{"product_id":"the-drowning-tree-isbn-9780345462121","title":"The Drowning Tree","description":"Artfully imagined, intricately detailed, eerily poignant: these are the outstanding features of Carol Goodman’s literary thrillers. She is part novelist, part craftsman—and \u003ci\u003eThe Drowning Tree\u003c\/i\u003e is her newest masterpiece.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJuno McKay intended to avoid the nearby campus of her alma mater during her fifteenth reunion weekend, but she just can’t turn down the chance to see her longtime friend, Christine Webb, speak at the Penrose College library. Though Juno cringes at the inevitable talk of the pregnancy that kept her from graduating, and of her husband, Neil Buchwald, who ended up in a mental hospital only two years after their wedding, Juno endures the gossip for her friend’s sake. Christine’s lecture sends shockwaves through the rapt crowd when she reveals little-known details about the lives of two sisters, Eugenie and Clare—members of the powerful and influential family whose name the college bears. Christine’s revelation throws shadows of betrayal, lust, and insanity onto the family’s distinguished facade.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut after the lecture, Christine seems distant, uneasy, and sad. The next day, she disappears. Juno immediately suspects a connection to her friend’s shocking speech. Although painfully reminded of her own experience with Neil’s mental illness, Juno nevertheless peels away the layers of secrets and madness that surround the Penrose dynasty. She fears that Christine discovered something damning about them, perhaps even something worth killing for. And Juno is determined to find it—for herself, for her friend, and for her long-lost husband.“Goodman’s early promise comes to full flower in this work . . . A novel full of surprises.”\u003cbr\u003e–The Denver Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] captivating literary mystery of secrets old and new.”\u003cbr\u003e–Publishers Weekly\u003cb\u003eCarol Goodman\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Seduction of Water \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Lake of Dead Languages\u003c\/i\u003e. Her work has appeared in such journals as \u003ci\u003eThe Greensboro Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLiteral Latté\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Midwest Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eOther Voices\u003c\/i\u003e. After graduating from Vassar College, where she majored in Latin, she taught Latin for several years in Austin, Texas. She then received an M.F.A. in fiction from the New School University. Goodman currently teaches writing in New York City. She lives on Long Island.CHAPTER ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI WAS LATE FOR CHRISTINE'S LECTURE.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI almost didn't go. I wouldn't have gone if she hadn't especially  asked me to come. The force of her preference was as irresistible now  as it had been nearly twenty years ago when of all the girls at  Penrose College she chose me to be her best friend. So even though  I'd made a vow to avoid the campus during reunion--and had managed to  do so, so far--I find myself on Sunday afternoon rushing through the  lengthening shadows toward the library, just as I had on so many  Sunday evenings during college, making a last dash to catch up on  everything I'd avoided doing all weekend.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUsually it was Christine herself who had lured me away from my work  in the first place, who had unearthed me from whatever hole I'd  buried myself in. \"The Middle Ages can wait,\" she'd say, \"but the  Sargent exhibit at the Whitney is ending this weekend.\" She was  always reading about some art exhibit that was just about to close.  Carried along by her enthusiasm, I'd follow her to the train station,  trying to keep up with her fast stride, in the wake of her long blond  hair that streamed out behind her like the wings of a dove quivering  on a current of air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs I open the heavy library door I almost catch a glimpse of that  hair, shining in a swath of sun behind me, but of course it's an  illusion. Christine is inside, standing at the podium, miraculously  transformed into this older, more constrained woman--a lecturer--her  long golden hair tamed into a sleek coil.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This is where you'd find me,\" Christine is saying to the audience as  I slide into a folding chair in the back of the crowded hall--even  the second-story galleries are packed with students sitting on the  floor between the stacks--\"after dinner Sunday nights, when the work  I'd happily neglected all weekend finally caught up with me.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRueful sighs stir the group seated beneath the stained-glass window.  Clearly, I'm not the only one who'd been reminded, walking toward the  library through the late afternoon sunshine, of those last minute  penitential pilgrimages. And this is where I would find her, already  at work on some paper due the next day, somehow arrived before me  even though when we'd finally gotten back to the dorm from the city  she'd claimed she was going to her room to sleep. While the escapades  she'd led me on left me tired and bleary-eyed, they somehow left  Christine refreshed and inspired. She had managed to write through  the night and the paper she'd turn in on Monday morning would be the  one the professors would hold up as the most original, the most  brilliant.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"When I approached the table here below the window I always imagined  that the Lady looked down at me askance,\" Christine continues, \"'Oh,  so you've finally seen fit to join us,' I imagined her saying. I  believe I endowed her with the voice of Miss Colclough, my sophomore  Chaucer professor.\" Christine pauses for another ripple of knowing  laughter. Miss Coldclaw--as we called her--was legendary for her  withering comments and draconian teaching methods. \"In fact, over the  years, as I studied below her I endowed the Lady in the Window with  many roles--muse, companion, judge. But of course these were my own  projections. What we've come to consider today is who she really is,  what she has to tell us--the class of 1987--about ourselves, and why  it's so important that we save her from decay.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChristine turns slightly and tilts her head up, meeting the gaze of  the figure in the glass as if she had been passing on the street and  recognized a friend at a second-story window. Throughout the lecture  she turns like this to address the Lady as if they were  contemporaries--and truly, even though Christine is dressed in a  spare, sleeveless black shift (Prada, I think) and the Lady is robed  in a medieval gown of embroidered damask (ruby glass acid-etched with  a millefleur pattern and layered with white drapery glass), there is  a kinship between the two women. There's something in the curve of  their spines--Christine's when she leans back to look up at the  window, the Lady as she arches her back away from her loom to look up  from her labors--that echoes each other. They've got the same yellow  hair. The Lady's by virtue of a medieval metallurgical process called  silver stain, Christine's thanks to a colorist on the Upper East  Side. The Lady's abundant Pre-Raphaelite locks, though, are loose,  while Christine's long blond hair is twisted in a knot so heavy that  when she bows her head back down to her notes her slender neck seems  to pull against the strain. I realize, from that strain and from how  thin she's gotten, what a toll this lecture has taken on her and  instantly forgive her for not making time to see me these last six or  seven months--the longest we've gone without seeing each other since  college.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"No doubt we all heard the same story on the campus tour. The window  was designed by Augustus Penrose, founder of the Rose Glass Works and  Penrose College, in 1922 for the twentieth anniversary of the  college's founding and it depicts Augustus's beloved wife, Eugenie.  As we all know, Penrose College grew out of The Woman's Craft League  which Eugenie had created for the wives and daughters of the men who  worked in her husband's factory.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA college born from a glorified sewing circle, is how Christine put  it once, a bit too loudly, at a freshman tea. But of course she  doesn't say that to this assembly of women in their tailored linen  skirts and pastel silk blouses, their Coach bags and sensible  Ferragamo shoes. Penrose College may have originated from a socialist  dream of aiding women from the underclasses, but it soon became a  bastion of East Coast wealth and privilege.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"But before we accept that the Lady in the Window is merely a  celebration of the medieval craftswoman,\" Christine continues, \"let's  review the social and artistic background of Augustus Penrose. His  family owned a glass works in England, Penrose \u0026amp; Sons, in Kelmscott,  a small village on the Thames River near Oxford, which supplied  medieval quality glass for stained-glass designers, including William  Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite artist who also happened to live in  Kelmscott. Young Augustus was particularly influenced by the opinions  of William Morris, who believed that integrity ought to be restored  to the decorative arts. When Simon Barovier, a wealthy factory owner  from the north, purchased Penrose \u0026amp; Sons, he encouraged young  Augustus in his artistic pursuits--and so did Barovier's daughter,  Eugenie, who fell in love with Augustus. As you know, the two  married, and were sent by old Simon over to this country in the 1890s  to found an American branch of the glass works. Augustus and Eugenie  wanted to do more, though, than run a glass factory. Influenced by  Morris's ideas, they were soon in the vanguard of the Arts \u0026amp; Crafts  Movement...\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow that Christine has moved onto the firmer ground of her expertise  in art history I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding. I  realize how nervous I am for her--how much I want this lecture to be  a success for her--a comeback.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBack in college, Christine had a sort of glow about her--a radiant  energy that drew people to her. We all believed she would go on to  great things--even when she eschewed a PhD in favor of a job at a New  York gallery and freelance writing on the arts. We thought then that  she'd write a brilliant book or at least marry one of the famous  artists she was often seen with at gallery openings. By the tenth  reunion, when none of these things had happened and she got so drunk  that she passed out during the Farewell Brunch, that glow of promise  began to fade. Her name disappeared from the class notes; when I ran  into people from the college that had known her they would ask after  her with a solicitous edge of concern in their voices as if expecting  to hear the worst. Sometimes, I suspected, hoping to hear the worst.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany were surprised, then, when the programs for the fifteenth  reunion arrived with the announcement that Christine would be  delivering the lecture on the Lady window which the class of 1987 had  elected to restore as their class gift. I wasn't, though, because I'd  seen Christine through rehab four years ago and urged her to apply  for a Penrose Grant, which supported alumnae who wanted to switch  careers ten to twenty years out of college (the \"second-chance\" grant  we often called it, a perfect prize for Christine who always managed  to pull her act together at the last minute and shine brilliantly) so  that she could go back to graduate school. I even suggested she make  the window the subject of her thesis and when McKay Glass won the bid  to do the restoration of the window--the first really big  conservation project we've gotten since I convinced my father to  expand into stained-glass restoration--I suggested to the college  that Christine deliver this lecture. So you couldn't really blame me  for being nervous for her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile Christine's lecturing on the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts \u0026amp; Crafts  Movement (material I've heard before), I let my mind wander and my  gaze shift to the window itself--brilliant now in the late afternoon  sun. The upper half is dominated by a large rounded window--a window  within a window--which frames a green pool carpeted with water lilies  and shaded by a weeping beech. The view of mountains in the distance  is the same as the view we would see if the window were clear--the  deeply wooded hills of the Hudson Highlands on the western  bank--still forested because Augustus Penrose bought up all the land  on that side of the river for his mansion, Astolat. When Astolat  burned down in the 1930s he and Eugenie moved back to Forest Hall,  their house on this side of the river. All that's left of Astolat are  the water gardens that Penrose designed--the centerpiece of which was  a lily pool similar to the one depicted in the window.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough the window is executed in opalescent glass and uses  techniques made popular by Tiffany and LaFarge in the 1880s, the Lady  herself could well be from a medieval window. Of course, as Christine  is explaining now, the Pre-Raphaelites were in love with the Middle  Ages--and in love with beautiful women with long flowing hair and  expressions of abandon. This one has just looked up from her work. As  she arches her back you can feel the strain of the long hours she has  spent bending over her loom. A flush of color--skillfully produced by  sanguine, a hematite-based paint used since the sixteenth century to  enhance flesh tones--rises from her low-cut bodice up her long neck  to the plane of her high cheekbones. It makes you wonder what she's  been dreaming of over her loom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What I always wondered,\" Christine is saying now, \"is why she is  looking away from the window and why she has such a rapturous  expression on her face. Her expression suggests some kind of  revelation. Who is this weaver supposed to be? Remember that Augustus  rarely painted his beloved Eugenie just as Eugenie. As the  Pre-Raphaelite painters he admired had before him, Augustus often  chose to depict his model in the guise of a figure from literature.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChristine presses a button on the speaker's dais and a slide screen  unrolls on the wall to the right of the window and fills with an  image of a young girl bending over a lily pool, her cascading hair  turning into heavy branches that trail into the water, a sheath of  bark just beginning to creep up her slim legs. \"In fact, the only  other work without a known mythological source is this one, The  Drowning Tree, which seems to echo the tales of transformation  Penrose was so fond of. He painted Eugenie as Daphne turning into a  laurel as she flees from Apollo--\" The Drowning Tree fades and is  replaced with the more familiar image of the running girl sprouting  leaves from her fingertips, \"--and as the nymph Salmacis merging in  her sacred pool with Hermaphroditus, and Halcyone turning into a  kingfisher with her drowned husband...\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChristine clicks through one picture after another, naming each  mythological or literary figure as the image appears and fades. She  goes so quickly that the faces begin to blur together until we are  left with the impression of one face--one woman appearing in many  guises. Which is, of course, the impression Christine has been trying  to create. They are all Eugenie--whether frightened as Daphne,  lusting like Salmacis, or in the throes of shape-shifting like  Halcyone. When the screen goes dark an image of that face--radiant,  haloed by bright red gold hair--seems to burn on the blank screen for  just an instant, glowing like the face in the stained glass-window.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"WHO, THEN, IS SHE--OUR LADY IN THE WINDOW? WHY, AFTER ALL THESE  TALES OF transformation, would Augustus chose to depict Eugenie as  some anonymous weaver in his last known portrait of her? To answer  that question I ask you to notice the 'window' at her back. Many  people have assumed that the landscape in the window depicts a view  of the Hudson Highlands where Penrose built his grand estate,  Astolat. But if you look carefully at the arrangement of ridges in  the landscape,\"--the flickering red arrow of Christine's laser  pointer skims over the ridgelines in the window--\"and compare them to  the arrangement of hills in the actual landscape\"--a photograph of  the view across the river appears on the slide screen--\"you will  notice that the ridges are actually reversed. This is not a  window--it's a mirror reflecting a window.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"And in what medieval story is a beautiful young maiden condemned to  look at life only in its reflection? Why 'The Lady of Shalott' of  course, Tennyson's version of an Arthurian legend. You probably  remember it from Miss Ramsey's Nineteenth-century Lit class.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat I remember from Miss Ramsey's class was having to memorize  Tennyson's endless ode to friendship, \"In Memoriam.\" But as Christine  outlines the story, \"The Lady of Shalott\" comes back to me: the  enchanted maiden in her island tower, prohibited from looking  directly at the world, weaving what she sees reflected in a mirror  set opposite the window....\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI look at the river landscape in the window and then at the scene  unfolding in the Lady's loom. If this were the Lady of Shalott, they  would be identical, but they are not. In fact the loom is blank. She  seems to be weaving plain, unfigured cloth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill Christine makes a good argument for identifying the Lady in the  Window with the heroine of Tennyson's poem. The name Augustus Penrose  gave his mansion--Astolat--is an alternate name for Shalott. The pose  of our Lady is similar to that of several Pre-Raphaelite Ladies of  Shalott, as Christine demonstrates through a series of slides. She  even has an explanation for why the scenes in the window and on the  loom don't match. According to Eugenia Penrose's design notebook, the  original painted panes for those sections were cracked during firing  and had to be replaced by plain colored glass in order for the window  to be ready in time for the library's dedication.Bestselling author of The Seduction of Water","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302717018341,"sku":"NP9780345462121","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345462121.jpg?v=1767739089","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-drowning-tree-isbn-9780345462121","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}