13. Isadora
Iam married on Friday in the chapel on the south cliff.
The dress is the one I arrived in. I have refused to wear another, and Yia-Yia has not objected.
Yia-Yia, I am told later by Calliope, settled the matter in the kitchen at six in the morning, over the bread, in the voice she uses for verdicts: “The girl is right. Marta wore white in this chapel, but Marta is dead. Let the new one wear what she came in.”
The wardrobe of clothes that were not mine stays closed.
I walk to my wedding in the dress I was delivered in, washed and pressed by my own hands, the gold chain at my throat, the signet of Konstantine Drakos’s office on the chain beside the dragon.
Let my brothers hear how the bride was dressed.
Let them work out for themselves what it means, that the payment walked to the altar in the wrapping it was sent in, of her own feet, and was received like a queen.
The cousins are present. The Patriarch is wheeled out for the ceremony, at his weakest, at his most tender, blankets to his chest in the warm morning.
Adrian places the chair for him at the front of the chapel with a gentleness he shows no one else, and the old man watches me cross the threshold with eyes that have outlived every enemy he ever had except time.
Theron sits in the second pew with Calliope, the dragon at her throat, little Eleni beside her in a white dress, up on her knees on the bench to see better.
Nikos is in the third pew with his wife Daphne, come from the mainland with the twins.
Daphne wears the dragon too. Three chains in one chapel, and mine the newest, and none of the men wearing anything at all, which tells you who this family actually armors.
Adrian stands at the front beside Konstantine, the witness, in a black suit, and for the first time since I met him, he is not being charming. Charm is what Adrian does to rooms he is working. But in this room he is not working. He is, and this is the only word I have for it, happy.
Sophia is at the rail in a small black dress that Yia-Yia made in three days, because when the child heard the bride would wear black she declared she would wear black also.
No argument in the house survived her. She carries a small bouquet of olive leaves.
As I pass she takes my hand and does not let go, so she walks up the aisle beside me.
At the rail she reaches out, puts her other hand into her father’s hand.
Her father, who has not held his daughter’s hand at a chapel ceremony in five years, who buried this child’s mother from this room, looks down at the small hand in his, and his face does the thing it does instead of weeping.
Sophia says nothing. She is six; nothing she could say would land at the scale of what is happening, and somewhere in that quick dark head she knows it, so she holds my hand, holds her father’s hand, and does not let go. The chapel is silent around the three of us.
I lift Sophia onto my hip and Konstantine puts one hand at my back, one at his daughter’s small shoulder. The three of us turn to the priest together, which was not in anyone’s order of service, but is the truest thing in it.
The priest is old, white-bearded, Cretan-born. He married Konstantine to Marta in this chapel in 2008 and sees this man stand at this rail again. He does the small smile a priest allows himself at the start of a ceremony he intends to enjoy.
I make the vows in the formal mode of my mother’s house, the mode I was taught for the marriage my father never chose. My father is in none of it, and my mother is in every word.
Konstantine makes the vows in the archaic Greek of the Iliad, low, unhurried, each phrase set down like cargo he has carried a long way.
We kiss. The cousins applaud, then the Patriarch lifts his hand from the blanket.
The chapel goes still for him. He speaks in the dry rasp of a man who has said almost nothing for two weeks, saving what voice remained for something worth the spending.
“Mikroúla. Little one. You are a better daughter than mine could have given me. I am glad I lived to see you in this chapel.”
I cross to his chair and lift his hand, papery and light as a bird’s wing, and I press it to my forehead in the gesture my mother taught me as a child, the old gesture, the one for the head of a house.
“Kyrie,” Sir, I say. “I will not be Kallis tonight. I am Drakos. I am one of yours.”
The Patriarch closes his eyes.
“Then I am ready,” he says.
No one asks him to speak again, and Adrian wheels him out into the sun with the same gentleness, and the old man’s hand stays curled over the arm of the chair like a man holding a rail on a ship that has finally come into harbor.
We walk out. The courtyard is set.
Yia-Yia has cooked all day. The long table runs the length of the south wall, olive branches at every place.
Calliope sits at one end, Daphne at the other, and I understand the geography now; the women of this house hold the ends of the table the way the men hold the ends of the island.
The twins are under the lemon tree with their dog, teaching Sophia and Eleni a card game that has too many rules to be honest. Konstantine sits across from me, where I can look at him, which I do, often, without a shred of the discipline I was raised on.
It is the loudest small gathering I have ever been inside.
My family’s celebrations were performances with witnesses.
This is eating, and interruption, Adrian’s stories getting less true with each telling, Nikos saying eleven words all afternoon, each one landing, Theron and Calliope arguing quietly about a book. No one performs anything.
Late, when the light has gone long and gold, I see Stavros stop Adrian at the courtyard door.
They stand close, heads bent, the eldest cousin and the charming one. Stavros speaks quietly, but I hear anyway. I was raised in corridors, listening past doors, and the training does not switch off for weddings.
“Adrian. The Patriarch will not last the year. The council meets next week. I have a Vassilakis proposal in front of me and I am going to accept it.”
“Persephone?” Adrian says.
“Yes.”
Persephone. Someone else, somewhere, is about to be handed into a dark kingdom, and I find my hand has gone to the chain at my own throat, but I make it come down.
“And?” Adrian says.
“And there is a problem inside the family. I will tell you when I am sure.”
Stavros hands him a small folded photograph. Adrian opens it, and I watch his face change, the charm going out of it entirely, leaving something colder that I recognize, because I grew up across a table from its Kallis equivalent.
Konstantine, across from me, does not look up from his glass.
Konstantine knows. He has known, I think, since the morning he sat down at his desk, crossed out my father’s name in his leather notebook, and turned the page. A man who keeps a book of names always knows when there is one more name coming.
Not tonight. Tonight the page stays turned.
I lift my glass.
I say, in the courtyard of the Drakos compound on Kalydon, at four in the afternoon, with my chosen name new in my mouth: “To the women of this house.”
“To the women of this house,” Calliope says, dry as her husband’s cousin.
“To the women of this house,” Daphne says, softly.
“To the women of this house, Mamá,” says Sophia, in her small careful Greek, lifting her glass of water with both hands.
Mamá. The word goes through the courtyard, and through me, and no one moves to correct her, least of all me.
Konstantine looks at me across the table. The corner of his mouth moves, all the way, this time.
“Mikrí mou,” he says. “To you.”
I drink.
I am married. I am Drakos. I am no one’s daughter.
I am, for the first time in twenty-two years, my own.
End of Book 3