Free Eleni by Nicholas Gage Page B

out his pockets for the candies they knew were there.
    When the midwife caught the baby in her apron, there was an anguished cry from Megali, who was crouched in the corner of the room. Another girl! Eleni began to sob. A son would have made her husband so grateful that he couldn’t refuse to take them all to America. Christos composed his face, took the child from the midwife and announced that the baby was beautiful and that he would name her Fotini for his dead mother.
    Fotini’s birth was the first ripple in the happiness of that year. A worse shock was the arrival, two months later, of Christos’ partner, Nassios Economou, who had been left in charge of the business in Worcester, Massachusetts.
    The Irish maids and Swedish cooks who worked in the silk-stocking suburbs of Worcester, in mansions built by tycoons of the industrial revolution, had always liked dealing with Christos because of his old-fashioned courtesy and the consistently high quality of his fruits and vegetables. Butafter Christos agreed to take Nassios on, at the pleading of a relative, the dissolute young man set the kitchens abuzz. Christos was ashamed to tell his wife how often Nassios would return from collecting outstanding bills empty-handed, with a grin like a tomcat, saying he had collected in other currency. When Nassios occasionally brought a couple of women home to the Spartan flat the two men shared at 1 Ledge Street, near the produce market, Christos would succumb to temptation and then despise himself afterward. “Nothing but whores in America!” he ranted. “It’s no place to bring decent women!”
    One morning at the coffeehouse in Lia a breathless urchin arrived and told Christos that Nassios Economou was in Babouri waiting for him to call. Christos was stunned. He found Nassios in Babouri, dressed like Al Capone, luxuriating in the attentions of his wife and son. Christos shouted questions, the words garbled in his anxiety. What had Nassios done with their gleaming blue GM Reo truck, the cornerstone of their business?
    Nassios replied as if he had nothing on his conscience. He was tired of getting up at 5 A.M . to go to the market, he said. He had heard that the Armenian proprietor of the greasy spoon near the railroad station, the “Terminal Lunch,” was ruined in a poker game. So Nassios had sold the vegetable truck to a Syrian for $1,200 and bought the diner for $200 cash.
    “Running a restaurant is a proper job for a man,” Nassios said as he handed Christos $600—his half share of the business he had spent twenty-four years building. “When the war comes—and it’s coming for sure—the railroad station will be mobbed and that diner will make a fortune! I’ll pay you fifty dollars a week to cook for me now, and when the money starts coming in, I’ll make you a partner. Meanwhile, I thought I’d come over and share your vacation.”
    Christos tasted the ashes of his life’s work and his head was spinning. He thought about killing his smirking ex-partner in front of his wife’s eyes, but knew deep down that he couldn’t slaughter a goat, much less a man. After a few glasses of Nassios’ whiskey, Christos’ unfailing optimism asserted itself. Perhaps Nassios was right, and the day of fruit peddler was over. It wouldn’t be bad to be a partner in a restaurant. In any case, it would liven things up in the village to have Nassios around.
    For the remainder of the summer Christos and Nassios reigned over the coffeehouses of Lia and Babouri like a pair of sultans. The weather-beaten, manure-stained shepherds couldn’t get enough of Nassios’ lurid tales of American women or of the free drinks and appetizers that the two “Amerikani” vied in ordering. The villagers had already learned Christos’ stories by heart, how he had arrived in America with $27 in his pocket, and how by dint of hard work and Spartan living he had risen to owning a produce business “that brings in—how much do you think?”
    They’d all