Days Like Today

by Rachel Ingalls

  She listened in silence, hurt at first, and then grim. He’d expected her to come back at him with a list of her own. But she didn’t do anything for a long time: she only continued to look at him contemptuously. And at last she said, ‘Never mind, Stratos. I’m sure you’ll find the right girl eventually.’ And she moved past him, over the threshold and down the hallway, without closing the door behind her. He thought that she was going to walk off her anger or go find a friend to complain to. But she didn’t behave in any of the ways he’d imagined. She just went.

  He took his dismissal badly. He’d never had to put up with being told no. Everything had always gone smoothly for him.

  For months the family teased him about her. Uncle Theo was the worst. At breakfast one day back at the beginning of April, Uncle Theo had said in a loud aside to Aunt Ariana, ‘Oh, poor Stratis, she must have said no in a big way. Look at his face.’

  Like many of the men he called uncle, Uncle Theo should have been addressed as ‘Great Uncle’. The house usually contained four generations and, for the moment, a fifth had been added: Cousin Sylvie had come up from the country, bringing her new baby, Melinda. She’d decided to spend the night because nobody wanted to let go of the baby – a placid, good-tempered child who didn’t throw things across the room, scream or make sudden, awkward movements that might cause her to injure herself. Stratis was glad to have the focus of family concern shifted to someone else. Uncle Theo’s remarks across the table were becoming outrageous.

  Now that it was May and nearing the time when the relatives would prepare for their summer habits, the house down in the country had been given its spring cleaning and repainting. The two hundred and three windows had all been cleaned, the French windows leading into the courtyard had been sprayed against termites and seven cracked flagstones on the terrace had been replaced. In the bedrooms elderly great-aunts and uncles, cousins and widowed in-laws supervised the unpacking and packing of winter, spring and summer clothes. As soon as the old man moved out of town, new schedules and their timetables would go into operation. Life would continue, with weekend trips back to the city or – for some – longer vacations. Later still, the house on the beach would also be full, and the boats in use. Not every year was precisely the same; the old man’s moods had to be taken into consideration.

  Stratis would be hanging around in town for as long as his grandfather stayed there. And Julia was still around, so he’d heard. He might run into her. He’d also picked up the information that she was going out with some actor who was working between parts as a waiter. Stratis had made a point of taking a look at him from a distance. The guy was a jerk. He even had a ponytail.

  ‘A ponytail, for God’s sake,’ Stratis said, looking at an ad in the papers.

  ‘They’re all the rage,’ Aunt Lydia told him. ‘The height of fashion.’

  ‘Only among phonies.’

  ‘Oh, no – even the movie stars have them. It’s considered glamorous.’

  He wouldn’t waste his breath on an answer to that. Aunt Lydia satisfied her sexual longings – if they could be called that – by poring over magazine pictures of young people of both sexes.

  ‘Not by me,’ he said.

  ‘And another style is firmly established among young men – a lot of stubble on the chin and a shaved head like a Victorian convict. And a very expensive Italian suit, often pinstriped. A most peculiar combination. But the middle-aged do find young people’s fashions extraordinary.’

  Aunt Lydia could not seriously be thought of as middle-aged. She was old, like all the others. She had simply made up her mind at a certain point that anything from sixty to seventy-five was middle-aged.

  ‘And waiters are quite chic nowadays,’ she went on. ‘All so young and good-looking. It’s a quick way to earn a living while they’re aspiring to do something else. A lot of artists make money waiting on tables: painters, singers, actors, film directors. Before they’re established, you know.’

  He grunted. Uncle Theo said, ‘Don’t take it too hard, my boy.’

  Aunt Lydia continued, ‘I suppose you’re right in general, in a big city like this. From the crowds I saw yesterday, you’d think everyone under forty was colorblind and not in possession of a mirror. The young have not yet developed a sense of taste. They try everything out. As they should. They’re sometimes drawn towards the unsuitable, the cheap, the fake, the pretentious, the sentimental.’

  ‘Do you mean me?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly not. With no disrespect intended, I was referring to the fact that your wayward young lady has chosen to move on to another and less deserving young man. I’m sorry to hear it, but I’m afraid it happens a lot. It always did. In fact, sometimes girls and boys will deliberately seek out the worthless because they aren’t ready to make a commitment – they know that they can break off that kind of thing at a moment’s notice, without any trouble.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, looking away. ‘Who knows?’ Julia had broken it off with him even faster than that: no notice at all, just quits. He stretched out a hand for part of Uncle Zenon’s newspaper.

  Uncle Zenon snatched up the section he’d been saving for when he finished with his first choice; he slid it across the table to the other side of his place, where Stratis wouldn’t be able to reach it without getting up.

  Stratis didn’t notice. He took what was left and began to read. The others too lapsed into silence, scanning their papers until Uncle Lucian began to talk about a play that was on in town: absolutely disgusting, and unfortunately it was impossible to obtain tickets to it; everyone said that even the scalpers couldn’t get in.

  ‘And this exhibition of icons looks interesting,’ Aunt Ariana said.

  ‘Oh, not that old stuff,’ Aunt Lydia told her.

  ‘They say it’s fascinating: untypical exhibits, unusual, free painting style, in contrast to the stereotypical idea of Byzantine stiffness and … I’ve got to get some new glasses … wait: here it is. The most important show of hitherto unknown –’

  ‘But it’s just icons,’ Aunt Lydia said. ‘All those dreary saints and Madonnas and so primitive and wooden-looking.’

  ‘So Greek.’

  ‘Well, you have to admit that the Italians did it better.’

  ‘Not better. Different. It says here –’

  Uncle Theo chuckled. He found his relatives particularly diverting when they were disagreeing.

  Stratis removed his conscious attention from the talk, the room, the place in general. Maybe what Aunt Lydia had really been saying was that when Julia went out with him, she was slumming, just as she was doing now with the guy who had the ponytail.

  He got up without excusing himself and left the table. He was heading for the door when he heard the small, muffled thump of the rubber protector on the tip of his great-grandfather’s cane. The sound was coming from around the corner.

  Stratis was the only one in the family who wasn’t afraid of the old man, whom he called grandfather, although there was an extra generation between them and – owing to the introduction of divorce and remarriage among some of his relatives – a confusing half generation: the family had one nephew older than his uncle and two aunts younger than their niece. And the whole family: all of them – whether doing well in business or retired on a solid annuity – owed their success to the old man, who thought that every one of them, except Stratis, was useless; and he occasionally told them so in a way that could be lighthearted, but with a twist. He usually didn’t bother to point it out. It was too obvious. Among the enormous family he belonged to, his was the dominant personality and his control over the others was absolute. Even so, occasionally he’d make a play for sympathy, always with some purpose in mind. ‘I’m an old man,’ he’d say, and then pause. ‘I won’t be here much longer.’ After that, he’d add, ‘Indulge me this time,’ or, ‘Let me have my way about this. It isn’t asking much for someone who has so few years left,’ or, ‘It’s a small thing – what can it matter: such an insignificant reques
t from an old man?’

  At least he never went on about his will. Others in the family had done that. One, a great-great-aunt, had changed her will nearly every week for the last five years of her life. During that time she hadn’t paid any bills; when she finally died, the lawyers’ fees as well as the debts were taken from her estate and they were considerable. The other will-fanatic had been a man; his changeableness proceeded not from whim, nor fears of being cheated, nor as an effort to upset his descendants, but as the result of forgetfulness. His preoccupation with his will was frustrating rather than infuriating. As soon as he managed to get himself over to his lawyer’s office, he’d seem confused for a few minutes until they showed him their copy of the will. ‘I just wanted to make sure that you still had it,’ he’d say. Then, to be polite after causing everyone so much trouble, he’d have some minor item altered before he went home. No one considered his vacillations tiresome, as he was so evidently worried about them himself. Sometimes he’d fly into rages, but just as often he’d cry. He remembered enough to realize what was happening to him. His last year was sad for all the family.

  There was nothing sad about Stratis’s grandfather, the old man, Eustratirios. He was a tough old bird who had worked his way up in business until he had several million dollars, four houses, many cars and boats, two light aircraft and three rooms full of Impressionist paintings that were as good as any you could see in the museums, although they didn’t constitute a collection that could be thought large in comparison to those of the big private buyers like the Greek shipping magnates.

  He owned a few other pictures, too: three Dutch landscapes and two tiny, dark Guardis, no bigger than framed snapshots; he kept those two on his desk in the country, as if they’d been a couple of family photographs. There was also an American seascape that hung on the wall of the first landing in his house on the Cape; and an icon. The icon was usually in the house in town, where it stayed hidden behind a curtain in back of the chair at his study desk. But since the painting measured only about seven by five inches, he sometimes took it with him in his briefcase if he had to stay anywhere else for the night. His study in the country, and in the house at the beach, had the same construction as the one in town: with a covered place behind the desk. When the window curtains were drawn, the line of material ran from side to side as if made of one piece.

  Once, as a child, Stratis had come into his grandfather’s study when the old man had gone out for a moment. The curtains were open and he’d seen the icon. He’d been amazed to find out that there was anything there at all. He’d always assumed that the curtained space between the two windows was a decoration. He’d never guessed that anything might be behind it other than the wall. To see that a religious painting was hidden there, housed and protected, made him wonder whether there might be some secondary reason for keeping the sacred object where it would remain concealed: perhaps it was much more valuable than it looked. Maybe it was even one of the special Madonnas said to be able to grant wishes and to cure people.

  *

  As soon as he found out about the icon, Stratis began to speculate about his grandfather’s beliefs. The old man railed against priests and against the idea of God, yet he kept an icon. He seemed to be so attached to it that he wouldn’t be parted from it for more than a day. Most of the time it stayed behind its curtains. Very rarely, on special feast days – at Easter, for example – it was to be seen looking out from the parted drapery, and then one could observe that it was not merely small but distinctly lacking in artistic merit.

  Because of the icon, Stratis was still very young when he began to think that there might be many things – events or institutions or people and their emotions – about which the surface presented to the world was no truer nor more important than what was kept from sight. Later, when he was in his early teens, his grandfather – in the middle of a conversation – swiveled his chair around, saying, ‘Let me show you something.’ He pulled the curtains apart. ‘Didn’t know this was there, did you? It’s so simple, no one would ever bother to look.’

  ‘You had it on show six years ago,’ Stratis said. ‘Christmas and Easter, remember? And I saw it once, a long time ago, when you must have stepped out of the room for a minute.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You didn’t ask me about her.’

  ‘I guess I must have been afraid you’d think I was snooping.’

  ‘She’s brought me luck. I took her with me after the war.’ He meant after the First World War, after Athens but before Marseilles, Paris, Manchester and Cairo. ‘I’ve always liked her face,’ he said.

  Stratis made up something about the attractiveness of the Madonna, the spiritual but loving, warm look in her large eyes. He was good at that kind of off-the-cuff speech; just short of glib. And in his grandfather’s company he hardly had to think about the wording in order to please. He was the favorite. The old man loved even his bad qualities, many of which sprang from character faults that he himself had suffered from before he learned to take life calmly

  He’d done terrible things: unfair, childish, cruel and spiteful. He’d hurt the people who had loved him. He’d done it like a man in a fight – to show them that they didn’t love him enough or in the right way. What had been wrong with him? What was wrong with Stratis? Whatever it was, it was the same malady. Most of it could be ascribed to youth, which you wouldn’t really want to wish away. He sympathized.

  As for Stratis, like everyone else, he revered the old man; but he also felt an affection for him that was stronger than his love for any other member of his family. He’d once come upon a photograph of his grandfather dating from a holiday in the south of France, sometime in the 1920s: in bathing costume and smiling for the camera. There was the athletic build, the dark hair and eyes, the smile full of beautiful teeth. And Stratis had thought: Who is this? He looks exactly like me.

  *

  Hearing his grandfather approach, he stepped back, and coughed to announce himself.

  ‘Stratis?’ the old man said. ‘Come see me.’

  He heard his grandfather turning around. He followed. They went to the study.

  Most of their talks were informal. Stratis would drop in twice a day to gossip and chat. He was seldom summoned; the serious matters would be mixed in with everything else. Just recently the same question kept coming up in their talks: what profession Stratis should train for.

  His grandfather broached the subject with relaxed approval. It was clear to him that his grandson was going to be exceptional but there was still some question about the direction he’d take. Back in October, when he’d met the girl, Stratis had wanted to be a poet; in March he’d agreed that maybe being a poet wasn’t a career that could support a wife and children, not that he’d want either at the moment. Besides, he’d just begun to realize that poetry was too difficult. He had to concede that it shouldn’t be his choice or, rather, that it hadn’t chosen him. But he had no desire to go into business. He couldn’t believe that, feeling no interest, he had an ability for it.

  ‘You could be a lawyer,’ his grandfather suggested.

  ‘A good lawyer should be able to argue a case either way. I couldn’t do that. Some things strike me as really wrong. And others aren’t important. And all that paperwork. I wouldn’t mind being a doctor if I didn’t have to watch people being cut open.’

  ‘There are all kinds of doctors.’

  ‘But most of them are practical, aren’t they? I’d only be good on the theoretical side. I’d like to help people but – not if it means having to stitch up wounds and hammer back pieces of bones and stuff. I really don’t have what it takes to deal with fixing up people who’ve been crushed and burned and torn up.’

  ‘Well, there are specialists: lungs, heart, ears –’

  ‘No, no. I can’t imagine that I’d be any good at it.’

  ‘You’re good at everything, Stratis. Then you get bored. I was the same. But an occupatio
n isn’t like a girlfriend: you don’t pick it up and pursue it till you lose interest.’

  ‘So it’s like falling in love?’

  ‘On the contrary. You have to have some interest, yes. But the important thing is to learn the profession. Training. It doesn’t matter what it is. And I think that while you’re making up your mind, it would be a good idea for you to go to business school.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They teach you a lot of useful things: economics, the stock market, corporations. It might help me, too. We could talk about your studies together. You could tell me how things have changed in the business world. And maybe I could give you a few tips. Think about it. You can’t just dither, year after year. I realize that it isn’t easy to choose; there’s no reason why you can’t qualify for one thing and then go on to another. There’s time for more than one decision. Some people are lucky – they know very early what they want to do in life. I didn’t know. I only knew that no one was ever going to beat me. And I was willing to try anything. Why not try, Stratis? I think maybe your talents have to be awakened by use. You have brains. You can get your qualification in some discipline and then find your own way to practice it: make it better, more modern, more yours. Why not? You’ll like it. The world is very interesting, you know. You don’t have to have the shining object that’s hanging just out of your reach. Look at what’s already in your hand. Use that.’

  Stratis always felt better after one of their talks. He still didn’t know what to do with his life, but he felt sure that someone else had faith in him. In his grandfather’s company he believed that his future was clear: if he couldn’t see it, at least his grandfather could.

  The old man enjoyed their talks even when Stratis spouted wildly about the artistic life, the crooked businessmen, the corrupt legal and political systems. ‘Yes, yes,’ he’d say, ‘but let me tell you about my friend, Nikos.’ And he’d illustrate some point with a story from his youth. All the time he’d be thinking: Who can know the love I feel for this boy? He’s myself when young, but better. He’s the one who is going to live for me after I’m gone. I’m proud of him, but also nervous. He’s more than I deserve.