Tales of the Heart

TALES OF THE HEART

Dreams and Memories of a Lifetime

by

HARRY MARK PETRAKIS

Copyright 1999 by Harry Mark Petrakis

All rights reserved

Smashwords Edition

Originally published by

Ivan R. Dee

Chicago, IL

DEDICATION:

For my dearest Diana

fifty and three years as sweetheart,

wife, companion, and

maker of superb baklava

http://harrymarkpetrakis.com

Praise for Harry Mark Petrakis...

In his tales, violence is measured by brotherhood, passionate hate by passionate love. And in the end it is man who, despite his weaknesses and his blindness, has the right to victory.

- Elie Weisel

I've often thought what a wonderful basketball team could be formed from Petrakis characters. Everyone of them is at least fourteen feet tall.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Harry Mark Petrakis is good news in American literature.

- Issac Bashevis Singer

I've always thought Harry Mark Petrakis to be a leading American novelist.

- John Cheever

Joy. A strange word when you think of contemporary fiction... or contemporary poetry, or contemporary anything. I am tempted to say that Petrakis is unique in our time because in his stories he can produce it, and he does regularly. It is as if some wonderful secret had been lost, then rediscovered by him.

- Mark Van Doren

Petrakis has something more important than skill; a deep and rich humanity.

- Rex Warner

Petrakis has something more important than skill; a deep and rich humanity.

- Rex Warner

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

PREFACE

FAMILY

ELLIS ISLAND MEMORY

MEMORIES OF EASTER

CIRCLES OF MEMORIES AND LOVE

CITY LIGHTS

GROWING TOGETHER

A WRITER TO HIS SONS

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF TWO MOTHERS

COMMUNITY

A LEAP OF FAITH

THE LESSON

REFLECTIONS ON A PHOTOGRAPH

THE HORSE GAMBLERS

THE WARMTH OF HALSTED STREET

A GREEK RESTAURANT MAN'S FINAL PAGE

SNARED BY A DECENT IMPULSE AT CHRISTMAS

WORLD

FIRST VISIT TO GREECE

LETTERS FROM ISRAEL

A CYPRUS JOURNEY

DEATH OF THE HOTEL DES ROSES

AN EASTER ODYSSEY

NOTES FROM AN ENGLISH JOURNEY

BIO/HMP

TALES OF THE HEART

PREFACE

In the classes where I have been teaching writing for many years, I have frequently been asked the difference between an essay and a short story. The customary response would be that the difference is one of focus and transition. In a short story one utilizes imagination and creates a world that might have been. In the essay one begins with a core of fact and creates a world that is. But the truth is that for me the difference barely exists. As far as I am concerned the essay is simply another way of telling a story.

In my childhood I had an old Uncle who would visit us in the small rustic cottage where we spent the summers. We would sit on the screen porch at night, darkness all around us except for the oil lamps flickering shadows across the mesh of the screens where tiny moths flailed their wings in an effort to get through to the flame. Within this haunted setting of lamplight, shadows and flailing moths, my uncle told us stories.

I could never be certain nor did I care whether he was telling us the truth or spinning a fantasy. What was important was that he conjured up for us a life more real, for a little while, than the life we were living.

I think my wonder and delight in storytelling was born then, a wonder and delight I feel to this day.

H. M. P.

Dune Acres, Indiana

FAMILY

ELLIS ISLAND MEMORY - FAMILY

I hold a browned photograph of my parents and four of my older brothers and sisters taken shortly before they emigrated to America from the island of Crete in 1916. In the seventy years that have passed since then, the countenances in the portrait have remained suspended in time. I inherited the photograph from one of my brothers, and it has hung in the houses where I have lived. Each time I look at it I am reminded that all of life is a mystery that lies not as much in the end as in the beginning.

In the portrait my patriarchal father is seated in an armchair, his family clustered beside him. He wears the ankle-length black cassock and high black stovepipe hat which were the raiment of Greek Orthodox priests in that period. His black hair flows into a black, bushy beard. His eyes are unwavering and vigilant, as if he understands he is the guardian of his flock. Suspended from a chain around his neck hangs the golden cross I saw him wearing for the last time in his coffin thirty-five years later.

My mother, short and small, stands close beside him. She was then in her early twenties, and her eyes and face radiate a serenity and sweetness. I was born in 1923, and another sister, Irene, was born in 1924. As I remember my mother from my childhood, hardship and suffering had carved lines and shadows in her cheeks and about her lips. I can never recall her eyes as tranquil as they appear in the photo.

Dan, my brother, was the oldest of the children. His hair is cropped short and razor-cut above his ears. He wears a white shirt and an oversized tie that dangles so far below his belt and pants it seems part of a clown's apparel. He has the bright, curious stare of a youth surveying new wonders.

Beside him, perhaps perched on a box or chair because she's a head taller than Dan, is my sister Barbara. Her abundant hair frames her extraordinarily large and lucent eyes. The curls falling across her shoulders look fair, although I remember her hair darker later on. Above her head, a large white ribbon billows like a wind-blown sail.

The remaining two children, my sister Tasula and my brother Manuel, appear much younger and smaller although they are separated from the other children by only a few years. Manuel has hair as curly and long as Tasula. She wears a white frock, he a white sailor suit. Both wear white button shoes and white ankle-length socks. But it is their eyes, innocent and comely, that resemble one another as if they were twins.

When the photograph was taken in Crete, they were on the eve of their voyage across the ocean to America. My father had been offered a community in Price, Utah, comprised of young immigrant Cretan coal miners. They had built a church and required a priest. My father could provide them a link to the families and church they had left in Greece, but he and my mother suffered over the decision whether to leave Crete. Their greatest fears were for their children. Yet it was because of the children, and particularly the educational opportunities they felt America would provide for them, that they made the decision for the journey.

My family posed for the final photograph, leaving it as a keepsake for parents, siblings and friends they were leaving. Afterwards they traveled from Crete to Piraeus, the port of Athens, and boarded a ship for America. Although the conditions and the duration of the crossings had improved over those journeys made in the earlier part of the century, there were still hardships. The children developed a form of ship's fever and Dan suffered from a severe dysentery. There were several frightening lifeboat alerts when German U-boats were detected watching them. (A week before their departure, a U-boat had fired on and damaged an American freighter.) They also endured a fierce storm that rocked their ship with huge waves. They spent almost all of a night in their small cabin, huddled together in prayer, my mother telling me later, certain we were going to die, our bodies lost forever in the sea.

When their ship entered New York harbor, they first saw the imposing Statue of Liberty. The passengers crowded the rails to view it, many weeping and kneeling to say their prayers, a few who knew the lines from the poem by Emma Lazarus repeating them to others. At different times in the years that followed, I heard my mother and brother and sister speak of their first sight of the statue.

I felt grateful she was a woman, my mother said. I felt she would understand a woman's heart.

I wondered what she was holding, my sister Barbara said. Then I recognized it as a torch like the Olympians carried in ancient Greece.

I had read in school about the Colossus of Rhodes, my brother Dan said. ''I thought this must be the Colossus of America."

Many years later, in a letter written to me less than six months before he died, Dan mentioned a dream in which he had seen the statue. Perhaps, nearing the end of his life, his spirit returned to what he recalled as the beginning of his life in America.

But my family's entrance into America wasn't without stress and fear. Even after they had passed through the examining areas, the representative from the parish who would escort them back to Utah hadn't arrived. In the confusing exchanges with an inspector and interpreter who knew little more Greek than my father knew English, a decision to detain my family overnight was construed by my father as imprisonment. In his effort to show the officials that he wasn't a pauper and should be allowed to enter the country, my father showed them a gold coin he had carried from Greece. To authenticate its purity, he bit the metal. I saw the coin years later and it seemed to me to reveal a faint indentation from my father's bite. (Or was it the intensity of his emotion I remembered when I saw the coin?)

His protests were to no avail. They were sent to the male and female dormitories, my father with the boys, my mother with the girls. It was the first time they had ever been separated.

My father would talk later in his life about the first night on Ellis Island as his introduction to democracy. He spent the dark, sleepless hours, frantic about my mother and the girls, hearing the snores and mutterings in strange tongues of strangers in beds around him. When the first traces of dawn lightened the sky, he rose and walked to a window. Through the bars he saw the statue that loomed in the harbor. He had seen it from the ship the day before, had been as impressed with it as the others, but he saw it that morning with a sharper definition and perception. The mist gilded the majestic head, the torch emerged like a sun from the receding night. He saw the statue suddenly as a spiritual incarnation of some ancient, beneficent goddess, sent to console him in his anguish, reassuring him that a fortuitous destiny would prevail. And, later that morning, the escort from Utah arrived and my family entered America.

This is the story I remember as I look at the photograph. In the sprawling multiplicity of nationalities and races that make up our nation now, myriad other stories are enclosed in family albums, within similar old pictures, in diaries, journals and letters. They symbolize the triumph of diversity, the persistence of a dream, the longing for a sanctuary of green leaves and of peace, of an education for one's children, and the free worship of one's faith. All of life, my father often said, was a miracle we must try to deserve each day. And the greatest miracle in his life, he told us, was to have brought his family to America.

The miracle renders insignificant the ephemeral glitter of celebrations, the minting of medallions and the plethora of gaudy and tawdry souvenirs with which we mark these events. These have nothing to do with the vision my father saw from the barred window of his compound on that misted dawn seventy years ago. He sensed the meaning of the great statue clearly then, and that is the dream each of us, sons and daughters of immigrants, grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants, must renew and fulfill in our own lives.

MEMORIES OF EASTER

When Spring comes each year and the last frosted cold and snow loosens from the crust of the ground, in that season Persephone returns from the womb of Hades, and the earth enters a cycle of fertility once more. During this rebirth, there is enacted the celebration of Easter, the most significant ritual of the Greek Orthodox Church as it is for other Christians.

The Easters of my childhood were a time of magic and anticipation, not the suspense that preceded the beribboned packages and ornamented trees of Christmas but a more mystical and haunting experience. These rituals gained added importance in my heart because my father was the priest of our parish church on South Michigan Avenue, and his vivid image dominated the whole of the Passion of Christ. I will never forget his tall, regal figure clad in the colorful and glittering vestments, leading the services of worship, his voice resounding to every corner of the church, his face glistening in the curling mist of candles and incense with the lambent glow of a prophet. And his marvelous, long, slender-fingered hands which, when he held them aloft, burst like pale flowers from the encirclement of his sleeves.

The Passion of Easter would begin with forty days of fasting. My father's fast would be stringent and relentless while ours was haphazard. But as we came closer to the beginning of Holy Week, stricter attention was paid to our abstention from eggs, cheese, milk, butter, and meat. In our classrooms we were told and retold zealously the story of Christ.

An animation and excitement communicated itself through our house, and in my mother, sisters, and brothers. My father rose earlier and returned home much later, sleeping only a few meager hours a night. In this time, despite his weariness, a vibrance radiated from him, and I understand now it was his absorption into the ritual of the Passion. He mustered his strength for the rigorous demands upon him, the hours of confession he listened to each day, the exhausting and lengthy services every night.

We moved through the early part of the week, attending church and then arriving at Holy Thursday, the night of the crucifixion, the agony of Christ on the Cross lamented and shared. All morning and afternoon of Good Friday the women and children carried baskets upon baskets of flowers to decorate the catafalque, which contained the coffin of Christ, bedecking the bier with flowers twined within flowers. Until the last hour of the Good Friday services late that night when the death of Christ was sanctified.

But all our week moved toward the great revelation of Saturday night, the night of Anastasis or Ascension. From the early part of the evening when we first entered the portico of the church, whispering excitedly to our friends, purchasing the long, slender white candles with the tiny paper cups to catch the drippings of wax, we waited in a fever of anticipation. All through the hours of the evening we shifted restlessly in our seats. Sometimes catching the eye of a friend, we managed to slip from our pews, past the vigilant gaze of the trustees, to gather giggling and whispering in the washroom and corridors of the basement. Often a trustee would zealously drive us back up to church, but whether we were dispersed in our loitering or not, as the final hour neared toward midnight we pushed our way back to our places, accepting the reproving looks of the adults for our absence. By this time the crowd filled every pew, pressed into every corner of the church. As the last few moments before midnight elapsed, we stood thronged and jammed together in a common bond. Perhaps the older people remembered in those moments the Easters in their villages in the old country, the services in small churches on the slopes of the mountains. But for those of us too young to have such memories, the emotion of the anticipation had its particular flavor.

We listened to the voices of the black-robed and white-collared girls of the choir, led by the sonorous and resonant baritone of our choirmaster, Mr. George. Kyrie Eleison, Lord Have Mercy, chanted an old man with a face like a weathered spruce. Kyrie Eleison, prayed the old, somber-faced women in black. Kyrie Eleison, chanted my father, and the choir responded, Kyrie Eleison, Kyrie Eleison.

At midnight, the moment we had been waiting for, the packed and crowded church would be plunged into total darkness. To this day I can recall the chill along my flesh as that blackness descended. For Jesus Christ was in that darkened church. I felt it in my bones, perhaps a haunted and blooded memory of the somber catacombs where our forebears gathered to whisper their prayers. Within the encompassing darkness was the presence of His thorn-crowned and tormented head stirring within the tomb.

We would draw closer together, my body pressed against my mother, drawing what comfort I could from her nearness, from the proximity of my brothers and sisters, my friends and their parents. There would be a holding of breath, a fastened silence, unbroken except for a few small children whimpering, a baby crying, an old man coughing.

Then a great exhilaration would sweep like a wind through the tense and crowded church. For before us, in the confines of the Sanctuary which contained the Altar table of marble, a single, flickering taper of flame appeared. The flame moved forward, and as it emerged from the Sanctuary, I saw my father, his hand holding aloft the candle, his face glistening and disembodied with the beauty of an angel of the Lord or a Prometheus delivering the