Three Junes Read Online Free PDF Page B

Maureen could look out at the kennel. Her three favorite dogs were given free roam of the house. Most of the time they lay on the floor near Maureen’s bed, but once Paul caught them chasing one another up the front stairs, skidding on the hallway runners. He thought of the boys when they were small, their never-ending war games. He thought of Fenno, making an imaginary conflagration of the house and everything in it. Cupping both hands around his mouth, Fenno had been able to broadcast a near-perfect air-raid siren; every time, for an instant, the wail made his father’s chest throb with fear.
    “LUNG CANCER,” he told Jack. “A terribly ordinary death, you might say. Or an ordinary terrible death. But she died at home. All of us there. The children—our sons, not children anymore by a long stretch, in fact. A bright day. How we’d all like to go.” It sounded as if he were composing a telegram.
    They were sitting together on the airplane from London to Athens. Jack, who seemed to use teasing as a way of forcing acquaintance with people he liked (and it worked), had asked how an obviously attractive, apparently independent chap like Paul could wind up alone on a guided tour. “Not your usual follower,” Jack had said. “Or should I say not one of mine.”
    “Christ, sorry,” he said now. “Christ, that’s a trial.”
    Paul held his hands up and shook his head. “Please. I came to escape how sorry everyone feels for me every bloody minute of my life these past six months. My sons fuss at me as if I’m an invalid, one foot in the grave myself. At the office they fuss. My old friends fuss.”
    “Bet your old friends’ wives make another kind of fuss.”
    They laughed together. Paul looked out the window and saw the Alps. Maureen had loved flying, loved seeing everything pressed below her like a map. She liked the thrill of vertigo when the plane banked to turn, when the earth tipped up alongside you—mountains and rivers reaching inside you and seizing your heart.
    Below him now, horizon to horizon, June was spreading its green, abundant promise, disputing the few peaks that guarded their snow. Up close, there would be flowers, wildflowers, yellow and purple and white. One long-ago June, Paul and Maureen had driven somewhere along these slopes, tiny Fenno asleep in a crib they’d wedged into the car (there was none of this safety gear back then; most parents were too young to fret about dangers unseen). They had pulled into a field of flowers to eat their lunch. After the food, they made love until Fenno’s crying interrupted them. As she changed the wet nappy (Paul wistfully stroking the small of her back), Maureen had said, “Well then, we shall just have to find this place again when our children are grown.” The multiple expectations in her simple remark had thrilled Paul; he was so naive.
    When he turned away from the window, he told Jack that he had traveled a great deal, but never on a tour. “But now . . . now I like the idea of everything planned. No surprises.”
    “Ah, but I can’t promise you no surprises,” said Jack.
    Jack was thirty-six, Fenno’s age. There, all similarity ended. Jack was not willowy, not soft-featured, not articulate in a well-schooled way. He was compact, muscular, ruddy. He had the body of a swimmer and the coloring of the fair-haired Italians Paul remembered from Verona and Venice. Like a fox, he had shrewd glassy eyes, very blue, and a long sharp nose. He spoke with a trace of Yorkshire farmhand. Jack reminded Paul of fleeting friendships he’d made in the war, with men from a different but parallel world. He felt a quick, irrational trust and warmth—nothing of the distance he kept these days, without wanting to, from his sons.
    Jack had been married once, briefly and much too young. Took the taste for it out of his mouth. He had managed a pub; after the marriage ended, he took his savings and went to Greece for a year, hitched around, lived here and there. He