“Then my father came home and all of that was wiped away. He was like a summer storm, lightning bright across a pale sky. When he was there, everything else faded.”
I knew that trick of Odysseus’. I had seen it each day for a year.
“I went to her the day he beat Nicanor. ‘I fear he goes too far,’ I said. She would not even look away from her loom. All she would answer was that we must give him time.”
“And did time help?”
“No. When my grandfather died, my father blamed Nicanor, the gods know why. He shot him with his great bow and threw the body on the beach for the birds to eat. The only thing he talked of by then was conspiracy, how the men of the island were gathering arms against him, how the servants were colluding in treacheries. At night, he paced the hearth, and every word from his mouth was guards and spies, measures and countermeasures.”
“Were there such treacheries?”
“A revolt in Ithaca?” He shook his head. “We don’t have time for that. Rebellion is for prosperous islands, or else those so ground down they have no other choice. I was angry by then. I told him that there was no conspiracy, there never had been, and he would do better saying three kind words to our men than plotting how to kill them. He smiled at me. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that Achilles went to war at seventeen? And he was not the youngest man at Troy. Boys of thirteen, fourteen, all did themselves proud in the field. I’ve found that courage is not a matter of age, but true-made spirits.’”
He did not imitate his father, not exactly. Yet the rhythm of the speech caught Odysseus’ confidential, luring mildness.
“He meant I was a disgrace, of course. A coward. I should have fought off the suitors single-handedly. Was I not fifteen when they first came? I should have been able to shoot his great bow, not just string it. At Troy I would not have lived a day.”
I could see it: the smoky fire and the tang of old bronze, the must of pressed olives. And Odysseus, expertly wrapping his son with shame.
“I told him we were on Ithaca now. The war was finished and everyone knew it but him. It enraged him. He dropped his smile. He said, ‘You are a traitor. You wish for me to die so you can take my throne. Perhaps you even think to speed me along?’”
Telemachus’ voice was steady, nearly expressionless, but his knuckles showed white on the chair’s arm.
“I told him that he was the one who shamed our house. He could boast all he liked of the war, but all he had brought home was death. His hands would never be clean again and mine would not be either, for I had followed him into his lake of blood and I would be sorry for it all my days. It was finished after that. I was shut from his councils. I was barred from the hall. I heard him shouting at my mother that she had nursed a viper.”
The room was silent. I could feel the place where the fire’s warmth faded and died against the winter air.
“The truth is, I think he would have preferred me as a traitor. At least then I would have been a son he could understand.”
I had been watching him, as he talked, for his father’s mannerisms, those tricks that were as indivisible from Odysseus as tides from the ocean. The pauses and smiles, the dry voice and deprecating gestures, all wielded against the listener, to convince, to tease, and most of all, to mitigate. I had seen none. Telemachus took his blows straight on.
“I went to my mother after that, but he had set guards to keep me out, and when I shouted past them she said I must be patient and not provoke him. The only person who would speak to me was my old nurse, Eurycleia, who had been his nurse as well. We sat by the fire, chewing our fish to paste. He was not always like this, she kept telling me. As if that changed anything. This man of rage was all the father I had. She died not long after, but my father did not stay to watch her pyre burn. He was tired of living among ashes, he said. He set out on a skiff and came back a month later with gold belts and cups and a new breastplate, and splashes of dried blood on his clothes. It was the happiest I had ever seen him. But it did not last. By the next morning he was railing about the smoky hall and the clumsiness of the servants.”
I had seen him in such moods. Every petty defect of the world enraged him, all the waste and stupidity and slowness of men, and all the irritants of nature too, biting flies and warping wood and the briars that ripped his cloak. When he had lived with me, I’d smoothed all those things away, wrapping him in my magic and divinity. Perhaps it was why he had been so happy. An idyll, I had called our time. Illusion might have been a better word.
“After that, he went on some raid every month. Reports came back, scarcely believable. He had taken a new wife, the queen of some inland kingdom. He ruled there happily among the cows and barley. He wore a golden circlet and feasted till dawn and ate boars whole and roared with laughter. He had fathered another son.”
His eyes were Odysseus’. The shape and color, even the intensity. But the expression: Odysseus’ gaze was always reaching out, cajoling. Telemachus’ held fast to itself.
“Was any of it true?”
He lifted his shoulders, let them drop. “Who can say? Perhaps he started the rumors himself to wound us. I sent a message to my mother that the goats needed extra tending and went to live in an empty hut on the hillside. My father could plot and rage, but I did not have to see it. My mother could eat one piece of cheese all day and let her eyes turn gray on her loom, but I did not have to see that either.”
In the fire, the logs had burnt down. Their remains glowed white, scaled with ash.
“Into such miseries, your son came. Bright as a sunrise, sweet as ripe fruit. He carried that silly-looking spear, and gifts for us all, silver bowls and cloaks and gold. His face was handsome and his hopes crackled loud as a fire. I wanted to shake him. I thought: when my father returns, this boy will learn that life is not a bard’s song. And so he did.”
The moon had lifted away from the window, and the room was draped in shadows. Telemachus’ hands rested on his knees.
“You were trying to help him,” I said. “That is why you went down to the beach.”
His eyes were on the fire’s ashes. “He did not need me, as it turned out.”
I had used to imagine Telemachus so often. As a quiet boy keeping watch for Odysseus, as a burning youth bearing vengeance across land and sea. But now he was a man, and his voice was dull and drained. He was like those messengers who run great distances with news for kings. They gasp out their words, then fall to the ground and do not rise.
Without thinking, I reached across and laid my hand on his arm. “You are not your blood. Do not let him take you with him.”
He looked down at my fingers a moment, then up into my face. “You pity me. Do not. My father lied about many things, but he was right when he called me a coward. I let him be what he was for year after year, raging and beating the servants, shouting at my mother, and turning our house to ash. He told me to help him kill the suitors and I did it. Then he told me to kill all the men who had aided them, and I did that too. Then he commanded me to gather up all the slave girls who had ever lain with one of them and make them clean the blood-soaked floor, and when they were finished, I was to kill them as well.”
The words jolted me. “The girls would have had no choice. Odysseus would have known it.”
“Odysseus told me to carve them into joints like animals.” His eyes held mine. “Do you disbelieve it?”
It was not one story that I thought of, but a dozen. He had always loved his vengeances. He had always hated those he thought betrayed him.
“Did you do as he said?”
“No,” he said. “I hanged them instead. I found twelve lengths of rope and tied twelve knots.” Each word was like a blade he thrust into himself. “I had never seen it done, but I remembered how in all the stories of my childhood the women were always hanging themselves. I had some thought that it must be more proper. I should have used the sword instead. I have never known such ugly, drawn-out deaths. I will see their feet twisting the rest of my days. Goodnight, Lady Circe.”