Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  I did not have to hear about my mother’s death long-distance. I was there at her side, along with my father and both of my brothers. According to her doctors, the cancer consumed her rapidly—within five months of her diagnosis—but as far as I could see, she died a prolonged, torturous death. (I have glimpsed a few, lest you doubt my powers of comparison.) Since she smoked as if tobacco were a vocation, the cancer was hardly a surprise, but she was the youngest sixty-nine-year-old I have ever known, and I couldn’t imagine her anything but very much alive, electrically so, for two or three decades to come.

  I flew home when she got the news, seven summers ago, and again that December, when she died. She decided to die at home—not easy, with this kind of death. She took oxygen until the day she decided, Enough. By then she spoke only in terrible gasps, and she’d given up even those attempts, probably because they planted such terrified expressions on the faces around her. So she wrote it down, that one decisive, indignant word, in large unquavering capital letters: ENOUGH.

  It was my shift, and I was reading to her from a volume of Emily Dickinson I’d brought overseas from my shop, along with another two dozen books. Mum was never much of a reader—only because, I suspect, she hated all the sitting it requires—but my father had told me on the telephone that she liked being read to now that she was stuck in bed. So when she rapped on my knee and thrust that piece of paper across the open book, I laughed and said, “I should’ve guessed Emily’s not your cup of tea.” Mum laughed too—a brief hideous cough—and shook her head. She pointed to her chest. Emily Dickinson, everything she was and wrote, seemed so infantile for that instant, so pointlessly frilly against my mother’s granite wish. I began to cry. Mum’s eyes, of course, remained quite dry. She pushed herself upright from the pillows to give me her best approximation of a smile. Her breath sounded like a handsaw fighting through a dense green tree. I left the room to find my father. Within an hour, we were assembled. Except for David (who had the confounding nerve to respond, however briefly, to calls on his pager), none of us left that room for the seven hours it took her to leave us behind.

  My father sat closest to her, on the bed, speaking now and then straight into her ear. His voice was quiet and caressing, inaudible as words to the rest of us, largely because of Mum’s ghastly breathing, which grew louder and more urgent, interrupted by patches of gasping silence. She did not want enough morphine to put her under, even though the doctor had given my father instructions on how to “relieve her discomfort.”

  Of those endless hours, I remember very little other than the sound of her breathing. I remember feeling sad that her favorite dogs could not be in the room because her state would only have agitated them. They were in the kennel out back, visible from the windows but not from my mother’s bed. And I remember feeling angry at David because his trousers were spattered with blood; he’d been in the midst of a difficult delivery, a breech calf, when he got Dad’s call. (I thought, though I suppose it was petty, that if he could leave the room to return his calls, he could fucking change his trousers.)

  It was David who rang about Dad. I was in the shop well before opening time, browsing shelf by shelf through New Fiction, to see which not-so-new fiction I must relegate to the less prominent Novels & Stories shelves. Because of that dreary human predilection for the shiny and new, I always feel when I make this shift as if I’m sending so many bright, hopeful creatures out to pasture before their youth is spent. (Though I would never condemn them, as other shops do, to a section entitled Literature, a word which to my admittedly overschooled mind is ossified and clubby. I picture a mausoleum, filled with sagging armchairs and lamps that cast inadequate, jaundiced light.)

  “Fen, it’s David, are you up? I’ve got bad news.”

  “David, it’s half nine. I’ve been up for hours.” I can answer my personal phone in the shop because it’s two floors below my flat and I have an extension; David would not know I was at work. He rises at dawn every day but clearly assumes I lead the stereotypically debauched life of a New York City faggot.

  Why I did not think of our father, I can’t say. Maybe because David didn’t sound sad enough for someone with news of a death. I thought for some reason of Tealing, our family house, and imagined that it had burnt to the ground. In my mind (though our house is nowhere near that grand), I saw the end of Rebecca, Manderley in ruins. I waited.

  “I’m afraid it’s Dad. He’s been found dead by the woman who cleans his house.”

  In my brother’s expectant silence, I stared out the window and watched a young woman cross the street straight in my direction. “Dead?” I said dumbly. “He was dead?”

  “Yes, it’s awful, I don’t know much more than that so far,” David rushed on. “Had a ridiculously muddled conversation with whoever masquerades as a coroner in those parts. I’m paying him through the nose to take care of the remains, get them shipped out by the end of the week.”

  Remains: such a Victorian cloak of a word.

  “Fenno, are you still on the line? Fenno?”

  “Yes, David.” Now the young woman was trying the door. When she caught my eye, I clamped the phone between shoulder and cheek and used both hands to indicate that I would open at ten. (Would I open? I supposed that I would. Running a bookshop—unlike manning a seat on the stock exchange or replacing burnt-out bulbs along the cables of a suspension bridge—is something one can manage even in fairly acute states of mourning. No one is at risk of anything more than the embarrassment of witnessing grief.)

  “We’ll want to do a proper funeral. You know, hundreds of people are likely to attend. Dad’s still an éminence grise to the church-elder types.”

  This was true. Our father was influential, affluent, and genuinely loved around and beyond the Scottish country town where we grew up. For most of his life, following his father, he was the publisher of the Dumfries-Galloway newspaper. I told David I’d book the earliest flight I could manage.

  “Bear in mind that you can get condolence fares; I’m not sure that’s what they’re called, but the rates are reduced and they’ll find you seats on full-up flights if you tell them there’s been a family death.”

  How like David to get right to the practical stuff. I wanted to ask him if he had actually realized what the impetus was behind his pragmatic overdrive. That our father was gone. I can’t say whether David and Dad were confidants, but David saw more of him than Dennis or I—at least in the winter months, the months my father chose to stay at Tealing these past years, as if what’s the point of a northern home if you don’t immerse yourself in its northness? Six months before, David and Lillian had moved into Tealing, a temporary arrangement. His practice had become so successful that he’d decided to convert their cottage-by-the-clinic into an equine surgery; they’d look for a house of their own once construction was finished. Now, I supposed, they would simply stay on.

  I settled on “David, are you all right?”

  “In shock, but yes, ‘all right’ I suppose. You think I sound cold, don’t you?”

  “Not cold . . .”

  “Someone has to get everything organized. If you were here with me now, that would be a different thing. Dennis, of course . . .” Half-heartedly, he laughed.

  “You mean Véronique.” On this, we were in complete agreement. There wasn’t much use asking Dennis to help out in a crisis, not because he wouldn’t—instinctively, he’d give you five days for every one he had to spare—but because there’d be hell to pay with his watchdog of a wife. (Dennis would ring me later that night, from France, and cry through most of the short conversation she allowed us.)

  “He’ll take care of food, and that’s not trivial. I’m thinking we should do a luncheon.”

  “David?” I found myself reaching again and again for my mug of tea, though it had been empty almost since he rang. “David, can we please discuss all this when I arrive?”

  By ten o’clock, I had booked a seat on British Air, called Ralph and cajoled him into looking after
my animals and watching the shop for a week (he’s my business partner but loves the shop as a place to make appearances, not to linger). When I unlocked the door, I saw the girl who’d peered in the window. To pass the time, she had spread a newspaper on the postbox across the street. As I stepped outside and waved to her, a blast of summer air engulfed me. June in New York, its rudely sudden heat, is something I still can’t get used to. (But then, air-conditioning is one of the American luxuries I love best, the only one with which I’m profligate.)

  I held the door for her to enter. Without waiting for me to offer assistance, she said, “My best friend’s over at Saint A’s having a double mastectomy. She loves mysteries, but only with women detectives, and nothing where anything bad happens to animals or children. Oh, and maybe, considering, no knives . . .?”

  Such presumptive demands and perversely touching out-of-the-blue disclosures, both of which I encounter often in a working day, are two things that have helped me weather the insanities and losses I’ve suffered since moving across the Atlantic. Like air-conditioning, they seem indigenous to these parts.

  “I have just the thing,” I said, which is what I say, as a stalling tactic, when I haven’t the faintest idea if I have such a thing at all. I led her downstairs to Detective Stories & Thrillers—not my favorite section, though I respect its devotees—and together we filled a small shopping bag with books that would do what precious little they could to distract her friend from waking up without her breasts. Off and on that day, when I wasn’t thinking of Dad, I was thinking of that anonymous woman and hoping she wasn’t as young as her friend—though would age make it any more acceptable or any less painful, having to go through that ordeal without the promise of true, regenerative healing?

  BEFORE I CAN MAKE the front door, Dennis has me clenched in a garlicky full-body vise-grip. Dennis and David are both noticeably taller than I am, but Dennis stands over me by nearly a head, and the feel of his embrace is inescapably parental, in the very best sense. I am never the first to pull away. “Fenny, Fenny, I can’t believe it, can you? I thought he’d live to ninety, I thought he’d watch me walk wee Laurie down the aisle.”

  Sometimes I think Dennis ought to have been an actor or a lounge singer, but then I set myself straight, since he wouldn’t recognize artifice if it were a cricket bat smashing his jaw. All the sweetness, all the loving-kindness in the two sides of our family—present in our parents, certainly, but in neither one to that degree—must have flowed like a sap through our family tree, condensing into the affectionate effervescence of my youngest brother. Dennis is that rare cliché come true: He is a gem, a diamond chiseled well beyond the rough.

  If I were to list my own finer attributes, sweetness would be markedly absent. Highest on my list would be patience. (Highest on David’s would be ambition. And each of us has been served quite well by his cardinal strength.)

  Dennis wears one of those double-breasted nehru jackets that are the uniform of his trade, and when at last he stands back from me, I can see that it’s splashed with oils and sauces and wine. Reflexively, I look down.

  My brother begins brushing at my shirt. “I’m so sorry—I’m trying a balsamic marinade for butterflied lamb—I thought, because you know how Dad loved lamb—and I thought I’d grill it out back—”

  “We can’t do leg of lamb for fifty, you’re out of your mind. I thought we decided on chicken something-or-other,” says David.

  “Davey, it’s for us, for tonight.” Dennis hears none of the sniping in our brother’s voice. He’s tolerated, and usually honored, David’s edicts and vetoes his entire life. (Sometimes it seems obvious that’s why he chose Véronique—not because David liked her, not at all, but because she has the same imperial confidence. I’ve wondered what might have happened if David had met her before their wedding day, whether he’d have been tactless enough to say what a bitch he thought she was. If he had, that wedding would never have taken place.) Just fifteen minutes younger than David, Dennis adores him, probably more than anyone else now that our mother’s gone. I’ve always been a little jealous of their twinship, even though they look and act so differently.

  “Well good, fine. Just please don’t overtax yourself,” says David. “I’ll get Dad out of the boot, and then Lillian has a doctor’s appointment; we’ll be back after that.” I hadn’t realized Dad’s ashes returned in the boot and am about to comment on the disrespect when Dennis cheerfully interrupts me.

  “By seven if you like it rare!” Never motionless except at a meal, he takes my bags from me with one hand and pulls me into the house, shouldering open doors. “Allô! Mes petits poires!” he calls out. “Il est là! Onco est arrivé!

  “You’ve got your old room, I made sure of that,” he says as he starts up the stairs. “I told Vee I wouldn’t stand seeing you on some lumpy camp bed in the library, you’ve come so far. The girls are all in with us, and Davey’s moved into Mum and Dad’s. Lord of the manor already.”

  “Attends! Nous sommes occupées!” Véronique calls down.

  I hold Dennis back. “Just drop that stuff and get me into the kitchen. I’m famished,” I tell him, though hunger and even my aversion to his wife are not my primary motives. The kitchen is where I’ll find Dennis at his happiest and most relaxed, where he in turn will make me as happy and relaxed as I can be under the circumstances.

  As always now when he is here, the front hall is filled with extravagant odors. Onions sautéing in butter is a constant, because his training is classic French, but invariably something less predictable will hover just above that bedrock scent: cilantro or coconut or cumin. Today I smell something I can only describe as Provençal, perhaps rosemary or fennel. Because the house never smelled like this when we were small—because our mother, though she made a dependable joint, spent as little time indoors as possible—this has transformed my homecomings for the past several years. Though the furnishings are just as they were when I was ten, the aura is altogether changed by Dennis’s cooking—the pervasive mustiness of Dad’s books overruled at last—so that I feel as if I’m visiting home in a dream, where everything yet nothing is the way it should be, where the best of what you have and what you wish for are briefly, tantalizingly united.

  Tealing is a house beamed north from a Thomas Hardy moor: white, many-gabled, and crisscrossed, like a late Mondrian, with dark rough beams. It is charming, not grand. Its steep roof was designed to be thatched—an imported folly of the architect, kept up at great expense for decades but replaced with blue slate before we moved in. Since our mother never fussed with decor and gave not a hoot for modernization (an unusual trait in a postwar bride, and one which I suspect helped win her my father), the kitchen is still a cavernous, utilitarian room. Its chief features are a long stained oak table smack in the center and—a treasure to Dennis, who repeatedly threatens to steal it—a tarantula of a stove that can accommodate ten large pots. Next door stoops a stodgy little cooker our mother used for the plain suppers she made; only Dennis, it seems, knows how to manage the wood-fed stove. He’s even turned a soufflé out of its oven.

  He goes straight to the icebox when we enter and, with the habitual speed of a chef, pulls out a plate of pâté and crackers, a whole roast chicken, still trussed, and a glistening cluster of large black grapes. One foot wedged in the door, he lays them on the table, then reaches back deftly again and pulls out a beer. “Chilled expressly for my Amoorican brother.”

  I smile, touched by his gesture. “Cultural turncoat that I am.”

  He walks around the table, facing me over a cutting board and a dozen heads of garlic. “I remember your friend Mal and his little speech on the stupidity of warm beer. ‘Tepid spirits for a tepid people.’ I’m not sure whether he made an actual convert of you or simply shamed you into it.”

  We laugh at the memory of Mal’s Anglophobe diatribe, delivered at this table. I watch Dennis’s hands as he uses a broad knife to pummel apart the cloves, then flatten and flay them, then mince them into pungent
snowy mounds. I find myself fascinated by the way he moves, so aggressively yet so gently.

  “You must miss him, even that sharp wit.”

  “Sharp? Oh, serrated,” I say. “And yes, I still miss them both—him and his high-minded jibes at the world.”

  “You still have that bird?”

  “Felicity will outlive us all.” I’m moved again by the way my brother remembers these details, without any apparent effort, about my distant life. It’s as if he studied up, yet I know these things are simply right there, within easy mental grasp; it gives me the comforting impression that he thinks of me often. “She keeps Rodgie alive by sheer virtue of her constant badgering. He leaves my couch now only for short walks in the neighborhood. He likes to go to a nearby playground, sit down on the pavement, and watch the children through the fence. I think he thinks they’re sheep, the way they careen about and bleat. Rodgie’s not used to human beings as such relentlessly happy creatures. I’m not sure he even knows it’s happiness he’s seeing.”

  “I wish sometimes . . .” Dennis pauses to sweep the minced garlic off the board into an old chipped bowl of our mother’s. “ . . . that I’d taken one of the dogs back then.” Rodgie is one of the last two sheepdogs we own from the line our mother bred and showed. That was her shining skill in life, her special knack. When she died, there were half a dozen dogs left at Tealing; I took Rodgie, the youngest, and David took a pair, one of whom survives to ride about like a dignitary in the back of his pickup.