Dinner with Persephone (45 page)

Throughout her life, she continued to demonstrate this religious devotion to charismatic leaders like General Nikolas Plastiras, and above all, Eleftherios Venizelos, her father’s own candidate and political colleague and the most famous prime minister of modern Greece. It was as if she found a way to assent to her father’s treatment of her, and to submerge her own impermissible criticisms by idealizing masculinity, in a sense participating in this charismatic power as a sacrifice to it—if she was going to be crucified, at least her torment would be at the hand of God the Father, in whose divinity she would share. And above all, she resolutely idealized Greece, and found a way through patriotism to craft a career in a culture which barred women from any work not ultimately in the service of a father or a husband—in Greece Penelope ingeniously found a father to work for, and a way to justify her work. If her books were created in the service of patriotism, then in a sense her work was a sacrifice, and therefore not an act of independence. Greece was a father that she could love and serve unreservedly and uncritically—the problem of painful criticism was resolved, as in her steely, heartfelt, charming, and oddly tragic political allegory for children,
Fairy Tale Without a Name
, in which a young prince, through leadership, and his sister, through service, set out to restore the lost perfection of their kingdom, now corrupt and degraded.
The degraded condition of the kingdom is temporary, a momentary episode between a past perfection and a future restoration, and so cannot have its roots in the kingdom itself, since corruption would hardly have evolved from such perfection. The faint strain of tragedy comes through the evocation of the lost ideal, the nothingness of lost perfection which makes a nothingness of the future, a hopeless cycle in which an unattainable and unreal goodness is sought and never regained. Penelope is stymied in this book by the common problem of presenting goodness as ideal perfection, not as something living, complex, intricately, integrally, vitally connected to many qualities that are not good. And when good is seen only as an ideal quality, confused with the perfect, then evil is viewed only as a horrible flaw, a cyclical aberration, not a development that occurs in relation to other things. Critical thinking, vigilant revision, profound and lasting change, become impossible. If goodness is idealized, evil can only be repented.

Penelope’s mother was as domineering as her father, a woman whose repressed fury at her own condition seems to have been vented on her household, her only realm of power, since she was utterly subject to her husband, who even read her letters as a matter of course, as later Penelope’s husband read her correspondence—a practice Penelope wondered at only in retrospect. Poorly educated, almost pathologically without empathy, seethingly angry, but commandingly wealthy, emotionally and intellectually deprived, but materially spoiled, as a woman, abased, but as a wealthy wife, arrogant, vengeful, and self-important, Penelope’s mother ruled her household with slaps, beatings, and constant vicious criticism. She was like a corrupt regional overlord, ruling her territory in the name of an absent but all-powerful sultan. She was gentle with her children only in one of her rare good moods, or when they were sick, and for the child Penelope, the “ne plus ultra of life’s beauty” was a sentimental engraving she saw in an illustrated English magazine that showed a mother kneeling on a lawn and tenderly embracing a child, with the caption “My darling is better.”
Early in her childhood, Penelope was possessed with the idea of suicide, the image of which was always mingled with the imagining of her mother’s tears, of feeling valued and loved. The thought of suicide, she reflected later, from early childhood, had never ceased to live within her. As an adult, Penelope spent substantial time in German spas seeking cures for undiagnosable ailments, cramps, and exhaustion.

Penelope imitated her mother in games with her toddler brother in which she would alternately tease him and comfort him, baiting him even as she caressed him, and becoming even more enraged as he cried. Siblings often have distinctly, and even completely, different upbringings, depending on their parents’ ambitions, fantasies, and responses to them, and of the five surviving Benaki children (one had died in infancy), Penelope seems to have been singled out for the most brutal treatment—her father seemed to see her as a competitor, and steadily undercut her intellectual gifts, telling her that with her mind she ought to have been born a boy, conveying to her that a woman’s talents only emphasized her inferiority, while her mother seemed to bitterly resent any possibility that Penelope had capacities she did not, and might not share her own fate, jealous of any interest of Penelope’s that she herself did not understand. As Penelope became more and more absorbed by reading and writing, her mother increased her household duties, so that when she was not having lessons she was nearly always occupied with sewing and other housework. Her mother hated her reading and if she discovered Penelope with a book, she would invent an errand, saying, “Stop your reading, I don’t intend to make a philosopher of you …”

Penelope had thoughts and emotions and capacities that, if not destroyed or damaged, might enable her to escape from the loveless web of the Benaki family, and it seemed they could not endure their own lives if there was a richer hope in hers. If they could force her life to resemble theirs, then the pain of their own disappointments could be contained. Her misery would make their own seem justified,
not a matter of choice, or of blind chance, but inevitable, the condition of life itself.

Her situation was, too, an example of the ironic social circularity that makes the lives of rich and poor abused children mirror each other, both classes of children equally vulnerable. The maltreated children of the poor are unprotected partly because of the difficulty of marshaling the human and financial resources to monitor and rescue them; the maltreated children of the rich are unprotected because their parents control those financial resources, surrounded by people they employ directly or indirectly, or colleagues with whom they are doing business, who are unlikely to risk their livelihoods and financial and social alliances by interfering.

One particular incident, with its atmosphere of almost luxurious brutality and voluptuous violence, marked Penelope throughout her life, and the memory of it brought tears to her eyes even as an adult. One day, Penelope, aged seven or so, simply couldn’t stomach her French lesson, and declared a private holiday, drawing horses in her notebook. The next morning when the teacher asked for her homework, Penelope showed her the page with the cartoons, and told her that she didn’t have the lesson prepared and didn’t know who had drawn horses on the clean paper. She was sent into her mother’s bedroom, where her mother, wearing a white peignoir with open sleeves that left her arms bare, asked her daughter who had ruined her notebook. Penelope said she didn’t know, and her mother called her over to the bedside. Then, Penelope remembered, “The arms of my mother, white and powerful, fell on me like mallets …,” her mother striking her child’s head, shoulders, back, chest, face with unappeasable rage. Penelope screamed and fell backward, and her mother continued to beat her, wherever the blows fell. A maid restrained the mother, holding back her “white, naked” arms, shouting that she would kill the child. The floor under Penelope was soaked with the little girl’s urine; her mother noticed, stopped beating her, and ordered the maid, “Bring a mop.” Penelope, hysterical with fear, rage, and shame, was taken
from the room by the maid, and later that day was set again to her lessons, shut up in the schoolroom by herself. Her mother swept in, carrying Penelope’s baby sister, and told Penelope that if her lessons weren’t neatly written she would beat her again. Then she cuddled the baby, and said to the child in her arms, “Look out yourself that you don’t grow up evil like that one.” The incident was never mentioned again, although in Penelope it lived forever, intact, undiminished, inexhaustible, as love is supposed to be. Reading her English storybooks, Penelope wondered why it was only in books that mothers loved their children, and not in life.

When Penelope became a marriageable teenager, she began to participate in the highly chaperoned exhibitions at dances and opera evenings that were a prospective bride’s work. Her older sister had been married to the son of an English partner of her father’s, and under this system, a groom’s potential as an administrator of the family business was perhaps his most important feature—his marriage to the bride was almost incidental, his marriage to her father was crucial. In addition, Penelope’s maturity coincided with her father’s developing political ambitions, so that a Greek groom would be important.

The Alexandrian community’s courtships were conducted at family dinners, at the theater, at carnival and Easter dances. Young men from Greece and Constantinople as well as from Alexandria would be present, the boys’ choices no freer than the girls’, threatened with the loss of inheritances and career prospects if they differed from their parents’ selection.

Negotiating the intricate social fissures of being Greek, the young couples courted each other in foreign languages, particularly English and French, and the fragments of such courtships recorded in diaries of the period like Penelope’s give the impression that in this world of repressed sexuality, moving from language to language was itself an erotic experience, full of momentary revelations, glimpses of sudden unpredictable nakedness, charged secret vocabularies. They danced European dances, to fashionable new tunes like
the “Carmen Sylva Waltz,” named for the Queen of Rumania. There were no waltzes in their own country. The dances of Greece explore, most often in circular patterns, the expression of community, or of continuity between generations—they also, in men’s solos, examine the nature of individuality, through improvisation and mesmerizing feats of movement, performed in relation to uniformly moving background dancers. But this dance-loving people’s imagination of partnered dance, of the gestures a man and woman make in a conversation of motion together, face-to-face, of physical dialogue, is among the poorest in the world. In Greek discotheques, the couple dances are necessarily foreign ones, and when I left Greece briefly for the States and went with a friend to a Latin dance club, I was shocked to remember the wit, invention, erotic courage, reflection on the relation between passion and ethics, the burnished philosophical sensuality of those dances with partners. In Alexandria, in 1894, the year Penelope fell in love with a young man called Mavrocordatos, the girls wore dance cards which hung from their waists, along with lace fans, and the boys would approach, asking to sign for a particular number on the card. Neither partner could know each other well before marriage, so the courtship was managed through glances, waltzes, and code. Suitors proposed and were rejected in the interval between numbers; large questions about someone’s ambitions and personal ethics were posed and answered on the way into the dining room for refreshments. Penelope described herself as proper to the point of priggishness, discouraging even lighthearted compliments, determined to behave correctly. She wanted both a husband she could care for and a son-in-law who would fulfill her father’s desires. When a matchmaker approached her independently on behalf of a suitor, she answered that her father must be contacted instead, because she would only reply to such proposals through him. But for all her perfect decorum, what she longed for was a marriage of mutual love, a longing made more acute by a joyless childhood. When her mother discussed with her the possibility of living somewhere less appealing
than Alexandria after her marriage, Penelope said she dreamed only of being devoted to someone, of making her husband happy. “Permit me to take a husband who I will like!” she begged. “I will be so miserable if I don’t marry out of love.” Her mother was so moved by Penelope’s passionate sincerity that, in one of her caprices, she kissed her, and promised that Penelope would not be pressured when she came to make a choice.

The young man called Mavrocordatos Penelope met in 1894 was poor but socially distinguished, and had come out from Athens to work for her father. They fell in love in French and English, dancing at a carnival dance to a waltz they both thought “divine,” called “The Dream of Love After the Dance.” They explored each other’s minds between dips and turns, both agreeing that they believed in fate. Mavrocordatos added that he had felt a magnet of fate drawing him from Athens to unknown joys in Alexandria. They described their feelings for each other in parables, telling each other stories about their attraction to each other so as not to violate propriety by direct declaration. Mavrocordatos, to let her know he couldn’t forget her, told her he was puzzled by why there was no photograph of her in the office, mentioning significantly that he couldn’t find one anywhere, telling a love story in which he himself was the male lead. He began to be a frequent visitor to the Benaki home, a guest at family dinners, received in an unspoken acceptance as a suitor, participating in conversations engineered by Penelope’s mother to explore his philosophy of marriage. Mrs. Benaki spoke harshly of a nephew of hers who had declared he would only marry for money, testing Mavrocordatos, who replied that it was regrettable how common it was for gold to be more important than feelings in making a marriage. Penelope’s mother declared before the company that feelings were more important, and when Penelope fervently thanked her later, she promised that this principle would govern the matter of Penelope’s marriage. At Easter, the greatest of Greek seasonal feasts, Mavrocordatos was among the guests invited to the annual Benaki dinner. The company played whist, and at midnight a
servant rang the bell to announce that Christ was risen. The guests stood up, kissing and offering Easter wishes for happiness to each other. When they went into the dining room, a family friend wished Penelope a happy Easter, and that he would see her a bride within the year.

When Mavrocordatos visited, staying within the correct boundaries of courtship by not attaching himself too obviously to Penelope, she would send him a coded message by playing “The Dream of Love After the Dance” on the piano. And when they finally shyly declared their love to each other, they used the polite plural “you.”