The Clover House (28 page)

The young man’s eyes are mischievous. He seems to be at the farm, or
a
farm. I wonder who took the photograph. Who is he smiling at with such a lazy joy? I think about my mother’s reaction to the pictures I gave her, and I convince myself that this young man’s eyes hold the answer to that question. I prop the photo up on a bookcase and keep on sifting through the collection, every now and then glancing over at that smiling face.

There is a rap on the front door and I see right away that it is my mother for the third time, coming like a troll in some fairy story. Her small, erect shape is a blurred shadow on the frosted glass.

I swing the heavy door open and stand on the sill.

“You’re persistent.”

“Good afternoon, Calliope,” she says.

“What are you doing here,
Mamá
? Didn’t we say enough yesterday?”

“Calliope,” she whispers loudly, glancing over her shoulder. “Let me in, for God’s sake.”

I let her in and stand back while she walks through the foyer like someone who has never been to the house before—slowly, as if not wanting to disturb the air.

“Let me guess,” I say. “Constantopoulos called you.”

“Who?”

“The lawyer,
Mamá
.”

“Yes, I understand you’ve opened your uncle’s letter.”

“I have. Why didn’t you just tell me it was there? We could have gone together. I might have even let you read it first.”

She snorts.

“Why don’t you trust me, Mother? I have no reason to keep you from your brother’s memory. But what I don’t understand is why you seem to feel I shouldn’t be here. It’s what he wanted. Don’t be mad at me, be mad at him.”

“Oh, I am mad at him, Calliope. I am furious at him.”

We stare at each other for a moment. Her face reddens uncharacteristically.

“I’m sorry it’s all like this,
Mamá
. Maybe you can help me.”

She gives me a wary look. I sigh, exasperated.

“Fine,” she says.

To start things off easy, I bring her the photograph of the young man.

“Who is this?”

She gives the photo a quick glance.

“I don’t know.”

She moves toward a stack of papers on a low table.

“Are you sure?” I ask, bringing the photo closer. She peers at the image, then sighs dismissively.

“One of the refugees. At the farm.”

“Like in those other pictures I gave you?”

“Yes.” She shrugs and turns back to the papers, riffling through them casually.

“How long were they there?”

“A few months. I don’t know.”

“That’s a long time. Who were they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where were they from, what did they do? Who were they?”

She walks over to the other side of the room, where I have set the war-years pile.

“They came from Patras, Calliope, because their houses were destroyed during the bombings.”

As she talks, her hands continue their restless movement over the boxes, nudging them aside to read Nestor’s labels on the tops, lifting the lids. I think about that box from yesterday, with the feathers in it. That’s what she’s looking for. But I can play this game, pretending neither of us knows what’s going on. And, besides, it’s the refugees I want to hear about now.

“When did they come?” I ask.

“When? After the first day of the war. The planes came over from Italy, started dropping bombs, and the teachers sent us all home while the bombs were falling into the streets.”

“They didn’t send you to a shelter?”

“Nobody had a shelter. Nobody thought about shelter.”

“So these people just showed up one day because they were bombed out. What were they like?”

“Again with this question,” she mutters.

“Well, I want to know. And maybe it will help. What was his name?”

She bangs her hands on the lid of a box.

“It won’t help anything. Why do you care so much about these refugees? They showed up one day, we took them in, and
they left. They were poor people with no homes and we helped them. Isn’t that enough?”

Her face is trembling and her jaw is set. If I didn’t know her any better, I would think she was about to cry.

“I think,” I say slowly, “you were in love with him.”

My mother bursts out laughing. “In love with him? With the
refugee
?”

Her emphasis on the last word makes it clear that my suggestion of a class-crossing romance is preposterous. She is offended, but I can also see that she is relieved at my mistake. I decide to push, using her laughter and my own smile as cover for a harder question.

“You must have been in love with
someone
then,
Mamá
.”

Instantly, her mood changes; whatever opening I had closes shut.

“You’re in here all day, finding things you don’t know the meaning of and that you will never understand, and you are getting everything wrong.” She slaps the box and picks up her coat from the chair where she has draped it. “You’ve gotten everything wrong.”

“I’ve already asked you: Help me.”

She turns around. The guarded look is back, without the smile.

The phone rings, and my first thought is that it could be Constantopoulos with another message from Nestor.

“Help you do what?” my mother asks.

“Help me get the story right.”

“No,” she says. “It’s not your story. It’s not anyone’s
story
. It’s my life.”

She catches herself, and I know she has admitted too much.

I signal her to wait and I go to the study to pick up the phone.

“Neh?”

“Callie.” The voice is hushed, almost somber, and it takes me a second to recognize Stelios. My breath catches.

“Stelios, how did you get this number?” I cup my hand over the mouthpiece.

“Your cousin.” He pauses. “Callie, I need to see you.”

“Why?”

“Where are you?”

“In my uncle’s house, Stelios, and you can’t come here.”

“Callie, I can look it up. Nestor Notaris. He’ll be in the book.”

“Stelios, don’t.”

“Calliope!” my mother calls.

“Wait,” I tell her.

“Who is that?” Stelios asks.

“My mother is here,” I whisper into the phone.

“Get rid of her,” he says, and his voice sounds like sex.

“I can’t.”

“You can’t tell me that was all you wanted last night.”

It wasn’t. The thought of letting Stelios in now and clearing space among the boxes makes every inch of my skin flush with warmth.

“It was,” I say. “I’m sorry. What would my
fiancé
say?”

“What would
you
say?”

“And what would Anna say? Are you forgetting her?”

“What would
you
say?”

Nothing, for a while. My mother clears her throat. I can hear Stelios breathing. I curl myself around the phone, and into this space that seems to hold his breath and body and lips, I answer slowly.

“What do you want me to say?”

“The name of the street where your uncle lives.”

“Ellinos Stratiotou,” I tell him. “Number forty-two.”

The line clicks off and I place the black handset down in the cradle of the phone as if it were made of glass. When I turn around, conscious that my cheeks are burning, my mother is still holding her coat in her hand. I have a moment’s fear that she has just removed it and is planning to stay.

“Meeting someone?” she asks.

I think of lies I could tell her, like a teenager whose mother is actually paying attention.

“Yes,” I say.

“Remember what I told you yesterday,” she says.

“It’s too late for advice,
Mamá
.”

I take her coat and hold it out for her. She looks at me for a moment before stretching her arm into the sleeve. As soon as I have closed the door behind her, I go to the kitchen to open the bottle of wine I have spotted in one of the cupboards. I pour a large glass and drink it quickly, then walk around the house, alternately knowing I should never have told Stelios the address and waiting to see his silhouette against the streetlit glass of the door. When I do finally see a shadow in the glass, I open the door and draw him in, already loosening his belt while he shrugs off his jacket and undoes the buttons of my shirt.

We don’t wait for the clothes to come off. We stop long enough for me to put the condom on him and then keep going. Our skin squeaks and chafes and our bones press into the floor, against the furniture, into the walls. The sex is hard, nearly violent, and it is fun. When he makes me come, I tug so hard at his hair that he cries out, brings his head up, and bites a fold of skin by my navel.

Afterward, we don’t say much as we straighten the dining room chairs and stand the coatrack back up. We each take an end of the hall rug and set it back into place.

“Must have been a burglary in here,” he says, trying to make me laugh.

“We can’t leave any sign, Stelios. If we do, they’ll know.”

“In this mess?” He gestures at the boxes.

He dusts his hands off on his pants while he stoops to dig his shirt out of a corner of the living room. I am putting on mine but he starts to do the job for me, kissing once between my breasts for each button.

“When do we get to do this again?”

I laugh. “No, Stelios. This is over now. There’s no again.”

“Come on, Callie. What’s the harm?”

“Anna. There’s the harm.”

“You don’t get it.” He laughs. “We’re not that way, Anna and I. It’s just not that serious.”

“I’d rather hear that from Anna, if you don’t mind—which isn’t going to happen, because no one is going to find out about what we did.”

“In which case,” he says, talking over me, “the only one who matters is Jonah, and you haven’t said a word about him the whole time I’ve been here.”

“We weren’t exactly having a conversation, Stelios.”

Of course he’s right. And when I finally get him to go, I sit on the chair in the hall and think about what he and I did and what that means for me and Jonah. I have to tell him. And when I tell him, we’ll both realize that it was over as soon as he proposed to me, and he will write me an email telling me goodbye. My mother will have been right. When I return to Boston, my things will be in boxes, just like Nestor’s things, stacked in
a corner of the room so that I hardly need to set my foot in the apartment to get the hell out of his life.

I stay in Nestor’s house until the hunger in my stomach becomes too painful to ignore. The kitchen clock says it is ten thirty-five. I toss back the last of the wine, rinse the glass, switch off the lights, and leave.

Clio

November 1940

Clio and Sophia were in the kitchen of the farm, boiling sugar beets in a giant pot to make a thick syrup. The smell from the pot was bitter and sharp, and Clio hated to think that they were reduced to putting this mess into their coffee and cakes as a substitute for sugar. Never mind that she and her sister now had to help in the kitchen, since there were so many more chores to do. She gave the pole-handled spoon to Sophia and went to chop some more beets for the next batch before Irini could come in and scold her for being lazy.

She heard a man clearing his throat and turned to see a tall figure in the doorway. From the shape of his shadow against the sunny farmyard, she could see that he was wearing a suit and that he held a fedora by his side.

Clio gripped the chopping knife tightly. This time, at least, she would be able to do more than scream and run away, as she had last summer.

“Please,” he said, taking one step into the kitchen. “I’ve come from the city. I’m looking for somewhere to stay.”

That was why the Notaris family was at the farm. The Italians might be losing the war up north in Epirus and Albania, but down here they could terrorize the Greeks from the air. Patras’s harbor was easy pickings for them, so close to Brindisi just across the sea, so they continued to pound it with bombing raids that hit the rest of the city as well. Though only ten kilometers away from the harbor, the farm was beyond the zone that the Italians aimed for. Their bombers seemed almost too lazy to bother with the countryside, though they must have known that many had escaped there.

Clio saw that this stranger was a young man, no more than twenty, with dark straight hair and a cleft chin.

“You’d better talk to our father.”

“And that I will,” he said. “Where would I find him?”

“In the main part of the house. By the porch.”

The young man tipped his hat before putting it back on and heading out into the yard. Clio rushed to the door to watch him go, but Sophia pulled her inside.

“Don’t gawk,” she said. “You don’t know who he is.”

“He’s wearing a waistcoat and a watch chain. He’s not a tramp.”

“He probably stole the watch. And the waistcoat.”

But Clio had already been drawn in, attracted by the way the young man had waved the hat above his head, nodding downward as he did so but peering up at her with a grin. She waited until he was up the stairs and through the house door and then followed him across the farmyard, stopping on the porch so that she could peer into the house through a window.