So we are in a bit of a “holding pattern,” as they say. It would not be an entirely bad thing, since it gives us time to work out some wrinkles in the script, if it did not also mean that we won’t be reunited as I had hoped. I am crushed, my darlings. I miss you all so dearly, especially you, Thalia, my love. I can only count the days until later this spring when this shoot has wrapped and we can be together again. I carry all three of you in my heart every minute of every day.
“She’s not coming back,” Thalia said flatly, handing the letter back to Mamá.
“Of course she is!” I said, dumbfounded. I turned to Mamá, waiting for her to say something, at least pipe a word of encouragement. But Mamá folded the letter, put it on the table, and quietly went to boil water for coffee. And I remember thinking how thoughtless it was of her to not comfort Thalia even if she agreed that Madaline wasn’t coming back. But I didn’t know—not yet—that they already understood each other, perhaps better than I did either of them. Mamá respected Thalia too much to coddle her. She would not insult Thalia with false assurances.
Spring came, in all of its flush green glory, and went. We received from Madaline one postcard and what felt like a hastily written letter, in which she informed us of more troubles on the set, this time having to do with financiers who were threatening to balk because of all the delays. In this letter, unlike the last, she did not set a time line as to when she would come back.
One warm afternoon early in the summer—that would be 1968—Thalia and I went to the beach with a girl named Dori. By then, Thalia had lived with us on Tinos for a year and her disfigurement no longer drew whispers and lingering stares. She was still, and always would be, girded by an orb of curiosity, but even that was waning. She had friends of her own now—Dori among them—who were no longer spooked by her appearance, friends with whom she ate lunch, gossiped, played after school, did her studies. She had become, improbably enough, almost ordinary, and I had to admit to a degree of admiration for the way the islanders had accepted her as one of their own.
That afternoon, the three of us had planned to swim, but the water was still too cold and we had ended up lying on the rocks, dozing off. When Thalia and I came home, we found Mamá in the kitchen, peeling carrots. Another letter sat unopened on the table.
“It’s from your stepfather,” Mamá said.
Thalia picked up the letter and went upstairs. It was a long time before she came down. She dropped the sheet of paper on the table, sat down, picked up a knife and a carrot.
“He wants me to come home.”
“I see,” Mamá said. I thought I heard the faintest flutter in her voice.
“Not home, exactly. He says he has contacted a private school in England. I could enroll in the fall. He’d pay for it, he said.”
“What about Aunt Madaline?” I asked.
“She’s gone. With Elias. They’ve eloped.”
“What about the film?”
Mamá and Thalia exchanged a glance and simultaneously tipped their gaze up toward me, and I saw what they knew all along.
One morning in 2002, more than thirty years later, around the time I am preparing to move from Athens to Kabul, I stumble upon Madaline’s obituary in the newspaper. Her last name is listed now as Kouris, but I recognize in the old woman’s face a familiar bright-eyed grin, and more than detritus of her youthful beauty. The small paragraph below says that she had briefly been an actress in her youth prior to founding her own theater company in the early 1980s. Her company had received critical praise for several productions, most notably for extended runs of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in the mid-1990s, Chekhov’s The Seagull, and Dimitrios Mpogris’s Engagements. The obituary says she was well known among Athens’s artistic community for her charity work, her wit, her sense of style, her lavish parties, and her willingness to take chances on unheralded playwrights. The piece says she died after a lengthy battle with emphysema but makes no mention of a surviving spouse or children. I am further stunned to learn that she lived in Athens for more than two decades, at a house barely six blocks from my own place on Kolonaki.
I put down the paper. To my surprise, I feel a tinge of impatience with this dead woman I have not seen for over thirty years. A surge of resistance to this story of how she had turned out. I had always pictured her living a tumultuous, wayward life, hard years of bad luck—fits and starts, collapse, regret—and ill-advised, desperate love affairs. I had always imagined that she’d self-destructed, likely drank herself to the kind of early death that people always call tragic. Part of me had even credited her with the possibility that she had known this, that she had brought Thalia to Tinos to spare her, rescue her from the disasters Madaline knew she was helpless from visiting upon her daughter. But now I picture Madaline the way Mamá always must have: Madaline, the cartographer, sitting down, calmly drawing the map of her future and neatly excluding her burdensome daughter from its borders. And she’d succeeded spectacularly, at least according to this obituary and its clipped account of a mannered life, a life rich with achievement, grace, respect.
I find I cannot accept it. The success, the getting away with it. It is preposterous. Where was the toll, the exacting comeuppance?
And yet, as I fold the newspaper, a nagging doubt begins to set in. A faint intimation that I have judged Madaline harshly, that we weren’t even that different, she and I. Hadn’t we both yearned for escape, reinvention, new identities? Hadn’t we each, in the end, unmoored ourselves by cutting loose the anchors that weighed us down? I scoff at this, tell myself we are nothing alike, even as I sense that the anger I feel toward her may really be a mask for my envy over her succeeding at it all better than I had.
I toss the newspaper. If Thalia is going to find out, it won’t be from me.
Mamá pushed the carrot shavings off the table with a knife and collected them in a bowl. She loathed it when people wasted food. She would make a jar of marmalade with the shavings.
“Well, you have a big decision to make, Thalia,” she said.
Thalia surprised me by turning to me and saying, “What would you do, Markos?”
“Oh, I know what he would do,” Mamá said quickly.
“I would go,” I said, answering Thalia, looking at Mamá, taking satisfaction in playing the insurrectionist that Mamá thought I was. Of course I meant it too. I couldn’t believe Thalia would even hesitate. I would have leapt at the chance. A private education. In London.