Vic studies her watches, comparing one face with the other.
“He still has time for prayer. In honor of our guest’s visit today, we’ll sing chapter seventeen.” As she turns to me, the compassion is absent from her eyes, but her smile remains. “Okay, Ian. I hope you’ll consider what we discussed.” She waves me over and hugs my shoulder while pointing to her flock around the fire. They are passing around a crate of instruments and filling plastic cups with green juice from cartons and red wine from a fiasco bottle. I can’t find Helios among them.
“I ask, before you judge us, look at the joy, the camaraderie, the lack of pain. There is no night here. I might not make it to see the end, but some of them will.” They are dancing, they are laughing and kissing, they are beating tambourines. They are high on the waves of an atomic blast and they look unprepared for winter. A cough is worming up Vic’s throat, but she stalls it, a red blush ballooning on her face. “John prophesied the Apocalypse from Patmos, but he didn’t set the final battle here. That takes place in Armageddon, a town, to no one’s surprise, in Israel. How’s that for the accuracy of prediction?”
Convenient of him. As convenient and distant as a drone strike.
As if she’s read my mind, Vic releases my shoulder.
“We aren’t trying to win your thoughts,” she says. “What we want are your feelings.”
WHEN MY MOTHER and I moved postdivorce into the garden apartment on Riverside Drive, Helen took to decorating with the gusto of a person forced against her will into the mania of a midlife crisis. The new apartment offered, among other prospects, the opportunity for ornamental retaliation against Edward Bledsoe’s bland Michigan tastes.
Charlie called our place the Jungle House. Gaudily embroidered Mexican curtains hung across the windows; the sofa was a tropical motif of palm fronds and soaring parrots, where even food spills took on a second life as Amazonian flora; bamboo was the go-to material for tables and cabinetry. And for many Saturdays of that first year as our decidedly not-abandoned-but-released! mother-son unit, we’d plunder the last shrinking Chelsea flea markets set up in purgatorial parking lots (soon to be the ground floors of glass condo towers) for gilded birdcages, carved picture frames, beaded pillow shams that hinted of a South American origin, and artisan glass the colors of cough drops. Exotic plants came and went, delivered blooming, dying as melodramatically as stage actresses, one leaf at a time. My mother installed two yellow canaries, named Lovely and Lovelier, in a hanging brass cage by the window that sang their hearts out in the morning.
The one space that resisted the tropics was my bedroom. To my mother’s irritation, I left the walls white and blank. I preferred hardwood to the handwoven rugs that began to pile up in the living room like daises (our Peruvian cleaning lady had played intermediary to a textile importer in Queens). I changed my laptop’s screen saver on a weekly basis, but even as I aged into the double digits I didn’t so much as tack a postcard above my desk. It was a room where shadows collected, mine mixing with those from a century of previous occupants.
Eventually, in her ongoing fit of horror vacui, Helen took my indifference to décor as a silent revolt, a refusal to be devoured into our not-so-new life.
“Don’t you want anything up?” she’d ask pleadingly.
“I like it the way it is.”
“How about we buy a poster of the galaxy. A huge one. It could go—”
“No thanks.”
“Or we can dash over to the Met and get a nice framed poster of—”
“Not interested.”
She’d release a troubled breath.
“Do you need to talk to someone?”
“We are talking.”
“A professional. A psychologist. You’re clearly depressed.”
“I’m not, Mom. I swear.”
“It’s been years now, and you’re still having difficulty adjusting. You’re refusing to commit. You don’t see this as your home.” The tears would come then, worse for being so tentative. “Just one poster. A hockey player. You liked hockey last winter. A woman, is that what you’re holding out for? Go ahead. Bikini it up! A sports car, maybe? A band? That singer you and Charlie love whose lyrics I didn’t approve of? A fashion model? Is that what this is about? I’m okay with it. I like fashion! A man in a swimsuit! That’s absolutely fine!” She wanted me to have full freedom over my room, and it was my freedom to do nothing that proved to her the extent of my unhappiness.
“It’s just that the rest of the apartment has so much stuff,” I’d say. “And New York is right outside the front door. It’s nice to have a quiet place.”
“Please hang something.”
“I have my computer. I’m not even in my room that much.”
“Anything. Please. We’ll paint the walls!”
“I like them the way they are.”
“Ian, I don’t want you existing like this.”
She started dating. It took a while, and I was far too young to realize what a bear market New York is for smart, older women who have already suffered the disappointment of a marriage. She’d pin a flower to her chest and fold her coat over her arm so as not to squash the petals. She’d return a few hours later, the flower still pristine but her face wilted underneath her makeup.
I encouraged her volunteering. First it was dogs; she’d walk hapless mutts with orange ADOPT-ME vests up and down Riverside Park and spend her free time cleaning cages at the no-kill shelter in Morningside Heights. Our refrigerator door became a photographic record of successful adoptions. Helen gained weight, which filled the hollows of her face and suited her, and she laughed more, or rather her laughing stopped feeling like a symptom of nervousness and resentment. Her expensive clothes no longer fit and she began buying more comfortable smocks and silk pajama pants that were probably just as expensive but didn’t read as trying so hard. Dogs gave way to a solid year of volunteer horticultural services at the Riverside Park Conservancy—a passion that killed her interest in houseplants—and I’d quiz her delicately about some of the male retirees I’d find her with on hands and knees in the dirt, dumping out jars of worms to enhance the soil.
“Oh, it’s not like that,” she’d say, blushing. “Just friends. But if it ever were, would you, I mean, might it—”
“Of course it would be okay!” I’d exclaim.
Those men never materialized at our door. By the time I entered high school, the home décor began to shift, as if slowly ravaged by global warming. Indian tapestries and a gurgling miniature water fountain found their way among the bamboo—items sold at the yoga studio where Helen took classes on meditation and Ayurvedic massage. Lovely and Lovelier, perhaps realizing the fading interest in their roots, developed umpteen minor illnesses, which required constant veterinary appointments. The vet diagnosed them as “stressed.”
“Why do we have all of these dumb little baubles?” Helen would ask me, grabbing a glass jaguar.
“It was yours from an earlier phase,” I’d answer.
“I really don’t remember buying this. Would you want these in your room?” My room had remained adamantly untouched.
“Just throw them away.”
“We’ll donate them. I’ll bring them to the Center.”
The Center was a senior-care home, where, for nearly two years, my mother spent afternoons washing the elderly and keeping them company while they watched TV. At Christmas our hearth was lined in cards from her favorite patients with notes of thanks that she’d actually written for them to herself.
“Sometimes I wish—” And I could hear the needle in her brain sweep onto the groove of a sad, relentless song. I knew by then not to bring up dating, so I’d sit on the sofa and hug her.
“You’re going to be fine,” I’d promise her. “Keep looking ahead.”
She exchanged the old for the young in my last years of high school. First, infants with incurable diseases and with so many wires strapped to them they looked like jumped car batteries in their hospital incubators. Then f
und-raisers for runaways and at-risk youth at the Broadway New Heart Shelter. Soon it was vulnerable children from all over the world tacked to our refrigerator, and while her spirituality was drifting toward new age transcendentalism, she exploited her ties to Catholicism to join a Christian missionary program that ventured to orphanages in New World countries.
“There’s a trip coming up,” she mentioned to me. “To China.”
“Are you going?”
“Well, you see, I’d have to leave the afternoon of your graduation.”
“You should go.”
“I wouldn’t miss the actual ceremony, but I’d have to leave right after.” She frowned. “I can’t do that.”
“Mom, go. I can celebrate with Charlie. He rented out the Rainbow Room. I was planning on doing that anyway.”
“It’s your special day. I can’t not be there for you.”
“Mom, please go. You need this.” I was rebelling like a lunatic outside of the house (mostly under Charlie’s influence), but my gift to Helen was the illusion of a calm-and-steady son. Appearing morally upright for a parent is life’s longest con. But I wanted her happy. I wanted her to think I was already taken care of.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Really sure? It could be good for me.”
“It will be good for you. Try it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I just feel so lost.”
We both moved out at the end of the summer. I went to college in the Berkshires, and Helen sold the Riverside apartment and bought the static-electric midtown studio, which she decorated in costly Zen minimalism (the tropics had finally been bulldozed off the Bledsoe map). There was no second bedroom—no place for me to leave bare—but she did purchase a sofa bed. Lovely died by Thanksgiving, but Lovelier persisted. After three subsequent missionary trips with the Christians, my mother fell out with the program’s leaders when she decided they were milking her for funds. “They think I’m rich,” she told me squarely. And she was rich, sort of, thanks to her divorce settlement, but Helen continued in her delusion that she lived just above the white-Manhattan-divorcée poverty line. She began to travel, not for humanitarian purposes, but simply to see the world on her own. Indonesia. Tibet. Morocco. She’d plan her trips to coincide with my breaks from college so someone could be there to feed Lovelier.
It was in India that she found herself. Mumbai. Udaipur. Jaipur. Jaisalmer. Agra. She came back thinner from a stomach virus, but her eyes had turned a brighter hazel, like two distant planets that had finally locked into orbit. “The things I saw!” she kept repeating in an ecstatic form of post-traumatic shock. “I saw things I’d never thought I’d see! The colors alone! The peach silk of a Sikh’s turban moving against the orange sky!” That image, in particular, seemed to haunt her—far more than even the dead body she saw floating in the Yamuna River. Her phone calls to my dorm room followed the methodology of Freudian analysis, the playing and replaying of her Indian adventure as if one day, with enough clarity, she’d be able to process it and move on.
She did not move on. She called me in the spring of my last semester, after a late-season blizzard dumped a foot of snow on New York.
“I miss India,” she said.
“I know you do. But the great thing about it is it’s not going anywhere.”
“Neither is Manhattan. Not for me. I don’t think I like it here. I tell you, it’s this snow. I loved it in Michigan, but not in this city. Not anymore.” She paused for a very long time. “If it weren’t for you, I’d up and move to Delhi. I’d leave next month if I could sell the studio.”
“Why would I stop you?”
“Honey, if I left, you’d have no one in New York.”
“I’d have Dad.”
“I repeat, you’d have no one in New York.”
I knew what she was asking from me. My permission.
“Mom, if that’s where you want to live, you should go. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’m an adult if you haven’t noticed. I’d rather you happy in India than miserable while I slept on your couch.”
“But what about Lovelier?” she cried, as if I were the one being impulsive. “I can’t take him with me.”
“You’re really going to stay for a bird?”
“He’s been with us for twelve years! That’s very old for a canary. He’s a member of our family.”
“Snap his neck.”
“Murderer.” She laughed. “No. I’m only daydreaming. It’s not feasible.”
“Listen to me. If you really want this, I order you to go. It’s your life, Mom. Your life.”
“And I’m telling you, it’s simply not feasible. End of conversation!”
Helen sold the studio for a sizeable profit, donated her furniture, made her good-bye rounds at the Center to the few residents still alive and coherent enough to remember her, reallocated her stock portfolio for minimal risk, and began her course of malaria pills. I purposely didn’t ask about the fate of Lovelier. On her ride to the airport she phoned, her voice stiff and fragmented, shuffling around in the highest register.
“I’m scared, Ian. This was a mistake.”
“No it isn’t. It’s exciting.”
“I don’t know why I let you talk me into this. I don’t know anybody in Delhi. All I have is a one-month rental. I could be murdered my first night, and no one would find me for weeks.”
“No one’s going to murder you. You can do this.”
“I just don’t think I can. I just don’t . . . oh, look, the skyline. There it goes. My god. Driver, slow down. All the yellow and gray.”
“Call me when you land.”
“Okay,” she said in a whisper, trying to muffle her sobs. “I’ll call you. And when you’re back in New York, keep your eyes out. Maybe you’ll see him.”
“Who? Lovelier? Mom, you didn’t.”
“I’m not saying what I did. But keep your eyes on the trees. Oh, Ian, I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“I love you so much.”
I had done all I could for her. I waved good-bye from a mountain in Massachusetts as she blasted off on a Delta 747 toward the unknown. Helen was finally on her way.
AUGUST CROWDS HAVE overtaken Chora. A cruise ship must have docked in Skala this morning. Lots of golf hats and ergonomic walking shoes. Tour guides barely visible in the throngs hold up metal antenna wire with bright orange pennants at the tips. The ticket line leaks from the monastery and down its stone steps, a drool of single-file sightseers that ends under the UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE plaque. I have to fight my way through the mêlée of broken conversations—I hear the Greek islands are so bankrupt they can’t even get shipments of bottled water. That’s why I brought mine from the boat. What, they don’t allow photography inside? Cheap way to get you to buy a postcard. No monks in the chapel? What’s the blasted point of a monastery if you don’t get to see no monks? Colin, your wallet is showing in your back pocket. Cheryl, this is where . . . Cheryl, this is where they wrote the Bo . . . Cheryl?
In the narrows of the Choran maze, a three-minute walk from the monastery, the sounds of the multitudes fade into the clatter and hum of occupied houses. Large jugs of tea sit on a roof ledge, waiting for the sun to appear. I’m two hours early for Sonny’s lunch, but it was either drift around Chora or search out Stefan or Inspector Martis, and I chose the easier option. On a hilltop peak in the distance, three stone windmills beat, and I can taste the bitter pollen in the air, more in my throat than on my tongue. I make a few stabs toward Charlie’s house, climbing the skull of a cobblestone hill and winding along a passage that ends in a tiny courtyard. A flock of nuns draped in heavy black wool hurries through a carved wooden doorway. One of the nuns pulls a rope that activates a bell above the entrance. She continues ringing it until each nun has stepped over the threshold. They disappear like coats collected in a cabinet.
“Ian,” a child’s voice shouts behind me. I turn to find Duck skipping down the passage in her white linen caftan. Therese and Vesna follow, their arms l
oaded with netted bags of groceries. “Are you going to see the three eyes?”
“Three eyes?” I ask.
“In the convent,” Duck says, pointing to the door that has just slammed shut. “There’s a painting in there that Mommy loves. Mary has three eyes. It’s a miracle. The third eye just appeared one day.”
Therese smiles at me. “They do not let men inside today.” She shifts her arms and two oranges fall from the netting, which Vesna quickly gathers. When she lifts up, I make a point to catch her eye.
“Hi, Vesna, how was—” But I remember the secret of her Athens protest rally and cut the question off. Her lips stiffen but eventually relax when it’s clear I am not going to rat her out. Her black and blue hair is tied in a braid, and her gray shirt glitters with plastic rhinestones. “I saw your brother an hour ago.”
Now the lips of both Stamatis women stiffen, and they exchange glances.
“Where did you see Helios?” Vesna asks. “My father has been looking for him.”
“Down at the beach by Grikos. He was at—” I stop myself again. I’m guessing Helios doesn’t want to be found.
“He hasn’t shown up for work the past few days,” Vesna says. Her mother nudges her to stop her from airing family problems. Vesna doesn’t take the nudge lightly, turning to Therese and unleashing a thunderstorm of Greek.
“Today Miles started following me,” Duck brags. The declaration sounds mildly alarming until Duck inches her pink cell phone from her caftan pocket and pulls up her Instagram account. “He liked my picture of the three eyes.”
“Duck, you are not to take photos of the icons,” Therese scolds.
“Why not? We paid. Mommy always gives the nuns money. She says it’s not fair that tourists only give to the monks.”
Therese manages to disguise her frustration with a put-upon smile. Her bony arms adjust the groceries. When I reach for the bag of oranges, she deflects my attempts to help.
“I hope you are hungry. We make big lunch,” she announces. “My stew. Sonny tells me Stefan is on island. So I make extra in case he comes.”
The Destroyers Page 42
