Three Junes Read Online Free PDF

anything other than phlegmy and distant, his turns of phrase stilted and prim. Fenno’s contempt was quietly apparent, but he did not criticize his father again. Paul lay awake for hours each night trying to think of a way to find out what he needed to know. There might be a way to ask, but he couldn’t imagine waiting for the answer without knowing it first.
    One morning, from the library, Paul had watched the two men head back into the fields, Fenno pointing out trees and birds. Fenno loved birds; when he was a child, they kept a small piece of paper taped to one window in each room of the house so that anyone who spotted a new species could write it down then and there. Paul had left the lists up even after Fenno moved to New York. Gradually, the sunlight had faded the names of the birds, first on the windows facing south and last of all the north, until they had vanished altogether, leaving no record. Maureen, always less sentimental than Paul, took them all down while he was away on a trip.
    Spying on Fenno and Mal, Paul never saw them hold hands or embrace, though he assumed they must, and he thought how, all of a sudden, that might not be so awful. Just weeks ago, it would have upset him tremendously. Paul remembered his own father’s reaction when he announced his engagement to Maureen, the disappointment muted but clear. Paul harbored a disappointment in Fenno, but it was not about his choices in love or because he might not produce heirs.
    Fenno ran a bookstore—a logical enterprise for the son who, in Paul’s memory as a child of five or nine or twelve, was always reading. But Fenno was the one Paul had hoped would take over the paper—even after Fenno went overseas to get an American doctorate. Neither of the twins had shown much interest in anything to do with the veneration of language. David was a veterinary surgeon, his mother’s son; Dennis, a romantic like his father but without intellectual cravings, was (after years of meandering) studying to be a chef. When these two came of age and, simultaneously, emptied the small trusts left by their grandfather to follow their respective curiosities, Paul looked on happily. He loved their separateness and, when they shared their enthusiasms, felt the privilege of being admitted to different worlds. But when Fenno took some (only a prudent fraction) of his inheritance and invested it in his own business, Paul felt instinctively, illogically betrayed. Again and again, he reminded himself how enslaved he’d felt to his father’s desires (though he could have denied them without any dire consequence); still, he came away feeling wounded.
    Maureen came home for good in mid-December. As Paul pointed out their house to the ambulance driver, he saw against the hedgerow an obscenely white car that he knew must be Fenno’s, the one he’d have hired at the airport. Fenno he found standing before a fire in the living room. “
There
you are,” said Fenno, as if Paul were the child, hiding out from a scolding. Fenno’s coldness was painful, but it was not a surprise, not since Paul had bungled his visit five months before.
    Beside Fenno, Mal rose quickly from Paul’s reading chair. Greet-ing him, Paul struggled against the same revulsion he’d felt in the summer. (Was the young man frailer? He was certainly paler, but this was winter.)
    So now, as Maureen was being carried across the snow into their house, as Paul wanted so much to feel his sons hold him together, secure him like a seaworthy knot, Fenno seemed lost to him entirely. He remained between Paul and the fireplace, so miraculously close, but he might as well have been back at his home in New York, a home Paul had never seen and now supposed he never would. His oldest son, after the funeral—which would be soon—might become little more than an address on the flimsy blue tissue of an airborne letter. If that.
    Paul instructed the orderlies to take the bed and the equipment upstairs to the library. There,