Estia Rising

Julius Rowan Raper

Description

ESTIA RISING is the intimate life of Estia Boyle, an attractive modern Greek woman, her mountain home,

and of the three men in her life: her demanding father, the tall American officer she marries, and the

American poet, she grows to love. Most of the story takes place in Greece of the late '70s and early '80s.

All of Estia's life is told in her own voice and words. Because her father is not a kind man, she finds it

convenient to escape him into the world of the red-headed officer. They have two daughters before she

meets the bearded poet and begins the very sensual affair that offers her a way out of her marriage.

Although the poet has his own family, his two children are roughly the same ages as hers and seem a good

fit. Together Estia and her poet spread their passions throughout Greece and across parts of Europe.

When both husband and lover have to return to their bases in the States, it becomes impossible for her to

see her poet regularly and she feels forced to make a choice.

Informations

• Publié par: Book Thoughts Publishing
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781949570069
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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Estia Rising
Copyright © 2018 by Julius Raper.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-949570-06-9 (eBook)



Book Thoughts Publishing
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Miami (Coconut Grove), FL 33133

[e-mail]
www.bookthoughtspublishing.com




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Estia Rising



The Novel










Julius Rowan Raper


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The stars in the sky don’t mean nothing to you, they’re a mirror . . .

Rod Stewart, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”


“For poetry makes nothing happen”

W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”


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I
Estia’s House
In the dream last night, best I remember, I was sleeping with you, Milton, the way I do so many nights when Rick disappears from this carved four-poster. So it is you I see clear as day lying beside me in this flimsy sheet-rock bedroom, or we are again in your small block-and-plaster room back in Athens with the low bed that has no headboard. Except this time my eyes are closed and I know it is you because I want to put my hands all over you, run them over every bone and muscle the way I never wanted in ten years with him--because I have wrapped my leg over your hip and squeezed down--because I am breathing the sea-salt of your hair, pressing your arm and ribs with flesh that felt dead until you showed me why I have this body.
And still my eyes are closed, so I know my happiness will not be complete until I open them and see your hair flecked with fire and your human eyes and taste the salty firmness of your chest; and I want that, what I never dream with him. And I open my eyes so we can look into one another again before we . . .
Except--except it is not you in my four-poster.
This time it is not Rick, the way it has been these hundreds of nights I see you stretched out here in my San Diego house plain as day. Instead I have wrapped my arms around-- impossible!--the man I despise, the man I hate almost as much as Father: mother’s Uncle Georgos lying in love’s place.
Rick says I jumped up in bed and grabbed the bedpost. I woke him. He says I grunted NO!--like I was hugging a smelly goat.
Someday, when all this housework I do day after day is finished and I tell you my dreams, Milton, I will have to explain about Uncle Georgos. Or you will claim that I confuse you with Uncle Georgos the way I sometimes fused you and capital-F Father. But it’s not so. In the dream I feel cheated, as though they have taken you away and left that thieving rascal who makes piles of money in his little pawnshop down those stairs below the market back in Athens, on Odos Mathias, where village people come from Omonoia Square to give up their copper and hand-stitched linen, their heirlooms and dowries that he sells for three, four times what he pays. And the only thing he thinks about is making more drachmas, so that all of us in the family, his own wife and daughter, hate him even though he gives us drachmas when we ask, to show how rich he is. You are not like that, except to help me. Rick worries about money. It is Rick I find when I wake.
And the other dreams I cannot remember. Something about a political speech, an amethyst, teeth. I will have to struggle to call back every one of them.
So many dreams for one night. So many. But if I trust them, they will come back, you say, when I need them.
One day, one triumphant morning with you, when I repeat all this because you are with me in the flesh, I will start with what I remember, because you will take every clue and figure how to read it, and the rest of my story I will send you, and this time I will be with you with all my memories. You always asked me to do so, and I did not know that I wanted to do it. But now I am ready. This time I will help every way I can, so you will be able to unravel my life out of that dream, from my Athens mountain down to this house, my San Diego home.
To start, when I explain Uncle Georgos, I will go back to days my brother Giannis and Soula and I spent on our mountain waiting for Father and our mother to come home, to see what mother will bring, afraid of the rage Father brings. My whole life feels as though I am waiting for happiness like that, and afraid Father will get there first. And I keep waiting for my decision to mature, for the courage to start our new life, afraid I will make a mistake. So I make my plans and try to unravel the hurt.
I was six, and while we waited we played in the dirt. We used the dolls mother taught Soula and me to make out of sticks and clothespins and pieces of cloth from dresses all of us had worn until they were only good for rags. We played Family and War with tiny carts, pulleys, buckets made out of bottle caps and spools mother gave us when the thread finished. And the dirt stuck to our skin, in my long hair, my nostrils. On the roof it felt cleaner because it was cement. But Giannis and Soula and I needed the dry yellow clay to make houses and roads, wells and walls.
One of us stayed on the roof. From the yard we could see the Red Cross in front of Erythros Stavros, the hospital where the old blue bus stopped at the end of the Omonoia line. From the roof we could tell when mother was carrying her giant canvas bags, filled with food she would have to haul up the mountain, half-an-hour coming up, because Father told her she could not waste the drachmas the taxi from the terminal charged.
So when whoever was on the roof saw her let herself down from the boiling bus into the blazing noon sun and drag those blue and green sacks down after her, we would throw down our dolls and, without thinking to close the door, come tumbling down the track cut in the white quartz and powdery clay as wild and sure-footed as a family of little goats.
“ Manoula, manoula mou ! My mother. Wait, wait. We are coming, we will help you! What did you buy! What did you bring us?”
We cry out our questions long before she can hear even though we can see her coming bent toward us when our heads bounce up above the bright boulders and clumps of wild thyme.
When she knows we can hear without her shouting, she would sing out: “Some potatoes, and some oranges, and beans and feta-- and some grapes.” And we know that the potatoes and oranges and beans are the ones with dark spots that are left over and sold cheaper, and that the feta will be all the white crumbs, because those were what Father taught her to ask for. But our oranges and grapes will also smell the sweetest because they have ripened, and our feta will taste the softest.
“Let us help, manoula mou ! Please let us carry something!” And she would set her sacks in the dirt, untie the string at the neck and begin pulling out smaller bags--heavy potatoes for Giannis, beans for Soula, and for me the tiny purple grapes, turned all seed and sugar. And I would start ahead of the others up the trail.
“My child, Estia, come back here!”
And I would stop cold, afraid she saw my fingers slip into the grapes, and let her catch up.
She said “You have huge holes in your socks.” She wrapped her free arm about my neck and pulled me against her lovely hip.
“Giannis’ shoes are too big--”
“Never mind. They are the best you have. I will find some old socks, I will sew a new pair.”
“Oh, manoula mou , please make them out of the green ones Soula wore last year and Gianni’s blue ones, can you?” New clothes, dear, always were a weakness--even new socks.
“I will see what I can do, love.”
And, each carrying his part, the four of us would climb like wild mountain creatures back to our single room . . .
But I am letting my memories swamp me. I almost forgot what I set out to tell you. Distractions from housework come too easy, my love. I must learn to stick with my story. . . . It wasn’t until Giannis and I were married out of the house and Soula came to the States to live with Rick and me that mother told me that our Father had not had enough money for even the spoiled groceries and crumbled feta, that in the years after our Greek civil war Father went at dawn every morning to that dirty old hotel on Omonoia Square where builders without work wait for construction bosses to come and pick out men, and that Father had to stand out in the weather no matter how cold or wet because he couldn’t afford the lefta to buy sharp hot coffee in the hotel cafe where most of the men went to keep warm. And on one of the days when there was no work at all for him, he started the cold hungry hour climb from Omonoia back to our house, and passing the gate of the cemetery by the hospital, he found two hundred drachmas on the path, and that saved us.
He felt terrible for whoever dropped them, someone too grief-broken to notice when the bills, stained and wadded, slipped out of her pocket. But he knew no way to locate the owner, and his wife and children depended on those drachmas. So that afternoon when he came home late (mother was afraid he had fallen off a building) we couldn’t be sure the thick body buried under the cloth sacks was his. He had brought