“Dennis, you haven’t had enough to drink,” I say. I get up to pour him a glass of wine as well, aware that I am, to borrow one of Mal’s colorful expressions, sloshed as a foundering yawl.
“No thank you,” he says, sounding demure and cold.
I sit down again. “But the ashes. Seriously, Dennis.”
“I think we should do whatever causes the least contention. Bury them in the churchyard by Mum or take them back to Greece, I won’t lose sleep either way.”
“So you’d leave Mum with Dad’s family and no one to defend her integrity.”
Dennis smiles at me with a touch of pity. “Where does Mum’s integrity come in?”
I laugh. “Can’t say.”
“None of us can, can we?” Dennis doesn’t look up as he says this, and I begin to think there’s more to it than the concentration he’s using to pour us each a cup of verbena (the dried leaves taken from a satchel of herbs he’s carried over from France; I peer in and see bundles of thyme, oregano, chives).
He hands me my cup, more than a little pointedly. “Go to bed. Tomorrow you’ll thank me.”
“I haven’t been much help here, have I?”
“Nonsense,” he says, jovial again. He points to the linen-wrapped leeks on the scullery washboard.
I leave the kitchen meekly, carrying my tea as bidden, one hand holding the saucer, the other bracing the cup. In the front hall, I see Dad’s ashes on the table where David left them, as if to greet guests when they enter the house. The ashes are in a plain wooden box—a box which, when I pick it up, turns out to be plastic with a false wood grain, warping apart at the seams. In size and color, it reminds me of the real wooden box in which my mother kept her few pieces of jewelry. A fragment of a Strauss waltz would play every time she opened it.
On a whim, I leave my tea behind and carry the box containing my father upstairs to my room. Without turning on the light, I set the box on the windowseat that overlooks the stream—the burn, it’s called hereabouts—which once defined a border of Tealing’s modest property. Not long after we moved in, Dad bought the large field on the other side, so Mum could build her kennel there and graze half a dozen sheep.
On a clear midnight with a good moon, the line of birches on the far side will glow. I’ve always thought it’s the best view from anywhere in the house; on so many nights it enticed or consoled me to sleep.
As I—or we, I can’t help thinking—sit there in the dark, voices materialize through a wall. I listen as acutely as I can; I walk soundlessly toward the wall and lean toward the conversation. It’s Lil and Véronique in my parents’ old room, now David and Lil’s.
“We had a very long talk, very long, and he has said no. He is sorry that he is saying no, but I think he will not be moved.” Véronique, in her lilting purr. “I told him I had thought of it and it would be agreeable for me—I have three children, I will not be having more.”
“Dennis doesn’t long for a son?”
“Oh Denis, he,
comment dirais-je?
”—a small and I suspect inappropriate laugh—
“il nage bien en fémininit
é
—
tu comprends?”
Lil, bless her manners, laughs along. “I’ve often thought something similar about Davey, he has his element too. I’m not sure I could say he ‘swims well in animality’—sounds ghastly in English—but that’s rather what it’s like. He seems to so many people so . . . gruff. But to see him with a lamb or an old swaybacked mare, the tender concentration in his hands and his eyes, I’ve had this fantasy almost since I met him that I’d love to see that particular tenderness replicated in a son—or a daughter. I suppose now . . .” Even through the well-built wall, I hear her voice quaver.
“You will, you will,” Véronique is saying. “You will still see this, Liliane, I believe you will. You must believe it, too, chérie.”
“Oh Vee, all the things they’ve done, I feel like I’m in some science fiction novel, abducted by bug-eyed aliens in white laboratory coats; the things they’ve been doing to us, to me, and after all I went through, what was the point? They did something centrifugal this time, and I just couldn’t listen to the results. It’s awful to admit, but up till now, even when it was me they were dissecting, I’ve just always thought, well
David
understands these things—he’s as good as a human doctor when it comes to all this medical knowledge—so I stopped paying attention ages ago and figured, David’s brilliant, David will solve it. But this is the absolute limit, and of course I’m just as responsible. . . .”
“
Ecoute
. This is
your
joy of which you must take care.” Lil has been sobbing awhile now, and Véronique goes on talking in a singsong voice, probably just to keep the grief from ballooning. She speaks so quietly now that I can’t make out a word, and I stop short of pressing my ear against the wall, an arm’s length from where they sit. What I’m doing is obscene, but as Mal would say, this is scalding stuff. Sad stuff too, though I can’t help feeling relieved that Véronique will apparently not be donating an egg to blend her genes with David’s (the inverse of my spouse-swapping fantasy!). I note with surprise and gratification that Dennis had the power to refuse—that she even asked his permission.
There are footsteps in the hall now, a knock on the neighboring door. “Lillian? Lil?” It’s David. Down in the kitchen, I had myopically assumed that everyone else was sleeping; now I’m wondering, paranoid but never mind, whether they were in fact avoiding Dennis and me (or simply avoiding me).
Lillian answers her husband. The door opens and closes. Véronique says good night; the door opens and closes again. Silence, shuffling; Lil resumes crying. I hear the bedsprings surrender to David’s weight. Then I hear another sound that might be—and I don’t want to know if it is—my brother crying, too.
I go to the windowseat and crank open the casement windows, not just because the room and I both need a dose of June air. The lead joints of the windowpanes always object; having finally reached the limits of my prurience, I’m hoping the noise will alert David and Lil to my waking presence.
The birches cast mossy shadows across the field, and the waters of the burn warble quietly along. Carefully, I open the box. My father’s ashes are contained, flimsily, in a plastic bag closed by a wire tie. Through a tiny lesion in the bag, some of the ashes have leaked out. When I close the box—quickly, a little horrified by my childish curiosity—a puff of gray dust escapes. I avert my head, to avoid inhaling the ash. I set the box on the windowseat and retreat to my narrow bed, undress without hanging or folding my clothes, don a pair of pajamas, and slip between the old-fashioned stiff linen sheets.
I am against spreading my father’s ashes in Greece—spreading them anywhere—in part for a simple, selfish reason irrelevant to my anomalous respect for family traditions.
Before I ever did it, I thought the notion of spreading ashes on water highly romantic, the best and most mannerly way to get past the horror of funerals. Having partaken in this ritual twice now, I dread and despise it. Inevitably, the faintest breeze against the water sends the finest ashes back into your eyes and mouth; you have to brush the residue of your loved one’s bones, organs, viscera, and skin from the folds of your clothes, excavate it later on from the seams in your shoes. You have to wash him from your hair and down the drain of your tub, as if he were soot from a campfire, dust from an attic, diesel exhaust from an ill-mufflered bus.
Ever since, I’ve begged off such outings by claiming that I get rabidly seasick and thus would spoil the solemnity of the occasion. (In truth, I love to sail, so long as someone else knows how to navigate.)
THE SHOP WAS CHRISTENED PLUME
. I wasn’t happy about this coy pun Ralph cooked up to evoke both scholarship and ornithology, but it was preferable to Books of a Feather, Feathered Folio, and Bibliobirds, three other suggestions which should not have surprised me, coming as they did from a man whose bed wore a bonnet of chintz. (I wanted, simply, Books & Birds, to which Ralph snorted, “Sweetheart, you are a font of insight, but you infallibly err on the side of dull.” Which I would not dispute.)
We opened quietly in July, postponing the christening party until September and what the French so succinctly call
la rentrée
to ensure the attendance of half the humanities faculty from Columbia and, by extension, their spousal and rivalrous complement from nearby NYU. Even a few Princetonians made the commute. By then, we had also attracted our neighbors’ attention and made them sufficiently comfortable to wander in for a free glass of wine. As a featured guest, we had the aging but still robust Roger Tory Peterson; by the time our soiree was in full swing (full flight?), a queue had curled toward the corner of the block, each occupant holding one of Mr. Peterson’s guidebooks.
A major expenditure turned out to be the proper framing of my bird prints, but the investment was wise. Though even a sliver of unshelved wallspace in a bookshop might seem like folly in these parts, the view from the street was seductive. Here and there between the shelves, like portals onto a lost world, hung Audubon’s grand, effetely poised birds. In the glass that brightened their plumage was reflected the greenery on the street and in the garden, lending our low-ceilinged quarters a touch of the arboreal that made it feel, at times, akin to a treehouse.
By the door to the garden stood a display case holding, on green velvet, fine binoculars and portable telescopes with featherweight tripods, along with compasses, camping knives, and even upscale picnicking gadgets. (To Ralph, I gave a firm veto on T-shirts bearing the logo he longed to commission.) I kept in stock the complete ornithological guidebooks from several respected publishers, along with whatever used books of interest I could find in backwoods shops on the rare occasion I left the city. The week we ran our first ad in a birdwatching journal, our foot traffic doubled, and for the first time we talked of hiring an assistant, at least for weekends and evenings.
By the end of that summer, we’d already earned a number of regulars, some of whom bought and some of whom didn’t. I realized the value of this place as a drifter’s or procrastinator’s paradise, destination for a dreamy lunch hour, meeting place for illicit lovers, oasis for unhappy spouses who wanted to postpone the evening’s squabbles. We had a handful of lonelyhearts, none too daft or unpleasant, who wanted not the shop’s atmosphere but my free-for-the-asking company. I didn’t mind this as much as I’d have guessed, and Ralph, who dropped by every day for about an hour, was more than willing to contribute his practiced charm. Mavis and Druid would doze about his ankles, lending us their hunting lodge cachet.
Come September, this troupe of regulars expanded to include a few more stylish, polished types, people who’d had the luxury of fleeing the city for a month or more. One was a man, about my age, who paid his first visit as if he were the bookshop equivalent of a health inspector. After a smug hello, he turned slowly about, lighthouse fashion, and regarded the shop as if alert for violations. Next he began appraising my Audubons—and I do mean appraising; I could see him searching, eyes about an inch from the glass, for watermarks or registration flaws or whatever it is that art experts search for. At first I thought he was a dealer, and I hoped he would mistakenly declare the prints of great value so I could happily tell him they were not.
Once he had finished scrutinizing the prints, however, he gave equal attention to the vitrine of birding accessories and then wandered out to the garden. I could only imagine his busybodying examination of everything, from the fading blossoms of the Armand Memorial Geraniums I’d planted that summer to the cracks in our flagstones and rotting stockade fence.
At last he turned to the books, stopping throughout the shop to scan shelves (I mapped his sojourn by the creaking floorboards), though I never saw him take down and handle a book. He went to the basement as well, emerging after just a few minutes. Well, I thought with begrudging approval, no Raymond Chandler or bloody
Dune
for that one.
After looking out the front window with a dreamy expression, he finally focused on me. “I didn’t know Ralph had a thing for birds.”
Refusing to be startled, I answered, “He doesn’t.”
“Then, I take it, you do?”
“I’m not a birdwatcher, if that’s what you mean.”
He nodded, as if I had given the correct answer, and pointed to the Carolina Parakeets hanging behind my desk. “Parrots. Do you know parrots?”
I couldn’t imagine where this conversation was headed, so I said, “You know Ralph?”
“Oh everyone in the nabe knows Ralph, he’s so civic-minded. Makes sure our trees are never thirsty, the sewers never clogged. Even without those droopy old dogs . . . Spaniels look rather boneless, don’t you think? As if they’ve been fileted?”
I wished we’d stayed on parrots.
“People must inquire about your accent,” he said. “I’ll bet they drive you nuts by assuming you’re Irish.”
“That does happen,” I said. “Irishness seems fashionable here.”
“But not in Scotland.”
“No.” The telephone rang. It was Ralph, asking me to supper, and I longed to describe the man now meandering his way among the books again. I agreed to pick up duck breasts at Ralph’s favorite butcher.
When I rang off, the man returned to me like a magnet. “I’ll be frank: Your music section is deplorable. Deplorable and understocked. It’s not even as long as I am short!” He smiled at his self-effacement. I wouldn’t have called him short, but there was a slightness to the man which might have led people to underestimate his stature—that is, until they heard him express a few opinions.
“Ralph and I don’t know a great deal about music.” I was about to add that we were planning on getting some outside counsel on this and other subjects when I realized that if I did, this fellow might volunteer himself.
“Evidently,” he said, concluding yet another subject. He sat in the armchair next to my desk and returned to the subject of myself: where exactly I was from, how long I’d been here, how I knew Ralph. He knew that I lived upstairs, and as he never asked my name, I had to assume he knew that as well. My terse answers did not seem to deter him—but then he looked at his watch and said, without a trace of irony, “I see it’s teatime and I see you’re not offering any, so it’s a fair guess I’ve overstayed my welcome.” He stood and looked around. “I do love your birds.”