His wife, miraculously if predictably, has remained almost completely dry. Hermione is always in precise control of her appearance, so much so that years ago she had her eyebrows plucked out, preferring to draw them in perfectly in pencil each day. She remains sleek and elegant in the expensive garments she has had tailored, even if she looks like a ruler once her clothing has been shed. But she is reliable. Her smile has been fixed faultlessly for six hours now. Without doubt, she is exhausted, but Hermione is too rigid to complain. Yet no one in a marriage ever fully forgets its worst moments, which in Hermione’s case involve alcohol and a torrent of shrill anger that she finds difficult to dam once it bursts forth. In those times, usually when he himself is drunk and has in Hermione’s presence chatted too amiably, canted too close, hungered too openly for a young woman, she calls him a callous monster, whose ego is a well that can never be filled. He accepts these outbursts, even her judgment, in silence, knowing he has brought it on himself. The truth, of course, is that he is not a good person. He is entranced by his power and impressed by the way it has grown up in him like the trunk of a strong tree. But the immensity of the appetites Hermione deplores often shocks even him. She is right. He will never be happy.
Hermione inevitably restores order to their marriage. Ordinarily it is the next day when she comes to him and says simply, ‘I am grateful to you, Zeus. I am grateful for my life.’ This is enough, and far more than most men receive within the walls of their homes. He knows that. Thanks to his late father-in-law, Hermione understands their relationship the way a man would, as a deal well made on both sides.
Zeus has stopped in the living room, amid the brocades and the treasures. Phyllos brings him a glass of whiskey. Pete Geronoimos, who has been upstairs in Zeus’s office using the phone, comes down the stairs whistling.
“I’ve got a plane to take us to Winfield at 6 a.m. The Farmers thing is in line.” The UF, United Farmers, is going to endorse Zeus. He will talk about his family in Kronos, at the foot of Mount Olympus, who kept sheep and goats and horses, a few of which they had not stolen from someone else. His father had actually come to the US because a posse of local men had spent a full day tracking him like a wolf. But Zeus will limn Nikos as a gentle shepherd.
Pete is a food importer, but he has loved politics since they were boys together. By all rights, he should be the candidate, but Pete stands five foot three and is built to the same proportions as a kitchen stove, and has been busted three times Zeus knows about, propositioning undercover cops who told him they were sixteen. Last year Zeus finally acceded to Pete’s repeated requests to run. Pete undertakes most tactical decisions, attends to all operational details. Zeus’s job is to make them love him, a task he relishes, talking about his modest start in life, the war, business, the glory of America, selling his whole story, which he knows they yearn to believe. The voters are still angry with the Democrats and that weak cluck Jimmy Carter in his cardigan, telling Americans to turn down their thermostats and perk up from their funk. People want strength. Eighty percent of the people who will cast a ballot in November have no idea what the governor actually does besides live in a mansion and attend parades. Zeus is strong. The idea of standing on the balcony of the governor’s mansion after his inauguration and waving to a throng of thousands is as exciting to Zeus as sex.
When Hal and Mina come into the living room to say good night, Pete heads home to his dog and a few hours’ sleep. Zeus’s daughter-in-law-to-be embraces him and praises every aspect of today’s event-the food, the music, the warmth of the people from St. D’s. Hal, who is learning to follow her example, repeats every word as if he had thought of it himself. Hal is a good boy, far younger than his age, but dear to Zeus, due especially to his eagerness to please his father. Hermione is in despair because the couple cannot be married at St. D’s. The rules are absolute, Father Nik says, he does not make them. Were Mina a Catholic, a Presbyterian, anyone who accepts Christ and the Trinity, she could receive the sacrament. Zeus could not care less. He is a Greek of ancient sensibility, who believes more in the gods on Olympus than some mystical three-headed ghost. He takes Mina with him when he gives speeches at synagogues.
As Hal and Mina head off, Dita, his treasure, flashes by. Zeus calls her. She answers him, as always, with impatience.
“What?”
He considers her as she stands there, an extraordinary beauty with her sharp features and penetrating eyes. There is no love in his life like the ravening desperate love he feels for his beautiful daughter, his only true child. It precedes everything else. He is dirt and muscle and bone; but first he loves Dita. This love holds power over him, so much so that at a terrible moment it was beyond his control. Which is why she despises him in a way that will never ease. She needs him, too, as children always do, and is twisted on the rack by that antagonism, between her hatred and her need. But neither of them will ever fully escape that darkness in the past, a cataclysm that resides in the same place in Zeus as the chaos of war. It was a sad drunken time in his life, right after his mother died. He rarely lets his memory turn there, and neither Dita nor her mother nor he ever speaks a word. But the lock on her door is always a reminder.
“Thank you for being so gracious to our guests,” he says.
“You’re welcome. I hate this fucking day,” she tells him. “Those people bore me to death. Greek this, Greek that. They don’t seem to know they’re living in a cage.”
He ignores her. That is all that he can do. She will be twenty-four in a few days and remains under her father’s roof with the implicit proviso that she will be free from any criticism, including much she unquestionably deserves.
“Your boyfriend is Greek, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Cass? I’m just about done with him. His family hates me. What in the hell did you do to them, Dad?”
“Nothing. It was a misunderstanding. Lidia unfortunately married below herself. Mickey is really nothing but a Greek hillbilly. He has more pride than ability. He felt humiliated by my kindness to his family and I only meant well.”
Zeus spoke to Lidia today, the first words in many years. Teri believes Lidia attended the picnic because she is beginning to accept that Cass will marry Dita, as he well may, despite tonight’s hard words from Zeus’s mercurial daughter. Lidia is stout now and gray. Yet the woman he so desperately longed for remains visible to him. For years, especially when he entered the service, he retained the hope that he would return in glory and marry Lidia, whatever her father had to say. When Zeus learned that she had wed herself to a creature as simple as Mickey, it was like a stabbing. Zeus has always recognized that he married Hermione in part because the only woman he ever envisioned as his partner was gone. He wants so many females in other ways. Even now, he can saunter across some broad avenue, stricken by longing for half the women who come into sight. Any manifestation of beauty is enough to stimulate his ardor-good legs, a full bosom, a pleasant face. But he had truly yearned to marry only Lidia, who then chose her father over him. In reprisal, in time, Zeus fucked her. It was the way the gods always served him. He saw that the instant that Terisia asked him to give her best friend a job.