Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [100]
“No.”
“Mikey is a good Greek boy.”
“I know he is. But I don’t love him. I love Milton.”
Tessie expected Desdemona to react with shock or outrage, but to her surprise my grandmother barely seemed to register the confession. “You don’t know this, but Milton asked me to marry him a while ago. I said no. Now I’m going to write him and say yes.”
Desdemona gave a little shrug. “You can write what you want, honey mou. Miltie he won’t get it.”
“It’s not illegal or anything. First cousins can marry even. We’re only second cousins. Milton went and looked up all the statutes.”
Once again Desdemona shrugged. Drained by worry, abandoned by St. Christopher, she stopped fighting an eventuality that had never been fated in the first place. “If you and Miltie want to get married, you have my blessing,” she said. Then, having given her benediction, she settled back into her pillows and closed her eyes to the pain of living. “And may God grant that you never have a child who dies in the ocean.”
In my family, the funeral meats have always furnished the wedding tables. My grandmother agreed to marry my grandfather because she never thought she’d live to see the wedding. And my grandmother blessed my parents’ marriage, after vigorously plotting against it, only because she didn’t think Milton would survive to the end of the week.
At sea, my father didn’t think so either. Standing at the bow of the transport ship, he stared out over the water at his fast-approaching end. He wasn’t tempted to pray or to settle his accounts with God. He perceived the infinite before him but didn’t warm it up with human wishing. The infinite was as vast and cold as the ocean spreading around the ship, and in all that emptiness what Milton felt most acutely was the reality of his own buzzing mind. Somewhere out over the water was the bullet that would end his life. Maybe it was already loaded in the Japanese gun from which it would be fired; maybe it was in an ammunition roll. He was twenty-one, oily-skinned, prominent about the Adam’s apple. It occurred to him that he had been stupid to run off to war because of a girl, but then he took this back, because it wasn’t just some girl; it was Theodora. As her face appeared in Milton’s mind, a sailor tapped him on the back.
“Who do you know in Washington?”
He handed my father a transfer, effective immediately. He was to report to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. On the admissions test, Milton had scored a ninety-eight.
Every Greek drama needs a deus ex machina. Mine comes in the form of the bosun’s chair that picked my father off the deck of the AKA transport ship and whisked him through the air to deposit him on the deck of a destroyer heading back to the U.S. mainland. From San Francisco he traveled by elegant Pullman car to Annapolis, where he was enrolled as a cadet.
“I tell you St. Christopher get you out of the war,” Desdemona exulted when he called home with the news.
“He sure did.”
“Now you have to fix the church.”
“What?”
“The church. You have to fix it.”
“Sure, sure,” Naval Cadet Stephanides said, and maybe he even intended to. He was grateful to be alive and to have his future back. But with one thing or another, Milton would put off his trip to Bithynios. Within a year’s time he was married; later, he was a father. The war ended. He graduated from Annapolis and served in the Korean War. Eventually he returned to Detroit and went into the family business. From time to time Desdemona would remind her son about his outstanding obligation to St. Christopher, but my father always found an excuse for not fulfilling it. His procrastination would have disastrous effects, if you believe in that sort of thing, which, some days, when the old Greek blood is running high, I do.
My parents were married in June of 1946. In a show of generosity, Michael Antoniou attended the wedding. An ordained priest now, he presented a dignified, benevolent figure, but by the second