The Drowning Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

again, noticing what it usually takes people a few times to notice. It looks, at first glance, as if the vines are growing over the metal frame of the skylight, but actually, the pattern of vine and leaf is one I’ve set into the glass panes.
    “Wow, you did those, too? I like it even better than the piece you had at Urban Glass last year …” Looking back down, Christine notices thatI’m awkwardly balancing the water bottle and glasses in my right hand, the bread and cheese in my left. “Here, let me take those …”
    We put the food and water down on an old wicker table and I upend a lawn chair to brush away the soot that finds its way up from the Metro-North tracks. I offer to get a towel for her to sit on but Christine waves away the idea and sinks into the torn vinyl webbing, consigning her Prada dress to industrial grit and her expensive leather bag to the sooty tarpaper roof. I bend down to pick up the bag—I remember when she brought it back from Italy and showed me its fancy silk lining embossed with the logo of a trendy Italian luggage designer—but she waves me off, saying, “I have something in there I want to show you.” Instead of taking anything out, though, she crosses her long slim legs, the leather of her boots making a sticky sound like a tape pulling off glass, and sighs at the view.
    “Incredible—you’d pay a million dollars for a view like this on the West Side of Manhattan.”
    It is my favorite hour of the day—the stained-glass hour, I can’t help but think of it as, when the sky cools down to an opalescent glaze and the trees darken into traceries of lead. I sit down on a rusted metal chair and pour the sparkling water into long-stemmed glasses, admiring how the bubbles turn into a faceted gem in the ruby red bowl of the goblet. I’ve never seen anyone do cut glass the way Ernesto does—as intricate as Waterford, but as delicate as Orrefors. They transform plain water into some exotic elixir—which is just the effect I was after. Since Christine gave up drinking I’ve tried to make a point of serving her nonalcoholic beverages in this ceremonial fashion.
    Christine holds her glass up to the dark line of hills across the river as if saluting the last light lingering in the distant Catskills. A ray catches the glass, traveling through the red glass and casting a red stain on Christine’s hand, like a bracelet of rubies dripping off her delicate wrist.
    “Here’s to the Lady in the Window,” I say, leaning forward to strike the rim of my glass against hers. The chime they make is still resonating in the air when I sip my water. “The lecture was a success and now the window will be restored in time for the college’s centennial celebration in the fall. You’ll come back, won’t you?”
    Christine sets her glass down on the table and tears off a piece ofbread. “If they’ll have me. I have a feeling my talk wasn’t quite what Gavin Penrose expected. He knew I was going to identify the subject of the window as ‘The Lady of Shalott’ but I don’t think he was happy about me bringing up Eugenie’s sister, Clare.”
    “The research you did was amazing. I never even knew that Eugenie had a sister. How did you find out about her?”
    “My aunt Amy told me about this woman Clare Barovier who had spent her whole life in Briarwood and I recognized the name as Eugenie’s maiden name. Then I went over to Briarwood and did a little digging around—” Christine smiles mischievously. From my past experiences with Christine I know that “digging around” could mean just about anything, including actual digging. Once, when she was doing a paper on landscape design she sneaked into the formal rose gardens next to Forest Hall and dug up one of the borders to prove that the garden had originally been laid out according to a knot design copied from a fifteenth-century gardening book. The college trustees wanted her expelled, but when her paper was published in
Architectural