Middlesex

  During the daytime, if he felt cooped up, Lefty pulled his new fedora low on his forehead and left the house to think. He walked down to Waterworks Park, amazed that the Americans had built such a palace to house plumbing filters and intake valves. He went down to the river and stood among the dry-docked boats. German shepherds, chained in ice-whitened yards, snarled at him. He peeked into the windows of bait shops closed for the winter. During one of these walks he passed a demolished apartment building. The façade had been torn down, revealing the inner rooms like a dollhouse. Lefty saw the brightly tiled kitchens and bathrooms hanging in midair, half-enclosed spaces whose rich colors reminded him of the sultans’ tombs, and he had an idea.

  The next morning he climbed down into the basement on Hurlbut and went to work. He removed Desdemona’s spiced sausages from the heating pipes. He swept up the cobwebs and laid a rug over the dirt floor. He brought down Jimmy Zizmo’s zebra skin from upstairs and tacked it on the wall. In front of the sink he built a small bar out of discarded lumber and covered it with scavenged tiles: blue-and-white arabesques; Neapolitan checkerboard; red heraldic dragons; and local, earth-tone Pewabics. For tables, he upended cable reels and spread them with cloths. He tented bedsheets overhead, hiding the pipes. From his old connections in the rum-running business he rented a slot machine and ordered a week’s supply of beer and whiskey. And on a cold Friday night in February of 1924, he opened for business.

  The Zebra Room was a neighborhood place with irregular hours. Whenever Lefty was open for business he put an icon of St. George in the living room window, facing the street. Patrons came around back, giving a coded knock—a long and two shorts followed by two longs—on the basement door. Then they descended out of the America of factory work and tyrannical foremen into an Arcadian grotto of forgetfulness. My grandfather put the Victrola in the corner. He set out braided sesame koulouria on the bar. He greeted people with the exuberance they expected from a foreigner and he flirted with the ladies. Behind the bar a stained glass window of liquor bottles glowed: the blues of English gin, the deep reds of claret and Madeira, the tawny browns of scotch and bourbon. A hanging lamp spun on its chain, speckling the zebra skin with light and making the customers feel even drunker than they were. Occasionally someone would stand up from his chair and begin to twitch and snap his fingers to the strange music, while his companions laughed.

  Down in that basement speakeasy, my grandfather acquired the attributes of the barkeep he would be for the rest of his life. He channeled his intellectual powers into the science of mixology. He learned how to serve the evening rush one-man-band style, pouring whiskeys with his right hand while filling beer steins with his left, as he pushed out coasters with his elbow and pumped the keg with his foot. For fourteen to sixteen hours a day he worked in that sumptuously decorated hole in the ground and never stopped moving the entire time. If he wasn’t pouring drinks, he was refilling the koulouria trays. If he wasn’t rolling out a new beer keg, he was placing hard-boiled eggs in a wire hamper. He kept his body busy so that his mind wouldn’t have a chance to think: about the growing coldness of his wife, or the way their crime pursued them. Lefty had dreamed of opening a casino, and the Zebra Room was as close as he ever came to it. There was no gambling, no potted palms, but there was rebetika and, on many nights, hashish. Only in 1958, when he had stepped from behind the bar of another Zebra Room, would my grandfather have the leisure to remember his youthful dreams of roulette wheels. Then, trying to make up for lost time, he would ruin himself, and finally silence his voice in my life forever.

  Desdemona and Sourmelina remained upstairs, raising the children. Practically speaking, this meant that Desdemona got them out of bed in the morning, fed them, washed their faces, and changed their diapers before bringing them in to Sourmelina, who by then was receiving visitors, still smelling of the cucumber slices she put over her eyelids at night. At the sight of Theodora, Sourmelina spread her arms and crooned, “Chryso fili!”—snatching her golden girl from Desdemona and covering her face with kisses. For the rest of the morning, drinking coffee, Lina amused herself by applying kohl to little Theodora’s eyelashes. When odors arose, she handed the baby back, saying, “Something happened.”

  It was Sourmelina’s belief that the soul didn’t enter the body until a child started speaking. She let Desdemona worry about the diaper rashes and whooping coughs, the earaches and nosebleeds. Whenever company came over for Sunday dinner, however, Sourmelina greeted them with the overdressed baby pinned to her shoulder, the perfect accessory. Sourmelina was bad with babies but terrific with teenagers. She was there for your first crushes and heartbreaks, your party dresses and spins at sophisticated states like anomie. And so, in those early years, Milton and Theodora grew up together in the traditional Stephanides way. As once a kelimi had separated a brother and sister, now a wool blanket separated second cousins. As once a double shadow had leapt up against a mountainside, now a similarly conjoined shadow moved across the back porch of the house on Hurlbut.

  They grew. At one, they shared the same bathwater. At two, the same crayons. At three, Milton sat in a toy airplane while Theodora spun the propeller. But the East Side of Detroit wasn’t a small mountain village. There were lots of kids to play with. And so when he turned four, Milton renounced his cousin’s companionship, preferring to play with neighborhood boys. Theodora didn’t care. By then she had another cousin to play with.

  Desdemona had done everything she could to fulfill her promise of never having another child. She nursed Milton until he was three. She continued to rebuff Lefty’s advances. But it was impossible to do so every night. There were times when the guilt she felt for marrying Lefty conflicted with the guilt she felt for not satisfying him. There were times when Lefty’s need seemed so desperate, so pitiful, that she couldn’t resist giving in to him. And there were times when she, too, needed physical comfort and release. It happened no more than a handful of times each year, though more often in the summer months. Occasionally Desdemona had too much wine on somebody’s name day, and then it also happened. And on a hot night in July of 1927 it significantly happened, and the result was a daughter: Zoë Helen Stephanides, my Aunt Zo.

  From the moment she learned that she was pregnant, my grandmother was again tormented by fears that the baby would suffer a hideous birth defect. In the Orthodox Church, even the children of closely related godparents were kept from marrying, on the grounds that this amounted to spiritual incest. What was that compared with this? This was much worse! So Desdemona agonized, unable to sleep at night as the new baby grew inside her. That she had promised the Panaghia, the All-Holy Virgin, that she would never have another child only made Desdemona feel more certain that the hand of judgment would now fall heavy on her head. But once again her anxieties were for naught. The following spring, on April 27, 1928, Zoë Stephanides was born, a large, healthy girl with the squarish head of her grandmother, a powerful cry, and nothing at all the matter with her.

  Milton had little interest in his new sister. He preferred shooting his slingshot with his friends. Theodora was just the opposite. She was enthralled with Zoë. She carried the new baby around with her like a new doll. Their lifelong friendship, which would suffer many strains, began from day one, with Theodora pretending to be Zoë’s mother.

  The arrival of another baby made the house on Hurlbut feel crowded. Sourmelina decided to move out. She found a job in a florist’s shop, leaving Lefty and Desdemona to assume the mortgage on the house. In the fall of that same year, Sourmelina and Theodora took up residence nearby in the O’Toole Boardinghouse, right behind Hurlbut on Cadillac Boulevard. The backs of the two houses faced each other and Lina and Theodora were still close enough to visit nearly every day.

  On Thursday, October 24, 1929, on Wall Street in New York City, men in finely tailored suits began jumping from the windows of the city’s famous skyscrapers. Their lemming-like despair seemed far away from Hurlbut Street, but little by little the dark cloud passed over
the nation, moving in the opposite direction to the weather, until it reached the Midwest. The Depression made itself known to Lefty by a growing number of empty barstools. After nearly six years of operating at full capacity, there began to be slow periods, nights when the place was only two-thirds full, or just half. Nothing deterred the stoic alcoholics from their calling. Despite the international banking conspiracy (unmasked by Father Coughlin on the radio), these stalwarts presented themselves for duty whenever St. George galloped in the window. But the social drinkers and family men stopped showing up. By March of 1930, only half as many patrons gave the secret dactylic-spondaic knock on the basement door. Business picked up during the summer. “Don’t worry,” Lefty told Desdemona. “President Herbert Hoover is taking care of things. The worst is over.” They skated along through the next year and a half, but by 1932 only a few customers were coming in each day. Lefty extended credit, discounted drinks, but it was no use. Soon he couldn’t pay for shipments of liquor. One day two men came in and repossessed the slot machine.

  “It was terrible. Terrible!” Desdemona still cried fifty years later, describing those years. Throughout my childhood the slightest mention of the Depression would set my yia yia off into a full cycle of wailing and breast-clutching. (Even once when the subject was “manic depression.”) She would go limp in her chair, squeezing her face in both hands like the figure in Munch’s The Scream—and then would do so: “Mana! The Depression! So terrible you no can believe! Everybody they no have work. I remember the marches for the hunger, all the people they are marching in the street, a million people, one after one, one after one, to go to tell Mr. Henry Ford to open the factory. Then we have in the alley one night a noise was terrible. The people they are killing rats, plam plam plam, with sticks, to go to eat the rats. Oh my God! And Lefty he was no working in the factory then. He only having, you know, the speakeasy, where the people they use to come to drink. But in the Depression was in the middle another bad time, economy very bad, and nobody they have money to drink. They no can eat, how they can drink? So soon papou and yia yia we no have money. And then”—hand to heart—“then they make me go to work for those mavros. Black people! Oh my God!”

  It happened like this. One night, my grandfather got into bed with my grandmother to find that she wasn’t alone. Milton, eight years old now, was snuggled up against her side. On her other side was Zoë, who was only four. Lefty, exhausted from work, looked down at the spectacle of this menagerie. He loved the sight of his sleeping children. Despite the problems of his marriage, he could never blame his son or daughter for them. At the same time, he rarely saw them. In order to make enough money he had to keep the speakeasy open sixteen, sometimes eighteen, hours a day. He worked seven days a week. To support his family he had to be exiled from them. In the mornings when he was around the house, his children treated him like a familiar relative, an uncle maybe, but not a father.

  And then there was the problem of the bar ladies. Serving drinks day and night, in a dim grotto, he had many opportunities to meet women drinking with their friends or even alone. My grandfather was thirty years old in 1932. He had filled out and become a man; he was charming, friendly, always well dressed—and still in his physical prime. Upstairs his wife was too frightened to have sex, but down in the Zebra Room women gave Lefty bold, hot looks. Now, as my grandfather gazed down at the three sleeping figures in the bed, his head contained all these things at once: love for his children, love for his wife, along with frustration with his marriage, and boyish, unmarried-feeling excitement around the bar ladies. He bent his face close to Zoë’s. Her hair was still wet from the bath, and richly fragrant. He took his fatherly delights while at the same time he remained a man apart. Lefty knew that all the things in his head couldn’t hold together. And so after gazing on the beauty of his children’s faces, he lifted them out of the bed and carried them back to their own room. He returned and got into bed beside his sleeping wife. Gently, he began stroking her, moving his hand up under her nightgown. And suddenly Desdemona’s eyes opened.

  “What are you doing!”

  “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “I’m waking you up.”

  “Shame on you.” My grandmother pushed him away. And Lefty relented. He rolled angrily away from her. There was a long silence before he spoke.

  “I don’t get anything from you. I work all the time and I get nothing.”

  “You think I don’t work? I have two children to take care of.”

  “If you were a normal wife, it might be worth it for me to be working all the time.”

  “If you were a normal husband, you would help with the children.”

  “How can I help you? You don’t even understand what it takes to make money in this country. You think I’m having a good time down there?”

  “You play music, you drink. I can hear the music in the kitchen.”

  “That’s my job. That’s why the people come. And if they don’t come, we can’t pay our bills. The whole thing rests on me. That’s what you don’t understand. I work all day and night and then when I come to bed I can’t even sleep. There’s no room!”

  “Milton had a nightmare.”

  “I’m having a nightmare every day.”

  He switched the light on and, in its glow, Desdemona saw her husband’s face screwed up with a malice she’d never seen before. It was no longer Lefty’s face, no longer that of her brother or her husband. It was the face of someone new, a stranger she was living with.

  And this terrible new face delivered an ultimatum:

  “Tomorrow morning,” Lefty spat, “you’re going to go get a job.”

  The next day, when Lina came over for lunch, Desdemona asked her to read the newspaper for her.

  “How can I work? I don’t even know English.”

  “You know a little.”

  “We should have gone to Greece. In Greece a husband wouldn’t make his wife go out and get a job.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lina said, holding up the recycled newsprint. “There aren’t any.” The 1932 Detroit Times classifieds, advertised to a population of four million, ran to just over one column. Sourmelina squinted, looking for something appropriate.

  “Waitress,” Lina read.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Men would flirt with me.”

  “You don’t like to flirt?”

  “Read,” Desdemona said.

  “Tool and dye,” said Lina.

  My grandmother frowned. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Like dyeing fabric?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Go on,” said Desdemona.

  “Cigar roller,” Lina continued.

  “I don’t like smoke.”

  “Housemaid.”

  “Lina, please. I can’t be a maid for somebody.”

  “Silk worker.”

  “What?”

  “Silk worker. That’s all it says. And an address.”

  “Silk worker? I’m a silk worker. I know everything.”

  “Then congratulations, you have a job. If it’s not gone by the time you get there.”

  An hour later, dressed for job hunting, my grandmother reluctantly left the house. Sourmelina had tried to persuade her to borrow a dress with a low neckline. “Wear this and no one will notice what kind of English you speak,” she said. But Desdemona set out for the streetcar in one of her plain dresses, gray with brown polka dots. Her shoes, hat, and handbag were each a brown that almost matched.

  Though preferable to automobiles, streetcars didn’t appeal to Desdemona either. She had trouble telling the lines apart. The fitful, ghost-powered trolleys were always making unexpected turns, shuttling her off into unknown parts of the city. When the first trolley stopped, she shouted at the conductor, “Downtown?” He nodded. She boarded, flipped down a seat, and took from her purse the address Lina had written out. When the conductor passed by
, she showed it to him.

  “Hastings Street? That what you want?”

  “Yes. Hastings Street.”

  “Stay on this car to Gratiot. Then take the Gratiot car downtown. Get off at Hastings.”

  At the mention of Gratiot, Desdemona felt relieved. She and Lefty took the Gratiot line to Greektown. Now everything made sense. So, they don’t make silk in Detroit? she triumphantly asked her absent husband. That’s how much you know. The streetcar picked up speed. The storefronts of Mack Avenue passed by, more than a few closed up, windows soaped over. Desdemona pressed her face to the glass, but now, because she was alone, she had a few more words to say to Lefty. If those policemen at Ellis Island hadn’t taken my silkworms, I could set up a cocoonery in the backyard. I wouldn’t have to get a job. We could make a lot of money. I told you so. Passengers’ clothes, still dressy in those days, nevertheless showed wear and tear: hats gone unblocked for months, hemlines and cuffs frayed, neckties and lapels gravy-stained. On the curb a man held up a hand-painted sign: WORK-iS-WHAT-I-WANT-AND-NOT-CHARiTY-WHO-WiLL-HELP-ME-GET-A-JOB.-7 YEARS-IN-DETROIT. NO-MONEy.-SENT-AWAY-FURNISH-BEST-OF-REFERENCES. Look at that poor man. Mana! He looks like a refugee. Might as well be Smyrna, this city. What’s the difference? The streetcar labored on, moving away from the landmarks she knew, the greengrocer’s, the movie theater, the fire hydrants and neighborhood newspaper stands. Her village eyes, which could differentiate between trees and bushes at a glance, glazed over at the signage along the route, the meaningless roman letters swirling into one another and the ragged billboards showing American faces with the skin peeling off, faces without eyes, or with no mouth, or with nothing but a nose. When she recognized Gratiot’s diagonal swath, she stood up and called out in a ringing voice: “Sonnamabiche!” She had no idea what this English word meant. She had heard Sourmelina employ it whenever she missed her stop. As usual, it worked. The driver braked the streetcar and the passengers moved quickly aside to let her off. They seemed surprised when she smiled and thanked them.