A House Like a Lotus

by Madeleine L'engle

  I felt simultaneously warm with excitement and frozen with shyness as I sat by this extremely handsome young man on the drive to the Hilton. Zachary did the talking, so I didn’t have to worry about what to say. “And listen, Red”—as we drew up to the Hilton—“uh—Pol—about coming up to my room—it’s perfectly okay—I mean, I’m not going to try anything or anything like that. So just relax.”

  His room was on the eleventh floor of the Hilton, “in the best curve of the building,” he told me as we went up in a very swift elevator. He led me through his room and right out onto the balcony, and I caught my breath in awe and delight. He had a view not only of the strange, flat-topped hill with the Parthenon but also a wide vista of the harbor at Piraeus, with the Aegean Sea to the left. And there was a high, stony mountain rising out of cypress trees, topped with a stone belfry, and then a large, white building, probably a monastery. It was far more spectacular than the view from the King George, or the poster at Petros’.

  I had let my breath out in what was almost shock at the vast sweep of gloriousness. He gave me a proprietary smile. “Told you it would wow you.”

  It did. But the funny thing was that despite the staggering magnificence of the view, I liked my old hotel better than the Hilton.

  As though reading my thoughts, Zachary waved toward the room. “The decor is pure Hilton, and a Hilton is a Hilton is a Hilton. However, my pa has connections, and the view redeems it. And the bathroom is European, black marble, with a tub made for people who prefer baths to showers.”

  “Like me,” I said.

  “I can’t start the day without a shower. Okay, what now?”

  “The Acropolis, please, if you haven’t been there too many times.”

  “The Acropolis, pretty Pol, can’t be visited too many times. We’ll just grab a cab.”

  “Can’t we walk?”

  “We could, if we had nothing else to do all day. I want to drive out in the country with you, and then come back to Athens, and maybe go to the Plaka to one of my favorite small tavernas.” He was planning to be with me the whole day. I felt a thrill of pleasure ripple over me. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He was just as gorgeous as I thought, and at least two inches taller than I.

  It was a glorious end-of-summer day. Despite Zachary’s chatter about the terrible pollution which was destroying the Parthenon and other ancient sites, and which gave him allergies, to me the air was clear and crisp and invigorating. It would be romanticizing to say it was like Gaea, because Gaea had as much fog and dampness as any other island, but it was like Gaea as I remembered it.

  Zachary insisted on paying the entrance fee for both of us, and I was not happy about this. I didn’t want to be beholden to some guy I had just met who came from the world of megabucks. I pulled out my Greek money and my booklet of traveler’s checks, but he brushed me aside and got our tickets and I couldn’t very well arm-wrestle him in the middle of the throng. I followed him through the gates, along with a lot of other tourists. Many were bunched together in groups, with guides herding them like sheep.

  Zachary pointed to a cluster of Japanese tourists slung with cameras. He nudged me. “They say that Japanese tourists really aren’t pushy. They just get behind a German.” He laughed, then said, “Or don’t you approve of ethnic jokes?” Just at that moment we saw a big, red-faced man in lederhosen pushing his way through the crowd.

  “See?” Zachary said. But the man opened his mouth and called to someone, and he spoke in pure middle-American. “Ouch.” Zachary made a face. “Corn belt. What does he think he’s trying to prove? No wonder most of the world hates us. Come on, Pol. If you think there’s a mob today, you should see it in midseason.” He took me by the hand.

  I pulled back, looking at the scaffolding partly concealing a beautiful building. “Not so fast.”

  He stopped. “Okay, listen, this is really interesting. They’re literally inoculating the stone with antibiotics to try to slow down decay. The Caryatids—you know what Caryatids are?”

  Max had seen to it that I would not come to Greece unprepared. “Female forms, sort of like columns, holding up a roof.”

  I think Zachary was slightly annoyed that I knew about Caryatids. (Kate had said to me, ‘Listen, Polly, guys don’t like it if they think you know more than they do.’ ‘I do know more than they do.’ ‘You don’t need to show it.’) “Okay, then,” Zachary said, “they’re trying to restore the Caryatids which hold up the Erechtheion. That’s what all the scaffolding is for. And that’s why the Parthenon is roped off, because all those tourists’ feet were wearing down the marble. Okay, Red, c’mon. The Theseum is one of my favorites. What gets me is knowing that all this beauty was destroyed not so much by the erosion of time, and normal wear and tear, as by war, and greed, and man’s stupidity. It really makes me more anti-war than some of the more obvious things, like nuclear stockpiling. Lots of these fallen columns were destroyed by people scavenging for metal.”

  “What for?”

  “Guns. Cannons.”

  I shuddered. “You mean they really destroyed gorgeous temples just to get a small quantity of metal?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “And Lord Elgin, all those marbles he took—” I looked around. “I suppose he really thought he was saving them from the Turks, but shouldn’t they be back now where they belong? At least those which didn’t get lost when that ship sank?” Why don’t you shut up, Polyhymnia. You’re showing off how much you know again, reeling back the tape of what Max taught you.

  Zachary knew I was showing off. But he was nice about it. “You’ve done your homework, haven’t you? That’s okay. Lots of Americans don’t know anything about what they’re gawking at, and don’t really care. Like my pop. He has a fancy camera and takes hundreds of slides, and when he gets them home he can’t even remember where he was when he took the pictures.” He led me to a marble bench in the shade of an ancient olive tree. “Let’s sit for a minute, and watch the crowd go by, okay? You know, Red—”

  “Don’t call me Red.”

  “Polly. You really intrigue me. You aren’t like any girl I’ve ever met.”

  Was that good? He made it sound good.

  “You said you’re nearly seventeen—”

  I nodded.

  “I’d say you’re nearly thirty and nearly twelve. And there’s something virginal about you. Nice contrast to me. But don’t worry. I won’t do anything to hurt you. Trust me.”

  Did I trust this guy? I was not in a trusting frame of mind. But I didn’t have to trust him to enjoy being with him.

  “Are you?” Zachary asked.

  “Am I what?”

  “A virgin.”

  I hesitated. She who hesitates is lost.

  He gave me a long, scrutinizing look. “Still waters run deep, eh?”

  I tried to recover myself. “That is not a question you should ask somebody you have just met. It is not an acceptable question.”

  He actually looked discomfited. “Sorry. Sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me. And you make me intensely curious, pretty Pol.”

  “I don’t play around,” I said. “Not ever.”

  “Sweetie, I never thought you did. Not for a minute. Whatever you did, and with whomever, would be totally serious.” He touched my arm lightly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Shall we change the subject?”

  “Please.” I was trembling.

  We got up and started to walk along again, brushed by tourists who were hurrying to catch up with their groups. If there was going to be any further conversation between us, he would have to start it. I wanted to tell him to take me back to the hotel, but my voice was lost somewhere deep down inside me.

  After a while he spoke in a quiet, normal way. “The Parthenon is probably more beautiful to us today than it would have been when it was built, because now it’s open to the Greek light that plays on the marble and brings it to life. In the old days, when it was complete, the main body of the buil
ding, the sanctuary that housed the goddess, was enclosed and had no windows, so the only light came from the doorway.”

  “Wait, please.” I dug into my shoulder bag. “Let me get some of this down, so I can write about it in the journal I have to take back to school.”

  “Now you sound like a little kid again. Why bother? Teacher’ll spank you if you don’t?”

  “I said I’d do it.” I opened the journal and made a couple of notes. My hand was steady.

  “You might add,” Zachary said, “that despite their brilliance, the Greeks were limited in their architecture, because they never discovered the arch. With the arch you can support lots more weight, and that’s why the great cathedrals can be so spacious.”

  Writing furiously, I said, “You certainly know a lot.”

  “I’m not stupid. I got kicked out of several prep schools because I was bored. But if I’m interested in something, I learn about it. Okay, take your notes and then we’ll go on. We can come back to the Acropolis another day. It’s so overwhelming you can’t take too much at a time.”

  I wrote down what Zachary had said, and I wondered about the Greeks and their gods. Why had they closed in the Parthenon, so that the goddess Athena had been hidden?

  Zachary surprised me by picking up on my thoughts. “Odd, isn’t it, Pol, how all the different civilizations want to box God in. The ancient Hebrews wanted to hide the Tabernacle in the Holy of Holies, so the ordinary people couldn’t see it. Christians are just as bad. Peter wanted to put Jesus, Moses, and Elijah in a box on the Mount of Transfiguration.”

  We had come to another bench, and I sat down; it was not easy to write standing up, and the notes I had taken were an untidy scrawl.

  “I’m an atheist, obviously,” Zachary said.

  I looked up at him. “For an atheist, you seem to know a lot about religion.”

  “That’s why I’m an atheist.”

  Maybe it was because Zachary was older than the kids I went to school with that he did not seem to be afraid to talk about ideas. I was far more comfortable with ideas than with ordinary social conversation.

  Athena was the Greek name for the goddess. The Romans called her Minerva. Max’s sister was Minerva Allaire. This was the kind of conversation Max delighted in.

  The sun was hot, the same sun which beat down on these stones and other people thousands of years ago.

  “Penny, Pol,” Zachary said.

  “Oh—just wondering what it would be like to worship a goddess.” Was that a Freudian question?

  “You a feminist?”

  “Liberation for all,” I said. “The Greeks had a pantheon of gods of both sexes, didn’t they?” I put the notebook in my bag. “Why am I suddenly famished?”

  “Breakfast was a long time ago.” Zachary took my hand to pull me up. “I’ve ordered the car for eleven. We’ll drive to Delphi and have lunch at a xenia. Know what a xenia is?”

  Sandy and Rhea and I would be staying at xenias. “Greek-run inns.” (‘You don’t have to show off all the time,’ Kate said.)

  “Ever been in one?”

  “I just arrived yesterday.”

  “Okay, c’mon, let’s go.”

  The car was an old VW Bug, a bit cramped for our long legs.

  “Sorry about this rattletrap,” Zachary said. “It was all I could get at the last minute.”

  “We have a Land-Rover on Benne Seed.” Daddy could drive it over the dunes, and it didn’t get stuck in the sand the way an ordinary car would. “This is a lot less bumpy than that.”

  Zachary drove too fast. I buckled my seat belt tightly. I’d much rather have puttered along and looked at the countryside. But I kept my mouth closed.

  Zachary was a new experience for me, and I didn’t want to turn him off by saying the wrong thing. If he was intrigued by me, I was certainly intrigued by him. I couldn’t figure out why he had picked me, out of all the kids in Constitution Square. But the fact that he had certainly did something for my ego.

  I think I expected Delphi to be bigger and grander than it turned out to be. It’s a small village on top of a mountain, facing a great valley and what appears to be a large lake but is actually part of the Bay of Corinth. We stopped at a small xenia set in the midst of gardens built on several levels, with the roofs of the lower levels planted with grass, trees, flowers, so that the xenia seemed part of the hillside. If Delphi was smaller than I’d expected, it was also lovelier, and the mountains were higher and grander. I was overwhelmed by the mountains.

  The xenia served only one dish, a lemony chicken that was delicious. But again I felt tongue-tied.

  “What’s wrong, Red?”

  “Polly.”

  “Polly. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on. I know better than that. Someone’s hurt you.”

  “You can hardly get to be my age without being hurt.”

  “You’re a constant surprise to me. When I relax into thinking of you as a child, you turn into a woman, wounded.”

  “Don’t be romantic.”

  “Don’t you want to talk to me?”

  “Of course I want to talk to you. What’ve we been doing all day?”

  “Chatting. Showing off how much we both know. With a few minor exceptions, we haven’t been talking.”

  Well. He was more sensitive than I’d realized.

  “So, shall we talk?”

  Out of desperation, I asked, “Why don’t you talk?”

  “About what?”

  “Well, why are you in Greece instead of college? It’s not just for the culture.”

  “Little Miss Smarty-pants. No. It’s not.”

  “So who wounded you?”

  As though stalling for time, he signaled the waitress for the check. “I got dumped by a girl I liked, and I deserved to be dumped. As is my wont, I showed off, tried to prove what a big shot I am, and when she really needed me I let her down. I don’t like accepting that about myself.” Suddenly his face crumpled. Then he was back in control. “My self-image took a beating. Hey, Red, I don’t talk about myself like this, not with anybody. What’ve you done to me?”

  This time I didn’t tell him not to call me Red.

  He went on. “So it seemed wise to take some time off, to find out more about who I am, what I want to be.”

  “Have you been finding out?”

  “No. As usual, I’ve been running away. It hit me a couple of days ago in Mykenos. I’ve been running so I wouldn’t have to stop and look at myself. Do I want to be a lawyer, part of an enormous global corporation, like Pa? I always thought I did. Putting growth and profit over the interests of any nation. Multinationals are not accountable to anybody. That’s Pa’s world. Do I want to inherit it?”

  It occurred to me that the world which Zachary stood to inherit was the world which Sandy and Rhea were devoting their lives to fight. Sandy and Rhea put the interests of human beings above the interests of corporations, and I knew they’d upset several global oligarchies.

  “Do you want to inherit that world?” I asked.

  “It’s power,” he said.

  “Power corrupts.”

  “Well, Red, I don’t know, I just don’t know. It’s easier to face your own weaknesses in a context of money and power than looking in the mirror in the morning while you’re shaving. If you have enough money, and enough power, nothing else matters. Pa’s never loved anything except money. He and Ma endured each other —she died a couple of years ago. The extent of their conversation was, ‘I need another ice cube.’ Or, ‘Where shall we go for dinner?’ I doubt if they ever slept together much after I was conceived. What about your parents? Do they still have sex?”

  He’d revealed too much about himself, I thought, so he had to turn it on me. My voice was cool. “They sleep in the same bed. What they do in it is their own affair.”

  Zachary paid the bill, putting out what seemed to be a very small tip. “Let’s get out of here and climb up to the stadium.”

&
nbsp; It was quite a climb, and Zachary got out of breath. If he was wandering around Europe finding out who he was and what he wanted to do, he must have been doing it in taxis and rented cars and expensive hotels. I felt sorry for him. But he also represented a world which was ruthless, where money mattered, and not people. We’d had to leave Portugal because of that world, because of people coming to Gaea and trying to get hold of Daddy’s work on regeneration and exploit it, long before it was safe. I liked Zachary, and not just because he liked me; there was just something about him that appealed to me. But I was also frightened by the world in which he’d grown up. Mixed feelings. As usual.

  The stadium was impressive, with many of the original marble seats intact, carved right out of the hillside. We sat looking at the mountains looming above us, at the valley far below, caressed by the golden air. The land was very dry and bare-looking. There were a few trees, but very little grass, and that was parched and brown. But this was only part of a great cycle, Max had told me. In the winter the rains would come and the earth would be green again.

  I didn’t like it when Zachary asked me about my parents’ sex life. I’m not like Rosy, of course. At four, Rosy still thinks of Mother as an extension of herself. I don’t. But still, I want Mother to be Mother, Daddy to be Daddy.

  Max, in a different way from Zachary, also separated my parents from me, seeing them with her clear grey eyes in a way that I had never seen them.

  ‘Your mother’s restless,’ Max said, one rainy winter day when we were sitting in the library.

  ‘Oh?’ Mother, restless?

  Max got up from the long sofa and put more fat wood on the fire. ‘She’s been a good mother to all of you, but it’s beginning to wear on her. She’s got a fine brain, and not enough chance to use it.’

  ‘She helps Daddy a lot in the lab, does all the computer stuff.’

  ‘Yes, she does, and that’s a saving grace, but it’s not her own thing.’

  ‘She’s going to finish her Ph.D. as soon as Rosy’s in school.’

  ‘Easier said than done. You do a great deal, too much, I think, but you’ll be out of the nest soon. The boys aren’t going to be that much help.’