The Drowning Tree (19 page)

The service is delivered by a minister of uncertain denomination who clearly never met Christine. For one thing he keeps referring to her as
“Chris” in a pathetic attempt to sound familiar, but it’s a nickname that Christine loathed. He praises her fine academic career at
Vassar
(Gavin Penrose groans audibly at the mention of Penrose’s rival) and bemoans the loss to the world of a talented artist (apparently not having grasped the difference between an art historian and artist). I glance over at the family pews to see if Mrs. Webb is taking umbrage at this misrepresentation of her daughter’s life but she is placidly fanning herself with the funeral program. Artist, art historian; Vassar, Penrose—it had probably all seemed equally far-fetched to her.

“Let us pray that Christine finds peace with the ultimate artist, He who fashioned us from clay, our creator,” the minister concludes. “Amen.”

Gavin is up before we’ve finished echoing the minister’s amen. I’m relieved that he’s going first until I realize this means that the responsibility of the last word is mine. What in the world can I say, I wonder, as Gavin unfolds two sheets of white typescript—his
few words from the heart
—and begins to speak.

“Christine Webb was the epitome of everything Penrose College stands for,” he says, laying heavy stress on the words
Penrose College
. “She’s the kind of girl Eugenie Penrose had in mind when she founded the Woman’s Craft League and when she and her husband, Augustus Penrose, broadened the scope of the Craft League by founding Penrose College.” I wonder if Gavin really wrote his speech this way or if he has altered it to get in as many references to Penrose as he can to extinguish the lingering echoes of
Vassar
in the overheated chapel.

“Augustus and Eugenie Penrose wanted to elevate women’s work to give girls from humble beginnings a chance to do honest work and create lasting beauty. Christine Webb was
not
an artist—” I peek to see if the minister, sitting to Gavin’s left, has any reaction to Gavin’s correction of his elegy, but his eyes are closed in prayerful contemplation—or perhaps heat-induced stupor.

“—She didn’t create beauty. Instead she looked for beauty in the world around her so she could uncover it and show it to the rest of us. She wasn’t the stained-glass window—” Gavin half turns to indicate the stained-glass window behind him—a reproduction of Tiffany’s “The
River of Life” mounted on a light box, not lit by natural light. “—she was the light shining through it. She spent her life and her great talent and her intellect
illuminating
the truth because Christine believed, with Keats, that
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Gavin stops. Looks down at his notes. Looks up and then folds the pages neatly in quarters and slips them into his breast pocket. A little dramatic gesture I suspect he planned as carefully as the Keats quote.

“Sometimes I think that Christine was too relentless in her search for the truth—that she shined her light into corners that should, perhaps, have remained in the shadows. That she spared nothing and no one—least of all herself—from the full force of her scrutiny. I could wish now that she’d been a little easier on herself, but I know that my grandmother, Eugenie Penrose, would have admired Christine. She would have considered her a worthy successor to the dream upon which she founded the college. Because, as Christine and Keats believed, she, too, believed that truth is beauty and
that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
. Wherever Christine is I hope that she knows now what she needed to know and that she rests easy with that knowledge.”

There’s an uncomfortable stirring as Gavin walks down from the podium and I get up to take his place. I can hear the pews creak as the aunts shift their weight and a dry rattle as they fan themselves. My mind is sadly blank when I turn to face the little assembly. It’s more than I can bear to meet anyone’s gaze, so instead I look over their heads at the smoke-damaged stained-glass windows at the back of the chapel. I can just make out the figure of a man on the other side of the panels, a shadow moving behind the cracked glass that comes to rest near the entrance to the chapel but doesn’t come inside. Instead of thinking about Christine I am remembering, stupidly, Keats’s poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—the one Gavin quoted from—and picturing the scene Keats describes on the urn, of a young man pursuing a young woman. I can even remember the lines (another legacy of Mrs. Ramsey’s Nineteenth-Century Lit):
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
and I picture, suddenly, my last glimpse of Christine’s face in the train window and realize that the look I’d seen there was of someone pursued. But by what? Or by whom?

“Gavin is right that Christine sought out beauty. She saw it in places no one else would notice it. In the angle of light in a smoky bar, in a brick wall of an old factory, or in an eighteen-year-old college freshman who had stopped seeing any beauty in the world.”

I take a deep breath that shudders only slightly and go on. “I remember the first time I met Christine. It was a few months into our first year at Penrose. She was studying in the library at the table in front of the Lady window and for a moment I thought the figure in the window had stepped down from the glass and turned into flesh. The girl at the table had the same long blond hair and she was wearing an embroidered tunic with bell-shaped sleeves that looked like the Lady’s medieval dress. It turned out to be an Indian kurta—a cheap gauzy thing that she’d bought in a thrift shop in the East Village, but it didn’t matter; Christine looked like a queen in it.

“ ‘I bet you’ve heard the superstition, too,’ she said when I sat down at the table. When I asked her what she meant she told me that any paper written under the Lady window would get an A. I told her I could use the help. Unlike a lot of my classmates at Penrose I hadn’t gone to a fancy prep school. It wasn’t just that the work was hard for me, but that the teachers and other students seemed to speak a language I didn’t understand. I’d just gotten back my first art history paper and gotten a C–on it.

“ ‘You have to stick with what you see,’ she explained to me, ‘and follow where your eye leads you.’ She spent the rest of the evening showing me not just how to rewrite the paper but how to really
see
the paintings we were supposed to write about. I found out later that she had a paper due the next day, too; she ended up writing it between two and four that morning and still got an A on it. When we left the library at midnight, though, she didn’t rush back to the dorm to work on her paper. It had started to snow for the first time that year.

“ ‘I believe it’s an old Penrose tradition to climb to the top of the library tower and watch the first snow fall over the valley,’ she told me. And so that’s what we did. I’ll never forget what the view of the Hudson Valley looked like from up there.”

The figure behind the stained-glass windows turns away as if disappointed in my elegy for Christine.
What more can I say?
I want to call to the
retreating figure. Instead I finish up with the only thing I can think of, raising my voice a little as if calling after my unknown listener in the anteroom.

“Christine had the gift of showing you what the world could look like from the highest heights and uncovering depths inside yourself you never knew you had. In losing her I’ve lost more than a friend, I’ve lost that part of myself that she saw in me.”

The man behind the glass walks away, crossing behind the heavy leaded joints of the window like a man slipping behind the trees of a forest. I can’t see his face, but something in his posture, his loping gait, suddenly reminds me of someone. Only it’s impossible for it to be him.

I
N MY HASTE TO GET OUT TO THE LOBBY
I
NO DOUBT CONVINCE
C
HRISTINE’S MOTHER
that I am as rude a heathen as she always thought me to be. I know it’s insane—that the figure behind the glass couldn’t possibly be Neil—but I have to know for sure.

The lobby is empty of everything but that faint whiff of smoke still hanging in the air. It’s a little fainter now than it had been before, as if the outside door had recently been open. It’s impossible to see the street because the outside windows are boarded up, so I move toward the front door, which opens in just as I reach it. I nearly run into a slender young man in a crumpled black suit and skinny tie. As it is, the man treads on my feet with his pointy-toed black cowboy boots.

Who would wear cowboy boots to a funeral?

I look up into a face so young he could be Beatrice’s age. Or maybe it’s just his red swollen eyes that make him look like a child.

“Am I late? Did I miss it? The train was delayed and then I walked from the station and got lost. This is where Christine Webb is—I mean, where her funeral is?”

“Yes. You’re Nathan Bell, aren’t you?” I say, having recognized his voice from our phone conversation. I hold out a hand to shake his and then, thinking better of it when I see him use his hand to mop his perspiring forehead, pat his shoulder instead. The black cloth, I notice, is covered in white cat hair, reminding me that he still has Christine’s cat. I can also feel through the thin fabric that he’s drenched. It’s a good mile to the station and he’s breathing as if he had jogged it.

“I’m Christine’s friend, Juno. We spoke on the phone last week. I should have thought to call you and ask if you needed a lift from the station.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t want to be a bother and Mrs. Webb told me it was only a few blocks. Have I missed the service?”

“I’m afraid so, but honestly, you didn’t miss much. The minister wouldn’t have known Christine if he’d tripped over her.” I look back guiltily over my shoulder to see if anyone’s overheard me, but the congregants are only now slowly filtering out of the chapel into the lobby. I notice that Ruth is walking next to Amy, leaning heavily on her sister’s arm. Detective Falco comes up beside her and offers her his arm as well, but she waves him away. Then he leans over and whispers something in her ear. I see Ruth’s skin, washed out already, turn whiter and then flush pink.
Something to do with the autopsy report?
I wonder. But what bad news could there be left to tell? I step forward, trying to get closer to them, but they’re surrounded by Ruth’s sisters and other Webbs. Besides, I’ve still got Nathan Bell, who’s stepped forward with me, glued to my side and shifting uneasily from foot to foot in those damned incongruous cowboy boots. What could he have been thinking? But then I realize that he’s probably a poor graduate student and they might be the only pair of black shoes he owns.

“Christine was cremated so there’s no burial,” I say to him, abandoning
my efforts to get closer to Detective Falco and Ruth. I can always find out later what the autopsy results have revealed. “But everyone’s going back to Mrs. Webb’s house. I can give you a lift.”

He looks so grateful I feel bad that I’ve made the offer half grudgingly. The truth is that I’d like to take the drive myself so I can think more about that apparition behind the stained-glass windows. “By the way, when you came in did you happen to pass someone going out—a young man …”

I falter, unsure of how to describe Neil, whom I haven’t seen in over ten years. Would his hair still be that shade of blond that turned to gold when the sun hit it? Did he still have that spray of freckles across the bridge of his nose—the same configuration that sprawls over Bea’s face—and hazel eyes that turned blue or green depending on his mood and sometimes didn’t match? Or had fourteen years in a mental hospital—even one as expensive and elite as Briarwood—washed all those colors out of him?

Nathan is still waiting.

“Did you see anyone leaving as you came in?” I ask.

“No,” he says, “only you.”

O
N THE DRIVE TO
M
RS
. W
EBB’S HOUSE
I
DECIDE THAT WHOEVER
I
SAW THROUGH THE
funeral parlor windows—if anyone was there at all—couldn’t be Neil. It was an undertaker, or a shadow—some trick of light in the distorted, fire-damaged glass. Still as we drive out of downtown and turn onto the wooded road that leads to Christine’s childhood home I find myself scanning the edges of the woods as if looking for some fugitive shape flitting between the trees.

“Webb Road,” Nathan says, reading the road sign. “Any relation—?”

“They’re all relations,” I answer. “Almost everyone on this road is a cousin of some degree. Even Christine’s mother was a Webb before she married Mr. Webb—a third or fourth cousin.”

“I didn’t know the area Christine grew up in was so
rural.”
The way Nathan says
rural
I know that what he’s really thinking is
white trash
. From his accent and the Star of David I can see now that he’s loosened his
tie, I place him as a nice Jewish boy from Long Island or Queens. Although only two hours from New York City this rural pocket must seem as remote to him as backwoods Georgia. “I’d never have found my way on these back roads—maybe we should have followed the other cars.”