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