by Julia Glass
“And I bet you loved it.”
“I’d love it,” says Dennis. “Entrée into the mysteries of another tribe. I have four children, but my wife’s a bit old-fashioned there. She let me in that room only for the final moments of truth.”
“Your wife’s not old-fashioned,” says Fenno. “She’s what’s known in these parts as a major control freak.” He shakes his head with amusement. “And it’s not mystical, what I learned. It’s a lot of very practical stuff, like why a woman gets heartburn so much when she’s pregnant, why babies are born with conical heads. I know about the best brands of breast pumps, where to lease them, and how to massage a blocked milk duct—a skill I hope I’ll never use. I know all about the pros and cons of circumcision.” He leans in for effect, knowing, as Fern does, that under the table all the men’s thighs are tensing.
A wave of loud male laughter follows, and everyone glances at Fern. Richard covers his mouth dramatically, as if to apologize for their boyish reaction.
“All that and runs a bookstore too,” Tony tells her. “Right around the corner from you. Plume!” He says the name with fanfare, and of course she knows it: a watch pocket of a place that catches you off-guard with its cool, Green Mansions interior; not a hole in the wall but a garden in the wall, the kind of shop where you are compelled by its very perfection to buy something, anything, and feel forlorn if you walk out empty-handed.
“That’s a dangerous place, I’ve spent a lot of money there,” says Fern, though in truth it was Jonah who bought so many books there, so many expensive books, for which she would scold him. Books on Giotto, Caravaggio, Goya, Vermeer. Jonah’s mother owns most of them now.
“Thank you,” says Fenno.
They pass the platters back and forth for seconds. Richard and Dennis exchange another round of tokes. Dennis exhales audibly and says, “You’ve got to wonder, what kind of mums could these young girls possibly make?”
“First off,” says Fenno, “a good number give their babies up for adoption. And with those who keep them, the social workers at the center follow up for years. Some of them make very decent mums. Some of them even marry the fathers, though I often wonder if that’s so wise.”
“Oh, my mom had me when she was seventeen,” says Richard. “I hardly know the guy I’m supposed to call Dad. But she’s been just fantastic, I still can’t bear to live too far away from her. We talk on the phone like every other day. Go ahead and laugh, but she’s my best friend.” He looks at Tony, knowing full well who’d laugh first. But Tony just smiles, no comment.
“Well, against all modern logic,” says Dennis, “maybe starting out young isn’t such a bad idea. Maybe you don’t have enough time to take your selfishness for granted. Vee was twenty-four when we had Laurie, and I worried about that. I thought, you know, she should enjoy her freedom longer and rubbish like that, but she was certain. She’s quite the devoted mum.”
“Twenty-four is ten years and a world away from fourteen,” says Fenno.
“Yes, yes, point taken—but think of our mum, getting on to her thirties when she had you. She had all these routines that had nothing to do with children, and then she got the dogs. I tell you, I can’t think of a time when I didn’t almost wish I was a puppy; the pups were the ones who got that unconditional love we’re all supposed to give our offspring.”
Fenno frowns. “She loved the dogs as you’re supposed to love dogs: consistently.”
“Yes, but also more intimately, with more real attention, don’t you think?” Dennis seems unaware of the corn kernels stuck to his chin. “Like dear old Roger, may he rest in peace. Do you remember the way she kept him close while she was dying? She’d whisper in his ear and nuzzle up with that dog as if he were human. She talked more to him than to Dad!”
Richard laughs. “Well dogs. When it comes to love, dogs make pretty steep competition for us people. And rightly so.”
Fern looks at Tony, who hasn’t spoken in a while. His arms are folded, his expression no longer wry as he watches the brothers debate.
“What was your mother like?” she asks him.
“Above reproach.” Typically, his tone discourages any sort of reply.
Looking around the table, Fern pictures these men as sons, little boys adoring and resenting their mothers by turns. She tries to picture the mothers themselves. Richard’s would be pretty in an ordinary way, and flaky, but warm and loyal; perhaps a drinker (the caution inspiring Richard’s near-purity), living in one of those flimsy little houses shaped just like the houses in a Monopoly game. The Scottish mother she envisions as an artistocratic, dog-besotted Brit, a tumble of Jack Russells under her long tweed skirts; her voice loud and trilling but holding the children (when not with a nanny) to quieter standards. Tony’s mother remains a cipher, a generic Madonna behind dark glasses and a long white cane. (How does a blind mother negotiate city streets with a baby? How does she push its carriage, aim a spoon at its bobbing and weaving mouth?)
“So, boys, what makes the perfect mother?” says Fern. “Tony?” She nudges his elbow. “Since yours sounds as if she was.”
He hesitates but says, “Stands up to any bullshit your father deals out.”
Before Fern can ask, Like, for instance, what kind of bullshit? Dennis says emphatically, “Just being there when you turn around. That is the cardinal virtue of the perfect mum.”
“Amen to that!” says Richard.
“But that could hardly describe the mother of your children,” Fenno says to Dennis. “Véronique with her ambitious career.”
“You forget that Vee works at home!” Dennis says. “Oh yes, she’s out and about to meet with clients, but she totes the wee’uns along, especially now that she’s in demand, and when she’s in the garden or the office, she’ll drop just about anything at a moment’s notice.”
“As you don’t think our own mum did.”
Fern wonders if it’s because he’s stoned that Dennis seems to take this subject so lightly, that he seems not to notice the stern expression on his older brother’s face. “You know how there were wife-swapping parties way back when?” he says now. “I remember reading about them in some tabloid when I was away at school and thinking, well, what a curious thing it might’ve been if we’d had a chance to mum-swap now and then. You know, see, just see, what it was like to have one of those domestic mums, about the house and baking biscuits, plumping your pillows . . .”
“You’d have been suffocated,” says Fenno.
“Yes well perhaps, perhaps. But didn’t you feel like she ought to have been a bit more regretful, shed just a single tear perhaps, about sending us off to school, to ice-cold washings and canings and all that militaristic rubbish?”
“For God’s sake, they stopped caning by the time you and Davey were there. And everyone we knew got sent away to school, some a lot sooner.”
Dennis pauses, looking at his brother with an odd smile. “You know, she was off on this jaunt to New Zealand when Davey had that awful fever and had to go in hospital because she couldn’t take him home.”
Fenno looks confused and annoyed. “We all got fevers now and then.”
“No, no, this was the mumps or some other pox you’re not supposed to get when you’re twelve. I’ve never asked Davey since, for obvious reasons.”
“You are high as a fucking kite. What are you talking about?”
Van Morrison’s wheedling voice forces itself on the room for a long moment before Dennis lets out a mulish, snorting laugh. “You don’t know that’s what did in his sperm?” He tries to stop laughing but fails. “Oh crikes.”
Fenno says, “You blame Mum for Davey’s getting sick at school?”
Dennis shrugs dramatically. “Silly, isn’t it? And Mum did plenty of things just right. I mean look at us. We love what we do, and isn’t that a rare thing? I think she taught us to hold out for that, I mean by example, don’t you think? All three of us. No coincidence there. And we’re mates, I think she made sure of that. . . .”
Fenno appears to
be rearranging his napkin in his lap.
“That’s incredibly important, loving what you do,” says Richard. “I love what I do, too.”
There’s a slight pause before Fern says, “What do you do?”
“I groom dogs right now, which is also a fabulous way to meet interesting people, but I’m training to be a veterinary technician.”
Another pause follows, but imperturbable Richard plunges on: “I do housecalls and charge a top rate. I groom Ross Bleckner’s dogs and Kim Basinger’s and once I did Mike Nichols’s, too. He has the most beautiful Gordon setter.”
“Roth Bletchner, is that someone famous?” says Dennis.
“Society painter,” says Tony. “Party animal, mainly. Hangs out at fund-raisers for charity cases like unemployed interior decorators or lifeguards who just came out of the closet. Gets his picture taken with liposucted debutantes.”
“I think you’re jealous,” says Richard. “Ross is a great guy. Not a snob at all. He even asked my advice about the Lyme’s disease vaccine. He has this standard poodle that’s one of the smartest dogs I’ve ever met. She likes to listen to opera while we work. Isn’t that fabulous?”
Tony snorts. “A poodle. Well need you say more.”
“No, no. You’re confusing standards with miniatures and toys. Standard poodles are the real thing, a dog bred for hunting. Steady and smart.”
“The real thing. Well, I stand corrected.” Tony’s hands are poised over his plate, his fingers splayed like talons and blackened by char from the chicken skin. Fern has never seen him so persistently edgy; she doubts he would behave this way if he and Richard were alone. He must be embarrassed before the others that his date (his gigolo?) is this happy-go-lucky dog groomer. But that’s no excuse. What did he think, that the boy would show up for dinner and debate the fallout of Clinton’s impeachment or deconstruct Don DeLillo?
Van Morrison is done spreading the Word, and the wake of silence feels morose. In it, Fern becomes aware of her reluctant clarity, of remaining sober while others do not, of watching temperaments shift in ways she would not otherwise perceive.
Richard stands. “My turn! Where’s the music stashed?” He sprints into the living room before he gets an answer.
In his gaping absence, Fern says, “Shall I cut the pie?”
“What a fine idea,” says Tony, sounding genuinely grateful. “Miss Fern here makes the world’s most outrageous pies,” he says to Fenno.
Fenno nods. He looks ten years older than the man Fern met upstairs that afternoon. “I’ll clear,” he says.
From the kitchen, as she searches for a broad-bladed knife, Fern recognizes the opening notes of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Should it surprise her that Richard would choose something so old-fashioned? No. Gigolo or not (and wouldn’t the money go toward his vet-tech tuition?), the boy has a long, likable streak of cornball sweetness.
Pausing to appreciate the pie before she cuts it, Fern lets the music—joy distilled—invade her. Long ago, before Jonah, she had wished that a neat fragment of this symphony’s ecstatic panorama could be extracted for a wedding procession. When she hears it now, its joy is painful. She is listening to a recording of her lost, outmoded certainty of what love would be: how uplifting, even in its storms.
TWO MONTHS AFTER JONAH’S DEATH, she ran into Stavros at a neighborhood toy store. They were shopping for nephews with adjacent birthdays. Fern walked in at the exact moment Stavros was startled by a velvet devil exploding from a jack-in-the-box. The instant of irrational terror on his face—on the face of such a conventionally masculine man—made her laugh. He looked happy to see her.
The manager of the toy store said, “And it’s a collector’s item, too.”
Stavros regarded him as if he were nuts. “After being played with by a three-year-old?” Fern laughed again.
They looked at trucks, trains, gyroscopes, rubbery bath toys. They didn’t buy a thing. As they left the store, Stavros said, “A drink, a cup of tea?”
“Tea,” she said, charmed by so quaint an offer. She expected him to choose a coffee shop, but he led her to a large sooty building one block from hers, to the ground floor rear apartment. When he turned on the light, she must have betrayed her amazement, because he laughed and said, “My parents’ place. I have to water my mother’s plants. She’s in Greece, and Dad doesn’t do domestic things. If I had sisters, he wouldn’t let me do them, either.”
The living room was large but claustrophobically filled with dark weighty furniture, brocades and velvet in colors and muted patterns that reminded Fern of minerals: agate, granite, bloodstone. Icons hung on the wall, but they were equally dark and poorly lit. The air smelled heavy as well, of meat and spices. She sat on a voluminous blood-colored couch and watched Stavros make himself at home in a kitchen not much larger than hers. After putting a kettle on the stove, he walked through the living room and pulled back brown velvet drapes. “Come have a look,” he called to Fern as he opened a pair of French doors and stepped outside.
Someone with talent and patience tended the garden before her. At the center was a tiled fountain (now dry), at the back a geometrically plotted planting bed. On three sides, the brick walls were nearly obscured by tall, well-established poplars and yews, beneath them sturdy bushes of box, hydrangea, mock orange, and lilac. From her childhood, Fern knew all these plants in an instant, even without their flowers. Stavros made the rounds with a hose. “Not much to look at now, but you should see this place in June.” She admired the moss on the stones, a rose still in bloom, chrysanthemums of a bluish purple she had never seen before. Herbs grew in the mazelike bed at the back. Most were shriveled or cut back, but sage and rosemary, waist-high, still flourished in the sharp November air. She bent to smell them.
“Here.” Stavros plucked leaves from three different plants. “All oregano. Varieties my mother swears you cannot find here anywhere.” One by one, he rubbed them between his fingers and held them under Fern’s nose.
She sighed, shocked at how their distinct but harmonious scents called up the Greece she had seen, nearly ten years ago, for only two weeks.
“I’ll cut you some to carry home,” he said.
As he surveyed the garden, his breath rose in prominent plumes. “My mother’s left me complicated directions for mulching, in case she has to stay away much longer. You can’t imagine what she’d do to me if anything died.”
“Oh but I can.” Fern told him about Arcadia, her summers of horticultural labor, the price of trial and error (your pay docked by the price of any plant you’d clearly killed—which only exacerbated finger-pointing among the Olitsky siblings).
In the living room, under a gaudy chandelier, they both drank tea, something dark and strong with a hint of cinnamon. Stavros told her about the courses he was taking when he wasn’t helping his father run the neighborhood empire: real estate law and Homeric Greek.
“Your father must be pleased—about the Greek.”
“Oh no. He thinks it’s pointless and sentimental. His parents are dead, his brothers all came to this country, and he hasn’t been back to the island where he grew up for ages. He left for good reason, he says! So Mom takes one or two of us over each summer, for a few weeks. She jokes that he won’t let her take all three of her sons because then she might never return.”
“She’s not happy here?”
Stavros shrugged. “You know, I’ve asked her that. She never answers directly. I don’t think she thinks in those terms.”
Fern looked around at the saints, the pottery displayed on trays, a large black cross hanging like a list of commandments beside the kitchen door.
“This is where I grew up,” said Stavros. “I know what you’re thinking. My father owns this building; why not the penthouse? Well, my mother would never leave that garden. That—that I know makes her happy.”
“But this is a huge place . . .”
“Two bedrooms. My brothers and I shared one.”
Three boys in one room. Fern r
ecalled her childhood gripes about shared bedrooms and bathrooms. But she had had yards and orchards and fields, a basement playroom. “How did you get any privacy?”
Stavros smiled at her for a moment before he said, “In Greek, you know, there’s no word for privacy.”
She laughed.
“I’m serious.” He crossed the room and sat next to her on the couch, uncomfortably close. She stopped laughing.
He said, “Where you are sitting, that’s where the only telephone was when we were growing up. Whenever I talked on the phone, my mother would come and sit right here. She was almost never out of the apartment, and she might be knitting or sewing on buttons or peeling potatoes, but whatever she was doing, she would come and sit this close while I talked to my friends. I especially hated it when she brought onions to cut up beside me. And when I hung up, she would say, ‘So who flunked that history test? So who broke up with this girl Mary? So it is what movie you are going to see?’” Stavros put on a thick accent and held his face aggressively close to Fern’s. Nervously, she laughed again. She could smell that same rich soap she had smelled two months ago, when she had cried on his shoulder.
He stood up, taking their cups to the kitchen. “She’d even stand outside the bathroom and wait while we took our showers.”
“I’d have killed her,” said Fern.
“Well yes, we could see our friends didn’t live like that, but there was no complaining without consequences from our father. So when I was thirteen, I decided I could live like this by imagining that I was a very famous child, like what’s-his-name, Grace Kelly’s son the junior prince of Monaco, and had to have a bodyguard no matter where I went.”
Fern stood in the doorway of the kitchen while Stavros washed their cups and laid them in a rack to dry. “Only problem was, I developed a celebrity complex and had to be brought back to earth.”
“How did that happen?”
“That,” he said, “is much too private to tell.”
They laughed together. He told her his Greek class started in half an hour, but before they left the apartment, he took a pair of scissors and a ball of string from a drawer and went back into the garden. When he returned, he handed her three small bouquets of his mother’s oregano. “If you like,” he said, “hang them upside down for two weeks to dry them. But keep them in separate jars, so their flavors stay separate too.” (In a dark place, in glass, away from the stove. From her own mother, Fern knew the routine.)