Lily and the Lost Boy

by Paula Fox

  As she climbed the steps to the door, missing Paul’s company, her head down and filled with vague, gloomy thoughts like gray clouds, a voice said in English, “Hello, Miss. I think you are one of the Americans I heard about. Perhaps.”

  Lily looked up. Standing in the doorway was a tall fair man in a loose white shirt, wearing rope sandals. He was carrying a small round-faced child with a gondolier’s hat on the back of her head, its red ribbon hanging straight down.

  Yes, she was American, Lily said. A dark-haired, slender woman joined the man and smiled at Lily. “Ho, how pleasant,” remarked the man. “We are Danish. We are the Haslevs. Here is Hanne, my wife, and Christine, my daughter, who is not quite two, and we are to live in this house for a time.”

  “I think I heard about you from Mr. Kalligas,” Lily said.

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Haslev. “We met Mr. Kalligas, the ear and eye of Thasos.”

  “I am an architect,” Mr. Haslev said, setting the child down on the step.

  “He won a prize,” said his wife. “The prize is to be the first to draw a new ancient temple, just excavated. It is in Halyke. Have you been there? We are eager to see it.”

  She had never been there, Lily said. It was on the other side of the island; she had heard you could reach it only by boat. Then she told the Haslevs that she and her family lived not more than a few minutes away.

  How had they found furniture for their house? wondered Mr. Haslev. He desperately needed a worktable. There were beds in the house and two very grand if broken chairs, which he could fix. But a table was a problem. “You would like to see the house?” he asked Lily. She nodded quickly, not mentioning that she had seen it before.

  “Beautiful!” Mr. Haslev exclaimed suddenly, waving his hands toward the harbor and the sea. He picked up his daughter and they all went inside.

  They must have arrived some time yesterday, Lily guessed, but the rooms had been swept clean. In one, there was a small folding bed. “For Christine,” said Mr. Haslev. Two mattresses were draped over window sills, airing. The beds themselves were made of woven rope. “Very good,” Mr. Haslev said. “Even commodious.” They had cleaned and scrubbed out the tile cooking trench in the kitchen, and Lily saw the remains of a breakfast picnic on the floor.

  “It is the water closet that puzzles me,” said Mr. Haslev. “In fact, it horrifies me,” he added, and shuddered. His wife laughed, and the little girl joined in.

  “Even my child laughs at me,” Mr. Haslev said. “But you come and look.”

  He crossed the room and flung open a door to a dark, dank closet. There was a large hole in the floor.

  “Can you imagine what lives down there? Serpents, I’m sure. Of course, it is impossible as it is. We should all fall in and never be heard from again. I must think very hard about this.”

  He said he was to start work at the temple very soon; now they must get settled. Lily suggested they all come home with her and meet her parents. They agreed at once. Even though they were so well organized and had, it seemed to Lily, already settled, they were the most carefree people she’d ever met.

  Her parents—especially her father—were delighted to have unannounced visitors. It certainly wasn’t like home, Lily noted to herself, where people had to make arrangements to visit weeks ahead.

  Mrs. Corey made coffee, and they all went to drink it on the balcony.

  “It’s all so splendid,” Mrs. Haslev said, looking out at the sea agleam in the late morning sunlight.

  Lily brought crayons and paper and sat down on the floor with Christine. While her parents and the Haslevs exchanged histories and told each other why they had come to Thasos, she drew cats and houses for the little girl.

  Mr. Haslev said, “You must come with us to Halyke on the boat. We are to be left there for a week. You can spend the day, and our boatman will bring you back to Limena. I have heard it is beautiful there. And it is so unknown. Hardly anyone has seen the temple except the archaeologists.”

  “It will probably be a few days,” Mrs. Haslev said.

  “Anytime,” Mr. Corey said quickly.

  As they got up to leave, Mrs. Corey asked Lily to go down and find Paul. It was nearly time for lunch.

  Lily walked back to the House of the Turk with the Danes. “I think I will find a table somewhere in this village,” he said. “Or else I must make one.”

  “There’s Mr. Kalligas,” Lily said. “I think he’s coming to see you. He’ll know where to find a table.”

  Mr. Kalligas was carrying a white plate covered with a cloth.

  “For you,” he said, holding out the plate to Mrs. Haslev. “My wife make.” He pulled back the cloth, revealing a dozen or so tightly wrapped grape leaves shimmering with olive oil. “It make you bite your fingers,” he said. “Inside is the Greek rice, the best.”

  Lily said good-bye to everyone and ran down to the quay.

  Paul was still there, but he had used up his drachmas. He was leaning against a wall watching Jack course about the quay in wide circles, Christos perched on the handlebars.

  “He’s not supposed to ride kids like that,” Lily said.

  Paul frowned and turned away from her. Jack was heading straight toward them, his legs pedaling furiously as Christos roared with excitement. Jack slammed his feet down on the pavement. Christos tumbled off and ran to join a group of children nearby who had been watching enviously. Jack motioned to Paul, staring straight at Lily with no expression at all, as if she’d been a bench. The two boys whispered together. Lily called out, “Mom says you have to come home for lunch.”

  She saw Paul’s shoulders stiffen, heard Jack laugh disdainfully. Then Jack rode away and Paul started up the quay toward home. She ran to catch up with him.

  “Will you go to the theater with me this afternoon?” she asked a little breathlessly. “If you don’t have anything else to do?”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. They walked on, saying nothing more to each other even when Rosa waddled down the steps of the police station and came to greet them with her one-swing tail wag.

  Paul didn’t go to the theater with Lily that afternoon. Instead, he got a job, work with a cobbler a few afternoons a week. It would be pretty casual, he told his family. Some days the cobbler had no work to do and spent the time in a taverna with his cronies. But on others there could be a pile-up of sandal orders. In an hour or two he had taught Paul how to cut out and staple leather straps to plastic soles.

  “How much does he pay you?” Lily asked curiously.

  Paul frowned, then shook his head. “I forget,” he said.

  “‘The laborer is worthy of his hire,’” said Mr. Corey in his quoting voice. “You really ought to know what your wages are, Paul,” he added.

  “Well—I just can’t remember,” Paul answered lamely.

  Mr. Corey left the kitchen where they were sitting and returned in a moment with a postcard. It was a photograph of a marble statue of Athena. He pointed to her sandals.

  “Look how solidly and beautifully they’re made,” he said. “Progress is all downhill.”

  “You might as well complain about weather,” observed Mrs. Corey.

  “If the cobbler made sandals like that, he wouldn’t have hired me,” Paul said.

  “Good point!” exclaimed his mother.

  Lily hoped that on his free afternoons Paul would take walks with her the way he had during their first months on Thasos. But he seemed only to want to hang around the house. One day he sat on the balcony for two hours with an opened book on his lap. Lily, leaning over his shoulder, noted that he hadn’t turned a page in all of the time he’d been there.

  “Where’s your friend?” she asked him suddenly. He started as though she’d dropped a ceramic jar on the tiles.

  He closed the book and stood up. He took a step toward the doorway where Lily was standing. She didn’t move.

  “Jack,” she said uneasily. “I meant Jack.”

  Paul sat down in the chair again. Not looki
ng directly at her, he said, “He’s working as a deckhand on that little boat that goes to Prinos Beach. There’re lots of tourists now. He wants to make money. It’s a good job. It leaves him free till the middle of the afternoon.”

  What do I care? Lily asked herself, sitting in the other chair. But she knew she did care. And she guessed that Paul had found a job because Jack had. It was awful for her to be interested in someone she didn’t want to be interested in.

  She stared at her brother. She hadn’t realized how tall he was getting. He wasn’t really chubby anymore. His face seemed longer, and his hair, much darker than hers, had begun to curl at its edges. She suddenly recalled how she’d cut his hair when he was around ten and she was eight. She had started, seriously enough, snipping neatly, then cut a great hank of hair. To her surprise, he’d urged her on, both of them giggling in front of a mirror. Then they’d walked into the living room where their parents were sitting. Her mother had stood up and shrieked. Lily started to smile, remembering. Paul glanced at her. He’d been sitting so stiffly. Now he seemed to relax. The book he’d been clutching fell to the floor. He began to talk about Jack.

  Jack wanted to be independent, he said, earn his own pocket money so he wouldn’t have to ask his father for handouts. He had plans to go to every village on the island. He was like that—he wanted to see everything.

  Lily watched his face grow animated. She wanted him to stop talking. At the same time she wanted to know more. How did Jack get back and forth from Panagia? she asked. He couldn’t sleep in the acropolis every night. One of the drivers of the little tourist taxis lived up there, Paul told her, the very short driver who always had a cigarette hanging from his lips. He brought Jack down in the morning and took him up the mountain in the evening.

  “I know that driver,” she cried. “He has the most beat-up taxi—it smokes like a chimney and snorts like a wild pig!”

  “But it’s a free ride,” Paul said triumphantly.

  There was a secret argument going on between them. Lily knew she wanted Paul to stop caring about Jack. Paul told her, in one way or another, that he wasn’t going to stop.

  “Please, Paul, take away that bone,” said Mrs. Corey who was about to flip over a large Spanish omelet she was making for supper.

  “It’s so old,” Paul murmured. The bone was smooth and dark like a piece of polished mahogany. He held it against his own arm. Yesterday, on the way to their swimming place off the rocks, they had seen a Greek they knew working in the agora. All of the sites in and around Limena were now filled with French people and the local men they had hired. As the Coreys were passing by, the Greek, a waiter at Giorgi’s taverna in the evenings, had shouted a greeting at Paul and tossed him the bone. The archaeologist in charge had said Paul could keep it—they’d found many skeletal remains and they could spare one radial, as he called the bone. It was probably one thousand years old, he had told Mrs. Corey, who could speak a little French. When they returned home after their swim, Lily had drawn a picture of a person with a forearm missing, floating over the agora in ghostly robes. She’d smiled at her drawing, but when she’d gone to Paul’s room to show it to him, he’d hardly glanced at it. She saw the bone lying on his bed. “Aren’t you going to add it to our collection?” she’d asked him. “You can have all that stuff,” he’d replied indifferently. “I’ll probably give this to Jack. He’ll like it.”

  Lily had walked out of his room without a word. Her mouth trembled and her face had felt fevered. In the hall, she stared down at the basket in which she and Paul had saved all the things they’d found since they’d come to Thasos, bits of jars and corroded coins they had dug from piles of earth in various places around the agora. She had wanted to cry out to Paul that he could give the whole collection to Jack for all she cared.

  But she did care. They had had such good times digging out those relics, too broken or too small to be of much interest to the archaeologists, but things that had conjured up a lost time for Lily and Paul.

  “Lily! You look like you’re trying to set the table in midair,” said Mrs. Corey. Lily started and put the plate she had been gripping down on the table.

  “Paul,” Mr. Corey said sternly, “that is definitely not a kitchen bone. Now please, do as your mother asked. Take it somewhere else.”

  As Paul passed Lily on his way out of the kitchen, she muttered, “I thought you were giving it to Jack.”

  “He didn’t want it,” Paul replied mildly. “He’s only interested in coins.”

  She placed a fork next to the plate, then went to the door. Paul was squatting next to the basket. She saw how carefully he placed the radial bone in it. She felt a touch of shame. When he walked back toward the kitchen, he gave her a vague smile as though he hadn’t suspected she had meant to taunt him with her question.

  “Come along,” Mrs. Corey said. “The omelet is hot, and we must eat supper and get to bed early.”

  In the morning, before the heat of the day began, they were to meet the Haslevs at the harbor. The fisherman whom Mr. Corey called Odysseus was to take them to Halyke in his boat. But there was a large blot on the day to come for Lily. Paul had invited Jack along, and he was coming.

  “Why does he have to?” Lily asked her mother when they were alone.

  “Lily! I thought you’d given up whining!” Mrs. Corey exclaimed.

  Lily was silent, staring at the floor.

  “You must try not to resent him,” her mother said more gently. “He doesn’t have much of a home, I think.”

  She suspected her mother didn’t like Jack any more than she did. As if aware of her thought, Mrs. Corey said, “Liking isn’t the last word.”

  The Haslevs were already on the quay the next morning when the Coreys arrived, boxes and straw baskets and canvas bags piled up around them. Christine sat in a little canvas chair wearing her gondolier’s hat, waving a wooden spoon as though conducting an orchestra. Everybody else wore hats, too—you had to. By midday the sky would be white with heat.

  On the water below them bobbed a large crescent-shaped boat. Kneeling in the middle of it was the boatman, tinkering with a kerosene engine. “He does look like Odysseus,” Lily murmured to her father. The soles of his leathery bare feet were dark as eggplant. From time to time he grabbed up a handful of greasy-looking rags and wiped his fingers, never lessening his concentration on his engine. Mr. Haslev saluted the Coreys by holding high a bottle of Thasian wine.

  “I think I forgot needle and thread,” Hanne Haslev said.

  Mr. Corey set down two picnic baskets. One held small bottles of carbonated lemonade and water. The other held the picnic Mr. and Mrs. Corey had made that morning: two loaves of crusty bread, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheese wrapped in damp cloths, fruit and a cake they had bought the evening before at the pastry shop that would be fresh still because it had been soaked in orange juice. “That alone will make our journey worthwhile,” said Mr. Haslev as he peered into the basket. “And with a new temple thrown in.”

  It took some time to load the boat with everything the Haslevs needed for a week: sleeping bags and boxes of food and supplies. Then, as though the drama of the occasion were not enough, Odysseus stepped on the blade of a knife buried among the rags and cut his heel. He reached under his black sweater, fumbled in a pocket, and took out a package of cigarettes. With a long fingernail he slit open one of the cigarettes, then emptied the grains of tobacco into the wound. Mrs. Corey gasped. The boatman shook his head at her, smiling. “It’s good,” he said. “Good. It will sterilize the wound.”

  The boatman had told Lily and Christine to sit midway between bow and stern. Lily’s feet rested on one of a pair of enormous oars fit for a Titan.

  “But we can’t go yet,” Paul said urgently. “Jack isn’t here.”

  She had forgotten all about Jack. For a moment she hoped he wouldn’t turn up, or that they would leave without him. He was late after all. Why shouldn’t they leave? But then she glimpsed him sauntering toward
the boat along the quay as though he had all the time in the world. As he drew close, Lily noted that despite his cool demeanor his shoulders were rigid, his arms held tightly against his sides. Bits of straw and grass clung to his shirt and pants. He must have slept in some dark hole last night, in the acropolis or a shepherd’s shelter in the hills, she guessed.

  Each time she saw him, she would be disgusted by his arrogant ways. But then she would see something—like the straw and grass, or a long tear in his clothes, or his fingers, the nails so torn it was as though he’d gnawed at them in a fit—and she would feel the reluctant pity that had struck her that night in the shack on the beach.

  Jack jumped down into the boat and squeezed next to Paul on a seat in the bow. Paul whispered to him, looked quickly at his mother, who was staring out to sea, and reached into the picnic basket. He took a peach and handed it to Jack, who looked at it rather critically for a moment, then took a very small bite. Oh, why didn’t he gobble it down if he was hungry, Lily thought.

  It was nearly seven o’clock when Odysseus stood up and shoved the boat away from the quay with one of the oars. The village by then was stirring with life. Shutters were flung open at the windows of the whitewashed houses; people had appeared in the square and opened their shops to the day. Here and there among the leaves of trees were spots of vivid color, red and orange and purple, the petals of flowers in pots and window boxes. The hill above their house rose like a great green wave, and Lily saw the apron of the theater and, more distant, the dark fortification of the acropolis.

  Christine was singing in a piping voice like a bird. The kerosene engine thumped into life, and the old sailor stood up as they passed through the harbor entrance. He looked, thought Lily, as though over the years he had grown a hard, salty skin that could endure the ravages of storm and sea.

  For the first hour Lily spotted familiar landmarks, the old wall, the rocks where they swam, then the beach with the shack. She glanced at Paul and Jack as they passed the beach. They were grinning and talking as they looked at the shore. How dumb boys are! How could they ever grow up to become men like Mr. Haslev or her father, or Mr. Kalligas and Odysseus?