And desserts. Cinnamon-cheese pastries, honey-laden phyllo dough vessels full of ground pistachios.
We lingered over each course. Each offering. Each bite. We talked and laughed, whiling away hours.
Eventually, we moved outside for the evening’s final coffee and nightcap. The night sky was clear. The world close and warm. No shadows between us.
Mania remarked to Nancy on our friendship. “It’s not something that can ever be re-created,” Nancy replied, crying.
Avraam, who didn’t understand the grim specter of my health, asked questions. I cried as I explained it might be ALS, a death sentence.
“But . . . ” I eked out, “no matter what happens, I am fortunate. I have met all of you. I can tell my children: ‘You are not sentenced by genes to suffer.’
“I now know that part of me came from a great man. And great people.”
I talked of the parents who adopted me. Who sacrificed for me. Who expected great things for me, stood by me, and made me who I am.
I said I felt like the luckiest person in the world.
And I did.
I might have been dying, but that night—on that terrace, after that meal, with those people—I was experiencing the full wonder of life.
I had arrived a stranger, but I was leaving with a new family.
I was unafraid.
Fearless.
I carried those feelings home with me, along with an antique bracelet—a gift from Soulla, exactly the kind I would have bought myself—and two cherished possessions found on Panos’s body when he died: his rosary and his Saint Andreas medallion.
I had the medallion mounted on onyx. I wear it often as a necklace, close to my heart.
The Bible
Two years later, my trip to Cyprus still resonated in my soul. Among my relatives I had found no answers, but I had found peace. I had felt accepted, as I rarely had before.
Even though I had never known Panos, it was the land of my heritage. My second home.
I wanted to return. To take John, introduce him around, and hear him assure me that he understood. That he would take the children there one day to meet their relatives.
I wanted to thank Soulla and her family.
To finish what I had started and discover more of the man my birth father had been.
I wanted to return in the spring. The cruise with Stephanie was in March. I was saving the summer for my children, when they would be out of school. That left two months for Cyprus.
But Nadia, my spitfire cousin, had been diagnosed with cancer and was in the middle of chemotherapy. Then Soulla had spinal surgery, which necessitated a long convalescence. The trip would have to be delayed until June.
No bother. I still had time.
And one important thing to do for Soulla before I returned.
To get her a gift as dear as the ones she gave me.
In Cyprus, it was clear that Panos’s family had no love for Barbara, the American woman Panos had married—and divorced—and married again. And divorced a second time.
Barbara was “a spoiled American princess,” they said. She had hissy fits at restaurants. Refused to participate in events if she was mad at Panos or someone else.
Each time they said her name—ruefully—they precisely pronounced each syllable BAR-ba-ra: “BAR-ba-ra was difficult!” Panos’s nephew-in-law Avraam said, circling a finger around an ear.
The final insult, according to Soulla, was when she asked BAR-ba-ra to bring the family Bible back to Cyprus for Panos’s funeral, and she had not.
“If you meet her and see the Bible—grab it!” Soulla said to me, partly in jest. Words I never forgot.
I became determined to get that Bible for Soulla.
And to meet BAR-ba-ra. I mean, Panos had married and divorced her twice? I was fascinated. Must have been one helluva love.
So I wrote BAR-ba-ra in Jacksonville, Florida, where she and Panos last lived. The letter returned unopened. A dead end. I needed help.
I thought of Pat McKenna. Pat is a nationally known private investigator, having worked for the defense in O. J. Simpson’s murder trial, William Kennedy Smith’s rape case, and Casey Anthony’s murder trials.
I had met Pat a decade before on a lower-profile case. A mother had left her toddler sleeping at home while she picked up a present nearby on tony Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.
The two-year-old had woken up and drowned in their backyard pool. The rest of the press pilloried her, partially because of the nature of the errand.
I believed as a mom that it was immaterial whether the woman left the child to buy Louis Vuitton luggage or a gallon of milk. She left the child. That was the crime.
Pat thanked me at the end of the case for being fair.
Pat and I hadn’t spoken much since. We were Facebook friends, though, so I sent him a private message.
I deliberated how dramatic I should make it and thought, Ah, why not? It is what it is.
I wrote:
Dear Pat,
I would like to hire you to find somebody. It’s a dying wish . . .
He showed up at my front door the next day, offering his services for free. Later, he told me he hadn’t even noticed the “dying wish” part. He just wanted to help me if he could.
Now, Pat is a charmer. His premier investigative skill is talking to people. The man could talk a cat out of a box of mice. He also uses the saltiest damn language of any human I know.
“I was on the balls of my ass too!” he said, explaining how he had been flat broke when a tabloid newspaper offered him a million bucks to spill secret details of O. J.’s murder case.
Pat turned the offer down.
He spares no salty spite for people who opine on Casey Anthony while sitting at computers in their dirty underwear. But he phrases that in a far more crass way.
Yes, Pat’s remarkably crude.
“I’ll either charm it out of her or intimidate it out of her,” Pat said, when I explained about Barbara. “I’ll give her a dirt nap if she doesn’t give you that Bible!”
But also remarkably dear.
When he phoned BAR-ba-ra the first time—it seemed to take him about five minutes to find her with a database search—Pat had to step away from me to regain his composure, choking up as he explained to her my health.
Barbara, for her part, was completely unaware of my existence.
And completely disbelieving.
She was so embroiled with lawyers and legal issues involving Panos’s estate, even ten years after his death, that she mistook our call to be an offshoot of that.
“No ma’am,” Pat said. “Susan has no interest in the estate. She wants nothing of you except information about Panos and his family Bible, if you would be so kind.”
They hung up. Soon came a call from Barbara’s protective older brother, an elderly man from Texas.
Now, you must understand, Texas is a unique state with a rebel spirit all its own, the one I imagine most likely to secede from the United States if given the chance.
Texas is so large it has its own power grid—one of only three in the United States: one for the eastern half, one for the western half, and one for Texas.
And this guy had an oversize Texas personality. The man once sued Panos, his own brother-in-law. That’s how brash they are in Texas.
He had choice words for Pat and me, spoken in a Texas twang so thick my ears rang. “I hear you’re harassin’ my sister,” he growled.
Barbara, he said, had had a heart attack and a stroke. “You’re gonna kill her. My friend is running for top prosecutor, and I’m helping him get elected. He says you could get charged with accessory to murder. I would hate for you to get charged or sued.”
Bring it on! I thought.
He twanged on about how Panos couldn’t have fathered a child beca
use he was made sterile after an accident in the early 1960s. Now, he could tell me Panos’s penis got cut off and launched into space, and I would still believe he was my birth father. So I was not one scrap deterred by his threats.
Of course, Pat wasn’t either.
Pat spoke gingerly to him, promised to send him photos and records, and asked him to reconsider when he got them.
“Fuckin’ hillrod,” Pat said as we hung up, using his own word combo of hillbilly and nimrod.
In the following days, Pat fielded long calls from a curious Barbara, convincing her to meet us. Barbara did not believe I was Panos’s daughter, but she was willing to give me the Bible if it brought me comfort.
Soon after, Pat, Nancy, and I flew to meet her in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she had just moved. It was my first airplane trip using a wheelchair. Another milestone crossed.
I thought of how Nancy and I had joked and joked about this mythical woman. Laughed about how we might have to dress in all-black and burgle her home to get the Bible—committing a sin, a crime, and an act of love at the same time.
I thought of how, out of gratitude, I should erase from my mind all the disparaging things we had heard of Barbara. She had been kind.
That afternoon, Barbara came to our hotel. Her lady helper drove her there in a big green Mercedes. Pat helped her in. She used an elegant cane, the only indicator that she was well into her seventies, at least.
Her hair was a deep brown, setting off her eyes, a crystal blue. Her skin was flawless. She smelled like roses.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, sitting near me and taking my near-lifeless hand. “How was your flight?”
She held the Bible in her free hand.
As she talked of Panos, her blue eyes widened and took on a dreamy look. “He and I, we were one.”
She was a remarkably beautiful woman.
And exceedingly polite. She did not pepper me with questions, nor stare. She invited us to dinner. I could tell by the way she specified a certain seat in the restaurant and ordered off the menu she was a particular lady.
I thought of how hard it was for her to learn that a man she thought was uniquely hers was not. She had moved to Knoxville, where she knew no one, which I thought odd and sad. I felt sorry for her.
That night she handed me the Bible.
Back in the hotel room, Nancy, Pat, and I checked it out. Nancy was the first one to say it: “Doesn’t look like a family Bible to me!”
Nancy described her own family’s Bible, a huge tome in German that had had its own stand, its pages crumbling with age.
The Bible Barbara had given me looked unused. It was a standard size in English, with a wood cover engraved with a Greek Orthodox cross. We checked the publication date: 1957.
Pat ’fessed up that he had spotted a religious bookstore near the hotel. “We’ve been had!” Pat concluded. “Fuckin’ hillrods!” He started anew on his I’ll-give-her-a-dirt-nap rant.
“Calm down, people,” I said. “We can talk more with her at her house tomorrow.”
Nancy messaged the folks in Cyprus to try to get a description of the family Bible. My iPhone chimed before dawn. It was Soulla. Nancy spoke to her.
As I stirred awake, I heard Nancy asking for a description of the Bible, then saying: “Whaaaat??? You don’t know?”
As it turned out, Soulla had not seen the Bible since childhood. She said the only person who could identify it was Xenon, the then hundred-year-old cousin we’d met two years before.
“He’s still alive?” Nancy blurted out.
When Pat joined us, we gave him the good and bad news. Good that there was someone who could check the Bible’s authenticity. Bad that the person was . . . not so reliable.
“Lemme get this straight,” Pat said. “Our bona fide is one hundred and two years old?”
“Yup!” we said, laughing.
We vowed to case Barbara’s house for the real-deal Bible when we visited her that day.
We lunched with Barbara at a wonderful place, the Northshore Brasserie. I remember two things from the meal: (1) The ice cream. Handmade. Caramel lime. Best I’ve ever had. (2) A breakthrough with Barbara.
At the meal, I brought up the story of my birth mother. Barbara, I realized, was too polite or nervous to ask. I was not spot-on sure about the dates of her relationship with Panos, or whether I had been conceived while they were . . . ugh . . . married.
I eased her into a conversation about how they met. She was a patient in the hospital where he worked. And when they married. 1967.
Phew!!!!
Well after my conception.
I asked Barbara to remember that the pregnancy—that I—had happened before Panos met her. “All this does not detract from what the two of you had,” I said to her. I saw her blue eyes widen with recognition and relief.
We went to her house, a huge home even by American standards, in an upscale Knoxville suburb. A home where she lived alone.
Barbara tottered up the steps to her towering front doors. Pat helped us both in. He was so helpful the whole trip. I was using a wheelchair off and on, and he lugged it around. I heard him groan one day as he hoisted it into the car trunk. “There goes a seminal vesicle!” he said cheerily.
The man was an absolute gentleman when he wanted to be. He even tucked away his F-bombs for Barbara. She was too much a lady (unlike me) to find them amusing.
Barbara’s home was decorated in Baroque style, with lots of gold accents and fine furniture. Formal, like Barbara. She had a trio of tiny dogs. Their yips echoed through the house.
We sat. I realized that I had never seen Panos’s handwriting.
Can you tell something about a person by his handwriting? I can.
I asked Barbara if I might see letters he had written to her. I cringe now, thinking of how nervy this was: I was asking to see their most private communication.
I never saw them.
But oh! what I did see.
Barbara brought out newspaper clippings of Panos’s many accomplishments at the Mayo Clinic. Stories of patients saved. Awards won. Books written and charities supported.
We sat in her fancy living room, with near floor-to-ceiling windows all around, both of us reading the articles. It was so sunny, I squinted in the light.
At one point, Barbara stopped talking. I looked up. She was staring at me.
“You are squinting just like Panos,” Barbara said.
In that moment, she believed.
She brought out some antique icons that had belonged to Panos. She laid them out in front of me. “Take whatever you wish,” she said. I chose one.
She gave me the gold worry beads that Panos thumbed. The gold money clip found in Panos’s pocket when he died, the euros still in it. No, I never counted them. There could be hundreds, but I would never spend them.
Pat and Nancy asked about the Bible. Barbara said it was the only one she had.
Nancy wandered the large home. She had asked the Cyprus relatives about other items, and they mentioned a painting of an ocean scene by a prominent Greek artist that Panos had owned and loved. Nancy was hell’s-bells intent on finding that painting too.
Barbara had recently moved in. Some things were still boxed, some pictures not yet hung. Nancy saw an ocean painting, but it looked too poorly done to be the one that had stirred Panos’s soul.
She spotted another painting, Mediterranean in color and feel, and brought it out to Barbara and me. That’s Nancy. So stylish and professional, my good-girl friend, but she always took things a step further. Pushed me to explore more, to seek more. To ask. To try.
Yes, the painting was the one Panos had loved. Barbara offered it to me.
She was so kind. She kissed me on the way out, smelling like roses. I felt badly leaving her alone in that large house, no doubt longing for the love she once
had.
Panos’s relatives considered it cuckoo for him to marry and divorce her twice. Panos’s best friend, Bob Abdalian, no fan of Barbara’s either, told me he believed Panos viewed her like a patient, trying to help her.
But I know there was more. I saw her beauty, when others did not.
I find it extraordinary that he had as much patience for her as he did.
I have no idea why they never had children. There are things even nervy me won’t ask. But they didn’t. And now Barbara is alone.
Perhaps that’s why she called me “stepdaughter” and shared so much.
The painting she gave me now hangs in the room where I sometimes sleep. My father hung it there without asking a single question about it.
It is of the ocean. Blue and green waves churning, a white froth atop them, sun glinting off the surface.
It is often the last thing I see before falling asleep.
The Chickee Hut
May
A Place of My Own
In many ways, my father Tom and I have a distant relationship. All through my childhood, he worked ten hours a day at his pharmacy, six days a week. On Sunday, he was at church. He was working for us, I know, but I missed him.
I used to lie awake at night, watching for the headlights of his car to pull into the driveway at nine or ten o’clock. Many times I fell asleep by the nightlight in the hallway, waiting for him to return.
I loved when he let me haul away the branches after he trimmed our ficus hedge, because yard work was one of the few things we did together.
I worshipped my dad as a child. He was always kind to me.
As adults, though, we seemed to grow further apart. The distance was intractable, really, for he never talked. In the twenty-five years before Mom got sick, I don’t think Dad called me five times. He lived one mile away, but never asked me to have lunch or see a movie with him.
But Dad remained kind. He picked up my kids when I was working, and he picks them up now that I am too sick to drive. He runs errands for me. He takes the boys for scooter rides.
Until I Say Good-Bye Page 15
