Fernanda shook her head. She knew Athens and she had other fish to fry. Dorcas was relieved. She was not yet ready for Greece. All she wanted was a place where she might curl up and give herself over to continued lassitude. Here, where she was to have felt safe and once more alive, she knew instead the growing fear that her exhaustion would go on forever, that she was, as Gino had always said, never going to get better. He had told her in no uncertain terms that he thought her hopelessly unbalanced. And how was she to disprove the echo of those words, even with Gino gone, unless she could rouse herself to feel something?
On and on droned the voices, and Dorcas caught the words of a suggestion Fernanda was making.
“I’ve made appointments to see several people at the Grande Bretagne,” she told Johnny. “So suppose you drop me there and then take Beth and Dorcas for a drive.”
The thought of effort was dismaying. “Please,” Dorcas said, “let Beth and me stay here at the airport until it’s time to leave for Rhodes. I don’t want to do anything.”
Fernanda made up her mind without hesitation. “Beth needs a change, if you don’t. Run along with Johnny and breathe some fresh air. There’s not much but cigarette smoke here in this waiting room. Take her in tow and give her your favorite test, Johnny. See if she passes it better than I did.”
It was true that Beth had turned as lively as a puppy, and since opposition would take even more energy, Dorcas gave in and went with them to the car.
In the front seat, with Johnny driving, Fernanda talked about arrangements and plans all the way into Athens. Beth bounced beside her mother in the back seat and filled the air with questions and exclamations. Her silky dark hair escaped beneath a blue-flowered hat and flew in wisps across her cheeks as she turned eagerly from one side of the car to the other.
At the Grande Bretagne they dropped Fernanda, set a time for picking her up for the trip back, and then Dorcas and Beth moved up with Johnny.
The roar of a big city surrounded them, and the inescapable odors of gasoline and exhaust fumes, the noise, the dust. Behind dark glasses Dorcas closed her eyes and resisted both clamor and smells. This was not the Greece of her father. It meant nothing to her.
Waiting for a traffic light, Johnny turned to look at her frankly. “I keep thinking I’ve met you somewhere. Do you suppose we’ve crossed paths?”
Dorcas roused herself to answer. “You’ve probably met me on a frieze somewhere in Greece. I can’t help it. I had a great-grandmother from the Peloponnese. I’m named for her.”
Johnny nodded. “That’s probably the answer. It’s funny how it is. They’ll tell you that present-day Greeks are a different breed. Then you walk down a street and find Hermes playing in an Athens alley, or you turn a corner and meet Athena on the back of a donkey.”
He was a friendly enough young man, with a casual manner that made him easy company, yet she felt too lethargic to respond.
“Lean back and relax,” he said. “Nobody can keep up with Fernanda day and night. I’ll wake you when the time comes.”
It was pleasant to be with someone who asked nothing of her. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Beth’s chatter and Johnny’s answers dimmed in her ears and seemed far away as she drowsed. Then she was aware that the car had turned and was winding upward around the curve of a hill.
“It’s time now,” Johnny said. “This is where we get out.”
The car had come to a stop beside other cars drawn up in a parking area. She had no desire to leave the comfortable seat, but when he came around and opened the door, she handed Beth to him and slipped out. Her body felt cramped and stiff, and she stretched as if she might send energy flowing through her with the movement of her blood. They were just below the crest of a small hill rising from the city. She could see Athens spread out below with its busy avenues of traffic, but she did not know why he had brought her here.
Johnny nodded toward the sloping rise of hill ahead. “The top’s our objective. It’s only a little way—you can make it. Go ahead and I’ll take charge of this young lady.”
Obediently, since that was still the way of least effort, Dorcas went up the pathway. Over the hill a few sight-seers were busy with cameras, posing with one another against the view, exclaiming and pointing.
Dorcas stepped out into the open and stood for a moment in the blowing wind. Then she took off the protective glasses. Light poured down from a sky unbelievably blue. It beat upward blindingly from the white houses of Athens. Yet she, who had begun to flinch from everything, did not flinch from its brilliance. Out across the rooftops rose another hill, and her first glimpse of it was like the rolling up of a curtain, like the signal for a drama to begin.
How marvelously white were the columns that topped that high, steep rock, how perfect, how complete they seemed, riding the centuries as they had done for more than two thousand years. To the left of the great main temple and well below it a width of entrance steps led up toward farther columns. Here, in long lines that zigzagged back and forth in mounting diagonals, came—surely!—the men and women of ancient Athens climbing toward the great temple above. Distance robbed the tiny figures of definition, showing only the throng as it ascended in slow ritual, back and forth along the wide flight of steps.
This was as it must always have been, with the great flat-topped rock pitching steeply upward into a vast sky, the city fanning out at its foot, the blue sea beyond, and worshipers climbing to the temple.
Johnny came up behind her and lifted Beth so that she, too, could see the high rock. It was a long while before he spoke, and Dorcas was hardly aware of them.
“Come along,” he said at length. “Now that you’re awake, we’re going up there.”
It was true that the sight had renewed her, but she still held back. “I’m not sure I want to see it close up. Not right away. From here it’s still perfect.”
Johnny laughed, and she found she liked the sound. “I’ll teach you a trick when we get up there that will spare you all pain.”
He set Beth down and Dorcas took the child’s hand as they started toward the car on their way to that other hill.
“At least you passed the test,” Johnny said. “You kept still and looked. You didn’t jabber or reach for a camera right away. Do you know what Fernanda said the first time I brought her up here? She said it made her homesick because it looked just like the First National back in her home town.”
Dorcas found herself laughing with him. Her step was lighter than it had been in a long time as she went down the hill at his side. Darkness and terror had retreated. Perhaps the warmth of golden light had begun its healing.
When they reached the rock of the Acropolis they left the car and started up the broken steps on foot. Figures that might have worn the robes of ancient Greece turned into tourists with cameras, into guides commanding their separate groups and jealous of wandering attention as they uttered well-rehearsed pronouncements.
The zigzag lines, Dorcas found, were caused by cement ramps winding back and forth across the rubble that had once been splendid steps. They climbed between the never-completed columns of the Propylaea, with Johnny lifting Beth over rough stone. Then they were in the open again, out in the dust and the wind. On every hand lay great tumbled rocks that had once been smooth paving. Prone blocks of marble for the continuous work of renovation lay all about, with spaces of dusty earth between. Once more it was the Parthenon that commanded the eye, but now it was too close for the illusion to be as perfect as it had seemed from afar.
“You promised me a charm,” Dorcas said. “I didn’t want to see it like this.”
He set Beth upon a low boulder. “Close your eyes,” he said to Dorcas. “Remember that the Greeks used color in their work. When this was completed there was crimson and gold and blue. But now you can see it as it was in the beginning. You can see the clean lines, the very bones of the marble as it was four hundred years before Christ when all of this was in the making.”
She opened her eyes a
nd forgot the broken pavement, the voices of the guides. Already the groups were scattering, losing themselves in a space so vast that thousands could scarcely have crowded it. Now she could see the wide marble steps, the columns, the sloping roof with the frieze beneath its peak, the figures so wonderfully alive. All was as it might have been at the time of the building. It was a place not ruined, but unfinished—its coming perfection already prophesied in lines that carried the eyes to soaring grace. The stone was not white, as it seemed from a distance, but aglow with the warm, creamy tones of Grecian marble.
“Thank you, Johnny Orion,” Dorcas said. Renewal was a deepening reality. She was truly coming to life.
As they moved around the great central building, the wind that whipped over Athens appeared to be blowing the Acropolis away in swirls of wheat-colored dust. Beth spread her arms as though she were about to take a wing and Johnny lifted her down from a prone marble column before she tried to fly. The ease of new companionship did not seem strange to Dorcas.
They found steps not too steep and broken to be climbed and went inside. There was no roof, no sides, only tall columns casting violet-dark shadows, framing glimpses of Athens far below. The floor had been repaired in part, but there were pockets and hollows in the marble and Johnny lifted Beth over the broken places.
Dorcas left them and stood alone where columns framed the view of an Athenian hillside. Once more she took off her glasses and submitted to the full blaze of light. It seemed to fall out of that improbable sky and wash across all this rock, to spread out in dazzling waves beyond, where the roofs of Athens caught and flung it back. Beyond the pillars the wind went by in a great rushing of sound, but here she was sheltered from all but the light. She raised her face to it, let the bright flood of it pour over her its healing rays.
Johnny must have guessed what she was feeling, for he stood silent and let her be. Once she turned back to him in apology and he smiled at her.
“I know,” he said. “It’s happened to me up here, too.”
He could not know it all. He could not know that she stood here not only for herself, but for her father and for her father’s friend as well. Yet she had never met anyone with whom she had felt so quickly at ease, so easily comfortable. She had known Johnny only a few hours, but she liked him very much. There was something about him that gave her a confidence she had not felt in another human being for a long time.
When she turned at last from the wash of light and went back to them, Johnny was telling Beth a story of the king whose name had been given to the Aegean. Here on this rock Aegeus had stood watching the horizon for the ships of Theseus, his son and heir. Theseus had killed the Minotaur, but he had forgotten to change black sails to white as his signal of victory. The old king saw black sails come over the horizon and flung himself in grief over the sides of this very rock.
Beth’s eyes were wide as she listened, and Dorcas watched her for a moment. Beth had accepted Johnny, too.
He put the child on her feet and rose from the block of marble. “There’s more to see. You’re not tired?” he asked Dorcas.
“How could I be—up here?”
“It’s been known to happen,” he said dryly. “Fernanda says you’ve been ill and you mustn’t overdo.”
How much had Fernanda revealed? she wondered, and answered him quickly. “I’ve been ill, but I’m well now. Completely well. I’m looking forward to Rhodes.”
“Of course you are,” he said.
As they left the Parthenon and walked toward the Porch of the Maidens, Dorcas quickened her steps, moving more lightly and freely than she had before. She reached the Porch ahead of Johnny and he laughed as he and Beth caught up with her.
“It’s a gazelle you are indeed,” he said. “You do honor to your name.”
So he knew what the name Dorcas meant, she thought, and was somehow pleased.
Above them the caryatides—here the priestesses of Athena herself—stood guard with their baskets upon their heads—baskets in which sharp knives were reputedly hidden, for all the serenity of the faces below. There was a hint of oriental splendor in the ornamentation of the Erechtheion. Here Athena had put away her warrior garb for more feminine robes, ruling from this sacred place as a goddess of the light.
“We’ll leave before too long,” Johnny said. “But first there’s something you must see.”
The rock of the Acropolis was like a long ship riding high on a sea of air and light. Now it was toward the stern he led her, carrying Beth for a while, since a four-year-old’s legs were not made for Acropolis climbing.
Steps ran steeply down to the entrance of a small building, and as they descended Dorcas realized where they led. This was the little museum of the Acropolis. The halls were cool and had the familiar echoing ring she knew so well. Johnny led the way past marble figures that had once adorned the buildings outside, past miniature reproductions of the frieze Lord Elgin had taken away to England and that Greece wanted back.
The farthest room was his goal. Dorcas crossed its threshold and saw the semicircle of korai watching her—damsels out of an archaic past. Their chitons hung in graceful folds, the robes held up by the left hand of each lady. Traces of color remained in embroidered shawl and elaborate hairdress. The sculptors had done justice to both beauty and character so that one had a sense of the individuality of each. All but one of them smiled—a polite smile that lifted rounded cheeks and gave softness to the curve of chin.
Johnny said nothing. He waited for her to find out for herself. It was the lady who did not smile who drew her. She was lovely and undoubtedly very old, belonging to an earlier time than the golden century of Pericles. Her eyes looked down upon Dorcas as if in calm recognition, as if she thought, “My sister, you have come.” This was the one. This was the face that had somehow come to her through the ages. The face Gino had seen that day in another museum far away.
Suddenly, and without warning, she was crying. She covered her face with her hands and her shoulders shook with the force of her weeping. She had not meant to do this. It was dreadful, yet she could not help herself.
“There’s a bench here. Come and sit down.” She knew by Johnny’s tone that she had alarmed him, but she could not explain.
The overwhelming emotion that so suddenly enveloped her had risen without warning out of the past. It stemmed from her love for her father and for Markos, both of whom had longed to stand in this very place and behold all that she was now beholding. It grew from the talk of Greece she had heard since she was a child, even from the love she had felt in the beginning for Gino—a love that had lost itself in terror and come to nothing—with Gino dead in the funeral pyre of a crashed plane. All this she felt and could not explain to Johnny Orion.
He waited and let her cry. Beth, frightened, tugged at her sleeve and drew her back to the present. Dorcas sat up on the bench, attempting a smile that was not, she suspected, the firm, polite smile of the korai on their pedestals.
When she’d wiped her eyes, she kissed Beth’s cheek. “I’m all right, darling.”
There was concern in Johnny’s look, and she saw how very deep a brown his eyes were beneath the irregular line of reddish brows. Gino’s had been an opaque black, and somehow impenetrable. Johnny gave something of himself in his look, and his eyes held no secrets.
She did not want him to think her tears were owing to any remnant of emotional instability. Resolutely she stood up.
“That’s better,” he approved. With a gesture free of self-consciousness he put out a finger and gently touched away one last tear on her cheek.
“A gazelle in more ways than one,” he said. “An affrighted creature, the gazelle. I’ve felt it about you from the first. But there’s nothing to trouble you here.”
She looked at him without concealment or subterfuge, the growing liking she felt for him in her eyes. There was an instant of oddly charged silence between them. It had been so long since such a feeling had come over her that she did not want to let it go
. There was something strengthening in feeling almost painfully alive.
Johnny broke the silence, although he did not step back from whatever he saw in her face. He merely moved on, drawing her with him, as though he knew better than to crowd so new and tentative a response in this moment of first awareness.
He looked at the damp tip of his forefinger and grinned. “You remind me of the sculpture they call the Weeping Boy. The boy with one tear on his marble cheek. We’ll see it in the Rhodes Museum.”
A picture of the sculptured head had been in a book of her father’s that she had loved as a child and Johnny’s whimsy pleased her.
They left the building and returned to the open, moving toward the entrance stairs to the Acropolis. Beth clung to her mother’s hand, still disturbed by her tears.
“Fernanda told me that you’d lost your husband recently,” Johnny said matter-of-factly as they walked along. “I can understand how you must feel coming here without him.”
It was as if he offered her a way out should she wish to take it, a way to step back. It was as if he had said, “I understand your loneliness, your need to reach for any hand.”
He did not understand, of course, and there was no way to explain. She could hardly tell him that she was far from being a bereaved and grieving wife. Yet out here in the wind and the great pure sea of light she longed to be done with pretense. She wanted Johnny for a friend. Nothing built on early deception could have solid ground beneath it. At least she could bring one thing into the open. It would be a step toward the truth.
“My married name isn’t Brandt,” she said. “That was my father’s name and I’ve taken it back. Nikkaris was my married name. My husband was half Greek.”
She knew by the quick look he gave her that she had startled him, that Fernanda had not told him this.
Seven Tears for Apollo Page 4
