And the Mountains Echoed

place on Kolonaki.
    I put down the paper. To my surprise, I feel a tinge of impatience with this dead woman I have not seen for over thirty years. A surge of resistance to this story of how she had turned out. I had always pictured her living a tumultuous, wayward life, hard years of bad luck—fits and starts, collapse, regret—and ill-advised, desperate love affairs. I had always imagined that she’d self-destructed, likely drank herself to the kind of early death that people always call
tragic
. Part of me had even credited her with the possibility that she had known this, that she had brought Thalia to Tinos to spare her, rescue her from the disasters Madaline knew she was helpless from visiting upon her daughter. But now I picture Madaline the way Mamá always must have: Madaline, the cartographer, sitting down, calmly drawing the map of her future and neatly excluding her burdensome daughter from its borders. And she’d succeeded spectacularly, at least according to this obituary and itsclipped account of a mannered life, a life rich with achievement, grace, respect.
    I find I cannot accept it. The success, the getting away with it. It is preposterous. Where was the toll, the exacting comeuppance?
    And yet, as I fold the newspaper, a nagging doubt begins to set in. A faint intimation that I have judged Madaline harshly, that we weren’t even that different, she and I. Hadn’t we both yearned for escape, reinvention, new identities? Hadn’t we each, in the end, unmoored ourselves by cutting loose the anchors that weighed us down? I scoff at this, tell myself we are nothing alike, even as I sense that the anger I feel toward her may really be a mask for my envy over her succeeding at it all better than I had.
    I toss the newspaper. If Thalia is going to find out, it won’t be from me.
    Mamá pushed the carrot shavings off the table with a knife and collected them in a bowl. She loathed it when people wasted food. She would make a jar of marmalade with the shavings.
    â€œWell, you have a big decision to make, Thalia,” she said.
    Thalia surprised me by turning to me and saying, “What would you do, Markos?”
    â€œOh, I know what
he
would do,” Mamá said quickly.
    â€œI would go,” I said, answering Thalia, looking at Mamá, taking satisfaction in playing the insurrectionist that Mamá thought I was. Of course I meant it too. I couldn’t believe Thalia would even hesitate. I would have leapt at the chance. A private education. In London.
    â€œYou should think about it,” Mamá said.
    â€œI already have,” Thalia said hesitantly. Then, even more hesitant, as she raised her eyes to meet Mamá’s, “But I don’t want to assume.”
    Mamá put down the knife. I heard a faint expulsion of breath. Had she been holding it? If so, her stoic face betrayed no sign of relief. “The answer is yes. Of course it’s yes.”
    Thalia reached across the table and touched Mamá’s wrist. “Thank you, Aunt Odie.”
    â€œI’ll only say this once,” I said. “I think this is a mistake. You’re both making a mistake.”
    They turned to look at me.
    â€œDo you want me to go, Markos?” Thalia said.
    â€œYes,” I said. “I’d miss you, a lot, and you know that. But you can’t pass up a private school education. You’d go to university afterward. You could become a researcher, a scientist, a professor, an inventor. Isn’t that what you want? You’re the smartest person I know. You could be anything you want.”
    I broke off.
    â€œNo, Markos,” Thalia said heavily. “No I couldn’t.”
    She said this with a thudding finality that sealed off all channels of rebuttal.
    Many years later, when I began training as a plastic surgeon, I understood something that I had not that day in the kitchen arguing for Thalia to leave Tinos for the boarding school. I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that. My patients knew this. They saw that much of what they were, would be, or could be hinged on the symmetry of their bone structure, the space between their eyes, their chin length, the tip projection of their nose, whether they had an ideal nasofrontal angle or not.
    Beauty is an