The Clover House (35 page)

Clio’s father met him on the porch.

“What’s this?”

“Parachute. Italian. There must have been a second plane yesterday and—” He made a cutting motion with his hand.

“Did you see the wreck?”

“No. It’s probably up in the mountains. Pilot ditched too soon.”

“What are you doing with it?”

“I don’t want it,” he said. “It’s for you. For the children.”

“Leave it in the barn, then. They’ll find some use for it.”

Clio went to get the others and brought them into the barn to see this new treasure. Sophia pulled the cord for the light-bulb. Vlachos set the parachute down on the dirt floor, where it subsided with a soft exhalation, as if it were alive. In the glare of the bulb, it glowed a soft gray, with its radiating seams picked out in white.

“A parachute,” Thalia said, in her awed voice.

“You can have it,” Vlachos said. He stood over the parachute—as if he had killed it, Clio thought.

That night, the children gathered in Sophia’s and Clio’s room to discuss Vlachos’s gift, if indeed they could see as a gift something whose origins were so mysterious. Their first concern was with the whereabouts of the Italian soldier who should have been attached to the parachute.

“We saw the plane fly away,” Sophia said. “If there was another one that crashed, we would have seen something.”

“What if the plane dropped a spy into the forest and that’s whose parachute it is?” Nestor’s eyes were wide with the thought.

Clio wondered if her lie from last summer and the clover houses could have somehow come true and there really would be spies lurking in the pastures now.

“What if he’s sneaking into the farmyard now?” Thalia said, shaking Nestor by the shoulders and using an ominous voice. “What if he’s creeping up on you,” then she shouted, “right now!”

“Thalia, cut it out!” Nestor said, smacking her arm.

“What I want to know,” Clio said, putting a calming hand on Nestor, “is how Vlachos got the parachute in the first place.”

“He told us,” Sophia said. “The soldier was gone. Probably dead.”

“Maybe he chased him away,” Nestor suggested.

But Clio had darker thoughts. Either the man was dangling from a tree somewhere, wounded horribly and crying out where no one could hear him, or he had died in the fall. Or he survived but Vlachos had killed him. Clio imagined Vlachos stooped over a fallen cypress, chopping its trunk into logs and suddenly seeing the paratrooper limping toward him, with blood perhaps smearing his face. A swift blow of the ax would have been enough to kill the wounded man. Then Vlachos would have followed the bloody trail back to where the parachute hung draped in the trees.

Thalia’s voice brought her back.

“What if the soldier’s lying there dead and we’re going to find him someday when we’re out playing?” As Thalia spoke the words, Clio saw her realize that she had described an actual, and terrifying, possibility.

“I’m sure he’s just gone, Thalia,” she said.

The idea of an Italian soldier loose in the neighboring forest was far less worrisome than the idea that Vlachos might have used violence against an acknowledged enemy. The soldier was exotic, connected in her imagination to the cloud of airy silk he must have descended with. Vlachos was the squat, stubbled man she had first seen bloody and dirty in the farmyard.

She made a point to watch Vlachos carefully, and when she encountered him in the kitchen the next afternoon, she braced herself, waiting for him to seize a knife and reveal the violent man he had been all along. He simply greeted her in his usual gruff way and took a basket of scraps out to the horse trough.

At dinner, Clio’s mother announced her plan for the parachute. The time for Carnival had come and gone, but there had been no official Carnival in Patras that year. So they would hold a Carnival of their own on the farm, and they would use the parachute silk to make costumes.

“I thought wings would be nice,” her mother said. “Butterfly wings.”

Clio remembered the dusty brown wings of the silk moths and wondered if the dingy gray parachute could turn into something better.

Work started the next day. None of the rooms of the house were large enough to spread the parachute out into an un-creased circle, so they all carried the fabric to the pasture. Each child held an edge of the silk and tossed it up so that it crackled smooth. Then they backed away from one another, pulling the
fabric taut, snapping it flat before laying it back down on the new grass. With a fat pastel crayon, Clio’s mother traced the outlines for the wings onto the silk and then cut them out with shears. She gathered the silk toward her little by little, the shears grinding with each cut.

Vlachos passed by the pasture once or twice with the cart while they helped with the cutting, but he only scanned the scene for an instant before moving on. Clio suspected he did not like to be reminded of the violent deed that had put the parachute in his hands. He was anxious, she thought, to have the thing cut up and turned into something else, something unrecognizable as an Italian soldier’s potential lifesaver.

But so was she. The longer the parachute remained intact, the more her imagination would continue to play out violent scenarios. Whenever they shook the cloth out into the air, a faint odor of oil and metal wafted up from it, and she could almost feel the gritty slide of engine grease on her fingers. She could not imagine wanting to place this cloth next to her skin or across her back, and the idea she had had of asking her mother to make the extra fabric into a gown for her now seemed abhorrent. Then there was something else. When she had picked up the parachute to lift it for the very first time, she had seen that there were thick canvas cords sewn onto the outer edge of the cloth in several places but that these cords had been roughly cut. Now the image in her mind was of Vlachos swinging at the Italian’s harness with his ax and then watching the man slam down to the ground. Clio might have been reluctant to join the others in their silken wings, but she could not wait until the parachute and all its reminders of death and danger had been cut into pieces.

Once the pattern pieces were cut out, Irini helped Clio’s mother clean them in the galvanized washing tub with water
boiled on the stove. When the washing was done, the children carried the wings out to the clotheslines behind the kitchen and pinned them up to dry. In the afternoon sun, the pieces of silk glowed white and gray and blue where their shadows overlapped. As Clio walked among the growing number of wings hung up on the lines, her shadow passed across the silk as if on a set of screens.

“Sophia, stand over there,” she said, directing her sister to the other side of a piece of cloth.

Clio struck a series of poses—arms extended, toes pointed in an arabesque, back arched. She flipped up the collar of her jacket and thrust her hands into her pockets. She stuck her chin up and out.

“Who’s that?” asked Sophia.

Clio snapped out of the pose. “It’s Hepburn,” she said, hands on hips now, her shadow arms making sharp points at her sides. “Can’t you tell?”

Thalia laughed, catching Sophia’s eye.

“I thought you were a man.”

“No,” Clio said. “If I were a man, I’d look like this.” And she turned sideways, slouched, and pulled her jacket out to make a fatter stomach. It was the shape they all knew from watching Vlachos, unmistakably his squat and almost sullen posture.

The next morning, they gathered the wings from the clotheslines and spread them out across the floor of the porch. Their mother had assembled her paints and her brushes and had pulled on the wide smock she always kept in her easel. She asked the girls to hold the silk taut and began to paint the fabric with bold strokes of magenta and orange and a fine tracery of black lines to connect the patterns. Clio stared down at the oil paint, waiting for the moment when the lines and colors
would resolve themselves into the whorls and circles of a butterfly’s coloring.

“Clio, let it lie smooth,” her mother said, and she saw that she had been rubbing the silk between her finger and thumb the way a baby worries a blanket. She put her hands in her lap and sat back from the cloth.

By early afternoon, the porch was scattered with painted silk, and the children stood around as if dazed, sighing in admiration of their mother’s work. Urania, too, sighed happily at what she had made and brushed her auburn hair out of her face with a paint-dotted hand. The wings were beautiful, Clio knew, and she forced herself to concentrate on that beauty. But when she lifted a wing from the porch, she felt the tiny stitches of the seams like scars running across the fabric. Staring down at the painted silk as she walked toward the clothesline, she lost the pattern. All she could see were patches of color striated with the lines of the brush and dotted here and there with bits of grit that had blown onto the porch. Only when she reached the clothesline and pinned her wing back up in the sun did she manage to replace the image of the stranded Italian with the fact of the light shining through the painted fabric. She stood back and saw the silk transformed finally into a butterfly wing, brilliant in its coloring and complex in its design.

For the rest of the day, Clio found reasons to wander over to the little yard behind the kitchen and watch the wings swing in the breeze, their brilliant colors catching the sun. She half-expected the summer’s butterflies to come early, swarming over the silken wings, drawn to the farm by the fragrance of the oil paint and by these grand images of themselves. Nestor wandered around the corner of the house and suddenly stopped, mesmerized by the light sway of the painted fabric.

“Oh,” he sighed.

Even the adults were tempted by the wings and stood in the kitchen doorway or by the side of the house simply to enjoy these splendid decorations. When Vlachos saw them, he smiled, but Clio remembered the cut cords she had noticed around the edges of the cloth and shivered at the image of Vlachos cutting down some handsome, dark-haired young man.

Callie

Saturday

I wake up very early, with only a dim gray light coming through the edge of the curtain. I lie in bed, relishing the duvet’s cloud of encompassing warmth, eager to swap my heavy wool and flannel for one of these as soon as I get home. I miss home. I miss Jonah. Fingering his grandmother’s ring, I roll onto my right side, the side that faces Jonah in our loft bed, and try to imagine myself without him. Not just without him in the bed, or sitting on the couch, or by my elbow at The Sevens—but without him in my life. I have done this before: sent a man away, or made it inevitable that he would send me packing. And, every time, the separation has felt not only inevitable but intrinsic to who I am. I am a person apart.

Of course I recognize the fallacy in this. A truly solitary person wouldn’t mourn a lover’s loss. A truly solitary person would find him, love him, and then kick him out. I suppose in her strange way, my mother was trying to warn me not to be this kind of person. As I lie here, I realize I don’t want to run through this same sad process with Jonah. And what is it about Jonah that has made it so? I have no idea.

Through the wall, I notice a faint thudding, and I realize this is what must have woken me up. A woman’s voice lets out a stifled cry. I smile and roll the other way, and I pull the duvet up around my ears to give Aliki and Nikos their privacy.

With Jonah, I always thought it started with sex. But it really began with that evening of quiet sadness by the bar and went quickly from there to a different need: my need for some other person from whom I could hide, someone who got so close that the act of holding back would be a source of solace. Jonah is, or was, that person.

I wait for the noises to stop in the next room and then I get up and get dressed. I tuck a red button-down shirt into my jeans and fasten a wide black leather belt that goes with my boots. I brush my hair silk-straight.

I find Aliki in the kitchen in her nightgown. Nikos is in his pajamas, watching soccer on the television. The apartment has the feel of Christmas, with the adults relaxing so visibly and Demetra in a state of high excitement. She comes sliding into the kitchen on stocking feet outstretched as if on a skateboard and crashes into the table.

“It’s the parade, it’s the parade, it’s the parade!” she crows, and Aliki presses her hand gently across the girl’s mouth, steering her back out of the kitchen. As soon as Aliki releases her, Demetra resumes crowing until Nikos shushes her and turns up the soccer volume. Aliki wipes her hand on her apron.

“She licked my hand!” she says, in amused disgust. “You’re getting out just in time,” she says, seeing me dressed and ready. This is the day of the biggest parade, when every club and team marches with its own float.

“I’m going over to the aunts’,” I say.

“More questions?”

“Aren’t you dying to know?”

She shrugs. “Dying, no. But tell me what they say.”

Nikos shouts at the television and smacks his leg in exasperation. It occurs to me that I have been treating him as tangential in all of this, even though he seems to understand how our family works better than the rest of us.