Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  So we were going. I could not picture us on a plane together, belted in side by side, let alone eating at my parents’ table or discussing current events (traditional silence fodder) with my brothers.

  “I wouldn’t mind going to one of those islands,” he said. “The Shetlands and the Orkneys are too far north, of course.”

  “There’s Arran. Arran’s not a bad drive.” This proposal echoed in my head with an embarrassing intimacy, but Mal simply nodded and said that sounded fine. Or he could drive himself; he didn’t wish to interfere with the family business I’d have.

  As I talked about what one could see thereabouts (local sights I’d grown up seeing dozens of times, dragged along by my parents with endless sets of guests), I thought Mal dismayingly agreeable. Was he resigning himself to something, winding down? Or was he on a new drug (he hadn’t coughed once since my arrival), another powerful substance which, in altering the chemistry of his immune system, had arbitrarily softened his edge?

  When Lucinda joined us with her own margarita, she sat close beside me on the couch. “To your trip,” she toasted, touching my glass first.

  “To a safe trip,” I said. “I’ve never loved flying.”

  “That’s what I meant about air. You can never quite trust it, can you?” Before I could answer, she said, “You know, you have a lovely brogue. Very subtle.”

  “It’s called a burr, Mom, and if it’s subtle, maybe that’s because he’s been trying like the devil to lose it,” said Mal. “Don’t make him more self-conscious than he already is.”

  “A funny word, burr. A burr is a thorny little ball. And isn’t it a wood-cutting tool?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, wishing I had something witty to add.

  “Well, boys, the menu,” she said, placing her glass on the table. “I am giving Mal a holiday from his brave new diet. I see no harm in a break for one night. So we are having soupe au pistou—and that, let me tell you, is a cure in itself—and sole bonne femme and haricots verts and baba au rhum. Straight, unadulterated Julia.”

  “Julia?” I inquired.

  “Child! La Julia,” she said. When she added, “My second all-time heroine,” Mal chimed in perfectly.

  “So go ahead, ask her who’s number one,” he said.

  “Margaret Sanger, no surprise,” said Lucinda.

  “One the mistress of control, the other a mistress of indulgence,” said Mal. “And number three is, let’s see, a tie between Ginger Rogers and Cyd Charisse. The tragedy of my mother’s life is that Dad has the rhythm of a brick.” Again, Mal and Lucinda wore identical, colluding grins. They had the same slender lips, the same uniformly delicate, well-spaced teeth. Standing, she walked over and kissed him on the forehead.

  “When I need a sidekick, I’ll let you know.” She stroked his hair. “Now I’ll go be that bonne femme and pull things together.”

  “Set the table in the kitchen,” said Mal. “No need to get fussy.”

  “But I love getting fussy. And I’ll be the one washing up.”

  A few minutes later, as Mal began telling me about a less than stellar review he’d had to write about a pianist he normally revered, Lucinda called from the kitchen, “Where are my dishes? Did you go and pawn them?”

  “For drugs. But tremendously fun drugs, I promise!” he called back. He was looking out a window when he added, “I’ve lent them to a friend who’s giving a fancy lunch!”

  “The entire set? Platters and all?”

  “Platters and all, Mom!” His raised voice made the room around us feel small. He looked at me. “What do you call your mother—‘Mum’?”

  “Yes. Mum.”

  “It sounds so different, don’t you think? That o in Mom evokes so much more longing, so much more Oedipal dependency this side of the ocean. Or do I overanalyze?”

  “You’re a critic, you can’t help it,” I said.

  Lucinda’s meal was old-fashioned—I’d forgotten how rich food could be—but it was, as she promised, splendid. She did most of the talking, as I could see she was accustomed to doing. She told Mal about his father’s latest battles over education, tourism, land conservation and development. She asked me about my mother, then told me about a cousin of hers who’d had most of a lung removed ten years ago and still skied the black diamond trails. She quizzed us both about the city’s local politics. (“The more local the issues, the more real the fights”: clearly a personal motto—no doubt one of many.)

  Mal drank a few sips of wine and ate most of his food. When Lucinda was talking and I looked at him, I saw him smiling at her in a distant way, as if at a pleasant memory. Sometimes I wasn’t sure he was listening. But after we’d finished dessert, after Lucinda had served us tea (green for Mal, Earl Grey for me, chamomile for herself), he said, “All right, Mother. Bring out your pictures. I know you’ve been dying to show off all evening.”

  Happily, as if she had indeed been waiting, she reached out and pulled a Kodak envelope off the counter behind her. “My girls,” she said to me, pressing the envelope against her chest before pulling out snapshots.

  “This is where she hits you up for money, so beware,” said Mal.

  Lucinda laid a dozen pictures on the tablecloth, dealing them out like cards. Her long nails were unpainted, and her traditional diamond ring was outnumbered by younger, more rustic rings: silver, jade, and turquoise. Around her neck, on a black silk cord, swung a bluntly fashioned pewter cross whose descender bisected a peace sign. If I had seen that symbol in recent years, I hadn’t noticed it; now I recalled the cheap vandalism of my teens, when I and my schoolmates, without the slightest knowledge of anything but peace, had impudently scrawled and carved that mark everywhere from our desks to the frosted windscreens of our masters’ cars.

  “Connie and Debra,” said Lucinda, turning a picture in my direction. “They’re both due at the end of this month—and can’t wait to deliver, let me tell you. To a pregnant woman, August is the cruelest month. But they’ve both been training with a local baker and haven’t missed a day. I’m very proud of them. Debra, I’m told, has a real knack, and if everything goes well, I may pull some of your father’s strings next year to get her a scholarship at a culinary school in Boston.”

  The pregnant girls I was looking at—holding hands on the steps of a suburban brick house, flanked by squat green yews that echoed the shape of their bellies—were girls indeed. They looked no older than fifteen or sixteen; eighteen, at a stretch. I realized I had so little contact with people this age that they seemed to hail from another species. But thirteen or nineteen, I thought, these girls ought to have been vandalizing desks, not giving birth.

  “So they’ll soon have tiny squalling brats and fourteen-hour jobs sweating in front of industrial ovens,” said Mal.

  “They will,” said Lucinda haughtily, “have beautiful healthy babies they thank God they’ve been blessed with, loving help and wisdom from the experienced mothers at the house, and part-time jobs in an air-conditioned bakery that supplies all the fanciest restaurants and ski resorts from Middlebury north. And they will finish high school.”

  “Well good for them, Mom. And good for you.” Mal reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “And you,” he said, turning to me, “get out your checkbook. Make it out to ‘The House.’ That’s what they call this utopian female refuge.” He tapped a finger on the brick house behind the two girls.

  I laughed nervously.

  “Not now,” said Lucinda, “but don’t you worry, you’ll be on my mailing list the minute I get back home.”

  She went on to tell us about several other girls, the ones who, unlike Connie and Debra, would be giving their babies up for adoption. Lucinda spoke of them all as glowingly as she would of her own daughter (whose news she had relayed to Mal—perhaps more efficiently than fondly—over the soup). I had never mixed with social workers or crusaders for the underprivileged; I now had a concrete image of what it meant to have a “mission.” Beside Lucinda, I felt boorishly self
-involved, but I was fascinated and would have been happy to stay much later than I knew was proper.

  When I could see that Mal was fading (his mother seemed not to notice), I made my excuses. Lucinda saw me to the door, where we exchanged compliments. As I turned to go, she held me back. “You never told me if you are a Pisces.”

  “On the cusp,” I said, “though I don’t give much credence to the stars.”

  “Give credence to anything God honors with light,” she said, almost sharply, and then, “Which cusp?”

  “The Aquarian side.”

  “Oh my. Oh my.” She seemed overjoyed, pressing her hands to her cheeks. She hugged me a second time. “Water, water everywhere.”

  “And not a spot to dive,” said Mal, still sitting at the kitchen table. But Lucinda and I ignored him, saying another round of good-byes. This woman, I thought as I walked downstairs, turning to wave when I could feel her gaze still sheltering me, this woman might become my adversary? Wasn’t that the word Mal had used?

  MY LUNATIC MOMENTUM dwindles as I leave the sooty northern reaches of Glasgow. Signs tell me that I am approaching Loch Lomond and the many smaller serpentine lakes which fill the glacial gullies of central Scotland. I glide to a halt in the middle of a stone bridge over a stream and open the glovebox to look for a map. The glovebox holds an ice scraper, a scatter of petrol receipts, the business card of a mechanic, and a jaundiced white handkerchief, neatly folded, which must have been my father’s. No maps.

  I stand on the bridge beside the car and watch the trickling water below me, wondering how many lakes it will join before it reaches the coast. Only then is my destination clear. Like a homing pigeon, I turn back south and, every turn correct as if by instinct, head to Ardrossan. There, I drive without a wait onto the ferry. It casts off within five minutes.

  I have not been back to Arran since the brief excursion I took with Mal the first time he came to Tealing. Seen from the bow of the low-slung ferry, it rises like the archetypal island of dreams, green with spring grass all the way to its camelback ridge, its shores salted with patches of humid evening mist. There are more houses on its slopes than I remember, but that is probably an illusion born of my relentlessly romantic expectations.

  The inn where Mal and I stayed for a night was part of a working farm near Goat Fell, the island’s summit. My father recommended it because a travel writer at the Yeoman had just discovered the place, though he had yet to write it up and make it fashionably inaccessible. Half of Mum’s malignant lung had been removed two days before, and she told me she was tired of seeing my hangdog face arrive so dutifully at the very first minute of every visiting period. “Go! Take that American bloke to Sweetheart Abbey, somewhere picturesque and mobbed with tourists! Make him listen to bagpipes! I’d rather see you when I’m home, where I can put you to good use instead of watching you simper at the foot of my bed. You’re so obviously wondering if I could die right here, right now. So go, and leave your good-boy guilt behind.” She said this with her typically brusque cheerfulness, forcing her voice till she was breathless and the nurse had to scold her and make her put on an oxygen mask. (My mother was never soft-spoken, soft of step or opinion. This made her a determined patient but not a good one.)

  The road up the hills from Brodick is clear, and the early evening sun shines, still warmly, on fields of grazing sheep. When Mal and I took this road, it was drizzling, and we became mired in a massive flock. A farmer was herding them home with the help of a small avid collie (purchased, for all I knew, as a puppy from my mother). The sides of these roads are closely walled, so there’s rarely a way to pass such bucolic comings and goings, and the farmers make no apology. Cars may back up by the dozen and they wouldn’t spare you a glance; the best pace a flock of sheep can do is a tortoiselike hurry.

  Like a grimy cloudmass, the animals undulated before us. With the windows down, the smell of wet wool was strong. “Charming,” said Mal, “for the simple reason we don’t have a curtain to make.” As I inched the car forward, keeping a respectful distance, there were long silences in which we could hear only the bleating complaint of the sheep and the clack of our windscreen wipers. The rhythm of the wipers began to seem vaguely sexual to me—as an absurd variety of things did over that fortnight away from New York—and I lapsed into thinking of Tony. Whenever I wasn’t with my mother, or talking to Dad or Mal or David or Dennis, I was thinking obsessively about Tony, about his body, its hard, soft, and callused places, summoning up the pale brown hair whorled like tiny nests around his nipples, the single barely audible gasp he uttered when he came, and his voice: flirtatious yet dry, camouflaging too well whatever he felt. (Living inside my tumultuous desire, I would forget that I kept my own emotions concealed.)

  Mal startled me when he laughed. “Imagine being in the midst of a terrible love spat when you round a corner and find yourself stuck in this livestock jam. You’ve been needling and needling away at your lover, and now he’s just confessed he’s having a passionate affair and is planning to leave you. You’re calling him every name in the book, a fucking whore, a faithless traitor, an asswipe, a cunt, you always knew his heart was nothing but compost . . . but physically, you have to move by agonizing inches, with nowhere to go, forward or back, while these poor dim-witted creatures make their sad little noises. . . .”

  Uneasy, I said nothing.

  “You aren’t amused.”

  “I don’t think I’d be so articulate. I suppose I’d get out and walk back down to the village.”

  Mal eyed me coolly. “Sometimes you are so constipatedly humorless.”

  As it happened, the sheep turned in at the farm where we’d be staying; this farmer’s wife was our hostess. The place was a good step up from your average bed-and-breakfast, however, because the family lived in a separate, modern cottage apart from the farmhouse, a place of ingenuous charm.

  Now, turning off the road, I see a glossier sign than the one which hung here eight years back. The inn looks freshly whitewashed, its walls bolstered with portly bushes of flowering broom. The roof is lush with new thatch, and there’s a pebbled car park off to one side, so that guests no longer pull up by the tractors at the barn. I have a sudden memory of the wonderful porridge (served with good strawberries, cream, and maple syrup imported from my second homeland) and wonder if I’ll be laughed out the door for thinking I can book a room on the spot.

  In the parlor, two tweedy older couples are sitting on the sofas, sipping sherry and exchanging stories about their day. Where I remember garish paisley carpet, the plank floors have been bared and sanded and laid with tasteful imitations of Persian rugs. I recognize the city hand of a hired designer and feel a little sad; Mal and I both loved the formerly tidy, earnest bad taste of this place, down to the violet tartan lino on the floor of Mal’s bedroom (“My kitchen would die and go to heaven!” he cried).

  The farmer’s wife strides out from a back room and shakes my hand. She’s plumper and grayer but, like her establishment, more nattily dressed. “Cheerio, you’re a lucky lad tonight! We’ve a cancellation, and there’s even a plate of lamb I could hot you up if you’re peckish.”

  In fact, I am famished, having had (how many lifetimes ago?) a bowl of soup at the Globe with Véronique and then missed my tea altogether. In memory of Mal’s mother—though I know, from Christmas cards and charity drives, that she is alive and well—I give a little credence to the stars, accept a cup of tea, hand over my credit card, and take a newspaper into the parlor to wait for my lamb. The two couples nod a civil greeting but do not (thank you again, stars) try to include me.

  After supper, Mrs. Munn leads me upstairs, carrying my whisky on a tray. The perfect hostess, she does not say how odd she must find it that I have no bags. Because of the last-minute cancellation, I have one of the biggest rooms, at the front of the house on the second floor. I have a queen-size four-poster tarted up in blue-tulip chintz (Ralph should be here), two matching slipper chairs, my own bathroom, and a southern view of the i
sland as it tumbles to the Firth of Clyde. The water, normally a dowager gray, mirrors the rose-colored sky. I’m a lucky lad indeed, but a lad who’s perversely sorry not to have one of the two tiny rooms on the top floor, little more than cupboards under the eaves sharing a common bath and looking up toward the summit of the fell.

  I should go out and walk under the beautiful sky, for—again—I will be here only one night. But it’s time to read Lil’s letter, before I collapse into sleep, and I couldn’t do it while sitting on some cold rock already damp with dew. I am no longer a country boy, not even a boy of the suburbs.

  My vital organs shrink in unison at the sight of Lil’s handwriting: a torrent of it, covering both sides of three pale green pages. At a glance, her soul poured onto paper. What did I expect, a telegram? PLEASE AID PROCREATION STOP DAVEY SAYS OK IF CHILD TURNS OUT POOFTY STOP PLEASE GO FORTH AND LIVE LIFE AS NORMAL STOP. But won’t that be the essence? All right then:

  Dear Fenno,

  Believe me, believe me, neither of us (you or I; David or I) could ever have imagined ourselves in this situation six months ago (or even, really, six days ago!). You should know right up front that it’s a situation of my making, not so much David’s, and any response you have at all I will accept fully, so long as it doesn’t harm your family in any way. Whether you say yes or no or you’ll think it over, whether you are flattered or insulted or flat-out embarrassed, that is essential to me.

  I am picturing you reading this letter in your old room (which will always be yours when you come to visit), and as I know Véronique or Dennis will have explained, David and I plan to stay elsewhere tonight, because I know you need time and space for a bombshell like this. I wish I could have waited to write to you in New York after your return, but for obvious reasons, that just isn’t practical.

  You will be asking a hundred questions, and I want to answer some of them here, before we face each other and talk. First, about Véronique: I hope you don’t think me a coward, but there is no earthly way David could have approached you, simply because of who he is, and I knew that I would just become a teary mess. All the tension and disappointment and misery I’ve felt these past few years would break the dam, and there you’d have been, in a doubly awful position for having to console me as well as hear this outlandish proposal. So I hope you understand that part.