Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [91]
“It was?”
“Just like in church. You could have fooled me.”
Which brings me to the final complication in that overplotted year. Worried about what Milton and Tessie were getting up to, my grandmother wasn’t only trying to marry Milton off to somebody else. By that summer she had a husband picked out for Tessie, too.
Michael Antoniou—Father Mike, as he would come to be known in our family—was at that time a seminarian at the Greek Orthodox Holy Cross Theological School out in Pomfret, Connecticut. Back home for the summer, he had been paying a lot of attention to Tessie Zizmo. In 1933, Assumption Church had moved out of its quarters in the storefront on Hart Street. Now the congregation had a real church, on Vernor Highway just off Beniteau. The church was made of yellow brick. It wore three dove-gray domes, like caps, and had a basement for socializing. During coffee hour, Michael Antoniou told Tessie what it was like out at Holy Cross and educated her about the lesser-known aspects of Greek Orthodoxy. He told her about the monks of Mount Athos, who in their zeal for purity banned not only women from their island monastery but the females of every other species, too. There were no female birds on Mount Athos, no female snakes, no female dogs or cats. “A little too strict for me,” Michael Antoniou said, smiling meaningfully at Tessie. “I just want to be a parish priest. Married with kids.” My mother wasn’t surprised that he showed interest in her. Being short herself, she was used to short guys asking her to dance. She didn’t like being chosen by virtue of her height, but Michael Antoniou was persistent. And he might not have been pursuing her because she was the only girl shorter than he was. He might have been responding to the need in Tessie’s eyes, her desperate yearning to believe that there was something instead of nothing.
Desdemona seized her opportunity. “Mikey is good Greek boy, nice boy,” she said to Tessie. “And going to be a priest!” And to Michael Antoniou: “Tessie is small but she is strong. How many plates you think she can carry, Father Mike?” “I’m not a father yet, Mrs. Stephanides.” “Please, how many?” “Six?” “That all you think? Six?” And now holding up two hands: “Ten! Ten plates Tessie can carry. Never break a thing.”
She began inviting Michael Antoniou over for Sunday dinner. The presence of the seminarian inhibited Tessie, who no longer wandered upstairs for private swing sessions. Milton, growing surly at this new development, threw barbs across the dinner table. “I guess it must be a lot harder to be a priest over here in America, huh?”
“How do you mean?” Michael Antoniou asked.
“I just mean that over in the old country people aren’t too well educated,” Milton said. “They’ll believe whatever stories the priests tell them. Here it’s different. You can go to college and learn to think for yourself.”
“The Church doesn’t want people not to think,” Michael replied without taking offense. “The Church believes that thinking will take a person only so far. Where thinking ends, revelation begins.”
“Chrysostomos!” Desdemona exclaimed. “Father Mike, you have a mouth of gold.”
But Milton persisted, “I’d say where thinking ends, stupidity begins.”
“That’s how people live, Milt”—Michael Antoniou again, still kindly, gently—”by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? ‘Tell me a story.’ That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. And what story does the Church have to tell? That’s easy. It’s the greatest story ever told.”
My mother, listening to this debate, couldn’t fail to notice the stark contrasts between her two suitors. On one side, faith; on the other, skepticism. On one side, kindness; on the other, hostility. An admittedly short though pleasant-looking young man against a scrawny, pimply, 4-F boy with circles under his eyes like a hungry wolf. Michael Antoniou hadn’t so much as tried to kiss Tessie, whereas Milton had led her astray with a woodwind. D flats and A sharps licking at her like so many tongues of flame,