The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  I hear the aunts before I see them. They are outside the door to the apartment, chattering amiably about some disagreement or other. I expect a buzzer to sound, but the door opens and Aunt Thalia leaves her key in the lock to come embrace me.

  “Calliope, Calliopaki!” she cries, alternately kissing me on the cheeks and hugging me close. I look over her shoulder to Aunt Sophia, who is drawing the key from the lock. Her face is utterly serious, as if nothing were going on around her except the task at hand.

  The two sisters seem far younger than their years. Were it not for her insistence on a bun and her standard outfit of skirt-and-cardigan, Sophia could pass for sixty instead of her actual seventy-four. She likes to point out that when she retired from her job at the harbor administration, everyone was shocked she was old enough. Thalia has let her dark hair go gray but keeps it in a modern cut, with short wisps that frame her face. Both of them are wearing black from head to toe, for Nestor.

  “Ela, Sophia,” Thalia says, rolling her eyes. “Leave the key.”

  “Mine doesn’t stick,” Sophia says. “Why does yours?”

  Sophia hands Thalia the extracted key and holds me out in front of her. She is a tall woman even now, and she looks down at me with an appraising eye. “Calliope. We missed you,” she says, and I know that this is true.

  “How long are you staying, Calliopaki mou?”

  “Just a few more days, Theia Thalia,” I say, using the word for aunt. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here for the funeral.”

  “Poor boy,” Thalia says, tearing up. “What are we going to do now, two old women?”

  I wince at the number, wondering again what it is that keeps my mother on the other side of the dividing line.

  “Have you seen your mother?” Sophia asks.

  “Is she coming?” asks Thalia.

  “Yes to both,” I say, and for some reason they find this funny.

  They agree to sit down in the living room, where Nikos arrives to serve them small glasses of wine. I hear the two women murmuring together that my Greek is very good, all the same.

  Aliki is carrying the lamb to the table when the buzzer rings.

  “I’ll go,” I say, embarrassed that my mother is the only aunt without a key of her own.

  I buzz her up and wait for her in the hallway. When she emerges from the elevator, I can tell she is disappointed to see only me.

  “Am I the first?” she asks.

  “Come in,” I say, kissing her on the cheeks and dodging the question. She looks younger now that she is dressed, her bumps and angles smoothed out by a black sweater over dark-blue jeans.

  The sisters all kiss as if they see one another every day, but I know from Aliki that they do not. I wonder if this is their way of pretending a closeness that no longer exists.

  Nikos calls us to the table, where there is some tussling about where to sit. Thalia, in her former home, expects to be seated at the foot of the table, but my mother claims the spot without even saying anything. If her daughter is the guest of honor, then my mother is owed this bit of reflected tribute. Nikos settles the debate by assigning us all to specific seats. My chair faces the tall windows screened with filmy white drapes. Behind me is a sideboard of sleek ash topped with ceramic bowls in solid primary colors; from my seat, the old walnut dining table is the only thing I can see that is not crisp and simple.

  The aunts want to know about my life in the States—not too much, just the demographic details of work and marriage. My ring is still twisted the wrong way around, and I keep my hands under the table until this part of my story is finished. I explain my job and brace myself for the puzzlement I saw in Marina and the others last night.

  “But you sound like a gyftissa,” Sophia says, “begging the rich for money.”

  “Or like a socialist,” Thalia says, chuckling.

  “It’s not like that, Theies,” I say, but don’t clarify.

  Thalia brightly turns to Demetra.

  “Parade today! Are you going to march with your school?”

  “She’s not coming with us,” Demetra says, pointing her fork at me.

  “Demetra,” Aliki says. “Don’t say she. Say Theia Calliope.”

  Theia. Only in Greece can an only child be an aunt. Though I’m her mother’s cousin, I am Demetra’s theia the way Thalia and Sophia were mine.

  “No, I am coming,” I tell her. “You can be my guide tonight.”

  “What else were you going to do?” My mother looks up from her food.

  “Some friends asked me to meet them for the parade.”

  “Well! It’s about time you made some friends here,” my mother says.

  Thalia caresses my arm, as if claiming me from my mother. I can’t resist.

  “Yes, I met them yesterday. On the bus with the chickens,” I say, looking at my mother with all innocence.

  For a while we are all absorbed in our food, commenting on the tenderness of the lamb and the crispiness of the roasted potatoes. I’m relieved that Nikos is not responsible for the death of the lamb. He passes the bread around so that we can sop up the sauce in our plates.

  “This is so good,” I say, savoring the dense crumb of the loaf.

  “Drimakopoulos bread,” Thalia says. “For generations, we’ve been buying their bread and no other. Even when we had the taverna.”

  “Theies,” I say. “You know, I went to the house today.” They all look up. “Someone let me in.”

  “How was it, Calliopaki mou?” Thalia asks. She sits back in her chair and puts her hands in her lap. My news has canceled her interest in the meal.

  “Filthy, I’m sure,” says Sophia. “Students and leftists living in it.” She trails off, leaving us to assume the depredations caused by such people.

  “It’s not bad,” I say. “It’s apartments.”

  “Well, there is a nice one on the second floor,” says Thalia. “It’s your room,” she nods to my mother, “and our room, plus the bathroom, and a little kitchen made out of part of Nestor’s room, bless his soul.”

  “You haven’t seen it, Mamá?” I ask.

  “Your mother won’t come with us,” Thalia says, and I can’t tell if my mother was even going to answer me. But she has an answer ready for her sister.

  “Why should I come?” she says. “I can’t understand why the two of you feel the need to go visiting these people who have ruined our beautiful home.”

  “But that’s the point, isn’t it, Clio,” Sophia says. “It’s not our beautiful home anymore. It hasn’t been for decades.” There’s a tone in her voice that I can’t quite place. I watch her for a moment, but she reveals nothing.

  “Clio, we have simply gone a few times to see how the house has changed. That’s all,” Thalia says. “Now, Nikos, will you stop hoarding that lamb and let me get another taste of my daughter’s cooking?”

  Nikos obliges, visibly relieved that his mother-in-law has changed the topic. I concentrate on my food.

  “Well,” my mother says. “What did you do in the house, Calliope?”

  “I went down to the basement.”

  “What on earth for?” Thalia asks.

  “Come on, you remember the story. Mamá must have told it to me and Aliki a million times.”

  “What story?” Demetra asks.

  “About the old house.” Aliki says it in an offhand way.

  “Your poor uncle got into huge trouble for that prank,” Thalia says.

  “I couldn’t find the drain,” I say, waiting.

  “Drain? There was no drain,” says Sophia.

  I remind the aunts of the story of the basement flood the way my mother always told it to me—with the hose, and the water, and the scullery door opened, and the drain. As I recite the story, I feel my allegiance shifting from the girls to Nestor, who never got to join the game. All these years, I have been blind to the fact that the sisters’ gaiety rested on the despair of their little brother.

  “That’s not how it happened,” Sophia says. “There
wasn’t any drain.”

  “Yes, there was,” says my mother. “In the scullery. Are you sure you looked properly, Calliope?”

  “I checked the whole floor. Moved boxes out of the way.”

  “Well, you must have missed it. Because what fool wouldn’t have a drain in the scullery?”

  “Then our parents were fools, because I’m telling you there was no drain,” Sophia says.

  “Clio,” says Thalia softly, “don’t you remember about the rice?”

  “No.”

  “What rice, Theia Thalia?”

  “When Nestor opened the scullery door to come out into the hall,” Thalia says gently, patting my arm again, “the water went into that room and it had already gone into the other rooms as well.”

  “Water seeks its own level,” says Nikos.

  “Nestor wasn’t supposed to open the door,” my mother says.

  “Can we speak kindly,” Thalia pleads, “of the man who just died?”

  “What were we going to do, Clio?” says Sophia. “Leave the boy in there forever?”

  Sophia takes the story over, speaking directly to me, as if I am the only one who needs to have her version of family history set straight.

  “One of the storerooms was full of food. Bags of rice and flour. This was during the war,” she says. “Imagine.”

  “It was not during the war,” says my mother. “I was only sixteen. I know because I remember the book I brought home from school that day.”

  “If it wasn’t during the war, it was right before the war. Anyhow,” Sophia goes on, “you can imagine what happened to that food when water got to it.”

  “It was one giant rice pudding,” Thalia says to Demetra, pinching her cheek.

  “All of it ruined,” says Sophia. “When we needed supplies like that.”

  My mother exhales loudly. “None of it was ruined, because the water went down the drain,” she says.

  I shake my head. “There wasn’t one.”

  “Then someone,” she says, her voice rising, “must have changed it. Things change, Calliope, you know. Because there was a drain in the scullery in the old house when we were children before the war.”

  “What’s so important about a dumb drain?”

  We all look at Demetra, who is pouting into her plate. Thalia caresses her head.

  “It is dumb, Demetraki,” I say, laughing. “You’re absolutely right. Tell us about the parade.”

  Demetra brightens and describes the floats and performers she can’t wait to see tonight. We listen, happy to share in the little girl’s excitement as we pick at the nuts and oranges that Aliki has set out on the table. Finally, Nikos rises and leads the aunts to the living room.

  In the kitchen, I scrape sauce and bits of lamb into the garbage while Aliki stacks the plates. In the hubbub of the aunts, she has forgotten that I’m supposed to be treated specially. It feels good.

  “Do you, at least, remember the story?” I ask.

  “I don’t think anybody does, Paki. It’s all so long ago, and they’re old women now. They’re starting to forget things.”

  “True, but that’s not what just happened here.”

  “Look,” she says, setting the plate down. “Áse to. Leave it alone. We grew up with some nice stories. Sometimes they told them one way, sometimes another. Leave it at that. Nikos reads and reads about the war and the civil war, and he’s never any clearer on the details. Even the historians can’t agree on what really happened.”

  As I dry the plates Aliki hands me, I tell myself that she’s right and I should take her approach. It shouldn’t matter. These are only stories, after all. But I can’t deny that it does matter to me. My mother’s stories were the one way I had of connecting to her—of finding some shared refuge from the cloud of her unhappiness. During the winters when I was far from Thalia’s embraces and Sophia’s loving vigilance, those stories gave me a glimpse of mischief and delight. I can’t let them go that easily.

  4

  Clio

  May 1940

  Clio turned and watched as a low-slung Citroën drove down the dusty street. Her father still insisted on a carriage, declaring that cars were for the profligate. Whoever owned the Citroën might be profligate, but he had passed by with a white-sleeved elbow resting stylishly on the open window, gauntleted fingers drumming the top of the door frame.

  The car tires had kicked up more dust than carriage wheels did. Clio could feel it sticking to her neck where she had begun to sweat a little. The leaves of the sycamores were too young to shade the sidewalks properly, and though there were weeks left to the school year, there was a summer heat in the air. She slowed her pace and let her sisters and brother pass her. After a few steps, they turned and waited.

  “Speed up, Clio,” Sophia said. “Come on.”

  “Go on without me. I don’t care.”

  “Fine.”

  Sophia turned forward again and murmured something to Thalia, who took a peek over her shoulder. Nestor pressed up behind them. They walked on like that, a few paces ahead of Clio but never outpacing her. Clio knew they desperately wanted to go faster, to get home to lunch and shade, but they were incapable of breaking free. She was their eldest sister, after all, and they always followed her—even when they walked ahead.

  By the time they reached the house, Thalia could bear it no longer and bounded up the front steps. She yanked one of the doors so wide open that it banged against the house, and Clio heard a cry from inside—Irini, the cook, yelling at her again. Clio arrived on the top step and stood in the doorway for a moment, exhaling and easing her shoulders back. She pulled the door shut behind her. Thalia, Sophia, and Nestor were long gone, their leather book bags in a heap in the foyer.

  Clio looked up at the atrium window, noting the direction of the shaft of light that marked the black-and-white foyer floor like a sundial. It was pointing to her left, toward the study door: early afternoon. She could hear faint sounds of clanging pot lids coming from the kitchen at the back of the house. Straight ahead of her, on the other side of the atrium, the open doors to the dining room revealed the long table already set with china and silver for lunch. A newspaper rattled in the study, and her mother said something softly, to which her father murmured a reply. Nestor burst out of the back hall, crossed the atrium, and ran up the wide stairs to the landing and the inner balcony that ringed the airy space. He went into his room, where she could hear him opening and closing his dresser drawers.

  Clio turned to face the large mirror that leaned against the foyer wall in a frame of dark carved wood. She set her book bag down and nudged it away with her foot as she adopted a pose: left hip cocked, weight on the left foot, right foot slid outward with the toe pointed to the side. She moved a hand to her hip and gave her reflection a hard stare, chin out like Garbo, with the same slight waves in her shoulder-length hair. She brought her face close to the glass and raised one eyebrow, letting her lips form a tiny, mocking smile. With her face this close to the mirror’s surface, she could forget about her school uniform with its cobalt-blue pinafore over a crisp white shirt. She could picture herself in that Citroën, wearing stockings and heels instead of the white ankle socks that peeked out of her brown T-strap sandals. With her face this close, all she could see was the olive skin of a young girl whose high cheekbones and straight nose were about to make her beautiful.

  She drew back from the mirror and saw Sophia and Thalia standing behind her, pulling faces. She wheeled around.

  “Hey!” she cried, and the other two fell into smothered laughter. They staggered off, giggling and thrusting their hips from side to side. It was fine for them to tease, but at fourteen and twelve they were children still, Sophia’s braids tight and long and Thalia’s curls only faintly controlled with a ribbon headband. They had no idea yet what it would mean to be grown up.

  Clio gave her book bag a kick and wandered over to the square of light coming down from the atrium.

  She turned her closed eyes up into the
sun, thinking of what to do until her parents or Irini called her for lunch. She didn’t want lunch. The food would be heavy and rich, and there would be too much of it. Two main courses to choose from, then cooked vegetables like fassolakia or a gratinée, and then fruit and possibly even dessert. She wanted something else.

  “No!” Irini shouted as soon as Clio pushed through the kitchen door. “No, go right back out, young lady. The food will be out when it’s ready.”

  Clio opened a cupboard and drew out a jar full of vanilia, a sticky vanilla mastic.

  “I’ll be gone in a minute,” she said, reaching for a glass and filling it with water from a pitcher she took from the refrigerator.

  “You’re ruining your appetite,” Irini said.

  “Irini, nothing could make me skip a meal that you had cooked.”

  She dug a spoonful of mastic out of the jar and dunked the spoon into her water glass. This is what she wanted now, something sweet: an ypovrichio. A submarine. She gave Irini a smile over her shoulder as she pushed back out of the kitchen.

  “Now they’ll all be coming in here for an ypovrichio,” Irini was muttering.

  Clio took the stairs down to the basement, looking for someplace quiet and cool where her sisters and brother would not come and pester her to get them a treat as well. She sat down on the bottom step at one end of a long hall lined with storerooms and sucked at the vanilia, gazing at her image on the back of the spoon.

  The sounds of cart wheels and footsteps and the occasional car motor came faintly through the basement windows. People were heading home for lunch all over Patras. In Clio’s neighborhood, cooks were spooning lamb or chicken and pilaf or her father’s favorite, moussaká, onto porcelain platters. They were sprinkling salads with oregano and olive oil and salt. By the harbor, dockworkers were eating fried anchovies from a paper cone or tugging chunks of pork souvlaki from bamboo skewers with their teeth. At school, some of the boys would come back to the classroom with little dabs of oil glazing their fingernails where they hadn’t thought to clean. She didn’t think she could like a boy with oily nails.