The Drowning Tree (18 page)

T
HE NEXT WEEK, WHILE WAITING FOR
C
HRISTINE’S BODY TO BE RELEASED FROM THE
morgue, I find that I can no longer cut glass. It’s something I’m generally quite good at. My father taught me the summer I was sixteen when he corralled me into working with him as a glazier’s apprentice instead of attending the summer art institute at the Rhode Island School of Design.

“It’s not like anyone can really teach you how to draw,” he’d said, his callused hand on mine guiding the glass cutter over a smooth pane, “but a trade like this … well, you gotta get it from someone who’s got the touch, like I learned it from my father. The McKays have been cutting glass for generations. I can see already you’ve got the knack for it, just press a little harder till you hear a scratching—” The cutter made a sound
like sand makes when it’s caught between your teeth. “—but not so hard so you see white coming off your blade, and always make sure your cutter’s freshly oiled, and never go over a score twice.”

It had seemed like a million things to keep in mind at once—impossible to remember—and it was only when I stopped listening to his words and let my hand go limp under the steady pressure of his hand that I had learned to make a perfect score. Then he showed me how to break the glass along the score line by gently rocking the plate between my thumbs. The first time the glass snapped free along the curving line I’d drawn was like a miracle. “See,” my father had said, “I told you it was in the blood. You’ll make a fine glass cutter.”

The only blood I see this week, though, is my own, as plate after plate of expensive handblown opalescent glass shatters in my hands in crazy jagged patterns that refuse to follow my score lines. The glass explodes in showers of splinters that lodge in my fingertips and under my nails, and spray far afield so that hours later I’m still picking out miniature daggers of ruby and emerald from my socks and hair. I wake up in the middle of the night to find crushed cobalt glass, like a dusting of frost, sticking to my damp skin.

By Thursday Ernesto bans me from the studio. “The boy and me can cut the replacement pieces—why don’t you call your friend’s mother and see if she knows when the funeral is yet?”

Ruth Webb is the last person I want to talk to but Ernesto is right—I can’t put it off any longer. As I dial the number, which I still know by heart from the many calls I made to Christine during vacations, I tell myself that at least I called the week before when I first knew Christine was missing. Still, there’s no evading the aura of disapproval that emanates from the silence on the other end of the line when I tell Mrs. Webb how sorry I am.

“I’m sure you are, June,” she says, refusing as always to acknowledge my real name, which she once told Christine was
heathen
, “but it’s a bit too late for
sorry
, isn’t it?”

Only Ruth Webb could turn an expression of sympathy into a confession of guilt. I have no idea of what I’m supposed to be guilty, but I’ve always known that Ruth doesn’t like me and that she held me somehow
accountable for Christine’s problems. First because I indulged her daughter’s foolish ambitions to pursue an academic career (as if anyone could have swayed Christine from her chosen course once she’d made up her mind) and then for Christine’s abandonment of that career and her subsequent slide into drug use. Even when I helped get Christine into a rehab center, Ruth refused to help pay for it, insisting that it was
coddling
her.
All she needs is a little willpower, not a country club to loll around in. It’s like the patients at Briarwood—half of them would pick themselves up if their families didn’t pay for them to wallow in the lap of luxury
. That was another favorite theme of Ruth’s—the special treatment received at Briarwood. To hear her talk you’d think she was jealous of the patients there.

“Well, I’m sorry for your loss, just the same,” I say now, knowing better than to try defending myself, “for what we’ve all lost in Christine. She was a remarkable woman. I wish you could have heard her lecture. I think Christine was really putting her life back together.”

“Apparently not or she wouldn’t have committed a mortal sin and taken her own life.”

“Mrs. Webb, have the police determined that as the official cause of death?”

“I don’t have to wait for the police to tell me what I’ve known in my bones since that girl was born. She was always unhappy. Always crying for no reason. Nothing ever good enough for her. She couldn’t go to the community college just down the road like all her cousins or work at Briarwood during summers when I got her a job there. She had to go to Penrose and then live in New York City, but nothing ever made her happy.”

I could argue, but listening to Mrs. Webb’s disparaging dirge half makes
me
want to jump in the river. What must it have been like to grow up with a mother so out of tune with your nature? I was luckier losing a loving and supportive mother at sixteen than having one like Christine’s.

“Have the police said yet when they’ll release the body?”

“Tomorrow. The funeral’s set for ten
AM
on Saturday. I told that Italian police officer that we had to bury her over the weekend because her aunts and cousins can’t miss work what with Briarwood laying off so many people right now.”

I almost smile imagining Detective Falco’s response to being given such a directive from the deceased’s mother.

“Do you want me to go to the morgue to … to ride up with her …” I falter thinking of all the times I’d given Christine a ride home over the years. My dad would let me borrow the van so we could pack up all Christine’s stuff—although truthfully she never had that much. We liked taking the van, though, because we could pull over and smoke a joint in the back. Often, as we approached her house she would suggest we pull over again and we’d just sit in the back talking, clearly putting off her arrival home. The idea of bringing her back home now, for all eternity, is almost more than I can stand.

“That won’t be necessary,” Mrs. Webb says, “that man from the college said he’d go to the morgue and ride up in the hearse with her.”

“You mean Gavin Penrose, the college president?” I remember Gavin saying he’d take care of these arrangements, but I’m surprised to learn that he’s personally accompanying Christine’s body from the morgue to the funeral home—and guilty at the sense of relief I have that I don’t have to do it.

“Yes, I know what his job is. I expect he feels bad about encouraging Chrissie on that fool’s errand poking into his family’s dirty laundry …”

“Christine was thrilled when Gavin asked her to give a lecture on the window.”

“Well, I’m sure she was … any notice from that college …” For a moment Mrs. Webb’s voice falters and I’m reminded that beneath the constant stream of criticism and carping at her daughter’s lifestyle she must have really loved her—at least, I’ve always hoped that was the case.

“Mrs. Webb, if there’s anything I can do to help …”

I’m expecting a curt dismissal of my offer, but Ruth surprises me. “I do have a job ahead of me getting this house ready for the wake afterward, what with my knee and all.”

Thirty years ago—when Christine was seven—a patient at Briarwood slammed a steel tray into Ruth’s right leg and shattered her kneecap. She’d been able to retire on full disability, but had always been bitter that nothing had been done to punish the patient.
She was happiest in the days of insulin shock treatment and lobotomies
, Christine always said.

“Well, do you want me to stop at Grand Union and pick up anything on the way?”

Ruth responds with a shopping list the length of my forearm. I write it all down—the liters of soft drinks, jumbo packages of chips, hot dogs, hamburger meat, Miracle Whip and Sara Lee cake—all of which sounds more like a supply list for a Fourth of July picnic than a wake—on a scrap of paper I steal from the studio. Only afterward do I notice that I’ve written the shopping list on the back of the drawing I did earlier in the week of the two Barovier sisters walking on their riverside path.

T
HE
S
ILAS
B. C
OOKE
F
UNERAL
H
OME IS IN DOWNTOWN
P
OUGHKEEPSIE, NOT FAR
from the train station, in a neighborhood that feels even more run-down than where I live. Looking at Poughkeepsie always makes me feel discouraged about the prospects of reviving Rosedale. No matter how much federal aid is pumped into the town—and at one point in the eighties Poughkeepsie was receiving the most federal aid of any city in New York State—the town continues to look hopelessly dreary and borderline dangerous. The funeral home itself was nearly burned down a few years before by a gang of teenagers. Two of the front windows are still boarded up and someone has scrawled a
d
at the end of Silas’s name on the front awning—boasting that Silas Be Cooked.

Inside, under the cloying smell of wax candles and flowers, a charred aroma still lingers. Clearly the Cookes haven’t been able to afford to renovate since the fire. In addition to the boarded-up exterior windows there’s a wall of stained-glass windows between the anteroom and the chapel that have obviously suffered serious fire and smoke damage. The panels are landscape scenes similar to ones that Tiffany made popular for use as memorial windows in churches and mausoleums in the early twenties. Called “The River of Life” or “End of Day,” these landscapes were supposed to evoke religious significance, but I’ve always thought Tiffany just loved creating flowers and streams with glass. Although they’re probably not Tiffany’s, these windows are actually quite lovely. I move closer to get a better look and see that soot has gotten between the layered plates of glass and that there are erratically curved cracks in many of the
panels.
Internal crazing
. It happens when glass is heated quickly to a high temperature and then rapidly cooled. The tension between a cooling exterior and hot interior creates delicate, bright cracks, like phosphorescent spiderwebs. It’s almost impossible to restore glass damaged like this, but I did recently read in a conservation textbook of a process in which the cracks were infused with epoxy and then reassembled. I make a mental note to talk to the owner of the funeral parlor and head into the chapel.

I’m relieved to see, when I enter the main chapel, that the room feels full, mostly because Ruth Webb’s family takes up five or six pews on the right side. Ruth Webb has four sisters and they all have three or four children apiece. I had remembered that the aunts, like Ruth, tended to fat, and I can’t help but notice that their children have followed suit. It’s always amazed me that Christine, reed thin even during freshman year when we all put on ten pounds from late-night pizza and keg parties, came from such a corpulent family. Of course I never met her father, who died when Christine was only four, but his two sisters, whom I notice now sitting a little apart from Ruth’s family, are also quite large.

One of the Webb aunts—Amy, I remember just in time—greets me as I come down the aisle with such a warm smile that I feel instantly guilty for obsessing about familial obesity at a time like this. I recall as she grasps me in a sweaty embrace—it feels as if the fire that cooked poor Silas is still raging somewhere below us—that she had been Christine’s favorite aunt.

“Juno, thank you for coming, Christine was just telling me not a month ago what a good friend you’ve always been to her.”

“You saw her last month?”

“She was doing some research at Briarwood and I got her an appointment with Doctor Horace,” Amy says, lowering her voice. “Ruth’s still upset she didn’t get in touch with her when she was up at the hospital. If I’d known I’d never have mentioned seeing her …” Amy takes a quick look around—the nylon fabric of her navy and white polka-dot dress making a rasping noise as it moves over some under layer of fabric—and then leans forward to whisper in my ear under the cover of kissing me on the cheek. “I have an idea why she didn’t want to see her mother …”

Before Amy can finish her sentence we both notice Gavin Penrose striding purposefully toward us. He’s quite a startling sight amid the nylon print dresses and floral wreaths crafted of carnations dyed in colors not found in nature. He’s wearing a charcoal gray suit with a subtle chalk stripe and a silk tie in yet another Morris print. Even though the suit is wool he appears to be the only one in the room not sweating.

“Juno, everyone from the college is sitting over here,” he gestures toward the left side of the chapel. “Let Fay know if you feel up to saying a few words—I’m going to, but don’t feel obliged.”

“Oh, that would have meant the world to Christine,” Amy croons into my ear. She’s still standing close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off her and smell her Jean Naté body splash.

“I don’t have anything prepared …”

“Just a few words from the heart—that’s all I’m doing. Come and tell Fay, though; she’s keeping a list.”

Gavin takes my arm and I reluctantly leave Amy. “We’ll talk later back at the house,” I say, hoping she doesn’t forget what she’d been about to tell me.

Gavin leads me to the front pew on the left side of the chapel and seats me between Fay Morgan and Joan Shelley, the petite blond trustee who I saw at Christine’s lecture last week. I’m touched that a woman of Joan’s social standing—I read in the alumnae magazine that she’s used her considerable fortune to found a number of art organizations—would come to Christine’s funeral. After we’ve exchanged greetings—and Fay has written my name down on her “list” of speakers, which only contains my name and Gavin’s—the two women resume their conversation, leaning forward to talk across me, about college budget cuts. I turn in my seat to look back and notice, in the very last pew, Detective Falco mopping his forehead with a white handkerchief. He catches my eye almost the instant I turn, waves at me and then, when he sees he’s waving the white handkerchief, quickly pockets it and blushes.

I turn back in my seat and smile, oddly pleased at the detective’s discomfiture, and then remember where I am and why and stop smiling.