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The Silver Spoon

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes.

My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license (from the Federal Republic of Germany) records my first name simply as Cal. I’m a former field hockey goalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation, rare attendant at the Greek Orthodox liturgy, and, for most of my adult life, an employee of the U.S. State Department. Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other. I’ve been ridiculed by classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the March of Dimes. A redheaded girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her brother liked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimming pool turned me into myth; I’ve left my body in order to occupy others—and all this happened before I turned sixteen.

But now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on. After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great-aunts and -uncles, long-lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or, in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those things in one. And so before it’s too late I want to get it down for good: this roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence, in the guise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother’s own midwestern womb.

Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too.

Three months before I was born, in the aftermath of one of our elaborate Sunday dinners, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides ordered my brother to get her silkworm box. Chapter Eleven had been heading toward the kitchen for a second helping of rice pudding when she blocked his way. At fifty-seven, with her short, squat figure and intimidating hairnet, my grandmother was perfectly designed for blocking people’s paths. Behind her in the kitchen, the day’s large female contingent had congregated, laughing and whispering. Intrigued, Chapter Eleven leaned sideways to see what was going on, but Desdemona reached out and firmly pinched his cheek. Having regained his attention, she sketched a rectangle in the air and pointed at the ceiling. Then, through her ill-fitting dentures, she said, “Go for yia yia, dolly mou.”

Chapter Eleven knew what to do. He ran across the hall into the living room. On all fours he scrambled up the formal staircase to the second floor. He raced past the bedrooms along the upstairs corridor. At the far end was a nearly invisible door, wallpapered over like the entrance to a secret passageway. Chapter Eleven located the tiny doorknob level with his head and, using all his strength, pulled it open. Another set of stairs lay behind it. For a long moment my brother stared hesitantly into the darkness above, before climbing, very slowly now, up to the attic where my grandparents lived.

In sneakers he passed beneath the twelve damply newspapered birdcages suspended from the rafters. With a brave face he immersed himself in the sour odor of the parakeets, and in my grandparents’ own particular aroma, a mixture of mothballs and hashish. He negotiated his way past my grandfather’s book-piled desk and his collection of rebetika records. Finally, bumping into the leather ottoman and the circular coffee table made of brass, he found my grandparents’ bed and, under it, the silkworm box.

Carved from olivewood, a little bigger than a shoe box, it had a tin lid perforated by tiny airholes and inset with the icon of an unrecognizable saint. The saint’s face had been rubbed off, but the fingers of his right hand were raised to bless a short, purple, terrifically self-confident-looking mulberry tree. After gazing awhile at this vivid botanical presence, Chapter Eleven pulled the box from under the bed and opened it. Inside were the two wedding crowns made from rope and, coiled like snakes, the two long braids of hair, each tied with a crumbling black ribbon. He poked one of the braids with his index finger. Just then a parakeet squawked, making my brother jump, and he closed the box, tucked it under his arm, and carried it downstairs to Desdemona.

She was still waiting in the doorway. Taking the silkworm box out of his hands, she turned back into the kitchen. At this point Chapter Eleven was granted a view of the room, where all the women now fell silent. They moved aside to let Desdemona pass and there, in the middle of the linoleum, was my mother. Tessie Stephanides was leaning back in a kitchen chair, pinned beneath the immense, drum-tight globe of her pregnant belly. She had a happy, helpless expression on her face, which was flushed and hot. Desdemona set the silkworm box on the kitchen table and opened the lid. She reached under the wedding crowns and the hair braids to come up with something Chapter Eleven hadn’t seen: a silver spoon. She tied a piece of string to the spoon’s handle. Then, stooping forward, she dangled the spoon over my mother’s swollen belly. And, by extension, over me.

Up until now Desdemona had had a perfect record: twenty-three correct guesses. She’d known that Tessie was going to be Tessie. She’d predicted the sex of my brother and of all the babies of her friends at church. The only children whose genders she hadn’t divined were her own, because it was bad luck for a mother to plumb the mysteries of her own womb. Fearlessly, however, she plumbed my mother’s. After some initial hesitation, the spoon swung north to south, which meant that I was going to be a boy.

Splay-legged in the chair, my mother tried to smile. She didn’t want a boy. She had one already. In fact, she was so certain I was going to be a girl that she’d picked out only one name for me: Calliope. But when my grandmother shouted in Greek, “A boy!” the cry went around the room, and out into the hall, and across the hall into the living room where the men were arguing politics. And my mother, hearing it repeated so many times, began to believe it might be true.

As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched into the kitchen to tell his mother that, this time at least, her spoon was wrong. “And how you know so much?” Desdemona asked him. To which he replied what many Americans of his generation would have:

“It’s science, Ma.”

Ever since they had decided to have another child—the diner was doing well and Chapter Eleven was long out of diapers—Milton and Tessie had been in agreement that they wanted a daughter. Chapter Eleven had just turned five years old. He’d recently found a dead bird in the yard, bringing it into the house to show his mother. He liked shooting things, hammering things, smashing things, and wrestling with his father. In such a masculine household, Tessie had begun to feel like the odd woman out and saw herself in ten years’ time imprisoned in a world of hubcaps and hernias. My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In the spring of 1959, when discussions of my fertilization got under way, my mother couldn’t foresee that women would soon be burning their brassieres by the thousand. Hers were padded, stiff, fire-retardant. As much as Tessie loved her son, she knew there were certain things she’d be able to share only with a daughter.

On his morning drive to work, my father had been seeing visions of an irresistibly sweet, dark-eyed little girl. She sat on the seat beside him—mostly during stoplights—directing questions at his patient, all-knowing ear. “What do you call that thing, Daddy?” “That? That’s the Cadillac seal.” “What’s the Cadillac seal?” “Well, a long time ago, there was a French explorer named Cadillac, and he was the one who discovered Detroit. And that seal was his family seal, from France.” “What’s France?” “France is a country in Europe.” “What’s Europe?” “It’s a continent, which is like a great big piece of land, way, way bigger than a country. But Cadillacs don’t come from Europe anymore, kukla. They come from right here in the good old U.S.A.” The light turned green and he drove on. But my prototype lingered. She was there at the next light and the next. So pleasant was her company that my father, a man loaded with initiative, decided to see what he could do to turn his vision into reality.

Thus: for some time now, in the living room where the men discussed politics, they had also been discussing the velocity of sperm. Peter Tatakis, “Uncle Pete,” as we called him, was a leading member of the debating society that formed every week on our black love seats. A lifelong bachelor, he had no family in America and so had become attached to ours. Every Sunday he arrived in his wine-dark Buick, a tall, prune-faced, sad-seeming man with an incongruously vital head of wavy hair. He was not interested in children. A proponent of the Great Books series—which he had read twice—Uncle Pete was engaged with serious thought and Italian opera. He had a passion, in history, for Edward Gibbon, and, in literature, for the journals of Madame de Staël. He liked to quote that witty lady’s opinion on the German language, which held that German wasn’t good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt. Uncle Pete had wanted to become a doctor, but the “catastrophe” had ended that dream. In the United States, he’d put himself through two years of chiropractic school, and now ran a small office in Birmingham with a human skeleton he was still paying for in installments. In those days, chiropractors had a somewhat dubious reputation. People didn’t come to Uncle Pete to free up their kundalini. He cracked necks, straightened spines, and made custom arch supports out of foam rubber. Still, he was the closest thing to a doctor we had in the house on those Sunday afternoons. As a young man he’d had half his stomach surgically removed, and now after dinner always drank a Pepsi-Cola to help digest his meal. The soft drink had been named for the digestive enzyme pepsin, he sagely told us, and so was suited to the task.

It was this kind of knowledge that led my father to trust what Uncle Pete said when it came to the reproductive timetable. His head on a throw pillow, his shoes off, Madama Butterfly softly playing on my parents’ stereo, Uncle Pete explained that, under the microscope, sperm carrying male chromosomes had been observed to swim faster than those carrying female chromosomes. This assertion generated immediate merriment among the restaurant owners and fur finishers assembled in our living room. My father, however, adopted the pose of his favorite piece of sculpture, The Thinker, a miniature of which sat across the room on the telephone table. Though the topic had been brought up in the open-forum atmosphere of those postprandial Sundays, it was clear that, notwithstanding the impersonal tone of the discussion, the sperm they were talking about was my father’s. Uncle Pete made it clear: to have a girl baby, a couple should “have sexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation.” That way, the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped.

My father had trouble persuading my mother to go along with the scheme. Tessie Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of twenty-two. Their engagement, which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the way she’d managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff my father’s flame, keeping him at a low burn for the duration of a global cataclysm. This hadn’t been all that difficult, however, since she was in Detroit and Milton was in Annapolis at the U.S. Naval Academy. For more than a year Tessie lit candles at the Greek church for her fiancé, while Milton gazed at her photographs pinned over his bunk. He liked to pose Tessie in the manner of the movie magazines, standing sideways, one high heel raised on a step, an expanse of black stocking visible. My mother looks surprisingly pliable in those old snapshots, as though she liked nothing better than to have her man in uniform arrange her against the porches and lampposts of their humble neighborhood.

She didn’t surrender until after Japan had. Then, from their wedding night onward (according to what my brother told my covered ears), my parents made love regularly and enjoyably. When it came to having children, however, my mother had her own ideas. It was her belief that an embryo could sense the amount of love with which it had been created. For this reason, my father’s suggestion didn’t sit well with her.

“What do you think this is, Milt, the Olympics?”

“We were just speaking theoretically,” said my father.

“What does Uncle Pete know about having babies?”

“He read this particular article in Scientific American,” Milton said. And to bolster his case: “He’s a subscriber.”

“Listen, if my back went out, I’d go to Uncle Pete. If I had flat feet like you do, I’d go. But that’s it.”

“This has all been verified. Under the microscope. The male sperms are faster.”

“I bet they’re stupider, too.”

“Go on. Malign the male sperms all you want. Feel free. We don’t want a male sperm. What we want is a good old, slow, reliable female sperm.”

“Even if it’s true, it’s still ridiculous. I can’t just do it like clockwork, Milt.”

“It’ll be harder on me than you.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I thought you wanted a daughter.”

“I do.”

“Well,” said my father, “this is how we can get one.”

Tessie laughed the suggestion off. But behind her sarcasm was a serious moral reservation. To tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris. In the first place, Tessie didn’t believe you could do it. Even if you could, she didn’t believe you should try.

Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this. I can only explain the scientific mania that overtook my father during that spring of ’59 as a symptom of the belief in progress that was infecting everyone back then. Remember, Sputnik had been launched only two years earlier. Polio, which had kept my parents quarantined indoors during the summers of their childhood, had been conquered by the Salk vaccine. People had no idea that viruses were cleverer than human beings, and thought they’d soon be a thing of the past. In that optimistic, postwar America, which I caught the tail end of, everybody was the master of his own destiny, so it only followed that my father would try to be the master of his.

A few days after he had broached his plan to Tessie, Milton came home one evening with a present. It was a jewelry box tied with a ribbon.

“What’s this for?” Tessie asked suspiciously.

“What do you mean, what is it for?”

“It’s not my birthday. It’s not our anniversary. So why are you giving me a present?”

“Do I have to have a reason to give you a present? Go on. Open it.”

Tessie crumpled up one corner of her mouth, unconvinced. But it was difficult to hold a jewelry box in your hand without opening it. So finally she slipped off the ribbon and snapped the box open.

Inside, on black velvet, was a thermometer.

“A thermometer,” said my mother.

“That’s not just any thermometer,” said Milton. “I had to go to three different pharmacies to find one of these.”

“A luxury model, huh?”

“That’s right,” said Milton. “That’s what you call a basal thermometer. It reads the temperature down to a tenth of a degree.” He raised his eyebrows. “Normal thermometers only read every two tenths. This one does it every tenth. Try it out. Put it in your mouth.”

“I don’t have a fever,” said Tessie.

“This isn’t about a fever. You use it to find out what your base temperature is. It’s more accurate and precise than a regular fever-type thermometer.”

“Next time bring me a necklace.”

But Milton persisted: “Your body temperature’s changing all the time, Tess. You may not notice, but it is. You’re in constant flux, temperature-wise. Say, for instance”—a little cough—“you happen to be ovulating. Then your temperature goes up. Six tenths of a degree, in most case scenarios. Now,” my father went on, gaining steam, not noticing that his wife was frowning, “if we were to implement the system we talked about the other day—just for instance, say—what you’d do is, first, establish your base temperature. It might not be ninety-eight point six. Everybody’s a little different. That’s another thing I learned from Uncle Pete. Anyway, once you established your base temperature, then you’d look for that six-tenths-degree rise. And that’s when, if we were to go through with this, that’s when we’d know to, you know, mix the cocktail.”

My mother said nothing. She only put the thermometer into the box, closed it, and handed it back to her husband.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Suit yourself. We may get another boy. Number two. If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it’ll be.”

“I’m not so sure we’re going to have anything at the moment,” replied my mother.

Meanwhile, in the greenroom to the world, I waited. Not even a gleam in my father’s eye yet (he was staring gloomily at the thermometer case in his lap). Now my mother gets up from the so-called love seat. She heads for the stairway, holding a hand to her forehead, and the likelihood of my ever coming to be seems more and more remote. Now my father gets up to make his rounds, turning out lights, locking doors. As he climbs the stairway, there’s hope for me again. The timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by an hour and you change the gene selection. My conception was still weeks away, but already my parents had begun their slow collision into each other. In our upstairs hallway, the Acropolis night-light is burning, a gift from Jackie Halas, who owns a souvenir shop. My mother is at her vanity when my father enters the bedroom. With two fingers she rubs Noxzema into her face, wiping it off with a tissue. My father had only to say an affectionate word and she would have forgiven him. Not me but somebody like me might have been made that night. An infinite number of possible selves crowded the threshold, me among them but with no guaranteed ticket, the hours moving slowly, the planets in the heavens circling at their usual pace, weather coming into it, too, because my mother was afraid of thunderstorms and would have cuddled against my father had it rained that night. But, no, clear skies held out, as did my parents’ stubbornness. The bedroom light went out. They stayed on their own sides of the bed. At last, from my mother, “Night.” And from my father, “See you in the morning.” The moments that led up to me fell into place as though decreed. Which, I guess, is why I think about them so much.

The following Sunday, my mother took Desdemona and my brother to church. My father never went along, having become an apostate at the age of eight over the exorbitant price of votive candles. Likewise, my grandfather preferred to spend his mornings working on a modern Greek translation of the “restored” poems of Sappho. For the next seven years, despite repeated strokes, my grandfather worked at a small desk, piecing together the legendary fragments into a larger mosaic, adding a stanza here, a coda there, soldering an anapest or an iamb. In the evenings he played his bordello music and smoked a hookah pipe.

In 1959, Assumption Greek Orthodox Church was located on Charlevoix. It was there that I would be baptized less than a year later and would be brought up in the Orthodox faith. Assumption, with its revolving chief priests, each sent to us via the Patriarchate in Constantinople, each arriving in the full beard of his authority, the embroidered vestments of his sanctity, but each wearying after a time—six months was the rule—because of the squabbling of the congregation, the personal attacks on the way he sang, the constant need to shush the parishioners who treated the church like the bleachers at Tiger Stadium, and, finally, the effort of delivering a sermon each week twice, first in Greek and then again in English. Assumption, with its spirited coffee hours, its bad foundation and roof leaks, its strenuous ethnic festivals, its catechism classes where our heritage was briefly kept alive in us before being allowed to die in the great diaspora. Tessie and company advanced down the central aisle, past the sand-filled trays of votive candles. Above, as big as a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, was the Christ Pantocrator. He curved across the dome like space itself. Unlike the suffering, earthbound Christs depicted at eye level on the church walls, our Christ Pantocrator was clearly transcendent, all-powerful, heaven-bestriding. He was reaching down to the apostles above the altar to present the four rolled-up sheepskins of the Gospels. And my mother, who tried all her life to believe in God without ever quite succeeding, looked up at him for guidance.

The Christ Pantocrator’s eyes flickered in the dim light. They seemed to suck Tessie upward. Through the swirling incense, the Savior’s eyes glowed like televisions flashing scenes of recent events …

First there was Desdemona the week before, giving advice to her daughter-in-law. “Why you want more children, Tessie?” she had asked with studied nonchalance. Bending to look in the oven, hiding the alarm on her face (an alarm that would go unexplained for another sixteen years), Desdemona waved the idea away. “More children, more trouble …”

Next there was Dr. Philobosian, our elderly family physician. With ancient diplomas behind him, the old doctor gave his verdict. “Nonsense. Male sperm swim faster? Listen. The first person who saw sperm under a microscope was Leeuwenhoek. Do you know what they looked like to him? Like worms …”

And then Desdemona was back, taking a different angle: “God decides what baby is. Not you …”

These scenes ran through my mother’s mind during the interminable Sunday service. The congregation stood and sat. In the front pew, my cousins, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Cleopatra, fidgeted. Father Mike emerged from behind the icon screen and swung his censer. My mother tried to pray, but it was no use. She barely survived until coffee hour.

From the tender age of twelve, my mother had been unable to start her day without the aid of at least two cups of immoderately strong, tar-black, unsweetened coffee, a taste for which she had picked up from the tugboat captains and zooty bachelors who filled the boardinghouse where she had grown up. As a high school girl, standing five foot one inch tall, she had sat next to auto workers at the corner diner, having coffee before her first class. While they scanned the racing forms, Tessie finished her civics homework. Now, in the church basement, she told Chapter Eleven to run off and play with the other children while she got a cup of coffee to restore herself.

She was on her second cup when a soft, womanly voice sighed in her ear. “Good morning, Tessie.” It was her brother-in-law, Father Michael Antoniou.

“Hi, Father Mike. Beautiful service today,” Tessie said, and immediately regretted it. Father Mike was the assistant priest at Assumption. When the last priest had left, harangued back to Athens after a mere three months, the family had hoped that Father Mike might be promoted. But in the end another new, foreign-born priest, Father Gregorios, had been given the post. Aunt Zo, who never missed a chance to lament her marriage, had said at dinner in her comedienne’s voice, “My husband. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride.”

By complimenting the service, Tessie hadn’t intended to compliment Father Greg. The situation was made still more delicate by the fact that, years ago, Tessie and Michael Antoniou had been engaged to be married. Now she was married to Milton and Father Mike was married to Milton’s sister. Tessie had come down to clear her head and have her coffee and already the day was getting out of hand.

Father Mike didn’t appear to notice the slight, however. He stood smiling, his eyes gentle above the roaring waterfall of his beard. A sweet-natured man, Father Mike was popular with church widows. They liked to crowd around him, offering him cookies and bathing in his beatific essence. Part of this essence came from Father Mike’s perfect contentment at being only five foot four. His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height. He seemed to have forgiven Tessie for breaking off their engagement years ago, but it was always there in the air between them, like the talcum powder that sometimes puffed out of his clerical collar.

Smiling, carefully holding his coffee cup and saucer, Father Mike asked, “So, Tessie, how are things at home?”

My mother knew, of course, that as a weekly Sunday guest at our house, Father Mike was fully informed about the thermometer scheme. Looking in his eyes, she thought she detected a glint of amusement.

“You’re coming over to the house today,” she said carelessly. “You can see for yourself.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Father Mike. “We always have such interesting discussions at your house.”

Tessie examined Father Mike’s eyes again but now they seemed full of genuine warmth. And then something happened to take her attention away from Father Mike completely.

Across the room, Chapter Eleven had stood on a chair to reach the tap of the coffee urn. He was trying to fill a coffee cup, but once he got the tap open he couldn’t get it closed. Scalding coffee poured out across the table. The hot liquid splattered a girl who was standing nearby. The girl jumped back. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. With great speed my mother ran across the room and whisked the girl into the ladies’ room.

No one remembers the girl’s name. She didn’t belong to any of the regular parishioners. She wasn’t even Greek. She appeared at church that one day and never again, and seems to have existed for the sole purpose of changing my mother’s mind. In the bathroom the girl held her steaming shirt away from her body while Tessie brought damp towels. “Are you okay, honey? Did you get burned?”

“He’s very clumsy, that boy,” the girl said.

“He can be. He gets into everything.”

“Boys can be very obstreperous.”

Tessie smiled. “You have quite a vocabulary.”

At this compliment the girl broke into a big smile. “ ‘Obstreperous’ is my favorite word. My brother is very obstreperous. Last month my favorite word was ‘turgid.’ But you can’t use ‘turgid’ that much. Not that many things are turgid, when you think about it.”

“You’re right about that,” said Tessie, laughing. “But obstreperous is all over the place.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said the girl.

Two weeks later. Easter Sunday, 1959. Our religion’s adherence to the Julian calendar has once again left us out of sync with the neighborhood. Two Sundays ago, my brother watched as the other kids on the block hunted multicolored eggs in nearby bushes. He saw his friends eating the heads off chocolate bunnies and tossing handfuls of jelly beans into cavity-rich mouths. (Standing at the window, my brother wanted more than anything to believe in an American God who got resurrected on the right day.) Only yesterday was Chapter Eleven finally allowed to dye his own eggs, and then only in one color: red. All over the house red eggs gleam in lengthening, solstice rays. Red eggs fill bowls on the dining room table. They hang from string pouches over doorways. They crowd the mantel and are baked into loaves of cruciform tsoureki.

But now it is late afternoon; dinner is over. And my brother is smiling. Because now comes the one part of Greek Easter he prefers to egg hunts and jelly beans: the egg-cracking game. Everyone gathers around the dining table. Biting his lip, Chapter Eleven selects an egg from the bowl, studies it, returns it. He selects another. “This looks like a good one,” Milton says, choosing his own egg. “Built like a Brinks truck.” Milton holds his egg up. Chapter Eleven prepares to attack. When suddenly my mother taps my father on the back.

“Just a minute, Tessie. We’re cracking eggs here.”

She taps him harder.

“What?”

“My temperature.” She pauses. “It’s up six tenths.”

She has been using the thermometer. This is the first my father has heard of it.

“Now?” my father whispers. “Jesus, Tessie, are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure. You told me to watch for any rise in my temperature and I’m telling you I’m up six tenths of a degree.” And, lowering her voice, “Plus it’s been thirteen days since my last you know what.”

“Come on, Dad,” Chapter Eleven pleads.

“Time out,” Milton says. He puts his egg in the ashtray. “That’s my egg. Nobody touch it until I come back.”

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, my parents accomplish the act. A child’s natural decorum makes me refrain from imagining the scene in much detail. Only this: when they’re done, as if topping off the tank, my father says, “That should do it.” It turns out he’s right. In May, Tessie learns she’s pregnant, and the waiting begins.

By six weeks, I have eyes and ears. By seven, nostrils, even lips. My genitals begin to form. Fetal hormones, taking chromosomal cues, inhibit Müllerian structures, promote Wolffian ducts. My twenty-three paired chromosomes have linked up and crossed over, spinning their roulette wheel, as my papou puts his hand on my mother’s belly and says, “Lucky two!” Arrayed in their regiments, my genes carry out their orders. All except two, a pair of miscreants—or revolutionaries, depending on your view—hiding out on chromosome number 5. Together, they siphon off an enzyme, which stops the production of a certain hormone, which complicates my life.

In the living room, the men have stopped talking about politics and instead lay bets on whether Milt’s new kid will be a boy or a girl. My father is confident. Twenty-four hours after the deed, my mother’s body temperature rose another two tenths, confirming ovulation. By then the male sperm had given up, exhausted. The female sperm, like tortoises, won the race. (At which point Tessie handed Milton the thermometer and told him she never wanted to see it again.)

All this led up to the day Desdemona dangled a utensil over my mother’s belly. The sonogram didn’t exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing. Desdemona crouched. The kitchen grew silent. The other women bit their lower lips, watching, waiting. For the first minute, the spoon didn’t move at all. Desdemona’s hand shook and, after long seconds had passed, Aunt Lina steadied it. The spoon twirled; I kicked; my mother cried out. And then, slowly, moved by a wind no one felt, in that unearthly Ouija-board way, the silver spoon began to move, to swing, at first in a small circle but each orbit growing gradually more elliptical until the path flattened into a straight line pointing from oven to banquette. North to south, in other words. Desdemona cried, “Koros!” And the room erupted with shouts of “Koros, koros.”

That night, my father said, “Twenty-three in a row means she’s bound for a fall. This time, she’s wrong. Trust me.”

“I don’t mind if it’s a boy,” my mother said. “I really don’t. As long as it’s healthy, ten fingers, ten toes.”

“What’s this ‘it.’ That’s my daughter you’re talking about.”

I was born a week after New Year’s, on January 8, 1960. In the waiting room, supplied only with pink-ribboned cigars, my father cried out, “Bingo!” I was a girl. Nineteen inches long. Seven pounds four ounces.

That same January 8, my grandfather suffered the first of his thirteen strokes. Awakened by my parents rushing off to the hospital, he’d gotten out of bed and gone downstairs to make himself a cup of coffee. An hour later, Desdemona found him lying on the kitchen floor. Though his mental faculties remained intact, that morning, as I let out my first cry at Women’s Hospital, my papou lost the ability to speak. According to Desdemona, my grandfather collapsed right after overturning his coffee cup to read his fortune in the grounds.

When he heard the news of my sex, Uncle Pete refused to accept any congratulations. There was no magic involved. “Besides,” he joked, “Milt did all the work.” Desdemona became grim. Her American-born son had been proven right and, with this fresh defeat, the old country, in which she still tried to live despite its being four thousand miles and thirty-eight years away, receded one more notch. My arrival marked the end of her baby-guessing and the start of her husband’s long decline. Though the silkworm box reappeared now and then, the spoon was no longer among its treasures.

I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. They wrapped me in a blanket and put me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly tagged. This can’t be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen.

Someone had switched on my eyes.

Matchmaking

When this story goes out into the world, I may become the most famous hermaphrodite in history. There have been others before me. Alexina Barbin attended a girls’ boarding school in France before becoming Abel. She left behind an autobiography, which Michel Foucault discovered in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene. (Her memoirs, which end shortly before her suicide, make unsatisfactory reading, and it was after finishing them years ago that I first got the idea to write my own.) Gottlieb Gottlich, born in 1798, lived as Marie Rosine until the age of thirty-three. One day abdominal pains sent Marie to the doctor. The physician checked for a hernia and found undescended testicles instead. From then on, Marie donned men’s clothes, took the name of Gottlieb, and made a fortune traveling around Europe, exhibiting himself to medical men.

As far as the doctors are concerned, I’m even better than Gottlieb. To the extent that fetal hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I’ve got a male brain. But I was raised as a girl. If you were going to devise an experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus nurture, you couldn’t come up with anything better than my life. During my time at the Clinic nearly three decades ago, Dr. Luce ran me through a barrage of tests. I was given the Benton Visual Retention Test and the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test. My verbal IQ was measured, and lots of other things, too. Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.

All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

And so now, having been born, I’m going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I’m sucked back between my mother’s legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There’s a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he’s in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we’re out of America completely; we’re in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we’re up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning …

In the late summer of 1922, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides wasn’t predicting births but deaths, specifically, her own. She was in her silkworm cocoonery, high on the slope of Mount Olympus in Asia Minor, when her heart, without warning, missed a beat. It was a distinct sensation: she felt her heart stop and squeeze into a ball. Then, as she stiffened, it began to race, thumping against her ribs. She let out a small, astonished cry. Her twenty thousand silkworms, sensitive to human emotion, stopped spinning cocoons. Squinting in the dim light, my grandmother looked down to see the front of her tunic visibly fluttering; and in that instant, as she recognized the insurrection inside her, Desdemona became what she’d remain for the rest of her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body. Nevertheless, unable to believe in her own endurance, despite her already quieting heart, she stepped out of the cocoonery to take a last look at the world she wouldn’t be leaving for another fifty-eight years.

The view was impressive. A thousand feet below lay the old Ottoman capital of Bursa, like a backgammon board spread out across the valley’s green felt. Red diamonds of roof tile fit into diamonds of whitewash. Here and there, the sultans’ tombs were stacked up like bright chips. Back in 1922, automobile traffic didn’t clog the streets. Ski lifts didn’t cut swaths into the mountain’s pine forests. Metallurgic and textile plants didn’t ring the city, filling the air with smog. Bursa looked—at least from a thousand feet up—pretty much as it had for the past six centuries, a holy city, necropolis of the Ottomans and center of the silk trade, its quiet, declining streets abloom with minarets and cypress trees. The tiles of the Green Mosque had turned blue with age, but that was about it. Desdemona Stephanides, however, kibitzing from afar, gazed down on the board and saw what the players had missed.

To psychoanalyze my grandmother’s heart palpitations: they were the manifestations of grief. Her parents were dead—killed in the recent war with the Turks. The Greek Army, encouraged by the Allied Nations, had invaded western Turkey in 1919, reclaiming the ancient Greek territory in Asia Minor. After years of living apart up on the mountain, the people of Bithynios, my grandmother’s village, had emerged into the safety of the Megale Idea—the Big Idea, the dream of Greater Greece. It was now Greek troops who occupied Bursa. A Greek flag flew over the former Ottoman palace. The Turks and their leader, Mustafa Kemal, had retreated to Angora in the east. For the first time in their lives the Greeks of Asia Minor were out from under Turkish rule. No longer were the giaours (“infidel dogs”) forbidden to wear bright clothing or ride horses or use saddles. Never again, as in the last centuries, would Ottoman officials arrive in the village every year, carting off the strongest boys to serve in the Janissaries. Now, when the village men took silk to market in Bursa, they were free Greeks, in a free Greek city.

Desdemona, however, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her inability to feel happy like everybody else. Years later, in her widowhood, when she’d spend a decade in bed trying with great vitality to die, she would finally agree that those two years between wars a half century earlier had been the only decent time in her life; but by then everyone she’d known would be dead and she could only tell it to the television.

For the greater part of an hour Desdemona had been trying to ignore her foreboding by working in the cocoonery. She’d come out the back door of the house, through the sweet-smelling grape arbor, and across the terraced yard into the low, thatch-roofed hut. The acrid, larval smell inside didn’t bother her. The silkworm cocoonery was my grandmother’s own personal, reeking oasis. All around her, in a firmament, soft white silkworms clung to bundled mulberry twigs. Desdemona watched them spinning cocoons, moving their heads as though to music. As she watched, she forgot about the world outside, its changes and convulsions, its terrible new music (which is about to be sung in a moment). Instead she heard her mother, Euphrosyne Stephanides, speaking in this very cocoonery years ago, elucidating the mysteries of silkworms—“To have good silk, you have to be pure,” she used to tell her daughter. “The silkworms know everything. You can always tell what somebody is up to by the way their silk looks”—and so on, Euphrosyne giving examples—“Maria Poulos, who’s always lifting her skirt for everyone? Have you seen her cocoons? A stain for every man. You should look next time”—Desdemona only eleven or twelve and believing every word, so that now, as a young woman of twenty-one, she still couldn’t entirely disbelieve her mother’s morality tales, and examined the cocoon constellations for a sign of her own impurity (the dreams she’d been having!). She looked for other things, too, because her mother also maintained that silkworms reacted to historical atrocities. After every massacre, even in a village fifty miles away, the silkworms’ filaments turned the color of blood—“I’ve seen them bleed like the feet of Christos Himself,” Euphrosyne again, and her daughter, years later, remembering, squinting in the weak light to see if any cocoons had turned red. She pulled out a tray and shook it; she pulled out another; and it was right then that she felt her heart stop, squeeze into a ball, and begin punching her from inside. She dropped the tray, saw her tunic flutter from interior force, and understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, over anything else.

So my yia yia, suffering the first of her imaginary diseases, stood looking down at Bursa, as though she might spot a visible confirmation of her invisible dread. And then it came from inside the house, by means of sound: her brother, Eleutherios (“Lefty”) Stephanides, had begun to sing. In badly pronounced, meaningless English:

“Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening, ain’t we got fun,” Lefty sang, standing before their bedroom mirror as he did every afternoon about this time, fastening the new celluloid collar to the new white shirt, squeezing a dollop of hair pomade (smelling of limes) into his palm and rubbing it into his new Valentino haircut. And continuing: “In the meantime, in-between time, ain’t we got fun.” The lyrics meant nothing to him, either, but the melody was enough. It spoke to Lefty of jazz-age frivolity, gin cocktails, cigarette girls; it made him slick his hair back with panache … while, out in the yard, Desdemona heard the singing and reacted differently. For her, the song conjured only the disreputable bars her brother went to down in the city, those hash dens where they played rebetika and American music and where there were loose women who sang … as Lefty put on his new striped suit and folded the red pocket handkerchief that matched his red necktie … and she felt funny inside, especially her stomach, which was roiled by complicated emotions, sadness, anger, and something else she couldn’t name that hurt most of all. “The rent’s unpaid, dear, we haven’t a car,” Lefty crooned in the sweet tenor I would later inherit; and beneath the music Desdemona now heard her mother’s voice again, Euphrosyne Stephanides’ last words spoken just before she died from a bullet wound, “Take care of Lefty. Promise me. Find him a wife!” … and Desdemona, through her tears, replying, “I promise. I promise!” … these voices all speaking at once in Desdemona’s head as she crossed the yard to go into the house. She came through the small kitchen where she had dinner cooking (for one) and marched straight into the bedroom she shared with her brother. He was still singing—“Not much money, Oh! but honey”—fixing his cuff links, parting his hair; but then he looked up and saw his sister—“Ain’t we got”—and pianissimo now—“fun”—fell silent.

For a moment, the mirror held their two faces. At twenty-one, long before ill-fitting dentures and self-imposed invalidism, my grandmother was something of a beauty. She wore her black hair in long braids pinned up under her kerchief. These braids were not delicate like a little girl’s but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver’s tail. Years, seasons, and various weather had gone into the braids; and when she undid them at night they fell to her waist. At present, black silk ribbons were tied around the braids, too, making them even more imposing, if you got to see them, which few people did. What was on view for general consumption was Desdemona’s face: her large, sorrowful eyes, her pale, candlelit complexion. I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona’s voluptuous figure. Her body was a constant embarrassment to her. It was always announcing itself in ways she didn’t sanction. In church when she knelt, in the yard when she beat rugs, beneath the peach tree when she picked fruit, Desdemona’s feminine elaborations escaped the constraints of her drab, confining clothes. Above the jiggling of her body, her kerchief-framed face remained apart, looking slightly scandalized at what her breasts and hips were up to.

Eleutherios was taller and skinnier. In photographs from the time he looks like the underworld figures he idolized, the thin mustachioed thieves and gamblers who filled the seaside bars of Athens and Constantinople. His nose was aquiline, his eyes sharp, the overall impression of his face hawk-like. When he smiled, however, you saw the softness in his eyes, which made it clear that Lefty was in fact no gangster but the pampered, bookish son of comfortably well-off parents.

That summer afternoon in 1922, Desdemona wasn’t looking at her brother’s face. Instead her eyes moved to the suit coat, to the gleaming hair, to the striped trousers, as she tried to figure out what had happened to him these past few months.

Lefty was one year younger than Desdemona and she often wondered how she’d survived those first twelve months without him. For as long as she could remember he’d always been on the other side of the goat’s-hair blanket that separated their beds. Behind the kelimi he performed puppet shows, turning his hands into the clever, hunchbacked Karaghiozis who always outwitted the Turks. In the dark he made up rhymes and sang songs, and one of the reasons she hated his new American music was that he sang it exclusively to himself. Desdemona had always loved her brother as only a sister growing up on a mountain could love a brother: he was the whole entertainment, her best friend and confidant, her co-discoverer of short cuts and monks’ cells. Early on, the emotional sympathy she’d felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she’d sometimes forgotten they were separate people. As kids they’d scrabbled down the terraced mountainside like a four-legged, two-headed creature. She was accustomed to their Siamese shadow springing up against the whitewashed house at evening, and whenever she encountered her solitary outline, it seemed cut in half.

Peacetime seemed to be changing everything. Lefty had taken advantage of the new freedoms. In the last month he’d gone down to Bursa a total of seventeen times. On three occasions he’d stayed overnight in the Cocoon Inn across from the Mosque of Sultan Ouhan. He’d left one morning dressed in boots, knee socks, breeches, doulamas, and vest and come back the following evening in a striped suit, with a silk scarf tucked into his collar like an opera singer and a black derby on his head. There were other changes. He’d begun to teach himself French from a small, plum-colored phrase book. He’d picked up affected gestures, putting his hands in his pockets and rattling change, for instance, or doffing his cap. When Desdemona did the laundry, she found scraps of paper in Lefty’s pockets, covered with mathematical figures. His clothes smelled musky, smoky, and sometimes sweet.

Now, in the mirror, their joined faces couldn’t hide the fact of their growing separation. And my grandmother, whose constitutional gloom had broken out into full cardiac thunder, looked at her brother, as she once had her own shadow, and felt that something was missing.

“So where are you going all dressed up?”

“Where do you think I’m going? To the Koza Han. To sell cocoons.”

“You went yesterday.”

“It’s the season.”

With a tortoiseshell comb Lefty parted his hair on the right, adding pomade to an unruly curl that refused to stay flat.

Desdemona came closer. She picked up the pomade and sniffed it. It wasn’t the smell on his clothes. “What else do you do down there?”

“Nothing.”

“You stay all night sometimes.”

“It’s a long trip. By the time I walk there, it’s late.”

“What are you smoking in those bars?”

“Whatever’s in the hookah. It’s not polite to ask.”

“If Mother and Father knew you were smoking and drinking like this …” She trailed off.

“They don’t know, do they?” said Lefty. “So I’m safe.” His light tone was unconvincing. Lefty acted as though he had recovered from their parents’ deaths, but Desdemona saw through this. She smiled grimly at her brother and, without comment, held out her fist. Automatically, while still admiring himself in the mirror, Lefty made a fist, too. They counted, “One, two, three … shoot!”

“Too bad I’m your sister.”

“You’re not only my sister. You’re my third cousin, too. Third cousins can marry.”

“You’re crazy, Lefty.”

“This way will be easier. We won’t have to rearrange the house.”

Joking but not joking, Desdemona and Lefty embraced. At first they just hugged in the standard way, but after ten seconds the hug began to change; certain positions of the hands and strokings of the fingers weren’t the usual displays of sibling affection, and these things constituted a language of their own, announced a whole new message in the silent room. Lefty began waltzing Desdemona around, European-style; he waltzed her outside, across the yard, over to the cocoonery, and back under the grape arbor, and she laughed and covered her mouth with her hand. “You’re a good dancer, cousin,” she said, and her heart jumped again, making her think she might die right then and there in Lefty’s arms, but of course she didn’t; they danced on. And let’s not forget where they were dancing, in Bithynios, that mountain village where cousins sometimes married third cousins and everyone was somehow related; so that as they danced, they started holding each other more tightly, stopped joking, and then just danced together, as a man and a woman, in lonely and pressing circumstances, might sometimes do.

And in the middle of this, before anything had been said outright or any decisions made (before fire would make those decisions for them), right then, mid-waltz, they heard explosions in the distance, and looked down to see, in firelight, the Greek Army in full retreat.

An Immodest Proposal

Descended from Asia Minor Greeks, born in America, I live in Europe now. Specifically, in the Schoneberg district of Berlin. The Foreign Service is split into two parts, the diplomatic corps and the cultural staff. The ambassador and his aides conduct foreign policy from the newly opened, extensively barricaded embassy on Neustadtische Kirchstrasse. Our department (in charge of readings, lectures, and concerts) operates out of the colorful concrete box of Amerika Haus.

This morning I took the train to work as usual. The U-Bahn carried me gently west from Kleistpark to Berliner Strasse and then, after a switch, northward toward Zoologischer Garten. Stations of the former West Berlin passed one after another. Most were last remodeled in the seventies and have the colors of suburban kitchens from my childhood: avocado, cinnamon, sunflower yellow. At Spichernstrasse the train halted to conduct an exchange of bodies. Out on the platform a street musician played a teary Slavic melody on an accordion. Wing tips gleaming, my hair still damp, I was flipping through the Frankfurter Allgemeine when she rolled her unthinkable bicycle in.

You used to be able to tell a person’s nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders—you don’t see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet.

The bicyclist was Asian, at least genetically. Her black hair was cut in a shag. She was wearing a short olive green windbreaker, flared black ski pants, and a pair of maroon Campers resembling bowling shoes. The basket of her bike contained a camera bag.

I had a hunch she was American. It was the retro bike. Chrome and turquoise, it had fenders as wide as a Chevrolet’s, tires as thick as a wheelbarrow’s, and appeared to weigh at least a hundred pounds. An expatriate’s whim, that bike. I was about to use it as a pretext for starting a conversation when the train stopped again. The bicyclist looked up. Her hair fell away from her beautiful, hooded face and, for a moment, our eyes met. The placidity of her countenance along with the smoothness of her skin made her face appear like a mask, with living, human eyes behind it. These eyes now darted away from mine as she grasped the handlebars of her bike and pushed her great two-wheeler off the train and toward the elevators. The U-Bahn resumed, but I was no longer reading. I sat in my seat, in a state of voluptuous agitation, of agitated voluptuousness, until my stop. Then I staggered out.

Unbuttoning my suit jacket, I took a cigar from the inner pocket of my coat. From a still smaller pocket I took out my cigar cutter and matches. Though it wasn’t after dinner, I lit the cigar—a Davidoff Grand Cru No. 3—and stood smoking, trying to calm myself. The cigars, the double-breasted suits—they’re a little too much. I’m well aware of that. But I need them. They make me feel better. After what I’ve been through, some overcompensation is to be expected. In my bespoke suit, my checked shirt, I smoked my medium-fat cigar until the fire in my blood subsided.

Something you should understand: I’m not androgynous in the least. 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome allows for normal biosynthesis and peripheral action of testosterone, in utero, neonatally, and at puberty. In other words, I operate in society as a man. I use the men’s room. Never the urinals, always the stalls. In the men’s locker room at my gym I even shower, albeit discreetly. I possess all the secondary sex characteristics of a normal man except one: my inability to synthesize dihydrotestosterone has made me immune to baldness. I’ve lived more than half my life as a male, and by now everything comes naturally. When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It’s a little like being possessed. Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp’s feet through the trousers of my legs. On the sidewalk I’ll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school. This continues for a few more steps. Calliope’s hair tickles the back of my throat. I feel her press tentatively on my chest—that old nervous habit of hers—to see if anything is happening there. The sick fluid of adolescent despair that runs through her veins overflows again into mine. But then, just as suddenly, she is leaving, shrinking and melting away inside me, and when I turn to see my reflection in a window there’s this: a forty-one-year-old man with longish, wavy hair, a thin mustache, and a goatee. A kind of modern Musketeer.

But that’s enough about me for now. I have to pick up where explosions interrupted me yesterday. After all, neither Cal nor Calliope could have come into existence without what happened next.

“I told you!” Desdemona cried at the top of her lungs. “I told you all this good luck would be bad! This is how they liberate us? Only the Greeks could be so stupid!”

By the morning after the waltz, you see, Desdemona’s forebodings had been borne out. The Megale Idea had come to an end. The Turks had captured Afyon. The Greek Army, beaten, was fleeing toward the sea. In retreat, it was setting fire to everything in its path. Desdemona and Lefty, in dawn’s light, stood on the mountainside and surveyed the devastation. Black smoke rose for miles across the valley. Every village, every field, every tree was aflame.

“We can’t stay here,” Lefty said. “The Turks will want revenge.”

“Since when did they need a reason?”

“We’ll go to America. We can live with Sourmelina.”

“It won’t be nice in America,” Desdemona insisted, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t believe Lina’s letters. She exaggerates.”

“As long as we’re together we’ll be okay.”

He looked at her, in the way of the night before, and Desdemona blushed. He tried to put his arm around her, but she stopped him. “Look.”

Down below, the smoke had thinned momentarily. They could see the roads now, clogged with refugees: a river of carts, wagons, water buffalo, mules, and people hurrying out of the city.

“Where can we get a boat? In Constantinople?”

“We’ll go to Smyrna,” said Lefty. “Everyone says Smyrna’s the safest way.” Desdemona was quiet for a moment, trying to fathom this new reality. Voices rumbled in the other houses as people cursed the Greeks, the Turks, and started packing. Suddenly, with resolve: “I’ll bring my silkworm box. And some eggs. So we can make money.”

Lefty took hold of her elbow and shook her arm playfully. “They don’t farm silk in America.”

“They wear clothes, don’t they? Or do they go around naked? If they wear clothes, they need silk. And they can buy it from me.”

“Okay, whatever you want. Just hurry.”

Eleutherios and Desdemona Stephanides left Bithynios on August 31, 1922. They left on foot, carrying two suitcases packed with clothes, toiletries, Desdemona’s dream book and worry beads, and two of Lefty’s texts of Ancient Greek. Under her arm Desdemona also carried her silkworm box containing a few hundred silkworm eggs wrapped in a white cloth. The scraps of paper in Lefty’s pockets now recorded not gambling debts but forwarding addresses in Athens or Astoria. Over a single week, the hundred or so remaining citizens of Bithynios packed their belongings and set out for mainland Greece, most en route to America. (A diaspora which should have prevented my existence, but didn’t.)

Before leaving, Desdemona walked out into the yard and crossed herself in the Orthodox fashion, leading with the thumb. She said her goodbyes: to the powdery, rotting smell of the cocoonery and to the mulberry trees lined along the wall, to the steps she’d never have to climb again and to this feeling of living above the world, too. She went inside the cocoonery to look at her silkworms for the last time. They had all stopped spinning. She reached up, plucked a cocoon from a mulberry twig, and put it in her tunic pocket.

On September 6, 1922, General Hajienestis, Commander in Chief of the Greek forces in Asia Minor, awoke with the impression that his legs were made of glass. Afraid to get out of bed, he sent the barber away, forgoing his morning shave. In the afternoon he declined to go ashore to enjoy his usual lemon ice on the Smyrna waterfront. Instead he lay on his back, still and alert, ordering his aides—who came and went with dispatches from the front—not to slam the door or stomp their feet. This was one of the commander’s more lucid, productive days. When the Turkish Army had attacked Afyon two weeks earlier, Hajienestis had believed that he was dead and that the ripples of light reflecting on his cabin walls were the pyrotechnics of heaven.

At two o’clock, his second-in-command tiptoed into the general’s cabin to speak in a whisper: “Sir, I am awaiting your orders for a counterattack, sir.”

“Do you hear how they squeak?”

“Sir?”

“My legs. My thin, vitreous legs.”

“Sir, I am aware the general is having trouble with his legs, but I submit, with all due respect, sir”—a little louder than a whisper now—“this is not a time to concentrate on such matters.”

“You think this is some kind of joke, don’t you, lieutenant? But if your legs were made of glass, you’d understand. I can’t go into shore. That’s exactly what Kemal is banking on! To have me stand up and shatter my legs to pieces.”

“These are the latest reports, General.” His second-in-command held a sheet of paper over Hajienestis’ face. “ ‘The Turkish cavalry has been sighted one hundred miles east of Smyrna,’” he read. “ ‘The refugee population is now 180,000.’ That’s an increase of 30,000 people since yesterday.”

“I didn’t know death would be like this, lieutenant. I feel close to you. I’m gone. I’ve taken that trip to Hades, yet I can still see you. Listen to me. Death is not the end. This is what I’ve discovered. We remain, we persist. The dead see that I’m one of them. They’re all around me. You can’t see them, but they’re here. Mothers with children, old women—everyone’s here. Tell the cook to bring me my lunch.”

Outside, the famous harbor was full of ships. Merchant vessels were tied up to a long quay alongside barges and wooden caiques. Farther out, the Allied warships lay at anchor. The sight of them, for the Greek and Armenian citizens of Smyrna (and the thousands and thousands of Greek refugees), was reassuring, and whenever a rumor circulated—yesterday an Armenian newspaper had claimed that the Allies, eager to make amends for their support of the Greek invasion, were planning to hand the city over to the victorious Turks—the citizens looked out at the French destroyers and British battleships, still on hand to protect European commercial interests in Smyrna, and their fears were calmed.

Dr. Nishan Philobosian had set off for the harbor that afternoon seeking just such reassurance. He kissed his wife, Toukhie, and his daughters, Rose and Anita, goodbye; he slapped his sons, Karekin and Stepan, on the back, pointing at the chessboard and saying with mock gravity, “Don’t move those pieces.” He locked the front door behind him, testing it with his shoulder, and started down Suyane Street, past the closed shops and shuttered windows of the Armenian Quarter. He stopped outside Berberian’s bakery, wondering whether Charles Berberian had taken his family out of the city or whether they were hiding upstairs like the Philobosians. For five days now they’d been under self-imprisonment, Dr. Philobosian and his sons playing endless games of chess, Rose and Anita looking at a copy of Photoplay he’d picked up for them on a recent visit to the American suburb of Paradise, Toukhie cooking day and night because eating was the only thing that relieved the anxiety. The bakery door showed only a sign that said OPEN SOON and a portrait—which made Philobosian wince—of Kemal, the Turkish leader resolute in astrakhan cap and fur collar, his blue eyes piercing beneath the crossed sabers of his eyebrows. Dr. Philobosian turned away from the face and moved on, rehearsing all the arguments against putting up Kemal’s portrait like that. For one thing—as he’d been telling his wife all week—the European powers would never let the Turks enter the city. Second, if they did, the presence of the warships in the harbor would restrain the Turks from looting. Even during the massacres of 1915 the Armenians of Smyrna had been safe. And finally—for his own family, at least—there was the letter he was on his way to retrieve from his office. So reasoning, he continued down the hill, reaching the European Quarter. Here the houses grew more prosperous. On either side of the street rose two-story villas with flowering balconies and high, armored walls. Dr. Philobosian had never been invited into these villas socially, but he often made house calls to attend the Levantine girls living inside; girls of eighteen or nineteen who awaited him in the “water palaces” of the courtyards, lying languidly on daybeds amid a profusion of fruit trees; girls whose desperate need to find European husbands gave them a scandalous amount of freedom, cause itself for Smyrna’s reputation as being exceptionally kind to military officers, and responsible for the fever blushes the girls betrayed on the mornings of Dr. Philobosian’s visits, as well as for the nature of their complaints, which ran from the ankle twisted on the dance floor to more intimate scrapes higher up. All of which the girls showed no modesty about, throwing open silk peignoirs to say, “It’s all red, Doctor. Do something. I have to be at the Casin by eleven.” These girls all gone now, taken out of the city by their parents after the first fighting weeks ago, off in Paris and London—where the Season was beginning—the houses quiet as Dr. Philobosian passed by, the crisis receding from his mind at the thought of all those loosened robes. But then he turned the corner, reaching the quay, and the emergency came back to him.

From one end of the harbor to the other, Greek soldiers, exhausted, cadaverous, unclean, limped toward the embarkation point at Chesme, southwest of the city, awaiting evacuation. Their tattered uniforms were black with soot from the villages they’d burned in retreat. Only a week before, the waterfront’s elegant open-air cafes had been filled with naval officers and diplomats; now the quay was a holding pen. The first refugees had come with carpets and armchairs, radios, Victrolas, lampstands, dressers, spreading them out before the harbor, under the open sky. The more recent arrivals turned up with only a sack or a suitcase. Amid this confusion, porters darted everywhere, loading boats with tobacco, figs, frankincense, silk, and mohair. The warehouses were being emptied before the Turks arrived.

Dr. Philobosian spotted a refugee picking through chicken bones and potato peels in a heap of garbage. It was a young man in a well-tailored but dirty suit. Even from a distance, Dr. Philobosian’s medical eye noticed the cut on the young man’s hand and the pallor of malnutrition. But when the refugee looked up, the doctor saw only a blank for a face; he was indistinguishable from any of the refugees swarming the quay. Nevertheless, staring into this blankness, the doctor called, “Are you sick?”

“I haven’t eaten for three days,” said the young man.

The doctor sighed. “Come with me.”

He led the refugee down back streets to his office. He ushered him inside and brought gauze, antiseptic, and tape from a medical cabinet, and examined the hand.

The wound was on the man’s thumb, where the nail was missing.

“How did this happen?”

“First the Greeks invaded,” the refugee said. “Then the Turks invaded back. My hand got in the way.”

Dr. Philobosian said nothing as he cleaned the wound. “I’ll have to pay you with a check, Doctor,” the refugee said. “I hope you don’t mind. I don’t have a lot of money on me at the moment.”

Dr. Philobosian reached into his pocket. “I have a little. Go on. Take it.”

The refugee hesitated only a moment. “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll repay you as soon as I get to the United States. Please give me your address.”

“Be careful what you drink,” Dr. Philobosian ignored the request. “Boil water, if you can. God willing, some ships may come soon.”

The refugee nodded. “You’re Armenian, Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not leaving?”

“Smyrna is my home.”

“Good luck, then. And God bless you.”

“You too.” And with that Dr. Philobosian led him out. He watched the refugee walk off. It’s hopeless, he thought. He’ll be dead in a week. If not typhus, something else. But it wasn’t his concern. Reaching inside a typewriter, he extracted a thick wad of money from beneath the ribbon. He rummaged through drawers until he found, inside his medical diploma, a faded typewritten letter: “This letter is to certify that Nishan Philobosian, M.D., did, on April 3, 1919, treat Mustafa Kemal Pasha for diverticulitis. Dr. Philobosian is respectfully recommended by Kemal Pasha to the esteem, confidence, and protection of all persons to whom he may present this letter.” The bearer of this letter now folded it and tucked it into his pocket.

By then the refugee was buying bread at a bakery on the quay. Where now, as he turns away, hiding the warm loaf under his grimy suit, the sunlight off the water brightens his face and his identity fills itself in: the aquiline nose, the hawk-like expression, the softness appearing in the brown eyes.

For the first time since reaching Smyrna, Lefty Stephanides was smiling. On his previous forays he’d brought back only a single rotten peach and six olives, which he’d encouraged Desdemona to swallow, pits and all, to fill herself up. Now, carrying the sesame-seeded chureki, he squeezed back into the crowd. He skirted the edges of open-air living rooms (where families sat listening to silent radios) and stepped over bodies he hoped were sleeping. He was feeling encouraged by another development, too. Just that morning word had spread that Greece was sending a fleet of ships to evacuate refugees. Lefty looked out at the Aegean. Having lived on a mountain for twenty years, he’d never seen the sea before. Somewhere over the water was America and their cousin Sourmelina. He smelled the sea air, the warm bread, the antiseptic from his bandaged thumb, and then he saw her—Desdemona, sitting on the suitcase where he’d left her—and felt even happier.

Lefty couldn’t pinpoint the moment he’d begun to have thoughts about his sister. At first he’d just been curious to see what a real woman’s breasts looked like. It didn’t matter that they were his sister’s. He tried to forget that they were his sister’s. Behind the hanging kelimi that separated their beds, he saw Desdemona’s silhouette as she undressed. It was just a body; it could have been anyone’s, or Lefty liked to pretend so. “What are you doing over there?” Desdemona asked, undressing. “Why are you so quiet?”

“I’m reading.”

“What are you reading?”

“The Bible.”

“Oh, sure. You never read the Bible.”

Soon he’d found himself picturing his sister after the lights went out. She’d invaded his fantasies, but Lefty resisted. He went down to the city instead, in search of naked women he wasn’t related to.

But since the night of their waltz, he’d stopped resisting. Because of the messages of Desdemona’s fingers, because their parents were dead and their village destroyed, because no one in Smyrna knew who they were, and because of the way Desdemona looked right now, sitting on a suitcase.

And Desdemona? What did she feel? Fear foremost, and worry, punctuated by unprecedented explosions of joy. She had never rested her head in a man’s lap before while riding in an oxcart. She’d never slept like spoons, encircled by a man’s arms; she’d never experienced a man getting hard against her spine while trying to talk as though nothing were happening. “Only fifty more miles,” Lefty had said one night on the arduous journey to Smyrna. “Maybe we’ll be lucky tomorrow and get a ride. And when we get to Smyrna, we’ll get a boat to Athens”—his voice tight, funny-sounding, a few tones higher than normal—“and from Athens we’ll get a boat to America. Sound good? Okay. I think that’s good.”

What am I doing? Desdemona thought. He’s my brother! She looked at the other refugees on the quay, expecting to see them shaking their fingers, saying, “Shame on you!” But they only showed her lifeless faces, empty eyes. Nobody knew. Nobody cared. Then she heard her brother’s excited voice, as he lowered the bread before her face. “Behold. Manna from heaven.”

Desdemona glanced up at him. Her mouth filled with saliva as Lefty broke the chureki in two. But her face remained sad. “I don’t see any boats coming,” she said.

“They’re coming. Don’t worry. Eat.” Lefty sat down on the suitcase beside her. Their shoulders touched. Desdemona moved away.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Every time I sit down you move away.” He looked at Desdemona, puzzled, but then his expression softened and he put his arm around her. She stiffened.

“Okay, have it your way.” He stood up again.

“Where are you going?”

“To find more food.”

“Don’t go,” Desdemona pleaded. “I’m sorry. I don’t like sitting here all alone.”

But Lefty had stormed off. He left the quay and wandered the city streets, muttering to himself. He was angry with Desdemona for rebuffing him and he was angry at himself for being angry at her, because he knew she was right. But he didn’t stay angry long. It wasn’t in his nature. He was tired, half-starved, he had a sore throat, a wounded hand, but for all that Lefty was still twenty years old, on his first real trip away from home, and alert to the newness of things. When you got away from the quay you could almost forget that there was a crisis on. Back here there were fancy shops and high-toned bars, still operating. He came down the Rue de France and found himself at the Sporting Club. Despite the emergency, two foreign consuls were playing tennis on the grass courts out back. In fading light they moved back and forth, swatting the ball while a dark-skinned boy in a white jacket held a tray of gin and tonics courtside. Lefty kept walking. He came to a square with a fountain and washed his face. A breeze came up, bringing the smell of jasmine all the way in from Bournabat. And while Lefty stops to breathe it in, I’d like to take this opportunity to resuscitate—for purely elegiac reasons and only for a paragraph—that city which disappeared, once and for all, in 1922.

Smyrna endures today in a few rebetika songs and a stanza from The Waste Land:

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocketful of currants C.i.f. London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

Everything you need to know about Smyrna is contained in that. The merchant is rich, and so was Smyrna. His proposal was seductive, and so was Smyrna, the most cosmopolitan city in the Near East. Among its reputed founders were, first, the Amazons (which goes nicely with my theme), and second, Tantalus himself. Homer was born there, and Aristotle Onassis. In Smyrna, East and West, opera and politakia, violin and zourna, piano and daouli blended as tastefully as did the rose petals and honey in the local pastries.

Lefty started walking again and soon came to the Smyrna Casin. Potted palms flanked a grand entrance, but the doors stood wide open. He stepped inside. No one stopped him. There was no one around. He followed a red carpet to the second floor and into the gaming room. The craps table was unoccupied. Nobody was at the roulette wheel. In the far corner, however, a group of men were playing cards. They glanced up at Lefty but then returned to their game, ignoring his dirty clothes. That was when he realized that the gamblers weren’t regular club members; they were refugees like him. Each had wandered through the open door in hopes of winning money to buy passage out of Smyrna. Lefty approached the table. A card player asked, “You in?”

“I’m in.”

He didn’t understand the rules. He’d never played poker before, only backgammon, and for the first half hour he lost again and again. Eventually, though, Lefty began to understand the difference between five-card draw and seven-card stud, and gradually the balance of payments around the table began to shift. “Three of these,” Lefty said, showing three aces, and the men started to grumble. They watched his dealing more closely, mistaking his clumsiness for a cardsharp’s sleight of hand. Lefty began to enjoy himself, and after winning a big pot cried, “Ouzo all around!” But when nothing happened, he looked up and saw again how truly deserted the Casin was, and the sight brought home to him the high stakes they were playing for. Life. They were playing for their lives, and now, as he examined his fellow gamblers, and saw perspiration beading their brows and smelled their sour breath, Lefty Stephanides, showing far more restraint than he would four decades later when he played the Detroit numbers, stood up and said, “I’m folding.”

They nearly killed him. Lefty’s pockets bulged with winnings, and the men insisted he couldn’t leave without giving them a chance to win some of it back. He bent over to scratch his leg, insisting, “I can go out any time I want.” One of the men grabbed him by his soiled lapels, and Lefty added, “And I don’t want to yet.” He sat down, scratching his other leg, and thereafter started losing again and again. When all his money was gone, Lefty got up and said with disgusted anger, “Can I leave now?” The men said sure, leave, laughing as they dealt the next hand. Lefty walked stiffly, dejectedly, out of the Casin. In the entrance, between the potted palms, he bent down to collect the money he’d stashed in his ripe-smelling socks.

Back at the quay, he sought out Desdemona. “Look what I found,” he said, flashing his money. “Somebody must have dropped it. Now we can get a ship.”

Desdemona screamed and hugged him. She kissed him right on the lips. Then she pulled back, blushing, and turned to the water. “Listen,” she said, “those British are playing music again.”

She was referring to the service band on the Iron Duke. Every night, as officers dined, the band began playing on the ship’s deck. Strains of Vivaldi and Brahms floated out over the water. Over brandy, Major Arthur Maxwell of His Majesty’s Marines and his subordinates passed around binoculars to observe the situation ashore.

“Jolly crowded, what?”

“Looks like Victoria Station on Christmas Eve, sir.”

“Look at those poor wretches. Left to fend for themselves. When word gets out about the Greek commissioner’s leaving, it’s going to be pandemonium.”

“Will we be evacuating refugees, sir?”

“Our orders are to protect British property and citizens.”

“But, surely, sir, if the Turks arrive and there’s a massacre …”

“There’s nothing we can do about it, Phillips. I’ve spent years in the Near East. The one lesson I’ve learned is that there is nothing you can do with these people. Nothing at all! The Turks are the best of the lot. The Armenian I liken to the Jew. Deficient moral and intellectual character. As for the Greeks, well, look at them. They’ve burned down the whole country and now they swarm in here crying for help. Nice cigar, what?”

“Awfully good, sir.”

“Smyrna tobacco. Finest in the world. Brings a tear to my eyes, Phillips, the thought of all that tobacco lying in those warehouses out there.”

“Perhaps we could send a detail to save the tobacco, sir.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Phillips?”

“Faintly, sir, faintly.”

“Good Lord, Phillips, I’m not heartless. I wish we could help these people. But we can’t. It’s not our war.”

The Silk Road

According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 2640 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess’s chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, and out of the Forbidden City, and into the countryside a half mile away before the cocoon ran out. (In the West, this legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an apple. Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.)

I feel a little like that Chinese princess, whose discovery gave Desdemona her livelihood. Like her I unravel my story, and the longer the thread, the less there is left to tell. Retrace the filament and you go back to the cocoon’s beginning in a tiny knot, a first tentative loop. And following my story’s thread back to where I left off, I see the Jean Bart dock in Athens. I see my grandparents on land again, making preparations for another voyage. Passports are placed into hands, vaccinations administered to upper arms. Another ship materializes at the dock, the Giulia. A foghorn sounds.

And look: from the deck of the Giulia something else unwinds now. Something multicolored, spinning itself out over the waters of Piraeus.

It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn’t remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.

From two separate locations on the Giulia’s deck, Lefty and Desdemona—and I can say it now, finally, my grandparents—watched the airy blanket float away. Desdemona was standing between two air manifolds shaped like giant tubas. At midships Lefty slouched in a brace of bachelors. In the last three hours they hadn’t seen each other. That morning, they’d had coffee together in a cafe near the harbor after which, like professional spies, they’d picked up their separate suitcases—Desdemona keeping her silkworm box—and had departed in different directions. My grandmother was carrying falsified documents. Her passport, which the Greek government had granted under the condition that she leave the country immediately, bore her mother’s maiden name, Aristos, instead of Stephanides. She’d presented this passport along with her boarding card at the top of the Giulia’s gangway. Then she’d gone aft, as planned, for the send-off.

At the shipping channel, the foghorn sounded again, as the boat came around to the west and picked up more speed. Dirndls, kerchiefs, and suit coats flapped in the breeze. A few hats flew off heads, to shouts and laughter. Yarn drift-netted the sky, barely visible now. People watched as long as they could. Desdemona was one of the first to go below. Lefty lingered on deck for another half hour. This, too, was part of the plan.

For the first day at sea, they didn’t speak to each other. They came up on deck at the appointed mealtimes and stood in separate lines. After eating, Lefty joined the men smoking at the rail while Desdemona hunched on deck with the women and children, staying out of the wind. “You have someone meeting you?” the women asked. “A fiancé?”

“No. Just my cousin in Detroit.”

“Traveling all by yourself?” the men asked Lefty.

“That’s right. Free and easy.”

At night, they descended to their respective compartments. In separate bunks of seaweed wrapped in burlap, with life vests doubling as pillows, they tried to sleep, to get used to the motion of the ship, and to tolerate the smells. Passengers had brought on board all manner of spices and sweetmeats, tinned sardines, octopus in wine sauce, legs of lamb preserved with garlic cloves. In those days you could identify a person’s nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.) Lefty’s annoyances were auditory as well as olfactory. To one side was a man named Callas with a snore like a miniature foghorn itself; on the other was Dr. Philobosian, who wept in his sleep. Ever since leaving Smyrna the doctor had been beside himself with grief. Racked, gut-socked, he lay curled up in his coat, blue around the eye sockets. He ate almost nothing. He refused to go up on deck to get fresh air. On the few occasions he did go, he threatened to throw himself overboard.

In Athens, Dr. Philobosian had told them to leave him alone. He refused to discuss plans about the future and said that he had no family anywhere. “My family’s gone. They murdered them.”

“Poor man,” Desdemona said. “He doesn’t want to live.”

“We have to help him,” Lefty insisted. “He gave me money. He bandaged my hand. Nobody else cared about us. We’ll take him with us.” While they waited for their cousin to wire money, Lefty tried to console the doctor and finally convinced him to come with them to Detroit. “Wherever’s far away,” said Dr. Philobosian. But now on the boat he talked only of death.

The voyage was supposed to take from twelve to fourteen days. Lefty and Desdemona had the schedule all worked out. On the second day at sea, directly after dinner, Lefty made a tour of the ship. He picked his way among the bodies sprawled across the steerage deck. He passed the stairway to the pilothouse and squeezed past the extra cargo, crates of Kalamata olives and olive oil, sea sponges from Kos. He proceeded forward, running his hand along the green tarps of the lifeboats, until he met the chain separating steerage from third class. In its heyday, the Giulia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Line. Boasting modern conveniences (“lumina electrica, ventilatie et comfortu cel mai mare”), it had traveled once a month between Trieste and New York. Now the electric lights worked only in first class, and even then sporadically. The iron rails were rusted. Smoke from the stack had soiled the Greek flag. The boat smelled of old mop buckets and a history of nausea. Lefty didn’t have his sea legs yet. He kept falling against the railing. He stood at the chain for an appropriate amount of time, then crossed to port and returned aft. Desdemona, as arranged, was standing alone at the rail. As Lefty passed, he smiled and nodded. She nodded coldly and looked back out to sea.

On the third day, Lefty took another after-dinner stroll. He walked forward, crossed to port, and headed aft. He smiled at Desdemona and nodded again. This time, Desdemona smiled back. Rejoining his fellow smokers, Lefty inquired if any of them might happen to know the name of that young woman traveling alone.

On the fourth day out, Lefty stopped and introduced himself.

“So far the weather’s been good.”

“I hope it stays that way.”

“You’re traveling alone?”

“Yes.”

“I am, too. Where are you going to in America?”

“Detroit.”

“What a coincidence! I’m going to Detroit, too.”

They stood chatting for another few minutes. Then Desdemona excused herself and went down below.

Rumors of the budding romance spread quickly through the ship. To pass the time, everybody was soon discussing how the tall young Greek with the elegant bearing had become enamored of the dark beauty who was never seen anywhere without her carved olivewood box. “They’re both traveling alone,” people said. “And they both have relatives in Detroit.”

“I don’t think they’re right for each other.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a higher class than she is. It’ll never work.”

“He seems to like her, though.”

“He’s on a boat in the middle of the ocean! What else does he have to do?”

On the fifth day, Lefty and Desdemona took a stroll on deck together. On the sixth day, he presented his arm and she took it.

“I introduced them!” one man boasted. City girls sniffed. “She wears her hair in braids. She looks like a peasant.”

My grandfather, on the whole, came in for better treatment. He was said to have been a silk merchant from Smyrna who’d lost his fortune in the fire; a son of King Constantine I by a French mistress; a spy for the Kaiser during the Great War. Lefty never discouraged any speculation. He seized the opportunity of transatlantic travel to reinvent himself. He wrapped a ratty blanket over his shoulders like an opera cape. Aware that whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was—already an American, in other words—he waited for Desdemona to come up on deck. When she did, he adjusted his wrap, nodded to his shipmates, and sauntered across the deck to pay his respects.

“He’s smitten!”

“I don’t think so. Type like that, he’s just out for a little fun. That girl better watch it or she’ll have more than that box to carry around.”

My grandparents enjoyed their simulated courtship. When people were within earshot, they engaged in first- or second-date conversations, making up past histories for themselves. “So,” Lefty would ask, “do you have any siblings?”

“I had a brother,” Desdemona replied wistfully. “He ran off with a Turkish girl. My father disowned him.”

“That’s very strict. I think love breaks all taboos. Don’t you?”

Alone, they told each other, “I think it’s working. No one suspects.”

Each time Lefty encountered Desdemona on deck, he pretended he’d only recently met her. He walked up, made small talk, commented on the beauty of the sunset, and then, gallantly, segued into the beauty of her face. Desdemona played her part, too. She was standoffish at first. She withdrew her arm whenever he made an off-color joke. She told him that her mother had warned her about men like him. They passed the voyage playing out this imaginary flirtation and, little by little, they began to believe it. They fabricated memories, improvised fate. (Why did they do it? Why did they go to all that trouble? Couldn’t they have said they were already engaged? Or that their marriage had been arranged years earlier? Yes, of course they could have. But it wasn’t the other travelers they were trying to fool; it was themselves.)

Traveling made it easier. Sailing across the ocean among half a thousand perfect strangers conveyed an anonymity in which my grandparents could re-create themselves. The driving spirit on the Giulia was self-transformation. Staring out to sea, tobacco farmers imagined themselves as race car drivers, silk dyers as Wall Street tycoons, millinery girls as fan dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies. Gray ocean stretched in all directions. Europe and Asia Minor were dead behind them. Ahead lay America and new horizons.

On the eighth day at sea, Lefty Stephanides, grandly, on one knee, in full view of six hundred and sixty-three steerage passengers, proposed to Desdemona Aristos while she sat on a docking cleat. Young women held their breath. Married men nudged bachelors: “Pay attention and you’ll learn something.” My grandmother, displaying a theatrical flair akin to her hypochondria, registered complex emotions: surprise; initial delight; second thoughts; prudent near refusal; and then, to the applause already starting up, dizzy acceptance.

The ceremony took place on deck. In lieu of a wedding dress, Desdemona wore a borrowed silk shawl over her head. Captain Kontoulis loaned Lefty a necktie spotted with gravy stains. “Keep your coat buttoned and nobody will notice,” he said. For Stephana, my grandparents had wedding crowns woven with rope. Flowers weren’t available at sea and so the koumbaros, a guy named Pelos serving as best man, switched the king’s hempen crown to the queen’s head, the queen’s to the king’s, and back again.

Bride and bridegroom performed the Dance of Isaiah. Hip to hip, arms interwoven to hold hands, Desdemona and Lefty circumambulated the captain, once, twice, and then again, spinning the cocoon of their life together. No patriarchal linearity here. We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.

Or, in my grandparents’ case, the circling worked like this: as they paced around the deck the first time, Lefty and Desdemona were still brother and sister. The second time, they were bride and bridegroom. And the third, they were husband and wife.

The night of my grandparents’ wedding, the sun set directly before the ship’s bow, pointing the way to New York. The moon rose, casting a silver stripe over the ocean. On his nightly tour of the deck, Captain Kontoulis descended from the pilothouse and marched forward. The wind had picked up. The Giulia pitched in high seas. As the deck tilted back and forth, Captain Kontoulis didn’t stumble once, and was even able to light one of the Indonesian cigarettes he favored, dipping his cap’s braided brim to cut the wind. In his not terribly clean uniform, wearing knee-high Cretan boots, Captain Kontoulis scrutinized running lights, stacked deck chairs, lifeboats. The Giulia was alone on the vast Atlantic, hatches battened down against swells crashing over the side. The decks were empty except for two first-class passengers, American businessmen sharing a nightcap under lap blankets. “From what I hear, Tilden doesn’t just play tennis with his proteges, if you get my drift.” “You’re kidding.” “Lets them drink from the loving cup.” Captain Kontoulis, understanding none of this, nodded as he passed …

Inside one of the lifeboats, Desdemona was saying, “Don’t look.” She was lying on her back. There was no goat’s-hair blanket between them, so Lefty covered his eyes with his hands, peeking through his fingers. A single pinhole in the tarp leaked moonlight, which slowly filled the lifeboat. Lefty had seen Desdemona undress many times, but usually as no more than a shadow and never in moonlight. She had never curled onto her back like this, lifting her feet to take off her shoes. He watched and, as she pulled down her skirt and lifted her tunic, was struck by how different his sister looked, in moonlight, in a lifeboat. She glowed. She gave off white light. He blinked behind his hands. The moonlight kept rising; it covered his neck, it reached his eyes until he understood: Desdemona was wearing a corset. That was the other thing she’d brought along: the white cloth enfolding her silkworm eggs was nothing other than Desdemona’s wedding corset. She thought she’d never wear it, but here it was. Brassiere cups pointed up at the canvas roof. Whalebone slats squeezed her waist. The corset’s skirt dropped garters attached to nothing because my grandmother owned no stockings. In the lifeboat, the corset absorbed all available moonlight, with the odd result that Desdemona’s face, head, and arms disappeared. She looked like Winged Victory, tumbled on her back, being carted off to a conqueror’s museum. All that was missing was the wings.

Lefty took off his shoes and socks, as grit rained down. When he removed his underwear, the lifeboat filled with a mushroomy smell. He was ashamed momentarily, but Desdemona didn’t seem to mind.

She was distracted by her own mixed feelings. The corset, of course, reminded Desdemona of her mother, and suddenly the wrongness of what they were doing assailed her. Until now she had been keeping it at bay. She had had no time to dwell on it in the chaos of the last days.

Lefty, too, was conflicted. Though he had been tortured by thoughts of Desdemona, he was glad for the darkness of the lifeboat, glad, in particular, that he couldn’t see her face. For months Lefty had slept with whores who resembled Desdemona, but now he found it easier to pretend that she was a stranger.

The corset seemed to possess its own sets of hands. One was softly rubbing her between the legs. Two more cupped her breasts, one, two, three hands pressing and caressing her; and in the lingerie Desdemona saw herself through new eyes, her thin waist, her plump thighs; she felt beautiful, desirable, most of all: not herself. She lifted her feet, rested her calves on the oarlocks. She spread her legs. She opened her arms for Lefty, who twisted around, chafing his knees and elbows, dislodging oars, nearly setting off a flare, until finally he fell into her softness, swooning. For the first time Desdemona tasted the flavor of his mouth, and the only sisterly thing she did during their lovemaking was to come up for air, once, to say, “Bad boy. You’ve done this before.” But Lefty only kept repeating, “Not like this, not like this …”

And I was wrong before, I take it back. Underneath Desdemona, beating time against the boards and lifting her up: a pair of wings.

“Lefty!” Desdemona now, breathlessly. “I think I felt it.”

“Felt what?”

“You know. That feeling.”

“Newlyweds,” Captain Kontoulis said, watching the lifeboat rock. “Oh, to be young again.”

After Princess Si Ling-chi—whom I find myself picturing as the imperial version of the bicyclist I saw on the U-Bahn the other day; I can’t stop thinking about her for some reason, I keep looking for her every morning—after Princess Si Ling-chi discovered silk, her nation kept it a secret for three thousand one hundred and ninety years. Anyone who attempted to smuggle silkworm eggs out of China faced punishment of death. My family might never have become silk farmers if it hadn’t been for the Emperor Justinian, who, according to Procopius, persuaded two missionaries to risk it. In A.D. 550, the missionaries snuck silkworm eggs out of China in the swallowed condom of the time: a hollow staff. They also brought the seeds of the mulberry tree. As a result, Byzantium became a center for sericulture. Mulberry trees flourished on Turkish hillsides. Silkworms ate the leaves. Fourteen hundred years later, the descendants of those first stolen eggs filled my grandmother’s silkworm box on the Giulia.

I’m the descendant of a smuggling operation, too. Without their knowing, my grandparents, on their way to America, were each carrying a single mutated gene on the fifth chromosome. It wasn’t a recent mutation. According to Dr. Luce, the gene first appeared in my bloodline sometime around 1750, in the body of one Penelope Evangelatos, my great-grandmother to the ninth power. She passed it on to her son Petras, who passed it on to his two daughters, who passed it on to three of their five children, and so on and so on. Being recessive, its expression would have been fitful. Sporadic heredity is what the geneticists call it. A trait that goes underground for decades only to reappear when everyone has forgotten about it. That was how it went in Bithynios. Every so often a hermaphrodite was born, a seeming girl who, in growing up, proved otherwise.

For the next six nights, under various meteorological conditions, my grandparents trysted in the lifeboat. Desdemona’s guilt flared up during the day, when she sat on deck wondering if she and Lefty were to blame for everything, but by nighttime she felt lonely and wanted to escape the cabin and so stole back to the lifeboat and her new husband.

Their honeymoon proceeded in reverse. Instead of getting to know each other, becoming familiar with likes and dislikes, ticklish spots, pet peeves, Desdemona and Lefty tried to defamiliarize themselves with each other. In the spirit of their shipboard con game, they continued to spin out false histories for themselves, inventing brothers and sisters with plausible names, cousins with moral shortcomings, in-laws with facial tics. They took turns reciting Homeric genealogies, full of falsifications and borrowings from real life, and sometimes they fought over this or that favorite real uncle or aunt, and had to bargain like casting directors. Gradually, as the nights passed, these fictional relatives began to crystallize in their minds. They’d quiz each other on obscure connections, Lefty asking, “Who’s your second cousin Yiannis married to?” And Desdemona replying, “That’s easy. Athena. With the limp.” (And am I wrong to think that my obsession with family relations started right there in the lifeboat? Didn’t my mother quiz me on uncles and aunts and cousins, too? She never quizzed my brother, because he was in charge of snow shovels and tractors, whereas I was supposed to provide the feminine glue that keeps families together, writing thank-you notes and remembering everybody’s birthdays and name days. Listen, I’ve heard the following genealogy come out of my mother’s mouth: “That’s your cousin Melia. She’s Uncle Mike’s sister Lucille’s brother-in-law Stathis’s daughter. You know Stathis the mailman, who’s not too swift? Melia’s his third child, after his boys Mike and Johnny. You should know her. Melia! She’s your cousin-in-law by marriage!”)

And here I am now, sketching it all out for you, dutifully oozing feminine glue, but also with a dull pain in my chest, because I realize that genealogies tell you nothing. Tessie knew who was related to whom but she had no idea who her own husband was, or what her in-laws were to each other; the whole thing a fiction created in the lifeboat where my grandparents made up their lives.

Sexually, things were simple for them. Dr. Peter Luce, the great sexologist, can cite astonishing statistics asserting that oral sex didn’t exist between married couples prior to 1950. My grandparents’ lovemaking was pleasurable but unvarying. Every night Desdemona would disrobe down to her corset and Lefty would press its clasps and hooks, searching for the secret combination that sprung the locked garment open. The corset was all they needed in terms of an aphrodisiac, and it remained for my grandfather the singular erotic emblem of his life. The corset made Desdemona new again. As I said, Lefty had glimpsed his sister naked before, but the corset had the odd power of making her seem somehow more naked; it turned her into a forbidding, armored creature with a soft inside he had to hunt for. When the tumblers clicked, it popped open; Lefty crawled on top of Desdemona and the two of them hardly even moved; the ocean swells did the work for them.

Their periphescence existed simultaneously with a less passionate stage of pair bonding. Sex could give way, at any moment, to coziness. So, after making love, they lay staring up through the pulled-back tarp at the night sky passing overhead and got down to the business of life. “Maybe Lina’s husband can give me a job,” Lefty said. “He’s got his own business, right?”

“I don’t know what he does. Lina never gives me a straight answer.”

“After we save some money, I can open a casino. Some gambling, a bar, maybe a floor show. And potted palms everywhere.”

“You should go to college. Become a professor like Mother and Father wanted. And we have to build a cocoonery, remember.”

“Forget the silkworms. I’m talking roulette, rebetika, drinking, dancing. Maybe I’ll sell some hash on the side.”

“They won’t let you smoke hashish in America.”

“Who says?”

And Desdemona announced with certitude:

“It’s not that kind of country.”

They spent what remained of their honeymoon on deck, learning how to finagle their way through Ellis Island. It wasn’t so easy anymore. The Immigration Restriction League had been formed in 1894. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge thumped a copy of On the Origin of Species, warning that the influx of inferior peoples from southern and eastern Europe threatened “the very fabric of our race.” The Immigration Act of 1917 barred thirty-three kinds of undesirables from entering the United States, and so, in 1922, on the deck of the Giulia, passengers discussed how to escape the categories. In nervous cram sessions, illiterates learned to pretend to read; bigamists to admit to only one wife; anarchists to deny having read Proudhon; heart patients to simulate vigor; epileptics to deny their fits; and carriers of hereditary diseases to neglect mentioning them. My grandparents, unaware of their genetic mutation, concentrated on the more blatant disqualifications. Another category of restriction: “persons convicted of a crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude.” And a subset of this group: “Incestuous relations.”

They avoided passengers who seemed to be suffering from trachoma or favus. They fled anyone with a hacking cough. Occasionally, for reassurance, Lefty took out the certificate that declared:

ELEUTHERIOS STEPHANIDES

HAS BEEN VACCINATED AND

UNLOUSED AND IS PASSED AS VERMIN-FREE THIS DATE SEPT. 23, 1922 DISINFECTION MARITIME PIRAEUS

Literate, married to only one person (albeit a sibling), democratically inclined, mentally stable, and authoritatively deloused, my grandparents saw no reason why they would have trouble getting through. They each had the requisite twenty-five dollars apiece. They also had a sponsor: their cousin Sourmelina. Just the year before, the Quota Act had reduced the annual numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants from 783,000 to 155,000. It was nearly impossible to get into the country without either a sponsor or stunning professional recommendations. To help their own chances, Lefty put away his French phrase book and began memorizing four lines of the King James New Testament. The Giulia was full of inside sources familiar with the English literacy test. Different nationalities were asked to translate different bits of Scripture. For Greeks, it was Matthew 19:12: “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.”

“Eunuchs?” Desdemona quailed. “Who told you this?”

“This is a passage from the Bible.”

“What Bible? Not the Greek Bible. Go ask somebody else what’s on that test.”

But Lefty showed her the Greek at the top of the card and the English below. He repeated the passage word by word, making her memorize it, whether or not she understood it.

“We didn’t have enough eunuchs in Turkey? Now we have to talk about them at Ellis Island?”

“The Americans let in everyone,” Lefty joked. “Eunuchs included.”

“They should let us speak Greek if they’re so accepting,” Desdemona grumbled.

Summer was abandoning the ocean. One night it grew too cold in the lifeboat to crack the corset’s combination. Instead they huddled under blankets, talking.

“Is Sourmelina meeting us in New York?” Desdemona asked.

“No. We have to take a train to Detroit.”

“Why can’t she meet us?”

“It’s too far.”

“Just as well. She wouldn’t be on time anyway.”

The ceaseless sea wind made the tarp’s edges flap. Frost formed on the lifeboat’s gunwales. They could see the top of the Giulia’s smokestack, the smoke itself discernible only as a starless patch of night sky. (Though they didn’t know it, that striped, canted smokestack was already informing them about their new home; it was whispering about River Rouge and the Uniroyal plant, and the Seven Sisters and Two Brothers, but they didn’t listen; they wrinkled up their noses and ducked down in the lifeboat away from the smoke.)

And if the smell of industry didn’t insist on entering my story already, if Desdemona and Lefty, who grew up on a pine-scented mountain and who could never get used to the polluted air of Detroit, hadn’t ducked down in the lifeboat, then they might have detected a new aroma wafting in on the brisk sea air: a humid odor of mud and wet bark. Land. New York. America.

“What are we going to tell Sourmelina about us?”

“She’ll understand.”

“Will she keep quiet?”

“There are a few things she’d rather her husband didn’t know about her.”

“You mean Helen?”

“I didn’t say a thing,” said Lefty.

They fell asleep after that, waking to sunlight, and a face staring down at them.

“Did you have a good sleep?” Captain Kontoulis said. “Maybe I could get you a blanket?”

“I’m sorry,” Lefty said. “We won’t do it again.”

“You won’t get the chance,” said the captain and, to prove his point, pulled the lifeboat’s tarp completely away. Desdemona and Lefty sat up. In the distance, lit by the rising sun, was the skyline of New York. It wasn’t the right shape for a city—no domes, no minarets—and it took them a minute to process the tall geometric forms. Mist curled off the bay. A million pink windowpanes glittered. Closer, crowned with her own sunrays and dressed like a classical Greek, the Statue of Liberty welcomed them.

“How do you like that?” Captain Kontoulis asked.

“I’ve seen enough torches to last the rest of my life,” said Lefty.

But Desdemona, for once, was more optimistic. “At least it’s a woman,” she said. “Maybe here people won’t be killing each other every single day.”

Book Two

Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot

Everyone who builds a factory builds a temple.

—Calvin Coolidge

Detroit was always made of wheels. Long before the Big Three and the nickname “Motor City”; before the auto factories and the freighters and the pink, chemical nights; before anyone had necked in a Thunderbird or spooned in a Model T; previous to the day a young Henry Ford knocked down his workshop wall because, in devising his “quadricycle,” he’d thought of everything but how to get the damn thing out; and nearly a century prior to the cold March night, in 1896, when Charles King tiller-steered his horseless carriage down St. Antoine, along Jefferson, and up Woodward Avenue (where the two-stroke engine promptly quit); way, way back, when the city was just a piece of stolen Indian land located on the strait from which it got its name, a fort fought over by the British and French until, wearing them out, it fell into the hands of the Americans; way back then, before cars and cloverleaves, Detroit was made of wheels.

I am nine years old and holding my father’s meaty, sweaty hand. We are standing at a window on the top floor of the Pontchartrain Hotel. I have come downtown for our annual lunch date. I am wearing a miniskirt and fuchsia tights. A white patent leather purse hangs on a long strap from my shoulder.

The fogged window has spots on it. We are way up high. I’m going to order shrimp scampi in a minute.

The reason for my father’s hand perspiration: he’s afraid of heights. Two days ago, when he offered to take me wherever I wanted, I called out in my piping voice, “Top of the Pontch!” High above the city, amid the business lunchers and power brokers, was where I wanted to be. And Milton has been true to his promise. Despite racing pulse he has allowed the maitre d’ to give us a table next to the window; so that now here we are—as a tuxedoed waiter pulls out my chair—and my father, too frightened to sit, begins a history lesson instead.

What’s the reason for studying history? To understand the present or avoid it? Milton, olive complexion turning a shade pale, only says, “Look. See the wheel?”

And now I squint. Oblivious, at nine, to the prospect of crow’s-feet, I gaze out over downtown, down to the streets where my father is indicating (though not looking). And there it is: half a hubcap of city plaza, with the spokes of Bagley, Washington, Woodward, Broadway, and Madison radiating from it.

That’s all that remains of the famous Woodward Plan. Drawn up in 1807 by the hard-drinking, eponymous judge. (Two years earlier, in 1805, the city had burned to the ground, the timber houses and ribbon farms of the settlement founded by Cadillac in 1701 going up in the span of three hours. And, in 1969, with my sharp vision, I can read the traces of that fire on the city’s flag a half mile away in Grand Circus Park: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.”)

Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons. Each wheel was to be separate yet united, in accordance with the young nation’s federalism, as well as classically symmetrical, in accordance with Jeffersonian aesthetics. This dream never quite came to be. Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. Since 1818, the city had spread out along the river, warehouse by warehouse, factory by factory. Judge Woodward’s wheels had been squashed, bisected, pressed into the usual rectangles.

Or seen another way (from a rooftop restaurant): the wheels hadn’t vanished at all, they’d only changed form. By 1900 Detroit was the leading manufacturer of carriages and wagons. By 1922, when my grandparents arrived, Detroit made other spinning things, too: marine engines, bicycles, hand-rolled cigars. And yes, finally: cars.

All this was visible from the train. Approaching along the shore of the Detroit River, Lefty and Desdemona watched their new home take shape. They saw farmland give way to fenced lots and cobblestone streets. The sky darkened with smoke. Buildings flew by, brick warehouses painted in pragmatic Bookman white: WRIGHT AND KAY CO… . J. H. BLACK & SONS … DETROIT STOVE WORKS. Out on the water, squat, tar-colored barges dragged along, and people popped up on the streets, workmen in grimy overalls, clerks thumbing suspenders, the signs of eateries and boardinghouses appearing next: We Serve Stroh’s Temperance Beer … Make This Your Home Meals 15 cents …

… As these new sights flooded my grandparents’ brains, they jostled with images from the day before. Ellis Island, rising like a Doge’s Palace on the water. The Baggage Room stacked to the ceiling with luggage. They’d been herded up a stairway to the Registry Room. Pinned with numbers from the Giulia’s manifest, they’d filed past a line of health inspectors who’d looked in their eyes and ears, rubbed their scalps, and flipped their eyelids inside out with buttonhooks. One doctor, noticing inflammation under Dr. Philobosian’s eyelids, had stopped the examination and chalked an X on his coat. He was led out of line. My grandparents hadn’t seen him again. “He must have caught something on the boat,” Desdemona said. “Or his eyes were red from all that crying.” Meanwhile, chalk continued to do its work all around them. It marked a Pg on the belly of a pregnant woman. It scrawled an H over an old man’s failing heart. It diagnosed the C of conjunctivitis, the F of favus, and the T of trachoma. But, no matter how well trained, medical eyes couldn’t spot a recessive mutation hiding out on a fifth chromosome. Fingers couldn’t feel it. Buttonhooks couldn’t bring it to light …

Now, on the train, my grandparents were tagged not with manifest numbers but with destination cards: “To the Conductor: Please show bearer where to change and where to get off, as this person does not speak English. Bearer is bound to: Grand Trunk Sta. Detroit.” They sat next to each other in unreserved seats. Lefty faced the window, looking out with excitement. Desdemona stared down at her silkworm box, her cheeks crimson with the shame and fury she’d been suffering for the last thirty-six hours.

“That’s the last time anyone cuts my hair,” she said.

“You look fine,” said Lefty, not looking. “You look like an Amerikanidha.”

“I don’t want to look like an Amerikanidha.”

In the concessions area at Ellis Island, Lefty had cajoled Desdemona to step into a tent run by the YWCA. She’d gone in, shawled and kerchiefed, and had emerged fifteen minutes later in a drop-waisted dress and a floppy hat shaped like a chamber pot. Rage flamed beneath her new face powder. As part of the makeover, the YWCA ladies had cut off Desdemona’s immigrant braids.

Obsessively, in the way a person worries a rip deep in a pocket, she now reached up under the floppy hat to feel her denuded scalp for the thirtieth or fortieth time. “That’s the last haircut,” she said again. (She was true to this vow. From that day on, Desdemona grew her hair out like Lady Godiva, keeping it under a net in an enormous mass and washing it every Friday; and only after Lefty died did she ever cut it, giving it to Sophie Sassoon, who sold it for two hundred and fifty dollars to a wigmaker who made five separate wigs out of it, one of which, she claimed, was later bought by Betty Ford, post White House and rehab, so that we got to see it on television once, during Richard Nixon’s funeral, my grandmother’s hair, sitting on the ex-President’s wife’s head.)

But there was another reason for my grandmother’s unhappiness. She opened the silkworm box in her lap. Inside were her two braids, still tied with the ribbons of mourning, but otherwise the box was empty. After carrying her silkworm eggs all the way from Bithynios, Desdemona had been forced to dump them out at Ellis Island. Silkworm eggs appeared on a list of parasites.

Lefty remained glued to the window. All the way from Hoboken he’d gazed out at the marvelous sights: electric trams pulling pink faces up Albany’s hills; factories glowing like volcanoes in the Buffalo night. Once, waking as the train pulled through a city at dawn, Lefty had mistaken a pillared bank for the Parthenon, and thought he was in Athens again.

Now the Detroit River sped past and the city loomed. Lefty stared out at the motor cars parked like giant beetles at the curbsides. Smokestacks rose everywhere, cannons bombarding the atmosphere. There were red brick stacks and tall silver ones, stacks in regimental rows or all alone puffing meditatively away, a forest of smokestacks that dimmed the sunlight and then, all of a sudden, blocked it out completely. Everything went black: they’d entered the train station.

Grand Trunk Station, now a ruin of spectacular dimensions, was then the city’s attempt to one-up New York. Its base was a mammoth marble neoclassical museum, complete with Corinthian pillars and carved entablature. From this temple rose a thirteen-story office building. Lefty, who’d been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it. Desdemona, having no alternative, followed.

But just imagine it in those days! Grand Trunk! Telephones in a hundred shipping offices ringing away, still a relatively new sound; and merchandise being sent east and west; passengers arriving and departing, having coffee in the Palm Court or getting their shoes shined, the wing tips of banking, the cap toes of parts supply, the saddle shoes of rum-running. Grand Trunk, with its vaulted ceilings of Guastavino tilework, its chandeliers, its floors of Welsh quarry stone. There was a six-chair barbershop, where civic leaders were mummified in hot towels; and bathtubs for rent; and elevator banks lit by translucent egg-shaped marble lamps.

Leaving Desdemona behind a pillar, Lefty searched through the mob in the station for the cousin who was meeting their train. Sourmelina Zizmo, nee Papadiamandopoulos, was my grandparents’ cousin and hence my first cousin twice removed. I knew her as a colorful, older woman. Sourmelina of the precarious cigarette ash. Sourmelina of the indigo bathwater. Sourmelina of the Theosophical Society brunches. She wore satin gloves up to the elbow and mothered a long line of smelly dachshunds with tearstained eyes. Footstools populated her house, allowing the short-legged creatures access to sofas and chaise longues. In 1922, however, Sourmelina was only twenty-eight. Picking her out of this crowd at Grand Trunk is as difficult for me as identifying guests in my parents’ wedding album, where all the faces wear the disguise of youth. Lefty had a different problem. He paced the concourse, looking for the cousin he’d grown up with, a sharp-nosed girl with the grinning mouth of a comedy mask. Sun slanted in from the skylights above. He squinted, examining the passing women, until finally she called out to him, “Over here, cousin. Don’t you recognize me? I’m the irresistible one.”

“Lina, is that you?”

“I’m not in the village anymore.”

In the five years since leaving Turkey, Sourmelina had managed to erase just about everything identifiably Greek about her, from her hair, which she dyed to a rich chestnut and now wore bobbed and marcelled, to her accent, which had migrated far enough west to sound vaguely “European,” to her reading material (Collier’s, Harper’s), to her favorite foods (lobster thermidor, peanut butter), and finally to her clothes. She wore a short green flapper dress fringed at the hemline. Her shoes were a matching green satin with sequined toes and delicate ankle straps. A black feather boa was wrapped around her shoulders, and on her head was a cloche hat that dangled onyx pendants over her plucked eyebrows.

For the next few seconds she gave Lefty the full benefit of her sleek, American pose, but it was still Lina inside there (under the cloche) and soon her Greek enthusiasm bubbled out. She spread her arms wide. “Kiss me hello, cousin.”

They embraced. Lina pressed a rouged cheek against his neck. Then she pulled back to examine him and, dissolving into laughter, cupped her hand over his nose. “It’s still you. I’d know this nose anywhere.” Her laugh completed its follow-through, as her shoulders went up and down, and then she was on to the next thing. “So, where is she? Where is this new bride of yours? Your telegram didn’t even give a name. What? Is she hiding?”

“She’s … in the bathroom.”

“She must be a beauty. You got married fast enough. Which did you do first, introduce yourself or propose?”

“I think I proposed.”

“What does she look like?”

“She looks … like you.”

“Oh, darling, not that good surely.”

Sourmelina brought her cigarette holder to her lips and inhaled, scanning the crowd. “Poor Desdemona! Her brother falls in love and leaves her behind in New York. How is she?”

“She’s fine.”

“Why didn’t she come with you? She’s not jealous of your new wife, is she?”

“No, nothing like that.”

She clutched his arm. “We read about the fire. Terrible! I was so worried until I got your letter. The Turks started it. I know it. Of course, my husband doesn’t agree.”

“He doesn’t?”

“One suggestion, since you’ll be living with us? Don’t talk politics with my husband.”

“All right.”

“And the village?” Sourmelina inquired.

“Everybody left the horeo, Lina. There’s nothing now.”

“If I didn’t hate that place, maybe I’d shed two tears.”

“Lina, there’s something I have to explain to you …”

But Sourmelina was looking away, tapping her foot. “Maybe she fell in.”

“… Something about Desdemona and me …”

“Yes?”

“… My wife … Desdemona …”

“Was I right? They don’t get along?”

“No … Desdemona … my wife …”

“Yes?”

“Same person.” He gave the signal. Desdemona stepped from behind the pillar.

“Hello, Lina,” my grandmother said. “We’re married. Don’t tell.”

And that was how it came out, for the next-to-last time. Blurted out by my yia yia, beneath the echoing roof of Grand Trunk, toward Sourmelina’s cloche-covered ears. The confession hovered in the air a moment, before floating away with the smoke rising from her cigarette. Desdemona took her husband’s arm.

My grandparents had every reason to believe that Sourmelina would keep their secret. She’d come to America with a secret of her own, a secret that would be guarded by our family until Sourmelina died in 1979, whereupon, like everyone’s secrets, it was posthumously declassified, so that people began to speak of “Sourmelina’s girlfriends.” A secret kept, in other words, only by the loosest definition, so that now—as I get ready to leak the information myself—I feel only a slight twinge of filial guilt.

Sourmelina’s secret (as Aunt Zo put it): “Lina was one of those women they named the island after.”

As a girl in the horeo, Sourmelina had been caught in compromising circumstances with a few female friends. “Not many,” she told me herself, years later, “two or three. People think if you like girls, you like every single one. I was always picky. And there wasn’t much to pick from.” For a while she’d struggled against her predisposition. “I went to church. It didn’t help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.” When Sourmelina was caught not with another girl but with a full-grown woman, a mother of two children, a scandal arose. Sourmelina’s parents tried to arrange her marriage but found no takers. Husbands were hard enough to come by in Bithynios without the added liability of an uninterested, defective bride.

Her father had then done what Greek fathers of unmarriageable girls did in those days: he wrote to America. The United States abounded with dollar bills, baseball sluggers, raccoon coats, diamond jewelry—and lonely, immigrant bachelors. With a photograph of the prospective bride and a considerable dowry, her father had come up with one.

Jimmy Zizmo (shortened from Zisimopoulos) had come to America in 1907 at the age of thirty. The family didn’t know much about him except that he was a hard bargainer. In a series of letters to Sourmelina’s father, Zizmo had negotiated the amount of the dowry in the formal language of a barrister, even going so far as to demand a bank check before the wedding day. The photograph Sourmelina received showed a tall, handsome man with a virile mustache, holding a pistol in one hand and a bottle of liquor in the other. When she stepped off the train at Grand Trunk two months later, however, the short man who greeted her was clean-shaven, with a sour expression and a laborer’s dark complexion. Such a discrepancy might have disappointed a normal bride, but Sourmelina didn’t care one way or another.

Sourmelina had written often, describing her new life in America, but she concentrated on the new fashions, or her Aeriola Jr., the radio she spent hours each day listening to, wearing earphones and manipulating the dial, stopping every so often to clean off the carbon dust that built up on the crystal. She never mentioned anything connected to what Desdemona referred to as “the bed,” and so her cousins were forced to read between the lines of those aerograms, trying to see, in a description of a Sunday drive through Belle Isle, whether the face of the husband at the wheel was happy or unsatisfied; or inferring, from a passage about Sourmelina’s latest hairstyle—something called “cootie garages”—whether Zizmo was ever allowed to muss it up.

This same Sourmelina, full of her own secrets, now took in her new co-conspirators. “Married? You mean sleeping-together married?”

Lefty managed, “Yes.”

Sourmelina noticed her ash for the first time, and flicked it. “Just my luck. Soon as I leave the village, things get interesting.”

But Desdemona couldn’t abide such irony. She grabbed Sourmelina’s hands and pleaded, “You have to promise never to tell. We’ll live, we’ll die, and that will be the end of it.”

“I won’t tell.”

“People can’t even know I’m your cousin.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“What about your husband?”

“He thinks I’m picking up my cousin and his new wife.”

“You won’t say anything to him?”

“That’ll be easy.” Lina laughed. “He doesn’t listen to me.”

Sourmelina insisted on getting a porter to carry their suitcases to the car, a black-and-tan Packard. She tipped him and climbed behind the wheel, attracting looks. A woman driving was still a scandalous sight in 1922. After resting her cigarette holder on the dashboard, she pulled out the choke, waited the requisite five seconds, and pressed the ignition button. The car’s tin bonnet shuddered to life. The leather seats began to vibrate and Desdemona took hold of her husband’s arm. Up front, Sourmelina took off her satin-strap high heels to drive barefoot. She put the car into gear and, without checking traffic, lurched off down Michigan Avenue toward Cadillac Square. My grandparents’ eyes glazed over at the sheer activity, streetcars rumbling, bells clanging, and the monochrome traffic swerving in and out. In those days downtown Detroit was filled with shoppers and businessmen. Outside Hudson’s Department Store the crowd was ten thick, jostling to get in the newfangled revolving doors. Lina pointed out the sights: the Café Frontenac … the Family Theatre … and the enormous electric signs: Ralston … Wait & Bond Blackstone Mild 10¢ Cigar. Above, a thirty-foot boy spread Meadow Gold Butter on a ten-foot slice of bread. One building had a row of giant oil lamps over the entrance to promote a sale on until October 31. It was all swirl and hubbub, Desdemona lying against the backseat, already suffering the anxiety that modern conveniences would induce in her over the years, cars mainly, but toasters, too, lawn sprinklers and escalators; while Lefty grinned and shook his head. Skyscrapers were going up everywhere, and movie palaces and hotels. The twenties saw the construction of nearly all Detroit’s great buildings, the Penobscot Building and the second Buhl Building colored like an Indian belt, the New Union Trust Building, the Cadillac Tower, the Fisher Building with its gilded roof. To my grandparents Detroit was like one big Koza Han during cocoon season. What they didn’t see were the workers sleeping on the streets because of the housing shortage, and the ghetto just to the east, a thirty-square-block area bounded by Leland, Macomb, Hastings, and Brush streets, teeming with the city’s African Americans, who weren’t allowed to live anywhere else. They didn’t see, in short, the seeds of the city’s destruction—its second destruction—because they were part of it, too, all these people coming from everywhere to cash in on Henry Ford’s five-dollar-a-day promise.

The East Side of Detroit was a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes, shaded by cathedral elms. The house on Hurlbut Street Lina drove them to was a modest, two-story building of root-beer-colored brick. My grandparents gaped at it from the car, unable to move, until suddenly the front door opened and someone stepped out.

Jimmy Zizmo was so many things I don’t know where to begin. Amateur herbalist; antisuffragist; big-game hunter; ex-con; drug pusher; teetotaler—take your pick. He was forty-five years old, nearly twice as old as his wife. Standing on the dim porch, he wore an inexpensive suit and a shirt with a pointy collar that had lost most of its starch. His frizzy black hair gave him the wild look of the bachelor he’d been for so many years, and this impression was heightened by his face, which was rumpled like an unmade bed. His eyebrows, however, were as seductively arched as a nautch girl’s, his eyelashes so thick he might have been wearing mascara. But my grandmother didn’t notice any of that. She was fixated on something else.

“An Arab?” Desdemona asked as soon as she was alone with her cousin in the kitchen. “Is that why you didn’t tell us about him in your letters?”

“He’s not an Arab. He’s from the Black Sea.”

“This is the sala,” Zizmo was meanwhile explaining to Lefty as he showed him around the house.

“Pontian!” Desdemona gasped with horror, while also examining the icebox. “He’s not Muslim, is he?”

“Not everybody from the Pontus converted,” Lina scoffed. “What do you think, a Greek takes a swim in the Black Sea and turns into a Muslim?”

“But does he have Turkish blood?” She lowered her voice. “Is that why he’s so dark?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“You’re free to stay as long as you like”—Zizmo was now leading Lefty upstairs—“but there are a few house rules. First, I’m a vegetarian. If your wife wants to cook meat, she has to use separate pots and dishes. Also, no whiskey. Do you drink?”

“Sometimes.”

“No drinking. Go to a speakeasy if you want to drink. I don’t want any trouble with the police. Now, about the rent. You just got married?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of dowry did you get?”

“Dowry?”

“Yes. How much?”

“But did you know he was so old?” Desdemona whispered downstairs as she inspected the oven.

“At least he’s not my brother.”

“Quiet! Don’t even joke.”

“I didn’t get a dowry,” answered Lefty. “We met on the boat over.”

“No dowry!” Zizmo stopped on the stairs to look back at Lefty with astonishment. “Why did you get married, then?”

“We fell in love,” Lefty said. He’d never announced it to a stranger before, and it made him feel happy and frightened all at once.

“If you don’t get paid, don’t get married,” Zizmo said. “That’s why I waited so long. I was holding out for the right price.” He winked.

“Lina mentioned you have your own business now,” Lefty said with sudden interest, following Zizmo into the bathroom. “What kind of business is it?”

“Me? I’m an importer.”

“I don’t know of what,” Sourmelina answered in the kitchen. “An importer. All I know is he brings home money.”

“But how can you marry somebody you don’t know anything about?”

“To get out of that country, Des, I would have married a cripple.”

“I have some experience with importing,” Lefty managed to get in as Zizmo demonstrated the plumbing. “Back in Bursa. In the silk industry.”

“Your portion of the rent is twenty dollars.” Zizmo didn’t take the hint. He pulled the chain, unleashing a flood of water.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Lina was continuing downstairs, “when it comes to husbands, the older the better.” She opened the pantry door. “A young husband would be after me all the time. It would be too much of a strain.”

“Shame on you, Lina.” But Desdemona was laughing now, despite herself. It was wonderful to see her old cousin again, a little piece of Bithynios still intact. The dark pantry, full of figs, almonds, walnuts, halvah, and dried apricots, made her feel better, too.

“But where can I get the rent?” Lefty finally blurted out as they headed back downstairs. “I don’t have any money left. Where can I work?”

“Not a problem.” Zizmo waved his hand. “I’ll speak to a few people.” They came through the sala again. Zizmo stopped and looked significantly down. “You haven’t complimented my zebra skin rug.”

“It’s very nice.”

“I brought it back from Africa. Shot it myself.”

“You’ve been to Africa?”

“I’ve been all over.”

Like everybody else in town, they squeezed in together. Desdemona and Lefty slept in a bedroom directly above Zizmo and Lina’s, and the first few nights my grandmother climbed out of bed to put her ear to the floor. “Nothing,” she said, “I told you.”

“Come back to bed,” Lefty scolded. “That’s their business.”

“What business? That’s what I’m telling you. They aren’t having any business.”

While in the bedroom below, Zizmo was discussing the new boarders upstairs. “What a romantic! Meets a girl on the boat and marries her. No dowry.”

“Some people marry for love.”

“Marriage is for housekeeping and for children. Which reminds me.”

“Please, Jimmy, not tonight.”

“Then when? Five years we’ve been married and no children. You’re always sick, tired, this, that. Have you been taking the castor oil?”

“Yes.”

“And the magnesium?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We have to reduce your bile. If the mother has too much bile, the child will lack vigor and disobey his parents.”

“Good night, kyrie.”

“Good night, kyria.”

Before the week was out, all my grandparents’ questions about Sourmelina’s marriage had been answered. Because of his age, Jimmy Zizmo treated his young bride more like a daughter than a wife. He was always telling her what she could and couldn’t do, howling over the price and necklines of her outfits, telling her to go to bed, to get up, to speak, to keep silent. He refused to give her the car keys until she cajoled him with kisses and caresses. His nutritional quackery even led him to monitor her regularity like a doctor, and some of their biggest fights came as a result of his interrogating Lina about her stools. As for sexual relations, they had happened, but not recently. For the last five months Lina had complained of imaginary ailments, preferring her husband’s herbal cures to his amatory attentions. Zizmo, in turn, harbored vaguely yogic beliefs about the mental benefits of semen retention, and so was disposed to wait until his wife’s vitality returned. The house was sex-segregated like the houses in the patridha, the old country, men in the sala, women in the kitchen. Two spheres with separate concerns, duties, even—the evolutionary biologists might say—thought patterns. Lefty and Desdemona, accustomed to living in their own house, were forced to adapt to their new landlord’s ways. Besides, my grandfather needed a job.

In those days there were a lot of car companies to work for. There was Chalmers, Metzger, Brush, Columbia, and Flanders. There was Hupp, Paige, Hudson, Krit, Saxon, Liberty, Rickenbacker, and Dodge. Jimmy Zizmo, however, had connections at Ford.

“I’m a supplier,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Assorted fuels.”

They were in the Packard again, vibrating on thin tires. A light mist was falling. Lefty squinted through the fogged windshield. Little by little, as they approached along Michigan Avenue, he began to be aware of a monolith looming in the distance, a building like a gigantic church organ, pipes running into the sky.

There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my grandfather’s nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the smell’s chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nose with his handkerchief.

Zizmo laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Do you want to know the secret?”

“What?”

“Don’t breathe.”

When they reached the factory, Zizmo took him into the Personnel Department.

“How long has he lived in Detroit?” the manager asked.

“Six months.”

“Can you verify that?”

Zizmo now spoke in a low tone. “I could drop the necessary documents by your house.”

The personnel manager looked both ways. “Old Log Cabin?”

“Only the best.”

The chief jutted out his lower lip, examining my grandfather. “How’s his English?”

“Not as good as mine. But he learns fast.”

“He’ll have to take the course and pass the test. Otherwise he’s out.”

Minotaurs

Which is something I’ll never have much to do with. Like most hermaphrodites but by no means all, I can’t have children. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve never married. It’s one of the reasons, aside from shame, why I decided to join the Foreign Service. I’ve never wanted to stay in one place. After I started living as a male, my mother and I moved away from Michigan and I’ve been moving ever since. In another year or two I’ll leave Berlin, to be posted somewhere else. I’ll be sad to go. This once-divided city reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification, for Einheit. Coming from a city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here in Berlin.

A word on my shame. I don’t condone it. I’m trying my best to get over it. The intersex movement aims to put an end to infant genital reconfiguration surgery. The first step in that struggle is to convince the world—and pediatric endocrinologists in particular—that hermaphroditic genitals are not diseased. One out of every two thousand babies is born with ambiguous genitalia. In the United States, with a population of two hundred and seventy-five million, that comes to one hundred and thirty-seven thousand intersexuals alive today.

But we hermaphrodites are people like everybody else. And I happen not to be a political person. I don’t like groups. Though I’m a member of the Intersex Society of North America, I have never taken part in its demonstrations. I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It’s not the best way to live. But it’s the way I am.

The most famous hermaphrodite in history? Me? It felt good to write that, but I’ve got a long way to go. I’m closeted at work, revealing myself only to a few friends. At cocktail receptions, when I find myself standing next to the former ambassador (also a native of Detroit), we talk about the Tigers. Only a few people here in Berlin know my secret. I tell more people than I used to, but I’m not at all consistent. Some nights I tell people I’ve just met. In other cases I keep silent forever.

That goes especially for women I’m attracted to. When I meet someone I like and who seems to like me, I retreat. There are lots of nights out in Berlin when, emboldened by a good-value Rioja, I forget my physical predicament and allow myself to hope. The tailored suit comes off. The Thomas Pink shirt, too. My dates can’t fail to be impressed by my physical condition. (Under the armor of my double-breasted suits is another of gym-built muscle.) But the final protection, my roomy, my discreet boxer shorts, these I do not remove. Ever. Instead I leave, making excuses. I leave and never call them again. Just like a guy.

And soon enough I am at it again. I am trying once more, toeing the line. I saw my bicyclist again this morning. This time I found out her name: Julie. Julie Kikuchi. Raised in northern California, graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently in Berlin on a grant from the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien. But more important, right now: my date for Friday night.

It’s just a first date. It won’t come to anything. No reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. And from love, too.

The Simultaneous Fertilization had occurred in the early morning hours of March 24, 1923, in separate, vertical bedrooms, after a night out at the theater. My grandfather, not knowing he was soon to be fired, had splurged on four tickets to The Minotaur, playing at the Family. At first Desdemona had refused to go. She disapproved of theater in general, especially vaudeville, but in the end, unable to resist the Hellenic theme, she had put on a new pair of stockings, and a black dress and overcoat, and made her way with the others down the sidewalk and into the terrifying Packard.

When the curtain rose at the Family Theater, my relatives expected to get the whole story. How Minos, King of Crete, failed to sacrifice a white bull to Poseidon. How Poseidon, enraged, caused Minos’s wife Pasiphae to be smitten with love for a bull. How the child of that union, Asterius, came out with a bull’s head attached to a human body. And then Daedalus, the maze, etc. As soon as the footlights came on, however, the production’s nontraditional emphasis became clear. Because now they pranced onstage: the chorus girls. Dressed in silver halters, robed in see-through shifts, they danced, reciting strophes that didn’t scan to the eerie piping of flutes. The Minotaur appeared, an actor wearing a papier-mache bull’s head. Lacking any sense of classical psychology, the actor played his half-human character as pure movie monster. He growled; drums pounded; chorus girls screamed and fled. The Minotaur pursued, and of course he caught them, each one, and devoured her bloodily, and dragged her pale, defenseless body deeper into the maze. And the curtain came down.

In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. “It’s like the paintings in the museum,” she said. “Just an excuse to show people with no clothes.”

She insisted on leaving before Act II. At home, getting ready for bed, the four theatergoers went about their nightly routines. Desdemona washed out her stockings, lit the vigil lamp in the hallway. Zizmo drank a glass of the papaya juice he touted as beneficial for the digestion. Lefty neatly hung up his suit, pinching each trouser crease, while Sourmelina removed her makeup with cold cream and went to bed. The four of them, moving in their individual orbits, pretended that the play had had no effect on them. But now Jimmy Zizmo was turning off his bedroom light. Now he was climbing into his single bed—to find it occupied! Sourmelina, dreaming of chorus girls, had sleepwalked across the throw rug. Murmuring strophes, she climbed on top of her stand-in husband. (“You see?” Zizmo said in the dark. “No more bile. It’s the castor oil.”) Upstairs, Desdemona might have heard something through the floor if she hadn’t been pretending to be asleep. Against her will, the play had aroused her, too. The Minotaur’s savage, muscular thighs. The suggestive sprawl of his victims. Ashamed of her excitement, she gave no outward sign. She switched off the lamp. She told her husband good night. She yawned (also theatrical) and turned her back. While Lefty stole up from behind.

Freeze the action. A momentous night, this, for all involved (including me). I want to record the positions (Lefty dorsal, Lina couchant) and the circumstances (night’s amnesty) and the direct cause (a play about a hybrid monster). Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates. Wouldn’t I also sneak up on a girl pretending to be asleep? And wouldn’t there also be a play involved, and somebody dying onstage?

Leaving these genealogical questions aside, I return to the biological facts. Like college girls sharing a dorm room, Desdemona and Lina were both synchronized in their menstrual cycles. That night was day fourteen. No thermometer verified this, but a few weeks later the symptoms of nausea and hypersensitive noses did. “Whoever named it morning sickness was a man,” Lina declared. “He was just home in the morning to notice.” The nausea kept no schedule; it owned no watch. They were sick in the afternoon, in the middle of the night. Pregnancy was a boat in a storm and they couldn’t get off. And so they lashed themselves to the masts of their beds and rode out the squall. Everything they came in contact with, the bedsheets, the pillows, the air itself, began to turn on them. Their husbands’ breath became intolerable, and when they weren’t too sick to move, they were waving their arms, gesturing to the men to keep away.

Pregnancy humbled the husbands. After an initial rush of male pride, they quickly recognized the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction, and quietly withdrew into a baffled reserve, catalysts to an explosion they couldn’t explain. While their wives grandly suffered in the bedrooms, Zizmo and Lefty retreated to the sala to listen to music, or drove to a coffee house in Greektown where no one would be offended by their smell. They played backgammon and talked politics, and no one spoke about women because in the coffee house everyone was a bachelor, no matter how old he was or how many children he’d given a wife who preferred their company to his. The talk was always the same, of the Turks and their brutality, of Venizelos and his mistakes, of King Constantine and his return, and of the unavenged crime of Smyrna burned.

“And does anybody care? No!”

“It’s like what Berenger said to Clemenceau: ‘He who owns the oil owns the world.’”

“Those damn Turks! Murderers and rapists!”

“They desecrated the Hagia Sophia and now they destroyed Smyrna!”

But here Zizmo spoke up: “Stop bellyaching. The war was the Greeks’ fault.”

“What!”

“Who invaded who?” asked Zizmo.

“The Turks invaded. In 1453.”

“The Greeks can’t even run their own country. Why do they need another?”

At this point, men stood up, chairs were knocked over. “Who the hell are you, Zizmo? Goddamned Pontian! Turk-sympathizer!”

“I sympathize with the truth,” shouted Zizmo. “There’s no evidence the Turks started that fire. The Greeks did it to blame it on the Turks.”

Lefty stepped between the men, preventing a fight. After that, Zizmo kept his political opinions to himself. He sat morosely drinking coffee, reading an odd assortment of magazines or pamphlets speculating on space travel and ancient civilizations. He chewed his lemon peels and told Lefty to do so, too. Together, they settled into the random camaraderie of men on the outskirts of a birth. Like all expectant fathers, their thoughts turned to money.

My grandfather had never told Jimmy the reason for his dismissal from Ford, but Zizmo had a good idea why it might have happened. And so, a few weeks later, he made what restitution he could.

“Just act like we’re going for a drive.”

“Okay.”

“If we get stopped, don’t say anything.”

“Okay.”

“This is a better job than the Rouge. Believe me. Five dollars a day is nothing. And here you can eat all the garlic you want.”

They are in the Packard, passing the amusement grounds of Electric Park. It’s foggy out, and late—just past 3 a.m. To be honest, the amusement grounds should be closed at this hour, but, for my own purposes, tonight Electric Park is open all night, and the fog suddenly lifts, all so that my grandfather can look out the window and see a roller coaster streaking down the track. A moment of cheap symbolism only, and then I have to bow to the strict rules of realism, which is to say: they can’t see a thing. Spring fog foams over the ramparts of the newly opened Belle Isle Bridge. The yellow globes of streetlamps glow, aureoled in the mist.

“Lot of traffic for this late,” Lefty marvels.

“Yes,” says Zizmo. “It’s very popular at night.”

The bridge lifts them gently above the river and sets them back down on the other side. Belle Isle, a paramecium-shaped island in the Detroit River, lies less than half a mile from the Canadian shore. By day, the park is full of picnickers and strollers. Fishermen line its muddy banks. Church groups hold tent meetings. Come dark, however, the island takes on an offshore atmosphere of relaxed morals. Lovers park in secluded lookouts. Cars roll over the bridge on shadowy missions. Zizmo drives through the gloom, past the octagonal gazebos and the monument of the Civil War Hero, and into the woods where the Ottawa once held their summer camp. Fog wipes the windshield. Birch trees shed parchment beneath an ink-black sky.

Missing from most cars in the 1920s: rearview mirrors. “Steer,” Zizmo keeps saying, and turns around to see if they’re being followed. In this fashion, trading the wheel, they weave along Central Avenue and The Strand, circling the island three times, until Zizmo is satisfied. At the northeastern end, he pulls the car over, facing Canada.

“Why are we stopping?”

“Wait and see.”

Zizmo turns the headlights on and off three times. He gets out of the car. So does Lefty. They stand in the darkness amid river sounds, waves lapping, freighters blowing foghorns. Then there’s another sound: a distant hum. “You have an office?” my grandfather asks. “A warehouse?”

“This is my office.” Zizmo waves his hands through the air. He points to the Packard. “And that’s my warehouse.” The hum is getting louder now; Lefty squints through the fog. “I used to work for the railroad.” Zizmo takes a dried apricot out of his pocket and eats it. “Out West in Utah. Broke my back. Then I got smart.” But the hum has almost reached them; Zizmo is opening the trunk. And now, in the fog, an outboard appears, a sleek craft with two men aboard. They cut the engine as the boat glides into the reeds. Zizmo hands an envelope to one man. The other whisks the tarp off the boat’s stern. In moonlight, neatly stacked, twelve wooden crates gleam.

“Now I run a railroad of my own,” says Zizmo. “Start unloading.”

The precise nature of Jimmy Zizmo’s importing business was thus revealed. He didn’t deal in dried apricots from Syria, halvah from Turkey, and honey from Lebanon. He imported Hiram Walker’s whiskey from Ontario, beer from Quebec, and rum from Barbados by way of the St. Lawrence River. A teetotaler himself, he made his living buying and selling liquor. “If these Amerikani are all drunks, what can I do?” he justified, driving away minutes later.

“You should have told me!” Lefty shouted, enraged. “If we get caught, I won’t get my citizenship. They’ll send me back to Greece.”

“What choice do you have? You have a better job? And don’t forget. You and I, we have babies on the way.”

So began my grandfather’s life of crime. For the next eight months he worked in Zizmo’s rum-running operation, observing its odd hours, getting up in the middle of the night and having dinner at dawn. He adopted the slang of the illegal trade, increasing his English vocabulary fourfold. He learned to call liquor “hooch,” “bingo,” “squirrel dew,” and “monkey swill.” He referred to drinking establishments as “boozeries,” “doggeries,” “rumholes,” and “schooners.” He learned the locations of blind pigs all over the city, the funeral parlors that filled bodies not with embalming fluid but with gin, the churches that offered something more than sacramental wine, and the barbershops whose Barbicide jars contained “blue ruin.” Lefty grew familiar with the shoreline of the Detroit River, its screened inlets and secret landings. He could identify police outboards at a distance of a quarter mile. Rum-running was a tricky business. The major bootlegging was controlled by the Purple Gang and the Mafia. In their beneficence they allowed a certain amount of amateur smuggling to go on—the day trips to Canada, the fishing boats out for a midnight cruise. Women took the ferry to Windsor with gallon flasks under their dresses. As long as such smuggling didn’t cut into the main business, the gangs allowed it. But Zizmo was far exceeding the limit.

They went out five to six times a week. The Packard’s trunk could fit four cases of liquor, its commodious, curtained backseat eight more. Zizmo respected neither rules nor territories. “As soon as they voted in Prohibition, I went to the library and looked at a map,” he said, explaining how he’d gotten into the business. “There they were, Canada and Michigan, almost kissing. So I bought a ticket to Detroit. When I got here, I was broke. I went to see a marriage broker in Greektown. The reason I let Lina drive this car? She paid for it.” He smiled with satisfaction, but then followed his thoughts a little further and his face darkened. “I don’t approve of women driving, mind you. And now they get to vote!” He grumbled to himself. “Remember that play we saw? All women are like that. Given the chance, they’d all fornicate with a bull.”

“Those are just stories, Jimmy,” said Lefty. “You can’t take them literally.”

“Why not?” Zizmo continued. “Women aren’t like us. They have carnal natures. The best thing to do with them is to shut them up in a maze.”

“What are you talking about?”

Zizmo smiled. “Pregnancy.”

It was like a maze. Desdemona kept turning this way and that, left side, right side, trying to find a comfortable position. Without leaving her bed, she wandered the dark corridors of pregnancy, stumbling over the bones of women who had passed this way before her. For starters, her mother, Euphrosyne (whom she was suddenly beginning to resemble), her grandmothers, her great-aunts, and all the women before them stretching back into prehistory right back to Eve, on whose womb the curse had been laid. Desdemona came into a physical knowledge of these women, shared their pains and sighs, their fear and protectiveness, their outrage, their expectation. Like them she put a hand to her belly, supporting the world; she felt omnipotent and proud; and then a muscle in her back spasmed.

I give you now the entire pregnancy in time lapse. Desdemona, at eight weeks, lies on her back, bedcovers drawn up to her armpits. The light at the window flickers with the change of day and night. Her body jerks; she’s on her side, her belly; the covers change shape. A wool blanket appears and disappears. Food trays fly to the bedside table, then jump away before returning. But throughout the mad dance of inanimate objects the continuity of Desdemona’s shifting body remains at center. Her breasts inflate. Her nipples darken. At fourteen weeks her face begins to grow plump, so that for the first time I can recognize the yia yia of my childhood. At twenty weeks a mysterious line starts drawing itself down from her navel. Her belly rises like Jiffy Pop. At thirty weeks her skin thins, and her hair gets thicker. Her complexion, pale with nausea at first, grows less so until there it is: a glow. The bigger she gets, the more stationary. She stops lying on her stomach. Motionless, she swells toward the camera. The window’s strobe effect continues. At thirty-six weeks she cocoons herself in bedsheets. The sheets go up and down, revealing her face, exhausted, euphoric, resigned, impatient. Her eyes open. She cries out.

Lina wrapped her legs in putties to prevent varicose veins. Worried that her breath was bad, she kept a tin of mints beside her bed. She weighed herself each morning, biting her lower lip. She enjoyed her new buxom figure but fretted about the consequences. “My breasts will never be the same. I know it. After this, just flaps. Like in the National Geographic.” Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized. Her face felt on fire during hormone surges. She perspired; her makeup ran. The entire process was a holdover from more primitive stages of development. It linked her with the lower forms of life. She thought of queen bees spewing eggs. She thought of the collie next door, digging its hole in the backyard last spring.

The only escape was radio. She wore her earphones in bed, on the couch, in the bathtub. During the summer she carried her Aeriola Jr. outside and sat under the cherry tree. Filling her head with music, she escaped her body.

On a third-trimester October morning, a cab pulled up outside 3467 Hurlbut Street and a tall, slender figure climbed out. He checked the address against a piece of paper, collected his things—umbrella and suitcase—and paid the driver. He took off his hat and stared into it as though reading instructions along the lining. Then he put the hat back on and walked up onto the porch.

Desdemona and Lina both heard the knocking. They met at the front door.

When they opened it, the man looked from belly to belly.

“I’m just in time,” he said.

It was Dr. Philobosian. Clear-eyed, clean-shaven, recovered from his grief. “I saved your address.” They invited him in and he told his story. He had indeed contracted the eye disease favus on the Giulia. But his medical license had saved him from being sent back to Greece; America needed physicians. Dr. Philobosian had stayed a month in the hospital at Ellis Island, after which, with sponsorship from the Armenian Relief Agency, he had been admitted into the country. For the last eleven months he’d been living in New York, on the Lower East Side. “Grinding lenses for an optometrist.” Recently he’d managed to retrieve some assets from Turkey and had come to the Midwest. “I’m going to open a practice here. New York has too many doctors already.”

He stayed for dinner. The women’s delicate conditions didn’t excuse them from domestic duties. On swollen legs they carried out dishes of lamb and rice, okra in tomato sauce, Greek salad, rice pudding. Afterward, Desdemona brewed Greek coffee, serving it in demitasse cups with the brown foam, the lakia, on top. Dr. Philobosian remarked to the seated husbands, “Hundred-to-one odds. Are you sure it happened on the same night?”

“Yes,” Sourmelina replied, smoking at the table. “There must have been a full moon.”

“It usually takes a woman five or six months to get pregnant,” the doctor went on. “To have you two do it on the same night—a-hundred-to-one odds!”

“Hundred-to-one?” Zizmo looked across the table at Sourmelina, who looked away.

“Hundred-to-one at least,” assured the doctor.

“It’s all the Minotaur’s fault,” Lefty joked.

“Don’t talk about that play,” Desdemona scolded.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Lina.

“I can’t look at you?” asked her husband.

Sourmelina let out an exasperated sigh and wiped her mouth with her napkin. There was a strained silence. Dr. Philobosian, pouring himself another glass of wine, rushed in.

“Birth is a fascinating subject. Take deformities, for instance. People used to think they were caused by maternal imagination. During the conjugal act, whatever the mother happened to look at or think about would affect the child. There’s a story in Damascene about a woman who had a picture of John the Baptist over her bed. Wearing the traditional hair shirt. In the throes of passion, the poor woman happened to glance up at this portrait. Nine months later, her baby was born—furry as a bear!” The doctor laughed, enjoying himself, sipping more wine.

“That can’t happen, can it?” Desdemona, suddenly alarmed, wanted to know.

But Dr. Philobosian was on a roll. “There’s another story about a woman who touched a toad while making love. Her baby came out with pop eyes and covered with warts.”

“This is in a book you read?” Desdemona’s voice was tight.

“Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels has most of this. The Church got into it, too. In his Embryological Sacra, Cangiamilla recommended intra-uterine baptisms. Suppose you were worried that you might be carrying a monstrous baby. Well, there was a cure for that. You simply filled a syringe with holy water and baptized the infant before it was born.”

“Don’t worry, Desdemona,” Lefty said, seeing how anxious she looked. “Doctors don’t think that anymore.”

“Of course not,” said Dr. Philobosian. “All this nonsense comes from the Dark Ages. We know now that most birth deformities result from the consanguinity of the parents.”

“From the what?” asked Desdemona.

“From families intermarrying.”

Desdemona went white.

“Causes all kinds of problems. Imbecility. Hemophilia. Look at the Romanovs. Look at any royal family. Mutants, all of them.”

“I don’t remember what I was thinking that night,” Desdemona said later while washing the dishes.

“I do,” said Lina. “Third one from the right. With the red hair.”

“I had my eyes closed.”

“Then don’t worry.”

Desdemona turned on the water to cover their voices. “And what about the other thing? The con … the con …”

“The consanguinity?”

“Yes. How do you know if the baby has that?”

“You don’t know until it’s born.”

“Mana!”

“Why do you think the Church doesn’t let brothers and sisters get married? Even first cousins have to get permission from a bishop.”

“I thought it was because …” and she trailed off, having no answer.

“Don’t worry,” Lina said. “These doctors exaggerate. If families marrying each other was so bad, we’d all have six arms and no legs.”

But Desdemona did worry. She thought back to Bithynios, trying to remember how many children had been born with something wrong with them. Melia Salakas had a daughter with a piece missing from the middle of her face. Her brother, Yiorgos, had been eight years old his whole life. Were there any babies with hair shirts? Any frog babies? Desdemona recalled her mother telling stories about strange infants born in the village. They came every few generations, babies who were sick in some way, Desdemona couldn’t remember how exactly—her mother had been vague. Every so often these babies appeared, and they always met with tragic ends: they killed themselves, they ran off and became circus performers, they were seen years later in Bursa, begging or prostituting themselves. Lying alone in bed at night, with Lefty out working, Desdemona tried to recall the details of these stories, but it was too long ago and now Euphrosyne Stephanides was dead and there was no one to ask. She thought back to the night she’d gotten pregnant and tried to reconstruct events. She turned on her side. She made a pillow stand in for Lefty, pressing it against her back. She looked around the room. There were no pictures on the walls. She hadn’t been touching any toads. “What did I see?” she asked herself. “Only the wall.”

But she wasn’t the only one tormented by anxieties. Recklessly now, and with an official disclaimer as to the veracity of what I’m about to tell you—because, of all the actors in my midwestern Epidaurus, the one wearing the biggest mask is Jimmy Zizmo—I’ll try to give you a glimpse into his emotions that last trimester. Was he excited about becoming a father? Did he bring home nutritive roots and brew homeopathic teas? No, he wasn’t, he didn’t. After Dr. Philobosian came to dinner that night, Jimmy Zizmo began to change. Maybe it was what the doctor had said regarding the synchronous pregnancies. A-hundred-to-one odds. Maybe it was this stray bit of information that was responsible for Zizmo’s increasing moodiness, his suspicious glances at his pregnant wife. Maybe he was doubting the likelihood that a single act of intercourse in a five-month dry spell would result in a successful pregnancy. Was Zizmo examining his young wife and feeling old? Tricked?

In the late autumn of 1923, minotaurs haunted my family. To Desdemona they came in the form of children who couldn’t stop bleeding, or who were covered with fur. Zizmo’s monster was the well-known one with green eyes. It stared out of the river’s darkness while he waited onshore for a shipment of liquor. It leapt up from the roadside to confront him through the Packard’s windshield. It rolled over in bed when he got home before sunrise: a green-eyed monster lying next to his young, inscrutable wife, but then Zizmo would blink and the monster would disappear.

When the women were eight months pregnant, the first snow fell. Lefty and Zizmo wore gloves and mufflers as they waited on the shore of Belle Isle. Nevertheless, despite his insulation, my grandfather was shivering. Twice in the last month they’d had close calls with the police. Sick with jealous suspicions, Zizmo had been erratic, forgetting to schedule rendezvous, choosing drop-off points with insufficient preparation. Worse, the Purple Gang was consolidating its hold on the city’s rum-running. It was only a matter of time before they ran afoul of it.

Meanwhile, back on Hurlbut, a spoon was swinging. Sourmelina, legs bandaged, lay back in her boudoir as Desdemona performed the first of the many prognostications that would end with me.

“Tell me it’s a girl.”

“You don’t want a girl. Girls are too much trouble. You have to worry about them going with the boys. You have to get a dowry and find a husband—”

“They don’t have dowries in America, Desdemona.”

The spoon began to move.

“If it’s a boy, I’ll kill you.”

“A daughter you’ll fight with.”

“A daughter I can talk to.”

“A son you will love.”

The spoon’s arc increased.

“It’s … it’s …”

“What?”

“Start saving money.”

“Yes?”

“Lock the windows.”

“Is it? Is it really?”

“Get ready to fight.”

“You mean it’s a …”

“Yes. A girl. Definitely.”

“Oh, thank God.”

… And a walk-in closet being cleaned out. And the walls being painted white to serve as a nursery. Two identical cribs arrive from Hudson’s. My grandmother sets them up in the nursery, then hangs a blanket between them in case her child is a boy. Out in the hall, she stops before the vigil light to pray to the All-Holy: “Please don’t let my baby be this thing a hemophiliac. Lefty and I didn’t know what we were doing. Please, I swear I will never have another baby. Just this one.”

Thirty-three weeks. Thirty-four. In uterine swimming pools, babies perform half-gainers, flipping over headfirst. But Sourmelina and Desdemona, so synchronized in their pregnancies, diverged at the end. On December 17, while listening to a radio play, Sourmelina removed her earphones and announced that she was having pains. Three hours later, Dr. Philobosian delivered a girl, as Desdemona predicted. The baby weighed only four pounds three ounces and had to be kept in an incubator for a week. “See?” Lina said to Desdemona, gazing at the baby through the glass. “Dr. Phil was wrong. Look. Her hair’s black. Not red.”

Jimmy Zizmo approached the incubator next. He removed his hat and bent very close to squint. And did he wince? Did the baby’s pale complexion confirm his doubts? Or provide answers? As to why a wife might complain of aches and pains? Or why she might be conveniently cured, in order to prove his paternity? (Whatever his doubts, the child was his. Sourmelina’s complexion had merely stolen the show. Genetics, a crapshoot, entirely.)