“He wouldn’t tell me,” she says. “But I showed up at the hospital one time just as she was leaving and I heard their voices raised. Which meant something, because Nestor was pretty weak by then. Your mother gave me that look she has—you know the look.” I give a rueful laugh. “And Nestor was all upset.”
“She would argue with a dying man.” Here is proof that my mother shouldn’t be confronted. “Did she say anything to you?”
“No.”
I think back to the voice mail my mother left. I wonder if that argument in the hospital had anything to do with her insistence that I not come to Greece. Did he tell her something that convinced her I shouldn’t be left alone with his things?
“The aunts can’t wait to see you,” Aliki says brightly. “I convinced them not to come over last night. It would have been a bit too much.”
“The aunts,” I say, happy for the change of subject.
I am eager to see them, one spinster and one widow, living together with the cozy friction of an old married couple in what used to be Sophia’s apartment. Sophia is always expounding on something, and Thalia is always giving a little smile of friendly mockery. It is as if each woman’s personality was determined by the meaning of her name—Sophia’s by wisdom, and Thalia’s by comedy.
“I don’t suppose there was room for all three sisters to live in the one place,” I say.
“Sophia and your mother tried that decades ago, before she met your father. It didn’t go well, apparently.”
Aliki’s face tightens just a bit, and I feel again the vague shame I felt in childhood, for a mother who was somehow apart from her two sisters, who was treated with love but held separate for some reason I could not understand. Only Nestor tried to keep the childhood relationship alive, but she wouldn’t let him. And now, with this argument right before he died, she must have ruined any chance of reconciliation. She kept coming back to Patras, bringing me with her every summer, but I know my mother sensed the way her sisters kept her at a slight distance, and during the waves of sadness that often hit her once we were back in America, she raged at me against these unexplained slights and insults.
As I did back then, I want now to defend my mother. When she finally returned to Greece for good soon after my father’s death, she’d spent more than three decades in America. Surely some of that country she insisted on disliking had rubbed off on her after all those years. It must have been hard for her to fit back into the Greek life her sisters had been living. Defiantly not American, she was no longer altogether Greek either. Still, she moved back ten years ago. In all this time, did Thalia and Sophia never ask her to join forces, even just to save a little money on rent?
We finish our breakfast and I take a quick and uncomfortable shower, struggling to shampoo with one hand while the other holds the spray nozzle. As I pull on jeans and a white turtleneck sweater, I realize that postponing the visit to my mother will only make things worse, so I tell Aliki I will stop by after all, but I need her as a buffer.
“Paki, I can’t. I need to stay with Demetra. Extended school holiday for Tsiknopempti.”
“Can’t Nikos stay with her?”
Aliki raises her eyebrows at me and makes a little laugh.
“He has work, but Demetra’s my job anyway.”
This is new. Marriage has turned her rebellious spirit into the stuff of stereotype. She has become the typical Greek wife, subservient but husband-mocking. I can’t imagine this ever happening to me.
“Don’t be afraid of her, Calliope.”
“I’m not afraid.” But she knows I’m lying.
“All right,” I say. “I’m a big girl. I’ll go alone.”
We kiss on the cheek as I put my jacket on.
“You know the way?”
“I remember.”
I head down in the elevator and out into Kanakaris Street, where a soft rain is falling. Compared to the February weather in Boston, the air feels mild. I leave my coat unbuttoned. A woman stares at me, as if she’s wondering why I have never learned to care for myself.
The smell of grease and cooked meat hangs in the colonnade over the sidewalk, and a few idle grills are pushed up against the building walls, embers still smoking. Two skinny dogs snuffle at the base of one of the grills. Streamers and popped balloons litter the street, along with bamboo skewers and cubes of bread that pigeons are squabbling over. Besides the birds and the dogs, the street is almost completely empty. The loudspeakers are quiet.
I follow the gentle slope of Kolokotronis Street downward, turning onto Maizonos where Plateia Olgas is crammed between it and Riga Ferraiou, two of Patras’s major boulevards. Predictably, the square seems much smaller now than when Aliki and I climbed in the mulberry trees that line it. It is hard for me to reconcile this scruffy, tiny space with our sense of concealment and wildness. As I pass by the kiosk—the same canopied stall that occupied the corner when I was little—the kiosk man is untying a bundle of newspapers and pinning them up on a stand. I can read the headlines, but they mean nothing to me, full of names I don’t know and events I have not followed. I realize now how early in the morning it is for this city that has just celebrated one of its important holidays, and it occurs to me that I should have called my mother to give her a warning. She will want to have dressed and fixed herself up.
Astiggos is a fairly unprepossessing street a few blocks northeast of Plateia Olgas and the area of the city where Sophia and Thalia and Aliki live. My mother’s apartment building is the nicest on the block, but the façade is spare and somewhat antiseptic. I can feel my shoulders tensing as I find Brown written in Greek letters on the list of buzzers: MПPAOYN. An odd sensation—to be apprehensive at the sight of my own name.
It takes her a while to answer, and when she does, her voice sounds faint and wary.
“It’s me,” I say.
“At this hour? You must be jet-lagged.”
She buzzes me in.
I know I am ridiculous in the elevator, straightening my coat, tucking my hair behind my ears, swiping a finger under each eye for stray mascara. I am going on the worst date of my life: all the dread of the familiar combined with the fear of the unpredictable. The elevator settles with a clang and I push the door open, preparing my expression.
My mother is tiny. This is my overriding thought when I see her standing in her doorway, clutching her robe. She is smiling, and I am overwhelmed with pity for her. I can’t imagine that this old woman is someone I have bothered to brace myself for.
“Calliope,” she says, and hugs me. Her chin reaches my chest, and my arms wrap all the way around her.
“Geia sou, Mamá.” The word comes out so effortlessly, riding a wave of memory and instinct. “I’m sorry, Mamá,” I say, holding her in the embrace for an extra second.
“The youngest, and he died first. Where’s the logic in that?” She pulls away. “Seventy years old. Now we’ll start dying, one by one.”
“Mamá, you’re all fine. None of you are dying anytime soon.”
“That’s what we thought about Nestor.” She gives me a look that’s half suspicion, half fear.
“But he’d been ill.”
“Yes,” she says. She nods her head and heaves a big sigh.
“You look good, Mamá. You look really good.”
She snaps out of her mournfulness and her eyes dart up to my face. I can see her checking my ears for piercings, my hairline for any signs of gray, then my hips and waist for added pounds. She won’t find any. Quickly, I twist my ring around so that the stones are on the inside. I don’t want to talk about my future with her.
“Let me take that,” she says, reaching for my jacket. I can’t tell whether I’ve passed inspection.
While she is putting my jacket away, I step toward the living room, looking for the mirror that has been a part of my mother’s life—and mine—for as long as I can remember. There it is, against the wall opposite a slipcovered couch: carved walnut, in the same style as Thalia’s table, and almo
st eight feet tall, its broad glass etched here and there with tiny black spots where the leading has pitted. This is the mirror that stood in the enormous foyer of my mother’s childhood house and in which, she said, her father would check his appearance before going out—even while the city was being bombed.
Given where my mother has placed the mirror, people sitting on her couch can’t escape their own reflection. I step in front of it, my heart-shaped face elongated by a curve of the glass. I see my American self against a backdrop of my mother’s Greek life.
I remember when she had the mirror shipped to America, over my father’s protestations that it would be too expensive. I wonder now whether what really bothered him was the vanity it represented. So much effort expended on something that allowed her to see only herself. When the mirror arrived, I half-expected it to be shattered, heaping bad luck on all of us. But it was all in one piece, and the movers placed it against a blank white wall at one end of our low-ceilinged living room so that it looked like the mouth of a tunnel. Now here it is again, my mother’s familiar, giving her easy passage to the better world of her youth.
“Come in here,” my mother says. She pulls me away from the mirror, as if she is afraid I will take possession of it.
I sit at her kitchen table and watch her make me instant coffee. She keeps her back to me as she putters at the counter. The room is twice the size of Aliki’s kitchen but has the perfect look of a space that no one cooks in. Everything is white or chrome, and there are no personal objects to be seen.
“Mamá, why didn’t you call me?”
“Why didn’t you call me? I haven’t spoken to you in, what, two months?”
“I mean about Nestor.”
“Why?”
“To tell me he was sick. You know, that maybe I should come see him.” I don’t want to say the last part—because he was about to die—and make her sad again.
She puts the two coffees down on the table and settles into her chair.
“I thought Aliki would have told you.”
“Aliki is busy,” I say. “She probably assumed you had called me.”
“In which case, she thought you didn’t care about your uncle, since you didn’t come.”
She has been doing this forever, trying to drive a wedge between Aliki and me. I let it go now. I need to stay detached. I watch her stir two teaspoons of sugar into her coffee. She’s holding the spoon by the very end, making a graceful motion with her wrist, like a dancer’s.
“Was the funeral nice?” It’s a stupid question, but I’m trying.
“Nice?” Her spoon clatters into the saucer. “No, the funeral wasn’t nice. The funeral was to bury a dead man’s body.”
“I mean after. It must have been comforting to have everybody there to talk about Nestor and remember his life.”
“I don’t need to talk to anybody else to show I remember my brother.”
“No.” I’m starting to give up. “No, you don’t.”
I take a long sip of hot, watery coffee, as if it could fortify me. “Well, I’ve been remembering all the things we used to do together,” I say. “How he used to make all those little gadgets for me. Remember his turtles?”
“Tortoises.”
“Right. Tortoises. I wonder if they’re still there.”
“They died, Calliope. Things die.”
In Greek, there are two words for dying, one for people and one for animals: pethainounai and psofanai. As a child, I used to use the people word for any pet or stray that died, as a way to grant a little extra dignity to the creature. My mother uses the animal word now, and it sounds cruel.
“I don’t know why he kept those things for all those years. Such a stupid pet. Like having a snake. Probably full of all sorts of diseases.”
“Wait a minute,” I say, sitting up so hard that my chair grinds against the floor. “Are you arguing with your brother? He’s dead. And you’re picking a fight with him over what pet he chose to have?”
“I can say what I want. He was my brother.”
“What is going on, Mamá? I heard about the day in the hospital. What could you possibly want to argue about with him?”
“Aliki told you.”
“Yes, she told me.” I look at her for a moment. “It’s embarrassing,” I say, my voice low. For me, at least, my words carry the weight of all the other times my mother’s actions dragged her and me beyond the safe and comfortable norm.
“Were you there? No. So I don’t see how I could embarrass you when you were thousands of miles away. You don’t know anything about it, Calliope.”
She is furious now. Her face has darkened and her breath is wheezing slightly. She rises to make some toast and I can see her hands shaking as she holds the plate. I want to set my hand on hers to quiet the trembling; she is so small.
“I’m going to Nestor’s this afternoon,” I say.
“I’m coming with you.”
“No. I’m doing this with Aliki.”
“What does Aliki have to do with anything? I’m the man’s sister and I have a right to be there when you go through his things.”
“He left them to me, Mamá.”
“Another stupid decision. Making you come all this way to go over piles of junk when I could have taken care of all of it. I can still take care of all of it if you sign the power of attorney.”
“Well, I’m here now, so I’m going to do what he wanted me to do. And it’s not junk. It’s photographs and tapes. I’d like to have those things.”
“Your uncle took pictures of everything, just because,” she mutters. “He was recording our lives, but what did he record? Just groups of people, faces, sometimes just things, objects.”
“Those things matter to me.”
“Why?” she says with scorn.
“Because I didn’t get to live it.”
We stare at each other and I see a faint trace of triumph in my mother’s eyes: Score one point for firsthand experience. I should walk away, but I can’t.
“At work the other day,” I say, “I remembered the story about the tracer bullets.”
She responds right away to this item from the catalog of her adventures.
“We stood there on the balcony. It’s a miracle we weren’t killed.”
“But, see, this is why Nestor’s stuff is important,” I say. “He told me it didn’t happen that way. You couldn’t have seen the bullets. They attacked during the day.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The first bombing and the tracer bullets. It was during the day.”
“It was at night, and I don’t care what Nestor told you. This is exactly why his collection is useless: It’s wrong. And you think you can go in there and set the record straight by looking at pictures of people’s shoes.”
She is agitated again, and there is no point in pursuing this. It is the same old story between us: She is living in her memories, and I am just trying to find a way in.
“Well, I’m going over there this afternoon and I’ll see what I find. I need the contact info for the lawyer,” I say, pushing my chair away from the table.
She looks as if she’s about to say something, but then she goes over to the telephone on the kitchen counter. “I’ll give you the lawyer’s numbers,” she says. “But you won’t find him.”
“Why is that?”
She is stooped over a notepad, and I can see the bumps of her vertebrae through the thin satin of her robe. “Carnival.”
“Doesn’t anybody work at some point around here?”
“Most people take Tsiknopempti off until at least Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. But maybe he’ll answer his cellphone and you can arrange something.”
I look at her for a moment. She is holding a slip of paper in her hand, and I see her draw herself up straight into the perfect posture of her once-athletic body.
“What were you going to say before?” I ask her.
“Nothing.”
“You were going to say something a minute
ago. About Nestor.”
“We’ve said all we need to say on that subject. How is Jason?” she says, pronouncing the name Iáson, like the hero of the Argonauts.
“It’s Jonah,” I say. “He’s fine.” I desperately hope she hasn’t noticed the thin silver band. There’s no telling news to my mother. She never appreciates the good news and takes the bad news as a foregone conclusion. And what I’d be forced to tell her now is mostly bad.
“Is that the number?”
She looks down at the paper in her hand.
“Yes.” She holds it out to me and I take it.
“If you need me, I’ll be at Aliki’s.”
I kiss her on the cheeks and walk out to the elevator, the taste of her cold cream on my lips.
Back on the street, I find myself turning not toward Aliki’s house or even Nestor’s house but farther up Astiggos Street toward my mother’s childhood home on Korinthou Street. It is only two blocks away from where she has settled in her widowhood, though her current neighborhood is noticeably scruffier than the old one was in its heyday.
By the time I was born, the family house had already passed out of the family, and my grandparents had moved into the small house that became Nestor’s own when they died, when I was still a little girl. But I knew every inch of the grand house inside and out from my mother’s stories. It was made of stone and stucco, with high ceilings and a wide and graceful stairway rising up through its core. Its garden, behind a wrought-iron railing, was paved with chessboard squares of marble, bordered by massive planters of heavy stone. Across the street from the city’s concert hall and in a neighborhood of neoclassical homes, it was a wealthy house, with a separate entrance for the servants beneath stairs leading to double oak front doors. I suppose it was the Greek version of the mansions on the upper part of Beacon Hill where Jonah and I stroll on weekends, imagining the stately lives inside.
Inside our house—as my mother still calls it—were four bedrooms, double parlors, and a library on the upper floors, each with a balconied window. On the first floor were large communal rooms: the dining room, the sitting room, and a spacious room in which were a grand piano and scattered chairs with velvet covers. A broad atrium rose up through the center of the house, topped with a skylight of gray glass. The bedroom doors gave onto a thin parapet from which you could see all the way down to the gleaming marble floor of the entrance, where the giant mirror stood guard.
The Clover House Page 6
