vow to avoid the campus during reunion—and had managed to do so, so far—I find myself on Sunday afternoon rushing through the lengthening shadows toward the library, ju
st as I had on so many Sunday evenings during college, making a last dash to catch up on everything I’d avoided doing all weekend.

  Usually it was Christine herself who had lured me away from my work in the first place, who had unearthed me from whatever hole I’d buried myself in. “The Middle Ages can wait,” she’d say, “but the Sargent exhibit at the Whitney is ending this weekend.” She was always reading about some art exhibit that was just about to close. Carried along by her enthusiasm, I’d follow her to the train station, trying to keep up with her fast stride, in the wake of her long blond hair that streamed out behind her like the wings of a dove quivering on a current of air.

  As I open the heavy library door I almost catch a glimpse of that hair, shining in a swath of sun behind me, but of course it’s an illusion. Christine is inside, standing at the podium, miraculously transformed into this older, more constrained woman—a lecturer—her long golden hair tamed into a sleek coil.

  “This is where you’d find me,” Christine is saying to the audience as I slide into a folding chair in the back of the crowded hall—even the second-story galleries are packed with students sitting on the floor between the stacks—“after dinner Sunday nights, when the work I’d happily neglected all weekend finally caught up with me.”

  Rueful sighs stir the group seated beneath the stained-glass window. Clearly, I’m not the only one who’d been reminded, walking toward the library through the late afternoon sunshine, of those last-minute penitential pilgrimages. And this is where I would find her, already at work on some paper due the next day, somehow arrived before me even though when we’d finally gotten back to the dorm from the city she’d claimed she was going to her room to sleep. While the escapades she’d led me on left me tired and bleary-eyed, they somehow left Christine refreshed and inspired. She had managed to write through the night and the paper she’d turn in on Monday morning would be the one the professors would hold up as the most original, the most brilliant.

  “When I approached the table here below the window I always imagined that the Lady looked down at me askance,” Christine continues. “ ‘Oh, so you’ve finally seen fit to join us,’ I imagined her saying. I believe I endowed her with the voice of Miss Colclough, my sophomore Chaucer professor.” Christine pauses for another ripple of knowing laughter. Miss Coldclaw—as we called her—was legendary for her withering comments and draconian teaching methods. “In fact, over the years, as I studied below her I endowed the Lady in the Window with many roles—muse, companion, judge. But of course these were my own projections. What we’ve come to consider today is who she really is, what she has to tell us—the class of 1987—about ourselves, and why it’s so important that we save her from decay.”

  Christine turns slightly and tilts her head up, meeting the gaze of the figure in the glass as if she had been passing on the street and recognized a friend at a second-story window. Throughout the lecture she turns like this to address the Lady as if they were contemporaries—and truly, even though Christine is dressed in a spare, sleeveless black shift (Prada, I think) and the Lady is robed in a medieval gown of embroidered damask (ruby glass acid-etched with a millefleur pattern and layered with white drapery glass), there is a kinship between the two women. There’s something in the curve of their spines—Christine’s when she leans back to look up at the window, the Lady as she arches her back away from her loom to look up from her labors—that echoes each other. They’ve got the same yellow hair. The Lady’s by virtue of a medieval metallurgical process called silver stain, Christine’s thanks to a colorist on the Upper East Side. The Lady’s abundant Pre-Raphaelite locks, though, are loose, while Christine’s long blond hair is twisted in a knot so heavy that when she bows her head back down to her notes her slender neck seems to pull against the strain. I realize, from that strain and from how thin she’s gotten, what a toll this lecture has taken on her and instantly forgive her for not making time to see me these last six or seven months—the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other since college.

  “No doubt we all heard the same story on the campus tour. The window was designed by Augustus Penrose, founder of the Rose Glass Works and Penrose College, in 1922 for the twentieth anniversary of the college’s founding and it depicts Augustus’s beloved wife, Eugenie. As we all know, Penrose College grew out of The Woman’s Craft League, which Eugenie had created for the wives and daughters of the men who worked in her husband’s factory.”

  A college born from a glorified sewing circle, is how Christine put it once, a bit too loudly, at a freshman tea. But of course she doesn’t say that to this assembly of women in their tailored linen skirts and pastel silk blouses, their Coach bags and sensible Ferragamo shoes. Penrose College may have originated from a socialist dream of aiding women from the underclasses, but it soon became a bastion of East Coast wealth and privilege.

  “But before we accept that the Lady in the Window is merely a celebration of the medieval craftswoman,” Christine continues, “let’s review the social and artistic background of Augustus Penrose. His family owned a glass works in England, Penrose & Sons, in Kelmscott, a small village on the Thames River near Oxford, which supplied medieval-quality glass for stained-glass designers, including William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite artist who also happened to live in Kelmscott. Young Augustus was particularly influenced by the opinions of William Morris, who believed that integrity ought to be restored to the decorative arts. When Simon Barovier, a wealthy factory owner from the north, purchased Penrose & Sons, he encouraged young Augustus in his artistic pursuits—and so did Barovier’s daughter, Eugenie, who fell in love with Augustus. As you know, the two married, and were sent by old Simon over to this country in the 1890s to found an American branch of the glass works. Augustus and Eugenie wanted to do more, though, than run a glass factory. Influenced by Morris’s ideas, they were soon in the vanguard of the Arts & Crafts Movement …”

  Now that Christine has moved onto the firmer ground of her expertise in art history I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. I realize how nervous I am for her—how much I want this lecture to be a success for her—a comeback.

  Back in college, Christine had a sort of glow about her—a radiant energy that drew people to her. We all believed she would go on to great things—even when she eschewed a PhD in favor of a job at a New York gallery and freelance writing on the arts. We thought then that she’d write a brilliant book or at least marry one of the famous artists she was often seen with at gallery openings. By the tenth reunion, when none of these things had happened and she got so drunk that she passed out during the Farewell Brunch, that glow of promise began to fade. Her name disappeared from the class notes; when I ran into people from the college who had known her, they would ask after her with a solicitous edge of concern in their voices as if expecting to hear the worst. Sometimes, I suspected, hoping to hear the worst.

  Many were surprised, then, when the programs for the fifteenth reunion arrived with the announcement that Christine would be delivering the lecture on the Lady window, which the class of 1987 had elected to restore as their class gift. I wasn’t, though, because I’d seen Christine through rehab four years ago and urged her to apply for a Penrose Grant, which supported alumnae who wanted to switch careers ten to twenty years out of college (the “second-chance” grant we often called it, a perfect prize for Christine, who always managed to pull her act together at the last minute and shine brilliantly) so that she could go back to graduate school. I even suggested she make the window the subject of her thesis and when McKay Glass won the bid to do the restoration of the window—the first really big conservation project we’ve gotten since I convinced my father to expand into stained-glass restoration—I suggested to the college that Christine deliver this lecture. So you couldn’t really blame me for being nervous for her.

  While Christine’s lecturing on the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts & Crafts Movement (material I’ve heard before), I let my mind wander and my gaze shift to the window itself�
��brilliant now in the late afternoon sun. The upper half is dominated by a large rounded window—a window within a window—which frames a green pool carpeted with water lilies and shaded by a weeping beech. The view of mountains in the distance is the same as the view we would see if the window were clear—the deeply wooded hills of the Hudson Highlands on the western bank—still forested because Augustus Penrose bought up all the land on that side of the river for his mansion, Astolat. When Astolat burned down in the 1930s he and Eugenie moved back to Forest Hall, their house on this side of the river. All that’s left of Astolat are the water gardens that Penrose designed—the centerpiece of which was a lily pool similar to the one depicted in the window.

  Although the window is executed in opalescent glass and uses techniques made popular by Tiffany and LaFarge in the 1880s, the Lady herself could well be from a medieval window. Of course, as Christine is explaining now, the Pre-Raphaelites were in love with the Middle Ages—and in love with beautiful women with long flowing hair and expressions of abandon. This one has just looked up from her work. As she arches her back you can feel the strain of the long hours she has spent bending over her loom. A flush of color—skillfully produced by sanguine, a hematite-based paint used since the sixteenth century to enhance flesh tones—rises from her low-cut bodice up her long neck to the plane of her high cheekbones. It makes you wonder what she’s been dreaming of over her loom.