Father Gregory says that Nicholas is the good-looking one and I am the smart one. With twins, one is usually good-looking and the other is usually smart, according to Father Gregory. God apparently makes a point to distribute His gifts, so they do not all go to the same person.
Your brain is your gift, Julian, Father Gregory tells me, when we are alone. Good looks are temporal, but a good brain will take you all the way to the end.
I do not know what The End is. But I know Nicholas, and I am pretty sure that he is both the good-looking one and the smart one. I like him anyway. Everyone likes Nicholas. It would be hard not to like Nicholas, even if we were not twins. But it would have been nice if God’s gifts had been handed out a little more evenly. Mama says that I was born precocious, but precocious is not the same as smart.
Nicholas and I live with our parents Damianos and Katerina Pappas in a small white house on the west side of Sheboygan. Mama told us once that she always wanted two children, but she had not thought that they would arrive together. She laughed when she said this, but I think that having twins must have been very hard for both of my parents, and especially for Mama. As Nicholas and I learned later, we came into the world as very different children, and we did everything on very different schedules. You would think that twins would sleep and wake at about the same time, need to be fed at the same time, that we would fuss and cry in the same way. In our case, all that was a fantasy. Instead, in the beginning, I would fall asleep every two or three hours, more or less, while Nicholas, lying in the same crib, would fight to stay awake, waving his arms and kicking at the wooden slats until either Mama came to soothe him or he wore himself out. On the other hand, I gave Mama more problems at feeding time. Nicholas would eat whatever was put in front of him. I was finicky. To hear Papa tell it, I would have starved to death before allowing squash to touch my lips.
Over time, Nicholas and I mostly grew out of our infant differences, although certain things have not changed. Nicholas acts as if he is always in a hurry, as if life has given him only so much time, and every minute spent sleeping or lazing around is a waste of time. I am, to use Papa’s kind phrase, less diligent. As for our taste in food, they do seem to have merged, somewhat. Our parents own a Greek restaurant, so Nicholas and I have both developed a stomach for souvlakia, beef and onion stew, lentil soup, even spanakopita if the spinach is not cooked to death. Also baklava. Especially baklava. Although the smell of squash, which Nicholas eats with a strange enthusiasm, still turns my stomach.
Oddly enough, Nicholas and I have begun feeling differently on the subject of religion. We have always attended St. Spyridon Greek Orthodox Church on Tenth Street with Mama and Papa – and when we were old enough, we both began serving as acolytes. For young boys, there is status to serving as acolytes: lighting the candles, raising the cross, holding the basket of bread at the end of the service, walking in processions around the church. Preparing the incense, which because of the smell is my least favorite job. Becoming an acolyte was always enough for me, but Nicholas has actually become more devout over the years. At night, he talks often about joining the priesthood, which is something I cannot imagine. Father Gregory does not encourage this kind of talk, which is something I do not understand. When a boy shows interest in the vocation, his parish priest is supposed to take the boy under his wing, as they say. Foster the drive. But Father Gregory spends more time with me than he does with Nicholas, as if my apathy is his special religious challenge. The other possibility is that, deep down, Father Gregory feels jealous of Nicholas because he is the popular and good-looking twin, and because Nicholas’ spirituality is more pure than even his own. That thought might qualify as a sacrilege. I do not know. Sins and sacrileges are two things I try not to obsess over. But I do find myself thinking about all this in my free time, when I am doing nothing while Nicholas is reading or studying or practicing his handwriting or helping Mama hang wet laundry on the clothesline or doing some other useful thing. When it comes down to it, I think the most important difference between Nicholas and me is that he feels the need to be useful and to fight his way through our childhood years as quickly as possible, and I do not.
One area where Nicholas and I share a common interest, now that we are twelve, is girls – or, more specifically, Rose McLaughlin. Nicholas and I have both kissed Rose McLaughlin, but I do not fool myself about who Rose likes. I was the first to show my love for Rose. It was the last day of school before the beginning of summer vacation, and I had asked her if I could walk her home. She frowned at me, since our houses are in different directions, but then she shrugged and began marching away. I hurried to catch up. I knew where Rose McLaughlin lives because I have ridden my bike past the house several times, hoping for a glimpse of her, so I knew of a small park which we had to cut through just a block or so away. There are benches arranged in a circle around the center of the park, and I suggested that we sit, pretending to be exhausted. Rose, who had not said a word during our walk, shrugged again. I had heard that the right way to kiss a girl was simply to do it – take her by surprise, rather than asking permission. It took all the courage I had, but after we had been sitting there for about a minute I leaned over and planted a kiss on her lips. Rose had absolutely no reaction. I had heard that the girl will either push the boy away in protest, or return the kiss with passion and tenderness, and that this is how you know where you stand. But Rose McLaughlin did nothing. I might as well have been kissing a loaf of bread. I waited for her to say something, which would have been my signal to either get up and run home or try for a second, truer kiss. After a long silence, she said, Well, I should get home, and she stood up, smoothed her dress, turned and walked away.
That night, I told Nicholas that I had kissed Rose McLaughlin. As twins, we always share everything that happens to us, however small it might be. And we do not hold back on even the most embarrassing details. The story of my first kiss had plenty of these. Nicholas laughed when I described Rose’s response to my romantic move, and it was such a good-natured laugh that I joined in. I cannot say that the story inspired Nicholas to try his hand at romancing Rose McLaughlin, but I do know that we were both sweet on her, in our own way, and later in the summer he told me that they had kissed. The way he said it – We kissed, instead of I kissed her – told me that his was a very different experience.
Nicholas and Rose are not boyfriend-girlfriend. I am as sure of that as I am sure that Nicholas and I are twins. When we were back in school, I saw that they were making a point to avoid each other. But I am also quite sure that he sparked something in Rose that I could not, and this feels worse than for me to have been rejected outright.
The Atheneum is open for lunch and dinner six days a week, and our parents both work there because the restaurant could not function otherwise. Nicholas and I also work there on Saturday mornings and weekdays after school and summer days, busing dirty dishes to the kitchen, restocking shelves, sweeping the dining room, taking inventory and doing other miscellaneous tasks. It has never been a paying job, but we do not mind. Sunday, when the restaurant is closed, is the only day of the week when we all sit down together at the supper table and have a regular meal. The food usually comes from the menu of the Atheneum – lamb scraps, grape leaves that split when they were stuffed, two-day-old egg and lemon soup, the slightly burned edge pieces of Papa’s spinach pie, soggy cucumber slices drenched in yogurt. Nicholas tries to look enthusiastic as he eats, while I do not bother.
Sunday supper is also Papa’s time to lecture us about the Washington politicians and the New York bankers and all the other people responsible for the Depression. The failure of the American economy, according to Papa, is a failure of capitalism and the American social order. During these lectures, Mama glances at Nicholas and me, as if she is warning us not to repeat outside the house what we are hearing at the table. I have no idea whether or not mother agrees with Papa about banks and politicians and capitalism, because she keeps her opinions to herself. My sense of Mama is that she simply accepts her God-given role, works hard to provide for her family, and tries to appreciate life’s blessings.
It is always Nicholas who knows exactly how to change the subject when Papa’s speeches are starting to go off the rails. What was it like back in Greece? he asks one evening. When you were a boy. When you were our age?
For a moment, Papa looks at Nicholas suspiciously. But Mama saves the day. Your father had eyes for me from the time he was eight or nine, she says.
Papa turns and stares at her. I can see that he is either trying to keep his anger under control or he is suddenly remembering something. Another place, an earlier time. Then he shakes his head and smiles. He leans back and tells the following story, which Nicholas and I have heard before, although never in one sitting. It features Katerina Apostolos and Damianos Pappas, which is who they were when they lived in Greece, before they were Mama and Papa, living with their sons in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Katerina and Damianos were born five months and about a half-mile apart, in the town of Farsala in central Greece. Every Greek town seems to have some claim to fame, either real or made-up, and Farsala’s claim is to have been the site of a famous battle where Julius Caesar defeated Pompey (probably real) and the birthplace of Achilles (probably not real). Papa reminds us that, in Greece, history is inescapable.
Every morning, their mothers brought little Damianos and Katerina in buggies to the town square, where the two ladies sat and gossiped with the other mothers of Farsala while their babies looked up at the sky, thinking whatever random thoughts ran through their little brains. So there was no time, really, when Damianos and Katerina had not known each other, even when they had no actual awareness of the world.
Around the turn of the century, life in Greece – and especially life outside of the large cities – was hard. If you were a shipowner, you could make a decent living sending goods to England and the United States. If you were a merchant, you bought and sold and traded your way into a life of leisure, and possibly fortune. But life for most everyone else was one of poverty and hardship. Of course, children care nothing about money, and Damianos and Katerina grew up ignorant about the world’s suffering.
Their parents became good friends, and they enrolled their children in the same class at the same school. So Damianos and Katerina rediscovered one another – and at a young age, Damianos found that the quiet little child who had been in his life forever had somehow become a smart, interesting, curious, outspoken little thing. And very pretty as well, he had to admit, in those embroidered blue and white smocks she wore.
There was a small pond behind the school, and for a few weeks during the winter of 1910 the temperature was cold enough that the surface water had frozen solid. This was the same pond where Damianos and his friends went swimming almost every Saturday afternoon during the summer months, and it was hard to believe that you could now walk from one side to the other, but the ice seemed strong enough. Katerina had received a pair of second-hand skates for Christmas that year, and on Saturday mornings in January she and Damianos walked together to the pond so she could practice. Skating was not a skill that Katerina had ever put to use – and, considering the Greek climate, one that she might never use again. At first, she fell often, but each time she picked herself up and raced off toward the other side of the pond, where she stopped, turned around, and raced back. Before long, Katerina was moving across the ice with what Damianos saw as a kind of awkward, girlish grace, her arms flapping like the wings of a small bird, her auburn hair flying behind her. Damianos stood on the side of the pond, watching, wishing more than anything that he had skates of his own so that he and Katerina could glide around together, silently holding hands.
Damianos had just turned sixteen when war broke out in Europe. His father assured him that this war would not be a long one – and that, in any case, Greece was and would remain neutral, so there was no cause for the family to worry. But three years later, the war had not ended, and Greece was actually being dragged into it. So Damianos, against the wishes of his mother, enlisted to fight with the Greek army. He and Katerina had, by now, pledged their love for each other, and Damianos had announced, in the presence of both families, their intention to wed. But with Greece now in the middle of a war, marriage would have to wait.
Damianos fought in the National Defense Army Corps for a little more than a year. He made close friends, saw some of them killed, met young men from Britain and France and America who were fighting on the same side and for the same cause – although it was not always obvious to him what that cause was.
Damianos and Katerina were married in December 1918, just a month after the end of the war. Katerina’s parents, who had saved enough money to buy a piece of land north of the town, had a small house built on the property for the couple, as their wedding gift. It was also, Damianos and Katerina knew, an invitation to stay in Farsala, to raise children there, to care for their parents as they aged, as good children were expected to do. But Damianos and Katerina had talked about leaving. They agreed that there was no future for them in Greece, no opportunity to have lives that were any more than the those of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. And while there was finally peace in Europe, it felt to Damianos like a very unstable peace, especially in this corner of the continent where the Turks were as angry as ever at their neighbors, and the Bulgarians were feeling defeated and humiliated, and the Bolsheviks in Russia were looking around for some small country to crush, and Greeks were conflicted over whether the Great War had been worth fighting, and whether the right side had won, and whether it might be time to start their own little war. So, in the early summer of 1920, with Greece and Turkey facing off again, and their own parents in denial, Damianos and Katerina packed their things, made the trip to Athens by rail, and sailed from the city harbor at Piraeus to New York, where they joined a long line of Greeks and Italians and Germans and Turks and Poles and Irish and Russians with their own dreams about putting down roots in a new country.
On the ship, Damianos and Katerina made friends with a young couple, Alexis and Zoe, who planned to settle in Queens, where one of their uncles lived. There was, it seemed, an area of Queens that had drawn many Greek immigrants, and where it was possible to shop for food at Greek groceries, to have your clothes altered by a Greek tailor, to eat at Greek restaurants, to attend Sunday mass at a Greek Orthodox church, to send your children to schools with Greek teachers. Damianos was not sure that he wanted to live in a place that was trying a little too hard to look like the town he had just left, a town that held so many memories. But Katerina thought it would be nice to have something familiar when they were beginning a new life in an unfamiliar place. So they joined their new friends and settled in Queens.
Damianos and Katerina both found work in the same Greek restaurant, Katerina as a server and Damianos as a lunch-hour cook. Damianos told the owner that, after the war, he had worked for a year as a cook in a restaurant in Farsala. It was not true, but Damianos had learned enough about Greek food watching his mother in the kitchen, so he took easily to the job. Katerina loved the restaurant, and she became a favorite with the Greek immigrants who dined there. After six months, she was promoted to hostess. A few months later, one of the evening cooks left, and Damianos was offered a job working the dinner shift, which paid better money. Things were looking bright, and the couple began talking about putting down roots in Queens, having children, maybe even coaxing Katerina’s younger brother Giannis to join them in America. Damianos and Katerina were still living in the same one-bedroom third-floor walkup, but they were saving money now, so the future was wide open.
They had just begun looking at new, larger apartments in the neighborhood when Alexis and Zoe, their old friends from the ship, announced that they were moving west. Katerina had made plenty of friends in Queens. She would be sad saying goodbye to their first real friends in America, but it would be nice having close friends in the Midwest – people they might want to visit someday. But Damianos took the news differently. In all the time that he and Katerina had been living in New York, they had never travelled west of New Jersey. America was an enormous country, and opportunities for immigrants were just as huge. They had tried life on the East Coast. Now, maybe, it was time for to join Alexis and Zoe in Chicago, a city which had made room for thousands of Greeks who came before them.
In June 1922, their friends left Queens for good, hugging Damianos and Katerina at the train station and promising to send them reports on life in Greektown, the Chicago neighborhood where they would be living. Back home, Greece was still at war with Turkey, but it was not going well. Giannis had joined the army, against the wishes of his parents, and he was now somewhere on the front.
One day, Katerina received a letter from her mother, saying that Giannis had appeared to her in a dream, with a bird perched on his shoulder. When she woke, Katerina’s mother knew at once that Giannis had been killed. The family was still waiting for word from the army, but Katerina’s mother was absolutely certain that Giannis would not be coming home alive. But he will be buried in Greek soil, she had written – and Katerina realized that she was being scolded for trying to lure her brother to America. Your father and I are childless now, the letter had ended, as if Katerina had given up her position as a daughter when she and Damianos moved away. But she knew what her mother meant: Your father and I will die alone.
Katerina and Damianos talked about making the trip home to visit their families. But they both knew that leaving Greece a second time would be even harder, maybe impossible. So instead of returning, they packed their things, bought train tickets, and moved further west, adding another thousand miles to the distance separating them from their motherland.
Alexis and Zoe had opened a small fruit market, and they offered Damianos and Katerina jobs after they arrived in Chicago. But there were nearly a dozen Greek restaurants in the district where they settled, and Damianos had seen that mixing business and friendship can damage both. So he and Katerina once again found jobs working in the kitchen and the dining room of a place called Georgios.
Georgios was a large, balding man with a thick beard and a reputation for flirting with his waitresses, who were required to wear low-cut blue-and-white peasant dresses – an outfit that reminded Damianos of the smocks Katerina wore to school when they were children back in Farsala. The fact that Katerina was married to one of Georgios’ own line cooks seemed to make no difference. Katerina suffered pinches and leers, remarks about her breasts and invitations to accompany Georgios home when the restaurant closed for the night. Damianos suffered the humiliation as well, promising Katerina that he would one day say something that would put an end to it. But the place meant both of their jobs, and making an enemy of a restaurant owner in Greektown would have made it very hard to work elsewhere. In time, Georgios turned his attention to other girls, although he never gave up on Katerina.
Before a year had passed, their old friend Zoe announced that she was pregnant. Damianos and Katerina had talked about having children, but the move from Queens had been costly, and their jobs at Georgios did not pay as well as their jobs in Queens. So they had agreed that it would be at least another year before they could afford to live without Katerina’s salary.
Alexis and Zoe were still the best friends they had in America. Damianos and Katerina had imagined that, after Zoe gave birth, their lives would more or less continue as before, with some accommodation for the baby, of course. But all that was wishful thinking. The baby changed everything. At the hospital, when they visited for the first time, Zoe had a hollow, frightened look on her face. Alexis was silent and distracted. It was as if they had realized for the first time that their lives were no longer their own, and that every day would bring some new responsibility for which they were not prepared.
Alexis explained that the name Angela meant Messenger from God, but as far as Damianos could tell, the message seemed to be nothing but a long list of demands. Feed me. Soothe me. Walk me around the room. Change me. Feed me again. Comfort me. Understand me, if you can.
Damianos and Katerina saw how parenthood had changed their friends, how they no longer had the time or energy for anything but work and child care. They decided to wait another year before trying.
A year passed, and then another year. Between trying to keep the fruit market in business and attending to a child that grew from fussy to demanding, the world of Alexis and Zoe shrank, until it barely included Damianos and Katerina. But Katerina was a social person, and she especially needed friends, and when Georgios hired a young woman by the name of Rhea Karras they bonded at once. Rhea’s parents had recently moved from Chicago to Sheboygan, fifty miles north of Milwaukee. They had expected Rhea to move with them, but Rhea loved her life in Chicago’s Greektown, and she doubted that she could ever be quite as happy anywhere else. Surviving on her own would be a challenge, but she knew that she could find work and she believed that life was offering her an opportunity. If Rhea failed, she could obviously join her parents in Sheboygan, but she would not allow that thought to take up space her head. Katerina loved Rhea’s optimism, and her determination. Katerina has been nearly the same age when she and Damianos had left Greece for life in America – and despite all the challenges and disappointments, it was a decision she had never regretted.
One day, Rhea asked Katerina to accompany her on a three-day trip to Sheboygan. Rhea was overdue for a visit with her parents, and she wanted company. If they meet you and see that I have a good friend, a good life, I think they won’t nag me to move, Rhea said, adding, And it’ll be more fun with you. So the two young women packed their bags, took a bus to the train station downtown, and caught a morning train to Sheboygan.
When Katerina returned home, she could not stop talking about Sheboygan. It was, Damianos felt, almost as if his wife had experienced something spiritual, while he had spent those same three days working at the restaurant, exchanging looks with Gregorio, eating warmed-over stifado and spanakopita at home, taking long walks around the streets of Greektown, sitting on the stoop watching the neighborhood children play stickball, reading newspapers and trying to sleep.
What was so special about Sheboygan? he wanted to know. Rhea’s parents lived in a small house with a very small yard in front, a flower bed on one side, a brick patio with a wooden picnic table in back. Their neighbors on one side were a large family of Italian immigrants. A German family lived across the street. The local Greek community was, Katerina said, large enough to support a Greek Orthodox Church, which was a short walk from the Karras house – although it was also true that there were very few Greek tavernas and restaurants and pastry shops and food markets, and probably not much of a demand for more.
But Katerina was growing tired of living in a small ethnic community within a large American city, where it seemed to always be noisy, and where you had to walk to the park to see a healthy tree and a flowerbed larger than a windowsill, and where everyone they met and everyone they knew and everyone they would ever know was Greek.
We could afford our own house in Sheboygan, Katerina proposed one evening, after they had gone to bed. They had both worked long shifts at Georgios that day, and Damianos wanted nothing but to collapse onto the mattress and fall asleep. It wouldn’t be a big house, but it would be big enough for us. And we could start a family…
Damianos turned and looked at Katerina in the moonlight. It had been a year since they had talked about having a child. Now, suddenly, everything was changing. Katerina was talking about moving to Sheboygan, but what she was really talking about was opening a door, beginning a new life. Damianos had never set eyes on Sheboygan, had not even visited Wisconsin in the years they had lived in Chicago. But he saw now that Katerina was proposing an adventure as grand as the one they had undertaken when they left Greece as newlyweds. And he realized in that moment that he loved Katerina more than ever, and he was ready to give up everything and move to Sheboygan, sight unseen.
It was the first week in December 1925 when they made the move – and, although Katerina did not know it yet, she was six weeks pregnant with twins. Alexis, who apparently felt responsible for their broken friendship, had told Damianos that he would help the couple move, using his fruit market truck. Damianos and Katerina had suffered through three Chicago winters, but the weather in Wisconsin, as they drove north, seemed worse than anything they had yet experienced. The snow along the road looked to Damianos as if it had been there for a month or more. Driving along the icy Lake Michigan shore, north of Milwaukee, he thought about the pond in Farsala where he had watched Katerina learning to skate. It had been unusually cold that month, almost fifteen years ago, but the memory in Damianos’ mind was warm and sunny. For just a moment, he questioned whether it might not have been better to stay in Chicago Greektown, reconnect with Alexis and Zoe, start a family of their own and build a life there. But he said nothing to Katerina and he pushed the thought out of his head.
You were very impulsive, says Nicholas. Weren’t you?
Papa looks at Nicholas as if he is trying to decide how a son of his has learned such a grownup word, but then he throws back his head and laughs. Papa has always had the laugh and mannerisms of a fat man, sitting in his chair like a king, planting his feet far apart and resting one hand on his stomach – although he is not, and as far as I know has never been, a large man. It was a different time, he says finally. Your mother and I were doing what we felt we needed to do. It was what people did, back then.
I do not really know what this means. Parents and children are always living in different times, but impulsiveness seems like a personal trait rather than something determined by the age you are living in. Nicholas, for example, is more impulsive than me, but I have a hard time imagining either one of us picking up and moving to some place we had never visited before, staking our future on a three-day experience of someone else, even if that someone is your spouse.
Mama ends the reminiscing by reminding us that tomorrow is Sunday, and that Nicholas and I are scheduled to serve the nine o’clock mass at St. Spyridon. Later, we will make our regular drive to Milwaukee to buy food for the week for the Atheneum. There are markets in Sheboygan where we could buy almost everything the restaurant needs, and our parents shop there when they need to. But there are certain things that are not available in Sheboygan, which is why we make the trip to Milwaukee every Sunday afternoon. I realize that this was one of the sacrifices Mama and Papa made when they left Chicago Greektown – not being able to find everything you need, anytime you need it, which can be tough when you are trying to operate a Greek restaurant in a town like Sheboygan. But I also realize that moving to Sheboygan made everything else possible, so I cannot very well complain about choices made.