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
