A year passes without another letter from St. Louis. It is possible now to go for days without thinking about it, and possible to imagine that we will not hear any more from our anonymous author about how Nicholas may or may not have died.
In the spring of 1947, Mama hires a young woman named Thea Apostolos to work as hostess at the Atheneum. Other than the times when Mama was sick or took the train to Chicago to visit her friend Zoe, it is the first time I can remember someone else having the job of greeting customers and showing them to their tables. Mama knows Thea’s mother from St. Spyridon, so I presume she has done this as a favor, although Thea seems too quiet and introverted for the role. Papa notices this too, but Mama tells him that Thea is a sweet girl and a hard worker and that she will grow to feel comfortable if Papa will give her a chance. That scolding is also intended for me, I realize, so I promise Mama to be as personable as I can.
It is not easy, at first. Thea was in high school with Nicholas and me, but she was two years behind us so we had no classes together and I have no recollection of seeing her in the hallways. As reserved as she is as hostess, she is painfully shy around me, almost fearful, as if she sees something dark within me. But her job keeps her in the front area of the restaurant, and mine keeps me mostly in the kitchen, so there is little need or opportunity to interact.
Until Mama invites Thea to Sunday supper. Sunday is still the only day of the week when the Atheneum is closed, and it is very unusual to have anyone at all as a supper guest – especially an employee of the restaurant. I know how much Papa covets our family time, and I can see that Mama’s unilateral invitation surprises and irritates him.
Thea’s going to be with us for a long time, Mama says cryptically. You can get used to that or not. I know her mother and I just want us to get to know her. We have things in common.
Things? Papa repeats in a loud voice. What things?
Mama pauses before answering. She looks at me to make sure that I am listening. Her parents immigrated from Athens before she was born. There’s that. And Thea’s brother died in the war. He was six or seven years older than Thea, so I don’t suppose you and Nicholas would have known him. He enlisted after Pearl Harbor. He fought in Europe for almost a year before he was killed. You and Thea… Mama gives me a steely look. So you both have Greek parents and you both lost brothers in the war. You have those things in common.
At Sunday supper, Mama does most of the talking, which is no surprise. She tells Thea stories about Nicholas and me riding our new bikes to school for the first time, Nicholas and me outfitted in matching coats and ties for our First Communion, Nicholas and me playing two of the wise men at the school Christmas play. Mama’s stories about Nicholas all involve me, as if it were unthinkable for one of us to have done something without the other. And the stories invariably end before our high school years, which I think is when Mama began to feel my brother and I pulling away. First from her and Papa. Eventually, very incrementally, from each other, struggling as we did to create unique identities for ourselves.
Thea listens, and her smile becomes a little more genuine. After some coaxing from Mama, she finally begins talking about her brother.
Christopher was an only child for seven years, she says, before I came along. I don’t remember, of course, but my mother said that for a long time he didn’t appreciate my sharing her attention. When she wasn’t around, he used to come into the nursery and throw beads at me and tell me what an ugly little thing I was. Until my mother caught him and gave him a spanking and made him sit for an afternoon and watch me. Christopher said that was actually when he started to feel different about having a little sister. I don’t know why, but all I remember is my brother being nice to me and protective when other kids were being mean to me.
Papa refills our wine glasses. In the beginning, I think he and I were secret allies about our Sunday supper being commandeered, but all that hostility is gone now. I never had to spank our boys, he says. Thankfully. They came close to earning a spanking once or twice, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Your father – is he the disciplinarian?
Thea shakes her head. I didn’t know my father. He died when I was three. So I guess I knew him, but I don’t remember him. Christopher would tell me stories. I don’t think my father was exactly a disciplinarian, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have been that way with me. Christopher said I made him turn into a bowl of mush.
No one says anything for a minute or two. Mama has made pot roast, and the four of us diligently pick at it with our forks, push the vegetables around on our plates, take small bites and chew slowly. It is quiet enough that I can hear two of the neighbor kids yelling back and forth, a dog barking, a car horn sounding. Mama knows Thea’s mother, so she would have known that Thea grew up without a father. It seems surprising that Mama did not bother mentioning this to Papa and me, but I suppose that, before this evening, neither of us has shown much interest in Thea Apostolos.
I didn’t get to know Thea’s mother until a couple of years ago, Mama explains, when Father Gregory asked if there was anyone who could make Koulourakia for the Easter bake sale. We both volunteered. Hers were better. But this was just two years ago, so I didn’t know Christopher. I wish I had.
He was the best, Thea says. She smiles again, and for the rest of the meal she tells stories about her brother. Mama did the right thing inviting Thea to share Sunday supper with us. And Mama is wise enough to do certain things without consulting her husband and her son.
After supper, after Thea has gone home, Papa finds a music station on the radio, and he and Mama and I wash and dry the dishes. Mama seems unusually pleased. There is a lot more to that girl than meets the eye, she says. I look at Papa and wonder if there was also more to Mama’s supper invitation than our family getting better acquainted with the Atheneum’s new hostess.
Later in the week, after the restaurant has closed for the day, Thea comes back into the kitchen, stands at the stove and watches Papa and me finish putting away the last of the pots and pans. I cannot remember Thea ever coming into the kitchen and it feels strange. A minute later, Mama appears in the doorway, and I get the sense that she and Thea have been conspiring.
My mother wanted to know if you wanted to come to supper at our house on Sunday, Thea says, a little breathlessly.
Papa stops and looks at Mama. He seems confused, as if maybe this invitation is something we should all respond to.
That sounds lovely, dear, Mama says quickly. Doesn’t it, Julian? Maybe your father will want to take me out for dinner that evening.
It is all now quite clear to me. I look at Thea and nod, feeling foolish. Years ago, Mama told Nicholas and me that her own parents were introduced by a Greek matchmaker – an older woman who served also as the town gossip. Apparently, matchmaking and arranged marriages were quite common in Greece, in earlier times. Of course, traditions die, and Mama and Papa found one another at an early age, without the help or interference of a matchmaker. But I wonder sometimes if Mama has always carried the gene. She certainly seems to have stepped into the role rather easily.
My impulse with Thea is to be a little suspicious and a little reluctant. At Sunday supper, I address her mother formally, answering her questions succinctly, declining to initiate any new topics of conversation. I am not hostile, but I am not exactly convivial. Thea sits quietly, mostly watching her mother, taking an occasional bite of food. It occurs to me that she herself might also be a victim in this blatant matchmaking plot, that the two of us might feel exactly the same way about this scheme being carried out by our mothers.
Let me check on the dessert, says Mrs. Apostolos when we have finished dinner. She stands and hurries out of the room. Thea and I exchange covert glances. She smiles. I can recognize a coy smile, and this is not one. It is a mildly resigned, here-we-are-playing-along smile, if I can put words to it.
Your mother is a good cook, I say, rather lamely. Dinner was roasted chicken with Greek olives, roasted potatoes and overcooked brussels sprouts.
Your mother is better, she says in a low voice. Anyway, it wasn’t about the food. Right?
For a moment, I am at a loss.
Your mother and my mother – you know, don’t you, they’ve been plotting this since before I was hired at the restaurant.
After the war ended, dozens of young veterans returned to Sheboygan, offering plenty of good opportunities for young women looking for a mate. Thea, I am certain, would have been attracted to someone with a war story to tell, so I cannot fathom why Mrs. Apostolos would have zeroed in on me as potential husband material for her only daughter, unless Mama filled her head with fables about what an upstanding and interesting person I was.
My mother, Thea continues. Dessert is a plate of cookies. How long do you think it takes to get a plate of cookies from the kitchen? She waits as if she expects an answer. You’re not saying anything, she says finally.
My mouth is suddenly very dry. I take a sip of water, and then another sip. I am surprised that, until now, I have not seen how Thea’s green eyes sparkle when something delights her. I finally find my voice. I don’t mind. I’ve been eating my mother’s food every Sunday of my life. This is…this is nice.
Thea’s green eyes sparkle, and she gives me another confidential smile.
Mrs. Apostolos finally returns with a platter of cookies. They look exactly like Mama’s shortbread cookies, which makes perfect sense. You’ll need to take some of these home to your parents, she tells me. It’s just Thea and me, and I always find myself making more food than we can eat.
At the Atheneum, once I get over my irritation about Mama’s matchmaking, I begin making excuses to leave the kitchen for a minute or two, when work allows, and I observe Thea floating among the tables, talking to the customers, rearranging empty chairs, keeping herself busy. Mama and Papa had not, as I had expected, interrogated me after my supper with Thea and her mother, and at the restaurant they seem as businesslike as always, as if nothing is happening here more than the feeding of our customers. Finally, my resistance having collapsed completely, I decide that I will ask Thea out on a proper date.
I am not entirely surprised to learn that Thea knows more about me than I do about her. She knows about Nicholas and me serving as young acolytes at St. Spyridon and even about Father Gregory’s efforts to recruit me to the priesthood. She knows that Nicholas and I took violin lessons when we were eight, that Nicholas quit after three months and that I quit one day later. She knows about Papa trying to enlist in the military after Pearl Harbor, and how he and Mama fought over our family’s war obligations. Of course she knows that Nicholas and I went off together to Fort McCoy for basic training, and that I escaped military service by shooting myself in the foot. I am just as ashamed of this today as I was when it occurred two and a half years ago, but Thea seems to think of the episode as simply something that happened to me and that had a mostly happy ending for my family. Although, in my mind, my self-inflicted injury will always be associated with my brother’s death in Okinawa.
On the other hand, I know very little about Thea Apostolos, beyond what I learned at that first Sunday supper and the vignettes Mama has shared. But we do, as Mama had said back then, share more things in common than we do with most other young people in Sheboygan.
Strangely, though, as I get to know Thea, it is our differences that most spark my interest. Thea took piano lessons from the time she was twelve until she was seventeen. She still practices thirty minutes a day, on an old upright piano in their family living room. Thea loves Charles Dickens. I fought my way through David Copperfield in high school, and the only writer I have ever read for pleasure is Zane Grey. Thea and I both attend Sunday mass at St. Spyridon, but since her brother’s death in the war her personal connection with God, rather than lapsing, has grown stronger. And this: while Papa has been a constant in my life, Thea has lived almost all of hers without a father, Mr. Apostolos having died three years after her birth and just eight months after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
For our third date, I decide to take Thea to a German restaurant in Milwaukee. The drive is an hour and a half one way, and we leave shortly after mass. Since Sunday is the only day of the week when the Atheneum is closed, all of our dates are on Sunday afternoons and evenings – although I am sure that my parents, if asked, would allow us to take the occasional day off. Mama especially is quite happy to see how well Thea and I are getting along, quite pleased with the results of her matchmaking. I know the route well, having accompanied Mama and Papa to Milwaukee on many a Sunday, to buy food for the week. It is a warm late May afternoon, and the drive is pleasant.
I have never been to a German restaurant and I know very little about German food, but Vic Yarborough has told me the same story four or five times about meeting his grandparents for the first time at a downtown place called Mader’s, eating pork shank and red cabbage and drinking from his father’s beer stein even though Vic was only thirteen. I am not sure exactly why, but the place sounded as if it might make for an intimate date site. At least it did the first time Vic related the story, during one of his more sober, reflective moments. And after I find Mader’s and park the car, I enjoy strolling down Third Street with Thea’s arm in mine, enjoying the aroma, thinking that maybe life will take me to places I have not yet imagined – maybe even to Milwaukee – and that maybe I will not be forever working in the kitchen of the Atheneum in Sheboygan.
At dinner, Thea and I talk about our brothers. She has told stories about Christopher, but I have mostly avoided talking about Nicholas. Thea finds the idea of twins fascinating, and she wants to know if we did actually know what each other was thinking – if we shared a brain, as adults were always remarking with a wink.
Sometimes we did, I say. There were times when the grownups were having a conversation that didn’t interest us, and we would look at each other and we could have our own private conversation without words, while everyone around us was talking.
That’s special. I wish I had had that with Christopher. But of course I was so much younger than him.
But it changed, I say. When we got older. We still had this connection, but you get to the point where you want to be your own person, more than anything. With different interests and different friends. So you don’t share everything. Including a brain.
Thea laughs. There is a candle in a red jar in the center of the table, and as it flickers I see the sparkle in Thea’s eyes. It has taken me a long time to realize it, but she is really very pretty. After our dinner dishes have been cleared away, we sit for a long time sipping our red wine. I feel slightly intoxicated, although I have been careful to nurse my drink. The waiter appears and asks if we would like anything else. He seems impatient, and when I look at Thea, I can see that she is thinking the same thing. Again, she smiles at me.
I think we’ll share an apple strudel, I announce. With ice cream.
We have dated for a little more than a year when I propose. Thea and I have talked about it for several months now. Not about a wedding specifically, but about where we would want to live, whether we would want to continue working together at the Atheneum, how each of us feels about being parents. So when I do actually propose – out on the Sheboygan breakwater, on a Sunday evening, of course – it is somewhat anticlimactic.
Since Thea and I have been dating, she has more or less replaced Vic Yarborough as my companion at the breakwater. This did not sit well with Vic, who said he understood that a girlfriend has priority over a drinking buddy but thought that Thea and I should have picked some other place to enjoy each other’s company. But I love sitting on the rocks, especially in warm weather, looking up at the lighthouse and out at the whitecaps when the breezes are blowing, and doing it with Thea Apostolos is a lot more enjoyable than doing it with Vic Yarborough.
I had expected to tie the knot sometime in the fall, but Thea laughs at this, says that she wants to have a longer engagement and more time to plan the wedding with her mother. So the date is set for June 11, 1949.
After the war, the countries of the world – foes and allies alike – seemed to exhale collectively. But events now seem to be accelerating again. Fascism has been defeated. But Communism, we are told, is ascendant. The Soviet Union, which has suddenly replaced Germany and Japan as America’s greatest foe, imposes a blockade on Berlin; the West responds with airlifts of food and supplies. Some of the senior Nazis who did not kill themselves, or who were not tried at Nuremberg and hanged, have apparently disappeared to far-off places, scattering like cockroaches when the light has been turned on. Japan has repented and asked for the world’s help in rebuilding, but its athletes are barred anyway from participating in the Olympics, as punishment for the country’s role in the war. And in November, President Truman surprises everyone by winning a full term as President.
Mama and Papa do not share the same political views. We go to bed on Tuesday, November 2 believing that Thomas Dewey will be our next president, which pleases Mama. But we wake up on Wednesday to the news that Dewey has lost. There is a lightness in Papa’s step as he pads around the house in his slippers. Wisely, he avoids Mama, avoids all conversation. Mama would not call herself an outright Republican. And Papa, at first, was no fan of Truman. But he warmed to the President last year, when Truman pledged money to help Greece fight the Communists. This made him a hero to a lot of Greek-Americans, including some of the regulars who gather for food and political arguments at the Atheneum. But Mama never forgave President Roosevelt for involving the country in war, and she blames Truman for not ending it before Nicholas was killed.
When spring comes, wedding preparations move into high gear. Mama and Papa are managing to suppress their political differences, so there is peace in the house. As mother of the bride, Thea’s mother is doing most of the planning, although she has accepted Mama’s offer to help. It is hard for Mama to actually help without taking over, but she reins in her impulses to take complete control, which Thea and I appreciate. The wedding itself will be held at St. Spyridon, of course, with Father Gregory officiating. The rehearsal dinner and the wedding reception will be held in the private room of the Atheneum. Thea and I decide to limit the number of guests to forty – twenty for the Apostolos side and twenty for the Pappas side. Our parents argue for higher numbers, but honestly I cannot think of twenty people I know well enough to invite. If Thea feels otherwise, she says nothing, and we prevail in the end.
Thea’s maid of honor will be her friend Elizabeth Murray. Thea and Elizabeth have known each other since second grade and they have long had a pact to be each other’s maid of honor – although they have not seemed especially close since I have known Thea, which leads me to wonder if this arrangement is mostly a matter of obligation. Elizabeth is not yet married, and she has no prospects that I am aware of, so this is only a conjecture.
Nicholas and I were supposed to be each other’s best man, obviously. So my choice is either Kenneth Cobb or Vic Yarborough. Kenneth served in the Navy and was on a destroyer in the Sea of Japan when Hiroshima was bombed, and he returned to a war hero’s welcome from Sheboygan, although he saw almost no action. Kenneth has taken a job at the bank, and we do not see much of each other, but he is one of the few friends I still have from my other life. My life as a twin. Vic, I am certain, expects to be my best man, since he is the closest thing I have to a best friend – and I am pretty much his only friend. But Mama would be disappointed if I asked him. She cannot yet bring herself to speak Vic’s name, and seeing him standing next to me in front of the altar at St. Spyridon would be too much. Disappointing Mama on my wedding day is something I do not want to do, so I decide that I will have to disappoint Vic Yarborough instead.
So, am I throwing you a bachelor party, he asks, or what? It is Friday, evening, just after closing. He has picked me up at the Atheneum and we are driving north, toward the breakwater. Like a coward, I have said nothing about my decision to ask Kenneth to be my best man. I was determined to tell Vic tonight, but he has now brought it up in his typically obtuse way.
I don’t think I want a bachelor party, I say. But thanks.
No bachelor party? Pappas, it’s a tradition. It’s actually the best part of the whole wedding business.
I’m asking Kenneth Cobb to be best man. I say it quickly, as if it were a throwaway conversational line. We promised each other, I add. A lie.
Vic eases up on the accelerator, looks at me. I cannot tell whether he is angry or hurt. Kenneth Cobb? The guy from the bank? The Negro? I didn’t know you guys even knew each other. You’ve never mentioned Kenneth Cobb.
We promised, I lie again. After Nicholas was killed, Kenneth and I promised each other. This makes it hard for Vic to challenge me, but I now feel even worse for involving my brother in the lie.
A long quietness fills the space between us, and it extends for several blocks. The light ahead turns yellow, and Vic is forced to stop. We are less than a mile from the breakwater, but I am no longer sure if that is our destination.
I finally break the silence. You’re going to come, though, right? I want my friends there, so you have to come.
I guess so. Vic checks the rear-view mirror. I think he wants to turn the car around, which is fine with me. But we continue for another block. So no bachelor party, he says, grinding his jaw. If that’s what you want…
That night, I realize that the debate about whether to ask Vic or Kenneth to be my best man has taken place entirely in my head, and that I have assumed that Kenneth would accept. But I have not actually asked. This gives me something else to obsess about, and I sleep more fitfully than usual. But when I stop into the bank in the morning, Kenneth is there at his desk, and he smiles and waves at me, and he says that he is honored to be asked and would be glad to be my best man. He makes a note on his desk calendar. I think maybe he is a little bit puzzled to have been asked, but Kenneth Cobb is on a path to being a bank executive and he has learned not to make others uncomfortable.
Among the twenty Pappas guests at the wedding, only six are exclusively friends of mine: Kenneth Cobb and Vic Yarborough, two other high school friends with whom I lost touch and then reconnected, a buddy of Nicholas with whom I became close in the days after my brother was killed, and Red Mullin. Red wrote several letters to me after I came home from Fort McCoy, and we became sporadic pen pals. While Nicholas went off to fight in Asia, Red was sent to Europe, and he was in a field hospital somewhere near Strasbourg when France was liberated. He came back to his hometown in western Wisconsin with a limp, got a job working at a dairy farm, and resumed his correspondence with me. If he views his limp as ironic, he has not said so. Neither Mama nor Papa know about Red Mullin’s role in my Army career-ending injury. They know him only as someone Nicholas and I trained with at Fort McCoy, so he is a welcome guest at the wedding.
The other fourteen family guests, since we have no known relatives in America, are either prized customers of the Atheneum or friends of my parents – including Alexis and Zoe, who make the trip from Chicago. And Lynette Markey is there, occupying a place alone on the Pappas side of the church. I have seen little of Lynette since I dropped out of economics class, but she and Mama talk, and it was Mama’s idea – her insistence, actually, although I certainly did not object – to invite Lynette to the wedding and the reception. Mama has informed me that Lynette is dating a nice young Irishman – too young to have fought in the war – but Lynette is not yet serious enough about him to bring him along as a wedding date. Mama says she is glad that Lynette is forging ahead with her life, that Nicholas would have wanted this. But I think that part of her is sad to see the world moving on while she continues to struggle with her private grief. I wonder how many people like Lynette the war has created, suspended between the lives they have to live, the routines they need to follow, and the undamaged people they used to be.
Your wedding is supposed to be the most joyful day of your life, and in truth I do feel happier than I have been in years. Since my days as a twin. Thea too seems happier than I have ever seen her, as if a light inside has been switched on. The ceremony proceeds without a hitch, just as we had practiced it a half-dozen times, blemished only by an overly long homily from Father Gregory about allowing God into our lives, and how the spiritual bond between Mary and Joseph is a model for the modern world, and about the wedding at Cana, where Jesus dealt with an unexpected shortage of alcohol by transforming water into wine – which says, he informs us, that there will always be abundance as long as we have faith. I am watching Vic Yarborough smirk through most of the sermon, but he is fortunately sitting several rows behind my parents so they are oblivious.
At the reception, Kenneth Cobb stands and gives a very nice, heartfelt, very appropriate toast. The words were memorized and perfectly delivered, and I tell myself how thankful I am that I decided to ask him to be my best man. Vic is standing off to the side, looking as if he has been drinking for hours, which he probably has been. Thea has never said anything about my friendship with Vic, but I think that today will probably be the end of it. As Mama would say, we all have to grow up sometime, and as we do, some of us grow in different directions.
While Thea and her mother and Mama did most of the planning for the wedding, one of my few tasks had been to look for a place to live. Thea’s mother offered to have us move into her house, at least for our first few months as a couple. She offered to move into Thea’s bedroom so that we could have the master. But Thea and I both wanted to start our lives together in our own place, so I was diligent about my assignment. In the months before the wedding, I looked at apartments near the lake, small houses in a new neighborhood on the south side of Sheboygan, an old apartment building one block from St. Spyridon, even a caretaker’s house on a farm west of town. Nothing seemed quite right until I found a small house that happened to be exactly six blocks from my childhood home and six blocks from Thea’s home. The real estate agent who showed it, Max Farley, was a regular at the Atheneum, and he offered to pay the first six months of rent himself, as a wedding gift, should Thea and I decide to take the place. Max had not been on Mama’s invitation list, but I told myself I could pull some strings, considering. I walked through the house imagining Thea and I here, wondering if I needed to consult with my fiancée or if I had been empowered to make the decision myself. And then I stepped into the living room, with its large picture window looking west, looking out onto an open field. It was the last week of April, and the field was a vast blanket of yellow wildflowers.
I asked Max Farley what the flowers were. Yellow was Thea’s favorite color, and I wanted to be able to tell her what she could expect to see when I showed her the view from the picture window of our first house.
The flowers? said Max. Their name? He scratched his chin. You got me. They’re yellow. I couldn’t tell you what they are. Sorry.
It is now June 11, and the wildflowers have mostly disappeared. But Thea saw them before they did, and when the wedding reception is over we thank everyone for coming and drive to our new home, exactly six blocks from the houses where we each grew up, and we sit on our new sofa looking out the picture window, looking west, at the field where the yellow wildflowers once bloomed, and will bloom again.
On Monday, Thea and I are back at the Atheneum. As their wedding gift, Mama and Papa are giving us a three-day honeymoon at a hotel in New York City. Neither of us has been to New York, and we may never go there a second time, so we decide to put off the honeymoon until December, when the city will be dressed up for Christmas.
The summer passes, fall arrives, the weather turns cool. It has been four years since the end of the war, four years since the letter from St. Louis to The Pappas Family arrived. I still feel some apprehension about another envelope appearing in the mailbox, to the point where I occasionally drive by the house after work, ahead of Mama and Papa, to see if the day’s mail includes anything unusual. I know that the chances of intercepting a letter using such a haphazard approach is remote, but it eases my anxieties in the short term. Thea and I agreed before the wedding that we would not keep any secrets from one another, large or small. But I have not told her about the letter from St. Louis, and I hope that it never surfaces.
For whatever reason, Thea is occasionally melancholy, which I am not used to and do not know how to handle. I bring home books from the library about New York City. Looking at the books together and planning our trip proves to be a good antidote for gloominess. When the day finally arrives, Thea tells me that she feels like she did on our wedding day, like a newlywed all over again.
New York City is a long way from Sheboygan – a long drive south along Lake Michigan and then a very long train ride east, offering opportunities for all kinds of things to go wrong. Honestly, I feel more anxious about the trip itself than I do about being in New York. But Thea is excited about our first real adventure, so I keep my anxieties private.
On Sunday morning, December 11, Mama and Papa drive us down to Chicago where we have tickets on the Lake Shore Limited for New York City. At the station, Mama asks if we remembered that today is our six-month anniversary. I did not, but I appreciate Mama reminding me in her not-so-subtle way – and probably reminding Papa as well, since he is listening impassively in the driver’s seat – that anniversaries are important dates in a marriage. Important for wives especially.
Alone finally, Thea and I settle in for what is scheduled to be a 20-hour trip. An overweight, impatient-looking businessman spends the first hour pacing back and forth from one car to the next, having private conversations with himself, before plopping down into a vacant seat across the aisle from Thea and me.
If we keep going at this rate, the trip will take more like 24 hours, he informs us.
This is my first train trip, so I have nothing to compare it to, but I had thought we had been traveling at what seemed to be reasonably good speed. Should we be going faster? I ask.
The man studies me as if he were trying to decide what kind of imbecile he was dealing with. Faster, and fewer stops. It feels like our engineer is slowing down and almost stopping at every intersection. Do you know how far it is to New York? You two are going to New York, right?
Thea leans over, tells the man that we are on our honeymoon and that today is our six-month anniversary. Then, to be polite, she asks him exactly how far New York is.
If you’re driving, it’s about 800 miles. If you’re taking the Lake Shore Limited, which you are, it’s more like 900. That’s the railroad system for you. Slow, uncomfortable, indirect. Sleeping cars where you can’t sleep and dining cars with lousy food. And if you start complaining to yourself that the train’s not going fast enough, think about the Crash of 1940.
The man looks at Thea as if he wants her to ask about the Crash of 1940, which I am fairly certain she does not. He takes a deep breath and tells us anyway, narrating as if the trip is just now happening.
April 1940. The Lake Shore Limited is heading west. The train leaves Albany twenty or thirty minutes behind schedule, and the engineer decides to try to make up the time. So he cranks up the speed to a pretty good clip, and he’s feeling pretty good about getting back on schedule. The train is about 75 miles east of Syracuse, near a town called Little Falls on the Mohawk River, when it takes a sharp curve too fast. And wham! The man suddenly claps his hands, startling Thea and me.
Wham? I ask.
The Lake Shore Limited jumps the tracks. One of the worse train accidents in American history. Thirty-one people killed. True story. And you know, that engineer had more than thirty years of experience, and he had taken that curve a thousand times. So he should have known better. And he was just a month away from retirement. True story.
When I imagined all the things that could go wrong on the trip from Chicago to New York, a catastrophic train crash was not one of them, but now I have something to think about for the next eighteen or nineteen or twenty hours. Thea has slumped down in her seat as if she is trying to make herself disappear.
The trip takes more than 22 hours, but our engineer seems to be unconcerned about the schedule. It is an uneventful trip, stopping in the expected places like Toledo and Cleveland and Erie and Buffalo and Syracuse, as well as towns I had never heard of. Thea and I catnap as much as we can, but we are both awake when the Lake Shore Limited departs Syracuse for Little Falls, New York. An hour and a half later, we are in Albany, and then, finally, we are in the home stretch, heading south along the Hudson River, New York City drawing near. Our businessman friend left us around dinnertime, and he has not been back since.
Mama and Papa have reserved a room for us at the Hotel Manhattan, on Madison Avenue and 42nd Street. Before moving to Chicago, they had lived for a time in Queens, so they became quite familiar with New York. They had never stayed at a hotel in Manhattan or eaten in a Manhattan restaurant, but when they were not working they were often out exploring the city. Papa told me they had spent several days walking through the lobbies of some of New York’s grand hotels, pretending to be guests, until a porter at the Algonquin asked them if they had business at the hotel and shooed them away. Papa had remembered wandering into the Hotel Manhattan with Mama, smiling at the desk clerk who smiled back, circling the lobby, then exiting and standing in front of the hotel, watching the streetcars rumble past. He had remembered, and he and Mama had agreed that it would be a good place for Thea and me to spend our three-day honeymoon.
The hotel is very nice, and New York is as festive as we had expected, but Thea and I spend most of the time doing things that we could have done in Sheboygan – though not on quite the same grand scale. We walk to Rockefeller Center and admire the Christmas tree. We ice skate for an hour on rented skates. We wander down Park Avenue looking into the decorated shop windows. We sit on a park bench drinking hot chocolate and listening to Christmas carols piped over a loudspeaker. I can understand why Mama and Papa enjoyed living in New York after they left Greece. But I can also understand why they wanted to leave, and why they settled finally in Sheboygan.
Two weeks later, Thea and I are back home celebrating our first Christmas as a couple. And on New Year’s Eve, Papa closes the restaurant even earlier than usual. Thea and I and Thea’s mother have all been invited to dinner at my parents’ place. Mama has been cooking and baking since early morning. She wants everyone there by one o’clock, so we have plenty of time to eat and drink and tell stories about our trip to New York. It is six o’clock when Mama brings out the Vasilopita. Before slicing into it, Papa reminds everyone to look for the coin, and he tells us – now that he has a new audience – the story of Saint Basil of Caesarea who started the tradition of enlisting local women to bake coins into loaves of bread, which were then distributed to the poor. I think Papa has become somewhat more spiritual since Thea and I married. I don’t know why.
After the storytelling, I watch Papa slice the bread, hoping that either Thea or her mother end up with the coin. I think about other celebrations. I think about our family’s first New Years’s Eve without my brother in the house, when Mama baked the coin into a bun which she set aside for Nicholas. I had not thought about it since that night. I wonder if Mama has kept the bun.
This year, the coin goes to Thea, which makes everyone happy. It is one of the best New Year’s Eve celebrations I can remember, even though Thea and I do not quite make it to midnight.