And it wasn’t just Perry and the Nicodemuses and Nick Kendros whom Karras knew. Karras scanned the pews, realized that he knew the names or recognized nearly everyone in the church, knew them from his own days in Sunday school or from the public schools he had attended or from visiting their businesses, food service establishments mostly, scattered throughout D.C.
There were other times he’d see them all together like this, too. There was the annual picnic at Marshall Hall, which he had attended last summer. He had caught the SS Wilson at the 7th Street wharves with his family, and they had taken the boat down the Potomac and gotten off on the Maryland side of the river across from Mount Vernon. On the boat, the Greeks had carried their food in baskets, roasting pans filled with lambs and flat trays of pastitso and bowls of salata choriatiki. Once the boat docked, the Greeks would rush off to get the choicest picnic tables, and there would be potato-sack races, and rides on the roller coaster, and dancing to music performed by a band of musicians playing bouzoukias and cymbaloms and clarinets. The older men would sit at the tables and get served by their wives while they drank a little ouzo or mastica and played cards, while the younger men, those that had been Americanized, stayed with their women and children. Karras’s father had been alive for that last picnic at Marshall Hall. He had been one of the card players, and Karras had sat there with him at the table, ignoring Eleni and his son.
Karras looked down the pew at Dimitri, whose hand was locked in Eleni’s.
His eye wandered to the lovely young woman in front of him in the next pew. He bent forward slightly to see if he could catch her smell. There was a raised mole on the bridge of her exposed shoulder, Karras imagined his tongue on the mole, and how it would taste. He glanced over her shoulder to her long, thin hands folded in her lap, and he imagined the way those hands would feel, caressing him, stroking his cock. As the woman turned her head to the side, Karras studied the curl of her lips and her slightly open mouth. He imagined her lipstick smeared from his kiss, and wondered how her mouth would look, if it would be open slightly as it was now, as her breath became short and she began to come.
Watching this woman, and the two or three others he had singled out since the service began, Karras suddenly remembered the one thing he had liked about sitting in church. And he wondered if the other men around him looked at the women in the church and shared similar black thoughts.
Who were these men? He thought of these Greek-Americans, who came to church each Sunday with their families, who worked hard as their fathers had, who knew what it was to make the full commitment that it took to be a man, who understood how difficult it was to stay on the path, and how easy it could be to stumble, yet in the end kept right to it. And Karras wondered, where did I begin to stumble? Why didn’t I stay right like them? How did I become this?
“Goddamn you, Pop,” he muttered under his breath. Then he crossed himself and shut his eyes tightly, realizing that he had just cursed his dead father in the house of God.
After the service the congregation gathered out on the stone steps in front of the church, visiting, greeting one another and exchanging pleasantries, but not for long, as the day was clear but biting cold. Eleni and Dimitri and Georgia Karras stood on the corner where 8th crossed L, Dimitri circling the lamppost there, his fingers tracing its iron ridges. They were waiting for Peter Karras, who had been stopped by Perry and Helen Leonides at the top of the steps.
Perry and Karras shook hands.
“Your family looks great, Perry,” said Karras.
“Yours too,” said Perry.
Karras smiled at Helen, who held their toddler Diana, little Evthokia standing at her side. Helen, shapely as ever but with a pleasing touch of age in her face, a fan-shaped spray of lines coming off her eyes. Helen smiled back, a drop of pity now in the look she gave to Karras as she scanned his gray hair and the cocked posture he had learned to adopt when shifting his weight off the bad knee.
“Perry,” said Helen. “It’s cold for the pethia.”
“Take them to the car, sweetheart, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Helen leaned forward, kissed Karras on the cheek. “Adio, Pete.”
“Take care of yourself, Helen.”
Perry and Karras watched Helen and the children cross the street, head for a ’48 Packard Super 8 sedan parked along the curb.
“Nice car.”
Perry blushed. “Lotta chrome, Pete. You think it’s too much?”
“Don’t be bashful, chum. You work hard, you deserve to give yourself and your family nice things. You get that second store opened yet?”
“Last month. I’m puttin’ in some hours now. Between that and the house we just put a contract on—”
“You bought a house?”
“Yeah, a little bungalow out in Silver Spring. If everything goes through all right, we’re moving in a couple of weeks.”
“Leavin’ the city, huh?”
“For the kids. Everything’s for the kids now, right?”
Karras looked at Perry: soft around the middle, no hair left on top, a pair of heavy, black-framed glasses resting on his thick nose. Not even thirty years old, but already looking like his dad. Well, Perry had always looked like a middle-aged man, even as a kid. It suited him, somehow.
“Ella, Pete!” yelled Eleni from the corner.
“You start walkin’,” yelled Karras, “I’ll catch up to you!” He turned back to Perry. “So, you got a new car, a successful business, a new house, a beautiful wife and a couple of beautiful kids. No wonder you look so unhappy.”
Perry laughed. “Aw, come on, Pete, stop ribbin’ me. You know I couldn’t be happier.”
“I know it, chum. I’m happy for you, too.”
Perry shuffled his feet. “Only, I wish life wasn’t moving so damn fast, Pete. I mean, I never even see you anymore.”
“Yeah, it’s been too long.”
“Maybe you and me could hook up together one night. Go see the fights down at U-Line or something.”
Helen honked the horn of the Packard. From the steps they could see her in the front seat, waving Perry forward.
“You better get going,” said Karras.
Perry put a hand on Karras’s arm. “I’m serious, Pete. I haven’t sat down and talked with you since your father’s funeral.”
Karras looked around at the other men and women on the steps, lowered his voice. “You don’t need to be hangin’ around with me. Perry. You’re doing fine without me, understand? You don’t want to be gumming things up for yourself at this stage in the game.”
“Aw, knock it off, Pete. Quit kiddin’ me.”
“I’m tellin’ it to you straight.”
Perry removed his glasses, folded them, slipped them in the side pocket of his topcoat. “It’s funny, Pete, the way you look at yourself. That’s one thing. And then the other thing is, the way people look at you.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“You think I’m some kind of altar boy, always doing the right thing, getting the right things back in return. Well, I have been pretty lucky, I guess. And that’s the way that you see me. But the truth is, growing up, you were the guy I wanted to be. I wanted to get my pants dirty once in a while, just like you. I never could play stickball like you, make small talk like you, make time with the girls like you. Even during the war, I had desk duty, and you were over there doing your part, putting your life on the line like a man ought to do. As far back as when we were kids, I’d see you and your father walking down the street, and I’d think, those are a couple of real tough characters. I knew... I’m telling you, I knew, even then, that I’d never be that kind of man.”