LOVER’S ODYSSEY

Harry Mark Petrakis

This year if we reach September 30, 2018, my wife Diana and I will have
been married 73 years. We have celebrated anniversaries in multiple
ways, but we are limited in how we celebrate now. Airports have
become as difficult to cross as battlefields. Since we do little socializing
anymore, new clothing is no longer needed. Stomach wear and tear
mandate against a celebratory dinner of lobster and champagne. So we
will spend that day quietly, grateful we still have one another.

Diana and I first met as children. I remember her as a bony girl with
great dark eyes looming oversized in her small pale face.

A story cradled in the folklore of our family goes that when both of us
were about ten, one Sunday in our parish church Diana pointed me out
to her older sister Maria as “the boy I’m going to marry.” I like to
believe that story is true.

We met again some five or six years later, both in our teens, once
again at church on a Sunday in summer. My father was our parish
priest, which gave me, his son, a certain patina of respectability which,
through idleness and gambling, I was working hard to overcome.

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I was astonished at how the girl had blossomed. Her eyes, while still
large and very dark, now ornamented her face. Her figure had filled out
into a slender loveliness.

Since we lived in the same direction, we rode the streetcar together.

When she stepped up into the streetcar, her light summer dress
tightened across her buttocks. The word that came to mind when I
thought of them later was their “contrapuntal” loveliness. I had no idea
what the word meant but the sound of it seemed to me appropriate.

Soon after that Sunday, we started dating, Diana’s mother invited me

for dinner to look me over. I went nervously, hoping that despite my
reputation as a wastrel, hoping to make a winning impression.

Her father was a short, stocky and ebullient man, who embraced me
with unrestrained affection. Diana’s sister, Maria, equally as lovely, and
her younger brother George, also accepted me warmly.

That wasn’t true of Diana’s mother. She stared at me through dinner,

her eyes reflecting the ferocity of a hawk guarding her nest against
predators.

During those days of our courtship, Diana radiated a child’s delight in

life. One summer day a friend drove us for an outing to Starved Rock
Park. The three of us walked along a wooded path through the forest
and came to a fountain, water bubbling from a triad of spigots.
Without a moment’s hesitation Diana flipped off her shoes, raised her
dress to the hem of her panties, and stepped barefooted into the
fountain. She began an exuberant, spontaneous little dance while
whirling and laughing. I wasn’t the only one entranced. Men and

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women walking past the fountain paused to admire the lovely nymph
cavorting joyfully in sunlight and water.

In 1940, we were both seventeen. War had broken out in Europe the
year before and America was expected to enter. I was draft age and in
good physical shape, so I felt certain I would be inducted into the army.
That gave our meetings and embraces the aura of star-crossed lovers
soon to be parted.

But when my induction physical came, I was rejected for service

because of scar tissue on my lungs from my childhood tuberculosis. As
my neighborhood friends and schoolmates departed for the army, I felt
ashamed at being rejected for service and found solace in gambling,
which had become an addiction that dominated my life. Despite the
warnings of her mother, Diana accepted my proposal of marriage and
we were married by my father on September 30, 1945.

For the first months following our wedding, we lived with my parents in
their south side apartment. At the beginning of our second year, we
found a studio apartment in Woodlawn, comprising a kitchen,
bathroom and living room. We slept on a murphy bed that swung out
of the wall. The second year we lived there, our first son Mark was
born. The journey of our family began.

While we occupied the studio apartment, I worked in the south side

mills of U.S. Steel, on rotating shifts. My schedule ran from eight in the
morning to four in the afternoon, from four to midnight, and finally
from midnight to eight in the morning.

Working the morning and afternoon shifts I was able to sleep at night.
The midnight to eight shift was a problem since I came home exhausted

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at dawn to a baby son who greeted the day with a strong pair of lungs.
So I might get a few hours of sleep Diana bundled our son in his buggy
and for the next four, five hours walked the streets with him, lingering
on a bench in the park, or taking him to her father’s shoe repair shop.
The price she paid for gaining me some sleep was to return home
exhausted.

After quitting the mills I worked a series of other jobs. While my

gambling habit had diminished, it still ate at my spirit and my time. But
the desire to write I’d held for years had also grown stronger. Writing
slowly weaned me from gambling. But writing also stripped me of
interest in any job I held. The result was that I either quit or was fired
from a series of employments.

In this time sequence there was also an abysmal year I spent as owner
of a small factory district lunchroom. My inexperience in the restaurant
business primed me for failure. Diana was my principal waitress
working long hours beside me. There were many nights the two of us
fell into exhausted sleep on the South Shore train that carried us home.

Meanwhile, beginning in the late 1940s and carrying into the mid-
fifties, as often as I sent stories out, they invariably came back with
printed rejection slips attached. Manuscripts often remained with
magazines for months, and once, having sent a story to Partisan
Review, I waited a year for a reply which was another rejection.

Two more sons were born to our family, one in Chicago and the other
in Pittsburgh where I worked for a year in the corporate offices of U.S.
Steel.

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 For our family of five, the monthly arrival of bills was a constant worry
for Diana as she tried to stretch our meager funds. We had arguments
about my occasional lapse into gambling as well as my inability to hold
a job. There were pleas and tears and promises I kept breaking. Yet,
Diana retained faith in me and never asked me to give up writing to
concentrate on making a living.

Ten years of submissions and rejections were to pass before I sold my

first story, Pericles on 31st Street to the Atlantic Magazine at Christmas
of 1956. When that story appeared in print in the April 1957 issue of
the Atlantic, I bought a score of copies to distribute to family and
friends. My repeated and often plaintive claim to being a writer had
been confirmed.

I wrote and sold more stories. I also completed a novel which was
published in 1959.Despite the warnings from editors and other
struggling writers, I decided to quit any regular employment and
become a freelancer. As a mother with children we needed to feed and
clothe, my frightened wife still had faith in me and agreed. Quitting my
job, we returned from Pittsburgh to Chicago and for the next few years
survived on the sale of a few more stories and another book but mostly
on the bounty of relatives and friends. My sister and brother-in-law
John Manta’s sons, Leo, Frank and Stephen helped us renovate an old
house their family owned and slated to be demolished. We lived there
for two years, rent free which aided our survival. We ate with my
mother and sister as well as Diana’s family several times a week.

During those years that I struggled to write, it was Diana who remained
rooted to that real world we lived in with our sons, seeing to their
clothing for school, making sure I looked presentable as I visited

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publishing offices and met with editors. When she shopped for
groceries, she carried a purse full of coupons that she manipulated for
substantial savings with the skill of an accountant.

I began lecturing and teaching at writer’s conferences which helped

bolster our income. When our sons grew older, Diana joined me on the
lecture circuit, her warmth and friendliness helping make our visits
memorable. A professor at a university in Toronto told me as we were
finishing a three-day residency, “Harry, you are the writer… you were
the one we were looking forward to seeing. Now that you’re leaving, I
must tell you we will miss Diana the most.”

Through the tumultuous and erratic course of my writing journey,

Diana looked after our family. In times of stress, she was our comfort.
She kept faith in me as I stumbled, and bolstered me when my
confidence wavered. When I confronted her with decisions that were
reckless, overcoming her fears as a mother, she supported me. I remain
convinced that without her love and the way she held our family
together, I would not have written a single story or book.

Having reached our73rd anniversary, Diana and I are now a very old
couple, my wife on a walker and I on a cane. Our breathing has grown
short, our muscles weary, strength and agility worn away, But there is
something that cannot be taken from us…that incredible life’s journey
we have made together.

Now in my life I also admit to having made a multitude of faulty

decisions. One decision I made, however, has proven so incredibly
sagacious that it might almost wipe away a plethora of faulty choices…
that was so many years ago, asking Diana to be my wife and then
reaping the bounty of having her say “Yes…”