Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  “Yes, yes, where the Campbells slew the McDonalds. Old news.”

  “But really. Invite yourself over to make up and kiss, then kill the women and children in their sleep? Over the top, wouldn’t you say?”

  I laughed. “Well enjoy yourself in pacifist Maggie Thatcher Land.”

  “But I accept,” said Mal. “I’m older and more broad-minded now. Thicker-skinned. I’d love to see the blood-soaked moors. I’d love to eat sheep’s bladder stuffed with lard. Maybe that’ll cure what ails me.”

  “LE VOILÀ!” Véronique greets me in the kitchen, clapping her hands together and clasping them at her throat, as if my late appearance has made her day. “I kept the baby wolves from your door; they wished you to bring them to that little farm and make them a tour of the animals.” She hands me a cup of tea. Out the window, I see the three girls playing together under the great old lilac bush which seems to have become their headquarters. David and Lil have left for work. Dennis is nowhere in sight.

  “I’d be happy to do that,” I say.

  “Not now. There are other plans now.”

  With my back to her, I roll my eyes, wondering when I will cease to be so predictably passive. I’d intended to take a train down to London for a few days, just to slouch sentimentally about, but the thought of announcing this departure makes me feel guilty, perhaps because I missed last night’s gathering (something Véronique doesn’t mention).

  As I make myself toast, she tells me that she’s promised to deal with the checks left by guests in memory of my father—to drive them to the hospital where my mother’s cancer was treated (and, I note sourly, not cured). The hospital is in town; Dennis has told her I know the way.

  “Why don’t you just post them?” I say. “Or why doesn’t Dennis drive?”

  “Denis, he wants to take the girls to this famous Annie Laurie’s house. That is not an endeavor for me. And the director of the hospital, he is anxious for the funds to begin.”

  “What, they’re desperate? The hospital’s broke? What kind of an object for charity is that?”

  Véronique looks at me with courteous indulgence. “On the return, we will market for tonight. Denis will roast hens on the fire. It will be beautiful again for dinner out in the air—though Davide and Liliane, they have engaged themselves elsewhere. Old friends of Denis from school, he says you may know them, they will join us.”

  At the thought of negotiating a Scottish town grocery with a Frenchwoman married to a professional chef, I begin to see my brother’s expertise as a prison of sorts, condemning us to spend most of our time shopping and eating, digesting and praising. I would rather play doctor with my nieces.

  This is what happens when you get up too late, I admonish myself. Other people make your plans.

  “We will leave in half an hour?” Véronique asks brightly, though it’s not a question. I nod, and she heads outside to check on her daughters. I reach for the day’s papers—the Times, the Guardian, the Yeoman, all still delivered to Paul McLeod. As I settle into my habitual slouch, my foot nudges something on the floor. I look under the table to see the doll I bought for Christine. When I pull it up, I see a dark smudge where its cloth face was stepped on. Its rice paddy hat is coming unglued. Resist identification, I tell myself sternly as I prop the poor thing in a sitting position against a bowl of red roses.

  So it is that, four hours later, I find myself receiving olfactory orders from my sister-in-law. “Smell this one. No, actually place your nose within the chamber. Do not be timid. Comme ça!”

  Only Véronique would have the nerve to place her manicured hand behind someone’s neck (mine) and push (however gently) until I am nasally submerged in a large copper-colored iris.

  “Do you smell it? For that, these are among my favorites, the bearded ones. But this scent has never been captive in a perfume. Never.”

  Silently, I have to agree that the scent of this flower is wonderful, a blend of moss and honey.

  I have been led by the nose (now literally) to the fortunately tithed hospital, the grocery, the apothecary, and, unexpectedly, to an explosively colorful garden. We are surrounded by towering larkspur, foxgloves, and irises, following a narrow brick path which winds toward a small grove of cherry trees. The garden, on the outskirts of the town, belongs to an old friend of Lillian’s who is off on holiday; Lil told Véronique that she must make a detour to see it. Like many gardens of the well-to-do in these parts, it stands separately from the house, across the road. We enter by an iron gate, which is probably never locked.

  On our drive, Véronique kept up a stream of chatter that, by its glittering cheerfulness, nearly won me over to liking her. She spoke with loyal enthusiasm of Dennis’s plans to expand his restaurant, talked happily about her daughters’ nascent talents, and did not forget to ask me about (and appear genuinely interested in) the bookshop. She even asked me to recommend a few novels—“light, if you please!”—to help her perfect her English.

  Still, I feel uncomfortable being alone with her and long to be back at Tealing. When she announced this last stop, I tried to refuse. “Dis donc,” she scolded, “there is always time for beauty, would you not say?” Yes, I conceded, I would have to say.

  Under the cherry trees, Véronique stands with her hands on her hips and surveys the sea of flowers. This, I realize, is a trait of hers which grates on my nerves: the appraising poise of the tireless critic. She glances at the branches above us, heavy with petaled starbursts. She sighs. “Ah, no apple. No pear. A small pity.”

  “It’s magnificent,” I say. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean”—she taps me on the arm, as a mentor would—“no fragrance. This garden is, safe those irises, made for the eye.”

  Here we go, I think. What harangue on inferior gardening will follow?

  “This garden, you know, it reminds me of my life before the girls. Oh, a lovely life, a life of pretty colors and passions. And this little wood of cerisiers I could say is like my marriage to Denis. But to have children . . . to have children is to plant roses, muguets, lavender, lilac, gardenia, stock, peonies, tuberose, hyacinth . . . it is to achieve a whole sense, a grand sense one did not priorly know. It is to give one’s garden another dimension. Perfume of life itself.”

  After noticing her impressive command of flowers in English (many of her Provençal clients will be Brits or Californians), I absorb with a small wry shock that her fatuous metaphor is, to me, an insult. Does she know this? Is she assuring me, or herself, that her life has greater dimension than mine? For all her new courtesies, nothing much has changed. I think of a remark she made a few days after I met her, when she was pregnant with Laurie and I asked whether Dennis would want to name a daughter after our mother. “Maureen?” she said. “Is this not, in your culture, generally the name of a servant? And it would not ring so well in French, I believe.” Here she pronounced my mother’s name in exaggerated French, so that its rolled r sounded contemptibly rough, its Celtic ending snippishly nasal.

  I am reviving my anger at this bygone offense when Véronique says, “I am sad for Liliane, because she knows this without knowing it. She would prefer that richer garden to this.”

  I say nothing. Despite her apparent kinship with Lil, I have no desire to gossip about Lil’s heartaches.

  I look openly at my watch. It’s half three and I thirst for my tea. Véronique sees my look. A breeze ruffles the branches and casts a handful of petals onto our shoulders. Hardly the bride and groom.

  Véronique sighs a capaciously French sigh and touches my arm again. This time she does not remove her hand. She looks me fiercely in the eye. “I am coming to you as an ambassador.”

  “Ambassador?” I repeat blankly. Representing what military junta? I think, but I smile and say, “I never thought you the diplomatic type.”

  “I am dreading this all morning,” she says, “so please will you not make it more difficult from what it already has been.”

  The ashes. Of course. Marveling at my br
others’ cowardice, I say, “Oh for God’s sake take the bleeding ashes back to Greece. I don’t know why I ever professed to care about where they get heaved.”

  Véronique’s eyes are wide and glisten slightly. She looks puzzled and frightened, as if she’s lost the ability to translate my language into hers.

  “Oh not ashes, no. I do not speak of ashes.”

  “Then what do you speak of?” I snap.

  “I speak of Liliane. I speak of Liliane and of her babies.”

  Her babies. I now need tea with the sweaty desperation of an addict.

  There is a stone bench behind us. Véronique sits. “Your brother cannot make babies. Do you know this? I think you do not.”

  “You think right. I do not know much of anything that goes on in these parts anymore. Certainly nothing that goes on in anyone’s private parts.”

  With a calm that shames me, she says, “I will ignore this anger you must always jettison. I will say what it is I have been asked to say. You will do as you wish.” She glares at me until I tell her I’m sorry and ask her to finish.

  “These male doctors to whom Liliane has consulted spent a year to discover that it is David who will not make her pregnant.” Véronique speaks slowly, as if she must be careful not to err.

  I sit beside her. The stone’s damp chill is a shock. “Sad.”

  “Oui.”

  “Is it absolute? That he can’t . . .”

  “It is no longer meriting the effort, they are told.”

  “And you were asked to tell me this news?”

  “I was chosen to ask you to consider a favor. The favor of helping Liliane to have a child.” She pulls subtly away from my body.

  I look out at the flowers before us. They are so tall—so fertile, it occurs to me—that from the street, Véronique and I must be invisible to passersby. Trespassing in the garden of a stranger, I have just been asked by a woman I have never liked (but must begin to admire) if I will impregnate another.

  I start to laugh. I hide it at first as a small cough, but then it is unmistakably laughter. Véronique, who, like me, does not take her eyes off the flowers, says, “I knew this would seem absurd. But reflect and perhaps it is not. You will be intelligent enough to understand that if you will agree to this intention, what is necessary will be accomplished in the doctor’s laboratory.”

  “You think right,” I say, failing to control my schoolboy’s reaction. And then I think of Lil dancing on that stage, all but naked in her leotard, the fleetingly real desire I had for her body.

  Véronique is holding out a blank envelope. “This is a letter for you which Liliane has written which you will please guard from reading until you are alone. You will please tell your decision to her.” Yet one more envelope containing a mystery I long for and dread. Curiosity as ever the victor, I wouldn’t dream of refusing it.

  For the hour it takes me to drive back to Tealing, we are silent. Except that Véronique, under her breath, hums Bach for a while, some solemn renowned air which I cannot quite identify, something funereal that I have heard played on the organ. Mal would know it in a flash—and scold me that I didn’t. I am sure she does this unconsciously, that it is an escape valve for her enormous relief at having put this task behind her.

  In the driveway, I continue to sit behind the wheel. I listen to the motor pinging as it cools. Efficiently, without asking for my help, Véronique ferries a dozen grocery sacks into the kitchen. David’s pickup is absent—and then I remember that he and Lil are not to be present this evening and know that it was by design—but there is an unfamiliar car parked on the road out front. At the thought of sitting down to dinner with anyone, let alone strangers (or, even worse, past familiars), I shrivel with dismay.

  When Véronique takes the last two shopping sacks from the car, I restart the motor. When she looks at me with surprise, I tell her that I will return by tomorrow evening. She has no ready reply. I do not wait to make her find one.

  At the motorway, I must choose to head north or south. I choose north. I do not need the company of the English. I drive toward Oban, toward cruel, beautiful Glencoe, toward a landscape to scour the mind of confusion. Not till I’ve left Glasgow behind do I realize that, for the first time since my brothers’ birth, I am certainly—rivetingly—the center of my family’s attention.

  NINE

  SOMETIMES I BEGAN to see my life as one of those Joseph Cornell boxes about which I’d done so much plodding research. It was, all of a sudden, highly compartmentalized: private home life/ life at the shop/ relations with my straitlaced family across an ocean/ evenings with Mal/ and—like a dusky passionate snowscape down in a corner—mornings with Tony. Because this part of my life (especially this part) touched none of the others, I did not tell him about my mother. He knew very little about my family and did not ask.

  I would leave for Scotland in a week, be absent for another two. I planned to tell him on the day of my departure, to minimize questions. Though we had been meeting nearly every day for over two months, I wanted him as desperately as ever, but I did not want his analysis or his astringent jests.

  That morning, Tony was not out on his lawn, nor did he answer the bell. This was not unprecedented. On a few other mornings he had been absent, but when I’d show up the following day, he’d be there. I never asked about his absences; he never explained.

  I knew Tony wouldn’t be the type to take offense, so after idling by the gate awhile, I took a banking slip from my wallet and wrote a note: Family emergency abroad. Flying out tonight, return in 2 weeks. Will see you then. Seeing my words to Tony on paper filled me with panic and excitement. They made real what all our sly fleshy tanglings never quite did. After I wedged the note into the doorjamb, I stood and stared at it. I wondered how I would endure the next fortnight. I resolved that, on my return, I would bring Tony—force him, if need be—fully into my life.

  Chronic turncoat that I am, I began to have second thoughts about taking Mal to Tealing. (“I might have known you grew up in a house with a name,” he said wryly the night I answered his questions about my family. “Explains your aura of entitlement.”) When he called a few days before our departure, I hoped his sudden invitation for dinner meant not just that he was well enough to cook but that he’d planned a good meal as consolation to me for his own cold feet.

  The woman who answered Mal’s door pulled me in with both hands, grasping my upper arms so tightly that I could feel her long nails through my sleeves. “You! You! I am so glad to meet you!” she cried, and her small oval face, pink and refined as a cameo, spread into a tissue of delicate lines, a human blueprint of joy. Simply because of her air—I could sense that she treated this home as hers—I knew she was Mal’s mother. And she looked at me (I saw this later) through his eyes—though in her face their blue was not so frosty. She looked much younger than any mother of her generation I had met; her long beaded earrings, long hair (though gray), and long cotton skirt mirrored with mica all reminded me of Cambridge twenty years before, of girls like Lil.

  Mal emerged from his bedroom looking oddly theatrical. Over his trousers he wore an ivory linen tunic so large it was almost clownish. “Well good, that spared me introductions,” he said. His mother still held my arms, looking me up and down with pleasure.

  She leaned toward me to peer directly into my eyes, then turned to Mal and said, “He’s got to be a Pisces. I see the fish struggling upstream and down, the valiant conflicts of a good, hardworking submarine conscience.” Then she looked back to me. “Water is the most freeing of the elements. Heavier than air, but once you get the hang of it, deeper and more rewarding, full of hidden surprises. You can’t hear so well, but the things you can see!”

  Mal came toward us and pulled her off me, folding her against his side. “Mom, cut the astrology crap.” To me he said, “This is an image she projects, to test you. I’ve told her it’s sadistic, though she always insists it’s sincere.”

  “Well, now I love doing it just to mortify you,�
� she said. “How about that?”

  She reached out to shake my hand, as if we were starting over. “I’m Lucinda. I already know who you are.”

  Who did she know I was? Friend? Occasional errand boy? Neighbor?

  Mal broke the silence by saying, “Mom, this is beautiful, it really is, but I’m swimming in it. I look like I belong in Sherwood Forest, with leather breeches and a little dagger in my belt.” He turned to me. “Birdlike, isn’t that what I’d be called in this garment?”

  “Oh, sweets, like a peacock,” said Lucinda.

  “Thank you for reminding me of my vanity, darling mother.”

  “I refer to your beauty. You have always been the most beautiful of my children, from the day you were born.”

  Mal had a smile for her I had never seen on his face, the kind of smile you give a beloved child (the return of the smile his mother had for him). He spread his arms and looked down at the shirt I knew she must have made. “You could take it in, couldn’t you?”

  “It’ll fit you when you flesh out again,” she said as he allowed her to tuck the shirt into his trousers. Then she gave him a small shove. “There now. Go sit.”

  So, on Lucinda’s orders, we found ourselves seated in the living room, hands in our laps like obedient, well-mannered boys. Mal flicked his eyebrows at me once, his only admission to the acute self-consciousness we all feel, regardless of age or station in life, when anyone meets our parents. Before I could say anything, Lucinda was back, carrying stemmed drinks. Margaritas, the glasses chilled, the rims unsalted just as I like.

  “Sweetheart, yours is lime juice with a splash of Grand Marnier. Would Susan permit that torsion of the rules?”

  Mal faked a sigh. “Yes, Mom.”

  “She wishes she could go with us,” he said when she’d left again. “She said she and my father spent a passionate weekend in Edinburgh before we children came along. Kissed on the castle ramparts. Bought Shetland sweaters they still wear, darned-up moth holes and all. Dad golfed at St. Andrews.”