Three Junes Page 3

  Paul laughs, too drunk to feel guilty. Jack leans toward him and says, “So which one, Paulie, which one would you have? Just supposing.”

  “Me?” Paul is so stiff that he longs to lie down then and there, on the grimy tiled floor. “I’m too decrepit for shenanigans of that sort.”

  “Oh rot. Bull, as those Americans would say. Look at you.”

  Paul looks down at himself, as if he will make an invigorating discovery. He pretends that pondering the choice is an effort. “The blonde, I suppose. I like her wild hat. Her pink skin.”

  “Her wild hat. Her pink skin. Oh Paulie.” Jack laughs hard, leaning on the bar, shaking his head. “Bucko, that hat would be the first thing to go.” He picks up the napkin he wore as the hat and lets it drift to the floor.

  MAUREEN BECAME SICK—or her sickness chose to show itself—almost a year ago, in the summer. Despite her jesting about the surgery (“Just a long-overdue rearrangement of my soul!”), her sons all came home: Fenno from New York, Dennis from Paris, David from two counties north. Fenno’s homecoming was the most momentous, because he had traveled the greatest distance and came home least often, but it was marred for Paul by Fenno’s unexpected traveling companion, a young American named Mal.

  Mal was a perfectly easy, considerate houseguest, but his flawless courtesy seemed like a screen. Sometimes when Mal and Fenno were upstairs in the room they shared, Paul could hear waves of sardonic laughter. Clearly Mal, yet he never laughed that way in Paul’s presence.

  Handsome but frail, Mal looked as if someone had carefully slipped the muscles and tendons out of his arms and legs, like stays from a dress, leaving him only brittle bones and sallow, translucent flesh. Perhaps he wasn’t ill, Paul argued with himself—or wasn’t ill with what it seemed the obvious and hence shameful conclusion to draw. Perhaps he was simply one of those ascetic young people who, having never been shortchanged on sustenance, used self-deprivation as a means of expressing scorn at what they saw as their parents’ myopic pleasures. Every time he heard Mal’s name, Paul could not help thinking of its French significance. Mal wore cologne, a grassy scent that was strongest in the mornings. Les fleurs du mal, thought Paul the first time he smelled it. His fears left him helplessly petty.

  When Paul was finally alone with Fenno, the third day of the visit, he asked if the boy’s name was Malcolm (perhaps Paul could address him that way).

  “Malachy. But God, no one ever calls him that.” They had taken the collies out for a run in the field across the burn. It was Maureen’s first overnight in hospital. Mal was taking a nap. “You don’t like him, do you,” said Fenno. “You’re so uptight.”

  Paul sighed. “Do you want me not to like him? I’ve spent the sum of a few hours in his company. And if I’m ‘up tight,’ it’s probably because your mother’s having her chest sliced open first thing tomorrow.” Fenno’s proliferating Americanisms depressed Paul, as if they were proof that he had chosen, literally, new patronage. (Of Paul’s three sons, the oldest was, ironically, the one who made him feel the most outmoded.)

  “You’re free to like him or not, Dad.”

  The collies ran helter skelter in widening, playful circles, but they never barked. Paul did not worry that they might bolt. They wouldn’t leave the circle of Maureen’s influence, even if she was not physically present.

  Fenno approached his father and put a hand on his back. Paul welcomed the physical warmth of the gesture and wondered if it was meant to be consoling or conciliatory. “Mal is a good friend,” said Fenno. “So could you just be less of a Brit and act like you care about knowing him, just a little? Do more than give him tours of the manor and speeches on why we Scots are anything but English?” Fenno laughed and pulled his hand away, reaching down to stroke one of the dogs. “Do you know one of the first things I loved about New York? People don’t waste any time telling you what they aren’t. Nobody has that strict an identity, never mind nonidentity.”

  “I’ve given speeches? What speeches?” Paul said.

  “Dad, you know what I mean. All that if-we-had-our-own-leadership crap; God save the Queen, but keep her the hell down below. It’s de rigueur when Americans visit, I know. Just get past it.”

  Get past it. A piece of advice Paul had never heard in so few words. Perhaps it was a motto he ought to have stitched or tattooed somewhere, to snap him out of his retentive ways.

  “So give me the truth,” Fenno said. “About Mum.”

  Back then, her prognosis looked hopeful, though the cancer had begun its campaign abroad. As Paul told Fenno what the doctors had said, as he talked about chemotherapy schedules and surgeries, he felt himself levitating over the field, above his own head, and one of the many voices in his incessantly verbal self told him that on this already fateful piece of land, on this beautiful summer afternoon, a few simple observations about his own son had finally crossed the blood-brain barrier and were shooting toward his heart: Fenno would never move back from his expatriate life, he knew his own mind more surely than Paul knew his, and he was a homosexual. The third acknowledgment was more oblique than the others, but of course it stood out the largest (though it shouldn’t, Paul knew). It stood out as both a relief and a terror. A relief because for several years he had only pretended to know. A terror because if his son was ill, too—though Fenno looked healthy in an offhand way, in the most reassuring way—Paul would not bear it. He would crumble and disintegrate, like dead leaves underfoot.

  The inevitably childish bargain crossed his mind: If I have to lose one of them, take her. “Biology speaking,” Maureen would have said; she would have applauded. But Paul did not want to give so much credence to the grandiosity of genes.

  Within a few days, Mal left for London, but from that moment in the field until Fenno’s departure a fortnight later, Paul could not speak to his son without the fear that his panic would puddle brightly around him, like milk from a bottle dropped on slate. He could not make his voice sound anything other than phlegmy and distant, his turns of phrase stilted and prim. Fenno’s contempt was quietly apparent, but he did not criticize his father again. Paul lay awake for hours each night trying to think of a way to find out what he needed to know. There might be a way to ask, but he couldn’t imagine waiting for the answer without knowing it first.

  One morning, from the library, Paul had watched the two men head back into the fields, Fenno pointing out trees and birds. Fenno loved birds; when he was a child, they kept a small piece of paper taped to one window in each room of the house so that anyone who spotted a new species could write it down then and there. Paul had left the lists up even after Fenno moved to New York. Gradually, the sunlight had faded the names of the birds, first on the windows facing south and last of all the north, until they had vanished altogether, leaving no record. Maureen, always less sentimental than Paul, took them all down while he was away on a trip.

  Spying on Fenno and Mal, Paul never saw them hold hands or embrace, though he assumed they must, and he thought how, all of a sudden, that might not be so awful. Just weeks ago, it would have upset him tremendously. Paul remembered his own father’s reaction when he announced his engagement to Maureen, the disappointment muted but clear. Paul harbored a disappointment in Fenno, but it was not about his choices in love or because he might not produce heirs.

  Fenno ran a bookstore—a logical enterprise for the son who, in Paul’s memory as a child of five or nine or twelve, was always reading. But Fenno was the one Paul had hoped would take over the paper—even after Fenno went overseas to get an American doctorate. Neither of the twins had shown much interest in anything to do with the veneration of language. David was a veterinary surgeon, his mother’s son; Dennis, a romantic like his father but without intellectual cravings, was (after years of meandering) studying to be a chef. When these two came of age and, simultaneously, emptied the small trusts left by their grandfather to follow their respective curiosities, Paul looked on happily. He loved their separateness and, when they shared their enthusias
ms, felt the privilege of being admitted to different worlds. But when Fenno took some (only a prudent fraction) of his inheritance and invested it in his own business, Paul felt instinctively, illogically betrayed. Again and again, he reminded himself how enslaved he’d felt to his father’s desires (though he could have denied them without any dire consequence); still, he came away feeling wounded.

  Maureen came home for good in mid-December. As Paul pointed out their house to the ambulance driver, he saw against the hedgerow an obscenely white car that he knew must be Fenno’s, the one he’d have hired at the airport. Fenno he found standing before a fire in the living room. “There you are,” said Fenno, as if Paul were the child, hiding out from a scolding. Fenno’s coldness was painful, but it was not a surprise, not since Paul had bungled his visit five months before.

  Beside Fenno, Mal rose quickly from Paul’s reading chair. Greet-ing him, Paul struggled against the same revulsion he’d felt in the summer. (Was the young man frailer? He was certainly paler, but this was winter.)

  So now, as Maureen was being carried across the snow into their house, as Paul wanted so much to feel his sons hold him together, secure him like a seaworthy knot, Fenno seemed lost to him entirely. He remained between Paul and the fireplace, so miraculously close, but he might as well have been back at his home in New York, a home Paul had never seen and now supposed he never would. His oldest son, after the funeral—which would be soon—might become little more than an address on the flimsy blue tissue of an airborne letter. If that.

  Paul instructed the orderlies to take the bed and the equipment upstairs to the library. There, Maureen could look out at the kennel. Her three favorite dogs were given free roam of the house. Most of the time they lay on the floor near Maureen’s bed, but once Paul caught them chasing one another up the front stairs, skidding on the hallway runners. He thought of the boys when they were small, their never-ending war games. He thought of Fenno, making an imaginary conflagration of the house and everything in it. Cupping both hands around his mouth, Fenno had been able to broadcast a near-perfect air-raid siren; every time, for an instant, the wail made his father’s chest throb with fear.

  “LUNG CANCER,” he told Jack. “A terribly ordinary death, you might say. Or an ordinary terrible death. But she died at home. All of us there. The children—our sons, not children anymore by a long stretch, in fact. A bright day. How we’d all like to go.” It sounded as if he were composing a telegram.

  They were sitting together on the airplane from London to Athens. Jack, who seemed to use teasing as a way of forcing acquaintance with people he liked (and it worked), had asked how an obviously attractive, apparently independent chap like Paul could wind up alone on a guided tour. “Not your usual follower,” Jack had said. “Or should I say not one of mine.”

  “Christ, sorry,” he said now. “Christ, that’s a trial.”

  Paul held his hands up and shook his head. “Please. I came to escape how sorry everyone feels for me every bloody minute of my life these past six months. My sons fuss at me as if I’m an invalid, one foot in the grave myself. At the office they fuss. My old friends fuss.”

  “Bet your old friends’ wives make another kind of fuss.”

  They laughed together. Paul looked out the window and saw the Alps. Maureen had loved flying, loved seeing everything pressed below her like a map. She liked the thrill of vertigo when the plane banked to turn, when the earth tipped up alongside you—mountains and rivers reaching inside you and seizing your heart.

  Below him now, horizon to horizon, June was spreading its green, abundant promise, disputing the few peaks that guarded their snow. Up close, there would be flowers, wildflowers, yellow and purple and white. One long-ago June, Paul and Maureen had driven somewhere along these slopes, tiny Fenno asleep in a crib they’d wedged into the car (there was none of this safety gear back then; most parents were too young to fret about dangers unseen). They had pulled into a field of flowers to eat their lunch. After the food, they made love until Fenno’s crying interrupted them. As she changed the wet nappy (Paul wistfully stroking the small of her back), Maureen had said, “Well then, we shall just have to find this place again when our children are grown.” The multiple expectations in her simple remark had thrilled Paul; he was so naive.

  When he turned away from the window, he told Jack that he had traveled a great deal, but never on a tour. “But now . . . now I like the idea of everything planned. No surprises.”

  “Ah, but I can’t promise you no surprises,” said Jack.

  Jack was thirty-six, Fenno’s age. There, all similarity ended. Jack was not willowy, not soft-featured, not articulate in a well-schooled way. He was compact, muscular, ruddy. He had the body of a swimmer and the coloring of the fair-haired Italians Paul remembered from Verona and Venice. Like a fox, he had shrewd glassy eyes, very blue, and a long sharp nose. He spoke with a trace of Yorkshire farmhand. Jack reminded Paul of fleeting friendships he’d made in the war, with men from a different but parallel world. He felt a quick, irrational trust and warmth—nothing of the distance he kept these days, without wanting to, from his sons.

  Jack had been married once, briefly and much too young. Took the taste for it out of his mouth. He had managed a pub; after the marriage ended, he took his savings and went to Greece for a year, hitched around, lived here and there. He made good money now, running these tours. Exhausting at first—twelve tours back to back—but he had learned how to relax. And then, five months off. A good life. No complaints. He had a girl in London, but she was easy. An actress in her late twenties: too ambitious to settle down, and the mere thought of children made her shudder.

  PAUL HAD ALWAYS ASSUMED that at the end, whenever it might be, he and Maureen would have great stretches of time together, alone. They would talk about everything. But why should this have been so? Even while Maureen was in hospital, there was still the paper to print, the dogs to feed and exercise, the friends to reassure: more occupations than ever. And his sons’ presence in the last weeks, however welcome, created yet more tasks, more diversions. At times, they seemed to move about the house—fondling objects, appraising pictures—as if they were about to divide its possessions and take them all away. Though Paul knew they were only drawing memories from their surroundings, he sometimes wanted to shout, “I am still very much alive! You’re not about to be orphaned!”

  A week before Maureen died, the jetliner with the bomb on board shattered in the air over Lockerbie. When the news came, Paul was sitting beside her, reading aloud from My Dog Tulip. By then, Maureen rarely spared the breath it took to speak, but as Paul crossed the room to take the call, he heard her say hoarsely, “Rodgie boy, my little king.” She was looking past Paul to where the dog stood, returning her look. She touched an ear, one of so many signals whose precise meanings Paul had never summoned the interest to learn, and Rodgie shot past him and jumped up beside her. When Paul rang off, she did not ask what the call was about. Her hands were buried in the dog’s coat, teasing out a burr. Paul knew then that they would not really talk to each other, not intimately, not even idly, ever again.

  Seen from every angle, the week was a tragedy, a crippling chaos. Divine vengeance, thought Paul, worse than anything he had seen or felt in the war. The morning after the crash was the only day he left Maureen, driving to Lockerbie with a detective whose daughter had long ago, for a summer, captivated Dennis. Together, the two men pressed through crowds and crossed barricades to walk through scatterings of oily, singed debris. In many places there was little to see but fragments—their smallness a horror in itself—and they looked so consistently obscure to Paul that he saw a kind of visual frolic in the wreckage: a sonata of quirky shapes, dark against the newly frosted ground, like a painting by Miró. As the detective stopped to speak with one of the men collecting the pieces and placing them in numbered, zippered plastic bags, the toe of Paul’s boot uncovered a glint of gold. Turning his back to the policemen, he squatted, shielding the object from their
view. Slowly, he lifted a shiny cylinder and held it in his gloved palm. It was a bright gold tube of lipstick, fallen intact from the sky. Without hesitating, he slipped it in a pocket. Walking alongside the detective again, he focused on the fog of his own breath, reminding himself to inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. When he got home, he went straight to the scullery sink and vomited.

  For five days he did not sleep. He forbade everyone who entered the house to mention the crash in front of Maureen. She no longer read the paper. From a mask, and then from plastic tendrils that snaked up her nostrils, she drank oxygen like an elixir whose magic was fading.

  TWO

  “THIS SEEMS TO BE A VERY SMALL ISLAND,” he says when there she is, yet again, on the boat from Paros to Delos.

  “Only so much to do, I guess.” Fern seems embarrassed but pleased.

  Jack passes them with a fast grin. “You tailing us, girl?”

  Paul sits beside her. “How fortunate for us, then.”

  Jack is on the foredeck with the captain. Old familiars, they laugh and joke in Greek. Jack wears dark spectacles that flash back the sun as he talks. Most of the others have gone below, nervous about the swells. For a sunny day, the sea is oddly rough, and the boat, a graceless trawler, bucks and creaks against the wharf. Jack has assured everyone that once they’re moving, the water will seem a lot smoother.

  “I’m guessing there’s a storm out there,” says Fern.

  “If there is, it’s a ways off. Nothing to worry about,” says Paul.