The Drowning Girl (3 page)

Which is not to say every word will be factual. Only that every word will be true. Or as true as I can manage.

Here’s something I scribbled on both sides of a coffeehouse napkin a few days back: “No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the mind of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.”

Before I wrote that and decided it was true, I would come into this room (which isn’t the room where I paint, but the room with too many bookshelves) and sit down in front of the manual typewriter that used to be Grandmother Caroline’s. The walls of this room are a shade of blue so pale that sometimes, in bright sunlight, they seem almost white. I would sit here and stare at the blue-white walls, or out the window at the other old houses lined up neatly along Willow Street, the Victorian homes and the autumn trees and the gray sidewalks and the occasional passing automobile. I would sit here and try to settle on a place to begin this story. I would sit here in this chair for hours, and never write a single word. But now I’ve made my beginning, arbitrary though it may be, and it feels about as right as I think any beginning ever will. It seemed only fair to get the part about being crazy out up front, like a disclaimer, so if anyone ever reads this they’ll know to take it with a grain of salt.

Now, also arbitrarily, I’m going to write about the first time I saw
The Drowning Girl
.

For my eleventh birthday, my mother took me to the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design. I’d told her I wanted to be a painter, so that year for my birthday she bought me a set of acrylics, brushes, a wooden palette, and a couple of canvases, and she took me to the RISD Museum. And, like I said, that day was the first time I saw the painting. Today,
The Drowning Girl
hangs much nearer the Benefit Street entrance than it did when I was a kid. The canvas is held within an ornately carved, gilded frame—same as all the others in that part of the museum, a small gallery devoted to nineteenth-century American painters.
The Drowning Girl
measures about nineteen by twenty-four inches. It hangs between William Bradford’s
Arctic Sunset
(1874) and Winslow Homer’s
On a Lee Shore
(1900). The gallery’s walls are a uniform loden green, which, I think, makes the antique golden frames seem somewhat less garish than they might otherwise.

The Drowning Girl
was painted in 1898 by a Boston artist named Phillip George Saltonstall. Hardly anyone’s written about Saltonstall. He tends to get lumped in with the Symbolists, though one article called him a “late American disciple of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” He rarely sold, or even showed, his paintings, and in the last year of his life burned as many as fifty in a single night. Most of the few that survive can be found scattered about New England, in private collections and art museums. Also, one hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and another in Atlanta’s High Museum. Saltonstall suffered from seizures, insomnia, and chronic depression, and he died in 1907, at the age of thirty-nine, after falling from a horse. No one I’ve read says whether or not it was an accident, that fall, but probably it was. I could say he was a suicide, but I’m biased, and it would only be speculation.

As for the painting itself,
The Drowning Girl
was done mostly
in somber shades of green and gray (and so seems right at home hanging on those loden walls), but with a few contrasting counterpoints—muted yellows, dirty-white shimmers, regions where the greens and grays sink into blackness. It depicts a young girl, entirely naked, possibly in her early twenties, but maybe younger. She’s standing ankle deep in a forest pool almost as smooth as glass. The trees press in close behind her, and her head is turned away from us, as she glances back over her right shoulder, into the forest, towards the shadows gathered below and between those trees. Her long hair is almost the same shade of green as the water, and her skin has been rendered so that it seems paradoxically jaundiced and imbued with some inner light. She’s very near the shore, and there are ripples in the water at her feet, which I take to mean she’s only just stepped into the pool.

I typed
pool
, but, as it turns out, the painting was inspired by a visit Saltonstall made to the Blackstone River in southern Massachusetts during the late summer of 1894. He had family in nearby Uxbridge, including a paternal first cousin, Mary Farnum, with whom he appears to have been in love (there’s no evidence the feelings were reciprocal). There’s been some conjecture that the girl in the painting is meant to be Mary, but if that’s the case, the artist never said so, or if he did, we have no record of it. But he did say the painting began as a series of landscape studies he made at Rolling Dam (also known as Roaring Dam, built in 1886). Above the dam, the river forms a reservoir that once served the mills of the Blackstone Manufacturing Company. The water is calm and deep, in sharp contrast to the rapids below the dam, flowing between the steep granite walls of the Blackstone Gorge, which are more than eighty feet high in some places.

The title of the painting has often seemed strange to me. After all, the girl isn’t drowning, but merely wading a little ways into the water. Still, Saltonstall has invested the painting with an undeniable
sense of threat or dread. This may arise from the shadowy forest looming up behind the girl, and/or from the suggestion that something there has drawn her attention back to the trees. The snapping of a twig, maybe, or footsteps crunching in fallen leaves. Or a voice. Or almost anything else at all.

More and more, I’ve come to understand how the story of Saltonstall and
The Drowning Girl
is an integral part of my story—same as Rosemary Anne and Caroline are integral to my story—even if I won’t claim that it’s truly the beginning of the things that have happened. Not in any objective sense. If I did, I’d only be begging the question. Would the start be my first sight of the painting on my eleventh birthday, or Saltonstall’s creation of it in 1898? Or might it be better to start with the dam’s construction in 1886? Instinctively, I keep looking for that sort of beginning, even though I know better. Even though I know full well I can only arrive at useless and essentially infinite regressions.

That day in August, all those years ago,
The Drowning Girl
was hanging in another gallery, a room devoted to local painters and sculptors, mostly—but not exclusively—artists from Rhode Island. My mother’s feet were sore, and we were sitting on a bench at the center of the room when I noticed the painting. I can recall this all very clearly, though most of that day has faded away. While Rosemary sat on the bench, resting her aching feet, I stood gazing at Saltonstall’s canvas. Only, it seemed like I was staring
into
the canvas, almost the same as if it were a tiny window looking out on a soft-focus gray-green world. I’m pretty sure that was the first time a painting (or any other sort of two-dimensional image) struck me that way. The illusion of depth was so strong that I raised my right hand and pressed my fingers against the canvas. I believe I honestly expected them to pass right on through, to the day and the place in the painting. Then Rosemary saw me touching it and told me to stop, that what I was doing was against the museum’s rules, so I pulled my hand back.

“Why?” I asked her, and she said there were corrosive oils and acids on human hands that could damage an old painting. She said that whenever the people who worked in the museum needed to handle them, they wore white cotton gloves to protect the canvases. I looked at my fingers, wondering what else I could hurt just by touching it, wondering if the acids and oils seeping from my skin had done all sorts of harm to all sorts of things without my knowing.

“Anyway, Imp, what were you doing, touching it like that?”

I told her how it had seemed like a window, and she laughed and wanted to know the name of the painting, the name of the artist, and the year it was done. All those things were printed on a card mounted on the wall beside the frame, and I read them off to her. She made notes on an envelope she pulled out of her bag. Rosemary always carried huge, shapeless cloth bags she’d sewn herself, and they bulged with everything from paperbacks to cosmetics to utility bills to grocery store receipts (which she never threw away). When she died, I kept a couple of those bags, and I still use them, though I don’t think I kept the one she was carrying that particular day. It was made from denim, and I’ve never much liked denim. I hardly even wear blue jeans.

“Why are you writing that stuff down?”

“You might want to remember it someday,” she replied. “When something makes a strong impression on us, we should do our best not to forget about it. So, it’s a good idea to make notes.”

“But how am I supposed to know what I might want to remember and what I won’t ever want to remember?”

“Ah, now, that’s the hard part,” Rosemary told me, and chewed her thumbnail a moment. “That’s the most difficult part of all. Because, obviously, we can’t waste all our time making notes about everything, can we?”

“Of course not,” I said, stepping back from the painting, but not taking my eyes off it. It was no less beautiful or remarkable for having
turned out not to be a window. “That would be silly, now, wouldn’t it.”

“That would be very silly, Imp. We’d waste so much time trying not to forget anything that nothing worth remembering would ever happen to us.”

“So you have to be careful,” I said.

“Exactly,” she agreed.

I don’t recall much else about that birthday. Just my gifts and the trip to RISD, Rosemary saying I should write down what might turn out to be important to me someday. After the museum, we must have gone home. There would have been a cake with ice cream, because there always was, right up to the year she was committed. There wouldn’t have been a party, because I never got a birthday party. I never wanted one. We left the museum, and the day rolled on, and midnight came, and it wasn’t my birthday again until I turned twelve. Yesterday, I checked a calendar online, and it informed me that the
next
day, the third of August, would have been a Sunday, but that doesn’t tell me much. We never went to church, because my mother was a lapsed Roman Catholic, and always said I’d be better off steering clear of Catholicism, if only because it meant I’d never have to go to the trouble of eventually lapsing.

“We don’t believe in God?” I might have asked her at some point.

“
I
don’t believe in God, Imp. What
you’re
going to believe, that’s up to you. You have to pay attention and figure these things out for yourself. I won’t do it for you.”

That is, if this exchange ever actually occurred. It almost seems that it did, almost, but a lot of my memories are false memories, so I can’t ever be certain, one way or the other. A lot of my most interesting memories seem never to have taken place. I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries
can’t be trusted. For instance, there’s a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I’m pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I’ve gotten used to it. And it doesn’t happen as much as it once did.

“I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed, and that’s what I’m writing. I’ve already written about the ghosts of my grandmother, my mother, and my great-grandmother’s sister, the one who kept dead animals in jars labeled with scripture. Those women are all only ghosts now, and they haunt me, just the same as the other ghosts I’m going to write about. Same as I’m haunted by the specter of Butler Hospital, there beside Swan Point Cemetery. Same as my vanished father haunts me. But, more than any of these, I’m haunted by Phillip George Saltonstall’s
The Drowning Girl
, which I’d have eventually remembered even if my mother hadn’t taken the time that day to make notes on an envelope.

Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time. I don’t imagine that when Saltonstall painted
The Drowning Girl
, almost a hundred years before I saw it for the first time, he paused to consider all the people it might haunt. That’s another thing about ghosts, a very important thing—you have to be careful, because hauntings are contagious. Hauntings are
memes
, especially pernicious thought contagions,
social
contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother’s suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.

Or a painting hanging on a wall.

I’m pretty sure that Saltonstall was, in fact, only trying to exorcise his own ghosts when he painted the nude woman standing in the water with the forest at her back. Too often, people make the
mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people. So, Saltonstall went to the Blackstone River, and he saw something there, something happened there, and it haunted him. Then, later on, he tried to make it go away the only way he knew how, by painting it. It wasn’t a malicious act, the propagation of that meme. It was an act of desperation. Sometimes, haunted people reach a point where they either manage to drive away the ghosts or the ghosts destroy them. What makes all this even worse is that it usually doesn’t work, trying to drag the ghosts out and seal them up tight where they can’t hurt us anymore. I think, mostly, we only spread them, when we try to do that. You make a copy, or transmit some infinitesimal part of the phantom, but most of it stays dug so deeply into your mind it’s never going anywhere.