Last Christmas, when I remained in New York, Dennis sent pictures of his family. Looking at the happy group posed in his dining room in France, I felt a jolt of envy when I saw, displayed in a rustic hutch behind my pretty nieces, that very set of plates. Of course, they suit Véronique perfectly.
IT’S TRUE: I can’t resist spying on people—though I won’t go out of my way to do so. So once the two couples have gone indoors, I sit back at the table with a glass of good wine and gaze at the house as if it were a mechanized dollhouse in a Christmas display at a swish department store. Through the kitchen windows, Dennis seems to dance at his chores, and I wonder if that might be how a chef gets through a long night on his feet. (A mazurka to sauté the garlic, a jig to grill the meat; then foxtrot the soup to a simmer and waltz the chocolate glaze right onto those tortes.) I watch him dump leeks by armfuls onto the table and palm a stone to sharpen a knife the length of a small umbrella.
Upstairs, the light in the library spills out the window. This is now as much David’s room as it is—was—our father’s; he moved his files in months ago, though news cuttings from Dad’s days at the Yeoman still cover the walls. I watch David lift the receiver from the telephone. In a moment he frowns, then laughs, then walks along the window surveying the night as he speaks to his underling. Though, it occurs to me, suppose he’s ringing a mistress?
With this thought, I look left, to the room at the end of the house where Dennis and his family are staying. There, the light is low. Side by side, my two sisters-in-law stand in silhouette. They look down together—at one of the children, no doubt. What wouldn’t I bet Véronique is busy extolling the perfection of her child’s fair skin, silky hair, eloquently curling toes.
I might have insisted the children have my old room, but the room where they are staying, the one Dennis once shared with David, is by far the largest on the second floor. Even with a cot and two mattresses spread on the carpet, there’s plenty of space to move about. When we were children, the room felt even larger because, for some unknown reason, there’s a ladder which ascends through a trapdoor to a tiny self-contained room with a huge fan-shaped window. I envied my brothers this funny little attic, which Mum named the foxhole; she’d call from below, “Any soldiers brave enough to dodge the bombs for a spot of tea?” or “Retreat for supper, troops!” But she seemed to respect its privacy, so it became like a treehouse, a repository for all manner of boy debris: fossilized cowpies, rodent skulls, comic books, homemade weapons, rusted horseshoes, and probably, long after my last ascent, racy magazines.
From this aerie, you can view the acreage out back for miles. When we were young, Angus cows and Shropshire sheep grazed this land, most of it open fields. (Now, two vast modern houses look back at ours, though from a stately distance.) Two or three mornings a week, in autumn and spring, the livestock would be confined to the barns and a foxhunting club would send its entourage thundering through. For a few years, until I lost interest in sport altogether, the three of us would rush up the ladder to watch whenever we heard the huntsman’s approaching horn.
There is also a peripheral view of the kennel my mother had built for her collies in a field across a stream. The brick structure still stands, but after Mum died, Dad removed the fencing from the space she set off as a dog run, and it quickly grew over in long wild grasses.
“Turning to stone out there?” Dennis is leaning out the kitchen door and waving a wooden spoon to get my attention.
“I’m spying on the household.”
“I don’t mean to complain about the work, but I am lonely in here. You don’t have to lift a finger, but you do have to keep me company.”
In the kitchen, he hands me an apron of Mum’s and says, “I lied—but there’s only one job I’ll force on you.” He’s filled the scullery sink with water and hands me a giant collander filled with chopped green leeks. “Rinse. There’ll be four or five of these, and you can roll them up in Mum’s old tea towels—second drawer down, next to the cooker.”
Grateful to have a purpose, I roll up my sleeves and pull out the towels. Dennis has plugged in a tape player and hums along to some hideously sappy Elton John collection. Only after I’ve rinsed and wrapped about two bushels of leeks do I suggest a change.
“But doesn’t it take you back?” says my compliant brother as he ejects Elton midstanza and shuffles through a pile of tapes.
“Not in any way I find pleasant.” I’m smiling when I say this, but Dennis stops to give me a look of apologetic alarm. I know what he’s thinking. In his rush to empathy, he’s worried that all my darkest memories are connected with Mal (whose place in my life he doesn’t fully understand, but why should he—or anyone—when I volunteer so little and do not encourage questions?). In fact, this particular Elton John is so old that it takes me back to misguided gropings with a particular girl, a determined consummation ranking very high among things I’d like to erase from my hard drive.
Dennis invites me to choose but then seizes a tape himself. “No, this! This is just the right thing for the occasion. Laurie picked it out when we visited Dad—drives her mother around the bend, so we listen to it in the car when I take her with me to the marché.” All at once our mother’s dour Scottish kitchen reverberates with bouzouki music and a plaintive tinny voice singing in Greek. Grating nutmeg with his hands but gyrating with his body, Dennis sings along in gleeful gibberish: “Yamos, yasmeero smeero yaka!”
I bend over the sink and laugh harder than I have in a long time, and just as it hits, this incredible release, so does the comforting, Christmasy smell of fresh nutmeg and the realization that I had no idea Dennis (or anyone) visited our father in Greece.
“When did you visit Dad over there?” I ask when we’ve both calmed down (Dennis casting a guilty eye upward and lowering the volume).
“Last August. Vee had a huge formal wedding job, a gala château affair requiring half a rainforest of orchids, and I thought I’d get ourselves, the girls and me, out of her hair for a week.”
“I thought he was into the monkish retreat, that he went there to ruminate.”
Dennis laughs. “Well he liked that part, absolutely. But it’s not as if he set up rules about the place or wore some kind of hairshirt. What—did you want to go but you just never asked?”
No, I have to admit. I never asked to go to Naxos and probably never would have. I assumed the place to be our father’s sanctum sanctorum, inviolable by family. Now I see this was pure extrapolation, based on a few surprisingly expressive letters he wrote me his first summer there (letters of any sort from Dad were rare), in which he went on about how much he liked the solitude. Liking it, of course, does not mean that you require it.
“You know, he made friends there,” says Dennis. “He had a super dinner party, in fact, and I taught him to make a few simple things like tzatziki and a loin of pork baked with yogurt, cinnamon, and potatoes; ordinarily, he hired a neighboring widow to cook for his little affairs.”
“His ‘little affairs’?”
Dennis laughs at me again. “Fenno, what’s life without dinner parties?”
“So who came to this dinner party?” My tone is that of a spurned ex-wife (having no reason to expect an invitation but hurt and indignant nonetheless).
“Who came? This professorial type and his wife who have a bungalow down the road—the fellow taught playwriting, I think. Local Greek gentry or some such distinction. And then two other couples, all British expats—ha, like yourself!—who live there year-round. One of the couples had a wee lass around Laurie’s age who came along, and the other couple were two men about Dad’s age. Or rather, I suppose, they shared a house . . .”
“Oh you mean they might have been mere flatmates.” Having finished my assigned task, I’ve hunted down another bottle of wine and yank the cork out for emphasis. The wineglasses from dinner have been washed and upended to dry, so I take a tumbler out of the cupboard.
“They seemed, I don’t know . . . they were both landscape ar
chitects and we got to talking about flowers, I liked them very much . . .”
I touch him on the shoulder. “I don’t mean to give you a rough time.”
Dennis collects himself. “In fact, Dad had just got permission to have them design a small garden of succulents around his patio. I was sorry Vee couldn’t meet them, exchange a little shoptalk.”
I smile. I like the notion of my father’s engaging a pair of florally minded queens to shape his surroundings. I don’t mean that nastily, either. I know I made my father uncomfortable (though, again, did I tell him anything of my life, directly, to confirm his hunches and make them easier to live with?), but I do not think I enraged or disgusted him.
“The wee girls went to sleep in Dad’s bed,” Dennis is saying now, “the two women walked each other home, and the party ended very late with Dad, me, the playwriting prof, and the two gardening blokes standing out under the olive trees trying to name the constellations. We were all terrible at it, so we just . . . invented. Dad found the House of Parliament up there somehow, I seem to recall pointing out a large duck, someone I think actually did peg Orion or the Plough . . . well, there was plenty of ouzo to go around! Next day, I had a monstrous crick in my neck.”
I wait for something more, but Dennis turns his happy attention to tapping the last of the nutmeg off his grater into a tiny bowl. I have two simultaneously mournful wishes: that I had been at my father’s dinner party and that my brother could describe the scene, the experience, with a precision more worthy of his emotions. There were moments, as a boy, when I wondered guiltily if my father wished the same of Mum. (Dad’s eloquence, though he was not a big talker, outstripped hers by far.) Dennis’s passions begin to resemble our mother’s: many and large, but not subtle.
I watch him work a bit longer before saying, “So you, then, ought to know what Dad would think of David’s idea about the ashes.”
Predictably (to my satisfaction), he is caught off guard. “Well Davey’s right he loved Greece, I mean that particular place. He did love it.”
“Enough to forsake family tradition.”
“Tradition? Well, ha Fenny, you’re hardly one to talk about toeing up to tradition, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t know why not,” I say slowly. “You know, I’m regarded as quite stuffy by many people I meet in America, and I can’t say I mind. I come back here and I’m suddenly, inexplicably, an iconoclast by virtue of my long absences and my alleged sexual preference.”
A look of confusion crosses Dennis’s face. He’s struggling, I realize, to recall the meaning of iconoclast. “Alleged?” he says quietly and then looks frightened, as if he didn’t mean to say it aloud.
“Dennis, you haven’t had enough to drink,” I say. I get up to pour him a glass of wine as well, aware that I am, to borrow one of Mal’s colorful expressions, sloshed as a foundering yawl.
“No thank you,” he says, sounding demure and cold.
I sit down again. “But the ashes. Seriously, Dennis.”
“I think we should do whatever causes the least contention. Bury them in the churchyard by Mum or take them back to Greece, I won’t lose sleep either way.”
“So you’d leave Mum with Dad’s family and no one to defend her integrity.”
Dennis smiles at me with a touch of pity. “Where does Mum’s integrity come in?”
I laugh. “Can’t say.”
“None of us can, can we?” Dennis doesn’t look up as he says this, and I begin to think there’s more to it than the concentration he’s using to pour us each a cup of verbena (the dried leaves taken from a satchel of herbs he’s carried over from France; I peer in and see bundles of thyme, oregano, chives).
He hands me my cup, more than a little pointedly. “Go to bed. Tomorrow you’ll thank me.”
“I haven’t been much help here, have I?”
“Nonsense,” he says, jovial again. He points to the linen-wrapped leeks on the scullery washboard.
I leave the kitchen meekly, carrying my tea as bidden, one hand holding the saucer, the other bracing the cup. In the front hall, I see Dad’s ashes on the table where David left them, as if to greet guests when they enter the house. The ashes are in a plain wooden box—a box which, when I pick it up, turns out to be plastic with a false wood grain, warping apart at the seams. In size and color, it reminds me of the real wooden box in which my mother kept her few pieces of jewelry. A fragment of a Strauss waltz would play every time she opened it.
On a whim, I leave my tea behind and carry the box containing my father upstairs to my room. Without turning on the light, I set the box on the windowseat that overlooks the stream—the burn, it’s called hereabouts—which once defined a border of Tealing’s modest property. Not long after we moved in, Dad bought the large field on the other side, so Mum could build her kennel there and graze half a dozen sheep.
On a clear midnight with a good moon, the line of birches on the far side will glow. I’ve always thought it’s the best view from anywhere in the house; on so many nights it enticed or consoled me to sleep.
As I—or we, I can’t help thinking—sit there in the dark, voices materialize through a wall. I listen as acutely as I can; I walk soundlessly toward the wall and lean toward the conversation. It’s Lil and Véronique in my parents’ old room, now David and Lil’s.
“We had a very long talk, very long, and he has said no. He is sorry that he is saying no, but I think he will not be moved.” Véronique, in her lilting purr. “I told him I had thought of it and it would be agreeable for me—I have three children, I will not be having more.”
“Dennis doesn’t long for a son?”
“Oh Denis, he, comment dirais-je?”—a small and I suspect inappropriate laugh—“il nage bien en fémininité—tu comprends?”
Lil, bless her manners, laughs along. “I’ve often thought something similar about Davey, he has his element too. I’m not sure I could say he ‘swims well in animality’—sounds ghastly in English—but that’s rather what it’s like. He seems to so many people so . . . gruff. But to see him with a lamb or an old swaybacked mare, the tender concentration in his hands and his eyes, I’ve had this fantasy almost since I met him that I’d love to see that particular tenderness replicated in a son—or a daughter. I suppose now . . .” Even through the well-built wall, I hear her voice quaver.
“You will, you will,” Véronique is saying. “You will still see this, Liliane, I believe you will. You must believe it, too, chérie.”
“Oh Vee, all the things they’ve done, I feel like I’m in some science fiction novel, abducted by bug-eyed aliens in white laboratory coats; the things they’ve been doing to us, to me, and after all I went through, what was the point? They did something centrifugal this time, and I just couldn’t listen to the results. It’s awful to admit, but up till now, even when it was me they were dissecting, I’ve just always thought, well David understands these things—he’s as good as a human doctor when it comes to all this medical knowledge—so I stopped paying attention ages ago and figured, David’s brilliant, David will solve it. But this is the absolute limit, and of course I’m just as responsible. . . .”
“Ecoute. This is your joy of which you must take care.” Lil has been sobbing awhile now, and Véronique goes on talking in a singsong voice, probably just to keep the grief from ballooning. She speaks so quietly now that I can’t make out a word, and I stop short of pressing my ear against the wall, an arm’s length from where they sit. What I’m doing is obscene, but as Mal would say, this is scalding stuff. Sad stuff too, though I can’t help feeling relieved that Véronique will apparently not be donating an egg to blend her genes with David’s (the inverse of my spouse-swapping fantasy!). I note with surprise and gratification that Dennis had the power to refuse—that she even asked his permission.
There are footsteps in the hall now, a knock on the neighboring door. “Lillian? Lil?” It’s David. Down in the kitchen, I had myopically assumed that everyone else was sleeping; now I’m
wondering, paranoid but never mind, whether they were in fact avoiding Dennis and me (or simply avoiding me).
Lillian answers her husband. The door opens and closes. Véronique says good night; the door opens and closes again. Silence, shuffling; Lil resumes crying. I hear the bedsprings surrender to David’s weight. Then I hear another sound that might be—and I don’t want to know if it is—my brother crying, too.
I go to the windowseat and crank open the casement windows, not just because the room and I both need a dose of June air. The lead joints of the windowpanes always object; having finally reached the limits of my prurience, I’m hoping the noise will alert David and Lil to my waking presence.
The birches cast mossy shadows across the field, and the waters of the burn warble quietly along. Carefully, I open the box. My father’s ashes are contained, flimsily, in a plastic bag closed by a wire tie. Through a tiny lesion in the bag, some of the ashes have leaked out. When I close the box—quickly, a little horrified by my childish curiosity—a puff of gray dust escapes. I avert my head, to avoid inhaling the ash. I set the box on the windowseat and retreat to my narrow bed, undress without hanging or folding my clothes, don a pair of pajamas, and slip between the old-fashioned stiff linen sheets.
I am against spreading my father’s ashes in Greece—spreading them anywhere—in part for a simple, selfish reason irrelevant to my anomalous respect for family traditions.
Before I ever did it, I thought the notion of spreading ashes on water highly romantic, the best and most mannerly way to get past the horror of funerals. Having partaken in this ritual twice now, I dread and despise it. Inevitably, the faintest breeze against the water sends the finest ashes back into your eyes and mouth; you have to brush the residue of your loved one’s bones, organs, viscera, and skin from the folds of your clothes, excavate it later on from the seams in your shoes. You have to wash him from your hair and down the drain of your tub, as if he were soot from a campfire, dust from an attic, diesel exhaust from an ill-mufflered bus.