THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
569
was sent presents and she took them, except for clothing. Here
of course she was already approaching the dangerous no-man's
land of the Greek community where no unmarried girl, not even
a little queen with a diadem between her thighs, dares to walk
abroad. She had been engaged twice and had kept the diamonds
and the wrist-watches, for which
it
was already whispered that
she was a
p'outana
by a very few old hens. But this whisper got
no breeze to travel on. Vasiliki carried about in her patent
leather handbag a clear image of herself, to maintain which
she was willing to make considerable sacrifices.
She gave the plainest wristwatch to her favorite girl cousin
who
needed
it, she pouted to her mother, father, aunts, uncles,
and girlfriends. She had the diamond prized out of one ring and
set in a gold, heart-shaped locket in which she actually wore the
beefy, bewildered countenances of mama and papa. The other
ring she gave with a certain amount of ladylike publicity to St.
Dimitrios during a fund-raising drive. She was even included
in
a group photograph of church "donors" in the
Greek Daily.
By the time Joshua came along she was forging a pretty coat-of–
arms in the Greek community for a mere cook's daughter.
I see now that she used Joshua to get to us because she
really believed she needed us for the construction of her private
palace. I'm not contriving excuses for her; she was wrong from
the moment she took it into her shiny, black-helmeted head that
it was a shameful thing to be the issue of a poor restaurant cook.
But oh Vasiliki, queen-bee, grubby infant of a fat, sweaty Mace–
donian hick who always smelled of other people's food, snorkled
in
his soup and wiped the grease off on the back of his hand–
target for the slings and arrows of portly, be-taffeted, real gold-ed
Daughters of Hera with their "teas" and their "luncheons"
and their squealing Demotic "minutes" and their infernal money–
raising-you with your purse-mouthed pursuit of a cell padded
in
real Brussels lace and imported Spanish shawls With a grand
piano in the middle to play the latest Greek tangoes on (they
were still tangoing in Athens in 1937)-miscarriage of your
