The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  I want to laugh with relief.

  “Are you staying?” I ask.

  He comes to the window.

  “Callie, if we’re going to do this, you can’t run away when you get scared.”

  “I know.” This time it’s true. “I don’t want to anymore. But you’re right. I was scared. The thing is, I don’t know if I can be any good at really being with someone.”

  He starts to move away in frustration.

  “But,” I go on, “I’d like to try. Could we do that, Jonah? Could we just try?”

  “I’ve never not tried, Callie. The thing about trying is that you don’t know the outcome. And you, you try to control the outcome the only way you know how. Which is by screwing it up.”

  “But now I know things. I haven’t been away that long, Joe, but I’ve learned a lot. Trust me. It’ll be different. I want you to be my home.”

  I reach up and comb his hair back from his forehead. He closes his eyes at my touch, and that is all I need to see. I know it will be all right. I take his face in both my hands and wait until he opens his eyes again.

  His kisses are tentative, as if he is still waiting to see what I will do. As I kiss back, I gently press against him, telling him to trust me, promising I will not draw away.

  Later, we sit on the couch with a box of pizza on the coffee table. I have that light-headed, dry sensation of jet lag and an all-nighter. My body thinks it is nearly three in the morning. I tell Jonah I have some photographs to show him. The rest of the story can wait until later. For now I dig into my bag and bring out the key ring, with our apartment key and the deeply crenellated key of Nestor’s house hanging side by side. He reads the inscription on the fob and laughs at the strangeness of the Scottish words on a Greek key ring in an American city. But I know this is just right. Just right for Nestor, the go-between boy and man—shuttling between Italian and Greek, past and present, home and away—and just right for me.

  For JP

  Il y a longtemps que je t’aime.

  Acknowledgments

  Early in The Clover House, Callie finds something unforeseen at the site of one of her mother’s stories. Where she expected to see a drain, she finds smooth floor. To her, it’s as if no belly button marks the umbilical cord connection between the story and its starting point. But while that may be true for Callie’s mother’s story, it is certainly not true of mine. The Clover House has come into the world thanks to the effort, generosity, patience, and inspiration of numerous friends, family, and mentors. The marks of their kindness are all over the novel, and I am thrilled to have the chance to point them out.

  There can be few better storytelling educations than my childhood summer days in Patras, sitting with my cousin Zeni in my aunt Alexandra’s apartment, listening to Alexandra and my aunts Zita and Elli, my uncle Dodos, and my mother, Suzanne, telling tales from their past. I am so grateful that they never tired of retelling their stories—of a childhood mercifully free of the tragedy and sadness I wove into the Notaris family history. For keeping the old stories alive in the present, I thank my cousin Alexandra, who also shepherded me through my own first experience of Carnival in Patras.

  There was a point when I couldn’t make these stories work as a novel. And as I strategized how to make an effective bonfire out of all my manuscripts, there were three people who convinced me not to buy the matches. Faith Salie made me realize that if I wanted something badly enough, I had to take a risk. Her faith in my writing has been a constant motivation. Kelley Lessard pushed me, questioned me, raised her eyebrow at me, and made me see that I couldn’t not be a writer. For that, and for being the sister I never had, I am more grateful to her than I can express. My husband, JP Power, encouraged me—as he has done from the very beginning—and helped me feel that I could commit myself more deeply and without fear.

  Along the way, numerous friends have helped make The Clover House the book it is today. Terri Payne Butler, Meg Sinnott Rubin, Jeanne Stanton, Eleni Gage, Christina Thompson, and Gwynne Morgan offered wise critiques on early drafts. Gillian English was there from the start, when the idea of jacket copy was a wild fantasy. Thanks to the incomparable Grub Street, I found a veritable army of wonderful critics and work-shoppers, especially Chris Abouzeid, Nichole Bernier, Kathy Crowley, Stephanie Ebbert, Cathy Elcik, Chuck Garabedian, Andrew Goldstein, Tracy Hahn-Burkett, Stuart Horwitz, Javed Jahangir, Ann Killough, Randy Susan Meyers, E.B. Moore, Necee Regis, Dell Smith, Becky Tuch, and Julie Wu. It’s safe to say that the book might not have seen the light of day at all had it not been for my serendipitous arrival in Jenna Blum’s master novel class at Grub. Jenna’s wisdom, her humor, and her honesty lie on every page of this book. I can’t thank her enough for seeing the potential in the manuscript.

  But a book needs supporters beyond its family of origin. And I have been tremendously lucky in my agent, Kent Wolf, at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, and my editor, Kara Cesare at Ballantine. Kent believed in the book from the start, and Kara embraced it with an invigorating enthusiasm. My thanks also go to Kathleen Murphy Lord for her incisive copyediting, and to Caitlin Alexander for getting me to fill the story in where it needed it.

  Though they may not realize it, my friends in the rowing world played an enormous role in supporting this novel project. Friends and teammates at Community Rowing, Inc. in Boston, who shared tough workouts during which we pushed one another to do our best—they taught me crucial lessons about taking chances, about going for broke. What works on the river works on the page.

  And there are those who are there all the time, beyond the river and the page. My ever-supportive father, Lazaros Lazaridis, who never got to see this book get off the ground, but whose experiences of occupied Athens are crucial to the novel. The entire Power and Lazaridis families, who took such kind interest in my progress. Iannis and Flora Karydis, who nurtured and supported me in everything. My children, Eoin Lazaridis Power and Nike Lazaridis Power, who have been quiet cheerleaders for me all along, often surprising me with their loyalty to something they only knew was happening “upstairs.” Eoin helped with historical research, and Nike gave me vital editorial help during revisions, with her unerring sense of how narrative works.

  Finally, JP, indeed the love of my life. From the day almost fifteen years ago when he urged me to quit academia and try what I really loved, to the many dark days when he believed in me more than I did, to the eventual cascade of writing joys we could share, he has been on my side, and by my side. In that and much more, I have been very, very lucky.

  THE

  CLOVER HOUSE

  A Novel

  Henriette Lazaridis Power

  A Reader’s Guide

  Patras and Memory:

  How I Chose the Setting for

  The Clover House

  Henriette Lazaridis Power

  Patras, Greece, is not the kind of city people choose to go to. Its architecture is dominated by boxy apartment buildings; its streets form a maze of one-way routes seemingly designed to prevent motion; its colonnaded sidewalks are rendered impassable by serried ranks of parked motorcycles. People transit through Patras, catching the ferry that will take them to Brindisi or Ancona or the Ionian Islands, or the train or bus that will take them to Athens. Patras is secondary to these other places, a placeholder, really. Just somewhere you have to sit for a few hours while you wait to leave.

  But if you look closely, past the satellite dishes and the antennas and the graceless apartment buildings of rebar and cement, you can see the city it used to be before the war, with its neoclassical homes, its public squares, and its harbor with an embracing jetty. And you can always see the beauty of its geography: the deep violet of the Gulf of Patras, the Ionian Sea to the west and the islands rising from the haze, the mountain of Panachaïko, cypress-clad, sloping up beyond the vineyards that ring the city.

  I set The Clover House in Patras because my mother’s childhood stories took place there—by the jetty, up the mountain, in those squares—and her s
tories tantalized me with their hints of who she had really been, and what had made her who she was. I spent much of my own childhood in the city, often trying to relive and recapture my mother’s experiences. In a sense, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been using Patras as a kind of live-in novel, a three-dimensional, real-life way to live an invented life. I always knew I loved Patras. But it wasn’t until after I had finished writing the actual novel of The Clover House that I realized the deeper role that Patras played for me, as a child and as a writer.

  Growing up in a Greek household in the United States but spending summers in Greece with my family, I did a lot of coming and going—linguistically, geographically, culturally. Like many bilingual and bicultural kids, blending in came naturally to me. In Greece, no one could tell I lived in America; and in America, no one could tell I had learned to speak Greek before English, and that I always spoke it at home. Many times, I felt this shuttling as a constant dislocation. I recall a pervasive sense of nostalgia, no matter where I was at any given time. But one thing was certain. When I was surrounded by my family in Greece, embraced by grandparents, cousins, and above all aunts, I belonged. Nowhere—not even in my New England hometown—was that belonging more emphatic than in Patras.

  The Patras of my childhood was a land of women—women who gave me independence and who smothered me with affection. Though they were my aunts, they served, bless them, as my mothers, filling in where my own mother lacked motivation and desire. I suspect now that my aunts and other maternal stand-ins did this quite deliberately. Seeing my need, they circled around me with a perfect balance of strictness and solicitude.

  My Aunt Elli’s husband, Pindaros, had a word for all these women: tsoupoules. Don’t look for the word in any dictionary; it was the product of Pindaros’s delighted imagination. The tsoupoules were my two cousins—one exactly my age and her sister old enough for us to idolize—my Great-aunt Eugenia, later on two little nieces, and always my Aunts Zita, Elli, and Alexandra. They weren’t really my aunts, any more than my cousins were really my cousins. In America, you’d call them something once or twice removed. But my mother had grown up with these women in the same house. And in the way they embraced, chided, and encouraged, there was nothing removed about them at all.

  Pindaros would giddily proclaim himself to be surrounded by tsoupoules when he came to join us at the beach each day. It wasn’t a fancy beach—just a thin strip of coarse sand and pebbles outside the city, and running in front of a tavern shaded by giant eucalyptus trees. We would come up from the sand, salt standing in crystals on our skin, and find Pindaros at a long table beneath the trees, their trunks whitewashed to thwart insects. He would sit there in his monogrammed shirt and dark-framed glasses, his hands scrubbed clean from his surgeon’s practice, looking like some jovial Onassis. He would order what he knew we liked, and we would sit in our bathing suits to eat plates of fried anchovies, wedges of watermelon, and chunks of fresh bread.

  Pindaros wanted to hear what all the tsoupoules had been up to that day, but as soon as he had returned to work, the aunts’ conversation shifted to the past. My cousin Zeni and I crunched our anchovies—each one a single bite—and watched the aunts make one another laugh with reminiscences. The boy who wore trousers perpetually too short, lending his name to the phenomenon of flood pants. Hiking trips up Mt. Panachaïko to glide down on skis. How they flooded the entire basement of their grand house in the heart of the city, just so they could play Slip ’N Slide across the hallway tiles. How they raised silkworms and sold the cocoons to the neighborhood children during the war. The crazy cow that chased the aunts into the hayloft on their farm outside the city.

  It’s true that this list hardly seems substantial enough to have provided summer after summer full of lunchtime stories. How much can you say about a boy who wore short pants? But as all storytellers know, and as all listeners come to discover, the telling sustains the tale, gives it new energy and life. It was those repeated tellings, I’m convinced, that taught me the power of stories and that gave me the unshakeable conviction that through stories we shape our lives.

  Most summers, my mother returned to Athens before me, sometimes to meet my father for a trip outside of Greece, leaving me in my aunts’ care. When she was there to take part in these storytelling sessions, she revealed herself to be a master of cadence and pacing, an expert of the witty phrase. She often found humor and whimsy that others had missed. When I listened to my mother joining in with the aunts, I saw a side of her that I loved and craved more of, but a side of her, too, that I could never reach. In The Clover House, when Callie remarks on the way her mother’s stories fascinate her but keep her at a distance, it’s my own experience I’m evoking. In fact, I come to stories—not just particular fictions, but fiction in general—with that pervasive sense of nostalgia. My love for the story goes hand in hand with the sadness of not being a part of it—of being shut out, stuck in reality while the imagined world spins on just out of reach.

  Zeni and I did our best to relive our mothers’ stories. Like them, we played in Psilalónia, shrieking at the bats that swooped over our heads; we visited the cave in the headland of Dasaki; we ate grilled corn on the cob from street vendors in the colonnades. One summer, we bought silkworm cocoons and kept them in Zeni’s basement, feeding the silkworms leaves from the mulberry trees that lined the sidewalk.

  But the one adventure we never could re-create was the building of the clover houses. During their childhoods, my mother and the aunts spent parts of the summer on their family’s farm just outside Patras. The area where it once stood is just a short drive from the harbor now, but in the 1930s and ’40s, it was a good carriage ride from the family’s neoclassical house. On the farm, the overseer used to cut a miniature neighborhood out of the tall forage grass in one of the pastures—a grass called trifîli that translates best as clover, but was probably a combination of clover and rye grass. My mother, her brother, and her four cousins (the three aunts and my one eccentric uncle) all played in this neighborhood of grassy streets and houses made of clover and rye for hours, hidden from the world of adults. If I were to ask them now to tell me about the clover houses, my aunts and my mother would sigh with longing and satisfaction, reveling anew in their remembered idyll.

  To me, the clover houses seemed a truly magical idea, a children’s world that was at once safe and exotic, domestic and wild. I was growing up with woods and rocks in New England and with beaches and city streets in Greece; an open space like a clover field was unlike anything I had ever experienced. When I learned, during the early writing of The Clover House, that my best friend had experienced something like this in Massachusetts, I was astonished and a little jealous. How could the clover houses from my mother’s fantastical childhood exist in my own reality and still pass me by?

  The idea that someone could fashion a house for you where no dwelling was ever foreseen has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. The creation of a safe and secret place out of almost nothing—this concept resonates at the heart of The Clover House. Callie’s dislocation—from her relationships, her mother, her heritage—is a form of what Greeks know as xenitia: self-imposed exile. It’s that isolation and longing of the self-exiled that the clover houses came to represent for me. In a sense, The Clover House is my clover house. It’s how I created for myself the Patras that I loved, and love, and the Patras that I never knew. It’s a world I shaped from what I already had, just as the farm overseer cut the dwellings and streets from the tall grass. And it’s just as fragile, just as ephemeral.

  My last trip to Patras took place in March 2011, during Carnival season. While I was there, I couldn’t help following in Callie’s footsteps quite literally. The currents of Carnival and the pull of my family made the duplication inevitable. Like Callie, I stood in George’s Square and watched the parades, deafened by samba music. Like her, I stepped into the quiet of Aghios Andreas for the services of Forgiveness Sunday. Like her, I went across the Gulf of Patras to Nafp
aktos for an afternoon’s Carnival respite.

  One day, my cousin Alexandra and I drove just a bit out of the center of Patras to a neighborhood of one-story houses and chicken-wire fences. She pulled onto the broken curb and put her hazards on so that I could dash across the street with my camera. Through a gate, a dirt road disappeared into an overgrown copse, and a black dog barked over his shoulder at me. That was the farm. That was where my mother and her cousins had sat inside their clover houses, hidden away from the real world, lost in make-believe. In all my childhood visits to Patras, no one had ever taken us there. I assumed the place had been built over. Now I think perhaps the aunts had given up on it, as if unwilling to bring the farm and the clover houses into a real world that was so changed. That day during Carnival, I stood at the gate, pointing my lens through the fencing at a world that was no longer there, looking in at a place just out of reach. I took a picture.

  I still have the photograph, but only in my computer. Though my study is littered with artifacts and photographs from my family’s past, the photograph of the farm is one I may never print. It’s better left to memory—and to my imagination.

  Questions and Topics

  For Discussion

  1. Callie grapples with the disassociation of being a Greek American, perceiving herself as an outsider in a land that is both familiar and yet wholly foreign. What steps does she take to reclaim this distinct piece of her identity, and does she always go about it the right way? Has she managed to embrace both cultures by the end of the novel, or does she still feel the need to validate herself in the estimation of others?