The Clover House (45 page)

Nikos cedes his chance as kite-wrangler to Thalia, who follows Demetra to the park, turning once to give us a proud wink. We watch as Demetra tosses the blue-and-green kite up into the air and makes little darting runs, hoping for the kite to catch the breeze. Thalia lurches and sways, urging it into the air, her feathered bangs blowing into her face. We shout encouragement. Finally, the kite is up with a dozen others, its edges vibrating in the current as it adds its own sound to the general hum of wind and paper. Demetra and Thalia stand side by side, eyes up to the sky, each with one hand shielding her face from the afternoon sun. I notice the resemblance between them, grandmother and granddaughter, both with round pretty faces and dimpled chins. Demetra’s kite flies as if painted onto the cobalt of the sky, a fragment of darker sky dropped out to look down on us with a cool feline gaze.

I see the proud smile on my mother’s face as she watches the kite, and I want to turn my chair toward her, huddle close, and tell her I understand. I understand now that she didn’t come to Boston with my father in 1959—or come into parenthood a few years later—the way my friends’ parents did, full of the hope and promise of an innocent America. No matter how much she tried to suppress it, she came with the memory of her country’s and her own history—a history of destruction and death for Greece, and, for her, a story of loss, guilt, and betrayal. She carried that burden into a new world and a new life. Long after the brown paper came down from the windows all those years ago, the fresh start she was hoping for stayed maddeningly out of reach.

It all seemed so straightforward in the cathedral yesterday.

You come in a sinner; the priest forgives you; you leave with a clean conscience. Outside the cathedral, though, things don’t line up so well. Very few people, I think, get the opportunity to repay their debts to the people they owe them to, to atone directly to those they have wronged. How many times have I seen an extravagant gift come across my desk at work and wondered what crime its donor was absolving in some other part of his life? Our interactions are shot through with acts of recompense that, if we’re lucky, don’t entirely miss the mark. Maybe I’ll be lucky that way when I talk to Jonah tomorrow.

My mother had no clear way to atone for her actions in the house with the Germans—except by letting the shame over what she’d done keep her cut off from her family, her husband, and her child. Could that be enough? And could her feelings of guilt and shame be repayment enough for how she treated me? I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right to find satisfaction from her suffering. Something less than satisfaction, then. Acceptance.

The air above the park is full of kites now, all of them on ramrod-straight strings, stiffened by the onshore breeze. Nikos and Sophia and my mother turn back to their food, but I keep watching. None of the kite fliers is moving; no one has to move the way you do if you’re flying a kite on a Boston beach. And instead of finding this boring, I am fascinated—by the beauty of the colors against the sun, by the golden light on the squinting faces, by the stillness and calm despite the invisible rushing of the wind. I think of what Jonah said on the phone—about how still and centered I am—and how wrong I knew he was then. I was not still then, nor am I now. But I think I have an idea of how to be that way. How to connect to another person simply by keeping my eyes on the same thing, how to feel the closeness even without touching.

Thalia waves over to the table, calling us to relieve her.

“I’ll go,” my mother grumbles, but she rises quickly and goes to stand beside Demetra. Thalia doesn’t come back at first, and for a moment the little girl is flanked by her grandmother and her great-aunt, Muses both. History and Comedy: not a bad pair to go through life with.

W
e take the car and a taxi back into the city. Nikos suggests the aunts share the taxi, but I ask him to take the other two home so I can go back with my mother. I have something I want to give to her before I leave.

She closes the taxi door once she gets out on Astiggos, but I pay the driver and then follow her to the building door.

“Why did you let him go? You’ll never find another taxi on Clean Monday.”

“It’s all right,
Mamá
. I’ll come up with you for a few minutes.”

“Why?”

“Just let me come up with you, okay?”

“Fine.”

She hangs her camel coat up in the closet and unwraps her silk scarf and sets it, folded, onto the table. She tugs her sweater down into place and then faces me.

“What is it?”

“It’s this.” I bring the small cardboard box out of my bag and see her trying to appear cool. “I don’t need to keep this,” I say, “and I thought you might want to have it.”

Inside the box are the four feathers, the spent cartridge, the scrap of silk, and one more thing that I have added and that my mother will discover with some surprise: the last page of the letter she wrote to Giorgio nearly sixty years and one lifetime
ago. If she wishes, she can pretend that I have never seen what she wrote. I won’t convince her otherwise.

“Thank you,” she says, and takes the box.

After everything that I have learned about the sorrows of my mother’s youth, this box seems so insignificant, to use Nestor’s word, a reminder of the kind of wrong that has tangible, concrete repercussions—and concrete ways to be repaired. It’s an almost mechanical system, like one of those gadgets Nestor and I would tinker with and adjust. Here are the shards of what was broken; somehow it can actually be mended.

How much greater, though, is the wrong that persists not in things but in memory, in identity. There is no collection of objects that can express something like that, no easily identifiable place to begin a restoration. Something in my mother was broken in 1943, and there is nothing I can do to fix it for her. I see that now, and I’m sorry for it.

She sets the box by her scarf on the little table, but I imagine that, as soon as I am gone, she will lift the cardboard cover and run her hands over the stiff edge of a feather’s barb. She’ll wrap her fingers around the cartridge and feel the cold brass in her palm. And maybe she’ll remember how her letter to Giorgio began, what indignation she showed him, and what hurt she hid.

We say goodbye, my arms wrapping all the way around her thin frame, enveloping her. We kiss on the cheeks.

“There is one thing I wish you would tell me,
Mamá
. Did you ever think of telling me the truth about the Germans?”

She thinks for a long moment.

“No, Calliope.” She smiles wistfully and adds, “Nestor and I, we kept each other’s secret. All our lives.”

She leans toward me for another kiss on the cheek.

“Ke tou chronou,”
she says, “and next year.” It’s a farewell said out of custom, but we both know there is no certainty to when I will return. It was truer when I was little and we drove our rental car every September to return to Athens and then Boston for the long winter. Still, I say it back to her, thinking maybe it will be true again this time.

“Ke tou chronou.”

Callie

Tuesday

“Ke tou chronou.”

Aliki says it as a question as I get into the Fiat.

“We’ll see,” I say. “I’d like to try.”

“Maybe you can bring Jonah,” she says, giving me a look.

“We’ll see.”

Despite the early hour, Sophia and Thalia have come over and are standing with Aliki on the damp sidewalk, Demetra held in front of them. She is in pajamas and her hair is sticking up in the back.

They all wave and I wave back until Nikos turns the sedan onto Kolokotronis. We drive out Korinthou past a small square littered with confetti and popped balloons. When we pass the old house, we both glance quickly at the façade, but don’t say anything. Farther along, an archway of accordioned paper hangs over the street. I turn to read it through the rear window: W
ELCOME TO
P
ATRAS
. E
UROPE
’
S
C
APITAL OF
C
ARNIVAL
. 2000. It’s a little sad to see such joy become irrelevant in the course of one night. But, then, people come back to Carnival again and again. I think of Aliki’s question. Perhaps I will too.

We have left early to avoid the traffic after the holiday, but a steady stream of cars and trucks already fills the two-lane road. Nikos rides the yellow line down the middle to pass the slower cars, tucking back in seemingly at the last minute to avoid those doing the same in the other direction. I look at him, gripping the armrest tightly. He tips his head and laughs.

“That’s how we do it here, cousin. Or we’d never get anywhere.”

I look over at the car we are passing—a truck of sorts, on three wheels with a tiny flatbed behind a cramped cab. I glimpse an old man in a brimless cap in the driver’s seat.

I am sleepy from the short night of packing and talking with Aliki, but I can’t relax enough to close my eyes. All the way, I sit silently, watching the march of cypress trees across olive groves and vineyards. The coast draws close and then away, the azure water by the shore suggesting warmth and summer. Nikos sings the lovers’ plaints of bouzouki music on the radio or takes calls on his cellphone.

“Yes,” he says, to one caller. “Aliki’s cousin. The one I told you about.”

He winks at me. I am too tired to ask.

We cross the Isthmus of Corinth and the new highway takes over—four lanes of divided asphalt leading the way to the western edge of Athens. At some point, as the highway skirts the refineries of Elefsina, I fall asleep, not waking again until the car comes to a stop at the curb outside the airport.

“Here we are,” Nikos says. “You want me to come in and do the Greek People Crying at the Airport thing?”

“No,” I laugh. “Here is fine.”

I tug my bag from the backseat and we kiss each other on the cheeks.

“Ke tou chronou,”
he says, and I know he is teasing me.

“I might surprise you.”

T
he shift from my mother’s life to my own comes upon me too fast. When I see the islands of Boston Harbor below me, I don’t recognize the place for a moment. I lay the Massachusetts coastline over the waving shore of Patras and Rio and the villages along the gulf. Then the plane swoops lower and I see brick and wood and gray snowbanks pushed up in parking lots. This is home.

I begin to get nervous as I ride the T to Charles Street station, not because of what I am going to say to Jonah but because I still don’t know what I am going to say. What can I say to make him understand that I’m sure? I have spent the plane ride and the layover in Milan in a kind of morose wistfulness, forcing my thoughts to run on a single nostalgic track. Sighing for the Greece I have left is infinitely preferable to confronting the conversation that awaits me in America.

At Charles Street T station, I move through a crowd of locals: doctors wearing scrubs beneath winter coats, grad students with backpacks and headphones. Here at the bottom of Beacon Hill, these are my neighbors—people who keep odd hours and live provisional lives. I walk on the sunny side of Charles, noticing that, when I say
excuse me
to a passerby, my English has no foreign accent. I turn onto Pinckney, where the all-day shade has preserved a thin bank of snow the length of the block. I step over the snow and head to our yellow cinder-block building, the only one here not made of Georgian brick. I fish out my keys, newly placed on Nestor’s ring, and head up to the apartment.

I stand in the doorway for a long time, taking in the fact that Jonah is not there. I am convinced that if I step forward or put my keys in my pocket, or crane my neck to see if there is a note for me on the counter, this moment will click into place as the new reality. As long as I don’t move, nothing will have changed. I will still have a chance to fix things.

I play our phone conversation over and over in my head. If he’s not here, maybe he has already gone to stay at Ted’s. Or maybe he’s still at work. Or maybe he’s sitting at The Sevens now, delaying the moment when he will have to look at the woman who let him down. At this point, I move into the apartment and walk over to the window, searching the sidewalk for someone with Jonah’s broad-shouldered silhouette. I am doing something I have never done before. Instead of accepting the idea that someone is leaving me, I want very much for him to return.

I hear steps and I look up to see him setting his bag down. He closes the door slowly and turns to see me wiping tears from my face.

“Hey,” I say.

He doesn’t answer right away but goes to the counter and fills himself a glass of water. He drinks it slowly, as if it hurts to swallow.

“I was going to stay away,” he says finally. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be here.”

“I know,” I say, though I didn’t.

“I’m still not sure.”

“But you’re here.”

“You have Nelson to thank for that.”

He refills his glass but just holds it, not drinking.

“Nelson said to think of you as an immigrant. But he’s only partly right.” He turns to face me for the first time since he
walked in. “When we do those
pro bono
cases, all my clients want is a home. They want to stay home or make a new home. It doesn’t matter where they are, as long as it’s theirs. But you’ve convinced yourself you don’t have a home here, that you don’t belong. You’ve convinced yourself you’re an exile, when the reality is that, just like them, you’re an immigrant. I’m here right now because I have this stupid notion I can make you see that.”