Even before I reach the corner, I can hear the hum of traffic from Korinthou Street. Once a stately boulevard, it is now a busy access road into the heart of the city. I wait for a pack of trucks and cars to pass and then cross to the other side so I can look up at the house from a distance. I scan the façade, looking for some sign of the atrium’s magnificent space. I imagine the four Notaris children arrayed along the parapet on a holiday morning. And the string-and-can telephones they rigged across the void, and the pulley-hung basket with which they could whisk away the reading glasses or chess pieces of their befuddled father.
But I can’t make anything out; how does an inner column of light alter the outward appearance of a house? All I see now is an anarchy symbol and the green cloverleaf of the PASOK socialists spray-painted on the crumbling stucco, and, by the double doors, a row of small white circles that glow orange in the daylight, each one with a metal nameplate beneath it. There are no Carnival streamers or balloons here. We are too far away from the center of the new Patras. Behind me, the concert hall has been turned into a cram school, complete with a large neon sign advertising instruction in numerous foreign languages.
My mother took me on summer pilgrimages to the house, posed me before the large iron gate, and took my photograph while I forced a smile of happiness and ownership. Every year, I stood there, worrying about what the truck drivers and deliverymen were thinking as they roared by on the busy road. I worried that she would step into the rushing traffic as she framed her shot, unaware that the boulevard of her youth was gone. I hoped that no one would emerge to see my mother smiling with a superior air over a house whose stucco was soot-blackened and chipped and whose gate had rusted half shut.
Now, as I look up at the façade, I see someone draw a curtain in one of the tall windows of the second story. A man in an undershirt yawns, briefly presses his head close to the glass, and disappears into the depths of the room.
I hear a tapping above me and look up to see the under-shirted man gesturing at me: a twisting of the hand, fingers extended as if he were turning a large knob. He is asking me what I want and he is frowning. I don’t know how to answer him. All my life I have wanted to go into the house, but that doesn’t mean that now is the right moment. If I’m allowed in, all I can do is stand in the same space as the rest of them and imagine how it used to be. There will be nothing familiar for me to see.
The man throws his arms into the sleeves of a light-blue shirt and begins to button it from the bottom up, all the while looking at me through the window. I shrug and smile. When he is finished with the shirt, he waves me toward him, then disappears from view.
When the oak door opens, I see that he is skinny, with gray hair cropped close to his head.
“I’m late for work,” he says. “Spit it out.” And again the sharp twisting gesture of the hand, as if he wants to wrench a confession from me.
“My family used to own this house,” I say, regretting a verb that might offend his possibly socialist sensibilities. “They used to live here.”
“I hope they owned it. Be an expensive place to rent the whole thing, don’t you think? I suppose you want to see it.”
He scowls at me, his dark furrowed eyebrows in stark contrast to his silver hair. I nod.
“My apartment’s only a one-bedroom,” he says. Probably not much bigger than mine and Jonah’s—assuming it’ll still be mine and Jonah’s when I get back.
“I don’t need to see your apartment,” I stammer. “I mean, it would be all right to just see the main spaces. That would be fine.”
He moves aside and waves me in.
“What part of America are you from?”
“Vostóni,” I say—as if this pronunciation of the word can reclaim some of the Greek identity he has taken.
The first thing I notice is the smell, damp and layered with the odors of several different breakfasts: toast and eggs, coffee, and cinnamon. It is dark inside, and I look up to where the glass ceiling of the atrium should be and see a panel of white-painted wood with a light fixture hanging from it. Two of its three bulbs have burned out.
“Got a three-story ladder?” the man asks with a laugh. “The landlord won’t bother until that third bulb goes.”
“That used to be glass,” I say.
“Used to be a lot of things, young lady.”
And this is why my mother never tried to take me inside. If anyone had waved to her as we stood before the house all those summers, she would have ignored the signal, all the better to preserve in her memory what would always be the most important version of the house. I take a few steps into the foyer, toward the tall oak door that must have led to the front sitting room. Boots and umbrellas lean against the corner by the door. A peephole has been drilled through the oak and covered over with scratched plastic.
I know the man is watching me with amusement as I spin around slowly, taking in the handful of things about the house that I assume have not changed. There is a wide expanse of wall where the walnut mirror once stood—I am sure of it—and the swinging door Irini, the cook, would push through coming in from the kitchen, and the railing around the landing on the third floor, where my aunts and Nestor dangled their baskets and hooks. Yes, it is changed now, but the space is still the same, still redolent of everything I have ever imagined in it.
“When did you lose the house?” the man asks.
“We didn’t lose it,” I say, turning to face him. But I don’t know that this is true. Perhaps we lost it in the Second World War, or in the civil war that came after it, or during the junta. No one has ever explained this to me.
“Well, when was the last time your family lived here?”
“Sometime after the war.”
He waves his hand.
“Ages ago when it comes to houses.”
“Please,” I say, “could I see the basement?”
“The basement?”
I can see he thinks I am a strange American.
“Please.”
“I told you I was late and now I’m even later.”
I smile at him, waiting. He checks his watch.
“Fine,” he sighs. “But be quick.”
I know he wouldn’t accommodate me if he thought I were truly Greek.
He leads me through the swinging door and down a flight of wooden steps to a narrow hallway tiled in black and white. Several doors open off the hallway, topped with transom windows and fitted with brass kickplates along the bottoms. All I can do is stand still and stare around me in wonderment.
“Seen it?” the man says, beginning to lead me away.
“Wait,” I say, reaching out to stop him. He gives me an odd look, and I wish I had not touched him. “I’ll meet you in the foyer in a few minutes.”
“These are private storage rooms.”
“I’m not going to take anything.”
“Five minutes,” he says, and heads upstairs.
Here again, my Americanness helps me. If I were completely Greek, he would fear I was a gyftissa, a gypsy or a thief.
Alone in the hallway, I give a little triumphant laugh. The basement is the exception that proves the rule, the one unchanged place that proves that all the other stories of my mother’s childhood in this house must be true. This is where my mother and my aunts and Nestor flooded the hall one day so they could slide and skim across the tiles. This is where they raised silkworm cocoons before the war. This is where my mother showed a puzzling kindness to the little Italian boy, the baker’s son, sneaking free cocoons up to him through the high basement windows as he crouched on the sidewalk outside.
I begin to test the doors to find the old scullery from which the children ran the hose through the transom window on the day they flooded the basement. The doors are not locked, or the locks are all broken, and I open one after another until I find the sink, a gray soapstone tub with square sides. Another gasp of satisfaction escapes me. I wish Aliki were here, or—and the thought surprises me—Jonah. I could start here, with thi
s, my favorite story, to explain myself to him.
The story goes that, once they had the right water level in the hall and the doors were all closed to keep the water in, the girls pushed Nestor into the scullery through the transom window with the hose so he could turn off the faucet. Then they did their prewar version of a Slip’N Slide, with poor Nestor clamoring to come back out to the hall and play. When they were done, they opened the door and the water went down the drain, leaving the floor surprisingly clean and their parents none the wiser.
To me, this story epitomized the glory of my mother’s childhood. Its setting was mundane—almost everyone I knew had a basement—but the mischief was extravagant. Who poured water into a house? Who dared to break such a fixed rule between order and chaos, domesticity and rebellion? It seemed like a heroic thing, almost, that my mother and her siblings had done. The closest I ever came to replicating this was the time I strapped the carriages of a toy train onto my feet and skated on them down the length of our ranch house. I crashed into the walnut-framed mirror, stared at my face pressed against the silvered glass, and got my first lesson that there was no recreating someone else’s past.
Now, in my mother’s actual basement, I can’t find the drain that should be in the scullery floor. The floor rebukes me with its smoothness, as if it lacked a navel, an omphalos. As if without the sign of an umbilical cord it bears no connection to anything that came before it. I stand there like a fool, embarrassed to have given even whispered voice to my mistaken enthusiasm. Embarrassed, too, to be putting such stock in so prosaic a thing as a basement. The missing drain proves nothing either way, I tell myself. Perhaps there was a renovation long ago; perhaps I have not found the right sink; perhaps I have simply misremembered the story. I close the door to the scullery and take one last look at the chessboard hallway before I head up the stairs.
“Find what you were looking for?” the man asks. He has put on a beige zippered jacket over the blue shirt, and he is holding a motorcycle helmet in one hand. I remember seeing a scooter locked to the rusted railing outside.
“Yes,” I say, to be polite. “Thank you.”
“I went to see the house,” I tell Aliki. There is no need to tell her which one.
“It’s looking pretty bad lately.”
“The graffiti? How long has that been on there?”
“Awhile. If you clean it up, they’ll just do it again.”
“You don’t—”
“No. The city cleans it. Sometimes.”
“Aliki, I went in,” I say, watching for her reaction.
She turns from the board where she is mincing garlic and leans back against the counter.
“Oh?”
“Some guy let me in. The atrium is covered. They put wood over it, with an ugly light up there.”
“It was probably leaking. It happens to all these old houses.”
“I really wanted to see it, the way the aunts always talked about it, with the light coming down.”
I am waiting for her to share my enthusiasm with some imagined recollections of her own, but she gives me a wistful smile in which I detect a touch of pity.
“Had you never been in?” she says.
“No. Have you?”
“Almost twenty years ago now. I knew someone who lived there, actually. We used to have parties in her apartment when her parents were out.”
“Aliki! You never told me this.”
She shrugs. “We drank a lot at those parties. Maybe I forgot,” she laughs. “The aunts are coming for lunch, by the way. Eager to see you.”
“Good,” I say, but I’m not interested in them now. “What was it like?” I go on. “Must have been weird for your friend.”
“Oh, I never told her. That would have been weird.” Aliki turns back to the counter and whips at a potato with a peeler.
“I went into the basement,” I tell her. “Looking for the drain.”
“The drain? To what?”
She doesn’t turn around.
“When they flooded the basement. The drain in the scullery.”
She picks up another potato.
“The story,” I say. “How can you not remember?”
Aliki stops and sets her hands on the counter. She tips her head to one side but still won’t turn around.
“I remember the story a little. Something about getting Nestor in trouble. Ask the aunts.”
“I will,” I say. “But there was more to it. Nestor probably has something about it in his stuff. Which I want to start going over as soon as possible.”
“Yes, but wait until I can go with you. If the neighbors see some foreigner fiddling with the lock, it’ll cause more trouble than it’s worth.”
I think about the way I am dressed—my jeans and my turtleneck and my beige wool peacoat. Dark hair and a straight nose don’t make up for them.
“I can’t believe you don’t remember the basement story. I feel like I know every word.”
Aliki shrugs again. “I don’t know. It’s not that big a deal.”
“You used to think the stories were a big deal,” I say. “When we were kids.”
This makes her turn around.
“I’m not a kid anymore, Paki,” she says, with an indulgent smile.
We are looking at each other, not speaking, and I am about to ask Aliki what’s the matter when the front door opens and Demetra’s singsong spills into the apartment. Aliki pushes off from the counter and returns to her potato peeling. Nikos leans into the kitchen doorway, Demetra’s coat and scarf in his hands.
“What’s cooking?” he says.
“Leg of lamb. Go wash your hands, Demetra.”
The girl starts to whine.
“Listen to your mother,” Nikos says, reaching for a garlic clove on the counter.
“I thought you had to work,” I say.
“The boss called me in,” he says, pointing to Aliki. “Reinforcements.”
“I needed a break,” Aliki says, and I wonder whether she planned it so that I’d see my mother first alone.
Nikos is already out of the kitchen when the phone rings. I hear him answer it, sounding mistrustful, and I wonder if it is Jonah. But then I realize Nikos is speaking Greek, and I am pleased that my brain has made no distinction.
“It’s for you. Someone called Anna?”
He holds the phone over to me and pops the garlic clove into his mouth.
“Yes, this is Calliope.”
“Callie! Ela! Come with us to the parade, or do your boring relatives have a solid grip on you?”
Anna is shouting over the hum of a crowd in the background. I steal a glance at Nikos, hoping he cannot hear what she is saying.
“No, but I don’t know if I should.”
I want to tell her that my relatives are not boring and I am happy to be in their company.
“Why not?” Anna persists. “Come with us. It’ll be fun.”
“You can wear my velvet hat!” Stelios shouts into the phone.
“You heard that?”
“Yes,” I laugh. “Wait.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Some friends want me to meet them later tonight.”
“But it’s the parade,” says Demetra.
“Are you going?” I ask Aliki.
“Yes, but go out with your friends. I don’t want to keep you.”
“No, I want to come with you, if that’s all right.”
“Sure.”
This isn’t quite the welcome I was looking for, but I’d rather choose family over these people I’ve only just met. I uncover the phone.
“Anna, thanks for the invitation, but my family’s got plans.”
“Come on! How much fun can they be? They’re in mourning.”
I don’t bother to explain that though my uncle’s death is new to me, my family has already begun to adjust around it.
“Sorry. But maybe another time?”
“Look, in case your plans change, we’ll be near the northeast corner of Plateia Georgiou. It’s an eig
ht o’clock parade. See you there!”
Aliki is in the kitchen when I hang up the phone. I offer to help her with the cooking, but she tells me to relax.
“Who are your friends?”
“That’s the thing. I just met them on the bus. I can’t understand why they care this much about me.”
“They’re Greek, that’s why. We’re social creatures, Paki, always eager for the next new thing. Or you can chalk it up to the ancient code of hospitality. Or the next hot girl,” she adds, giving me a leer.
“Oh, definitely the ancient code.”
“It’ll be nice to have you with us tonight,” she says. “Demetra will be pleased to show you all the festivities.” She jabs a knife into the lamb in several places and begins stuffing garlic cloves and knobs of butter into tiny slits. “I called your mother. Must have been after you left. She’s coming to lunch too.”
I realize that my mother’s inclusion in this family group is an afterthought, and my old urge to protect her rises for a moment. I cringe at the thought of what she will say when she arrives. How could they forget about her? How could her own daughter come to her house and not invite her to join them for the meal?
“You should have had me tell her,” I say.
“I know.”
The regret in Aliki’s voice signals that we are allies, both of us bound up now as always in my mother’s indignation.
She asks about my morning visit and I give her a brief account, sparing her my mother’s complaining, which she already knows about anyhow. I remember the lawyer, Constantopoulos.
“I should call him.”
“Monday,” Aliki says. “Don’t even bother before then. You’ll just make him mad and then he’ll delay you on purpose.”
“He would do that?” I can’t imagine Jonah ever pulling a stunt like that.
“Yes, he would.”
I think about how the old Yankees with the Mayflower names can hold up a gift if they think someone on our staff has been pushy. Maybe not so different.
The Clover House Page 7
