Y
|
ia Yia is a
chameleon. Quiet and inconspicuous in her surroundings, she sits and watches.
Her knobby aged hands are mostly motionless except when they fidget in her lap
or express a point. She quietly follows conversations, but says little these
days, her native Greek reappearing when English evades her memory. Yia Yia
(pronounced ya ya) is 101 years old
but still has the mental acuity of someone much younger. Wispy grey hair
curling around her aged, olive-skinned face and lack of expression gives her a
stoic weathered look. What you see – her advanced age, quiet presence, and
shrunken stature – is not necessarily what you get. Her elderly simplicity
masks a woman with a complex past awaiting her freedom.
Before being
known as Yia Yia (grandmother in
Greek), Ariadne Gagmiros was born into a world much different from today. In
1910, the Titanic was still two years from sinking, Communism had yet to topple
China ’s
2,000-year-old imperial rule, and the American Civil War was still a raw topic,
viewed as we do the Vietnam War today – a conflict fought not so long ago that
most people wanted to forget. In Greece ,
a poor economy generated a wave of immigration to the United States . Young Greeks
streamed into larger American cities hoping to start businesses and bring their
prosperity back home.
Ariadne was
born in Karystos on the island of Euboea , a picturesque Greek coastal town with bright
sunlit white buildings clinging to scraggly hills rising from the deep blue Mediterranean Sea . Greece was then a country still
rooted in male patriarchy. Even though she was the oldest of three girls and
two boys, “Boys went to college. I stayed home,” Yia Yia says.
“She was done
with school at twelve [years old],” says her granddaughter Stephanie Condon,
“She stayed with her mother, did embroidery, learned to cook, clean, and make
clothes.” Even given the skills taught by her mother, her authoritarian father
remained the central figure in defining Ariadne's limited horizon, which is
reflected in Yia Yia's favorite saying, "I don’t say a nothing.”
Yia Yia
expressively recounts a childhood memory with her younger rebellious sister,
Pizza, an Oscar Madison to Ariadne’s Felix Unger. “She go out…play with the
boys…make noise. And I’m quiet. I said, ‘Come here, Daddy’s gonna come out and
stop it.’“ Pausing, Yia Yia says with a raised index finger for emphasis, “My
father is a very strong.”
Strict
adherence to tradition regarding the roles of men and women, especially in
marriage and family, influenced Greek culture for centuries. Men dominated the
public arena while women nurtured power in the private, family role. Slowly,
these entrenched traditions have given way to more modern customs. Dowries and
arranged marriages are less common. Equal access to education and gaining the
right to vote in 1954 empowered women, who now constitute forty-five percent of
the Greek work force. Yet for Ariadne, social change was decades too late.
In 1931,
Ariadne's father arranged her marriage to a thirty-eight-year-old man from
neighboring Katsorini. Nickolas Benakis had started several successful
restaurants in Chicago , Illinois ,
and then returned to Greece
for a wife. Several months after their marriage, they sailed to the United States .
The Greece
they left was evolving, from classical backwater to modern regional player.
Asked whether
she remembers sailing to America ,
Yia Yia indignantly minimizes, “Of course I remember. It was a nice boat…it
took us eleven days.” Her granddaughter Stephanie then adds, “We think they had
money. They traveled well."
Yet as Ariadne
and her husband processed through New York 's Ellis Island , their future home was suffering. The Great
Depression, which lasted over a decade and ruined banks and businesses,
resulting in millions of homeless and unemployed – was just beginning.
Prohibition, which gave rise to bootlegging and organized crime, would not be
repealed until 1933. In Chicago ,
the surge of organized crime violence seemed unstoppable.
The American
gangster, Al Capone, was convicted on tax fraud in 1931, the same year Ariadne
and Nickolas Benakis settled into Berwyn , a
suburb west of Chicago .
Three miles away, or eight minutes by car, was Capone's headquarters in Cicero Illinois
In some
respects, Ariadne's life was never hers. While she had choices, she came from a
country where men made her decisions. She trusted her father as he decided her
future. She followed her relatively unknown husband, of an arranged marriage,
to a foreign country. Although Ariadne emigrated during one of the worst social
upheavals of the American twentieth century and lived with a successful Greek
restaurateur, mere minutes from the center of infamous organized crime in Chicago during the 1930s;
she remembers nothing. Astonished, Stephanie adds, "It's amazing. Yia Yia
doesn't recall anything,"
Cloistered within Chicago 's Greek community, Ariadne read only a
Greek newspaper, kept mostly to their home and with a successful husband, had
no need to work or drive. While Nickolas spoke English, Ariadne did not. True
to Greek tradition, Yia Yia maintained their home life while Nickolas managed
his several restaurants, the public face of their family. “He was all the time
at the restaurant,” she says.
By 1938, life seemed assured; their
three restaurants were successful, and Ariadne now had two sons, Costas and
John. Stephanie recounts her grandfather’s entrepreneurial ingenuity: “He and
his partners would buy the building, back in Chicago …so then people couldn’t screw with
them, with their rent. So I remember my dad [Costas], even when I was a little
girl; he’d say ‘if you’re going to own a business you buy the building.’”
One day in
1944, Nickolas was sitting on their living room couch, having just spoken with
his business partners, after a day of managing his restaurants. Ariadne arose
from sitting besides him, on the couch, to make Nickolas some coffee.
Returning, she found him still sitting up, on the couch, dead from a sudden
heart attack, “He come [home] to sleep. They was with him. Then he was on the
couch with me…and I go get him coffee.” She shrugs her shoulders, “I come
back…he was dead.”
The death of
Nickolas – their family's sole breadwinner who brought her to America ; the
man who controlled her decisions – left Ariadne adrift. Without any ownership
of Nickolas' restaurants, she was an unemployed widow, caring for two sons, without
income, could not drive, and spoke no English.
Perhaps Karma
pays out in installments.
Nickolas'
restaurant partners stepped in with Chicago 's
Greek community and provided for Ariadne and her boys’ every need. Impressed,
Stephanie adds, “They [the partners] really could have screwed with her.”
Sheltered in this tight community, Ariadne raised her two boys. Although
Ariadne never worked or drove, the support she received enabled both sons to
attend college and even send Costas to Harvard Law School
Ariadne's
story evolves with every circuit around the table. When interviewed with
Stephanie as translator, Yia Yia is more animated, more vocal, more at ease.
Yet conversation dissolves into silence when her past is breached too deep.
New details,
each one more painful and secretive, emerge to answer unresolved questions.
After the interview, secrets begin to trickle as Stephanie mentions that, “Yia
Yia did remarry, but I don’t bring it up because it shuts Yia Yia down. He
cheated on her with her best friend then they divorced. Her son had to tell her
he’d left.”
Stephanie
describes how her father's (Costas) generosity paid for Yia Yia's comfortable
mid-life, "For twenty years, Yia Yia would go to Greece for six months and
live with [her youngest sister] Koula; in the summer in Greece and come back to
Chicago [for] six months."
At some point,
though, Ariadne's carefully dictated life flipped like a magnet, from positive
to negative. The caliber of men making her decisions changed as the world
modernized and women's equality gained acceptance, exposing the illegitimacy of
traditional male patriarchy.
After a car
accident in 1979 left Ariadne's sixteen-year-old grandson Nick mentally
unstable, her oldest son John – now sole owner of Ariadne's house and land in
Aurora – moved Nick in with Yia Yia. For the next two years, she endured Nick's
unpredictable emotional abuse, until she discovered him sitting on her couch –
dead from a sudden heart attack.
In 1998,
Costas died from a sudden heart attack while vacationing in New Zealand.
Two years
later, Yia Yia's remaining son John, gave her one-week's notice and then moved
her from her home of the last forty-odd years into a small apartment in Aurora.
Every week, he delivered food. “He’d ring the bell and hand her the groceries
through the door, then leave,” Stephanie says, frowning. Still independent at
90, but now fearful of her son, she lived there for ten years. In 2010,
Stephanie confronted her uncle John about Yia Yia's treatment, and then moved Yia
Yia to an assisted living facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Stephanie
visits Yia Yia daily.
The truth of
Yia Yia's story presents a difficult moral. She is a product of time as well as
place. For much of her 101 years, men controlled Ariadne's journey by deciding
her path. A limited horizon and sheltered lifestyle insulated her from the
surrounding chaos of early twentieth century, but also denied Ariadne the right
of choosing to experience some of its wonders as well. The result is a woman
who lived well and travelled often, but has few stories to tell. At the end of
her journey, Yia Yia hopes to at least control her own death.
