Legends of Glory and Other Stories

LEGENDS OF GLORY

AND OTHER STORIES

by

HARRY MARK PETRAKIS

Copyrights 2007 by Harry Mark Petrakis

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Originally published by

Southern Illinois University Press

Carbondale, IL 62901

http://www.siu.edu/~siupress

Beauty's Daughter first appeared in the

Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine.

The Birthday, by Harry Mark Petrakis,

Copyright © 2002, by Harry Mark Petrakis,

was first published in New Letters, volume 69,

Number I, fall 2002. It is printed here with the

permission of New Letters and the Curators

of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Christina's Summer was first published in

Odyssey magazine, July-August 2006.

The Rousing of Mathon Sarlas was first published

in NEO magazine, spring 2007.

A Tale of Color was first published in MondoGreco,

Issue 6-7, fall 2001-spring 2002.

The Wisdom of Solon was first published in

Odyssey magazine, March-April 2004.

DEDICATION:

For my dearest Diana,

once my young beauty and my old beauty now,

whose love has nourished my work and my life.

http://harrymarkpetrakis.com

Praise for Harry Mark Petrakis...

Legends of Glory is a masterpiece, a commentary as well as a history of the present era.

— Fr. Andrew M. Greeley, author of The Senator and the Priest and Irish Crystal: A Nuala Anne McGrail Novel

This tale of generations at their warring song is both timely and timeless — as fresh as the news from Iraq and ancient as the sorrows of the Trojan War. Harry Mark Petrakis demonstrates once more his unmatched gift for melding the contemporary and old world — where glory turns to ash and yet endures.

— Nicholas Delbanco, author of Spring and Fall and The Vagabonds

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. Every one 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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SHORT STORIES

Beauty's Daughter

The Birthday

A Tale of Color

The Wisdom of Solon

Christina's Summer

Rites of Passage

A Dishwasher's Tale

The Rousing of Mathon Sarlas

LEGENDS OF GLORY: A Novella

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

BIO/HMP

LEGENDS OF GLORY AND OTHER STORIES

Beauty's Daughter

For years, each time I entered a certain bakery owned by a sullen-faced Greek man and his lovely, more amiable and pleasant wife, I wondered at the odd pairing and if that public image reflected their private lives. That is all any writer requires, a seed giving birth to reflection that spawns the words to make a story.

Perhaps I have done the real-life baker an injustice. He might in truth be the kindest and most loving of husbands and his wife more shrewish in their home than the persona she reveals in public.

But the reality of their lives does not matter in the story, which establishes a reality of its own. If there is anything truer than truth, it is legend.

***

My mother, who bore the name of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty, was also a very beautiful woman. As a child, I remember watching her sitting before her mirror brushing her long black hair. When the brush in her hand descended from the crown to the nape, her hair glistened with a soft, alluring sparkle. Within the cascade of her hair, her face was a pale, smooth oval graced with great dark eyes. In some ways I resembled my mother, but I also had the physical attributes of my father that made me look more coarse and common.

My mother and father's marriage had been arranged by their families. Their parents had been close friends. The families had agreed early that my mother would be married to Nicholas, who was near her own age. But Nicholas was killed in an auto accident when he was nineteen. The grieving families still wished to be bonded by marriage, and they arranged for my mother to wed Nicholas's older brother, Aristides, who was then thirty-four, ten years older than my mother.

I have only seen photographs of the young man who was to have married my mother and who might have become my father. He was handsome, but beyond his physical attributes, there was a lightness and laughter in his face and eyes totally alien to anything I ever saw in the face of my father.

My earliest memories of my father were those of a morose, brooding man. He rarely laughed and seemed somehow to darken any room or conversation he entered. In contrast, my mother was light-hearted and cheerful, quick to laugh and eager to praise. In any gathering of people, men and women were drawn to her, while my father often sat alone in some corner.

My parents owned a small bakery on Halsted Street, one among a number of other Greek stores, and we lived in an apartment above the store. Our bakery had several glass counters that held the trays of assorted pastries. (My task from childhood was to keep the glass of the counters sparkling clean.) There were also two small tables for patrons to sit and have a cup of coffee with their sweets.

The kitchen where we baked our pastries was always scented with the fragrance of flour, butter, and honey. As a child I would sit on a high stool and watch my parents baking. Even during the coldest days of winter, the kitchen was warm and nested. My parents would knead the dough and cut the pastry filo, then put the raw sweets onto the trays and slip them into the ovens. When the trays were removed from the ovens, the pastries were golden brown. My mother dipped them into honey or sprinkled powdered sugar across the crisp crust.

In all their labors together, my parents never seemed in any harmony of spirit. My mother worked buoyantly, smiling at me from time to time, letting me taste a corner of some freshly baked pastry even as my father grumbled that she was fostering in me an addiction for sweets. But my greatest pleasure in the kitchen wasn't to taste the pastries; it was simply to watch my mother. I loved to look at her, marveling even then at her beauty, which was enhanced by the traces of flour and butter like tiny adornments on her cheeks that accentuated the glow of her dark eyes.

My father worked hard but never seemed to take any joy in his labor. He rarely spoke except to hiss some complaint to my mother about something she was doing. Nothing she did appeared to please him. His rebukes were petty and constant. But my mother took them all in good humor, never challenging him, never allowing his comments to provoke a fight.

By the time I was fourteen, helping in the baking myself, I was more bothered by my father's endless criticism than my mother was. On a few occasions, I tried to defend her, and then my father would include me in his reprimand.

Like mother, like daughter, he snapped. If you model yourself after her, you will never do anything right.

I felt an urge to tell my father how much I wanted to be like my mother, but my mother's face warned me not to defy him. Afterward, when he had departed on some errand, she sought to justify his ill temper.

Your father works very hard, Despina, she said. He has built a good business here and is respected as being fair by our patrons and by the other storekeepers. We are warm and have all we want to eat. If he is cross sometimes, it is because there are things that trouble him.

I did not learn until my sophomore year in high school that what troubled my father was that my mother had not been able to give him a son. Within a year after I had been born, she developed some infection in her female organs that left her sterile and unable to conceive any more children.

I told my mother that I had heard my father voice his grievance to an acquaintance who had come into the bakery when he did not know I was in the kitchen. She sought to reassure me that his desire for a son did not mean he did not love me. She told me it was natural for any man to want a son who would carry on his name.

I will keep his name, Mama, I said.

You will always have his name my darling, my mother said, but when you marry, you will also assume your husband's name.

Then I will never marry, I said earnestly. That way I will always have our name and he will not need to be unhappy because he does not have a son.

In my conversations with my mother, I only referred to my father as he. In speaking to him, I never used Papa or Father but used the pronoun you—Do you want me to do this? Will you let me do that?

My father never struck my mother, and I was grateful to him for that. But as I grew into my teen years, I understood that his blows were damaging, emotional ones. As hard as my mother sought to please him and avoid incurring his displeasure, he still complained about her constantly. Whether it was the way she baked, or the length of time it took her to wait on a customer, or the dress she chose to wear to church, or the time she took in being kind to others, his censure and disapproval were relentless. The result was a certain weariness that pervaded the way my mother moved and spoke and a diminishment of pleasure in her work and in her life.

When I entered my senior year in high school, my days were occupied with schoolwork and other activities, and I spent less time in the bakery. But I never forgot my parents for very long. As I sat with a group of girls listening to their chatter, I thought of my mother and father working in silence in the shop. When I was with them, my conversation seemed to lighten my mother's burden. Not being there with her seemed almost a betrayal.

When it was time for my high school senior prom, my mother wanted me to have a fine new dress. She had told me on more than one occasion that I was a pretty girl, and she took time and pleasure in helping me select my clothing. My father invariably complained about the cost, counting such expenditures frivolous and unnecessary.

The dress my mother helped me select was more expensive than anything we had ever bought before. I was worried that my father would be angry with her, but my mother reassured me. As I had expected, though, my father criticized the cost and insisted, The dress goes back to the thief who sold it to you!

For the first time, my mother challenged him. She told him quietly but with a vein of firmness in her voice that she worked in the bakery as long and as hard as he did and that whatever profit they made was hers as well. If she chose to spend some of it on a dress for me, she had that right. My father gave in, grumbling and resentful, and we kept the dress. But the night of the prom was shadowed for me by the memory of his complaints. Afterward, I put the dress away in a storage bag in the back of my closet.

Among the other Greek stores on the street where our bakery was located was a grocery run by two brothers, Kostas and Manolis Sorvonis. They were from the same town in Greece my grandparents had come from. Kostas was the older brother and was married, with two children. Manolis was still single and about my mother's age. He was rather short in stature and not a very handsome man, but he had a laughing, carefree demeanor that made his presence heartwarming in the somber confines of our shop. After Manolis left the bakery, a certain cheerfulness and zest departed with him.

The Sorvonis brothers would buy trays of pastries from us and, from time to time, would have a cup of coffee in our shop with my father while discussing business relating to the street. But Manolis began coming alone into the store more frequently, lingering over a cup of coffee, chatting with my mother. He seemed to know when my father was away and would choose that time to come to our store. My mother and I were both sparked by his presence, and after he left I noticed that my mother returned to work with a renewed animation, a faint flush crimsoning her cheeks.

I think I began to love Manolis the summer after I graduated from high school. He brought me a small gift for my graduation, a music box on which a tiny slender dancer twirled while a haunting melody played. I treasured the music box and often played it a number of times before going to sleep.

Manolis was also a wonderful storyteller. He would relate stories such as that of Jason and the Argonauts so vividly that he might have been one of the shipwrecked members of that valiant crew who sailed with the hero for the Golden Fleece. His stories became so alive for me that at night, in my dreams, I heard the rough voices and laughter of those men bound for glory and adventure.

Manolis also spoke of the great heroines of legend, of Calypso, Nausicaa, and Penelope, who waited ten years for the return of her beloved Odysseus. He told us that all the heroines were really one woman who could be different at various times—shy and timid, promiscuous, loving and beloved.

I understood that in the eyes of Manolis, I remained little more than a child. He was always pleasant and affectionate with me because that was his nature. But in the same way that I found my own feelings for him sharpened, I felt his intensity directed toward my mother. When she waited on a customer, he watched her with a look of reverence on his face. When she brought him another cup of coffee or bent closer to him to give him another sweet, her nearness seemed to make him tremble. As I loved Manolis, I understood that he loved my mother.

I could not be with them every time they were together, so I had no way of knowing for sure how my mother responded to him. But in his presence she seemed to emanate a vibrancy and heightened beauty. She took longer to dress in the morning, longer to brush her hair. She was more careful that the smock she wore was freshly laundered.

I understood the delight Manolis must have felt looking upon my mother's loveliness. But then I could not believe that any man, old or young, existed anywhere on earth who would not love my mother.

One day when the three of us were laughing together, Manolis quoted the lines from a poem he said was written by a great English poet, Lord Byron. He looked at my mother as he spoke the lines:

"There be none of Beauty's daughters

With a magic like thee,

And like music on the waters

Is thy sweet voice to me."

When Manolis had finished, I saw my mother's face, warmed and tender, as if she had just been caressed.

My father noticed that Manolis was spending an inordinate amount of time in the bakery. He complained to my mother that she need not continue a conversation with the grocer after she had served him. He made caustic references to Manolis as indolent and lazy, leaving his brother alone to do all the work.

There was a night when my father was at a meeting of his lodge brothers. Manolis had been with us for several hours, and at closing time, after we locked the door, I left him with my mother in the kitchen while I cleaned the remaining crumbs from the trays. While I worked in the front, their laughter carried to me in waves of mirth.

At some point, I was conscious of a silence in the kitchen. I waited for their voices to resume, but the stillness continued. At the same time, I sensed a curious alteration of emotion in the constricted confines of the store. I was so close to my mother's heart that I suddenly felt my own heart accelerate as if it were beating with hers. A tingling excitement possessed me, and I wanted to go into the kitchen to see what was happening, but I did not dare move or make a sound.

Then, in the tense, highly strung silence, I heard my mother sigh. It was as if she had been holding her breath and suddenly released it. I did not know for sure whether Manolis had kissed her, but I knew that for the first time there had been some physical intimacy between them.

My own feelings were tangled. I felt jealous of my mother and resentful that Manolis would choose her to love instead of me. But an emotion stronger than jealousy was joy that Manolis had found my mother so beautiful that he wished to touch her. From that night on, Manolis did not appear as often in the store. My father commented on his absence by saying, Good riddance to the loafer. But I did not believe that his absence meant he was no longer interested in my mother. I believed both of them understood the danger of revealing their feelings in the presence of each other. I think they were content to wait.

Early in August of that year, my father received word that his sister, Froso, had died in Cleveland. They had never been close, but my father felt obligated to go to the funeral. My mother thought we should go with him, but he did not wish to close the store. He would be gone for only two days, so he left us to look after the business.

That first night after my father had left, while my mother and I ate supper, I noticed a restlessness about her. She walked from room to room, her shadow sweeping fitfully along the walls. Finally she said she was going to go downstairs to roll some dough. I suggested going with her, but she told me she wanted me to