The Clover House (46 page)

I want to laugh with relief.

“Are you staying?” I ask.

He comes to the window.

“Callie, if we’re going to do this, you can’t run away when you get scared.”

“I know.” This time it’s true. “I don’t want to anymore. But you’re right. I was scared. The thing is, I don’t know if I can be any good at really being with someone.”

He starts to move away in frustration.

“But,” I go on, “I’d like to try. Could we do that, Jonah? Could we just try?”

“I’ve never not tried, Callie. The thing about trying is that you don’t know the outcome. And you, you try to control the outcome the only way you know how. Which is by screwing it up.”

“But now I know things. I haven’t been away that long, Joe, but I’ve learned a lot. Trust me. It’ll be different. I want you to be my home.”

I reach up and comb his hair back from his forehead. He closes his eyes at my touch, and that is all I need to see. I know it will be all right. I take his face in both my hands and wait until he opens his eyes again.

His kisses are tentative, as if he is still waiting to see what I will do. As I kiss back, I gently press against him, telling him to trust me, promising I will not draw away.

Later, we sit on the couch with a box of pizza on the coffee table. I have that light-headed, dry sensation of jet lag and an all-nighter. My body thinks it is nearly three in the morning. I tell Jonah I have some photographs to show him. The rest of the story can wait until later. For now I dig into my bag and bring out the key ring, with our apartment key and the deeply crenellated key of Nestor’s house hanging side by side. He reads the inscription on the fob and laughs at the strangeness of the Scottish words on a Greek key ring in an American city. But I know this is just right. Just right for Nestor, the go-between boy and man—shuttling between Italian and Greek, past and present, home and away—and just right for me.

Early in
The Clover House
, Callie finds something unforeseen at the site of one of her mother’s stories. Where she expected to see a drain, she finds smooth floor. To her, it’s as if no belly button marks the umbilical cord connection between the story and its starting point. But while that may be true for Callie’s mother’s story, it is certainly not true of mine.
The Clover House
has come into the world thanks to the effort, generosity, patience, and inspiration of numerous friends, family, and mentors. The marks of their kindness are all over the novel, and I am thrilled to have the chance to point them out.

There can be few better storytelling educations than my childhood summer days in Patras, sitting with my cousin Zeni in my aunt Alexandra’s apartment, listening to Alexandra and my aunts Zita and Elli, my uncle Dodos, and my mother, Suzanne, telling tales from their past. I am so grateful that they never tired of retelling their stories—of a childhood mercifully free of the tragedy and sadness I wove into the Notaris family history. For keeping the old stories alive in the present, I thank my cousin Alexandra, who also shepherded me through my own first experience of Carnival in Patras.

There was a point when I couldn’t make these stories work as a novel. And as I strategized how to make an effective bonfire out of all my manuscripts, there were three people who convinced
me not to buy the matches. Faith Salie made me realize that if I wanted something badly enough, I had to take a risk. Her faith in my writing has been a constant motivation. Kelley Lessard pushed me, questioned me, raised her eyebrow at me, and made me see that I couldn’t not be a writer. For that, and for being the sister I never had, I am more grateful to her than I can express. My husband, JP Power, encouraged me—as he has done from the very beginning—and helped me feel that I could commit myself more deeply and without fear.

Along the way, numerous friends have helped make
The Clover House
the book it is today. Terri Payne Butler, Meg Sinnott Rubin, Jeanne Stanton, Eleni Gage, Christina Thompson, and Gwynne Morgan offered wise critiques on early drafts. Gillian English was there from the start, when the idea of jacket copy was a wild fantasy. Thanks to the incomparable Grub Street, I found a veritable army of wonderful critics and work-shoppers, especially Chris Abouzeid, Nichole Bernier, Kathy Crowley, Stephanie Ebbert, Cathy Elcik, Chuck Garabedian, Andrew Goldstein, Tracy Hahn-Burkett, Stuart Horwitz, Javed Jahangir, Ann Killough, Randy Susan Meyers, E.B. Moore, Necee Regis, Dell Smith, Becky Tuch, and Julie Wu. It’s safe to say that the book might not have seen the light of day at all had it not been for my serendipitous arrival in Jenna Blum’s master novel class at Grub. Jenna’s wisdom, her humor, and her honesty lie on every page of this book. I can’t thank her enough for seeing the potential in the manuscript.

But a book needs supporters beyond its family of origin. And I have been tremendously lucky in my agent, Kent Wolf, at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, and my editor, Kara Cesare at Ballantine. Kent believed in the book from the start, and Kara embraced it with an invigorating enthusiasm. My thanks also go to Kathleen Murphy Lord for her incisive copyediting,
and to Caitlin Alexander for getting me to fill the story in where it needed it.

Though they may not realize it, my friends in the rowing world played an enormous role in supporting this novel project. Friends and teammates at Community Rowing, Inc. in Boston, who shared tough workouts during which we pushed one another to do our best—they taught me crucial lessons about taking chances, about going for broke. What works on the river works on the page.

And there are those who are there all the time, beyond the river and the page. My ever-supportive father, Lazaros Lazaridis, who never got to see this book get off the ground, but whose experiences of occupied Athens are crucial to the novel. The entire Power and Lazaridis families, who took such kind interest in my progress. Iannis and Flora Karydis, who nurtured and supported me in everything. My children, Eoin Lazaridis Power and Nike Lazaridis Power, who have been quiet cheerleaders for me all along, often surprising me with their loyalty to something they only knew was happening “upstairs.” Eoin helped with historical research, and Nike gave me vital editorial help during revisions, with her unerring sense of how narrative works.

Finally, JP, indeed the love of my life. From the day almost fifteen years ago when he urged me to quit academia and try what I really loved, to the many dark days when he believed in me more than I did, to the eventual cascade of writing joys we could share, he has been on my side, and by my side. In that and much more, I have been very, very lucky.

A Novel

Henriette Lazaridis Power

A Reader’s Guide

Henriette Lazaridis Power

Patras, Greece, is not the kind of city people choose to go to. Its architecture is dominated by boxy apartment buildings; its streets form a maze of one-way routes seemingly designed to prevent motion; its colonnaded sidewalks are rendered impassable by serried ranks of parked motorcycles. People transit
through
Patras, catching the ferry that will take them to Brindisi or Ancona or the Ionian Islands, or the train or bus that will take them to Athens. Patras is secondary to these other places, a placeholder, really. Just somewhere you have to sit for a few hours while you wait to leave.

But if you look closely, past the satellite dishes and the antennas and the graceless apartment buildings of rebar and cement, you can see the city it used to be before the war, with its neoclassical homes, its public squares, and its harbor with an embracing jetty. And you can always see the beauty of its geography: the deep violet of the Gulf of Patras, the Ionian Sea to the west and the islands rising from the haze, the mountain of Panachaïko, cypress-clad, sloping up beyond the vineyards that ring the city.

I set
The Clover House
in Patras because my mother’s childhood stories took place there—by the jetty, up the mountain, in those squares—and her stories tantalized me with their hints of who she had really been, and what had made her who she was. I spent much of my own childhood in the city, often trying to relive and recapture my mother’s experiences. In a sense, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been using Patras as a kind of live-in novel, a three-dimensional, real-life way to live an invented life. I always knew I loved Patras. But it wasn’t until after I had finished writing the actual novel of
The Clover House
that I realized the deeper role that Patras played for me, as a child and as a writer.

Growing up in a Greek household in the United States but spending summers in Greece with my family, I did a lot of coming and going—linguistically, geographically, culturally. Like many bilingual and bicultural kids, blending in came naturally to me. In Greece, no one could tell I lived in America; and in America, no one could tell I had learned to speak Greek before English, and that I always spoke it at home. Many times, I felt this shuttling as a constant dislocation. I recall a pervasive sense of nostalgia, no matter where I was at any given time. But one thing was certain. When I was surrounded by my family in Greece, embraced by grandparents, cousins, and above all aunts, I belonged. Nowhere—not even in my New England hometown—was that belonging more emphatic than in Patras.

The Patras of my childhood was a land of women—women who gave me independence and who smothered me with affection. Though they were my aunts, they served, bless them, as my mothers, filling in where my own mother lacked motivation and desire. I suspect now that my aunts
and other maternal stand-ins did this quite deliberately. Seeing my need, they circled around me with a perfect balance of strictness and solicitude.

My Aunt Elli’s husband, Pindaros, had a word for all these women:
tsoupoules
. Don’t look for the word in any dictionary; it was the product of Pindaros’s delighted imagination. The
tsoupoules
were my two cousins—one exactly my age and her sister old enough for us to idolize—my Great-aunt Eugenia, later on two little nieces, and always my Aunts Zita, Elli, and Alexandra. They weren’t really my aunts, any more than my cousins were really my cousins. In America, you’d call them something once or twice removed. But my mother had grown up with these women in the same house. And in the way they embraced, chided, and encouraged, there was nothing removed about them at all.