As a child, I couldn’t see the whole woman my mother was. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood how deeply mistrustful of life she had become following an event of monumental loss that happened when she was twenty-four years old.
One summer evening in 1925, the Christos family was celebrating the upcoming marriage of their fourth daughter, Gladys. After the engagement party, my mother piled into the family car with nine other people, including most of her siblings, their spouses, and the bride and groom-to-be. My uncle Fred, the eldest Christos son, was driving. It was a wet and rainy evening, and as the car was crossing a narrow railroad bridge, slick from the heavy rains, Fred lost control and plunged over the bridge and the car tumbled into a steep ravine. My mother and her older sister Katherine were the only ones to survive the crash. Eight others, including the bride and groom-to-be, were dead.
My mother, who lost consciousness but who was otherwise unhurt, was hospitalized for a week. By the time she was released from the hospital, her siblings who had died in the crash were already buried. The tragedy had crushed both of my grandparents. They had lost both of their sons, two of their five daughters, two sons-in-law, a daughter-in-law, and a son-in-law to be. Two of their grandchildren were now orphans. My mother’s father, almost overnight, started showing signs of dementia, and her mother suffered a stroke. As the youngest, and as the only surviving daughter who was not married and did not have children, it was my mother’s responsibility to care for her ailing parents.
To say that my mother’s life was changed forever due to that trauma would be a terrible understatement. One minute she had been in the midst of a joyful family celebration, and the next she was returning to an empty home ravaged by tragedy and to her parents, who could no longer care for themselves.
She was thrust into the position of overseeing her family’s finances and businesses. On top of this, she suffered from survivor’s guilt that crippled her in very profound ways for the rest of her life. As she once told me, “After that accident my heart never opened again. Never.” It didn’t dawn on me until years later how literally she meant this.
My mother, given everything she had gone through herself, was nothing if not a realist. She knew that she could not make my life as the child of immigrants any easier by intervening in the drama of my daily life outside of our home.
What she really wanted was for me to show both her and my father the respect of a dutiful daughter. She wanted me to show her that I took the call to honor seriously, and this meant being constantly on guard. Because she knew how unexpected events could destroy life’s happiness, she needed, desperately, to try to contain my very willful personality, and the harder she tried, the harder I resisted her.
As I got older, and more willful, and it became clear that my mother could not figure out how else to get through to me, our relationship took on a terrible physical quality. She began to keep an arsenal of weapons stacked up in the corner of the kitchen, and whenever she felt that I was pushing the envelope too hard, straining too far from her and in any way igniting her fear that I would shame her, she would grab a stick, a spoon, or a switch and she would come after me with a ferocity that was terrifying. She needed to master the situation completely—and before my father came home. Otherwise her failure as a mother would be exposed.
I could never predict what would trigger one of these outbursts of hers. If I tried to be obedient in a way that I thought would appease her or please her, she might snap in anger; or I could walk into the house, completely unguarded, and she would grab me and slap me and just as quickly let me go. Or we would begin to have words and she would lunge toward me and slap at my face. She would exhort me to cry and I would look her right in the eye and refuse to shed a tear, refuse to feel shame. I stood my ground; she never saw me cry.
I realize now that my mother resorted to this behavior because she feared that I would become less of a girl and more of a woman before my time, which could so easily bring dishonor to our family name—like that girl in the olive tree. She was afraid that I would become that girl. She simply had no other skills to fall back on to do what she believed she had to do to fulfill her own role and to protect me from dishonoring the family, and, ultimately, myself.
For both my parents, their early years as a married couple with children, particularly during the first part of the 1930s, were tough. Both of them worked outside of our home. My father, aside from his printing business, finally got a job at Lever Brothers in Cambridge, in the quality control department. My mother worked, too, first for the WPA, which Roosevelt had established to create jobs during the worst of the Depression, and occasionally at various department stores around town. Many days, they would still be at work when I got home from school. (My grandmother would take Apollo to my uncle George’s house and watch over all three of her grandsons while Uncle George and his wife, Aphrodite, went to work.) There would be a sandwich left for me in an icebox that was kept on the side porch, meant to tide me over until my parents got home for supper.
My father deferred to my mother in matters concerning running the household and disciplining their children—specifically, me. I never once heard them argue or have words. My father never came to my defense when she came after me physically. On the other hand, my mother never disagreed with her husband, especially not in front of the children. Part of her job was to cultivate in Apollo and me a sense of absolute loyalty and respect for our father. Looking back from an adult perspective, I’m sure my mother suffered from the guilt that plagues so many women who work outside the home. I think she was so afraid that I’d stray in some way because she couldn’t keep an eye on me, and do her duty as a good Greek mother, that she often resorted to desperate measures in a bid to control me. I don’t recall my mother ever being as aggressive with my brother, Apollo. Perhaps, because he was a boy, and because he was the baby, she simply didn’t see him as being at such “risk” for ruin.
Though her use of physical violence as a form of discipline was the most fearful aspect of the relationship I had with my mother when I was a child, it certainly wasn’t the only way she interacted with me. This is why my relationship with her was so complex and confusing to me for so long.
Underneath the anger was another mother whose artistic, poetic nature would sometimes emerge. She wanted my brother and me to experience a certain beauty in life. She wanted us both to embrace the natural world, to feel the ground beneath our feet and the sun on our backs. While other people would put up their umbrellas or run under cover during a summer thunderstorm, my mother would take us outside and encourage us to put our faces into the storm, to taste it, drink it in, become fully engaged in it. For that, I’m eternally grateful to her.
She also loved to sing, and I remember her voice filling the house with Greek songs, particularly songs about love and loss. She could also make us all laugh. She would come home from an afternoon out with her friends and she’d regale us at the dinner table by sharing any slightly scandalous story she may have heard about the neighbors. I remember how my father would brighten up when my mother began one of these riffs, when she would let us see her wicked sense of humor. He would tell her to stop, to be kind—but I could tell that he really didn’t mean it: he loved her spiritedness.
One of my favorite memories is the days when she found enough money for all of the trains and buses it would take, and she would pack up Apollo and me and all our gear and take us out beyond the urban beaches to an unspoiled, exquisite spot on the Massachusetts shore. It was a place too far out for most people, so it remained beautifully uncrowded. We would leave the house very early, and by the time we got to the beach, it was time to eat. We’d unpack our lunch, enjoy the sun and sand, and swim all day. We would dig for clams, search for shells, and swim in the ocean. When the afternoon sun began to drop, she would put warm clothes on us and we would sit together, watching the light change and the sun begin to set. By then we were usually the last ones on the beach. It was as though she didn’t wan
t us to miss a moment of the day, a moment of the beauty that all the transitions of the sun could show us. Finally, when dusk was beginning to settle, we would catch the last bus back to Boston and start the long trip home.
My mother also served as my introduction to the movies, which she loved. From time to time, despite the poverty we endured during the Depression, my mother and I would go to the movies together. She was passionate about every aspect of the art of moviemaking: the storytelling, the acting, all of it. She could impersonate anyone and was herself a terrific actress with the ability to tell a great story. She was my first acting teacher. Her self-dramatizing and temperamental personality often frightened and provoked me, but that was never on display those nights we’d go to the movies together. I recall with great fondness those times we spent alone. After the show, she’d be completely energized and animated, so turned on by what she’d just seen that we would walk arm in arm, down the middle of the deserted winter streets, and she would talk to me as though I were her best friend in the world. She would talk about the story and imitate the stars perfectly while acting out various scenes. These were rare times when she was free of the worries brought on by the Depression. Because I often felt estranged from her—I tended to be defiant, contradictory, and argumentative with her—these trips to the movies remain imprinted on my heart as the times in my young life when I felt closest to her.
I now believe it was this sensitive, artistic person who was at the core of her being and who she learned to bury after that terrible time in her life when she closed her heart.
Toward the close of the 1930s, sometime around 1938, everything in Lowell changed. My father, who was so active in the local Greek community, knew that the state of Massachusetts was planning to build a huge housing project somewhere in the center of town, though the local government wouldn’t say exactly where. Word had it that the plan was to build it smack in the middle of “Greek Town”—to tear down most of the tenements in and around the Acre. My father devoted much of his time to battling this development, even going so far as to mount a lawsuit to stop any demolition. But before the lawsuit could be brought to trial, the state pushed the project through and demolition of the Acre began. In 1938, “Athens in America” was all but destroyed. Greeks (and Armenians, Jews, Irish, and other immigrant families) were forced to relocate. I don’t know if it is coincidental or not, but around that time, we Dukakises relocated as well.
In 1939, we moved to Somerville so that my father would be closer to his work at Lever Brothers. I was nine then, and I don’t recall being particularly sad about leaving Lowell. I remember that we moved into a second-floor apartment in a big old house where downstairs lived the priest of the local Greek Orthodox Church. He and his wife had six daughters. Having so many girls around was thrilling for me.
But things got tougher on the street. The level of aggression among the ethnic kids was much more hostile here, much less in the spirit of tribal gamesmanship. We were also older, and the boys were stronger. At some point, I realized that, as a girl, I was in danger now in a way that I had not been before. My response to this was to become even more aggressive and confrontational. One time, I was tied to a tree with a dirty sock stuffed in my mouth. Someone came along and untied me and I spent the next three weeks tracking down the kids who did it.
Fortunately, I started to find other outlets for my energy and aggression. I really began to like school and I brought home as many gold stars as possible. I became an overachiever in the classroom, and I remember loving my teachers. There was Miss O’Neal, who taught English and read the poem “Evangeline” to our class. I remember being completely transported, as she read so dramatically, so romantically. She was right out there with it! There was also Miss O’Connor, my Latin teacher, and my favorite of all, Miss French, who taught math. She was the essence of teacher to me: she was fair and had a true clarity of purpose about her. She treated each of her students with genuine respect.
I discovered the thrill of reading and the sanctuary of the Somerville Public Library. I would walk there on Saturday mornings and fill my arms with books, which I would devour over the course of the week. The next Saturday, I would trudge back with my load of finished reading and load up on another pile of books for the coming week.
My father, for reasons I never understood, decided that the church in Somerville was not the place for us. He decided that we should all go into Boston on Sundays to attend mass at the Greek Orthodox cathedral there. How I hated those Sunday trips! We had to take a bus and then the trolley; it seemed to take forever. I would start to feel sick as soon as the trip began. I would get terrible stomachaches, and on occasion I would even throw up. Just thinking about having to sit through Mass there and listen to that priest, who I found creepy, made me feel sick. One day I announced to my parents that I would no longer go to that church with them, I planned to go to the Salvation Army church instead with my friend and her family. My mother was horrified but my father listened to my argument and said that I could go to church with my friend—as long as I gave him a full report on what each Sunday’s sermon was about. He was serious. He didn’t just want proof that I actually went to the Salvation Army church (which I did—for over a year: I even rang the bell by the collection well on the street at Christmastime): he wanted to know what kind of information I was getting there. He wanted to know what I was doing with my mind. This is something my father did then, and for the rest of his life: engage me in discussions about politics, philosophy, and history. He always suggested books for me to read. One of his favorite expressions was Socrates’ dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” He also liked to quote from the temple of Delphi: “Know thyself, never in excess.” He instilled in me, quite early on, a consuming curiosity about life.
It was about this time, when I was twelve years old, that I started to menstruate. I told my mother that I was bleeding to death or was in some way injured. She simply hugged me proudly and promptly called my father into the room. She blurted out to him that I was now a woman, and though I was baffled as to why this news should delight them both (my mother had never talked to me about menstruation, let alone sex or any of the other changes my body was going through), I remember feeling very glad that here, at last, was something they were both proud of me for—though I certainly did not share their excitement at the prospect of wearing a Kotex pad; this would put a real constraint on my ability to play sports.
In my early teens a number of very important changes took place in my life. First, my beloved yia yia died. She had moved in with my uncle Panos and his family. Though I knew she had been unwell, I was not allowed to see her when she was dying. Apollo and I were never allowed to go into the room to visit with her. I would peer over my mother’s shoulder into the dining room (where my grandmother’s bed was set up) and I could see her white head on the pillow. How I wanted to be with her, to get close to her and tell her how much I loved her. My parents didn’t think it appropriate that Apollo and I witness her passing, but I regret to this day not being able to say good-bye to her.
At roughly this same time, I also saw a movie that made a lasting impression on me. Madame Curie starred Greer Garson as the great Nobel Prize–winning physicist, and Walter Pidgeon played her scientist husband. Here was a woman who truly had it all: an adoring husband who nurtured and supported her work, children, and an important career (she and her husband did the very dangerous work of isolating and identifying first polonium and then radium and contributed enormously to the development of radiation). I had found a role model. Here was a woman who was portrayed as smart, tenacious, outspoken, hardworking, passionate about her work, and a wife and mother. I decided I should work a little harder to get good grades, particularly in my science classes.
It was around this time that I started to put on little plays and carnivals in and around the neighborhood, and I always recruited my brother, Apollo, to star in my productions. One Christmas, we mounted a recreation of the Nativity—Ap
ollo played the baby Jesus. Another time we put on a circus and Apollo was the strongman. I always preferred to act as the writer, producer, and director—all rolled into one—rather than do any of the acting. Even so, I portrayed “the Spirit of Young Greece” in a production my father put on to raise funds for the Red Cross. I was supposed to open a box and free two white doves into the air, as symbols of liberty and freedom. I remember taking a dove in each hand, lifting them to the sky—and having one of them relieve itself all over my arm. Now I recognize this was an omen about what much of my life in “show biz” would be like.
I was becoming acutely aware of the dynamic between my parents and I found my loyalties becoming more and more aligned with my father—against my mother. As I moved into my early teens, my father began to treat me like an adult. It’s as though he had been waiting for me to outgrow my babyhood, to become old enough, in his words, “to reason things out,” and we started to grow closer. This burgeoning relationship with my father came at a price—it meant I’d become even more alienated from my mother, whose behavior was turning ever more violent and confusing to me.
Just at the time when my father began engaging me in discussions about the world at large, my mother began to suffer from dramatic and baffling episodes. At odd times and without warning, she would begin to choke. She would grab herself around the throat and continue to choke as she slid from her chair and onto the floor. The next thing we knew, she would be writhing on the floor, her eyes fluttering, and she would nearly lose consciousness. My father appeared detached during these episodes, as though nothing unusual was happening. Years later I tried to describe these scenes to a therapist who suggested that they were like the “swooning” or fainting spells that Victorian ladies would have. While my mother would lie on the floor, my father would start smiling and whistling. On these occasions, my brother would be pleading with my father to call the doctor. I would just stand there, seething with anger while I watched the whole scene. I felt enormous contempt for her at those times. I couldn’t stand watching her humiliate herself that way. This family tableau was insane. I vowed that I would never let myself reach such a level of self-abnegation. Never.
Ask Me Again Tomorrow Page 7