Eleni by Nicholas Gage

wait, looking expectant.
    “Ninety, ninety-five dollars a week!” he would shout triumphantly. “God bless America!”
    •  •  •
    “God bless America!” was the refrain that concluded every anecdote my father ever told me about his life. Not until I became an adult did I understand his complicated feelings for his adopted country and the reasons why he didn’t bring us there to join him. As a child it had seemed to me natural that my father lived in America and we lived in Lia. When, at the age of nine, I finally met him for the first time, I had come to the conclusion that he had abandoned us. Only later did I realize that given the times and his nature, it was the only thing he could do.
    To every immigrant America was the promised land, where hard work was rewarded with gold. As my father labored sixteen hours a day at two jobs, however, he quickly learned that America was also filled with traps for the innocent and the unwary. He saw fellow Greek immigrants, released from the bonds of village morality and poverty, quickly ruined by women, alcohol and gambling, among them the two younger brothers he brought over as soon as he could raise their fares. By nature a Puritan, my father quickly sent his brothers back to Greece to save them.
    When he married and had children, he decided that the United States was far too treacherous a place to raise a family, especially four daughters. Working long hours, he could not supervise them properly and his wife would be cut off from the support system of relatives and neighbors she had in Lia. In the village, wives and daughters knew exactly how to conduct themselves; the strict ethos permitted no lapses, but America was full of fallen women. Furthermore, his modest income allowed him to make his family the wealthiest in Lia, at the pinnacle of the social ladder, but if we ever came to Massachusetts, we would find ourselves children of a struggling vegetable peddler. Worse, we would see him treated with the scorn that rich Yankees displayed toward the immigrants who served them. Instead, when my father returned to Lia on his periodical sabbaticals, his wife and children considered him a sophisticated and successful American tycoon.
    He loved passing long days of luxurious idleness in the
cafenions
, basking in the adulation of family and friends, but he also had become accustomed to the conveniences of America: fine clothes, weekly baths—and no relatives to answer to. That was the other side of the coin: my father had been seduced by American comforts and the bachelor life he created among other immigrant men in Worcester.
    While he never became perfectly American, my father absorbed the country’s optimism and naïveté. Greek peasants at home were the opposite, profoundly suspicious of their neighbors, proud of their wiliness. They have a disparaging term for people like my father:
Amerikanaki
—“little American”—implying a wide-eyed innocent, eager to be duped. My father had come to America at seventeen and stayed away from the village too long. With time and distance, Greece began to take on a nostalgic aura of security and safety in his mind. He saw danger to his family among the industrialsmokestacks and noisy streets of Worcester, but he couldn’t imagine that his wife and children were in greater danger in the simple mountain village where he was born.
    As the harvest season passed and the winter rains began, the roll of bills in the rubber band became alarmingly thin. Christos and Nassios knew it was time to give up their pleasant idleness and return to America. One morning in late October, Christos took out his suitcases and began to pack.
    Nursing Fotini, Eleni watched him, realizing that she should have spoken before. She had been waiting for the right moment and now he was about to leave them behind again! She tried to prepare her speech, to convince him of the logic of her reasoning, and then, stammering in her eagerness, she blurted it all out. He