But, nothing could prepare Graham or his family, for the shocking success of his appearance on the Virtuascape game show, Rob Them Blind, in which Graham sat on as the champion for over seven seasons, until the producers graciously asked him to step down. While he was champion (continuing his extremely Randian progress), Graham finished his educational prerequisites and immediately accepted a position with a major automobile manufacturer, as both their spokesperson for three years and their District Manager of Safety and Comfortable Upholstery. Even after his screen fame waned, Graham managed to appear in magazines, newspapers and journals for climbing all seven of the world’s highest peaks in one year, canoeing across the Atlantic Ocean in just under forty-three days, and for saving a child who was choking on a piece of tenderloin in a fashionable restaurant. Graham was, by all accounts, the perfect, A-lister. He was the Gentlemen’s Club’s man of the year four times in ten years, he was Personality Magazine’s most eligible bachelor twice and number five, eleven, and twenty-six of their 100 Most Successful Men special double issue.
Graham had dated some of the most famous women in the world, actresses, princesses, the daughter’s of chancellors, senators, and lords, singers, magicians, and politicians. His face was seen almost weekly in Look Magazine, What’s Up, Mood, Urban Living, and Space. He penned a monthly column for the Whitaker Daily Telegram that was carried by over six hundred newspapers and one hundred and fifty periodicals. He regularly had essays and articles published in the Scientific Centurion, Odyssey, and World Culture. He made guest appearances on talk shows, was considered an expert on the public’s tastes, an authority on cultural shift, and taught a course at a nearby university on Love and the Media, an elective that focused on the correlation of consumerism and healthy relationships.
This fortune was true of all of Graham’s family (in the most Bernoullian of senses); his brothers and sisters were just the same as him, perfect. Barry, the youngest, had just graduated from Tokyo General School of Medicine and had received a post at Mount Sinai as the Director of Cardiac Mechanics. Barry had taken over for Graham after only one season of Greene absence as the reigning champion of Rob Them Blind and held the crown for three years. Barry was on all the same lists as Graham, and his face often appeared on the cover of teen magazines with flirtatious headlines: “Youngest Greene Is A Dashing Prince Looking for A Princess”, “Barry Greene Speaks Out on Love, Relationships, and The Perfect Date”, “Who Will Barry Greene Marry? It Could Be You — Page 68 for Details!” Barry was taller and skinnier than his brother, he did not have as much of an athletic physique, but still, he made a name for himself as a professional skeet ball player and a striker on the city’s most famous team. He did not write novels or travel memoirs like Graham, but he had penned an immensely popular home health-care guide called Mommy, my Spleen Hurts: How to Cure Internal Afflictions with Household Items and followed it up with a weekly health column in the magazine POP! that received more letters than any other feature. Barry followed in Graham’s footsteps like a man traversing a minefield. He was yet another perfect man raised from the Greene stock.
Following Barry were one and a half sisters, Margaret and Elisa. They were inspiration for artists. They had a classical, almost Roman appearance. They looked always as though they’d walked out of a Renaissance painting, in their manner, appearance, and dress. Margaret was the oldest, born only a year after Graham and was the only challenge he had throughout school. The first year Graham was old enough to join the trivia team he had won the world championships in Geneva. The following year, when it was held in Juarez, after eight days of matches, only two children were left, Graham and Margaret. The length of the game, of which Graham finally won when Margaret confused Zeno of Ithaca with Zeno of Sparta, caused the international association that sponsored the contest to break it into girl and boy competitions. Graham was the boy champion until he left for secondary school. Margaret was the girl champion for three more years, before her sister, Elisa defeated her in a match that rivaled the earlier Greene match-up and caused further changes in the competition’s rules.
Margaret not only matched wits with Graham, but was also the first woman to be actively recruited for male sports teams. She was six foot two, she had a muscular, swimmer’s build and could out-play many of the best boys at school. But, Margaret was no tomboy; she showed great promise as a homemaker, was president of Women’s Domestic Club and spoke at school assemblies about chastity, marriage, and the home. She was class president in secondary school, dated one boy for the entire six years, never did more than kiss his cheek, mentored twelve younger girls, formed music appreciation clubs, and ran the school’s newspaper almost single-handedly.
Margaret did all the right things. She went to college at a prestigious girl’s university close to her home so she could continue to help her mother with her domestic chores and left without a degree when she’d met the man of her dreams, Auto van Integra, a prince from the Carpathian Mountain region who attended a college nearby. Within a year of the marriage, Margaret provided her mother and father with their first grandchild. He was followed by two more, each spaced perfectly one year apart.
The last Greene was not Graham’s sister, but an altruistic endeavor that had become an integrated sibling due to the will of the patriarch of the family, who had unknowingly impregnated a graduate student on his zoological review team while he was apart from his dear wife. The young woman, who seemed to be one of the only iconoclasts of Greene legend, was a busy assistant who made herself useful to her mentor by pointing out whenever possible that she had an invitation for him whenever he chose to accept. When Graham’s father completed his expedition, after four years of disappearing for months at a time, he carried a two year-old child in tow and much to his wife’s dismay, informed the family that the dear little girl who cooed quietly in a rugged bassinette was there to stay, since the mother had chosen to remain at the expedition site and continue their work.
At first, of course, the father tried to lessen his relationship to the child, saying initially that he’d taken a liking to the little sprite as he worked side-by-side with the mother, but over time, and with more than a nominal understanding of the loins of her husband, it became apparent that the elder Greene had made a deposit in the womb of this woman (Zeusian in all of its clandestine aura) and could not refuse the withdrawal that had naturally followed. To her credit, Graham’s mother did not evil step-mother the new, bastard child of her husband’s infidelity, but treated the little girl like she was a welcome guest, although one would be reaching exceedingly far to say that she treated the youngster like one of her own. Still, Graham’s father made no mention of the cot squeaking nights that had produced the child and although it was well known amongst family members that he had bred outside his class, no one dared to mention it. Elisa, as Graham’s father named her, slowly became a staple of the household, an otherworldly possession given unto the children by the wilds of the African continent. However, it did take some time before they began to consider her their sister, and even after they were taken to introducing her as such, there were always reminders that she truly wasn’t.
Elisa, if it could be possible, was slightly more attractive than her older sister, although you had to be an experienced appraiser to tell. It wasn’t so much the aesthetic qualities of their features in comparison that made Elisa more captivating, it was the way she utilized these features in everyday life. She had a way of looking at people, no matter who they were, that made them honest. It wasn’t fear; it was as though they wanted approval. Elisa moved and when she came to a stop, no matter what she was doing, she looked like a portrait in oils beautifully depicted by a master. She could bend over to pick up a pen that had fallen to the floor and for an instant, she was the Virgin Mary receiving the annunciation. She could reach for a book on a high shelf and she was Persephone reaching up to pluck a terrestrial flower. Margaret was a gem, Elisa was a jewel placed in the perfect setting.