Three Junes (12 page)

I was leaning out my window by now, certain that a domestic dispute was about to turn physically violent (had it not done so already), wondering if I should ring the police. I listened for protest, argument, cries of pain. I could see nothing but the handsome curtains and carpeted wall, before it the surface of a table and a lamp (Arts and Crafts, from the shape of its shade).

Nothing. There was a long electric silence, and then I saw a hand in a green sleeve slip under the lampshade and turn out the light. A moment later, the flat was dark.

In the next few minutes, I realized that no other lights had gone on in response to the outburst I’d heard. Like the sleepwalker which I began to suspect I must be, I opened the box I had come to find, pulled out my mother’s package and began to work at removing the tape. Too stubborn or exhausted to find a knife or scissors in the kitchen chaos, I cut my fingers twice but finally bared the old folio. When I opened it, the first print I saw was Audubon’s Greater Flamingo. How breathtakingly sexual, I realized, not having looked at it since I was sixteen or so. I leafed past it to see his Trumpeter Swan, swimming black-footed through water like pleated chartreuse silk, turning its neck to marvel at a moth skimming its wake. Then a Whooping Crane, preying on small lizards. A brace of cross-eyed Great Horned Owls. Barn Swallows, breasts feathered tangerine, in their high-rise nest. Carolina Parakeets (long extinct), Common Grackle, Magpie Jays, and an American White Pelican which looked to me, under the intoxication of sleeplessness, like a comedian I’d seen on Ralph’s telly named Jay Leno. Peculiar the artifacts our memories unearth at such hours.

By the time I finished admiring the prints—all unharmed by exile—the sun had risen. I went to the kitchen and reheated the kettle (I’d left it to shut off and cool, never making that first cup of tea). I warmed and filled my pot and carried it back to the front room. I reseated myself on that crate of books and stared across the street but of course could see nothing more than those curtains, that lamp, that hanging rug. Eventually, I showered, took a nap, and went about the day’s tasks: measuring the downstairs space for bookshelves and finding the least costly way to have them built.

The predawn tantrum I had witnessed assumed the aftertaste of a potent dream. But two mornings later, returning from my daily frustrational, about to cross the street to my building, I happened to glance into an enormous cardboard carton sitting on the pavement beside a row of dustbins. The carton was filled with broken plates. I caught my breath. Though the fragments were many and small, they were the remains of the same pattern—a Victorian flummery of Chinese pheasants and tropical blooms—that my mother the new bride had selected as her formal china. Through my childhood, they had been on display in a breakfront at Tealing, hardly ever used. By my teenage years, I could already see how bafflingly unlike my mother those dishes were; by the time I left home, I came to realize she must have chosen them out of sheer (and uncharacteristic) insecurity, as a young woman marrying decidedly up, choosing what she presumed would be chosen by the kind of young woman my father had been expected to marry. My grandparents were not so antediluvian that my father’s choice became a scandal, but Mum was essentially a maid and barkeep. Even today, that sort of match would cause a catty whisper or two.

Last Christmas, when I remained in New York, Dennis sent pictures of his family. Looking at the happy group posed in his dining room in France, I felt a jolt of envy when I saw, displayed in a rustic hutch behind my pretty nieces, that very set of plates. Of course, they suit Véronique perfectly.

IT’S TRUE:
I can’t resist spying on people—though I won’t go out of my way to do so. So once the two couples have gone indoors, I sit back at the table with a glass of good wine and gaze at the house as if it were a mechanized dollhouse in a Christmas display at a swish department store. Through the kitchen windows, Dennis seems to dance at his chores, and I wonder if that might be how a chef gets through a long night on his feet. (A mazurka to sauté the garlic, a jig to grill the meat; then foxtrot the soup to a simmer and waltz the chocolate glaze right onto those tortes.) I watch him dump leeks by armfuls onto the table and palm a stone to sharpen a knife the length of a small umbrella.

Upstairs, the light in the library spills out the window. This is now as much David’s room as it is—was—our father’s; he moved his files in months ago, though news cuttings from Dad’s days at the
Yeoman
still cover the walls. I watch David lift the receiver from the telephone. In a moment he frowns, then laughs, then walks along the window surveying the night as he speaks to his underling. Though, it occurs to me, suppose he’s ringing a mistress?

With this thought, I look left, to the room at the end of the house where Dennis and his family are staying. There, the light is low. Side by side, my two sisters-in-law stand in silhouette. They look down together—at one of the children, no doubt. What wouldn’t I bet Véronique is busy extolling the perfection of her child’s fair skin, silky hair, eloquently curling toes.

I might have insisted the children have my old room, but the room where they are staying, the one Dennis once shared with David, is by far the largest on the second floor. Even with a cot and two mattresses spread on the carpet, there’s plenty of space to move about. When we were children, the room felt even larger because, for some unknown reason, there’s a ladder which ascends through a trapdoor to a tiny self-contained room with a huge fan-shaped window. I envied my brothers this funny little attic, which Mum named the foxhole; she’d call from below, “Any soldiers brave enough to dodge the bombs for a spot of tea?” or “Retreat for supper, troops!” But she seemed to respect its privacy, so it became like a treehouse, a repository for all manner of boy debris: fossilized cowpies, rodent skulls, comic books, homemade weapons, rusted horseshoes, and probably, long after my last ascent, racy magazines.

From this aerie, you can view the acreage out back for miles. When we were young, Angus cows and Shropshire sheep grazed this land, most of it open fields. (Now, two vast modern houses look back at ours, though from a stately distance.) Two or three mornings a week, in autumn and spring, the livestock would be confined to the barns and a foxhunting club would send its entourage thundering through. For a few years, until I lost interest in sport altogether, the three of us would rush up the ladder to watch whenever we heard the huntsman’s approaching horn.

There is also a peripheral view of the kennel my mother had built for her collies in a field across a stream. The brick structure still stands, but after Mum died, Dad removed the fencing from the space she set off as a dog run, and it quickly grew over in long wild grasses.

“Turning to stone out there?” Dennis is leaning out the kitchen door and waving a wooden spoon to get my attention.

“I’m spying on the household.”

“I don’t mean to complain about the work, but I am lonely in here. You don’t have to lift a finger, but you do have to keep me company.”

In the kitchen, he hands me an apron of Mum’s and says, “I lied—but there’s only one job I’ll force on you.” He’s filled the scullery sink with water and hands me a giant collander filled with chopped green leeks. “Rinse. There’ll be four or five of these, and you can roll them up in Mum’s old tea towels—second drawer down, next to the cooker.”

Grateful to have a purpose, I roll up my sleeves and pull out the towels. Dennis has plugged in a tape player and hums along to some hideously sappy Elton John collection. Only after I’ve rinsed and wrapped about two bushels of leeks do I suggest a change.

“But doesn’t it take you back?” says my compliant brother as he ejects Elton midstanza and shuffles through a pile of tapes.

“Not in any way I find pleasant.” I’m smiling when I say this, but Dennis stops to give me a look of apologetic alarm. I know what he’s thinking. In his rush to empathy, he’s worried that all my darkest memories are connected with Mal (whose place in my life he doesn’t fully understand, but why should he—or anyone—when I volunteer so little and do not encourage questions?). In fact, this particular Elton John is so old that it takes me back to misguided gropings with a particular girl, a determined consummation ranking very high among things I’d like to erase from my hard drive.

Dennis invites me to choose but then seizes a tape himself. “No, this! This is just the right thing for the occasion. Laurie picked it out when we visited Dad—drives her mother around the bend, so we listen to it in the car when I take her with me to the
marché
.” All at once our mother’s dour Scottish kitchen reverberates with bouzouki music and a plaintive tinny voice singing in Greek. Grating nutmeg with his hands but gyrating with his body, Dennis sings along in gleeful gibberish: “Yamos, yasmeero smeero yaka!”

I bend over the sink and laugh harder than I have in a long time, and just as it hits, this incredible release, so does the comforting, Christmasy smell of fresh nutmeg and the realization that I had no idea Dennis (or anyone) visited our father in Greece.

“When did you visit Dad over there?” I ask when we’ve both calmed down (Dennis casting a guilty eye upward and lowering the volume).

“Last August. Vee had a huge formal wedding job, a gala château affair requiring half a rainforest of orchids, and I thought I’d get ourselves, the girls and me, out of her hair for a week.”

“I thought he was into the monkish retreat, that he went there to ruminate.”

Dennis laughs. “Well he liked that part, absolutely. But it’s not as if he set up rules about the place or wore some kind of hairshirt. What—did you want to go but you just never asked?”

No, I have to admit. I never asked to go to Naxos and probably never would have. I assumed the place to be our father’s sanctum sanctorum, inviolable by family. Now I see this was pure extrapolation, based on a few surprisingly expressive letters he wrote me his first summer there (letters of any sort from Dad were rare), in which he went on about how much he liked the solitude. Liking it, of course, does not mean that you require it.

“You know, he made friends there,” says Dennis. “He had a super dinner party, in fact, and I taught him to make a few simple things like tzatziki and a loin of pork baked with yogurt, cinnamon, and potatoes; ordinarily, he hired a neighboring widow to cook for his little affairs.”

“His ‘little affairs’?”

Dennis laughs at me again. “Fenno, what’s life without dinner parties?”

“So who came to this dinner party?” My tone is that of a spurned ex-wife (having no reason to expect an invitation but hurt and indignant nonetheless).

“Who came? This professorial type and his wife who have a bungalow down the road—the fellow taught playwriting, I think. Local Greek gentry or some such distinction. And then two other couples, all British expats—ha, like yourself!—who live there year-round. One of the couples had a wee lass around Laurie’s age who came along, and the other couple were two men about Dad’s age. Or rather, I suppose, they shared a house . . .”

“Oh you mean they might have been mere
flatmates
.” Having finished my assigned task, I’ve hunted down another bottle of wine and yank the cork out for emphasis. The wineglasses from dinner have been washed and upended to dry, so I take a tumbler out of the cupboard.

“They seemed, I don’t know . . . they were both landscape architects and we got to talking about flowers, I liked them very much . . .”

I touch him on the shoulder. “I don’t mean to give you a rough time.”

Dennis collects himself. “In fact, Dad had just got permission to have them design a small garden of succulents around his patio. I was sorry Vee couldn’t meet them, exchange a little shoptalk.”

I smile. I like the notion of my father’s engaging a pair of florally minded queens to shape his surroundings. I don’t mean that nastily, either. I know I made my father uncomfortable (though, again, did I tell him anything of my life, directly, to confirm his hunches and make them easier to live with?), but I do not think I enraged or disgusted him.

“The wee girls went to sleep in Dad’s bed,” Dennis is saying now, “the two women walked each other home, and the party ended very late with Dad, me, the playwriting prof, and the two gardening blokes standing out under the olive trees trying to name the constellations. We were all terrible at it, so we just . . . invented. Dad found the House of Parliament up there somehow, I seem to recall pointing out a large duck, someone I think actually did peg Orion or the Plough . . . well, there was plenty of ouzo to go around! Next day, I had a monstrous crick in my neck.”

I wait for something more, but Dennis turns his happy attention to tapping the last of the nutmeg off his grater into a tiny bowl. I have two simultaneously mournful wishes: that I had been at my father’s dinner party and that my brother could describe the scene, the experience, with a precision more worthy of his emotions. There were moments, as a boy, when I wondered guiltily if my father wished the same of Mum. (Dad’s eloquence, though he was not a big talker, outstripped hers by far.) Dennis’s passions begin to resemble our mother’s: many and large, but not subtle.

I watch him work a bit longer before saying, “So you, then, ought to know what Dad would think of David’s idea about the ashes.”

Predictably (to my satisfaction), he is caught off guard. “Well Davey’s right he loved Greece, I mean that particular place. He did love it.”

“Enough to forsake family tradition.”

“Tradition? Well, ha Fenny, you’re hardly one to talk about toeing up to tradition, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t know why not,” I say slowly. “You know, I’m regarded as quite stuffy by many people I meet in America, and I can’t say I mind. I come back here and I’m suddenly, inexplicably, an iconoclast by virtue of my long absences and my alleged sexual preference.”

A look of confusion crosses Dennis’s face. He’s struggling, I realize, to recall the meaning of
iconoclast
. “Alleged?” he says quietly and then looks frightened, as if he didn’t mean to say it aloud.