Enemy and Brother (3 page)

I had not seen a newspaper I could read in months and told him so. He then told me what I have already set down in this account, that my mother had died during my trial. I had no way of knowing, or at the time of caring, whether he was honest or calculating in the manner of telling me such news. His job required excellence in dissembling.

Once again I was captive and docile before a fate beyond my power to comprehend. I heard him in blandly sympathetic terms detail the life possible to the man before him, a new life under a new identity. He suggested the possibility of my returning to school, perhaps at his own university where he “might be able to do me some slight service.” He suggested the name Eakins. The American painter of that name had done a portrait of his grandfather which hung in the university he recommended to my consideration.

To acquire a new identity, one must shed an old one, however ghostly the man presenting his papers to the courts. Mr. Redmond was prepared to obtain copies of Jabez Emory’s birth certificate and army discharge papers. And because Emory had served his country as a soldier, a sum of money could be found to support him during what might be called his period of rehabilitation. He supposed I could live a little better on it than I had lived… abroad.

He cleared his throat, saying the word, and asked if he might proceed along the lines he had suggested.

I said he might proceed, and that night, registering at a New York hotel, I first signed the name, John Eakins.

So much is prologue. I have told of Eakins’ progress, of the fellowship to work on a life of Byron and of the passport in hand. I should probably have gone in any case, but an item in the New York
Monitor
was the final catalyst. It was datelined Athens, and it read:

Paul Stephanou, jailed as an accessory in the murder of the American newspaper correspondent, Alexander Webb, in 1948, will be released next month after serving seventeen years of a life sentence.

I
ONCE CALCULATED THAT
my transport from Greece to New York had taken twenty-three days. I returned in nine hours’ flying time. American emigration and Greek customs officials were excessively polite. People I expected to examine my passport waived the privilege. I was who I said I was to everyone except myself. In the plane I sat next to a wholesale grocer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I might have been on my way to Chicago to speak before the 19th Century Club.

But at the desk of the Grande-Bretagne Hotel in Athens something extraordinary happened to me. I had filled out the registration card, the porter waiting behind me with my luggage, the desk clerk waiting in front of me, a key as large as an anchor in his hand.

“Your letters will be at the mail desk, Professor Eakins.”

I knew he meant to hurry me, but I checked the card anyway, the habit of one steeped in footnotes. I had signed my name Jabez Emory.

The shock of seeing what I had done froze me. The clerk reached for the card. I only managed to prevent his having it, crumpling it under my hand. I stuffed it into my pocket. “I’m sorry,” I said. “May I have another card?”

Contemptuously he turned his back while I filled out the second card. As I made my way to the mail desk I thought that in all the world I was my only enemy.

The Grande-Bretagne is no scholars’ haven. Its lore is strictly British upper class. The ranking staff, Greek though they may be, are the very models of model major-generals. I wondered if any of them remembered “the kid.” I doubted it. But I remembered some of them. I had done a lot of loitering in my few months in Athens, and most of it at the Grande-Bretagne bar.

My mail consisted of a letter of welcome from Dr. Palandios, the director of English Studies at the university with whom I had corresponded regarding my Byronic studies. He hoped that I would be free to attend a small dinner party at his home that night. Nothing suited me more perfectly, so early a recognition of my legitimate pursuits. I unpacked a few necessities, gave the valet a suit to be pressed and phoned my acceptance.

I went down to the bar and took my first step back into time. The decor had changed, the hotel having been remodeled. Nonetheless, I saw it now as I best remembered it, the heavy furniture, dark and plush in feeling, the cheeriness of crystal and elegant chandeliers, and not enough light anywhere. And I remembered the bartender who now set a whisky and soda before me. He still liked to talk, but now, as then, to somebody else. I watched him for a moment, thinking back on his imitation of a German colonel during the occupation who insisted on inspecting the glass before his drink was poured. The routine included a monocle and I had suspected then that the whole performance came out of an Erich Von Stroheim movie.

I took my glass to a table such as that at which I was sitting scribbling in a notebook when Alexander Webb had come over, set his glass down and eased his great bulk into the chair next to me. He had sat a moment, blinking, as he looked at me. His expression was perpetually sardonic, something else I admired naturally. He breathed like a drinking man.

“How would you like to go on a little journey with me?” He pointed to my notebook. “It might give you something to write about one of these days.”

“I’d go to hell and back with you, sir,” I said with a fervor that might have embarrassed even him.

He grunted. “It might just be that.” Again the breathy silence. That day too the bar was all but deserted. If there had been more people, I should not have had my notebook out. “You’re to tell no one about this,” he said. “Absolutely no one.”

“I understand.”

“Not even Margaret.” He looked at me sharply.

By then I had met Margaret Webb perhaps a dozen times. Sometimes we walked. Mostly we sat and talked in the hotel lobby where she seemed to be forever waiting for her husband. But at a New Year’s ball, with audacity brewed of several drinks and the confidence a waltz gave me, I had asked her to dance. We made an impression on many people that night which had lasted even to a murder trial.

“No, sir,” I said.

“What do you talk about, you and Margaret?”

I knew he was baiting me, albeit good-naturedly, but I could only be earnest, truthful.

“Mostly you,” I said and then amplified: “Well, mostly me, then you, sir.”

He grunted and tapped a stubby finger on my notebook. “Tear out a piece of paper and write what I tell you to.”

I wrote: “I promise to neither write nor relay by word of mouth anything I may see or hear while accompanying Alexander Webb from and to Athens until released by Webb from this promise.”

I signed and gave him the paper.

“I want to be sure I’m not scooped by a cub,” he said. “Where do you come from?”

“Illinois—a small town not far from Springfield, Illinois.”

“You’re a long way from home, young Jabez Emory.”

He gave me the name of a dockside
taverna
in Piraeus where I was to have my dinner at ten o’clock that night. He might or might not eat with me. I was to wear my army shoes for heavy walking, and to take only such essential articles as I could carry in my trenchcoat. We might be gone for as long as two weeks, and again we might be back much sooner. I was also to wear a sweater.

“Do I need money?”

He grinned with that downward pull of the corners of his mouth. “Do you have money?”

“A little.”

“Is your rent paid?”

“Just till tomorrow.”

“Then pay it so they won’t be looking for you.”

He bought us a drink then, and, after paying for it, put the piece of paper on which I had written my promise into his pocket.

I had almost finished dinner when he joined me at the
taverna
that night. He sipped brandy and reminisced about his boyhood in Elyria, Ohio. We talked about Sherwood Anderson. He seemed completely relaxed. The
bouzouki
players never rested. A roaming band of sleek-haired youths danced for a while and then moved on to another
bouzoukakia.
I had written an article on these waterfront
taverna
, so popular then with the teen-aged boys. Toward midnight a vendor of herbs came to the table. Webb bought a bunch of sage.

“Sage for wisdom,” he said to me. “We can go now.”

We walked some distance along the water’s edge, Webb peering into the darkness. He stopped. Only then did I see the rowboat, the man waiting at the oars. Webb threw the sage down to him. Then we climbed into the boat. He rowed us out to where a fishing vessel was waiting. It was in Patras three days later that we made contact with our guide, Paul Stephanou.

In the National Library that afternoon I searched three months’ files of the Athens newspapers for mention of Stephanou’s release from prison, impending or actual. I found not a word. While in New York I had looked for it without success in American, British and French publications. If I had not carried the small clipping from the
Monitor
in my wallet I should have doubted ever having seen it at all.

I went back in the newspaper files to the period covering the trial. How strange to turn the yellowed pages and suddenly confront myself, aged twenty-three, hollow-cheeked, unshaven, my eyes sunken and furtive as any criminal’s. The picture was taken on the day I went to trial. In the next column was a picture of Paul Stephanou. His jaw was out in defiance and he had smiled at the moment the photographer caught him; handsome, his dark hair tousled, he looked as though he had just run off a football field. I learned nothing, reading, that I did not already know by heart.

I left the library and stepped into the late afternoon rush. It was the beginning of June, a few days later in the season than when Webb and I had left Athens. The first heat of summer had come and the first flush of tourists. During my last sojourn there had been no tourist problem, but the restless trafficking of people had been the same. Then it was swarms of advisers, military and civilian, British and American, some hurrying to settle in, others to pack and go home. Churchill had grudgingly passed on the burden of his brother’s keepership. I stopped in my tracks, remembering the phrase. It was Alexander Webb’s.

I was still wondering as I dressed for dinner if the Webb case remained a matter of sensitivity to the Greek government or if it was so well forgotten as to be worth not a line of newsprint.

D
R. PALANDIOS HAD BEEN
a wry and witty correspondent, abreast of his own times as well as the past. And he lived exceedingly well, I realized the moment the apartment door was opened to me. Madame Palandios came at once, a jeweled hand extended. She was past middle-age, superbly groomed and, her dark eyes set off by the crown of white hair, one suspected she was more nearly beautiful now than at any other time in her life. Wealth and taste, I thought, the carpet soft beneath my feet. I promised myself a better look at the paintings later, and followed my hostess through to where the other guests were having drinks on the balcony. To me she spoke English with an accent which was not Greek as I had known it, to the others French. I suspected she would find my Greek common and wonder how I had come to acquire it. I resolved to keep it to myself.

Palandios, a bald gnome of a man in his sixties, shook my hand warmly and introduced me around. It was not until dinner that I came somewhat to know these people, but it was obvious from the start that our hostess had a knack of mixing guests who were not likely to come together otherwise.

Looking down on the city—it seemed like the whole of Athens, the lights of its great avenues strung like pearls, Lykabettos and the Acropolis rising and disappearing with the alternate crescendo and diminuendo of light like magic islands in the sea of night—I complimented my host on his home and its vista.

“Not bad for a pedant, eh?” He pulled me down to where he could speak in mock confidence. “A rich wife. Every scholar should have one.”

“At least one,” I said.

The talk was small and pleasant, the drinks large so that even I went in to dinner with a feeling of companionable ease.

I was seated near our host between a female novelist named Elsa Storme and the wife of the Greek Minister of Education, a cozy, plump little mother who laid her hand on mine every time she spoke. The novelist’s husband, Shepherd Storme—who would be likely to forget that name?—sat across the table and down, an ascetic Englishman whose specialty was seals and signets.

Dr. Palandios himself was an authority on Byron sources. He acquired a dubious fame some years ago for having perpetrated a deliberate hoax: he suggested to a gullible newspaper reporter that the famous Byron autobiography had not been destroyed at all and that he knew where it was. He estimated its value at a million dollars. Shortly after the story was published and before the retraction appeared—attributed to misinterpretation of language: he had meant to say that
if
the manuscript were extant—three hitherto undisclosed caches of Byron letters became available. I asked him about these letters.

“Every last piece went to where the money is, America.” He snorted his disapproval. What could he have expected with the device he had used to flush them? “But better there than in a mouldy trunk,” he added. “What put you onto him, Eakins?”

“My mother,” I said without hesitation. It was true. One of my most vivid childhood memories was of her nightly reading to me from
Childe Harold
and
Don Juan
, the latter of which, I presently realized, she was censoring heavily. The most omnivorous of my adolescent reading was tracking down the omissions.

Palandios raised his eyes to the ceiling. “If I knew you better I should inquire about your father.”

“And if I knew you better, sir, I should tell you.”

He laughed heartily.

At that point Mrs. Storme said, “Do you think Byron was a homosexual?”

It served us right for having talked across her. Her husband lifted his wine glass to the light and studied it.

“Why not? He was everything else,” I said lightly.

“I think it’s important that we know,” she said.

I was defeated, but our host, a mischievous lilt in his voice, said, “Have you ever dreamt of Byron, Mrs. Storme?”