Eleni (85 page)

On the night of August 24, 1949, in the cabbage-rose-papered bedroom she shared with Kanta and Fotini in the first-floor tenement her father had rented for his new family on Greendale Avenue, Olga Gatzoyiannis had a dream about her mother. It was four days before the anniversary of her death. In the dream, Eleni told her eldest daughter that she should instruct the other children to take off the black of mourning and allow themselves to sing and dance again, because Glykeria was alive and would soon find them.

The next morning Olga went into the bathroom where her father was shaving and told him about her dream. Christos stared gloomily into the mirror and said, “It probably means that Glykeria was killed last night, wherever she is.”

He sounded so certain and resigned that Olga began to cry. When the telephone rang, she was sobbing too hard to answer it, so her father threw down his razor and picked up the receiver. The caller was Chrysoula Tatsis, the young wife of Leo Tatsis, who had been one of the first women from Lia to immigrate to the United States before the war. She began to break the news gently. “Christos, have you had any news of Glykeria?” she asked.

His face fell. “No, I think she must have been killed by now,” he replied. “Olga had a dream about her last night and I’m afraid it’s a bad sign.”

Olga stifled her sobs to hear what her father was saying. She was electrified by a whoop of joy and the sound of her father shouting, “Chrysoula, you bring that telegram over here and I’m going to kiss you, married woman or not!”

The remnants of the guerrilla forces who had been driven out of the mountains of Vitsi in mid-August regrouped with the last of their surviving comrades on Grammos for a final desperate stand. On August 28, 1949, the highest peak of Grammos was taken by the nationalist forces and the guerrillas were routed. It was exactly one year to the day since Eleni Gatzoyiannis had been executed. Two days later, all hostilities between the guerrillas and the nationalist army ceased.

The war was over.

On February 10, 1950, the steamship
LaGuardia
pulled into New York harbor, where Christos Gatzoyiannis waited to meet the last of his children.
He took Glykeria directly back to the house on Greendale Avenue, which had been readied for her arrival with new furniture of dazzling maroon velvet. The children had changed from black to new clothes in bright colors. Over the protests of her father, Kanta had even bobbed her hair.

A dozen Greek immigrants from Lia crowded into the small living room. Reporters from the local Worcester paper waited to record Glykeria’s arrival in her new country. The girl was photographed smiling, holding a doll in Greek costume. Her father told the reporters that now she would have to learn all over again how to be young and happy.

That night the five children sat up talking excitedly, laughing and crying as they recounted the adventures of the twenty-one months since they were separated. They avoided the subject of their mother’s death because the wound was still too fresh.

Although their father had provided three beds for them, they all fell asleep huddled together in one, just as they had slept on the floor of the kitchen before the hearth in the Perivoli next to their mother. Eleni was not with them but she had accomplished the goal for which she struggled through a decade of war and revolution and for which she ultimately died.

Her children were together and safe in the land she never lived to see.

W
HEN FATE PRESENTED
five children to my father, who had lived all his fifty-six years as a bachelor, he assumed the role of a Greek paterfamilias, shouldering the burden of our upbringing, which had always been our mother’s responsibility.

Shortly after our arrival the diner where he had been working as a short-order cook closed down, but he donned his best three-piece suit and dove-gray felt hat, and with me at his heels, walked the streets of Worcester until he found another job in a restaurant which paid $50 a week.

There was no way we could survive on his salary, so my three eldest sisters were sent to work in a Greek-owned factory that produced baked goods, where a knowledge of English wasn’t essential.

My sister Fotini and I, eleven and ten years old, were sent to the local public school, which had no provisions for non-English-speaking students. On the first day we found ourselves in an ungraded class filled with children of every shape and size, who we quickly realized were all retarded. Soon I managed to learn enough English to be promoted to a regular grade. To my surprise, the teacher didn’t beat her students but draped a comforting arm around me when I struggled to recite aloud, a maternal gesture that touched a well of loneliness within me.

Although Fotini had earned good marks in Greece, she never quite adjusted to school in America and dropped out as soon as she reached the legal leaving age of sixteen.

My father turned his attention at once to the matter which had been my mother’s greatest concern: finding suitable husbands for her four daughters. Within ten years of our arrival in America, each girl was provided with a groom, beginning with the eldest and moving down.

Although Olga had lost her cherished dowry, her American citizenship was dowry enough. Within months of our arrival, a letter came postmarked “Kastoria, Greece,” from a young tinker named Constantine Bartzokis whose family originally lived in Lia. So revered was the Gatzoyiannis name,
the young man wrote, that he would deem it an honor if my father would consider him as a potential husband for any of his daughters. Christos replied that he would accept him as a groom for his eldest, and would put through papers for him to immigrate.

Olga had given up her dream of marrying nothing less than a professional and she vaguely remembered the tall, dark-eyed Constantine visiting relatives in Lia when she was a girl. When the groom arrived, my father got him a place as salad chef in the restaurant where he worked, and we were even allowed to use one of the private dining rooms for the dinner and dance that followed the wedding ceremony.

By 1954 my father had saved enough money to send Kanta back to Greece, ostensibly to sell the half of the store in Yannina which he still owned but also to use the proceeds to outfit herself for a wedding, after she found a suitable groom under the surveillance of my grandfather.

From the moment she was met by Kitso at the boat in Athens, Kanta was deluged with a blizzard of invitations from the relatives of eligible young men, but not until she reached Lia and met a thin, mustached young man named Evangelos Stratis did she make up her mind. The couple’s formal engagement was sealed within days of their meeting, and after the wedding, Kanta returned to her job on the line at Table Talk Bakeries in Worcester until her husband was permitted to immigrate and found work with a Greek produce seller.

One floor was no longer enough to house our growing family, so my father bought a three-story wooden tenement in Worcester for $13,000. Olga and Constantine and their new baby lived on the top floor, Kanta and her husband on the middle floor, and the rest of us on the ground floor.

Glykeria was a veteran at Table Talk by the time our family went to a relative’s house in Worcester to welcome a new arrival from Babouri, twenty-eight-year-old Prokopi Economou, who had found a job in a shoe factory in Worcester. Glykeria was impressed by the innocence and openness of his round face. When, at a Greek picnic, Prokopi began singing old love songs and looking at her meaningfully, she knew he returned her admiration. Although Glykeria was not permitted to have dates, the two talked on the phone. Prokopi explained that he was not free to marry until his sister back in Greece had been satisfactorily wed. But Glykeria hadn’t lost her willfulness and she set the young man a deadline for him to declare his intentions or never speak to her again. Finally Prokopi defied his parents and married Glykeria in 1956.

Fotini was the only one to select her husband entirely on her own. She went with our father to a name-day party of a relative in Phildelphia where she met a handsome young cabinet maker from Fatiri, Greece, named Minas Bottos. On her return, Fotini announced to her sisters that she was in love. They warned her against making such a decision on her own, at the age of nineteen, but Fotini was adamant. The only love match among the four girls was the only marriage that eventually ended in divorce.

Eleni Gatzoyiannis had suffered the births of four daughters before finally
bearing a son, but her daughters produced a total of eight boys and only two girls. Olga, who never quite conquered the English language or the complexities of American life, gave birth to three boys and one girl. Her children all began first grade speaking only Greek but graduated from top colleges to become either lawyers or doctors.

Under the burden of family responsibilities, my father blossomed into a worthy patriarch, not only to his new family but to a growing community of refugees from Lia. One by one, he sponsored relatives who followed us to Worcester, until Christos Gatzoyiannis became the godfather of the large community of immigrants from Lia and Babouri who settled there.

In his seventies and eighties, my father would sit with the dignity of a king on the chair of honor at the annual summer picnic of Liotes in Worcester. A serpentine line of dancers spiraled around him under the shade of the oak trees, and the hundreds of immigrants who owed their new lives to him paid homage. Although many women set their caps for the prominent widower, he never considered remarrying after my mother’s death and I never heard him speak of any other woman.

If my father was the godfather of the immigrant community, I grew to be the
consigliere
after I entered college on a scholarship. As the only Greek with an education, I was in charge of doing all the immigration papers, citizenship applications, tax returns and medical forms for the burgeoning Greek populace. I helped to enroll their children in school and to interpret when necessary between my fellow villagers and the American doctors, teachers and judges.

When I returned to Lia for the first time in 1963, I carried a wallet stuffed with gifts of cash from Worcester immigrants to their relatives back home. The Greeks seemed to absorb the Calvinist work ethic with their first step on American soil. They abandoned afternoon siestas and long, lazy hours in the coffee shops to work fourteen-hour days—husbands, wives and children side by side. They paid for their homes and automobiles in cash. Many of the Mourgana Greeks in Worcester, including all four of my brothers-in-law, saved enough eventually to open pizza parlors throughout New England.

It was on that first trip back home in 1963 that I became close to my maternal grandfather. He had been such a distant figure in my youth but, as adults, we became friends after he shared with me, as a kind of peace offering, the secret of the Turk he killed when my mother was a child.

In 1967 my grandmother, Megali, died at eighty-five. My grandparents had been married for seventy-one years, ever since they were both in their early teens. Although Kitso had fought with his wife every day, he couldn’t live without her. He fell ill and died a month later. As his life ebbed, he placed three long-hoarded gold sovereigns on a table near his bed and said he would give them to the first person who told him Nikola was coming up the mountain. But I was delayed by a crisis in my job as a reporter and he died before anyone could collect the reward.

My grandfather had a long-standing rivalry with my uncle Foto as to
which one would bury the other. My grandfather was eighty-seven when he died, and Foto was eighty-five then. Today Foto is a hundred years old, the Methuselah of the Mourgana. He still hunts and climbs the steep mountainside from his house to the
cafenion
in the village square every day, raising his first glass of
tsipouro
before noon. His mind and his ascerbic tongue are as sharp as ever as he spins tales of his long life: how he killed the Turk who insulted his first wife in 1909; uncovered the body of his second wife, Alexo, executed by the Communists; saw his son Costas throw his life away in a futile search for revenge on his mother’s killers.