Middlesex

On a third-trimester October morning, a cab pulled up outside 3467 Hurlbut Street and a tall, slender figure climbed out. He checked the address against a piece of paper, collected his things—umbrella and suitcase—and paid the driver. He took off his hat and stared into it as though reading instructions along the lining. Then he put the hat back on and walked up onto the porch.

Desdemona and Lina both heard the knocking. They met at the front door.

When they opened it, the man looked from belly to belly.

“I’m just in time,” he said.

It was Dr. Philobosian. Clear-eyed, clean-shaven, recovered from his grief. “I saved your address.” They invited him in and he told his story. He had indeed contracted the eye disease favus on the Giulia. But his medical license had saved him from being sent back to Greece; America needed physicians. Dr. Philobosian had stayed a month in the hospital at Ellis Island, after which, with sponsorship from the Armenian Relief Agency, he had been admitted into the country. For the last eleven months he’d been living in New York, on the Lower East Side. “Grinding lenses for an optometrist.” Recently he’d managed to retrieve some assets from Turkey and had come to the Midwest. “I’m going to open a practice here. New York has too many doctors already.”

He stayed for dinner. The women’s delicate conditions didn’t excuse them from domestic duties. On swollen legs they carried out dishes of lamb and rice, okra in tomato sauce, Greek salad, rice pudding. Afterward, Desdemona brewed Greek coffee, serving it in demitasse cups with the brown foam, the lakia, on top. Dr. Philobosian remarked to the seated husbands, “Hundred-to-one odds. Are you sure it happened on the same night?”

“Yes,” Sourmelina replied, smoking at the table. “There must have been a full moon.”

“It usually takes a woman five or six months to get pregnant,” the doctor went on. “To have you two do it on the same night—a-hundred-to-one odds!”

“Hundred-to-one?” Zizmo looked across the table at Sourmelina, who looked away.

“Hundred-to-one at least,” assured the doctor.

“It’s all the Minotaur’s fault,” Lefty joked.

“Don’t talk about that play,” Desdemona scolded.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Lina.

“I can’t look at you?” asked her husband.

Sourmelina let out an exasperated sigh and wiped her mouth with her napkin. There was a strained silence. Dr. Philobosian, pouring himself another glass of wine, rushed in.

“Birth is a fascinating subject. Take deformities, for instance. People used to think they were caused by maternal imagination. During the conjugal act, whatever the mother happened to look at or think about would affect the child. There’s a story in Damascene about a woman who had a picture of John the Baptist over her bed. Wearing the traditional hair shirt. In the throes of passion, the poor woman happened to glance up at this portrait. Nine months later, her baby was born—furry as a bear!” The doctor laughed, enjoying himself, sipping more wine.

“That can’t happen, can it?” Desdemona, suddenly alarmed, wanted to know.

But Dr. Philobosian was on a roll. “There’s another story about a woman who touched a toad while making love. Her baby came out with pop eyes and covered with warts.”

“This is in a book you read?” Desdemona’s voice was tight.

“Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels has most of this. The Church got into it, too. In his Embryological Sacra, Cangiamilla recommended intra-uterine baptisms. Suppose you were worried that you might be carrying a monstrous baby. Well, there was a cure for that. You simply filled a syringe with holy water and baptized the infant before it was born.”

“Don’t worry, Desdemona,” Lefty said, seeing how anxious she looked. “Doctors don’t think that anymore.”

“Of course not,” said Dr. Philobosian. “All this nonsense comes from the Dark Ages. We know now that most birth deformities result from the consanguinity of the parents.”

“From the what?” asked Desdemona.

“From families intermarrying.”

Desdemona went white.

“Causes all kinds of problems. Imbecility. Hemophilia. Look at the Romanovs. Look at any royal family. Mutants, all of them.”

“I don’t remember what I was thinking that night,” Desdemona said later while washing the dishes.

“I do,” said Lina. “Third one from the right. With the red hair.”

“I had my eyes closed.”

“Then don’t worry.”

Desdemona turned on the water to cover their voices. “And what about the other thing? The con … the con …”

“The consanguinity?”

“Yes. How do you know if the baby has that?”

“You don’t know until it’s born.”

“Mana!”

“Why do you think the Church doesn’t let brothers and sisters get married? Even first cousins have to get permission from a bishop.”

“I thought it was because …” and she trailed off, having no answer.

“Don’t worry,” Lina said. “These doctors exaggerate. If families marrying each other was so bad, we’d all have six arms and no legs.”

But Desdemona did worry. She thought back to Bithynios, trying to remember how many children had been born with something wrong with them. Melia Salakas had a daughter with a piece missing from the middle of her face. Her brother, Yiorgos, had been eight years old his whole life. Were there any babies with hair shirts? Any frog babies? Desdemona recalled her mother telling stories about strange infants born in the village. They came every few generations, babies who were sick in some way, Desdemona couldn’t remember how exactly—her mother had been vague. Every so often these babies appeared, and they always met with tragic ends: they killed themselves, they ran off and became circus performers, they were seen years later in Bursa, begging or prostituting themselves. Lying alone in bed at night, with Lefty out working, Desdemona tried to recall the details of these stories, but it was too long ago and now Euphrosyne Stephanides was dead and there was no one to ask. She thought back to the night she’d gotten pregnant and tried to reconstruct events. She turned on her side. She made a pillow stand in for Lefty, pressing it against her back. She looked around the room. There were no pictures on the walls. She hadn’t been touching any toads. “What did I see?” she asked herself. “Only the wall.”

But she wasn’t the only one tormented by anxieties. Recklessly now, and with an official disclaimer as to the veracity of what I’m about to tell you—because, of all the actors in my midwestern Epidaurus, the one wearing the biggest mask is Jimmy Zizmo—I’ll try to give you a glimpse into his emotions that last trimester. Was he excited about becoming a father? Did he bring home nutritive roots and brew homeopathic teas? No, he wasn’t, he didn’t. After Dr. Philobosian came to dinner that night, Jimmy Zizmo began to change. Maybe it was what the doctor had said regarding the synchronous pregnancies. A-hundred-to-one odds. Maybe it was this stray bit of information that was responsible for Zizmo’s increasing moodiness, his suspicious glances at his pregnant wife. Maybe he was doubting the likelihood that a single act of intercourse in a five-month dry spell would result in a successful pregnancy. Was Zizmo examining his young wife and feeling old? Tricked?

In the late autumn of 1923, minotaurs haunted my family. To Desdemona they came in the form of children who couldn’t stop bleeding, or who were covered with fur. Zizmo’s monster was the well-known one with green eyes. It stared out of the river’s darkness while he waited onshore for a shipment of liquor. It leapt up from the roadside to confront him through the Packard’s windshield. It rolled over in bed when he got home before sunrise: a green-eyed monster lying next to his young, inscrutable wife, but then Zizmo would blink and the monster would disappear.

When the women were eight months pregnant, the first snow fell. Lefty and Zizmo wore gloves and mufflers as they waited on the shore of Belle Isle. Nevertheless, despite his insulation, my grandfather was shivering. Twice in the last month they’d had close calls with the police. Sick with jealous suspicions, Zizmo had been erratic, forgetting to schedule rendezvous, choosing drop-off points with insufficient preparation. Worse, the Purple Gang was consolidating its hold on the city’s rum-running. It was only a matter of time before they ran afoul of it.

Meanwhile, back on Hurlbut, a spoon was swinging. Sourmelina, legs bandaged, lay back in her boudoir as Desdemona performed the first of the many prognostications that would end with me.

“Tell me it’s a girl.”

“You don’t want a girl. Girls are too much trouble. You have to worry about them going with the boys. You have to get a dowry and find a husband—”

“They don’t have dowries in America, Desdemona.”

The spoon began to move.

“If it’s a boy, I’ll kill you.”

“A daughter you’ll fight with.”

“A daughter I can talk to.”