Three Junes by Julia Glass Page A

cleaned and swaddled.
    Sometimes now, while Maureen sat with a bitch giving birth, Paul would go down and make tea. She’d scold him for losing a good night’s sleep. He’d lose it no matter what, he told her.
    He waited this time until he could no longer stand it, till he’d read the same unturned page in his book half a dozen times. He had heard nothing for a while, then running water.
    Maureen stood at the scullery sink. She jumped when he said her name. “Paul! It’s past two.” She looked at him over her shoulder but did not turn around.
    He could see the red glow of the heat lamp over the whelping box, where Betsey nosed among the indistinct creatures that shivered and writhed between her legs. “Good girl there, Bets,” he said. Betsey did not thrash her tail to greet him as usual but stiffened and warned him away with her eyes.
    “Let her be,” whispered Maureen. “She’s had a hard time. Thirteen all together.”
    Paul came up behind her. Under his hands, her body felt like a barricade of muscle. There was a pail of pinkish water in the sink; she held her hands under the surface and did not move when Paul touched her.
    He stepped back when she pulled her hands out of the pail. He’d thought she was washing them, but she held in each one a newborn black puppy. She laid their bodies on the drainboard. “A mongol,” she said as she emptied the pail down the drain. “And this little one, no tail.”
    “No tail? Why kill that one? You could have found it a home.”
    “Paul. Paul.” She spoke soothingly, as if he were one of the boys, acting up over a lost toy. “Something else is bound to be wrong with it, you can’t be soft.” She faced him. “Go back to your book, Paul.” She might as well have said, Go back to your cave.
    Maureen wrapped the drowned puppies in sheafs of yesterday’s
Yeoman
. She went about cleaning up as she always did after a whelping, as if Paul were not there. Without offering to make tea, he went upstairs. In an hour, she lay down beside him and fell fast asleep.
    The rest of the puppies were healthy and bright. When they were eight weeks old, they were let out to play with the older dogs. Colin Swift rode over from Conkers to see them. Working upstairs, Paul watched the dogs race loops around the lawn, leaving behind them a maze in the snow. When they were put away, he joined Maureen and Colin in the kitchen. She toweled the pups dry while Paul made the tea. Colin chose a small bitch with a white blaze, the one he claimed had chosen him.
    “Her name’s Flora,” said Maureen. “None of your swish foxhound names. No crown princes or movie starlets bred here.”
    Colin laughed and saluted her.
    At the beginning of January, Paul was scheduled to go on a trip to Mexico and Guatemala with a group of editors, most of them from America. He’d accepted two tickets, but Maureen told him that now, with puppies to watch, there was no way she could go. Why not take Fenno? It was his first year away at school. He was doing well, and his masters liked him, but Maureen thought he needed a little adventure. He seemed so awfully serious, she said, not at all his old bombardier self. If he went with Paul, he would miss just a few days of school after the Christmas holiday.
    Fenno was the only child on the trip, but he did not need playmates. He replied politely, even learnedly, to everything he was asked, and he never complained when Paul sent him to bed by himself after dinner. Later, when Paul retired, he would often find Fenno doubled over, asleep on the pages of a notebook. After unfurling his son’s body back onto the pillows, Paul would close the book and set it on a table, resisting the urge to read it. Not because he was so discreet but because he was afraid of the imagination he might uncover—one he might wish had been his.
    The other editors and their husbands and wives told Paul to count his lucky stars for having such a son. They took Fenno’s presence as an invitation