The Drowning Tree (7 page)

“So these could be notes from Augustus Penrose, or Eugenie …” I gather up all the cream-colored sheets, counting twelve in all. Because they’re covered in lead and putty dust I seal them in a garbage bag.

“Or just trash,” my dad finishes my sentence for me.

“I’ll have a look at them later,” I say, checking my watch again. “If you guys can really handle the rest …”

“Go!” the three men shout at me.

So I do. Halfway down the hall, though, I turn back to look at where the window was. Through the stone arch I can see the Hudson and the long, sloping ridges of the Hudson Highlands. For a moment I wonder why anyone would ever want to hide that view with colored glass, but then, I remind myself as I turn away, I’d be out of a job if they didn’t.

I
STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MAIN QUAD AND CALL
B
EA ON MY CELL PHONE TO TELL
her I’m running late. She says no problem, she’ll head down to the gym and work out on the rowing machines. At her age I would have spent the spare time out in the woods behind the track smoking Marlboros with Carl Ventimiglio, the juvenile delinquent I dated my last two years in high school.

Old Gym—so called since the college built a multimillion-dollar field house on the edge of campus—is deserted. Finals ended last week and most of the students have already packed up and left for home. The pool, though, has been kept open for faculty members still finishing their grades. I run into Umberto Da Silva, my old Dante professor, who’s now assistant to the president, on the steps coming up from the basement, his thin gray hair combed in damp strands across his forehead, his usual pipe tobacco and licorice mint smell mixed with chlorine.

“Ciao Bella,”
he says, leaning toward me to give me the traditional European kiss on both cheeks. I hold up a hand to wave him off.

“I’m covered with lead dust,
Professore,”
I explain. He purses his lips and blows out a puff of air—
puh!
—a dismissive sound as if to say,
what’s a little lead poisoning between friends
, but still I keep my distance.

“So you have taken the Lady away,” he says. “She went willingly?”

I laugh. “Like Blanche DuBois on the arm of her gentleman caller.”

“
Bene
. After Christine’s lecture yesterday I dreamed bad dreams of her all night.”
Of Christine
, I wonder,
or the Lady?
But Umberto is already raising a hand to signal his departure—a gesture that is at once elegant and imperious: Augustus saluting the centurions. The professor comes from an old Italian family—like my mother—which is, I believe, the source of his fondness for me.

“Ciao Professore,”
I say, resisting an impulse to high-five his raised hand. “If you miss the Lady come down to the studio to visit—we’d both appreciate the company.”

The women’s locker room is cold and empty. I strip off my powdery clothes and seal them in the same garbage bag that holds the cream-colored pages. The shower floor is so cold on my bare feet that I decide, after rinsing off, to hop in the sauna for five minutes just to warm up and bake some of the soreness out of my neck and shoulders. Seven hours of chiseling and craning to look up at the window have taken their toll on my back. I stretch out on the hot wood of the top shelf and close my eyes. Splotches of bright color float across the inside of my eyelids—bright citrine yellow, ruby red, cobalt blue—lozenges of bright jewels, all the colors in the window I’ve spent the day removing. When I hear the click of the door and open my eyes to see who’s come in all I can see are sunbursts of color hovering ghostlike in the dimness of the sauna.

“Oh, Juno, there you are. I wanted to have a word with you.” It’s Fay, Gavin’s assistant, acting for all the world as if she’d found me in the president’s waiting room instead of naked and sweating on a slab. I adjust my towel, which was not made to cover a five-foot-eleven-inch woman, and sit up. Fay, I notice, is wearing the kind of terry wrap that buttons at the side, the elastic puckering over her flat chest. Her fine silver hair—which I’ve only ever seen folded and clipped to the back of her head—is combed back wet from her high forehead, so thin in places I can see the shape of her skull.

She sits sideways on the bottom shelf, leans against the wall, and stretches her legs out in front of her. “Have you spoken to your friend Christine today?”

“No, I’ve been in the library all day.…”

“Because there are several pages missing from archival material she borrowed.”

I wipe away the sweat beading up on my forehand and wonder if Fay turned up the thermostat control when she came in.

“You mean from Eugenie Penrose’s notebook? Christine said you were copying it—”

“Well, I can’t copy what I don’t have, can I? Personally, I don’t see why she was given the original source material in the first place and now look what’s happened.”

“I’m sure Christine would never be careless with a rare document. Are you sure the missing pages were there when she took the journal?” I’m thinking of the pages in the bottom of the garbage bag in my gym locker. For all I know they’re the missing pages, torn out from Eugenie’s notebook years ago. I’m afraid, though, that if I mention them to Fay she’ll confiscate them immediately. “Are you sure that Eugenie’s notebook was completely intact when you gave it to Christine?”

Fay purses her lips and rakes a hand through her hair, leaving whitish trenches where the scalp shows through. “Unfortunately a full inventory has never been made of this material,” Fay admits, “but I’m almost certain there were pages there that are missing now. You know what I think?” Fay leans forward, her thin shoulders hunched so that her towel gapes open and I’m treated to a view of her flat sternum. Before I can look away I notice a strip of pearly white skin—scar tissue—snaking across her chest. A mastectomy? I close my eyes and a vision of my mother’s scarred chest after she came home from the hospital blooms in the darkness. I open my eyes, preferring Fay’s censorious face to that vision. She’s holding a hand to her chest now as if she’s testifying at a Bible meeting.

“I think she’s planning to write a book about Eugenie Penrose, and she doesn’t want anyone else scooping her research. All that nonsense about Eugenie’s sister, Clare, and awakening from the shadows. What do you think she meant by that? It was the oddest lecture I’ve ever heard at
the college. It made me wonder if she’d come a bit unhinged. Wasn’t she in a rehab clinic a few years ago for substance abuse?”

“She had a little drinking problem, that’s all, but she’s completely over that—”

“And wasn’t she hospitalized during her senior year for a drug overdose?”

“That was an accident,” I say a little too quickly. “She was taking pain pills after she broke her leg skiing spring break and she just messed up on the dosage.” At least that’s what we’d told people had happened. What had really happened was that Neil had dared Christine to climb up the tower of the library. We’d all been high on mushrooms, and Christine had fallen and broken her leg and cracked three ribs.

“You forget that I worked in the infirmary back then. I overheard the head nurse say she had taken over thirty Darvon—that’s no accident. When she came into Mr. Penrose’s office Sunday morning before the lecture she seemed quite agitated and she asked me for a glass of water so she could take a pill. She had one of those pill-sorters and it was
stocked!
And Mr. Penrose seemed concerned about her after the lecture. He asked me to place a call to her office this morning but she wasn’t in. Don’t you think she seemed depressed?”

I slip down off the shelf, holding my towel tightly over my chest. I’d like to deny it, but then I remember Christine’s expression when I last saw her through the train window. And the lecture was a bit odd—all that preoccupation with madness and doom. And even though Fay is a bit officious for my taste, no one cares more about the fate of the college.

“I think she was probably just under a lot of pressure getting her lecture ready,” I answer, turning my back to the door so that I can back out without exposing my towel’s limitations. The sight of Fay’s hand splayed over her chest makes me wince with the memory of her scar. “But I’ll call her tonight to see how she’s doing and I’ll ask her about the missing notebook pages. I’m sure if she kept any pages it was an accident.”

B
Y THE TIME
B
EA AND
I
GET HOME, THOUGH, IT’S TOO LATE TO CALL
. W
HEN
I
PICKED
her up, Bea had hesitatingly expressed interest in a North Face backpack that she’d seen at the outlet store in Harriman two weeks ago when she’d
gone there with her friend Melissa and Melissa’s mother, Lisa. When they’d dropped Bea off I’d noticed the back of the Ford Escort crammed with bags from Coach and Burberry’s and Diesel and felt a pang remembering the twenty-dollar bill I’d given Bea for the trip. Of course Bea had expressed total indifference to Melissa and Lisa’s purchases. While most of the moms I know in Rosedale have spent their daughters’ high school years fending off requests for Kate Spade bags I usually have to corral Bea into trading one set of worn Nikes and Levi’s for another. She’s always claimed complete disinterest in the trappings of high fashion but I also suspect she absorbed early on the true state of our financial circumstances (she knows, for instance, that the only money I’ve ever taken from Neil’s family has been put into a college trust for her) and made a pact with herself (Bea’s always making pacts with herself) never to strain them. So whenever she does mention an interest in a material good I try to satisfy it. Besides, I’ve only got another week of her before she’ll be gone for eight weeks—the longest we’ve ever been apart.

After getting her the backpack and a fleece jacket at North Face I take her to an Italian restaurant on Route 9 and we linger over our cappuccinos and Italian cheesecake. How often do you get to linger with your fifteen-year-old? Especially one like Bea, who’s in accelerated motion from the minute she opens her eyes in the morning to the moment she crashes—usually with her kayaking gear still on—on the floor of her bedroom. We talk about the rivers she’ll be rafting on, she tells me a story that Kyle told her about rafting down the Yampa River in Colorado (he’s told me the story already but I act like I’m hearing it for the first time), and I try to pretend that the idea of my daughter whipping down a chute of churning water and sharp rocks doesn’t fill me with dread. Driving home, I’m congratulating myself on the good job I did hiding my fears when Bea’s sleepy voice startles me from the passenger side of the car.

“Someone told me in school today that Aunt Christine talked about that insane asylum up near Poughkeepsie during her lecture. Isn’t it where Dad is?”

“Who at your school knew about the lecture?” I ask.

“Denise Levitan. Her mother was in your year at Penrose. Did you know her?”

I shake my head, but then sneaking a look at Bea out of the corner
of my eye, see she’s not looking at me. She’s closed her eyes and I realize she’s giving me a chance not to answer.

“Yes,” I say, “Neil was at Briarwood, but I don’t know for sure if he’s still there. Since your grandma Essie died I haven’t had any updates and that’s … what? Almost three years ago.”

“Oh.” That’s all she says. Then she lifts her hand to a curl of hair at her temple and begins twirling it around her finger. The same gesture she’d made as a baby when she was soothing herself to sleep.

“Do you want me to find out if he’s still there?” I ask, my voice suddenly hoarse. The sound it makes in my throat reminds me of the moaning sound the Lady window made today when it scraped against its stone setting.

“I don’t know … yeah, I mean I’d like to know where he is at least. Do you think he might have gotten … better? We learned in Health about all these new drugs they use for mood disorders. Maybe one of those would work for him.”

I imagine Bea studiously copying down pharmaceutical names in her spiral notebook and making a pact with herself to bring up the subject with me. “I’ll call your aunt Sarah tomorrow and ask her,” I tell Bea. “I’ll see what I can find out before you leave.”

It’s eleven when we get back to the loft. Bea heads straight for her room, but I sit out on the roof for a while, staring at the lights on the train tracks and the dark water of the river beyond them. Across the river the hills where Penrose had built his grand estate are dark, thanks to the fact that Penrose specified in his will that the property couldn’t be developed.

Surely if there’d been any change in Neil’s condition someone would have let me know, I tell myself. But who? Neil’s sister, Sarah, who married an Orthodox rabbi the year after Neil’s breakdown and has since refused to eat at her mother’s house? Essie Buchwald, on her twice-a-year calls to me, had bemoaned her daughter’s newfound religious zeal with almost as much drama as her son’s mental incapacity. I’d dreaded those calls from Essie, but since her death I’ve missed them and I realize now that there is no one in Neil’s family who would feel obliged to call me. For all I know, Neil could have been released from Briarwood a year ago.

I get up and lean against the railing at the edge of the roof. From
here I can see the park and boathouse and the brightly lit Metro-North train platform. Christine had asked me an awful lot of questions about Neil. Had she heard something about him while researching Clare Barovier’s confinement at Briarwood? Had she maybe even visited him? Christine had, I knew, a bit of a crush on Neil. It would be only natural for her to ask about him while she was at the hospital, but then wouldn’t she have told me if there were any change? I remember suddenly the question she’d started to ask me:
But what if Neil were well again …?
Had she asked because she knew he
was
well?

I check my watch: eleven thirty. Christine often stayed up late, sometimes working through the night when she was excited about a project. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call after all. I go inside and dial Christine’s number. When I get her machine I speak into it and give her a minute to pick up but she doesn’t. After I hang up I notice there’s a message on my machine. I hit the replay button, expecting that it will be Christine, but it’s not. It’s a man’s voice that I don’t recognize, identifying himself as Nathan Bell, a graduate student in Christine’s program at Columbia.