Middlesex (24 page)

   Despite the gaps in Milton’s missives (syntactical and physical), my grandmother registered the danger of his situation. In his badly penned sigmas and deltas she spied the shaking hand of her son’s growing anxiety. Over his grammatical mistakes she detected the note of fear in his voice. The stationery itself frightened her because it already looked blown to bits.
   Seaman Stephanides, however, was doing his best to prevent injury. On a Wednesday morning, he reported to the base library to take the admittance exam for the U.S. Naval Academy. Over the next five hours, every time he looked up from his test paper, he saw his shipmates doing calisthenics in the hot sun. He couldn’t help smiling. While his buddies were baking out there, Milton was sitting under a ceiling fan, working out a mathematical proof. While they were forced to run up and down the sandy gridiron, Milton was reading a paragraph by someone named Carlyle and answering the questions that followed. And tonight, when they would be getting creamed against the rocks, he would be snug in his bunk, fast asleep.
   By the time the early months of 1945 rolled in, everyone was looking for exemptions from duty. My mother hid from charitable works by going to the movies. My father ducked maneuvers by taking a test. But when it came to exemptions, my grandmother sought one from nothing less than heaven itself.
   One Sunday in March, she arrived at Assumption before the Divine Liturgy had started. Going into a niche, she approached the icon of St. Christopher and proposed a deal. “Please, St. Christopher,” Desdemona kissed her fingertips and touched them to the saint’s forehead, “if you keep Miltie safe in the war, I will make him promise to go back to Bithynios and fix the church.” She looked up at St. Christopher, the martyr of Asia Minor. “If the Turks destroyed it, Miltie will build it again. If it only needs painting, he’ll paint.” St. Christopher was a giant. He held a staff and forded a rushing river. On his back was the Christ Child, the heaviest baby in history because he had the world in his hands. What better saint to protect her own son, in peril on the sea? In the shadowy, lamplit space, Desdemona prayed. She moved her lips, spelling out the conditions. “I would also like, if possible, St. Christopher, if Miltie he could be excused from the training. He tells me it is very dangerous. He’s writing to me in Greek now, too, St. Christopher. Not too good but okay. I also make him promise to put in the church new pews. Also, if you like, some carpets.” She lapsed into silence, closing her eyelids. She crossed herself numerous times, waiting for an answer. Then her spine suddenly straightened. She opened her eyes, nodded, smiled. She kissed her fingertips and touched them to the saint’s picture, and she hurried home to write Milton the good news.
   “Yeah, sure,” my father said when he got the letter. “St. Christopher to the rescue.” He slipped the letter into his Greek-English dictionary and carried both to the incinerator behind the Quonset hut. (That was the end of my father’s Greek lessons. Though he continued to speak Greek to his parents, Milton never succeeded in writing it, and as he got older he began to forget what even the simplest words meant. In the end he couldn’t say much more than Chapter Eleven or me, which was almost nothing at all.)
   Milton’s sarcasm was understandable under the circumstances. Only the day before, his C.O. had given Milton a new assignment in the upcoming invasion. The news, like all bad news, hadn’t registered at first. It was as if the C.O.’s words, the actual syllables he addressed to Milton, had been scrambled by the boys over in Intelligence. Milton had saluted and walked out. He’d continued down to the beach still unaffected, the bad news acting with a kind of discretion, allowing him these last few peaceful, deluded moments. He watched the sunset. He admired a neutral Switzerland of seals out on the rocks. He took off his boots to feel the sand against his feet, as if the world were a place he was only beginning to live in instead of somewhere he would soon be leaving. But then the fissures appeared. A split in the top of his skull, through which the bad news hissingly poured; a groove in his knees, which buckled, and suddenly Milton couldn’t keep it out any longer.
   Thirty-eight seconds. That was the news.
   “Stephanides, we’re switching you over to signalman. Report to Building B at 0700 hours tomorrow morning. Dismissed.” That was what the C.O. had said. Only that. And it was no surprise, really. As the invasion neared, there had been a sudden rash of injuries to signalmen. Signalmen had been chopping off fingers doing KP duty. Signalmen had been shooting themselves in the feet while cleaning their guns. In the nighttime drills, signalmen lustily flung themselves onto the rocks.
   Thirty-eight seconds was the life expectancy of a signalman. When the landing took place, Seaman Stephanides would stand in the front of the boat. He would operate a sort of lantern, flashing signals in Morse code. This lantern would be bright, clearly visible to enemy positions onshore. That was what he was thinking about as he stood on the beach with his boots off. He was thinking that he would never take over his father’s bar. He was thinking that he would never see Tessie again. Instead, a few weeks from now, he would stand up in a boat, exposed to hostile fire, holding a bright light. For a little while, at least.
   Not included in the News of the World: a shot of my father’s AKA transport ship leaving Coronado naval base, heading west. At the Esquire Theater, holding her feet off the sticky floor, Tessie Zizmo watches as white arrows arc across the Pacific.
The U.S. Naval Twelfth Fleet forges ahead on its invasion of the Pacific,
the announcer says.
Final destination: Japan
. One arrow starts out in Australia, moving through New Guinea toward the Philippines. Another arrow shoots out from the Solomon Islands and another from the Marianas. Tessie has never heard of these places before. But now the arrows continue on, advancing toward other islands she’s never heard of—Iwo Jima, Okinawa—each flagged with the Rising Sun. The arrows converge from three directions on Japan, which is just a bunch of islands itself. As Tessie is getting the geography straight, the newsreel breaks into filmed footage. A hand cranks an alarm bell; sailors jump out of bunks, double-time it up stairways, assuming battle stations. And then there he is—Milton—running across the deck of the ship! Tessie recognizes his skinny chest, his raccoon eyes. She forgets about the floor and puts her feet down. In the newsreel the destroyer’s guns fire without sound and, half a world away, amid the elegance of an old-fashioned cinema, Tessie Zizmo feels the recoils. The theater is about half-full, mostly with young women like her. They, too, are snacking on candies for emotional reasons; they, too, are searching the grainy newsreel for the faces of fiancés. The air smells of Tootsie Pops and perfume and of the cigarette the usher is smoking in the lobby. Most of the time the war is an abstract event, happening somewhere else. Only here, for four or five minutes, squeezed between the cartoon and the feature, does it become concrete. Maybe the blurring of identity, the mob release, has an effect on Tessie, inspiring the kind of hysteria Sinatra does. Whatever the reason, in the bedroom light of the movie theater Tessie Zizmo allows herself to remember things she’s been trying to forget: a clarinet nosing its way up her bare leg like an invading force itself, tracing an arrow to her own island empire, an empire which, she realizes at that moment, she is giving up to the wrong man. While the flickering beam of the movie projector slants through the darkness over her head, Tessie admits to herself that she doesn’t want to marry Michael Antoniou. She doesn’t want to be a priest’s wife or move to Greece. As she gazes at Milton in the newsreel, her eyes fill with tears and she says out loud, “There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.”
   And while people shush her, the sailor in the newsreel approaches the camera—and Tessie realizes that it isn’t Milton. It doesn’t matter, however. She has seen what she has seen. She gets up to leave.
   On Hurlbut Street that same afternoon, Desdemona was lying in bed. She had been there for the last three days, ever since the mailman had delivered another letter from Milton. The letter wasn’t in Greek but English and Lefty had to translate:
 

   Dear folks,
   This is the last letter I’ll be able to send you. (Sorry for not writing in the native tongue, ma, but I’m a little busy at the moment.) The brass won’t let me say much about what’s going on, but I just wanted to drop you this note to tell you not to worry about me. I’m headed to a safe place. Keep the bar in good shape, Pop. This war’ll be over some day and I want in on the family business. Tell Zo to stay out of my room.
   Love and laughs,

Milt

   Unlike the previous letters, this one arrived intact. Not a single hole anywhere. At first this had cheered Desdemona until she realized what it implied. There was no need for secrecy anymore. The invasion was already under way.
   At that point, Desdemona stood up from the kitchen table and, with a look of triumphant desolation, made a grave pronouncement:
   “God has brought the judgment down on us that we deserve,” she said.
   She went into the living room, where she straightened a sofa cushion in passing, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. There she undressed and put on her nightgown, even though it was only ten in the morning. And then, for the first time since being pregnant with Zoë and the last time before climbing in forever twenty-five years later, my grandmother took to her bed.
   For three days she had stayed there, getting up only to go to the bathroom. My grandfather had tried in vain to coax her out. When he left for work the third morning, he had brought up some food, a dish of white beans in tomato sauce and bread.
   The meal was still lying untouched on the bedside table when there came a knock at the front door. Desdemona did not get up to answer it but only pulled a pillow over her face. Despite this muffling, she heard the knocking continue. A little later, the front door opened, and finally footsteps made their way up the stairs and into her room.
   “Aunt Des?” Tessie said.
   Desdemona did not move.
   “I’ve got something to tell you,” Tessie continued. “I wanted you to be the first to know.”
   The figure in the bed remained motionless. Still, the alertness that had seized Desdemona’s body told Tessie that she was awake and listening. Tessie took a breath and announced, “I’m going to call off the wedding.”
   There was a silence. Slowly Desdemona pulled the pillow off her face. She reached for her glasses on the bedside table, put them on, and sat up in bed. “You don’t want to marry Mikey?”
   “No.”
   “Mikey is a good Greek boy.”
   “I know he is. But I don’t love him. I love Milton.”
   Tessie expected Desdemona to react with shock or outrage, but to her surprise my grandmother barely seemed to register the confession. “You don’t know this, but Milton asked me to marry him a while ago. I said no. Now I’m going to write him and say yes.”
   Desdemona gave a little shrug. “You can write what you want, honey
mou
. Miltie he won’t get it.”
   “It’s not illegal or anything. First cousins can marry even. We’re only second cousins. Milton went and looked up all the statutes.”
   Once again Desdemona shrugged. Drained by worry, abandoned by St. Christopher, she stopped fighting an eventuality that had never been fated in the first place. “If you and Miltie want to get married, you have my blessing,” she said. Then, having given her benediction, she settled back into her pillows and closed her eyes to the pain of living. “And may God grant that you never have a child who dies in the ocean.”
   In my family, the funeral meats have always furnished the wedding tables. My grandmother agreed to marry my grandfather because she never thought she’d live to see the wedding. And my grandmother blessed my parents’ marriage, after vigorously plotting against it, only because she didn’t think Milton would survive to the end of the week.
   At sea, my father didn’t think so either. Standing at the bow of the transport ship, he stared out over the water at his fast-approaching end. He wasn’t tempted to pray or to settle his accounts with God. He perceived the infinite before him but didn’t warm it up with human wishing. The infinite was as vast and cold as the ocean spreading around the ship, and in all that emptiness what Milton felt most acutely was the reality of his own buzzing mind. Somewhere out over the water was the bullet that would end his life. Maybe it was already loaded in the Japanese gun from which it would be fired; maybe it was in an ammunition roll. He was twenty-one, oily-skinned, prominent about the Adam’s apple. It occurred to him that he had been stupid to run off to war because of a girl, but then he took this back, because it wasn’t just some girl; it was Theodora. As her face appeared in Milton’s mind, a sailor tapped him on the back.
   “Who do you know in Washington?”
   He handed my father a transfer, effective immediately. He was to report to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. On the admissions test, Milton had scored a ninety-eight.
   Every Greek drama needs a deus ex machina. Mine comes in the form of the bosun’s chair that picked my father off the deck of the AKA transport ship and whisked him through the air to deposit him on the deck of a destroyer heading back to the U.S. mainland. From San Francisco he traveled by elegant Pullman car to Annapolis, where he was enrolled as a cadet.
   “I tell you St. Christopher get you out of the war,” Desdemona exulted when he called home with the news.
   “He sure did.”
   “Now you have to fix the church.”
   “What?”
   “The church. You have to fix it.”
   “Sure, sure,” Naval Cadet Stephanides said, and maybe he even intended to. He was grateful to be alive and to have his future back. But with one thing or another, Milton would put off his trip to Bithynios. Within a year’s time he was married; later, he was a father. The war ended. He graduated from Annapolis and served in the Korean War. Eventually he returned to Detroit and went into the family business. From time to time Desdemona would remind her son about his outstanding obligation to St. Christopher, but my father always found an excuse for not fulfilling it. His procrastination would have disastrous effects, if you believe in that sort of thing, which, some days, when the old Greek blood is running high, I do.
   My parents were married in June of 1946. In a show of generosity, Michael Antoniou attended the wedding. An ordained priest now, he presented a dignified, benevolent figure, but by the second hour of the reception it was clear he was crushed. He drank too much champagne at dinner and, when the band began playing, sought out the next best thing to the bride: the bridesmaid, Zoë Stephanides.
   Zoë looked down at him—about a foot. He asked her to dance. The next thing she knew, they had started off across the ballroom floor.
   “Tessie told me a lot about you in her letters,” said Michael Antoniou.
   “Nothing too bad, I hope.”
   “Just the opposite. She told me what a good Christian you are.”
   His long robe concealed his small feet, making it difficult for Zoë to follow. Nearby, Tessie was dancing with Milton in his white naval uniform. As the couples passed each other, Zoë glared comically at Tessie and mouthed the words, “I’m going to kill you.” But then Milton twirled Tessie around and the two rivals came face-to-face.
   “Hey there, Mike,” said Milton cordially.
   “It’s Father Mike now,” said the vanquished suitor.
   “Got a promotion, eh? Congratulations. I guess I can trust you with my sister.”
   He danced away with Tessie, who looked back in silent apology. Zoë, who knew how infuriating her brother could be, felt sorry for Father Mike. She suggested they get some wedding cake.