The Drowning Tree (3 page)

“She was sent,” Christine concludes, “almost immediately upon her arrival in New York, to the Briarwood Insane Asylum—just a little upriver from here, where she lived out the rest of her life.”

It might be my imagination, but it seems to me that Christine meets my eye for a moment when she names Briarwood. We both have a personal connection to the mental institution: she grew up just down the road from it and members of her family have worked there for generations. My connection is more recent—my ex-husband was institutionalized there fourteen years ago. I wonder if this is what she meant when she told me on the phone several weeks ago that she had discovered something while conducting her research that might have an impact on me. I’m more worried right now, though, about the impact that Christine’s revelation will have on the audience. Eugenie Penrose has always been held up as an exemplary figure and role model—the college’s secular saint.

“Imagine what it was like for Eugenie to know that her sister was a mental patient just up the river from here. Did she fear she might follow in Clare’s footsteps? Or that her children would suffer from an inherited malady? Remember, the Victorians believed that madness was hereditary …”

Christine bends her head down to look at her notes. Unlike her previous pauses, this one does not seem timed for effect. I see, for the briefest of moments, a look of confusion pass over her face. She’s flipping through her note cards as if she’d realized that her lecture was running over and decided to skip something. It occurs to me, though, that she has another reason for skipping this part of her lecture.

“Let’s go back to the poem,” she resumes. “It’s when the Lady of Shalott sees Lancelot in the mirror that she disobeys the rules of her enchantment and looks directly at the world, thus condemning herself to die. She is not content to die in the solitary confinement in which she’s
dwelled, however. She finds a boat and sets off on her death journey down the river so that by the time she has died she will have arrived in Camelot and the object of her affection, Lancelot, will witness what his love has wrought. It’s not a passive death. The Lady of Shalott is the woman scorned who secures her revenge through her own death. She is the woman left behind, watching her unfaithful lover disappear over the horizon, Dido staining the night sky with her own funeral pyre—a beacon of recrimination to Aeneas’s departing fleet—or Madame Butterfly singing her last aria.

“It makes no sense to cast Eugenie in this role. It makes perfect sense, though, if we accept that the lady in the window is not Eugenie, but her sister, Clare, who looked enough like Eugenie that most people would think the portrait was of her. Only Eugenie and Augustus would know the truth.”

Christine pauses to allow this idea to sink in. The silence in the library feels charged, but whether because the audience is appalled at the notion that the window depicts not our beloved founder but her crazy sister, or because they are impressed by Christine’s scholarly sleuthing, I’m not sure. I’ve encountered this ambiguity in reaction to Christine before when, in classes or at parties, she would come out with statements so shocking and forthright that for a moment her audience would sway between embarrassment and admiration.

“If we see the figure in the window as Clare, Augustus’s message becomes clear. The window depicts the moment that the Lady turns from her loom to look directly at Sir Lancelot—the moment when she disobeys the rules of her confinement, the moment that seals her fate. She is not content to dwell in the cloistered realm of women’s work and she pays a heavy price for her rebellion. She is the artist—as Tennyson said—caught between reflection and reality at the moment when love releases her from shadows into substance. I believe that Augustus imagined this figure as his sister-in-law finally released from the spell of madness, and that he designed the window as a tribute to her.

“I believe that Augustus Penrose was also thinking about the generations of young women who would sit beneath this window. And so we must ask what her message is to us. I believe that the Lady is the student
waking up from the cloistered world of the academy into the demands of the real world. In other words, she is you and me.”

I notice that the room has gone very still. There’s no nervous ripple of laughter. The women lean forward in their seats, their pale clothes soaked in the bright colors from the window. Later they might carp at Christine’s unorthodox interpretation of the window, but for now she has their full attention.

“When I look back at my time here at Penrose it is as though I lived in a sealed tower, aloof from the world. Some might say we were too sheltered—that we dwelled in a world of shadows and that for many the strong sunlight of the real world was too much.”

Christine raises a hand into a gold beam cast by the sun shining through the Lady’s yellow hair and twirls her fingers around as if she were grasping the light.
How in the world
, I wonder,
could she have planned that?

“That like the Lady of Shalott the journey away from here too quickly became a slow drift toward death.” Christine unfurls her hand and it’s as if she has released the golden light into the room—a dove set free by a master magician. She pauses, allowing the silence to swell. Although there is little doubt that she is talking about herself now—about her own disappointments and failures—I sense that everyone in this room understands what she is saying. For whom of us has life turned out the way we imagined it would when we left here?

“But I don’t believe that Augustus Penrose wished us to be afraid of the journey—no matter where it might lead. He wanted us to be ready to look up from our books and away from the shadows—no matter where our awakening would lead us. I believe he conveyed his message in the way he painted the Lady’s face. Look at her—look at the flush of color that bathes her. It is the reflection of the sun striking her for the first time in her life. She might be bound for death, but in this moment—the moment in which she chooses life over shadow—she is more alive than she has ever been.

“Remember, too, that the window behind her is not a window but the mirror from which the Lady has turned away. In looking through the window she is looking at us, the women of Penrose College assembled
here before her. We are her reflection, we are her future. She has broken the spell that enslaves us—it’s up to us what we do with that freedom.”

Christine has chosen the perfect moment for her conclusion. The glass in the river scene, which was lit up by the sun during the first part of her lecture, is now cool and shadowy. The light has moved through the Lady’s yellow hair, down her face and bare throat, and settled into the bodice of her brocaded dress. Every woman here must remember the superstition—one of those silly campus legends women’s colleges are famous for—that when the light shone through the Lady’s dress it was shining through her heart. If you were touched by that red stain you would die young. Christine, standing in front of the window as the setting sun hits the glass, is bathed in the ruby-red light.

T
HE WINE AND CHEESE RECEPTION, WHICH IS HELD AT
F
OREST
H
ALL, THE PRESI
dent’s house, is not as horrible as I expected. The food and drinks are laid out in the dining hall, the walls of which are hung with Augustus’s collection of old world masters. Even though many of the paintings have turned out to be nineteenth-century copies, it’s still a pleasure to look at them. Christine is too well surrounded by college dignitaries to talk to me, but she manages to lip-synch a request for me to wait for her and take her to the train station.

If anyone has been offended by Christine’s lecture it’s impossible to tell from the crowd gathered around her now. Everyone is smiling as Gavin Penrose, current president of the college and grandson of Augustus and Eugenie, holds up a glass of champagne to toast Christine. I’m
struck by how good the two of them look together. At forty-five, Gavin’s lost none of the boyish good looks that made him the idol of every girl at Penrose. I remember that during our sophomore year he dated a girl in our dorm and when he’d drive up from Wharton to visit her every girl in the dorm would contrive to drape herself over a chair in the study lounge. His dark curly hair and slightly olive complexion are a nice contrast to Christine’s yellow hair and pale coloring.

The contrast in their coloring is echoed by the Titianesque blond Venus and dark, burly Mars they’re standing beneath. After Gavin’s toast, Christine gestures toward the painting and makes a comment that’s greeted by another ripple of laughter within the group but not from Gavin, who looks, instead, slightly mortified. If I know Christine, she is probably explaining why Augustus Penrose should have known the painting was not an authentic Titian when he bought it. Since Augustus donated the house and all of his art collection to the college, it’s of no personal moment to Gavin whether or not the work is original, but who wants to be told that their grandfather couldn’t tell a fake from the real thing? I’m afraid it’s just the kind of tactless comment Christine is wont to make—not out of malice, but because she has the habit of saying whatever occurs to her. Fortunately, Gavin seems more interested in the reallife Venus he’s talking to than the painted one above him. In fact, his attention is so riveted to Christine that it takes several tries before Fay, his assistant, is able to steer him over toward a petite, faded blonde in a Chanel suit whom I recognize from the alumnae magazine as Joan Shelley, class of ’77 and one of the college’s richest trustees.

When Gavin finally turns to Joan, Christine catches my eye and raises a conspiratorial smile at Joan’s obvious pique at being kept waiting. I head across the room to join her, but I’m waylaid by Robin Lindley, a girl I sat next to in Latin 101.

“It’s June, isn’t it?”

“Close,” I say, “Actually it’s …”

“No, wait! I remember. Juno. Juno McKay. Like the goddess. The Latin teachers loved that. Wasn’t your mother Greek or something?”

“No,” I say, “Italian. If she were Greek I’d be named Hera.”

Her puzzled expression—I remember suddenly that she was one of those girls who kept asking why we had to study a
dead
language and who
petitioned the college to drop mandatory Latin—is not half as bad as DeeDee Smith’s, our class president, when I tell her I was unable to attend the reunion because of my daughter Bea’s crew match upriver in Poughkeepsie.

“A daughter old enough to crew, why she’d have to be …”

Do the math
, I’m tempted to say. I had her the week before our graduation—or your graduation, I might say—and so instead of celebrating my fifteenth college reunion this weekend I watched my fifteen-year-old daughter out-row Poughkeepsie Country Day. A pretty good trade, I’d said to myself earlier today catching a flash of Bea’s red-gold braid, coiled between her taut shoulder blades. I’d read in the tension of her back muscles all her fire and enthusiasm, the way she leans into life, never away. A pretty good trade, I say to myself now, as DeeDee lifts a tennisbraceleted hand to smooth her already perfectly smooth hair.

“Beatrice,” she murmurs. “Such a lovely name. Beatrice McKay.”

“Beatrice Buchwald,” I correct her. “Her father’s name. We did get married—”

“Yes, I remember now. In the Rose Garden on May Day … didn’t he go to Columbia?”

“—and divorced two years later.”

“Honey,” DeeDee says, laying her flawlessly manicured hand on mine, “half the girls at the club are divorcing this year. My best friend Elyse’s husband left her for his twenty-three-year-old lab assistant. Men, they think with their
dicks.”
She lowers her voice on the last word, but just in case I don’t get her point she crooks her little finger to illustrate the male organ of derision.

“I’m afraid that wasn’t Neil’s weakness …” I look over DeeDee’s shoulder to see if there’s someone
—anyone
—to distract her attention from me, but the only gaze I meet is the lascivious leer of a Raphaelesque Triton pursuing a naked sea nymph. Explaining what happened to Bea’s father is not my favorite topic and in the interest of protecting Bea’s privacy I’ve been known to lie about his whereabouts, but when I look back at DeeDee I can see from the wash of red—crimson as the hematite paint in the Lady window—creeping over DeeDee’s tanned skin that she has remembered what happened to Neil.

“Oh my God!” she says squeezing my arm. “I completely forgot. I heard at our fifth reunion that he’d ended up in a mental hospital. In fact, wasn’t it the one Christine just mentioned in her lecture—the Briarwood Insane Asylum? The same one that Eugenie Penrose’s poor sister went to?”

Went to
, I think, as if we’re talking about where they went to college. Of course, Briarwood is one of those institutions—like MacLean or Austin-Riggs—so exclusive that it has almost the same cachet as a prestigious college or social club.

“Yes,” I admit, desperately trying to signal to Christine to come to my rescue. “Only now it’s called the Briarwood Institute for Mental Health. They dropped the ‘Insane Asylum’ part years ago. As far as I know he’s still there.”