Anyhow, it was finally decided that Mary would give up her singing lessons as well as her hopes for appearing at Old Pete’s Mill. Instead she began to take Greek lessons which, to say the least, pleased Old Pete a great deal. Often, later however, Old Pete had wished that he had relented and allowed her at least a try as a performer at The Mill, mainly because in the middle of certain arguments, Mary would claim that Old Pete had stifled what was obviously a very promising career and now that she was positively, this time, leaving him, her life ruined, completely ruined, and what did she know how to do, she might have been famous if it hadn’t been for him.
Of course this suppression of her career didn’t seem to have any real detrimental effect on her innate sense of the dramatic. In fact it seemed to heighten it. That is it had seemed to merely change her visualization of herself from that of a musical star (with all the trimmings, of course—town house parties, bouquets and bouquets of flowers, countless suitors, and an idolizing public)—it had merely altered her visualization so that now she saw herself as a kind of tragic Helen Hayes or Sarah Bernhardt; probably Bernhardt more than Hayes because Mary had one mental picture she was especially fond of where, in the visualization, she was being wheeled onto the stage of the Lyceum Theatre in a wheel chair while the audience rose as one in acclamation and after a few simple farewell words, she had made a dramatic exit, tossing a rose out over the footlights as she was wheeled off stage left.
And now that Marci had entered the conversation Old Pete seemed to be intrigued. Show business was in his blood. Ever since he had bought his first small tavern (he was twenty-one then) he had been in the entertainment business in one form or another. Many of the personalities that had started out with small acts had played the two places Pete had had before The Mill, played The Mill, and were now big names. And every name act in the country, practically, did at least one engagement at The Mill when they did Chicago, unless of course they were on one of the circuits. So Pete had a host of friends in the business and as it turned out, the manager of the theatre in New York that Marci had last played turned out to be an old and dear friend of Old Pete. And as much as Old Pete was intrigued merely by talking about the business, Marci seemed equally intrigued by Pete’s tales of the famous entertainers of an earlier era. Only once were Marci and Old Pete interrupted once they got going, and that was when Mary had suggested that Old Pete be sure and tell Marci about his old girlfriend, herself a famous entertainer.
After that interruption Old Pete cleverly changed the topic of conversation. He began to tell Marci about the old, old days when he had lived in a hay loft in a car barn on Halstead Street, existing on olives and cheese and Greek bread and saving his money and how, when he had first come to this country, to Chicago, he was twelve then, he had worked for a distant cousin of his, an old bushy-moustached man, worked twelve to eighteen hours a day in a fruit stand while his cousin got drunk on resinous wine and played casino in the Greek coffee houses. Old Pete had worked those hours just for his keep and occasional hand-me-downs. And often, he told Marci, he had dozed off because of the long hours attending the stand and he would be awakened abruptly by his cousin who had drunkenly, unexpectedly returned; awakened by flames from a newspaper the cousin had ignited and then thrust into his face.
Marci was enchanted by Old Pete’s tales of a younger America, Nick could tell. But at the same time, he could also tell, the stories were causing Pierro considerable discomfort. A discomfort that Nick seemed to relish more and more, a mounting discomfort which Nick finally decided he himself would amplify, which he did by telling the story of how Al Capone had hijacked Old Pete’s whiskey from his warehouse near The Mill and how, after a phone call from Old Pete, Capone had replaced the entire amount, with a little extra thrown in, as well as his apologies. I swear, Al had said, I didn’t know that was your stuff, Pete.
Nick did not have to look at Pierro to know the anguish this last tale caused him. And after a moment Pierro said that they had better be getting along, but Old Pete suggested that they have another drink.
Then Nick told Marci of his first visit to his father’s home town in Greece. It had taken them (Nick was a child then) a day and a half by donkey to get there. He told her of the shawled old women with their wrinkled faces, almost all of whom were his relatives, and of the big feast they had with people coming from miles around and how the old women had taken off his, Nick’s, shoes and bathed and kissed his feet. And how they had hugged him, and kissed him, and cried out of the pure joy of seeing him. And how strange it was to sleep on straw bedding and drink from a well. And how beautiful was the hill country that surrounded the town; rocky and barren and ancient. Stripped was the country, it seemed, to a bare ancient essentialness. And how truly the town people reflected the land. As if they were not born upon the earth but born of the very earth they tended with such tender care. Their hands lined like the crevices of the soil, faces ruddy and scorched by the winds and the suns, hearts that felt the land was really God’s (for it provided), so they treated it almost sacredly. And smiles, white even smiles and broken-toothed old smiles on the dark faces because long long ago they had learned to provide even their own joy. That was only fair, they seemed to say, to provide your own joy. For life provided sorrow enough. And man was born to live with his maker and in man’s happiness, as opposed to this life’s sorrow—life would have an equality.
This sudden, almost sacred testament by Nick for his father’s land seemed to instill, if but for a moment, a calmness and tranquillity about the table. And Nick himself, Marci thought, slightly intrigued by his sudden change of pace (even if it did border on the esoteric), did not really seem to be speaking to them, but rather to himself.
“I have a cousin, Marci,” Nick said as if still speaking to himself, as if, Pierro thought, he was a little drunk. “An old man. He has a face like Christ, yet many in his home town, and here, claim he is evil. He lives in a shack now, with three goats, on a lot that my father owns on the North Side—”
“Not mine,” Old Pete interrupted. “Our lot.”
“And when you look at Old Gus,” Nick continued as if he hadn’t heard the interruption, “or are near him you wonder why we complicate things as we do. What compels us to live as we live, as opposed to the way these hill people live...Pierro should introduce you to Old Gus some time.”
“I’d like to meet him,” Marci said, interested.
“He’s odd, that fellow is,” Old Pete said. “He knows things before they happen.”
“The Greeks are very superstitious, you know,” Pierro said to Marci. “Really, it’s almost a medieval superstition that exists in the Spartan country today.”
“Pierro’s just ashamed that he’s Greek, Marci,” Nick said, grinning sardonically. “I don’t know why. He makes some profound statements about wars being caused by our racial heritage or our national pride, but he offers no solution like most so-called intellectuals.”
“I think you’ve had too much to drink,” Pierro said. “I thought you’d have outgrown that by now.”
“But this is what really gets me,” Nick said and took another drink. “This is the only country in the world where nationalities blend, and Pierro thinks we’re uncivilized compared to Europeans. Primarily, I think, because he’s never really explored America. He exploits, all right. We all do that. But never really explored it. If we go to Europe we try to explore wherever we go. But not here.”
“The native America, what we call the grass roots America,” Marci said, “is a superstitious lot itself.”
“Agreed,” Nick said. “But I think as long as you’re born with certain national characteristics, you should use them instead of trying to bury them. The Greeks are a passionate race. Emotional. Pierro thinks of that as being a crudeness, don’t you, Pierro?”
“A civilized man controls his emotions. And understands them. I think that’s something you haven’t learned yet, Nick,” Pierro said surely.
“Do you know what a prominent
gynecologist told me right before we kicked the Germans out of Greece,” Nick said. “And since, he’s written a paper on it. Well, near Sparta, this guy was an Athenian, but he was with a guerilla outfit near Sparta, and took care of the Spartans as well as the hill people. Well, one day a woman came to him and told him she hadn’t had a menstrual period in three months and that her husband was off fighting and she hadn’t had intercourse—”
“Nick, not in front of your sister,” Mary said.
“For God’s sake, Mother, listen for once. I’m trying to show something, and it’s not vulgar,” Nick said. “Anyhow, the doctor didn’t think much of it, but then about a month later three more women came in and gave the same story. Apparently the women that stopped having their periods mentioned it to other women, and soon women were pouring into the doctor’s camp, all of them having stopped. The doctor spread the word to other doctors and they began to keep a record of this—well, whatever it was. All in all, over fifty thousand women in Greece, whose husbands or lovers were off fighting, and who did not have intercourse, stopped having their menstrual periods. Now if that doesn’t show a passionate and emotional national characteristic, I don’t know what does,” Nick said.
“Rubbish,” Pierro said.
“That’s fantastic,” Marci said.
“Rubbish, hell,” Nick said. “I got a copy of the paper with my stuff.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you sometimes, Nick,” Old Pete said. “Pierro’s proud that he’s Greek.”
“And proud that he’s American, too,” Mary said.
Nick was thinking what Pierro had said about a civilized man being one who could control his emotions. That Pierro had learned to control his, there was no doubt. Nick had known Pierro ever since he could first recollect, and up until the time that Pierro was in high school he was as emotional as any Stratton. More so in fact, in lots of ways. For a second Nick wondered if that was the secret (controlling your emotions) of getting what you wanted. And if it was, was it worth it? was it worth the feeling you had to give up? the living you had to give up? Maybe, though, Pierro hadn’t really learned to control his emotions. Maybe he had just learned to direct them. Sure, that was what he did. And what was difficult about directing your emotions if you had a ready-made place in which to direct them. But what are you going to do with your emotions if you don’t know where to direct them. What are you going to do with the sensitivity if you can’t direct that? Kill it. Just kill it off and go around acting civilized as that sonofabitch put it. It was so goddamn easy for him.
Then accidentally Nick glanced over towards Marci, who was staring as if contemplating, almost as if captivated by a lace-edged Irish linen handkerchief that was on the table to the right of Yvonne’s drink, and which Yvonne was fingering. Then Pierro mentioned again that they had better be getting along, but then Mary began to tell Marci about her last trip abroad and what was Marci’s opinion—would Paris ever be the same again?
And then suddenly Nick was thinking of Greece again. Not the Greece of this war but when he was there as a small boy and had become friends with another boy who was considerably older than himself, a distant cousin actually, and how they had wandered in the hills together watching the sheep flock in the spring in the sun and begged bread from the monks in a monastery that was high on a hill, and walked barefoot down into the valley where there was a stream that came cold out of the hills and they swam there. The boy, Nick remembered, was named Dimitri, and he spoke long and reverently of Nick’s cousin Old Gus and of the wise things Gus had spoken and of the peaceful way he was—so peaceful, Dimitri had said in Greek, that when you were with him you felt all the peace and calm of him yourself. Just as you felt it rarely when you sat alone on the hillside at night and looked at the stars and the moon was so bright that you could see the outline of the other rocky barren hills and the reflection of the moon on the rocks. As peaceful as that. And as peaceful, Dimitri said, as you felt when the sun was warm again on your face after the damp and chill of winter and you went away alone with the goat flock and there was no one to bother you.
In the village they had played a game that was an old Greek game of hitting a rock with a stick and Nick remembered having then wondered if this game might somehow have tied in with the origin of baseball. Old Pete had played that game when he was a small boy, and maybe that was why he loved baseball so.
Then suddenly it struck Nick that his father was one of the people of that town in Greece that Nick loved so much. The thought had never occurred to him before, and he could not relate his father to any of those that he had danced around the fire with, and drunk resinous wine with and talked seriously with, even when he was small, of God and the purpose of life. Nor could he relate him to those that had bathed his feet and waited on him and kissed him with such affection; an affection he had never known or felt before, and knew was real.
It did not seem possible that Old Pete was of them. And then Nick thought, I know what the difference is. In the town, the land was the life of the people. Glamour was our life, he said to himself, and that is the evil. And, too, it is our heritage. And all of glamour is on the surface as lipstick is on the surface. And powder. And as the body and the face often betray, by their very appearance, what is in the heart.
Pierro was saying again that really they had better be getting on. Then Nick’s eyes caught Marci’s hands working surreptitiously towards Yvonne’s handkerchief (lace-edged Irish linen) and he looked up, and her blue eyes were darting about the table excitedly, then her hand clamped over the handkerchief and she surreptitiously pulled it towards her, then down into her lap, then out of the corner of his eye Nick saw her slip it into the pocket of her dress, her blue eyes still darting excitedly. Inwardly Nick grinned. In fact, he almost laughed out loud. Then after a moment, Nick suggested that on the way back from Lake Forest, Pierro and Marci stop by Los Caballeros for at least one drink with Yvonne and him. Pierro politely said they’d try, but not to count on them.
“Well, I just thought we’d get together for one my first night home,” Nick said as if he would be extremely hurt if Pierro denied his invitation.
God, Yvonne giggled to herself, how very much Nick was like Old Pete at times.
“We’ll try,” Pierro said.
“I knew you would,” Nick said humbly, and slightly plaintively.
Then Mary told Pierro to please come back soon and to please bring back Marci when he came, she was such a lovely girl.
And Nick sat back in his chair listening to Pierro and Mary and suddenly Nick was grinning a knowing silly little boy grin at Marci and she eyed him for a moment as if indeed he were a little boy; a smug little boy who ought to have his ass paddled soundly.
Then Pierro helped Marci up and they left.
They all stood in the doorway waving them goodbye, then Nick started towards the stairs. He was going up to call Nora from where he would have some privacy. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” he said.
“Nick,” Old Pete said, “you really think you ought to take your sister to that kind of place?”
“What kind of place?”
“That roadhouse. That cabaret,” Old Pete said.
“Please Daddy,” Yvonne said.
For a second Nick felt like everything was closing in on him and that he would scream. Then, seeing that sorrowful disappointed look on Yvonne’s face, he said: “I’ll take good care of her, Dad.” Then lied, “We won’t stay there long. We’ll probably just go to a movie and then drop by there for a short while. All right?”
“All right, son,” Old Pete said. “But remember, she’s your sister. It’s your duty to protect your sister.”
Everyone’s not an old whoremonger like you, Nick felt like saying. But instead: “I know, Dad.” He felt suddenly tired. Old and tired.
“And I want you to get up early,” Old Pete said, sensing that Nick would agree to about anything at this moment. “We ought to have a little talk. Just you and me. Even if you stay in the A
rmy, you got to know about our affairs. I’m getting up in years, son. I could go any day,” he said. “And somebody has to take care of your mother and sister. I’ll wake you.”
“My car running?” Nick asked after a moment.
“We use it once in a while,” Old Pete said. “But we keep it at Sam’s Garage. Mary, call Sam and tell him to send Nick’s car over.”
“Thanks for the dinner, Mother,” Nick smiled at her. Then walked over from the foot of the stairs to where she stood by the concert grand and kissed her. “I sure have a beautiful mother,’ he said warmly. Then turned and went upstairs.
“You go and freshen up,” Mary said to Yvonne. “I’ll take care of things in the kitchen.”
“Oh thank you, Mother,” Yvonne said. She went excitedly up the stairs.
And Nick called Nora and her answering service answered and said they didn’t know when she was expected.
CHAPTER XIV
NICK and Yvonne got out of the house about as fast as it was humanly possible for two people to dress and get out of a house when you took into consideration that one was a woman, and also took into consideration the pre-departure lecture (it was almost what you might call a sermon) that Old Pete had delivered.
Yvonne had on a yellow cotton shirt-maker dress with a tapered skirt and the sleeves rolled up above her elbows as if deliberately exposing the fine olive Grecian skin of her arms, and around her neck was a chiffon scarf knotted on the side. Nick really couldn’t get over how she had grown. There she was, his sister, sitting next to him a grown woman.
“What would you like to do?” Nick asked her.
They were driving south, towards the city.
“I don’t care. Whatever you’d like. Let’s stop somewhere and have a drink. Then we’ll decide.”
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