The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman

Author:Carol Goodman [Goodman, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mentally Ill, Psychological Fiction, Class Reunions, Fiction, Literary, College Stories, Suspense, Female Friendship, Thrillers, Suspense Fiction, Mystery Fiction, Women Art Historians, Universities and Colleges, Missing Persons
ISBN: 0345462114
Google: Eyi8eh3GhnYC
Amazon: B000FC1RR8
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2004-06-01T07:00:00+00:00

IT WAS TO THOSE PIECES OF GLASS THAT I TURNED MY ATTENTION IN THE DAYS following Christine’s funeral and my visit to Briarwood. We’d dedicated the light table to the landscape section of the window because it was the part of the restoration that was giving us the most trouble. The rest of the window was relatively simple to reassemble because Penrose had, for the most part, used only a single layer of glass in the figure of the lady and the furniture of her room. The landscape in the window, however, was composed of many layers of glass.

“He was jealous of Tiffany,” Ernesto concluded when he laid out all the pieces on the light table.

“Oh, he hated Tiffany,” my father concurred. “He claimed that Tiffany stole the idea of this landscape from him.”

“But it’s such a simple landscape,” I pointed out, “a stream flowing through some mountains into a pool …”

“If you look at Tiffany’s memorial windows he often used the same image.” Robbie, who had been hanging on the edge of the conversation, came over with an art book held open to a picture of Tiffany’s window “Magnolia and Irises,” which I’d seen a dozen times at the Met. He flipped forward a few pages to one called “Autumn Landscape.” In both windows there are mountains in the distance, and a stream, although in “Magnolia and Irises” there’s no pool and in “Autumn Landscape” the stream seems to start at the base of the mountains instead of transversing the mountains. “According to this book, the passage of the river through the mountains and into a pool is supposed to stand for the life of the dead person that the window is commemorating, and it says Tiffany used plating to create depth and three-dimensionality.”

“Yeah, Penrose wanted to do the same thing, only better and with more layers of glass,” Ernesto said, “and he wanted to create a dichroic pattern just like Tiffany did in his lamps only on a bigger scale.” Ernesto pointed to the section of the mountain landscape in our window that he reassembled last week to produce a stream flowing through the mountains. The problem was that if we reassembled the rest of the landscape by following the blueprint of how it had been originally assembled the stream died out just below the mountains before it reached the lily pool.

“It looks like it just dries up,” Ernesto complained. “That can’t be how it’s meant to be.”

The area where the stream “dried up” though was in among the rocks and boulders that led to the lily pond. It was built out of hundreds of tiny pieces of glass, and when I started trying to rearrange them they threw off the rest of the composition.

“I say we put it together the way it was,” my father suggested. “No one will be the wiser. You said you never mentioned the dichroic pattern to Gavin Penrose.”

“No,” I agreed. “I forgot to. But still, I’d like to try to see if I can figure out how it was originally laid out.

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