before the tune launches into full volume, let me fill you in on what has happened these last eleven years.
Prohibition has ended, for one thing. In 1933, by ratification of all the states, the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth. At the American Legion Convention in Detroit, Julius Stroh removed the bung from a Gilded Keg of Stroh’s Bohemian beer. President Roosevelt was photographed sipping a cocktail at the White House. And on Hurlbut Street, my grandfather, Lefty Stephanides, took down the zebra skin, dismantled his underground speakeasy, and emerged once again into the upper atmosphere.
With the money he’d saved from the auto-erotica, he put a down payment on a building on Pingree Street, just off West Grand Boulevard. The above-ground Zebra Room was a bar & grill, set in the middle of a busy commercial strip. The neighboring businesses were still there when I was a kid. I can dimly remember them: A. A. Laurie’s optometrist’s shop with its neon sign in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses; New Yorker Clothes, in whose front window I saw my first naked mannequins, dancing a murderous tango. Then there was Value Meats, Hagermoser’s Fresh Fish, and the Fine-Cut Barber Shop. On the corner was our place, a narrow single-story building with a wooden zebra’s head projecting over the sidewalk. At night, blinking red neon outlined the muzzle, neck, and ears.
The clientele were mainly auto workers. They came in after their shifts. They came in, quite often,
“Why don’t you go back to your own country?” one of them shouted.
“This is my country,” Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.
These conflicts lie in the past now—as Tessie paints her toenails—overshadowed by a much bigger conflict. All over Detroit in 1944, automobile factories have been retooled. At Willow Run, B-52s roll off the assembly line instead of Ford sedans. Over at Chrysler, they’re making tanks. The industrialists have finally found a cure for the stalled economy: war. The Motor City, which hasn’t been dubbed Motown yet, becomes for a time the “Arsenal of Democracy.” And in the boardinghouse on Cadillac Boulevard, Tessie Zizmo paints her toenails and hears the sound of a clarinet.
Artie Shaw’s big hit “Begin the Beguine” floats on the humid air. It freezes squirrels on telephone lines, who cock their heads alertly to listen. It rustles the leaves of apple trees and sets a rooster on a weather vane spinning. With its fast beat and swirling melody, “Begin the Beguine” rises over the victory gardens and the lawn furniture, the bramble-choked fences and porch swings; it hops the fence into the backyard of the O’Toole Boardinghouse, stepping around the mostly male tenants’ recreational activities—a lawn-bowling swath, some forgotten croquet mallets—and then the song climbs the ragged ivy along the brick facing, past windows where bachelors snooze, scratch their beards, or, in the case of Mr. Danelikov, formulate chess problems; up and up it soars, Artie Shaw’s best and most beloved recording from back in ’39, which you can still hear playing from radios all over the city, music so fresh and lively it seems to ensure the purity of the American cause and the Allies’ eventual triumph; but now here it is, finally, coming through Theodora’s window, as she fans her toes to dry them. And, hearing it, my mother turns toward the window and smiles.
The source of the music was none other than a Brylcreemed Orpheus who lived directly behind her. Milton Stephanides, a twenty-year-old college student, stood at his own bedroom window, dexterously fingering his clarinet. He was wearing a Boy Scout uniform. Chin lifted, elbows out, right knee keeping time within khaki trousers, he unleashed his love song on the summer day, playing with an ardor that had burned out completely by the time I found that fuzz-clogged woodwind in our attic twenty-five years later. Milton had been third clarinet in the Southeastern High School orchestra. For school concerts he had to play Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart, but now that he had graduated, he was free to play whatever he liked, which was swing. He styled himself after Artie Shaw. He copied Shaw’s exuberant, off-balance stance, as if being blown backward by the force of his own playing. Now, at the window, he flourished his stick with Shaw’s precise, calligraphic dips and circles. He looked along the length of the shining black instrument, sighting on the house two backyards away, and especially on the pale, timid, excited face at the third-floor window. Tree branches and telephone lines obscured his view, but he could make out the long dark hair that shone like his clarinet itself.
She didn’t wave. She made no sign—other than smile—that she heard him at all. In neighboring yards people continued what they were doing, oblivious to the serenade. They watered lawns or filled bird feeders; young kids chased butterflies. When Milton got to the end of the song, he lowered his instrument and leaned out the window, grinning. Then he started again, from the beginning.
Downstairs, entertaining company, Desdemona heard her son’s clarinet and, as if orchestrating a harmony, let out a long sigh. For the last forty-five minutes Gus and Georgia Vasilakis and their daughter Gaia had been sitting in the living room. It was Sunday afternoon. On the coffee table a dish of rose jelly reflected light from the sparkling glasses of wine the adults were drinking. Gaia nursed a glass of lukewarm Vernor’s ginger ale. An open tin of butter cookies sat on the table.
“What do you think about that, Gaia?” her father teased her. “Milton’s got flat feet. Does that sour the deal for you?”
“Daddeee,” said Gaia, embarrassed.
“Better to have flat feet than to be knocked off your feet forever,” said Lefty.
“That’s right,” agreed Georgia Vasilakis. “You’re lucky they wouldn’t take Milton. I don’t think it’s any kind of dishonor at all. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to send a son off to war.”
Every so often during this conversation, Desdemona had patted Gaia Vasilakis on the knee and said, “Miltie he is coming. Soon.” She had been saying it since her guests arrived. She had been saying it every Sunday for the past month and a half, and not only to Gaia Vasilakis. She had said it to Jeanie Diamond, whose parents had brought her last Sunday, and she had said it to Vicky Logathetis, who’d come the week before that.
Desdemona had just turned forty-three and, in the manner of women of her generation, she was practically an old woman. Gray had infiltrated her hair. She’d begun to wear rimless gold eyeglasses that magnified her eyes, making her look even more perpetually dismayed than she already was. Her tendency to worry (which the swing music upstairs had aggravated of late) had brought back her heart palpitations. They were a daily occurrence with her now. Within the surround of this worrying, however, Desdemona remained a bundle of activity, always cooking, cleaning, doting on her children and the children of others, always shrieking at the top of her lungs, full of noise and life.
Despite my grandmother’s corrective lenses, the world remained out of focus. Desdemona didn’t understand what the fighting was all about. At Smyrna the Japanese had been the only country to send ships to rescue refugees. My grandmother maintained a lifelong sense of gratitude. When people brought up the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, she said, “Don’t tell me about an island in the middle of the ocean. This country isn’t big enough they have to have all the islands, too?” The Statue of Liberty’s gender changed nothing. It was the same here as everywhere: men and their wars. Fortunately, Milton had been turned down by the Army. Instead of going off to war he was going to night school and helping out at the bar during the day. The only uniform he wore was that of the Boy Scouts, where he was a troop leader. Every so often he took his scouts camping up north.
After five more minutes, when Milton still had not materialized, Desdemona excused herself and climbed the stairs. She stopped outside Milton’s bedroom, frowning at the music coming from inside. Then, without knocking, she entered.
In front of the window, clarinet erect, Milton played on, oblivious. His hips swayed in an indecent fashion and his lips glistened as brightly as his hair. Desdemona marched across the room and slammed the window shut.
“Come, Miltie,” she commanded. “Gaia is downstairs.”
“I’m practicing.”
“Practice later.” She was squinting out the window at the O’Toole Boardinghouse across the yard. At the
