The Clover House Read Online Free

working on that invitation. He takes both my hands in his and gently tugs me over to his wife, or his racquetball partner, or his grandson who is a senior now, and he repeats my joke, which was never very funny to begin with. I’m sure he knows this, but he is too kind to stop the routine.
    I’m the first one in, as usual. Lucy and Katherine come in from the suburbs, and Daniel drops his daughter off at the front gate by some arrangement that allows her to sever all ties daily before she sets foot on campus and then meet her father gladly to go home. I pull the door shut to my tiny office and sit for a minute in my coat, feeling the heat build up beneath my wool turtleneck. I think of Nestor sitting at the enormous deskhe positioned just inside the doors to his garden. As a child, I would stand at his elbow, the sun warming my back, while he showed me things from his collections: a fossil, a rock, one of those vials of sand. By the time I got to Greece in the summer, he would have already darkened to a deep tan from a spring full of hiking. Where I stood, I could see the pale spots behind his ears.
    Nestor never came to the beach with us. Sometimes he was away on one of his trips, and sometimes he spent the days at his desk, reading from his many history books in order to be prepared for the school year. He would laugh and say he had finally grown into his Homeric namesake, the old man advising the young. I would see him in the afternoons, when my hair was thickened with salt. My mother would leave me at the door, where brother and sister would give each other quick pecks on the cheek before parting. If they had real conversations, I never heard them. When I was old enough, I would go to Nestor’s house by myself, Aliki coming with me for a time until she began to go off with her own friends. He was always the same. His kindness never varied as we moved from tinkering with small gadgets and souvenirs to listening to music or looking through his photo albums or his movies that captured my relatives in rickety motion.
    I used to ask him to repeat the stories of their childhood that I knew so well from my mother’s winter recitations. The one about the cow that chased his sisters Thalia and Sophia into the hayloft. Or, my favorite, the one about the time they all flooded the basement of the grand city house. I would prompt him, reminding him of how he and my mother had stood on the balcony of the house the night the war began, watching Italian tracer bullets write sparkling lines in the darkness. My grandmother Urania had grabbed them, terrified theywould be shot, while they had been dazzled by the colors. He usually let me tell this story, as if it were my own to tell. Once, though, he stopped me, saying, no, the war started in daylight, with bombs dropping, not tracer bullets. He showed me a newspaper clipping from his collection. There it was, the official account, beneath a headline of block capitals, proving the accuracy of his memory.
    As I become aware of the sweat rising beneath my coat, I remember what he told me during what turned out to be my last visit. I was back in Greece again, thanks to a discount flight and the good pay from my newly acquired private-school job. I had changed my mind at the last minute about the man I was supposed to be there with, so I was alone, seeking a brief respite from my errors in Nestor’s familiar space. We were looking through old photographs and I asked him to identify some unknown relative for me. He gave me a name I can’t remember now, then stopped himself and placed his hand on mine. “There are things you need to know, Calliope,” he said. “But not now.” I sit up suddenly and shake my coat off. What was it he wanted me to know, and why did I have to wait—until he died—to find it out?
    There’s a tap on the door and Lucy sticks her head in.
    “Morning,” she says, and does a double take when she sees my expression. “What’s up? Did Bart Wilcox make another