Three Junes (3 page)

One Sunday they were out on the lawn: Paul resting on a chaise, Maureen hosing down the pens, and the boys playing quietly for a change, each on his own. Betsey, Maureen’s favorite bitch, hunted insects among the wildflowers. David had a new toy, a red ball, which caught Betsey’s eye. He threw it to her and shouted rudely, “Fetch!” But Betsey carried it off, and when David followed and tried to take back his ball, she growled. In an instant, Maureen had lifted the dog off her feet by the loose skin on her chest. She shook Betsey so hard she yelped. “Do that again, anything like it, and I will have you shot.” Maureen spoke, literally, in a growl. This time, lying nearby, Paul saw her face up close. Her eyes were so wide she looked crazed. After she let the dog go, her hands shook. Betsey looked up at Maureen with the most bereaved expression Paul had ever seen in a dog. “That’s a promise,” Maureen told her, quietly but unrelenting.

That was their second summer at Tealing. A year later, Paul took a call at his office from one of the county aldermen. Mrs. Ramage had filed a complaint. The alderman was delicate, apologetic, but there was no getting around it. The sheep smelled, Mrs. Ramage claimed, and the dogs barked up a row. The kennel, visible from her bedroom, was a “blemish upon the landscape.” Paul was glad she had not come directly to them. For all her insolence, Mrs. Ramage was afraid of Maureen, perhaps with some justification. Paul told the alderman that he would not challenge the complaint but asked for two months’ grace. He had a compromise in mind.

He was thinking of the long meadow on the opposite side of their property, the one beyond the burn. It belonged to Colin Swift, the man who had recently bought Conkers and the adjoining farm. A sea of weeds, the field lay unused, since its back half tended to flood in the spring when the burn spilled over its banks.

“SHE WAS TELLING ME,”
says Fern, “about a production of
Madame
Butterfly
—she saw it at the Met. Amazing set decoration, she was telling me, with a full-grown actual live tree onstage, light through the branches, purple kimonos with gold butterfly medallions, hung like ghosts on the walls of the house. The butterflies up there made her think of it. . . . I’ve never been to the opera. I used to think it was silly, I never thought I’d change my mind, but . . . you get older, you know? See things differently? Anna, though: Anna was
born
a woman of the world.” She smiles at her friend, who’s talking to Jack.

Fern is prettier without the hat. Her wet hair is contained in a flat coil against her skull. She has a long studious face, a small chin. She tells Paul she’s a painter traveling on a fellowship. She finished university a year before and has been in Europe since then—mostly in Paris, where she rents a small flat. Anna, a college friend, is living on Paros all summer, working on a dig.

At a nearby table sit Irene and Ray. They glance over now and then, their suspicions undisguised. Well fine, thinks Paul, let me take a nosedive from the widower’s pedestal. He has drunk too much retsina already; the heat in his skin and the ache in his legs from that torture rack of a saddle have given him a vicious thirst. And he drinks out of restlessness. In the grove, after small talk, introductions—what had possessed him?—he invited the girls to join their group for a drink before dinner. But dinner is not until nine, an hour away, and most of the others won’t show up till then. For now, the low sun seems to linger indefinitely, a party guest reluctant to leave.

“Absurd the things people say. I mean, people think we don’t have a single
tree
in the entire city, for God’s sake, that you have to carry an
Uzi
to feel safe, that sadistic black boys roam the streets in search of white
prey
. Look, you could be raped and murdered in . . . well certainly London, but anywhere. Dangers lurk
everywhere
.” Anna is from Manhattan and seems to see the rest of the world as woefully benighted. She is defending the city’s virtues to Jack, who nods and smiles, unusually quiet. Aggressive and passionate by turns, the girls have talked for nearly an hour. Once, Jack turned briefly to Paul and cocked an eyebrow. Mockery; desire; conspiracy: it could have meant just about anything.

“Yes, Anna, but you can’t tell me honestly you wouldn’t really rather live somewhere like . . .” Fern smiles at Paul. “Scotland. In the long run, I mean.”

“Oh, no offense to Paul here, but never,” Anna says. “Too homogeneous.” She draws out the middle syllables, as if the word itself contains a genie. Paul has heard his son Fenno refer to this woman or that as a “drama queen,” and now he’s sure he knows exactly what it means. Fenno, like Anna, lives in Manhattan, but Paul decides against mentioning this. To do so would hand the conversation entirely to Anna—and place Fenno’s vital statistics under her dissecting eye. Paul’s oldest son, who has ventured the farthest from home, is the most independent and ought to worry Paul the least, but the distance in itself has always been a source of worry—as if, were something to go wrong, Fenno couldn’t be reeled in fast enough. And the twins, Paul can’t help feeling, will always have each other to lean on, collapse against, push each other upright if it comes to that.

Fern sighs and turns her chair slightly aside, facing the sea. She closes her eyes and tilts her face upward, the same yearning, pious expression Paul saw in the grove after the butterflies—the moths. He continues to drink his retsina but tries to step outside its field of distortion. What could he want from her? She likes him, but she isn’t flirting. He watches Jack, the way Jack looks at Anna as she talks on and on.

Fern says suddenly, “Pink sky at night, sailors delight.”

Anna pauses, and Jack turns slowly toward Fern. “So then, must be a bloody lot of delighted sailors out there tonight, would you say?”

“All right, all right,” says Fern, laughing self-consciously. “It’s something silly my mother recites whenever she sees a beautiful sunset. It just popped out.”

“‘Just popped out!’” Jack warbles in falsetto, batting his eyes at the sun. “Ah, like a wanton champagne cork.” Fern continues to laugh, but Paul feels as if he is looking at Jack through the backside of a telescope. For that moment, he does not like the young man’s wit, its facile malice.

At nine (promptly, since Marjorie’s in the lead), the rest of the group arrives, and there is a complicated move to a larger, more sheltered table.

Anna takes Fern by the elbow. “Well, boys, we have crispier fish to fry.”

“So . . . well,” says Fern. When she stands, she is clearly dizzy and leans for a moment on her friend. Paul murmurs a polite good-bye. For the third time in a day, he tries to memorize her features, sure it’s the last he will see of this awkward, inexplicably appealing girl.

In the hotel bar after dinner, after the others have gone upstairs, Jack puts on an American drawl and impersonates the two girls. “‘Why these donkeys lead the life o’ Riley! Why, compared with the steeds of the New York mounted bobbies—no picnic that, keeping all those bumpkin tourists in line!’” He unfolds a napkin, drapes it on his head, and raises his voice an octave. “‘Oh but if the poor things lived in heavenly Scott-land . . .’” He drops the napkin and his voice. “‘Land of warm beer, boiled sheep guts, and men showing off their ugly knees, you mean!’”

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.