Meeting Yia Yia

*This is a magazine article I wrote for a class I recently completed.

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. Although Capone was gone, his successor, Frank Nitti and Capone's brother Ralph, took over Capone's organization and continued plaguing local businesses well into the 1940s.

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. By the early 1960s, Ariadne had moved into a five-bedroom house her sons built for her on land they purchased.

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.

Stephanie stops next to her car, in the assisted living facility parking lot and tells me a final secret: “She [Yia Yia] told me she wants to die in her sleep in her bed.” Stephanie sighs sadly, and then confides, “The doctor said Yia Yia's kidneys are failing, which means it will be slow.”