What It Takes (39 page)

“Attention Katharine Dukakis! Mrs. Katharine Dukakis! If you weren’t smoking, you would be off the plane and with your husband now!”

She really could kill him sometimes. But, see, he never would have done it if he weren’t so eager to see her walk off that plane. He was like a kid who stayed home from camp. He missed her so terribly when they were apart ... like half of
him
was gone.

Everyone agreed, it was a wonderful marriage. Michael and Kitty agreed, tacitly—not everything had to be said. Not out loud. Not all the time. Certainly, not when things were so good. And they were: things were just about perfect.

Michael won big in ’86, won bigger than any Massachusetts Governor in modern times. He won with sixty-nine percent, four points better than Mario Cuomo, his Governor-neighbor in New York. (And don’t think those two weren’t keeping score.)

That night, in front of the crowd, he reminisced about the races of the past, the victories ... “But this, my friends, this ... is the sweetest of them all.” Then, he borrowed a line from a rock ’n’ roll song: God knows who taught it to him, but he used it. “The future’s so bright,” said Dukakis, “I gotta wear shades.”

Two days later, Sasso gave him the memo, the President memo he’d been holding in his locked briefcase for the last three weeks. Now it was ... appropriate. But Michael’s head started shaking, no, almost imperceptibly, but ... no, he just didn’t want it... not yet. He told John that he might not get back to him on it right away.

“Yeah, well, some decisions have to get made ... in this kind of thing,” Sasso said. His solemn brown eyes locked onto Michael’s face. He was doing it like he always did, nudging Michael along with veiled warnings that he could do what he chose ... but, of course, he might be screwing up the plan. Michael liked to stay on the plan. “This kind of thing, you have to be rolling by February or March. ...”

Michael got the message. But his head was still shaking. His face had that little grin of rue. His heavy eyebrows were arched in silent irony, almost a plea:
We just got here, to this peak
—
can’t we just ... sit?
All he said was, “I just want to enjoy the holidays, the family ...”

Sasso understood. His own face relaxed into a quiet, conspiratorial smile. It was a gift, that smile of Sasso’s, a confidence he bestowed. His head inclined once, slightly, on the wrestler’s neck that his suit never quite disguised. All he said was, “That’s fine, Mike. Fine.”

To his friends, who called in that day, Sasso said, “I don’t think he’ll go. I don’t know. Depends on the family.”

There wasn’t much discussion in the house on Rangely Road: certain things were expected, and once those were clear, what was there to discuss?

True, every once in a while an adjustment in the pattern had to be made. But generally, that could be taken care of with a quiet word from Euterpe to Panos. She was the only one who could change his mind. When his practice grew so busy and he was working thirteen- and fourteen-hour days (not to mention calls in the middle of the night), it was Euterpe who changed his life. “Now, listen, dear,” she told him one night. “The children are never going to see you if you keep the office hours through six, seven, eight o’clock, and you come home at nine or ten. We’re not a family. You come home and eat dinner, and then you can go out again.”

So he would come, every afternoon, five-thirty or six o’clock, and he’d listen to the CBS Radio news, and he would eat, and then rest. He’d sit in his chair, with his paper, put his feet up, and in five or ten minutes, he was asleep. Five or ten minutes later, he’d be up again, a new man: he’d be back in his office by seven, seven-thirty. And he was happy: he loved his family, his home, he loved the practice of medicine. And he loved the country that had opened its arms to him. A placid man was Panos.

Sometimes, he’d start working up a case about the boys’ behavior: something that just didn’t look right, or reflected badly on the family ... those bicycles all over the front yard! They were ruining the grass! But Euterpe would step in, before he forbade it, and reason with him. “Now, Pan,” she’d say, “didn’t we get the house for the boys? So they would have a place to play? Soon they’ll be gone, and we’ll have a nice lawn.” And that would end the matter.

It was funny: he was such a softie, she could do almost anything with him. And when she’d met him, as a high school girl, she thought he was stiff ... so forbidding! Pan was at Bates College then, in the premedical course, and a member of the Philhellenic Club. Each year, the club put on a play, and that year, in the
Hippolytus
, Panagis Dukakis played the title role. Euterpe’s older brothers, Nick and Adam Boukis, haberdashers, men of substance among the Greeks in Haverhill, Massachusetts, brought the student troupe down to perform, and although Euterpe missed the show (she had a gym exhibition that night), she ran to the train station, early the next day, to meet the actors and their professor. And there was Pan. He was so solemn, she thought—perfectly humorless. Nice-looking, yes, but he had no spark.

He was just shy, she found out later—very self-conscious was Pan, all his life. It was much later, she learned to love him. He didn’t call her for almost a decade, until she herself had gone through Bates College and was off on her own, teaching school. And then, Panos called to say, he had not thought of anyone else since he saw her at the station, ten years before. But being an upright Greek man, he could not come courting until he was on his feet, with his medical practice well established. Of course, she could not have talked to him, either—not seriously, not before both were ready to give their promise—as that was the way with the Greeks. In fact, it was quite daring, ultramodern, that he called
her
, directly, to talk. It would not have been permitted in the old country. But no one was going to arrange a marriage, in the old way, for Euterpe ... they wouldn’t dare. She had come a long way since Pan first saw her, the immigrant girl with the two long braids and the eager dark eyes, at the station that morning. She was the first Greek girl to go all the way through Haverhill High. And then she went on! To a coeducational college! Alone! No, Euterpe Boukis was quite the
Amerikana
.

She was always a special girl, even in that special family. She was born in a Thessalian mountain village of stone and mud-brick, in a whitewashed house on a path of dusty rock, where she and the other children used to play a sort of hide-and-seek called the Rescue of Helen of Troy. Her mother washed clothes in the shallow, stony Piniós River, and spread them on the bank to dry. The Boukis family had no more than the rest, but her grandfather had insisted on an education for his son: Euterpe’s father, Michael, had studied at Smyrna. He was only a bookkeeper, a clerk by trade, but he had the standing of a learned man, and the Philosophical Society would not meet unless Michael Boukis was present.

Her oldest brother, Nick, was almost eighteen when he determined to go to America to work: the family had no land, and alas, three daughters. (How would they get dowries? Who would marry them without?) So he wrote to a cousin in New Hampshire, who sent money for the passage, but still, Nick paused. His mother was pregnant again, and he waited for the birth. When he walked into his mother’s room, on the day of delivery, she was in tears. “Oh, Nick,” she wailed, “another girl!” Nick said: “Don’t worry. Mama. I’ll work two more years in America for her.”

But soon, they were all in America. Nick wrote back of the marvels in the New World. The Americans, he wrote, had so much wood, they built houses of it, and sometimes, he wrote, they would pick up a house—and
move it
. No one could believe it! Soon, he sent money for his brother, Adam, to come and work beside him in the mills—good wages! And when Nick and Adam were both at work, they pooled their savings to open a business: a clothing store in Haverhill. There, they got their own apartment, and then bought (from an older Greek) three houses on a corner of a poor street, in the factory district, where the Greeks lived. Then the brothers sent for all the family. The father, mother, and four daughters left their village in the spring of 1913. Euterpe, the third girl, was nine years old.

And, like her brothers, she took to this new land. It was easier for her than her older sisters. They had come of age in Greece. They had trouble with the odd new language, the loose customs, the want of everything they knew. But Euterpe had her father’s love of learning. She and the youngest sister, Eftie, just absorbed all the strange English words. Euterpe would stand before the mirror, watching her mouth, to make sure she pronounced each new word correctly. She so wanted to fit in. She went to school and she understood. She brought home all A’s to show her father. The principal at her elementary school, Stanley Grey, was a Yankee, but a kindly, childless man who took this young Greek girl under his wing. He taught her about reading, for pleasure, just to know a new book, a new world. He’d take books out of the library for her, and send her home with them, three or four at a time.
Little Women, Little Men, Treasure Island, Jane Eyre
... In Euterpe’s house, all the girls had chores, but if you had a book in your hands, you were not to be disturbed. So Euterpe spent all of her time reading. Her oldest sister, Lica, left grade school and was apprenticed to a dressmaker. The second daughter, Helen, only finished the eighth grade. But Euterpe not only stayed in school, she skipped the ninth grade and went right into high school. There were plenty of Greeks in Haverhill who couldn’t see the point of so much schooling for a girl. (Who would marry her after all that?) But in the Greek café where he spent his years in the New World—happily arguing philosophy, reading his Bible, railing against the ignorant priests who deceived their poor flock—Michael Boukis would shake his head and laugh at the doubters. He was proud of his learned daughter.

This was the pride Euterpe had in her own sons, and the expectation: that they would apply themselves to their learning, to all their tasks; that they would excel beyond their peers; that they would make their own way in this opportune New World, farther even than their parents had gone. She and Pan named their two sons in the traditional way, the first for Pan’s father, Stelian, who had died in the influenza epidemic just before the First World War. It was the second son, her last child, who would be named for her family: he would be called Michael, for her learned father ... and she gave him a middle name, Stanley, to honor that kindly WASP principal who had seen the spark in her. It was just right, the way it worked out ... because her first son, her Stelian, was such a Dukakis! A kindly boy, good-natured, he had Pan’s broad face and sturdy frame—he loved to play sports with his friends. But the second son, Michael, was a Boukis, sure enough: he had her looks, her slender quickness, the gift of easy learning, the near-photographic memory. ... He had her discipline: now it was little Michael who stood in front of the mirror, learning his new words. ... And he had her will: with pride, she always told strangers that the first Greek words he ever learned were
monos mou
, “by myself.”

Both the boys learned Greek when Pan’s mother, Olympias (Lymbia, they called her in the family), came to live out her last years with her doctor son. That was just after Michael was born, and from that point, they spoke Greek in the home. Lymbia loved all her grandchildren, but she could not get enough of Michael. She would sing to him, in Greek, and tell stories of her old home in Adramiti (now Edremit, in Turkey), how her old stepmother kept cocoons in the house, and spun out raw silk to make the sheets, and men’s shirts, for Lymbia’s dowry. ... In fact, Lymbia still had one with her: a silk shirt with no neck opening (because every girl had to have so many shirts for the man she would marry—but, of course, no girl knew how to cut the neck until she found the husband). ... And little Michael would regard the shirt, listen to the story, in solemn fascination. Stelian would be outdoors with his friends, whooping around the neighborhood. But Michael loved to sit and listen to his
yiayia
(grandma). He was so gentle with her. Every night, he would bring Yiayia from her room to the table. And he’d pull her chair out, hold it for her. She adored him for that.

Lymbia, in fact, was the reason they moved from their apartment to the house in Brookline. Euterpe wanted an extra bedroom on the ground floor, so Yiayia Lymbia (who could not manage stairs) could sit with them at the dinner table. Pan only had two conditions for a new house: it had to be within fifteen minutes of his office, and it had to have a two-car garage. When they found the house on Rangely Road, it seemed perfect, though there were no other Greeks in the neighborhood. In the midst of the Depression, they bought the house, new, for $12,500. Panos paid cash. That was the way Dr. Dukakis did business. No debts allowed—not to strangers. Family, that was different: it was Pan’s brothers who had helped him through medical school. That was a debt he never forgot.

Panos would never take a dime for doctoring anyone in the family. This was a matter of pride: What good was a doctor in the family, if a cousin had to pay a stranger to look at him? Whenever a cousin anywhere in this country took sick, the family called Panos. Sometimes, half-asleep, three o’clock in the morning, Pan would be on the phone to New Jersey (or New York, or South Carolina), listening to the symptoms of a niece or nephew. Even in later years, when his brothers, and their wives, and wives’ families, could well afford their own local care, no one’s doctor was allowed to make a move without consulting Pan, by telephone in Boston. After all, he was their pride, too, the ornament at the top of their tree,
a doctor in their family
.

And what a doctor! By the time Panos made a bride of Euterpe, he had long since wed the practice of medicine. Throughout his life, it remained his first love. When Euterpe joined him, he had already worked his way through premed and medical school, practiced as an intern and resident for nearly five years, and opened his office at 454 Huntington Avenue (just across from the Greek Orthodox Cathedral). He and his bride took an apartment in the same building, across the hall from the office, so Pan could be there on a moment’s notice. Even after they moved to leafy South Brookline, Pan still spent the bulk of his life in the office on Huntington Avenue, or in the car. He made house calls for more than forty years, even after he couldn’t do the driving. (Euterpe had to chauffeur him, and read or knit at the wheel while he went inside.) Through five decades, he delivered three thousand babies, and in later years, he birthed the babies of his babies. They were his pride and his testament, his patients. For the first-generation Greeks who came to him, he was the first doctor who spoke to them gently, who did not lord it over them, as they expected an educated man to do. Panos was always respectful of them, sometimes even tender. There was a young priest, named Iakovos, who served for a time at the cathedral. One night, about 2:00
A.M.,
Panos called him to the hospital: one of his patients, a Greek man, was dying. The young priest ran to the church and then straight to the hospital. But he found Dr. Dukakis in tears, because his patient had died before the priest arrived. The priest had never seen a doctor cry. Iakovos, the future Archbishop of all the Greeks in America, concluded: “Panos was a very human man.”