The Clover House (22 page)

The children set the silkworms up in four shallow trays packed with mulberry leaves and spent hours in the basement, waiting for the worms to stop chomping on the leaves and begin winding their silk thread around themselves. Clio suspected this was her father’s way to offer Nestor something in place of the hikes and camping he did with the Scouts. But she went along with it, and on the day the worms finally did enclose themselves in their fuzzy white cases, she couldn’t resist picking one up and holding it in her palm. She was surprised at how light it was. She expected something more substantial from these creatures, heavy with all their stages of development at once.

At Marinelli’s that Monday, Clio greeted the man and called to Marco, who was sitting on his grandmother’s low stool, holding a thick slice of bread. He blew at the steam and then held his palm flat over the bread to test the heat.

“Vieni qui,”
she said. She reached into the book bag she had slung off her shoulders and gently unwrapped a small cloth bundle from the bag.

“I have something for you,” she said, speaking in a hush.

“What is it?” He whispered so softly that she could hardly hear him. He was practically holding his breath.

“There.”

“Ohhh,” he sighed, and Clio checked his face.

“Do you know what it is?”

He shook his head.

“It’s a silkworm cocoon.”

He still didn’t seem to understand, so she explained it all to him.

“I’m going outside,” Sophia said, her hip cocked, the back of her hand propped against it. She turned on her heel, with Thalia following her out the door.

“Look,
Papà
,” Marco cried, and ran behind the counter to show Marinelli.

“Marco, say thank you to Clio,” said Marinelli.

“Thank you,” came the boy’s voice from behind the glass case. He darted around to the front again, holding a special raisin roll out on a piece of wax paper. “Here, Clio. For you.”

She smiled. “You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s all right, Miss Clio,” said Marinelli. “One gift for another.”

“Grazie,”
she said, and gave Marco a hug.

Nestor was tugging her jacket.

“What about us?”

Clio knew she couldn’t ask for something for him and the girls. If she did, Marinelli would feel obliged to treat all of them and would probably give a raisin roll to each child. One roll as a trade would be fine, but four was too much for a simple silk moth cocoon that cost the children nothing. She shook Nestor off.

“Mr. Marinelli, could we have our usual
karveli
, please?”

Nestor was frowning, but Clio smiled at Marinelli as she said goodbye and nudged her brother outside.

“What’d you do that for?” cried Nestor. “He would have given us some for free.”

“That’s the point. Keep walking.”

Out on the sidewalk, Sophia wanted to know what Clio had. Clio showed her and then had to show the others as well.

“It’s from Marco.”

“We get some,” said Nestor.

“Don’t whine, Nestor,” she said, tearing off a piece and handing it to him.

“Besides,” he said with a mouthful of roll, “they’re Notaris raisins in there anyhow.”

Clio didn’t bother to remind him that Marinelli had paid for the raisins so they were his now.

After dinner, Clio followed her mother into her parents’ bedroom.

“Can I sit while you get ready?”

“Of course.”

Clio perched on the edge of the bed and watched her mother come and go from her wardrobe to the walnut vanity. Urania draped a dark-green silk gown over the dress stand in the corner and sat at the little cushioned stool before the tri-fold mirrors. Green was her mother’s color, to go with the auburn of her hair. Urania dusted her cheeks with powder and cocked her head to the left and right as she sprayed perfume from a square-cut bottle. She held the bottle in one hand and squeezed the bulb of the cord-covered atomizer with the other as a faint rose scent drifted into the air.

“Why do you leave the dress for last?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

Urania stepped into the dress, pulled it up, and asked Clio to button the back for her. Then she held her topaz choker to her neck and motioned for Clio to clip it fast.

“There.”

Looking at her mother’s reflected image, Clio thought she knew why Urania saved the dress for last. Without the dress, her mother could test how
she
looked. The dress would never be more than a complement; it would never be the source of her beauty. If Clio watched her mother enough, she might gain that kind of confidence.

Once her parents had gone out for the evening, her father in his tailcoat and her mother in that dark-green dress, Clio went up the back stairs to the flat roof of the house. She often went there to think and to find some of the solitude she had looked
for in the clover houses. At times, she imagined herself as an adult—as an actress, or a dancer. The picture was never quite clear. But she always drew confidence from her high-up view of the city streets, reminded of her place in a world she loved, a world that was stable and fully known to her.

Whenever her father caught her coming down from the narrow stairway at the back of the third floor, he said, in a voice that was mostly bewildered but partly annoyed, “What were you doing up there? Going to Hollywood?” He pronounced this incorrectly, Clio was certain, making this very American word sound as though it were part of his native language.
Choleywooud
. With a guttural
H
, a tight
o
, and a
w
that sounded like three letters put together.

Now she opened the door of the little hut on the rooftop and felt a tiny breeze pushing past her into the house. Her hair blew back from her face for a second before she stepped out into the night air. From the northern edge of the roof, she could see the streetlights in rows running down to the giant blackness of the sea. Just at the edge, there were zigzags of light from the tavernas by the docks. And then nothing. There was nothing on the other side of the Gulf of Patras—at least nothing visible tonight—but that way were mountains and more mountains until you reached Albania. And to the northwest was the other blackness of the Adriatic and then Italy, that giant boot tossed onto the water, ready to kick.

She crossed to the southern railing, where she could see men and women in fine clothes getting out of carriages at the concert hall across the street. Looking down at the elegance of the men and women, it was hard to believe that war could touch them. There were a few cars among the carriages—long, sloping, shiny things, like exotic animals. Everything about the scene below her was sleek: the men’s hair, the women’s gowns.
She saw her parents walk up the front steps of the hall. Her father was tall and lean, in his tailcoat and high-collared shirt, and her mother wore a fur stole over her shoulders and white gloves past her elbows.

Her mother raised her arm to greet someone, and her topaz bracelet slid along the glove, like a stream of honey on a tablecloth. Sophia would be given that bracelet when she turned sixteen, and Thalia would get the choker Clio could see now at the nape of her mother’s neck. Already sixteen, Clio had the ring. But she had given it to her mother for this evening, eager that an emblem of her be included with the other two. She imagined she could trace its outline beneath the white silk of her mother’s glove. As she watched her mother swing past her father through the door, she shivered. As long as the war didn’t come, it would be just months until the first parties where she, too, could wear a woman’s gown.

As the days passed, Clio tired of the cocoons. At first she had joined the other children in their vigil, watching for that sign of change that would herald the emergence of a new creature. But when nothing happened day after day, she lost interest. It was Marco who made the cocoons exciting, after all. She felt a jolt of anticipation every time she neared the bakery. She would take Marco aside and hand him one more cocoon to tuck away into a little box beneath the counter. He would check to be sure his grandmother wasn’t looking, and then he would slip a raisin roll into Clio’s hand and wink at her. He looked like an adult, like the men who winked at her when she walked by a taverna, clearly delighted to be doing something mysterious.

But then one day Marinelli was standing behind the counter and Marco was nowhere to be seen. Clio was certain she had noticed him running down the street ahead of them a few
blocks earlier. Marinelli was smiling, but there was something different about him. She glanced over to see if maybe the old woman was sick, but she was there, on her stool, tucked in by the far end of the counter.

“
Ciao
, Mr. Marinelli,” Clio began.

“Miss Clio.”

“Where’s Marco? I have another cocoon for him.” She felt the need to offer something to Marinelli, just to make him become the friendly baker he always was.

“Marco is at home. I can give him the cocoon if you want.”

Clio was not sure what to say. Marco liked their secret trading. But Marinelli was still looking at her that way.

“All right,” she said.

Marinelli smiled at her with tight lips, and then he placed both hands flat on the counter.

“Miss Clio, I can’t let Marco keep trading raisin rolls for these cocoons. I’m sure you understand that our raisin rolls are our specialty and that we use only the best ingredients available. We simply can’t afford to give them away.”

What he meant was that if he didn’t take in four drachmas for each roll, he would lose money, because Notaris raisins were expensive. He was looking at her in a way that told Clio he knew she understood him.

She kept her eyes on him and nodded.

“Can we please have a
karveli
, Mr. Marinelli?” She chose Greek, since it was a matter of business now.

“Of course.” He turned to tug one from a bin on the wall. “Five drachmas.”

She placed the coin in the bronze plate and ushered the others out the door before turning to go back.

“Please do give this to Marco.” She looked Marinelli in the
eyes and her face was on fire. “It’s a gift from us.” She left the cocoon on the counter.

Two days later, Clio tried once more, going into the bakery with a small bag full of cocoons. There were plenty more at the house, and not even Nestor would notice how many she had taken.

“
Geia
, Marco.” The grandmother was at her stool and the boy sat cross-legged on the floor with paper and a colored pencil.

“Geia.”
He gave her a timid smile and came over to see what she was holding.

“For you,” she said, and placed the bag in his hands.

Just then Marinelli came in from the back of the store. Marco slipped away, tucking the bag under his arm.

“One
karveli
, please, Mr. Marinelli,” she said, and set her coin in the bronze dish.

When she took the
karveli
from him, she simply nodded.

“Arrivederci,”
she said this time. She shot out each syllable crisply.

Friday morning, Clio heard low voices, men’s voices, coming from somewhere at the bottom of the house. She leaned over the parapet and peered down, but couldn’t see anything except the chairs and tall plants and the delicate hall table in the pale-blue light of early morning. The other children followed her down the stairs into the sitting room, where they found their parents standing by the radio. Their father told them that, sometime after midnight, Mussolini had sent Metaxas an ultimatum: Let us through, or we’ll force you to let us through. Metaxas had answered in French, which, to Clio, seemed to confirm the utter strangeness of the situation. “
Alors, c’est la guerre
,” he had said. So, it’s war. Already the newspapers
and radio had reduced this debonair statement into one forceful word:
Ochi!

“Ochi!”
her father repeated, slamming his fist into his palm. “
No!
Our soldiers are in Albania even now, pushing those Italians back where they came from.”

“I thought you liked the fascists,
Babá
,” Nestor said.

“I like Metaxas, Nestor. Not that clown Mussolini.”

Clio didn’t say anything, but she thought of Marinelli and his grim mother.

“So, we get to stay home today?” Nestor asked.

“Nonsense. Everything’s fine. We’re not going to run around screaming. Go have your breakfast.”

Clio did not know what to make of this. Nestor and Thalia chattered away while they ate, but Clio held her biscuit in her sweet coffee too long and it fell in. How could the others eat? All summer and all fall, everyone had been waiting and waiting for this war, and now that it had come, they were all behaving as if everything were normal.

Clio led her siblings down Kolokotronis to school, proud to be walking down a street dedicated to a leader of the War of Independence, this day of all days. She saw Marinelli’s up ahead, and for the first time in her life she wished she didn’t have to pass it. It was more than the confusion of the new war; she was suddenly overcome with shame for the way she had focused her eyes on Marinelli two days before and the way she had spoken to him. She could not believe she had dared to behave that way. And that word,
arrivederci
, which rang so oddly now that Italy was their enemy. It was no different from
au revoir
, but that wasn’t what she had meant when she had said it.

Clio turned her head as if she were intensely interested in the groups of people on the other side of the street discussing
the ultimatum. But as she approached the school, she couldn’t help noticing Marco standing by a doorway. He didn’t move until she reached him, and then the little boy sidled away from the building and fell in beside her.

He seemed about to cry.

“What’s the matter, Marco?” she asked. “Are you worried about the war?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “It’s the cocoons. My father says they’re charity and I need to pay you today or I can’t have them.”

Suddenly she was glad she had stood up to Marinelli. He had turned this into something serious, when she had only been trying to play a game with his little boy.