Three Junes (4 page)

Spying on Fenno and Mal, Paul never saw them hold hands or embrace, though he assumed they must, and he thought how, all of a sudden, that might not be so awful. Just weeks ago, it would have upset him tremendously. Paul remembered his own father’s reaction when he announced his engagement to Maureen, the disappointment muted but clear. Paul harbored a disappointment in Fenno, but it was not about his choices in love or because he might not produce heirs.

Fenno ran a bookstore—a logical enterprise for the son who, in Paul’s memory as a child of five or nine or twelve, was always reading. But Fenno was the one Paul had hoped would take over the paper—even after Fenno went overseas to get an American doctorate. Neither of the twins had shown much interest in anything to do with the veneration of language. David was a veterinary surgeon, his mother’s son; Dennis, a romantic like his father but without intellectual cravings, was (after years of meandering) studying to be a chef. When these two came of age and, simultaneously, emptied the small trusts left by their grandfather to follow their respective curiosities, Paul looked on happily. He loved their separateness and, when they shared their enthusiasms, felt the privilege of being admitted to different worlds. But when Fenno took some (only a prudent fraction) of his inheritance and invested it in his own business, Paul felt instinctively, illogically betrayed. Again and again, he reminded himself how enslaved he’d felt to his father’s desires (though he could have denied them without any dire consequence); still, he came away feeling wounded.

Maureen came home for good in mid-December. As Paul pointed out their house to the ambulance driver, he saw against the hedgerow an obscenely white car that he knew must be Fenno’s, the one he’d have hired at the airport. Fenno he found standing before a fire in the living room. “
There
you are,” said Fenno, as if Paul were the child, hiding out from a scolding. Fenno’s coldness was painful, but it was not a surprise, not since Paul had bungled his visit five months before.

Beside Fenno, Mal rose quickly from Paul’s reading chair. Greet-ing him, Paul struggled against the same revulsion he’d felt in the summer. (Was the young man frailer? He was certainly paler, but this was winter.)

So now, as Maureen was being carried across the snow into their house, as Paul wanted so much to feel his sons hold him together, secure him like a seaworthy knot, Fenno seemed lost to him entirely. He remained between Paul and the fireplace, so miraculously close, but he might as well have been back at his home in New York, a home Paul had never seen and now supposed he never would. His oldest son, after the funeral—which would be soon—might become little more than an address on the flimsy blue tissue of an airborne letter. If that.

Paul instructed the orderlies to take the bed and the equipment upstairs to the library. There, Maureen could look out at the kennel. Her three favorite dogs were given free roam of the house. Most of the time they lay on the floor near Maureen’s bed, but once Paul caught them chasing one another up the front stairs, skidding on the hallway runners. He thought of the boys when they were small, their never-ending war games. He thought of Fenno, making an imaginary conflagration of the house and everything in it. Cupping both hands around his mouth, Fenno had been able to broadcast a near-perfect air-raid siren; every time, for an instant, the wail made his father’s chest throb with fear.

“LUNG CANCER,”
he told Jack. “A terribly ordinary death, you might say. Or an ordinary terrible death. But she died at home. All of us there. The children—our sons, not children anymore by a long stretch, in fact. A bright day. How we’d all like to go.” It sounded as if he were composing a telegram.

They were sitting together on the airplane from London to Athens. Jack, who seemed to use teasing as a way of forcing acquaintance with people he liked (and it worked), had asked how an obviously attractive, apparently independent chap like Paul could wind up alone on a guided tour. “Not your usual follower,” Jack had said. “Or should I say not one of mine.”

“Christ, sorry,” he said now. “Christ, that’s a trial.”

Paul held his hands up and shook his head. “Please. I came to escape how sorry everyone feels for me every bloody minute of my life these past six months. My sons fuss at me as if I’m an invalid, one foot in the grave myself. At the office they fuss. My old friends fuss.”

“Bet your old friends’ wives make another kind of fuss.”

They laughed together. Paul looked out the window and saw the Alps. Maureen had loved flying, loved seeing everything pressed below her like a map. She liked the thrill of vertigo when the plane banked to turn, when the earth tipped up alongside you—mountains and rivers reaching inside you and seizing your heart.

Below him now, horizon to horizon, June was spreading its green, abundant promise, disputing the few peaks that guarded their snow. Up close, there would be flowers, wildflowers, yellow and purple and white. One long-ago June, Paul and Maureen had driven somewhere along these slopes, tiny Fenno asleep in a crib they’d wedged into the car (there was none of this safety gear back then; most parents were too young to fret about dangers unseen). They had pulled into a field of flowers to eat their lunch. After the food, they made love until Fenno’s crying interrupted them. As she changed the wet nappy (Paul wistfully stroking the small of her back), Maureen had said, “Well then, we shall just have to find this place again when our children are grown.” The multiple expectations in her simple remark had thrilled Paul; he was so naive.

When he turned away from the window, he told Jack that he had traveled a great deal, but never on a tour. “But now . . . now I like the idea of everything planned. No surprises.”

“Ah, but I can’t promise you no surprises,” said Jack.

Jack was thirty-six, Fenno’s age. There, all similarity ended. Jack was not willowy, not soft-featured, not articulate in a well-schooled way. He was compact, muscular, ruddy. He had the body of a swimmer and the coloring of the fair-haired Italians Paul remembered from Verona and Venice. Like a fox, he had shrewd glassy eyes, very blue, and a long sharp nose. He spoke with a trace of Yorkshire farmhand. Jack reminded Paul of fleeting friendships he’d made in the war, with men from a different but parallel world. He felt a quick, irrational trust and warmth—nothing of the distance he kept these days, without wanting to, from his sons.

Jack had been married once, briefly and much too young. Took the taste for it out of his mouth. He had managed a pub; after the marriage ended, he took his savings and went to Greece for a year, hitched around, lived here and there. He made good money now, running these tours. Exhausting at first—twelve tours back to back—but he had learned how to relax. And then, five months off. A good life. No complaints. He had a girl in London, but she was easy. An actress in her late twenties: too ambitious to settle down, and the mere thought of children made her shudder.

PAUL HAD ALWAYS ASSUMED
that at the end, whenever it might be, he and Maureen would have great stretches of time together, alone. They would talk about everything. But why should this have been so? Even while Maureen was in hospital, there was still the paper to print, the dogs to feed and exercise, the friends to reassure: more occupations than ever. And his sons’ presence in the last weeks, however welcome, created yet more tasks, more diversions. At times, they seemed to move about the house—fondling objects, appraising pictures—as if they were about to divide its possessions and take them all away. Though Paul knew they were only drawing memories from their surroundings, he sometimes wanted to shout, “
I
am still very much alive! You’re not about to be orphaned!”

A week before Maureen died, the jetliner with the bomb on board shattered in the air over Lockerbie. When the news came, Paul was sitting beside her, reading aloud from
My Dog Tulip
. By then, Maureen rarely spared the breath it took to speak, but as Paul crossed the room to take the call, he heard her say hoarsely, “Rodgie boy, my little king.” She was looking past Paul to where the dog stood, returning her look. She touched an ear, one of so many signals whose precise meanings Paul had never summoned the interest to learn, and Rodgie shot past him and jumped up beside her. When Paul rang off, she did not ask what the call was about. Her hands were buried in the dog’s coat, teasing out a burr. Paul knew then that they would not really talk to each other, not intimately, not even idly, ever again.

Seen from every angle, the week was a tragedy, a crippling chaos. Divine vengeance, thought Paul, worse than anything he had seen or felt in the war. The morning after the crash was the only day he left Maureen, driving to Lockerbie with a detective whose daughter had long ago, for a summer, captivated Dennis. Together, the two men pressed through crowds and crossed barricades to walk through scatterings of oily, singed debris. In many places there was little to see but fragments—their smallness a horror in itself—and they looked so consistently obscure to Paul that he saw a kind of visual frolic in the wreckage: a sonata of quirky shapes, dark against the newly frosted ground, like a painting by Miró. As the detective stopped to speak with one of the men collecting the pieces and placing them in numbered, zippered plastic bags, the toe of Paul’s boot uncovered a glint of gold. Turning his back to the policemen, he squatted, shielding the object from their view. Slowly, he lifted a shiny cylinder and held it in his gloved palm. It was a bright gold tube of lipstick, fallen intact from the sky. Without hesitating, he slipped it in a pocket. Walking alongside the detective again, he focused on the fog of his own breath, reminding himself to inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. When he got home, he went straight to the scullery sink and vomited.

For five days he did not sleep. He forbade everyone who entered the house to mention the crash in front of Maureen. She no longer read the paper. From a mask, and then from plastic tendrils that snaked up her nostrils, she drank oxygen like an elixir whose magic was fading.

TWO

“T
HIS SEEMS TO BE A VERY SMALL ISLAND,”
he says when there she is, yet again, on the boat from Paros to Delos.

“Only so much to do, I guess.” Fern seems embarrassed but pleased.

Jack passes them with a fast grin. “You tailing us, girl?”

Paul sits beside her. “How fortunate for us, then.”

Jack is on the foredeck with the captain. Old familiars, they laugh and joke in Greek. Jack wears dark spectacles that flash back the sun as he talks. Most of the others have gone below, nervous about the swells. For a sunny day, the sea is oddly rough, and the boat, a graceless trawler, bucks and creaks against the wharf. Jack has assured everyone that once they’re moving, the water will seem a lot smoother.

“I’m guessing there’s a storm out there,” says Fern.

“If there is, it’s a ways off. Nothing to worry about,” says Paul.

Marjorie comes up from below. When she sits beside them, she is breathing heavily from climbing the ladder. “Go down there,” she says, pointing at her feet, “instant scurvy.” She leans across Paul. “Hello, dear. Did I see you yesterday, in the taverna, sketching the local color?”

Fern smiles at Paul. “Small island,” she says to Marjorie, and introduces herself.

Marjorie pats the bulky rucksack in her lap. “Paul dear, I packed extra biscuits and cheese for you boys. About an hour from now, we’ll be awfully glad to have them. Salt air makes you ravenous.” She pats her rucksack again. “Though what kind of cheese this
is,
I have to confess I’m not sure.”

The motor starts up with a grinding roar and chokes forth a cloud of black smoke. Marjorie frowns and waves an arm, shooing at the exhaust as if it were a swarm of mosquitoes. “
Not
auspicious. A lovely day, but looks are deceiving!”

Paul and Fern smile and nod in unison. Paul turns his head slightly toward Fern and winks. Her smile tightens and trembles. Paul feels quite unlike himself: boyishly cruel and happier than he has been in months.

Jack comes up to them and holds out a plastic sack. “Be a sport, Marj, and hand these round below, will you?”

Marjorie looks inside the sack. “What did I say?” She holds it open toward Paul. Inside are brown wax-paper bags, a cheap version of the sickbags on airplanes. After Marjorie climbs below, Jack takes her place. Fern laughs. Jack says, “What’s so funny, girl?”

“You,” she says. “The way you run people around. I mean, you know, these people
pay
you.”

“Paul,” says Jack, “how do I take that?”

“As flattery.”

Jack lifts his sunglasses and stares at Fern. “So. Where’s Madama Butterfly?”

“In the trenches. She’s here to work. I’m here to play.”

“Archaeology?” Jack says. “Christ, a lot of sunbathing. Mucking about in the dust. I don’t call that work.”

“Trailing a lot of happy tourists around, swilling beer every chance, wolfing moussaka . . . well, I don’t call
that
work.”

Jack laughs. “Touché, girl.”

The trip takes an arduous two hours, the boat pitching through the high waves and deep troughs between them. Some of the other two dozen passengers emerge from below, grip the rail and lean out, looking mournful and blanched. Fern and Paul—along with Jack, Marjorie, and a few others—know how to roll with the boat, to keep their stomachs from seizing. It’s something you can’t explain, they agree. Your body knows or it doesn’t. “Like lust,” says Jack. Marjorie giggles, pretending shock.

Jack spends most of the time below, trying to distract the more nervous members of the group with his jokes. Marjorie takes photographs of the open sea with its canted horizon, the distant islands, the crew, the boat. Fern tells Paul about studying art, about her paintings, about her hometown—Cornwall, Connecticut. He persuades her to let him look through her sketchbook.

There are watercolors and pencil drawings. Most are pictures of people, but there is a handful of landscapes. When Paul reaches the first one, a twisted olive tree, she says, “I’m no good at nature, but it’s sort of required when you’re traveling. I mean, people expect you to paint the scenery, like they expect you to carry a camera, put together a slide show. As if your memory doesn’t count or can’t be trusted, right?” Paul has begun to notice a habit Fern has of asking for reassurance she shouldn’t need. She isn’t much like Maureen after all.

The tree is drawn gracefully yet somewhat timidly. “I feel as if I can see the wind,” says Paul. “In the tension of the branches.” But already she’s turned the page; on the overleaf is a young woman in a bathing suit, with a little boy asleep in her lap. Fern has captured well the little boy’s hands around his mother’s neck, holding fast even in sleep. The mother’s gaze is fixed elsewhere, perhaps on a beautiful sunset. “That’s marvellous. I love how you’ve painted her hair.”

“I like to draw people on the ferries. Portraits—that’s what I like doing best. I refuse to believe the portrait’s finished as something vital, something, I don’t know . . . provocative. I think there must be new ways of getting inside a person and sort of . . . eviscerating the self. Artwise, I mean.” She looks up. “Listen to me: ‘artwise.’ Like I’m still in school.”

Fern’s portraits are sure, not timid. Many are self-portraits. At one place, she reaches over and turns the page before Paul can look at it fully. “I forgot about that one,” she says. It was, he saw briefly, a picture of Fern sitting naked on a bed, reflected in a mirror beside a window with a view of hills. Hibiscus pinks, cobalt blues, pungent coppery greens. On the next page, Paul sees himself. He gasps.

“You did this in, what, ten minutes?”

“It’s not finished. We were interrupted,” she says. But there he is, in three-quarter profile, recognizable at once: shaggy hair blown over one ear, big jaw, bristled eyebrows. The near eye is dark, a white liquid glint in a scribble of shadow. “What were you thinking? You looked so . . . I don’t know, tragic.”

“I was thinking how little time I have here, on this trip. I’d like just to roam around for years, live on every island,” he invents. “Or choose just one and make it an actual home. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t—” He falters at his eagerness. He feels as if he’s issued an invitation.

“If only life were so generous,” says Fern. She ducks her head and pulls back her hair, coiling it nervously around one hand. She points out to sea. “Look—is that it? Where we’re going?”

MAUREEN WAS IN THE KITCHEN,
putting together their tea. From the living room, Paul heard what sounded like hooves. He heard the kitchen door close, followed by indecipherable chatter, then Maureen’s voice, raised: “How does Juno take hers? Or does she fancy a sherry?”

A man’s vibrant laugh. “A cup of plain sugar would suit her. Bust her girth, too.”

Then Paul heard Maureen calling his name, footsteps heading rapidly through the dining room toward the front of the house.

“You don’t mind, I hope?” said Colin Swift as he entered the room after Maureen. “My dropping by so boldly? My interrupting your tea?” He extended his hand. When Paul stood, a book fell from his lap. Paul had met Colin Swift, but only in passing: at a retirement party for Paul’s deputy publisher; at a political reception. He was a man whom everyone watched but few people seemed to know.

After tea, they walked the borders of the meadow. He would sell the meadow—the mall, he called it—but only with a right of way during hunt season, across the back half. “You see, riders jump the wall here, then they’re away through the glen. Not likely, though, we’d barge through more than twice a season—if that.” He wore, Paul noticed, a white stock tie—absurdly formal for a solitary hack in the woods, but it had the dignifying effect of a ruff in an old Dutch portrait.

Maureen stood in the center of the meadow. The kennel would still be within easy sight of the house if she built it in front, she said, pacing out the length. She could plant a screen of shrubbery to hide the back (or fence it; would he mind?) and, behind it, shelter and graze the sheep.

Colin Swift was the master of Swallow Run, the foxhunt. He was also the owner of Conkers, of the adjoining farm, and of a thousand handsome acres—hills, hayfields, forests, streams. He was a newcomer, a transplanted Englishman who’d bought the estate only the year before. It was well known, because he made it no secret, that he had left behind in Cornwall another estate and a hostile wife. People in the village called him The Major, with a mixture of worship and chiding. In his late fifties, he was tall and fit—handsome, with a storklike grace—and would appear at formal events in dress uniform, his medals bright as confetti. At Tobruk, he had lost his left hand and most of the arm to the elbow.

Before leaving, he asked Maureen for a pail of water. While the horse drank, he inquired about the collies, who had lined up along their fence to watch him. “I’m buying a flock of Shrops in the autumn. Just twenty head to begin,” he said. “Would you have pups then? I like to do things the old-fashioned way.” Maureen took him back to the kennel. Paul made his excuses and returned indoors, to his book.

When Maureen came in, she was laughing and shaking her head. “The ‘mall.’ The ‘glen.’ The ‘linden wood.’ La-dee-da.”

“Will you sell him a dog?”

“Of course. He’ll let me work his new flock—the ‘Shrops,’” she drawled in shrewd imitation. “As if he’s so fluent in sheep that Shropshires, Cheviots, and Oxfords are just other currencies to him. . . . But laugh too hard and I’ll jinx this bit of luck.”

“But that’s you, Maureen—lucky. Charmed,” Paul said. He reached out to touch her waist. “And charming.” She put a hand on his, but the affection seemed to surprise her.

“I do get just about everything I wish for,” she said as she stacked cups and saucers. She had left the room by the time Paul thought to ask what wish she hadn’t got.

TONIGHT, WHEN THEY RETURN,
he will ask her to dinner. They will go to the opposite side of the island, to Naoussa, the smaller village. (Jack will know exactly where he should take her, where to find a car.)

He keeps his distance for the moment but watches her. She disappears behind a wall, reappears next to a decapitated column. She meanders deliberately, enjoying whatever she looks at or touches. The day is still bright, but windier and slightly cool. Paul offered her the wool jumper he brought along; she wears it now as she sits on the ground, opens her book, and begins to draw. Paul’s stomach feels like it’s made of glass. His hands sting, as if they were dipped in ice.

They have two hours in which to explore the ruins, and then they will head for Mykonos. Paul lets Marjorie and the two wives lead him to and fro, Marjorie reading aloud from her guidebook about the birth of Apollo and Artemis. Delos is a place of rooms without ceilings, rooms that let the sun stream over everything: cratered mosaics, fallen lintels, crumbling walls. In one room, Paul stares down at the image in the broken tiles beneath his feet: an octopus. He listens contentedly to Marjorie’s didactic singsong.

Out in the open again, the wives find their husbands conferring. Ray squints and holds his arms in front of him at odd stiff angles. An engineer, Ray will have found a way to measure the place. Perhaps that’s how he remembers the sights he’s seen, by their dimensions.

Looking in one direction, Paul sees the quadruplets at the postcard kiosk. In another, he sees Fern, absorbed in a drawing; behind her, Jack sneaks up and tilts her hat over her face. She turns accusingly; Jack says something that makes her laugh. She stands and dusts off the back of her legs, puts her book away. Jack points toward the room with the octopus floor.

“Now does that sea look wine-dark to you? I’d call it peacock, or indigo, or navy gabardine, but that is resoundingly blue, and no wine I know is
blue
.” Marjorie, still beside him, scans the water with a hand tenting her eyes.

“I don’t believe this is the sea in question,” says Paul. “Homer was writing about the Ionian Sea, I think. The sea around Ithaka.”

“No, there you’re wrong. Shame on you. That renowned metaphor is from the
Iliad
. The allusion speaks of the soldiers’ sacrifice, of course, wine as a stand-in for blood. I do get quite literal about these things, I confess, but good art is never flabby.”

Paul smiles. Marjorie’s conviction would have swayed even Homer.

Without taking her eyes off the sea, as if willing it to become less blue, she says, “So are you liking it here? Are you finding your sea legs again—ha, so to speak?”

“My sea legs?” Paul laughs. “Today, hard ground seems quite secure.”

“Oh, I mean back in the saddle, living life, all that.”

“I’m having a good time.”

“I’m glad,” says Marjorie. “A friend forced me to take a trip like this after I had a loss of my own. Spain. I was just in my thirties then, but I became an addict. Personally, I credit El Greco. Hard to stay maudlin in a place like Toledo. Since then, I’ve never stopped.”

“Taking trips?” Paul says.

“Collecting worlds, that’s how I think of it. Different views, each representing a new window. Take stock—architecturally, so to speak—and I’ve built myself quite the mansion.”

Before Paul can answer, she’s looking away again and waving. “Halloo, fellow wanderers, isn’t this place magnificent?” she calls. The rest of the group, approaching them, wave back almost collectively. No one, in the end, can resist Marjorie’s bullying charms.

“HELLO, HELLO!
Did we make a rousing sight?” Colin Swift noticed Paul and Maureen among the spectators as he walked past leading his mare, the reins looped around his left elbow, the arm with the sleeve doubled back. The horse was striped in a lather of sweat, and his hounds, muddied but still lively, trotted in tight formation close to his legs and the mare’s. With his one hand, he’d wave to someone, then reach down to stroke a hound. His royal air—the way he wore that clownish red coat like just another layer of skin—irritated Paul, but you couldn’t help envying the nimble satisfaction in everything he did.

When Colin reached the house at the end of the field, he passed his horse and hat to a waiting boy and knelt on the grass. The hounds engulfed him like a mob of zealous disciples. They licked his ears, shoved one another to reach his asymmetrical embrace. There was yipping and whining—some of it, Paul would have sworn, from the man. When he stood, he called out, “Enough gossip, ladies and gents! Git, git, board up,” and urged the hounds toward a van, where the kennelman herded them in.