THE ORCHARDS OF ITHACA
by
HARRY MARK PETRAKIS
Copyright 2004 by Harry Mark Petrakis
All Rights Reserved
Smashwords Edition
Originally published by
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale, IL
DEDICATION:
For our sons, their wives, and their children
— our grandchildren —
with gratefulness and love
Praise for The Orchards of Ithaca
"With humor, drama, and a dash of classical mythology, fifty-year-old Halsted Street restaurant owner Orestes Panos stumbles toward the dawn of the millennium. Thwarting his aspirations to live as heroically as his mythic namesake are a delusional young beauty and the problems of a dysfunctional family. In Petrakis's suspenseful and moving narrative, Chicago's streets, landmarks, Greek restaurants, and weather come stunningly alive."
- Martin Northway, founder of the Chicago arts magazine, "Strong Coffee"
"In The Orchards of Ithaca, Harry Mark Petrakis is back at what he does best, chronicling the tragic and comic peaks and valleys of life among Chicago's Greek Americans. The mythic Hellenic past of his characters is engagingly reflected in the comic flair of dialogue and the heroic posturing that marks their contemporary American lives."
- Edward Lueders, author of "The Clam Lake Papers"
Praise for Harry Mark Petrakis...
"In his tales, violence is measured by brotherhood, passionate hate by passionate love. And in the end it is man who, despite his weaknesses and his blindness, has the right to victory."
- Elie Weisel
"I've often thought what a wonderful basketball team could be formed from Petrakis characters. Everyone of them is at least fourteen feet tall."
- Kurt Vonnegut
"Harry Mark Petrakis is good news in American literature. His style is in the classic manner. He writes about his characters with vigor and zest."
- Issac Bashevis Singer
"I've always thought Harry Mark Petrakis to be a leading American novelist."
- John Cheever
"Joy. A strange word when you think of contemporary fiction... or contemporary poetry, or contemporary anything. I am tempted to say that Petrakis is unique in our time because in his stories he can produce it, and he does regularly. It is as if some wonderful secret had been lost, then rediscovered by him."
- Mark Van Doren
"Petrakis has something more important than skill; a deep and rich humanity."
- Rex Warner
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
THE ORCHARDS OF ITHACA
CHAPTER ONE
The night before his fiftieth birthday, Orestes Panos dreamed he had been invited to a reception at the Clinton White House. Clad impeccably in formal attire (since he didn't own a tuxedo, he must have rented one), he moved coolly and with self-assurance among the distinguished guests in the ballroom. In addition to the president, William Jefferson Clinton, and his wife, Hillary Clinton, who were holding court in a corner of the elegant room, Orestes rubbed shoulders with a bevy of celebrities including Wolf Blitzer from CNN and Dan Rather from CBS. He recognized the squat Madeline Albright and tall, slump-shouldered Janet Reno. The stern-faced director of the Justice Department gave him a piercing look as if questioning why a restaurant owner from Halsted Street should have been included on the guest list. Before he could tell her he was as bewildered as she was, he was distracted by the appearance of the courtly, white-maned senator from New York, who spoke in rhetorical flourishes, and whose name escaped his dream. (After he woke, he remembered it was Patrick Moynihan.)
Then, in a corner of the ballroom, Orestes was startled to see the lumpish figure and doe-eyed face of Monica Lewinsky. Her presence suggested the notorious affair with the president had not yet entered its lethal finale.
Orestes suddenly understood the purpose of his visit to the White House was to warn the lascivious leader of the nation of the disaster that awaited him if he continued to pursue the young intern. But every desperate effort he made to approach Clinton was thwarted by stern Secret Service agents who formed an impregnable cordon around the president. Despite all his exertions, they held him at bay.
Frustration woke him. He opened his eyes reluctantly to the first glimmerings of daylight around the rim of the shades. He lay still for a few moments recapturing the images and impressions of the dream, which was more celebrity-riddled than any other dream he could remember. He hoped it wasn't a sign that at fifty, he was succumbing to megalomania.
Dreaming about the White House was understandable because for more than a year, the dominant newspaper and television stories had focused on the Clinton fiasco. Gennifer, Paula, and Monica, Clinton’s flexuous troika of either hapless victims or scheming bitches, depending on a Democratic or Republican perception. Months of charges and countercharges and days of debate in the Houses of Congress. Finally, there were the U.S. Senate hearings on the president’s perjury and the articles of impeachment.
What Orestes had seen of the political partisanship masquerading as moral indignation had revolted him. The spectacle of the thirteen House managers marching into the Senate for the hearings, their procession led by the portly, egregious Illinois congressman, his flaccid jowls quivering with his fabricated outrage, a man who had himself broken up a marriage by seducing another man’s wife, was enough to sour one's stomach. Their brazen efforts to impeach the president had failed in the Senate, but Orestes knew that the residue of the bitter conflict would carry over into the following year's presidential elections. He feared that the whole country would have to pay for Clinton's peccadilloes.
He slipped quietly from beneath the sheets so not to wake his wife, Dessie, still asleep at the other side of the queen-sized bed. As he walked toward the bathroom, he became conscious of a more pervasive stiffness in his limbs than he had felt the morning before. Is that because I am one year older, he thought gloomily? Perhaps the afflictions of age didn't only creep up on a man but enacted a swift explosive mugging on the occasion of a birthday.
In the bathroom, Orestes stared at his face in the vanity mirror, a reflection he had been confronting for half a century. Not even in his youth could it have been mistaken for a handsome face (Tom Cruise need not worry) but, he hoped, a face reflecting some nobility of character.
Feeling the need for reassurance, he made an effort to evaluate his visage as it might be viewed by a stranger. Deep-set dark eyes, forehead furrowed, curly dark hair laced with the first strands of gray, hairline receding slightly. He had good teeth (thanks to his dentist and regular brushing and flossing) and (people told him) a resolute jaw. For some years he had worn a mustache but the great swashbuckling soup-strainer his father, Moustakas, sported while he was alive discouraged him. Any mustache Orestes grew seemed a whimpering imitation of his fathers, and he shaved it off.
At fifty, his general health was good. A slight diminishment of eyesight required he wear glasses for reading. His hearing and senses of taste and smell were still good (all three essential functions in the restaurant). He was about ten pounds overweight for his five-foot-ten-inch frame, but he remained active by cycling in summer and swimming indoors in winter. His general health, confirmed by a recent visit to his friend and internist, Dr. Solon Savas, had not revealed any heart or cancer problems. His prostate was slightly enlarged (requiring nocturnal visits to the bathroom) but was also benign.
To keep his mind from stagnating, he still read whenever he had the chance (he was halfway through David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest). He watched educational programs on PBS, and after returning home at night, following the ten o'clock news, mustering a final effort to concentrate, he watched Ted Koppel on Nightline before going to bed.
In the twenty-three years he had been married to Dessie (a diminutive for Despina), they had so far survived all the precipitous entrapments that demolished numerous other marriages. Father Elias Botsakis, their parish priest from St. Sophia's Greek church, called their union an inspiration to the newlyweds in their parish.
Orestes wasn't sure about how inspiring their survival was, but he believed that Dessie and he had a good marriage with very few arguments of any virulence. Meanwhile, unlike so many other married men, for all the years of his marriage he had remained faithful to his wife.
Certainly there had been a few minor scuffles at parties where he had drunk too much, a furtive kiss or two with women who were also emboldened by liquor. But he never followed up on any of these contacts and, since his marriage, had never gone to bed with anyone except Dessie, rewarding her own faithfulness by an unwavering fidelity of his own.
Their family consisted of a twenty-two year old son, Paulie, who had married a little more than a year earlier (after dropping out of city college in his junior year). As a teenager, Paulie had become a follower of one of those Indian fakirs (spending a month in an Ashram in a religious retreat). Afterwards, he had become a Hare Krishna, shaving his head and spending hours chanting his prayers.
Dessie and Orestes made every effort to tolerate their son's quest for faith. They even permitted Paulie to chant Hare Krishna prayers before dinner. That forbearance didn't extend to his own father, Moustakas. Orestes would never forget his father's fury upon hearing Paulie chant a Hare Krishna prayer at the start of a meal. Moustakas unleashed a verbal tirade, punctuated by curses against his grandson that drove Paulie from the room in tears.
Paulie finally escaped from his religious obsessions. With his psyche refocused from religion to sex, he impregnated an attractive Italian girl named Carmela Barzini, the daughter of a neighborhood florist, Mario Barzini. The child, a girl they named Catherine Yoko Ono after John Lennon’s wife, was born a scant five months after the wedding.
Dessie had proved more tolerant and sympathetic about the hasty marriage and premature birth than Orestes, who couldn't help feeling that Carmela had trapped their son into marriage by allowing herself to become pregnant. But all that speculation didn't really matter because the child Paulie and Carmela produced was a little beauty who brought a tangible joy into Orestes and Dessie's life.
The youngest member of his family was their daughter, Marika, a fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school. She was a slender, dark-haired, pretty girl who mirrored Dessie's attractiveness.
As sweet and loving as Marika could often be, she spent money as if she were the daughter of Donald Trump. Orestes couldn't make her understand that Citibank and BankAmerica weren't her own personal depositories. On several occasions, he took away her credit cards, only to relent when Marika tearfully reassured him she would mend her ways. Those promises proved feckless beside her compulsion to patronize those two sybaritic gurus, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.
Orestes felt his daughter's obsession with material things wasn't her fault alone. Young people Marika's age were subjected daily to the callow and shallow aspects of society. There were the bizarre and cruel antics of Howard Stern, the dredging up of human misfits by Jerry Springer, the terpsichorean crotch-gripping Madonna, as well as an assortment of rap and rock groups with names like Death, Madness, Rape, Vomit, Mongrels, and worse, whose music assaulted hearing and whose lyrics bristled with references to murder, blood, and death.
Yet Orestes had to admit there were fathers of families with far greater reason for grievance. The son of Mathon Savalas had to drop out of high school because of his addiction to drugs. And, in another neighborhood family, the daughter of Tony Poulos had eloped with a petty hoodlum who was now serving a ten-year term in jail for assault and battery.
There were even more terrifying scenarios such as the massacre earlier in the year at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, when two youths aged seventeen and eighteen, using shotguns and an automatic rifle, massacred a dozen students and a teacher and wounded more than twenty others. As terrible as the grief the parents of the murdered students must have felt, Orestes wondered at the anguish of the parents of the killers. Had there been any hint of those murderous impulses in their sons? He imagined the nightmares those tormented parents would suffer for as long as they lived.
After considering all the somber alternatives, Orestes had to be grateful that his grievances with his son and daughter were minor.
The single remaining member of their household was Dessie's eighty-seven-year-old widowed mother, Stavroula, who had been living in their home for seven years (the seven-year plague) since the death of her husband,
Stavroula was a lean-bodied, wiry woman, steel-jawed and razor-tongued, with beady dark eyes, and lips curled like a scimitar that she used to slash out with one of her barbs, Orestes tried to be compassionate and tolerant because of her advanced age and because she was Dessie's mother, but her merciless and caustic tongue made living with her an ordeal. She had never liked Orestes and took every opportunity she could to deride and demean him to Dessie, Her male ideal was Tom Selleck, the tall, rugged actor she called in Greek "palikari!"—which translated into a strong, virile masculine figure. She'd watch Selleck’s old movies and television reruns for hours on the VCR in her bedroom. Orestes could only imagine the obscene and licentious fantasies moving through the old viragos withering head as she watched the palikari.
Stavroula was far too healthy (as well as too mean) to be consigned into a nursing facility (even if one could be found willing to accommodate aging assassins). Any mention of that possibility evoked in the acerbic old woman a rant and rage that included laments about the tragic fate of aging parents and diatribes on the ingratitude and cruelty of heartless offspring.
The only inhabitant of their house who had never caused Orestes a moment of concern had been their dog, Apollo, until the poor creature succumbed to failing kidneys a few years earlier at sixteen (well over a hundred human years) and had to be put to sleep.
Meanwhile, despite some pessimistic rumblings in the economy and on the stock market, Orestes was in fairly solvent financial shape. He owned a portfolio of blue chip-stocks and investment-grade bonds as well as a choice parcel of land in Naples, Florida, where he planned to build a home for Dessie and himself nearer to his retirement. That was years away because he was still active in business, sharing a partnership in the prosperous and upscale Olympia Restaurant on Halsted Street with a good friend, Cleon Frangakis. Despite the problems many downtown Chicago restaurants were experiencing, business on Halsted Street (thanks to a solid customer base of students from the nearby University of Illinois Circle Campus and medical personnel from Rush-St. Luke's hospital) was good.
Meanwhile, the world in which he lived was several months away from the much-heralded millennium. That impending transition had spawned a myriad of plans for extravagant year-end parties, as well as inciting the warnings of zealots who predicted the wicked world’s collapse as the century ended. There was also a concern about something called Y2K. As far as his comprehension of the dangers that entailed, at its worst, Y2K would bring about the collapse of the infrastructure of society.
Orestes hoped their predictions would prove baseless, but meanwhile, life around him had become immensely more complicated and intrusive. Nowhere was this more clearly evidenced than in the proliferation of cell phones. It was impossible to ignore them. (He had one himself) But where there had once remained certain sanctuaries of silence, now the buzzes and rings of the ubiquitous cell phones were everywhere, as was caller ID, call-waiting, take-this-call or don't take-this-call.
Then there were the computers. Under the prodding of Paulie and Marika, who were computer literate, Orestes had finally given in and bought a Gateway PC. But even as he gained a particle of competence in its use, he remained terrified at the way the squat box with the large Cyclopean eye could swallow a letter the way a shark snatched a morsel of prey. Nor could he comprehend the ominous messages that snapped up on his monitor, such as the one that read, the system has performed AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN. For the life of him, he hadn't the slightest idea what he had done that was illegal.
Of course the greatest threat mankind would carry into the millennium remained the nuclear bomb that might destroy a considerable portion of the world's population and leave the rest to die slowly in a polluted environment. Any number of countries had the bomb or were developing a nuclear capability. Yet, if a man spent time brooding about the somber prospect of a world held hostage by such dreadful weapons, he'd never muster the will to do any more than lie in bed all day and moan.
Whatever the millennium brought for mankind, Orestes felt a trembling wonder that he had lived to witness a new century (Of course, there were still a few months he had to get through alive.) He had survived to this point, but the chronology of the half-century mark was merciless. He couldn't help feeling that fifty was a clarion call to get ready for what no one could ever be ready for.
On his way to his room to dress, Orestes listened for a moment outside Stavroula's room. Because his mother-in-law watched Tom Selleck movies at night, she slept later in the morning, sparing him her presence to sour the beginning of his day. He was always careful not to wake her, and when he heard the old lady's sibilant snores, Orestes moved on to his daughter's bedroom to wake her for school.
As he entered the shadowed room, he inhaled the scents of efflorescent youth. Marika slept awkwardly in bed, her body partially concealed under the sheet except for one bare leg visible to the knee. He had a sudden poignant recollection of his daughter as a child, sleeping tangled within her blankets, her face angelic and serene.
Now it was clearly evident that she was no longer a child, the smooth and perfect symmetry of her naked leg emanating an erotic aura. His young daughter was in that awesome transition between girlhood and womanhood, her breasts budding, her thighs curving. He felt he was conscious of those changes not in any prurient way, but because he knew they signified her sexual awakening. He also understood it meant he would have to be more vigilant about those testosterone-glutted despoilers who sought to pursue (and deflower) her. (Sometimes he feared she might be already deflowered.)
Yet his innocent and paternal attitude did not apply to the attractive young girlfriends Marika brought home, Orestes caught glimpses of them lounging on the floor or on the bed in her room, skirts tossed recklessly about their glistening thighs. What was there about teenaged girls that raised a man's blood pressure? The Lolita complex? A child's face on a woman's body. That hint of still unsoiled virginity? (That also was dangerous ground to tread upon.)
When he gently shook Marika's shoulder, she stirred and whimpered a plea for mercy, "Come on, honey," he said. "Time to get up. You've already been late three days this week."
He waited in the doorway for a sign of movement in the bed.
"Honey, you hear me? Don't go back to sleep now."
Marika raised one slim-fingered, limp hand in a drowsy assent.
After he'd dressed, Orestes walked downstairs to the kitchen and made coffee. By the time he had squeezed oranges for juice and divided the assorted vitamin tablets for his wife and himself, Dessie entered the kitchen in her white terry cloth robe. She came to the table and bent to give him a warm, gentle kiss.
"Happy birthday, my darling."
"I know I'll be reminded of my age many times today."
"Don't be like George," Dessie said, referring to George Darlas, a close friend about his own age. "Mention his birthday and he sulks for days. You're alert, vigorous, with a loving wife, loving children, and a loving grandchild. That makes you very fortunate." She paused. "Did you wake Marika?"
"I did."
"Maybe I better call her again."
"Give her another minute!"
"You'd rather let Marika sleep longer so she won't wake Mama until you leave," she said with a wry smile.
"Let the beloved old diamond get her rest," Orestes said genially. "They say sleep improves one's disposition."
"Mama needs more than sleep for that," Dessie smiled. She returned to the table. "Marika shouldn't be late for school again. That would be the second time this week."
"The third time," Orestes said. "She's getting to bed too late."
"She's only been back in school a week," Dessie said. "After summer vacation it takes time to return to a regular schedule. Besides, girls her age are too excited about life to sleep."
"It might simply be the prospect of a sale at Lord and Taylor that keeps her too excited to sleep," Orestes said, and they both laughed.
They ate a light breakfast of English muffins, cheese, and coffee, Orestes read the Chicago Tribune while Dessie watched the morning news on the small screen TV above the refrigerator. She kept the volume low because she knew he preferred to read.
But the same gloomy news prevailed in both mediums. Continued harping by his Republican critics about President Clinton’s infidelities. In a more serious vein, there was the murder of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, and the flight of more than a million refugees including women and children into Albania and Montenegro. Another suicide bombing on a bus in Israel with six people dead and almost a dozen Palestinians killed in the Israeli response. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, still rejecting the return of U.N. inspectors. Finally, there was the terrible aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey that had killed forty thousand people. (The month before, Orestes had co-chaired a benefit for Turkish earthquake relief.)
Within their own city, the night had produced several robberies, a car belonging to a prominent minister stolen, a restaurant torched in Old Town, a rape in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Reading about these events depressed Orestes and made him feel helpless because he could do nothing about them. He thought, sometimes, that his son, Paulie, was right when he suggested starting one's day by avoiding the news in favor of meditation.
On this morning of his birthday, under the pretext of reading his paper, he studied Dessie, who was intent on the Good Morning America program, appraising her as he had earlier evaluated himself.
Four years younger than he was, Dessie had added a little weight but still remained slender and attractive. She had been, as he was, fortunate in having good health. She walked diligently in good weather and exercised vigorously on a stationary bike in their basement when the weather was inclement. Dessie was also scrupulous about their diet.
Despite those inevitable alterations the years had wrought, his wife was still a beautiful woman. Her thick long hair, which had once been raven-black, now revealed only a few vagrant strands of gray. Beneath her large, luminous dark eyes, a web of tiny wrinkles pinched at her flesh. There were times it seemed to him she looked her forty-six years, but when she smiled or laughed, he recaptured glimpses of the lovely, buoyant young girl she had been at twenty.
Orestes still found his wife's nakedness erotic and desirable. She'd had small breasts when they married, and it took a while for him to convince her that he couldn't abide those bulbous-breasted women that filled the pages of Playboy and Penthouse. Now, the bearing of children had filled out her breasts slightly, and he still found them lovely. Yet in spite of his desire and her own apparent responsiveness, sometimes weeks passed without their finding a chance to make love. He had been reduced to relieving himself as he had done when he was a quivering teenager. Helping him in his periodic need for sexual release were the plethora of sex sites he had discovered some years earlier while surfing the Internet on the computer in the privacy of his office at the restaurant. Heterosexual and homosexual intercourse, sadomasochism, virgins, mature women, transvestism, anal sex, necrophilia, scatophilia, all the bewildering deviations he had read about as a youth in Kraft-Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis, had numerous Websites in vivid, living color. They catered to every conceivable fetish, including his own fantasies, which involved black garter belts and black silk stockings as well as some playful bondage and spanking. He suspected (and feared) a man could become as addicted to sex on the Internet as he might become enslaved to alcohol, gambling, and drugs.
In the first years of their marriage, he had revealed his sexual fantasies to Dessie, who had indulged him. He still had carefully hidden some fading Polaroid photos of Dessie in high heels, black garter belt, and black silk stockings.
The unhappy reality was that they had not played those erotic games in at least a dozen years. He still yearned for that sex play, but Dessie had become self-conscious about her body and was reluctant to play out his fantasies. He understood her concerns and tried to reassure her that he still found her beautiful.
Dessie noticed him staring at her.
"What are you looking at?"
"The beautiful woman who is my wife," Orestes said earnestly. "The woman I love dearly and still desire."
"Isn't it a little early in the morning for that stuff?" Marika asked as she moved sleepily into the kitchen. She wore skintight peach-colored slacks, sneakers, and a shapeless yellow vest with fringes on the pockets. Her dark hair was cut short, and she had her mother's lovely, dark eyes and small, shapely ears.
"Do you always have to dress like a refugee from a rummage sale?" Orestes asked.
"Don't be old fashioned, daddy," Marika said. "All the kids dress like this."
"You mean all of them favor tight slacks with torn flaps on their behinds?"
"These are Calvin Kleins, daddy," Marika said. "I bought them at Bloomingdale's."
"Have you ever considered shopping at J.C. Penney? I've seen the clothes in their catalogues, and they seem fine to me."
Marika arched her eyebrows as if the absurdity of his remark didn't warrant a response. Then she crossed the kitchen to give him a hug.
"Happy birthday, daddy!" she said earnestly. "Even if you are old fashioned, I love you very much, and I want you to celebrate many, many more birthdays! A hundred, at least."
"If I'm still hanging on at seventy-five, you'll be begging for mercy."
"Don't forget your father's birthday party this evening," Dessie said."Paulie and Carmela will be coming, and Mario and Theresa."
"Can I bring Lenny?"
"Is he the skinhead with the pirate rings in his ears?" Orestes asked.
"That was Billy Bob. He and I broke up weeks ago," Marika said. "Lenny is a wonderful new friend I met just last week. Wait till you meet him."
Orestes suddenly heard a clatter from the top of the stairs that indicated Stavroula was descending. He rose quickly to leave. "I'm not going into the restaurant until later today," he told Dessie."I think I'll stop at the cemetery for a while."
"Do you want me to come with you?"
"You don't have to," Orestes said. "I'll just stop for a few minutes." He smiled to reassure her. "After all, without my parents I wouldn't be here to celebrate fifty."
"Don't let the cemetery depress you for the rest of the day," Dessie said, a soft note of warning in her voice.
He kissed her good-bye and hugged his daughter. She smiled up at him. "Wait until you see the wonderful present I bought you, daddy."
"I hope it's something from Ralph or Calvin," he teased her and left.
CHAPTER TWO
As Orestes walked from the house to the garage, the early September air retained the moistness of summer with clusters of hibiscus and dahlias still in bloom. The only intimations of autumn were a few yellow leaves on the poplar in their yard.
As he drove from the shadows of the garage into the light, he noticed the tiny liver spots of aging on the backs of his hands gripping the wheel. He couldn't believe they had appeared overnight, but he hadn't noticed them before. He felt a tremor of apprehension.
"Snap out of it, boofo!" he said loudly, using the derogatory epithet his father had often used against him. "You're just fifty, not a hundred!"
He drove north on Seeley Avenue through the Beverly neighborhood, passing the spacious houses and sloping lawns on Longwood Drive. He couldn't shake off the nagging unrest he had felt upon rising. He had read somewhere that in the journey of one's life, midpoint could become a time of crisis. He was suddenly afraid that Dessie was right and that visiting the graves of his parents would depress him for the remainder of the day. He didn't want to dampen the festivities planned for his birthday party that evening.
As a precaution, he decided to stop briefly in the neighborhood library. He used his cell phone to call the Olympia and left word for his partner, Cleon, that he wouldn't be in until later in the morning.
At Longwood Drive and Ninety-fifth Street, he turned west to the library. He parked in the lot and walked into the old stone building he had frequented so many times. Mrs. Kohn, the gray-haired, gentle-voiced librarian, greeted him.
"Good morning, Mr. Panos," she smiled.
"Good morning, Mrs. Kohn."
"You're not usually here this early."
"I'm just stealing a little time away from work."
"Good for you," she nodded in approval.
That time of morning the library was quiet, its only occupants several old men reading newspapers, or dozing in the armchairs. Orestes walked slowly along the shelves, immersing himself in the beguiling aura of books. As he turned a corner, he noticed a girl in an armchair bent over a book.
The most striking thing about her was the blondness of her hair made even brighter by the morning sun streaming through the window across her bent head. The thick, golden waves looped in back and fastened in a glittering pearl comb cascaded in a silky mane down across her shoulders.
Orestes moved away, and, as he drew down a book from the shelf, an image of the girl returned to him. He felt a curious impulse to see her again. He walked casually toward the alcove where she'd been sitting, but she was gone. He sighed and returned to his browsing.
From boyhood he had loved libraries and the multitude of books they contained. He recalled his awe before the sheer number of volumes, amazed that so much had been written during the preceding centuries. When he was much younger, he recalled a librarian telling him the books contained the collective wisdom of the past.
At one time in his youth, he had thought about writing himself, and somewhere, shuffled in among boxes of old magazines and correspondence, was a slim packet of poems and a couple of stories he had written. But the task of putting words coherently on paper proved too arduous, and he gave up any effort to write.
Yet he still loved the sight and feel and yes, particularly, the smell of books. Not old books that had been handled by many hands but new books, their jackets bright, the fresh paper and ink emanating a fragrance hard to describe but palpably pleasurable.
He browsed in the fiction areas, found the work of Nikos Kazantzakis, and took down Zorba the Greek. Sitting in one of the armchairs, he began to reread the opening chapter. As much as he loved the work of Kazantzakis, the melancholy introspection he had begun upon rising made it difficult for him to concentrate, and his thoughts wandered over the terrain of his life.
His love of books had been nurtured during a two-year period of illness that began when he was eleven. Prior to his visiting the doctor, he had been listless for months, his appetite diminished, his energy curtailed. His mother finally took him to their family physician, Dr. loannides. A set of chest x-rays revealed lesions on Orestes' lungs that the doctor diagnosed as tuberculosis. In those days before medications were discovered for that disease, the prescribed therapy was rest, and the doctor ordered Orestes to bed for a month. That was followed by another month, and those months grew to become a year, and the year became two years.
In the beginning, Orestes exulted in his good fortune at escaping school, lounging lazily beneath the sheets, his solicitous mother bringing him food on a tray, pleading with him to eat.
During this period of his illness, he rarely saw his father, who worked long hours at the restaurant. On those infrequent occasions when Moustakas was home, he would come to stand briefly in the doorway of the room. Orestes believed his father feared being infected by his illness because he never lingered in the room, never approached his bed or touched him. He'd stand staring at his son for a few moments in silence.
"You eat your food, you hear?" his father might say.
"I will, papa."
His father continued staring somberly at him and then turned and left the doorway.
As the weeks wore on, Orestes initial exhilaration at loafing in bed all day became boredom and frustration. His father had been adamant against allowing a television set in their house, but, defying him for the only time Orestes could remember, his mother bought a small, used black-and-white set from a neighbor that she placed in Orestes' bedroom. As a precaution against his father's anger, he only watched it during the day when Moustakas wasn't home.
But the cooking programs and soap operas held no appeal for Orestes. His salvation rested in books. At first he read his school books, which classmates brought him, and then he read the books brought to him by friends of his parents. A cousin of his mother who taught high school in the city brought Orestes a twenty-volume set of the The Book of Knowledge, which he read from the first volume to the last.
Orestes loved the stories of adventure most of all. The Count of Monte Cristo, White Fang, Captain Blood, The Call of the Wild he read with growing delight, at the same time assembling a vast array of diverse information regarding myths, geography, history. His mind became a sea into which flowed the fertile rivers of hundreds of books.
Near the end of his first year of illness, his condition became critical. On several occasions his coughing brought up particles of blood. One night he heard Dr. loannides in the adjoining room telling his parents that it might be necessary to send him to a "sanatorium." Orestes had never heard the multisyllabled word before, and it suggested something dreadful, much like the labyrinth of the monster, the Minotaur, he had read about in the books on Greek myth. Despite his mother's assurances that he wouldn't be sent away, he fought going to sleep, terrified that while he was unconscious he'd be transported to the dreaded "sanatorium" to die.
Each night for weeks, his weary mother sat beside his bed until he fell asleep. Even after sleeping, his nights were lashed by terrifying dreams of demons and dying. When he sometimes woke screaming, only his mother came to reassure him.
His condition slowly improved, the passing of time dispelling some of his fears about dying. His mother, who helped his father in the restaurant by cooking some of the entrees on the menu, returned to work part of the day in the restaurant kitchen. In her absence, a variety of caretakers were brought in to look after Orestes. These included several stern, somber-cheeked old women who smelled of stale coffee grounds and spoiled fruit. There were also two girls, each one no more than seventeen or eighteen years of age, conscripted from an orphanage where they had been confined since childhood. Orestes had long since forgotten their last names and remembered them only as Olga and Mary.
Olga came first, in the spring of the year. She was a stocky, robust-armed Russian girl who walked with a limp because one leg was an inch shorter than the other. A large, discolored birthmark stained one side of her throat. She had a habit of rubbing her fingers roughly against the mark, as if trying to scrape it away.
Olga was a powerful girl whose strength, at first, frightened and then fascinated Orestes. When she changed the linen on his bed, he'd sit in an armchair and marvel how easily she lifted and flipped the mattress. He was especially intrigued by her big ugly hands with stubby, broken nails that she chewed down to her fingers.
From time to time, Olga would light a cigarette that she smoked near an open window, brushing vigorously with her hand to disperse the smoke.
"You don't say nothing to your father or mother now, you hear?"
He would nod that he understood.
"If you do talk, you know what I'll do to you?"
He nodded once again, feeling an excited tightness in his belly.
She chuckled, winked, raised one broad, ugly palm.
"You'll get this," she said slowly, relishing the effect she was having on him." You'll get it you know where..."
"I know," he said and released his pent-up breath.
She bullied him and teased him, never with any cruelty but in a playful demonstration of her dominance. She'd lift him from the bed in her strong arms, and he'd see the glaring birthmark on her throat and the small hairy moles on her cheeks. On one occasion when she was putting him back in bed, she gave him a light teasing smack on the seat of his thin pajama trousers.
He encouraged her disapproval, relishing her mastery and control over him. She began threatening him with spankings if he "wasn't a good boy." With a mixture of excitement and fear, he went out of his way to disobey her. She obliged by spanking him, first on his pajamas and, finally, on his bare buttocks. The light spankings seemed to fulfill a strain of dominance in her own nature and also satisfied a submissiveness in him. In the grip of her excitement, he smelled the sour stench of her sweat and saw her glowing eyes. The spankings also evoked erotic feelings in him he had never experienced before.
Then, one morning at the beginning of autumn, Olga was gone, replaced by Mary, a plump, sweet-faced girl who smelled of lavender. There was nothing strong or assertive about Mary; who was feminine and soft and evoked in Orestes different feelings than those he'd felt with Olga. He became conscious of the soft: sheen of Mary's skin, the mounds of her breasts with their nipples visible against her blouse, and the tantalizing glimpses he caught of her bare thighs when she bent to make his bed.
As they became more familiar with one another, he couldn't resist reaching out and touching her, caressing her hair and stroking her arms. She asked him if he liked touching her, and he told her yes.
"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Do you think I have nice skin?"
"Yes."
"Do you like my eyes?"
"Yes..."
"Do you like my..." she left the word unfinished, but one of her slender hands fumbled to touch her breast.
"Yes!" he said fervently. "Yes... yes."
His caresses became more intimate, and, when she didn't object, excitement made him bolder. Sometimes she lay in bed beside him, let him touch her breasts and press his lips lightly on her mouth. She guided him gently into the first kisses he had ever known.
Their games grew more brazen, and there were times during the day when they were alone that Mary stripped to her slip. After a while she peeled off that garment, as well. Wearing only drab cloth panties and brassiere, she snuggled into bed beside him.
She talked to him sweetly, her scents making him dizzy. She stroked him and encouraged him to caress her. Mary's breasts were the first he had ever seen naked, and he marveled at their symmetry and at their resilience, the way her nipples sprang back against his awkward, groping fingers after he'd pressed them in. When she fondled his genitals, her touch light as a bird's wing, he felt a tingling and surges of heat all through his body.
Then Mary was gone, as well, replaced by a prune-faced old woman appropriately named Barboonis, sexless and humorless, who made his room appear darker no matter what the time of day. From that period until his recovery and beyond, he thought with great longing and excitement of the two girls.
In later years, he came to understand how those dualities of his confinement, books and the sexuality of the girls, had blended. Perhaps that was the reason he was drawn so strongly to libraries.
Lost in the recesses of memory, the book he had been reading slipped down to his side. He became aware of the faint noises of the library around him, an old man clearing his throat, Mrs. Kohn at the reference desk responding on the phone to some query. As reluctant as he was to leave the warm sanctuary of the library, he knew he had to go. He checked out Zorba the Greek, and, as he left the library, he girded himself for the visit to the graves of his dead parents.
Driving east on Eighty-seventh Street to Kedzie, he passed between the iron gates of the Evergreen Cemetery, and the sign that read, hours: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. He stopped in the cemetery greenhouse and bought a bouquet of fresh flowers.
He drove into the Greek section of the cemetery, passing the graves on the slopes that grew more crowded year after year. The stones and markers bore the names of families he had known, CAPPAS, CHRISSIS, LAMBESIS, STAMOS. The graves held the parents of boys and girls who were his classmates in the parochial school.
Near his family's gravesite, he passed a mound of fresh wreaths and garlands that marked a new grave. He wondered if he knew the person who had died. He parked, finally, on the road beside the large, brown, granite cross that bore his family's name of PANOS.
At that midday hour, the cemetery was silent and deserted, a light wind fluttering the neatly trimmed shrubs and patches of flowers decorating the graves. A solitary oak tree whose thick branches shaded a score of graves rustled its foliage.
Three of the six graves in his family plot were occupied. One belonged to his father, Moustakas, one to his mother, Kanella, and one to Manolis, the brother born before him, who had died of meningitis at the age of four. Orestes felt sure his mother's lifetime sadness resulted from the early death of her first child. Perhaps his father's relentless cruelty and anger stemmed from the child's early death, as well. Each time Moustakas looked at Orestes, he must have been reminded of the son he had lost.
Orestes thought often of the brother he had never known. If he had been allowed to live and grow into adulthood, Orestes might have been able to turn to him for counsel. His brother might also have become Orestes' ally against the harshness of his father.
Orestes spread the flowers, placing a few petals on each of the graves. His family gravestone had once held two small cameo photos of his father and mother, but they had been defaced by vandals with air guns. He had replaced the small photos several times, but each time the vandals destroyed them again. When Orestes complained to the cemetery management, they told him apologetically they couldn't possibly patrol the vast acreage of the cemetery. He finally stopped replacing the photographs.
Now, standing above the graves, Orestes recalled his mother's patient, impassive face. A melancholy, resigned woman, she had died in 1993 at the age of eighty-two, as quietly and uncomplaining as she had lived, slipping seamlessly from pneumonia into death in the space of a weekend.
His father's dying in 1997, at the age of eighty-eight, had been a savage battle pitting Moustakas against the forces of death. In the hospital in his last weeks of life, the old man not only berated his son but spit at the doctors and nurses who attended him. When his raging heart finally succumbed to the assorted liver and heart ailments that killed him, Orestes knew every nurse, orderly, and doctor on the floor breathed a sigh of relief.
Orestes made the arrangements for both his mother and father's funerals, picked out their caskets, arranged for the vaults and the opening of the graves.
Remembering how his parents looked in their open coffins, his mother's stillness seemed compatible with her passive nature. For the first time he could ever remember, she appeared finally at peace. His father was a different story. For all the efforts of the undertaker, a tranquility couldn't be fashioned on Moustakas's face. Even in death, there seemed a grimace on his cheeks, a snarl around his mouth. A family friend passing his coffin remarked, in an awed voice, "My God, he still looks angry!"
It was true that even in death his father radiated the same fury and harshness that had characterized his life. He had been boorish, brutally outspoken, saying what he wished, doing what he wanted, his voice mocking or bellowing, lashing and intimidating the waitresses, busboys, and cooks in his restaurant. Behind his back they referred to him as "Moustakas, the beast!"
Everyone around him was subjected to his anger or to his insatiable appetite. He ate and drank voraciously and pursued the waitresses in his restaurant with relentless lust. Many rebuffed him, and, soon afterwards, he found a pretext to fire them. The exceptions were the older, experienced waitresses his partners would not allow him to discharge.
Orestes first learned of his father's sexual infidelities when he was fourteen, the year following his recovery from his illness. After attending a basketball game at school one evening, he had stopped by the restaurant to go home with his father. The cook who had since died was cleaning his grill and, with what Orestes later recalled was a malicious glint in his eyes, told him his father was in the storeroom. When Orestes opened the door, he saw his father, pants crumpled around his ankles, crouched between the naked, thrashing legs of one of the waitresses.
For an instant Orestes stood frozen, as much anguished at what his father felt about being caught, as at his own shock. Then his father snarled, "What are you looking at, boofo? Go and wipe your snots!"
Orestes closed the door and stumbled out of the kitchen, the memory of his father crouched between the naked thighs of the waitress searing his heart all the way home.
His father never mentioned the episode, never asked him not to say anything to his mother. Orestes felt his father wouldn't have cared if he had told her. But even as he remained silent, carrying the burden of that revelation with him all through the years he attended high school, he suspected his mother knew of his father's infidelities.
There were other waitresses his father pursued beside the one Orestes had seen him crouched over in the storeroom. Young ones and older ones, fair-haired and dark-haired, skinny and plump, bold and shy. Moustakas played no favorites but graced all with his ubiquitous cock.
All through Orestes' childhood and into adolescence, the image of his father's great cock and massive dangling testicles he had first seen in the bathroom when he was a child, seemed those of a giant, far out of proportion to his bony, lean-fleshed frame. Orestes imagined the cock in full erection, a battering ram invading the loins of the waitresses and unloading in them a flood of rancid semen.
As a boy, there were nights Orestes sat in the locked bathroom, studying his own genitals, despairing at their inadequate size beside those of his father, hoping and praying they would grow as the rest of his body grew.
The shadow of his father's proportions lingered over him through his first sexual explorations so that he feared girls would reject him because his organ was inadequate. But the few girls with whom he had sex seemed satisfied, and that was also true of Dessie after they married.
Nothing more fittingly exemplified the retribution fate exacted on his dying father than the withering and shrinking of his genitals. In the hospital, in his father's last weeks of life, when Orestes had to wash him and change the diapers he wore for incontinence, he saw his father's huge genitals had become a dried, rotting clump, his cock a small and wrinkled turnip, his testicles a pair of withered olives eroded and drained by a lifetime of copulation.
A bird flew overhead, trailing its throaty cry across the cemetery. At times in the past when Orestes visited the graves, he had felt driven to curse and rebuke his father.
"Goddam you, Moustakas," he'd cry in the silence and solitude of the cemetery. "Goddam you for the things you did and goddam you for the things you should have done. I hope you're burning in hell for eternity!"
That day of his birthday, he felt only a melancholy, an awareness that each passing year brought him closer to the time when he'd take his place in one of the graves beside his father. They'd have eternity to settle their quarrels then.
"Let bygones be bygones, pa," Orestes said. "It's my birthday. Today I'm fifty. I thought you might want to wish me 'happy birthday.' "
He saw the flowers flutter above his mother's grave and could almost hear her sad, quiet voice saying, "Happy birthday, my son." But he waited in vain for any sign that his father might have heard him or that he even cared.
After Orestes received his bachelor's degree from Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago, he told his father he wanted to work in the restaurant full time. He had worked there as a busboy after school and as a waiter during the summers, but his father vehemently objected to Orestes' making the restaurant his life's work.
"What the hell you want to spend your time in here for?" his father cried. "I don't need you! Why don't you go be somebody, maybe a doctor or a lawyer! Not another hamali, a Turkish beast of burden!"
"You've been in the restaurant all your life," Orestes fought back. "It was good enough for you!"
"Because I was ignorant!" his father stormed. "Because I was barely able to read and write! I never had the chances you got! I paid for your goddam education, so you could make something of yourself!"
What tormented Orestes most was the way his father used his dead brother to attack him, "Why couldn't your brother have lived!" his father cried. "He would have made something of himself, made me proud! He wouldn't have shit up my life the way you do! He wouldn't have been a lazy, worthless boofo like you!"
Now, years after his father hurled those words at him, Orestes still felt their sting and bite.
"I wasn't lazy or a boofo, pa," Orestes said. "I worked as hard and even harder than you. After you were gone, I made the restaurant more successful and more profitable than it had ever been. Then I bought a bigger place that I turned into one of the finest establishments on Halsted Street. And I did all this without tongue-lashing the busboys, abusing the cooks, or fucking the waitresses."
But as it had been when his father was alive, Orestes knew he could never convince the old man of anything he didn't want to believe.
He turned slowly to leave and paused.
"You never listened to me before, pa," he said slowly. "So why the hell should I expect you'll listen to me now that I'm fifty? I never became a doctor or a lawyer because I had no confidence that I could do anything else besides work in the restaurant. All the years of your cruelty and your mockery cut out part of my heart and maybe my balls, as well. By the time I could pull together any courage or confidence, it was too late for me to change." He paused and shook his head. "You never understood that, pa, you never understood something as simple as that."
The cemetery remained silent, the gravestones unmoving, the flowers fluttering in the wind.
Among the throngs of the dead in the graves about them, there may have been fathers who believed his words and who understood his grievance. But Moustakas Panos was not one of them. As Orestes started for his car, he thought he heard the mocking laughter of his father spiral into the summer sky above his head.
CHAPTER THREE
Each time Orestes entered the Olympia Restaurant, he was hurled into smells and sounds that melded America and Greece. Depending on the time of day, the restaurant was lively over lunch, quiet through midafternoon, the tempo of activity intensifying to a peak of hustle and clamor through the evening. On Friday and Saturday nights, the line of people waiting for tables would stretch out to Halsted Street while cheerful young waiters poured the patrons small tumblers of ouzo as a consolation for the delay.
During the crowded, boisterous evenings, the atmosphere in the Olympia would be singed with the cheese and brandy scents of saganaki, the garlic aromas of roast lamb, the pungency of assorted brandies and wines.
Joined to the smells were the treble tones of women, the deeper, hoarser voices of men, the shrill bursts of laughter, the buoyant calls of waiters placing orders, the harsh responses of cooks. Meanwhile, loudspeakers throughout the restaurant emitted the ebullient strains of Greek music.
All of this ambience was so familiar to Orestes that he could graphically recapture it no matter where he was. Even when he was away from the restaurant, the smells and sounds lingered in his nose and ears.
His partner, Cleon Frangakis, standing at the register caught sight of him.
"Because it's your birthday," Cleon called with mock sternness, "you think you can just take the day off?"
"I wanted you to see how much you need me," Orestes laughed. "How was lunch?"
"The main room was half full including the thirty ladies from the Philoptochos Society." Cleon turned to service a waiter bringing him a check and a credit card. "They asked about you and I told them you had run off with the bearded lady in the circus."
Cleon was a stocky, swarthy man in his sixties who'd worked in restaurants all his life. He'd been managing another restaurant on Halsted Street when Orestes hired him. Cleon quickly became a diligent employee as well as a loyal friend. Realizing that he would be an even greater asset as a partner, Orestes worked out a generous arrangement allowing Cleon to acquire part ownership in the Olympia. The association had greatly benefited both of them.
Cleon finished the credit transaction and then hurried around the register to clasp Orestes in a great bear hug.
"Happy birthday, partner and friend!" he said earnestly. "Today I wish you the love and best wishes I'd wish my own brother."
"Thank you, partner and friend."
In the hours that followed, Orestes accepted birthday greetings from waiters and busboys, from dishwashers and cooks, from vendors delivering produce, from a few customers, and, finally, from other merchants on the street. Sophie Kalamas hurried in from the Hellenic Bakery with a freshly baked tray of baklava, and Jim Spirou came from the Salonika Candle Shop with a small icon of his patron saint.
"My God," Orestes exclaimed to Cleon after several additional well-wishers had gone. "Does everyone in the city have to know I'm turning fifty today?"
"That isn't all!" Cleon spoke with the delight of a child revealing a secret. "I haven't told you yet that our distinguished county treasurer, Maria Pappas, phoned her best wishes and so did Christos Panagis, you know he's one of the aides to Mayor Daley. He's trying to get the mayor's office to issue a proclamation making this 'Orestes Panos Day in Chicago.' "
"You're all crazy," Orestes sighed. "I should have taken the rest of the day off and driven to one of the riverboat casinos."
In the next few hours Orestes reviewed the evening's menu with Kyriakos, the master chef, and called the Hellenic Packing Company about an overdue shipment of steaks. He mediated a complaint between a pair of young waiters. He spent an hour with a liquor salesman replenishing the Olympia's extensive supply of wines. In all these contacts, while he remained resolute about what he wished done, he remembered his father's harshness towards employees and associates, and his demeanor was quiet-spoken and courteous.
Later in the afternoon, a few old friends who were also regular patrons drifted in. They gathered at the large round table Cleon set aside for them in a quiet corner of the restaurant.
"Happy birthday, Orestes," George Lalounis said. He was a handsome, neatly dressed man in his early forties, who owned the Crown Realty Company. ("Buy a Crown home and live like a King.") He handed Orestes a small wrapped gift.
"A small token of friendship," he said.
"The keys to the kingdom?" Orestes smiled.
"Happy birthday, my friend," the greeting came from Nikos Karvelas, a tall, sixtyish undertaker who owned the Santorini Funeral Home. He shook Orestes' hand firmly. "I too have brought you a modest present."
"Probably a certificate allowing Orestes ten percent discount on his funeral expenses," Dr. Solon Savas, a white-haired general practitioner in his late seventies who had just walked up laughed.
"To joke about death and funerals is callous and boorish," Karvelas scowled. "And coming from a man whose medical blunders probably dispatched scores before their time is an added blasphemy."
"If that's the way you feel," Dr. Savas sneered, "I'll be happy to give you back the diseased gall bladder I removed last year from your worthless carcass!"