Until I Say Good-Bye (15 page)

Thank heavens for George. He set up the whole trip and sent us a daily schedule in advance. He made appointments to meet Soulla and other relatives. Told us exactly where to go, and when, and offered his house as a home base.

“Welcome Nancy and Suzin,” read a sign when we arrived, a high-hanging banner made by his eight-year-old son Stelios.

George's home was outside the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, a contemporary white abode in the middle of a golden wheat field. For me, those are the colors of the Cyprus: white and gold. Like the sun.

And blue, like the Mediterranean. So many shades of blue.

We had a fish dinner, straight from the sea, and wine. George was, as he joked in one of our first e-mail exchanges, “still the dashing, bright, handsome male you knew at UF but with less hair due to . . . maturity reasons.” We talked into the night with him and his wife Yioula, drinking wine long after the fish was finished.

After dinner, George brought out an extensive family tree of Panos's relatives. He had included everyone he could find. It was six sheets of paper, taped together. He rattled off the names of the people he had spoken with, telling me details. The tree listed more than sixty people, but that night it seemed like six hundred.

Including me.

There I was, on a short branch in the splay of Greek names like Petrides, Georgiades, Michaelides. My plain-Jane name, “Susan Spencer,” among the -ides and -ios and -is.

I was overjoyed.

But that night, I turned the family tree over in my mind. Wondering. Was I really one of them?

Panos had no descendants or immediate family . . . except me. But as is common in Greek culture, he had been close with his aunts and uncles and cousins. And the person he had perhaps been closest with, from childhood onward, was his cousin Soulla.

Soulla had been kind to me over e-mail, referring to me as the unexpected gift. But I couldn't help but wonder, would she like the gift as much when she opened it? What would she think when she actually met me?

Would I live up to the legacy of my birth father?

The next day we drove into the heart of Nicosia, a city of contrasts. An ancient walled area, near high-rise buildings. Crisp Mediterranean architecture in hills miles from the sea. A European feel with strong Middle Eastern influences. Sleepy but alive, crowded but compact, familiar but comfortably foreign.

Soulla's apartment was in a modern building on a busy street. I smiled when I saw the name: Attikus Street. Wesley's first name is Atticus.

We took a private elevator to her floor. George, who had visited her already, said it opened right into her apartment.

Soulla was a widow. Her husband might have been elected president of Cyprus, her children told us, if he had not died. I had worn black, out of courtesy for her status, halfway expecting a four-foot-nine stooped babushka clad in mourning black from head-to-toe.

Then Soulla opened the door, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

“Hi! Hello! I have been excited all day!” she said.

We stepped into her apartment, a wide open, light-filled space, with stained glass lamps and antiques, built-in display cases full of tidy collections, and artwork, including her daughter Alina's icon paintings, framed in a zinging electric blue.

The home of an aristocrat, yet perfectly comfortable.

Just like Soulla.

We sat outside on her terrace. I studied the lines of the buildings around us, a jumble of apartments with hills beyond. Soulla studied my face. Subtly. Searching for Panos. Torn between maintaining a polite gaze and staring.

She ordered souvlaki from a local restaurant. It was delivered with a bright salad of tomatoes and cukes. (We should have this in America. Where is the souvlaki delivery van?) We ate and talked all evening.

Soulla is an affluent, educated, tiny woman, maybe a hundred pounds after a large meal. Her English was perfect, her conversation effortless. She exuded warmth and thoughtfulness, as natural as any woman on the street, not a stroke of makeup or whit of snobby air despite her upper-class status.

It was apparent, immediately and often, that she had loved and admired Panos, her older cousin. Loved how Panos was tenderhearted with patients. How he was always loyal and kind. How he adored her children.

Soulla talks with her hands, her gestures revealing as much as her words. She has one where she says, “It was . . .  ,” and drifts off, shaking her hand, shrugging her shoulders, closing her eyes, and inhaling deeply, signaling something divine.

“To know he had a daughter . . .  ,” she said, and gestured just so.

She explained their devastation when Panos died suddenly in 2002. He had flown back to Cyprus for the birth of Soulla's first granddaughter. He felt ill after the flight, and went to bed. He never woke up.

Soulla said my sudden appearance in their lives was like a piece of him returned. A gift. “Like Christmas,” she said again, gesturing just so.

Soulla showed me pictures of Panos. There he was sitting in a café in Italy, in his twenties, his profile just like mine. There he was as a child, his wingnut ears and eyes exactly like Aubrey's.

He was fearless.

That's what Soulla kept saying. Panos was fearless.

He would help anyone. Go anywhere. Face any challenge.

Months later, Panos's best friend Robert Abdalian would tell me how Panos would swim way into the ocean, out of sight of the shore. Bob used the same word: fearless.

I took the word into my soul. Fearless was in my genes.

After a while, Soulla's daughter Mania came by. She lived in the same building. A mother like me, with two girls I would meet later, Anastasia—pronounced the elegant Greek way, AH na-sta-SI-ah—and Phaedra.

Another hour, and Mania's husband, Avraam—the operator, as I always thought of him—arrived with a bottle of wine.

Avraam was quiet the first few days, but after that, he was nonstop.  He later told me my sudden appearance panicked him. He wondered if he too might have a daughter he didn't know about. “From college, you know.”

As I said, an operator.

Avraam is a business engineer. Here's how he explains this in his e-mail signature line: “BUSINESS ENGINEERING involves industrial & environmental management, innovation management, entrepreneurship, marketing engineering, services management, operational research, econometrics, global strategy and leadership, management science, business administration, finance, economics, mathematics, social science (ethics and law).”

And as Avraam will unabashedly tell you, he's an expert in each subject.

He brought the electric car to Cyprus, he told me. I ordered a Red Bull one day in front of him. “I brought Red Bull to Cyprus!” he said.

Like them all, Avraam adored Panos. “He had an unbelievable rationality,” Avraam told me that first evening. “He was no BOOL-sheeter.”

He poured the last of the wine, went for another bottle. Soulla kept showing me pictures, talking about Panos. As the wine went around, the talk cycled into Greek. Despite a childhood of Saturdays spent with Ms. Karadaras pinching my ears, I couldn't understand a word. It sounded like Russians speaking Italian to me.

And yet I felt at home.

Eventually, Soulla would show me a fifty-something-year-old family photo, maybe twenty people, including Panos's parents, aunts, and uncles. I got out my reporter's notebook and asked her to name each person.

Something -ios. Some-other-person -ides.

“And who is this gentleman?” I asked, pointing to a swarthy, stocky figure in black.

“That would be your grandmother,” Soulla said.

Grandmother Julia, Soulla explained, had been blessed with brains, not looks. She had been a mustachioed woman. So much so, according to Alina, she had scared the grandchildren.

We laughed and laughed about this, Soulla included.

It was perfect. Levity and gravity, at the same time.

T
he next morning, Soulla took me to meet the doctor, a friend, who had pronounced Panos dead. There had been no autopsy, but the doctor assured me Panos had no neurological problems that would explain my withered hand. He had died of something vascular—likely an aneurysm—after the long flight, the doctor opined.

Phew! I thought. Still no sign of hereditary ALS.

Soulla confirmed it: no known genetic problems in her family.

In fact, she and Panos had a hundred-year-old cousin. Xenon, the centenarian, was in excellent health. A doctor himself, he had helped Panos with his career. Soula arranged for Nancy, George, and me to meet him.

Cousin Nadia accompanied us. Nadia is similar to Soulla: tiny, tasteful, in her sixties. But Nadia is a spitfire, prone to off-color jokes. A professional interpreter of Greek, Italian, and English, she once had a chance to translate during a visit by the pope. She declined. “I never really liked the man,” she said.

It was a short climb up stairs to Xenon's apartment—something that bothered us when we found out that Xenon was in a wheelchair and hadn't been able to leave the apartment for years.

Xenon met us in his living room. He had a blue blazer on over his pajamas. His hearing aid stuck out of its breast pocket.

His much younger wife, Irini (only in her eighties), joined us.

Xenon had been Cyprus's minister of health. He told us how he had worked with Lord Mountbatten, eradicating malaria. How both his sons were doctors. How he had practiced medicine around the world.

In his youth, he had typhoid. Typhoid! Xenon was in the middle of that story when Irini, his silent wife, finally barked, “SHE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT PANOS!”

“He can tell stories till tomorrow,” Irini said, shaking her head.

This got Nancy, Nadia, and me giggling.

Undeterred, Xenon went on. “Before the war . . . ” he started.

And George politely broke in: “WHICH WAR?”

He shouted, of course, because Xenon couldn't hear. Which made Nancy, Nadia, and me giggle harder. George looked horrified.

Nadia asked if Irini had pictures of Panos. The two disappeared to another room and returned with scads of framed photos.

“Of her boys, the doctors!” Nadia said, rolling her eyes.

Laugh. Smile. It was a delightful afternoon, even if I didn't learn much about my birth father. Except for one precious, ethereal detail.

As we left, I leaned and gave Xenon a kiss on each cheek, the Cypriot custom.

“Ah!” the old man said, smiling. “You kiss like Panos.”

I
have always loved Greek food—stuffed grape leaves, sharp feta cheese, ink-black olives steeped in rosemary and garlic.

In Cyprus, I discovered the best way to eat: at a mezze. A word from the Arabic meaning “to share,” a mezze was a variety of courses, shared by all at the table, common throughout the Middle East. A reminder that a meal is more than food.

Early in the trip, we shared a seafood mezze courtesy of the spitfire Nadia. It included every type of shellfish, roe, octopus, and urchin, filleted fishes large and small, served on white plates upon white linen. Delight.

Near the end, in a small tavern with russet walls and deep brown tables, we shared an unforgettable meat mezze with Soulla's extended family. It was Soulla's gift, though she was a vegetarian herself.

First came quail eggs and marinated artichokes, sauteed mushrooms, warm pita with hummus and spicy caponata.

Then course after course of meats: souvlaki, roasted chicken, pork in all varieties, followed by lamb in a mint-reduction sauce. Spinach pie. Moussaka with a toasted top of savory custard. Couscous with broth. Vegetables.

And desserts. Cinnamon-cheese pastries, honey-laden phyllo dough vessels full of ground pistachios.

We lingered over each course. Each offering. Each bite. We talked and laughed, whiling away hours.

Eventually, we moved outside for the evening's final coffee and nightcap. The night sky was clear. The world close and warm. No shadows between us.

Mania remarked to Nancy on our friendship. “It's not something that can ever be re-created,” Nancy replied, crying.

Avraam, who didn't understand the grim specter of my health, asked questions. I cried as I explained it might be ALS, a death sentence.

“But . . . ” I eked out, “no matter what happens, I am fortunate. I have met all of you. I can tell my children: ‘You are not sentenced by genes to suffer.'

“I now know that part of me came from a great man. And great people.”

I talked of the parents who adopted me. Who sacrificed for me. Who expected great things for me, stood by me, and made me who I am.

I said I felt like the luckiest person in the world.

And I did.

I might have been dying, but that night—on that terrace, after that meal, with those people—I was experiencing the full wonder of life.

I had arrived a stranger, but I was leaving with a new family.

I was unafraid.

Fearless.

I carried those feelings home with me, along with an antique bracelet—a gift from Soulla, exactly the kind I would have bought myself—and two cherished possessions found on Panos's body when he died: his rosary and his Saint Andreas medallion.

I had the medallion mounted on onyx. I wear it often as a necklace, close to my heart.

The Bible

T
wo years later, my trip to Cyprus still resonated in my soul. Among my relatives I had found no answers, but I had found peace. I had felt accepted, as I rarely had before.

Even though I had never known Panos, it was the land of my heritage. My second home.

I wanted to return. To take John, introduce him around, and hear him assure me that he understood. That he would take the children there one day to meet their relatives.

I wanted to thank Soulla and her family.

To finish what I had started and discover more of the man my birth father had been.

I wanted to return in the spring. The cruise with Stephanie was in March. I was saving the summer for my children, when they would be out of school. That left two months for Cyprus.

But Nadia, my spitfire cousin, had been diagnosed with cancer and was in the middle of chemotherapy. Then Soulla had spinal surgery, which necessitated a long convalescence. The trip would have to be delayed until June.

No bother. I still had time.

And one important thing to do for Soulla before I returned.

To get her a gift as dear as the ones she gave me.

In Cyprus, it was clear that Panos's family had no love for Barbara, the American woman Panos had married—and divorced—and married again. And divorced a second time.

Barbara was “a spoiled American princess,” they said. She had hissy fits at restaurants. Refused to participate in events if she was mad at Panos or someone else.

Each time they said her name—ruefully—they precisely pronounced each syllable BAR-ba-ra: “BAR-ba-ra was difficult!” Panos's nephew-in-law Avraam said, circling a finger around an ear.

The final insult, according to Soulla, was when she asked BAR-ba-ra to bring the family Bible back to Cyprus for Panos's funeral, and she had not.

“If you meet her and see the Bible—grab it!” Soulla said to me, partly in jest. Words I never forgot.

I became determined to get that Bible for Soulla.

And to meet BAR-ba-ra. I mean, Panos had married and divorced her twice? I was fascinated. Must have been one helluva love.

So I wrote BAR-ba-ra in Jacksonville, Florida, where she and Panos last lived. The letter returned unopened. A dead end. I needed help.

I thought of Pat McKenna. Pat is a nationally known private investigator, having worked for the defense in O. J. Simpson's murder trial, William Kennedy Smith's rape case, and Casey Anthony's murder trials.

I had met Pat a decade before on a lower-profile case. A mother had left her toddler sleeping at home while she picked up a present nearby on tony Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.

The two-year-old had woken up and drowned in their backyard pool. The rest of the press pilloried her, partially because of the nature of the errand.

I believed as a mom that it was immaterial whether the woman left the child to buy Louis Vuitton luggage or a gallon of milk. She left the child. That was the crime.

Pat thanked me at the end of the case for being fair.

Pat and I hadn't spoken much since. We were Facebook friends, though, so I sent him a private message.

I deliberated how dramatic I should make it and thought, Ah, why not? It is what it is.

I wrote:

Dear Pat,

I would like to hire you to find somebody. It's a dying wish . . .

He showed up at my front door the next day, offering his services for free. Later, he told me he hadn't even noticed the “dying wish” part. He just wanted to help me if he could.

Now, Pat is a charmer. His premier investigative skill is talking to people. The man could talk a cat out of a box of mice. He also uses the saltiest damn language of any human I know.

“I was on the balls of my ass too!” he said, explaining how he had been flat broke when a tabloid newspaper offered him a million bucks to spill secret details of O. J.'s murder case.

Pat turned the offer down.

He spares no salty spite for people who opine on Casey Anthony while sitting at computers in their dirty underwear. But he phrases that in a far more crass way.

Yes, Pat's remarkably crude.

“I'll either charm it out of her or intimidate it out of her,” Pat said, when I explained about Barbara. “I'll give her a dirt nap if she doesn't give you that Bible!”

But also remarkably dear.

When he phoned BAR-ba-ra the first time—it seemed to take him about five minutes to find her with a database search—Pat had to step away from me to regain his composure, choking up as he explained to her my health.

Barbara, for her part, was completely unaware of my existence.

And completely disbelieving.

She was so embroiled with lawyers and legal issues involving Panos's estate, even ten years after his death, that she mistook our call to be an offshoot of that.

“No ma'am,” Pat said. “Susan has no interest in the estate. She wants nothing of you except information about Panos and his family Bible, if you would be so kind.”

They hung up. Soon came a call from Barbara's protective older brother, an elderly man from Texas.

Now, you must understand, Texas is a unique state with a rebel spirit all its own, the one I imagine most likely to secede from the United States if given the chance.

Texas is so large it has its own power grid—one of only three in the United States: one for the eastern half, one for the western half, and one for Texas.

And this guy had an oversize Texas personality. The man once sued Panos, his own brother-in-law. That's how brash they are in Texas.

He had choice words for Pat and me, spoken in a Texas twang so thick my ears rang. “I hear you're harassin' my sister,” he growled.

Barbara, he said, had had a heart attack and a stroke. “You're gonna kill her. My friend is running for top prosecutor, and I'm helping him get elected. He says you could get charged with accessory to murder. I would hate for you to get charged or sued.”

Bring it on! I thought.

He twanged on about how Panos couldn't have fathered a child because he was made sterile after an accident in the early 1960s. Now, he could tell me Panos's penis got cut off and launched into space, and I would still believe he was my birth father. So I was not one scrap deterred by his threats.

Of course, Pat wasn't either.

Pat spoke gingerly to him, promised to send him photos and records, and asked him to reconsider when he got them.

“Fuckin' hillrod,” Pat said as we hung up, using his own word combo of
hillbilly
and
nimrod
.

In the following days, Pat fielded long calls from a curious Barbara, convincing her to meet us. Barbara did not believe I was Panos's daughter, but she was willing to give me the Bible if it brought me comfort.

Soon after, Pat, Nancy, and I flew to meet her in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she had just moved. It was my first airplane trip using a wheelchair. Another milestone crossed.

I thought of how Nancy and I had joked and joked about this mythical woman. Laughed about how we might have to dress in all-black and burgle her home to get the Bible—committing a sin, a crime, and an act of love at the same time.

I thought of how, out of gratitude, I should erase from my mind all the disparaging things we had heard of Barbara. She had been kind.

That afternoon, Barbara came to our hotel. Her lady helper drove her there in a big green Mercedes. Pat helped her in. She used an elegant cane, the only indicator that she was well into her seventies, at least.

Her hair was a deep brown, setting off her eyes, a crystal blue. Her skin was flawless. She smelled like roses.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, sitting near me and taking my near-lifeless hand. “How was your flight?”

She held the Bible in her free hand.

As she talked of Panos, her blue eyes widened and took on a dreamy look. “He and I, we were one.”

She was a remarkably beautiful woman.

And exceedingly polite. She did not pepper me with questions, nor stare. She invited us to dinner. I could tell by the way she specified a certain seat in the restaurant and ordered off the menu she was a particular lady.

I thought of how hard it was for her to learn that a man she thought was uniquely hers was not. She had moved to Knoxville, where she knew no one, which I thought odd and sad. I felt sorry for her.

That night she handed me the Bible.

Back in the hotel room, Nancy, Pat, and I checked it out. Nancy was the first one to say it: “Doesn't look like a family Bible to me!”

Nancy described her own family's Bible, a huge tome in German that had had its own stand, its pages crumbling with age.

The Bible Barbara had given me looked unused. It was a standard size in English, with a wood cover engraved with a Greek Orthodox cross. We checked the publication date: 1957.

Pat 'fessed up that he had spotted a religious bookstore near the hotel. “We've been had!” Pat concluded. “Fuckin' hillrods!” He started anew on his I'll-give-her-a-dirt-nap rant.

“Calm down, people,” I said. “We can talk more with her at her house tomorrow.”

Nancy messaged the folks in Cyprus to try to get a description of the family Bible. My iPhone chimed before dawn. It was Soulla. Nancy spoke to her.

As I stirred awake, I heard Nancy asking for a description of the Bible, then saying: “Whaaaat??? You don't know?”

As it turned out, Soulla had not seen the Bible since childhood. She said the only person who could identify it was Xenon, the then hundred-year-old cousin we'd met two years before.

“He's still alive?” Nancy blurted out.

When Pat joined us, we gave him the good and bad news. Good that there was someone who could check the Bible's authenticity. Bad that the person was . . . not so reliable.

“Lemme get this straight,” Pat said. “Our bona fide is one hundred and two years old?”

“Yup!” we said, laughing.

We vowed to case Barbara's house for the real-deal Bible when we visited her that day.

W
e lunched with Barbara at a wonderful place, the Northshore Brasserie. I remember two things from the meal: (1) The ice cream. Handmade. Caramel lime. Best I've ever had. (2) A breakthrough with Barbara.

At the meal, I brought up the story of my birth mother. Barbara, I realized, was too polite or nervous to ask. I was not spot-on sure about the dates of her relationship with Panos, or whether I had been conceived while they were . . . ugh . . . married.

I eased her into a conversation about how they met. She was a patient in the hospital where he worked. And when they married. 1967.

Phew!!!!

Well after my conception.

I asked Barbara to remember that the pregnancy—that I—had happened before Panos met her. “All this does not detract from what the two of you had,” I said to her. I saw her blue eyes widen with recognition and relief.

We went to her house, a huge home even by American standards, in an upscale Knoxville suburb. A home where she lived alone.

Barbara tottered up the steps to her towering front doors. Pat helped us both in. He was so helpful the whole trip. I was using a wheelchair off and on, and he lugged it around. I heard him groan one day as he hoisted it into the car trunk. “There goes a seminal vesicle!” he said cheerily.

The man was an absolute gentleman when he wanted to be. He even tucked away his F-bombs for Barbara. She was too much a lady (unlike me) to find them amusing.

Barbara's home was decorated in Baroque style, with lots of gold accents and fine furniture. Formal, like Barbara. She had a trio of tiny dogs. Their yips echoed through the house.

We sat. I realized that I had never seen Panos's handwriting.

Can you tell something about a person by his handwriting? I can.

I asked Barbara if I might see letters he had written to her. I cringe now, thinking of how nervy this was: I was asking to see their most private communication.

I never saw them.

But oh! what I did see.

Barbara brought out newspaper clippings of Panos's many accomplishments at the Mayo Clinic. Stories of patients saved. Awards won. Books written and charities supported.

We sat in her fancy living room, with near floor-to-ceiling windows all around, both of us reading the articles. It was so sunny, I squinted in the light.

At one point, Barbara stopped talking. I looked up. She was staring at me.

“You are squinting just like Panos,” Barbara said.

In that moment, she believed.

She brought out some antique icons that had belonged to Panos. She laid them out in front of me. “Take whatever you wish,” she said. I chose one.

She gave me the gold worry beads that Panos thumbed. The gold money clip found in Panos's pocket when he died, the euros still in it. No, I never counted them. There could be hundreds, but I would never spend them.

Pat and Nancy asked about the Bible. Barbara said it was the only one she had.