The Clover House (9 page)

“Is that the number?”

She looks down at the paper in her hand.

“Yes.” She holds it out to me and I take it.

“If you need me, I’ll be at Aliki’s.”

I kiss her on the cheeks and walk out to the elevator, the taste of her cold cream on my lips.

Back on the street, I find myself turning not toward Aliki’s house or even Nestor’s house but farther up Astiggos Street toward my mother’s childhood home on Korinthou Street. It is only two blocks away from where she has settled in her widowhood, though her current neighborhood is noticeably scruffier than the old one was in its heyday.

By the time I was born, the family house had already passed out of the family, and my grandparents had moved into the small house that became Nestor’s own when they died, when I was still a little girl. But I knew every inch of the grand house inside and out from my mother’s stories. It was made of stone
and stucco, with high ceilings and a wide and graceful stairway rising up through its core. Its garden, behind a wrought-iron railing, was paved with chessboard squares of marble, bordered by massive planters of heavy stone. Across the street from the city’s concert hall and in a neighborhood of neoclassical homes, it was a wealthy house, with a separate entrance for the servants beneath stairs leading to double oak front doors. I suppose it was the Greek version of the mansions on the upper part of Beacon Hill where Jonah and I stroll on weekends, imagining the stately lives inside.

Inside our house—as my mother still calls it—were four bedrooms, double parlors, and a library on the upper floors, each with a balconied window. On the first floor were large communal rooms: the dining room, the sitting room, and a spacious room in which were a grand piano and scattered chairs with velvet covers. A broad atrium rose up through the center of the house, topped with a skylight of gray glass. The bedroom doors gave onto a thin parapet from which you could see all the way down to the gleaming marble floor of the entrance, where the giant mirror stood guard.

Even before I reach the corner, I can hear the hum of traffic from Korinthou Street. Once a stately boulevard, it is now a busy access road into the heart of the city. I wait for a pack of trucks and cars to pass and then cross to the other side so I can look up at the house from a distance. I scan the façade, looking for some sign of the atrium’s magnificent space. I imagine the four Notaris children arrayed along the parapet on a holiday morning. And the string-and-can telephones they rigged across the void, and the pulley-hung basket with which they could whisk away the reading glasses or chess pieces of their befuddled father.

But I can’t make anything out; how does an inner column of
light alter the outward appearance of a house? All I see now is an anarchy symbol and the green cloverleaf of the PASOK socialists spray-painted on the crumbling stucco, and, by the double doors, a row of small white circles that glow orange in the daylight, each one with a metal nameplate beneath it. There are no Carnival streamers or balloons here. We are too far away from the center of the new Patras. Behind me, the concert hall has been turned into a cram school, complete with a large neon sign advertising instruction in numerous foreign languages.

My mother took me on summer pilgrimages to the house, posed me before the large iron gate, and took my photograph while I forced a smile of happiness and ownership. Every year, I stood there, worrying about what the truck drivers and deliverymen were thinking as they roared by on the busy road. I worried that she would step into the rushing traffic as she framed her shot, unaware that the boulevard of her youth was gone. I hoped that no one would emerge to see my mother smiling with a superior air over a house whose stucco was soot-blackened and chipped and whose gate had rusted half shut.

Now, as I look up at the façade, I see someone draw a curtain in one of the tall windows of the second story. A man in an undershirt yawns, briefly presses his head close to the glass, and disappears into the depths of the room.

I hear a tapping above me and look up to see the under-shirted man gesturing at me: a twisting of the hand, fingers extended as if he were turning a large knob. He is asking me what I want and he is frowning. I don’t know how to answer him. All my life I have wanted to go into the house, but that doesn’t mean that now is the right moment. If I’m allowed in, all I can do is stand in the same space as the rest of them and
imagine how it used to be. There will be nothing familiar for me to see.

The man throws his arms into the sleeves of a light-blue shirt and begins to button it from the bottom up, all the while looking at me through the window. I shrug and smile. When he is finished with the shirt, he waves me toward him, then disappears from view.

When the oak door opens, I see that he is skinny, with gray hair cropped close to his head.

“I’m late for work,” he says. “Spit it out.” And again the sharp twisting gesture of the hand, as if he wants to wrench a confession from me.

“My family used to own this house,” I say, regretting a verb that might offend his possibly socialist sensibilities. “They used to live here.”

“I
hope
they owned it. Be an expensive place to rent the whole thing, don’t you think? I suppose you want to see it.”

He scowls at me, his dark furrowed eyebrows in stark contrast to his silver hair. I nod.

“My apartment’s only a one-bedroom,” he says. Probably not much bigger than mine and Jonah’s—assuming it’ll still be mine and Jonah’s when I get back.

“I don’t need to see your apartment,” I stammer. “I mean, it would be all right to just see the main spaces. That would be fine.”

He moves aside and waves me in.

“What part of America are you from?”

“Vostóni,”
I say—as if this pronunciation of the word can reclaim some of the Greek identity he has taken.

The first thing I notice is the smell, damp and layered with the odors of several different breakfasts: toast and eggs, coffee, and cinnamon. It is dark inside, and I look up to where the
glass ceiling of the atrium should be and see a panel of white-painted wood with a light fixture hanging from it. Two of its three bulbs have burned out.

“Got a three-story ladder?” the man asks with a laugh. “The landlord won’t bother until that third bulb goes.”

“That used to be glass,” I say.

“Used to be a lot of things, young lady.”

And this is why my mother never tried to take me inside. If anyone had waved to her as we stood before the house all those summers, she would have ignored the signal, all the better to preserve in her memory what would always be the most important version of the house. I take a few steps into the foyer, toward the tall oak door that must have led to the front sitting room. Boots and umbrellas lean against the corner by the door. A peephole has been drilled through the oak and covered over with scratched plastic.

I know the man is watching me with amusement as I spin around slowly, taking in the handful of things about the house that I assume have not changed. There is a wide expanse of wall where the walnut mirror once stood—I am sure of it—and the swinging door Irini, the cook, would push through coming in from the kitchen, and the railing around the landing on the third floor, where my aunts and Nestor dangled their baskets and hooks. Yes, it is changed now, but the space is still the same, still redolent of everything I have ever imagined in it.

“When did you lose the house?” the man asks.

“We didn’t lose it,” I say, turning to face him. But I don’t know that this is true. Perhaps we lost it in the Second World War, or in the civil war that came after it, or during the
junta
. No one has ever explained this to me.

“Well, when was the last time your family lived here?”

“Sometime after the war.”

He waves his hand.

“Ages ago when it comes to houses.”

“Please,” I say, “could I see the basement?”

“The basement?”

I can see he thinks I am a strange American.

“Please.”

“I told you I was late and now I’m even later.”

I smile at him, waiting. He checks his watch.

“Fine,” he sighs. “But be quick.”

I know he wouldn’t accommodate me if he thought I were truly Greek.

He leads me through the swinging door and down a flight of wooden steps to a narrow hallway tiled in black and white. Several doors open off the hallway, topped with transom windows and fitted with brass kickplates along the bottoms. All I can do is stand still and stare around me in wonderment.

“Seen it?” the man says, beginning to lead me away.

“Wait,” I say, reaching out to stop him. He gives me an odd look, and I wish I had not touched him. “I’ll meet you in the foyer in a few minutes.”

“These are private storage rooms.”

“I’m not going to take anything.”

“Five minutes,” he says, and heads upstairs.

Here again, my Americanness helps me. If I were completely Greek, he would fear I was a
gyftissa
, a gypsy or a thief.

Alone in the hallway, I give a little triumphant laugh. The basement is the exception that proves the rule, the one unchanged place that proves that all the other stories of my mother’s childhood in this house must be true. This is where my mother and my aunts and Nestor flooded the hall one day so they could slide and skim across the tiles. This is where they raised silkworm cocoons before the war. This is where my
mother showed a puzzling kindness to the little Italian boy, the baker’s son, sneaking free cocoons up to him through the high basement windows as he crouched on the sidewalk outside.

I begin to test the doors to find the old scullery from which the children ran the hose through the transom window on the day they flooded the basement. The doors are not locked, or the locks are all broken, and I open one after another until I find the sink, a gray soapstone tub with square sides. Another gasp of satisfaction escapes me. I wish Aliki were here, or—and the thought surprises me—Jonah. I could start here, with this, my favorite story, to explain myself to him.

The story goes that, once they had the right water level in the hall and the doors were all closed to keep the water in, the girls pushed Nestor into the scullery through the transom window with the hose so he could turn off the faucet. Then they did their prewar version of a Slip’N Slide, with poor Nestor clamoring to come back out to the hall and play. When they were done, they opened the door and the water went down the drain, leaving the floor surprisingly clean and their parents none the wiser.

To me, this story epitomized the glory of my mother’s childhood. Its setting was mundane—almost everyone I knew had a basement—but the mischief was extravagant. Who poured water
into
a house? Who dared to break such a fixed rule between order and chaos, domesticity and rebellion? It seemed like a heroic thing, almost, that my mother and her siblings had done. The closest I ever came to replicating this was the time I strapped the carriages of a toy train onto my feet and skated on them down the length of our ranch house. I crashed into the walnut-framed mirror, stared at my face pressed against the silvered glass, and got my first lesson that there was no recreating someone else’s past.

Now, in my mother’s actual basement, I can’t find the drain that should be in the scullery floor. The floor rebukes me with its smoothness, as if it lacked a navel, an
omphalos
. As if without the sign of an umbilical cord it bears no connection to anything that came before it. I stand there like a fool, embarrassed to have given even whispered voice to my mistaken enthusiasm. Embarrassed, too, to be putting such stock in so prosaic a thing as a basement. The missing drain proves nothing either way, I tell myself. Perhaps there was a renovation long ago; perhaps I have not found the right sink; perhaps I have simply misremembered the story. I close the door to the scullery and take one last look at the chessboard hallway before I head up the stairs.

“Find what you were looking for?” the man asks. He has put on a beige zippered jacket over the blue shirt, and he is holding a motorcycle helmet in one hand. I remember seeing a scooter locked to the rusted railing outside.

“Yes,” I say, to be polite. “Thank you.”

“I
went to see the house,” I tell Aliki. There is no need to tell her which one.

“It’s looking pretty bad lately.”

“The graffiti? How long has that been on there?”

“Awhile. If you clean it up, they’ll just do it again.”

“
You
don’t—”

“No. The city cleans it. Sometimes.”

“Aliki, I went in,” I say, watching for her reaction.

She turns from the board where she is mincing garlic and leans back against the counter.

“Oh?”

“Some guy let me in. The atrium is covered. They put wood over it, with an ugly light up there.”

“It was probably leaking. It happens to all these old houses.”

“I really wanted to see it, the way the aunts always talked about it, with the light coming down.”

I am waiting for her to share my enthusiasm with some imagined recollections of her own, but she gives me a wistful smile in which I detect a touch of pity.

“Had you never been in?” she says.

“No. Have you?”

“Almost twenty years ago now. I knew someone who lived there, actually. We used to have parties in her apartment when her parents were out.”

“Aliki! You never told me this.”

She shrugs. “We drank a lot at those parties. Maybe I forgot,” she laughs. “The aunts are coming for lunch, by the way. Eager to see you.”

“Good,” I say, but I’m not interested in them now. “What was it like?” I go on. “Must have been weird for your friend.”

“Oh, I never told her.
That
would have been weird.” Aliki turns back to the counter and whips at a potato with a peeler.

“I went into the basement,” I tell her. “Looking for the drain.”

“The drain? To what?”

She doesn’t turn around.

“When they flooded the basement. The drain in the scullery.”

She picks up another potato.