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In the early days, Penelope did not mind the noise. She awoke each day not to Dawn’s red fingertips caressing her white cheek, but instead to the shuffling of her maids down the corridors of her palace. The clinking of pottery made her draw near the kitchen, where she watched the preparation of her meal, her polished and unburdened hands starving. She pleasured in feasts, not for the food, but for the devotional hymns sung for the gods. She held her gaze down during banquets, smiling warmly at the company that chattered around Odysseus as if his veins ran with gold.
The ambient sounds that had welcomed Penelope to Ithaca were fully drowned out the day she met her wailing son. His wrinkled, tiny palms reached out to her, and Penelope mirrored him until her child’s warm flesh lay on her breast. Her chamber was laden with her maids, all of them cheering and imploring over Penelope’s health, stumbling over each other to bring her water.
“A healthy boy!” One of them announced, turning to Odysseus gaily. “An heir to Ithaca.”
Penelope, lost in the spellbinding cries of her son, did not notice her husband kneel before her, his large hand holding her shoulder. What Odysseus said to her then, she did not hear, and in the future, could not recall. All she knew of in the world was her son, glued to her bare skin, his small toes curling. “Telemachus,” she said, interrupting her husband’s speech, “Telemachus is a fine name for our son, don’t you think?” At that time, Odysseus and Penelope had only been wed for a year, a sound arrangement made by her father, and despite sleeping next to him for hundreds of days, she had not yet held his canny gaze for as long as she did the day she demanded her son be named Telemachus: “Far from Battle.”
Odysseus considered his wife, infamous for her timidity and reclusiveness, and said, “It shall be as you say, dear wife, our son will own the name of your choosing. Telemachus. An elegant name.” He touched Telemachus’ mass of curls that sat atop his small head and Penelope reached out to her husband, performing a similar gesture.
Following the birth of the prince, the air in the palace changed, for Penelope no longer wandered shyly from room to room, but held a firm stride, her newborn son slung around her chest. Her maids clustered around her and Telemachus at all times, wishing to take care of her child. “I am his mother,” she responded, “and so I will raise him.”
From dawn till dusk, Penelope never left Telemachus’ side. He hung by her breast until he was old enough to crawl around her feet; when he began to walk, Penelope let him waddle around the gardens, plucking flowers as he explored the Earth.
In that year, Penelope had never felt so alive, Telemachus had sealed the wretched numbness that lived in her heart, for she did not find joy in Ithaca sitting alone in her chambers. It was without a doubt that Telemachus brought new colors into the world. She grew fond of banquets, where she no longer sat silently but conversed with her husband’s friends, who were taken aback by their blindness, for Penelope was neither plain nor ordinary, she resembled a goddess, her porcelain skin bright as moonlight, her eyes as big and round as obsidian disks, and her flowing dark hair accentuated by the purple bell flowers, planted by Telemachus. The people of Ithaca grew fond of their queen, a grand weaver, they called her, as she was known for her colorful tapestries that hung like trophies around the palace. What brightened Ithaca’s halls all the more, however, was Penelope’s view of her husband, because the more Telemachus grew, the more she realized, she was deeply in love with her husband, who she cherished until the day of his departure.
Penelope had stood before her divine cousin once when she was a girl. Helen had towered over her, a statuesque figure of femininity and beauty. Her limbs were long, lithe, and smooth as marble, everyone she knew spoke of her striking appearance; it was no surprise to Penelope when men from all over Greece were asking for her hand in marriage, Penelope’s father even once said: “Helen’s beauty is so rare, it would drag men to the battlefield.”
And so it did. For all her beauty and grace, Penelope found her cousin who had once held Odysseus as a suitor, to be tragically in need of wits.
“I promised,” Odysseus tried to explain, “I was once her suitor, we are all bound to an oath, to protect Helen’s marriage.”
“Protect her marriage!” Penelope scoffed. “I don’t think Helen much desired protection when she willingly ran away to Troy with Paris! She binds herself to her own fate, why must you interfere? Why must you depart and destroy all that is precious to me?”
“A woman does not understand dishonor, Menelaus’ pride has been massacred, his wife stolen,” he pulled her close, “I would do much the same if you were in the arms of another.”
She withdrew, hand digging into her husband’s chest. “A woman may not understand dishonor, but a man will never understand loyalty.” The shore seemed to quiet, Odysseus’ men turning to see Penelope rest her hands against her husband’s face, bringing his head down so their lips could meet, their foreheads leaned against each other afterward, their eyes speaking the words they couldn’t form.
It was Penelope who stepped back, feet falling into the angry pattern her feet had made in the sand when she had followed her husband to Ithaca’s shore.
“Wait for me,” he said.
“That is not something you should ask for. You know I will,” she said.
“I will come back,” Odysseus promised. “I will come back to both you and my son.” He mounted his ship at his crewmates calling, their eyes tearing away from King and Queen, the waves rippling once more. She lifted her hand in goodbye as the ship began to leave the shore. “Do not forget me!” She yelled.
“That is not something you should wish,” he yelled back, “I could never forget the woman whose beauty and character shine most brightly upon my homeland. For every moment we are parted, I will think of you and only of you, Queen of Ithaca, you who has brightened my sunny kingdom all the more.”
When Penelope reached the palace, heart heavy, her son stumbled towards her, clutching her calf. He looked up at her, eyes large and all too familiar. A sudden feeling of mourning washed over her, and she could no longer withhold from crying. Telemachus, small yet filled with sorrow at the sight of his mother, tottered to the open doorway to see the empty beach, ships gone.
For many years, the palace remained empty and still. The maids hardly spoke and the conversation between mother and son always seemed to land on Odysseus, a story of his childhood or Penelope’s recollection of him. The taller and broader Telemachus became, the more difficult Penelope found it to believe her husband did not still dwell in the same palace.
Telemachus resembled his father so closely that when the first suitor arrived at the doors of the palace, he believed Telemachus to be the forgotten King himself. Telemachus refused his entry, but soon enough, the men of Ithaca ignored the prince's wishes and walked in uninvited, gorging themselves on Ithaca’s finest meals.
“They wish to marry you,” Telemachus told his mother, “they believe father to be dead at sea.”
“Do you?” Penelope asked, her head turned towards the window.
“No,” Telemachus said, “I believe and hope in his safe return.”
The hope Telemachus had of seeing his father dwindled with time, as more men arrived, asking for his mother’s hand in marriage. Telemachus, his name holding truth, was not trained in battle and could not see a way to dispel the men from his home. “My mother does not wish to marry any of you,” he told them, “we want to remain undisturbed.”
But the men were drunk on wine and pushed Telemachus back, reaching Penelope’s chambers, ignoring the maids who protested against their ascent. The suitors knocked on her door. “Penelope, Queen of Ithaca who resembles starlight, the men of Ithaca wish to claim you as a wife, as your late husband has most likely fallen in battle, of that you cannot deny. You must choose a new husband, Penelope, of this you cannot escape, for Ithaca desires a new King.”
Telemachus raced up the stairs, emptyhanded and afraid as he thrust his body in front of his mother’s door. The men backed away in amusement and Penelope did not respond, though Telemachus could hear her breaths come from the other side of the door. “Very well,” her soft voice came from behind her son, “but first I must weave Odysseus’ father a burial shroud. Laertes is elderly, of this you must know and honor, a former king deserves respect at his grave. When I have finished weaving, I will choose one among you to be my new husband.”
To Telemachus’ surprise, the men agreed and assembled downstairs once again to continue their unwelcome ruckus. Penelope opened her door and her son stumbled inside. “Mother,” his face twisted in agony and Penelope held her son, his tears spilling down her neck. She shushed her child who was still a boy, soothingly stroking his back. She gazed upon the men downstairs raising chalices towards her gentle figure with a roar of celebration. Their prize smiled down at them, though in her mind she remembered an Ithaca of the past, one devoid of the sound of lustful men and full of the noise that prequeled the life of a family that was yet to come. Telemachus’ sobs made their way into his mother’s room, where they both unsuccessfully slept to the tune of broken ceramic and distasteful music.
The following week, the men came up to Penelope’s door, asking for news of her weaving progress. Penelope came out and showed the men her unfinished burial shroud and they descended the stairs. “Mother, what are you doing? Do you really wish to marry one of them?” Telemachus asked her, maids wandering around him. “What I wish is to make time,” Penelope said as she bent down to take the bellflower from her boy’s hands. “A year since my cousin has returned to Sparta. I feel your father approach, he promised he would return and men don’t often break their promises.” She put the purple bellflower in her hair. “Your father once told me men don’t often tolerate dishonor. And what could be more shameful than your grandfather dying without a beautiful burial shroud?” She sat back at her weaving stool and slowly continued her project, her fingers long and agile.
Weeks passed and the white shroud suddenly began to turn colorful, blues and yellows adorned the weaving, as the shores of Ithaca began to appear on the tapestry. Days and nights passed and the shroud became all the more detailed. “Laertes’ shroud will display his home,” she told them. “I have made a mistake, I must correct it,” she said. “I still must add more color.”
Years passed and Laertes’ shroud was still unfinished. If that maid, who longed for a homely and peaceful palace, had not revealed Penelope’s trickey to the suitors, they might have just waited until the shroud was complete; they might have just waited for Penelope forever. “She unweaves everything she did during the day, her fingers and words deceive you. She does not intend to marry any of you as she, more than a decade later, still yearns for Odysseus who has undoubtedly left this world. Penelope has led all of you on. I tell you this not to simply betray my lady, but because Ithaca needs a King, Ithaca needs peace and order once more.”
The men, astonished, remembered their various encounters with Penelope and her shroud. In their memory, the shroud always appeared to be growing longer, and more detailed, how could Penelope have unraveled it without their noticing it?
The suitors concluded that their ignorance was due to their lust for Penelope, they were too lost in her beauty, to properly notice the length of the shroud. They could have never discovered the truth, however, as it wasn’t even in the knowledge of the weaver herself. As Penelope sat weaving for three years, Athena, clouded in mist and secrecy put a spell on Penelope’s shroud, making it appear longer and more complete every day than the previous. “Unweave it,” she told Penelope, supporting the weaver's thoughts.
The day the maid revealed Penelope’s trickery, Athena, in all her cunningness, whispered in the maid’s ear, convincing her to walk forward towards the spindle, until she tripped over it, falling out of the window and into Telemachus’ garden of purple bell flowers.