Three Junes Read Online Free PDF Page A

smelled it. His fears left him helplessly petty.
    When Paul was finally alone with Fenno, the third day of the visit, he asked if the boy’s name was Malcolm (perhaps Paul could address him that way).
    “Malachy. But God, no one ever calls him that.” They had taken the collies out for a run in the field across the burn. It was Maureen’s first overnight in hospital. Mal was taking a nap. “You don’t like him, do you,” said Fenno. “You’re so uptight.”
    Paul sighed. “Do you want me not to like him? I’ve spent the sum of a few hours in his company. And if I’m ‘up tight,’ it’s probably because your mother’s having her chest sliced open first thing tomorrow.” Fenno’s proliferating Americanisms depressed Paul, as if they were proof that he had chosen, literally, new patronage. (Of Paul’s three sons, the oldest was, ironically, the one who made him feel the most outmoded.)
    “You’re free to like him or not, Dad.”
    The collies ran helter skelter in widening, playful circles, but they never barked. Paul did not worry that they might bolt. They wouldn’t leave the circle of Maureen’s influence, even if she was not physically present.
    Fenno approached his father and put a hand on his back. Paul welcomed the physical warmth of the gesture and wondered if it was meant to be consoling or conciliatory. “Mal is a good friend,” said Fenno. “So could you just be less of a Brit and act like you care about knowing him, just a little? Do more than give him tours of the manor and speeches on why we Scots are anything but English?” Fenno laughed and pulled his hand away, reaching down to stroke one of the dogs. “Do you know one of the first things I loved about New York? People don’t waste any time telling you what they aren’t. Nobody has that strict an identity, never mind nonidentity.”
    “I’ve given speeches? What speeches?” Paul said.
    “Dad, you know what I mean. All that if-we-had-our-own-leadership crap; God save the Queen, but keep her the hell down below. It’s de rigueur when Americans visit, I know. Just get past it.”
    Get past it. A piece of advice Paul had never heard in so few words. Perhaps it was a motto he ought to have stitched or tattooed somewhere, to snap him out of his retentive ways.
    “So give me the truth,” Fenno said. “About Mum.”
    Back then, her prognosis looked hopeful, though the cancer had begun its campaign abroad. As Paul told Fenno what the doctors had said, as he talked about chemotherapy schedules and surgeries, he felt himself levitating over the field, above his own head, and one of the many voices in his incessantly verbal self told him that on this already fateful piece of land, on this beautiful summer afternoon, a few simple observations about his own son had finally crossed the blood-brain barrier and were shooting toward his heart: Fenno would never move back from his expatriate life, he knew his own mind more surely than Paul knew his, and he was a homosexual. The third acknowledgment was more oblique than the others, but of course it stood out the largest (though it shouldn’t, Paul knew). It stood out as both a relief and a terror. A relief because for several years he had only pretended to know. A terror because if his son was ill, too—though Fenno looked healthy in an offhand way, in the most reassuring way—Paul would not bear it. He would crumble and disintegrate, like dead leaves underfoot.
    The inevitably childish bargain crossed his mind: If I have to lose one of them, take her. “Biology speaking,” Maureen would have said; she would have applauded. But Paul did not want to give so much credence to the grandiosity of genes.
    Within a few days, Mal left for London, but from that moment in the field until Fenno’s departure a fortnight later, Paul could not speak to his son without the fear that his panic would puddle brightly around him, like milk from a bottle dropped on slate. He could not make his voice sound