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aunt Amelia (who lived up the block from us while I was growing up) was convinced that my mother was withholding insurance money from remaining family members. What was probably true was that it humiliated Amelia that her husband, the surviving male of the family, was not named executor. My father, though not yet technically a lawyer in the eyes of the state of Massachusetts, supported my mother in her legal battle against her sibling, and in the end, my mother prevailed; by then they were in love.
    On September 5, 1927, Alexandra Christos, orphaned daughter of one of the wealthier Greek families in Lowell, Massachusetts, married Constantine Dukakis. It was my mother’s twenty-sixth birthday. Four years later, in 1931, I was born.

Chapter Four
    D URING the early days of my parents’ marriage, they ran what was left of the Christos family business together. My father would take care of the buildings they owned, making sure that the apartments they rented were in good repair, and my mother, much to the horror of her sister Amelia, who thought it “whorish” behavior, would go door-to-door each month to collect the rent from their tenants.
    Initially, my mother had no housekeeping skills. My grandmother Olympia (my father’s mother) told me once that she watched my mother wash out a chicken cavity with soap and water before stuffing it! My yia yia, who lived with us when I was young, took my mother under her wing and taught her to cook the Anatolian Greek dishes that my father grew up on and loved so much. She took care of me when my mother started to work for the WPA. I spent the day with Yia Yia except for lunchtime, when my mother would race home to nurse me.
    By the time I came along, most of their real estate holdings were lost to the Depression. Once tenants started defaulting on their rent, my parents were unable to make the mortgage payments, and the bank foreclosed on all of their properties in Lowell, except the house my mother grew up in (which my parents rented out) and the house my aunt Amelia lived in, both of which were on Claire Street.
    The Depression was difficult for both my parents, but particularly for my mother. She once told me that during a terrible freezing winter, when I was a baby, she didn’t even have a quarter to put into the meter to keep the electricity on and she was terrified that rats would come out if the apartment were left in darkness. She was so frightened of the rats (which were plentiful at that time) that she resorted to burning her mother’s funeral candles so that we would not be without light. This was anathema to her, having to take drastic measures like this simply to keep her child safe, and it took a terrible toll on her, even prompting her, at one point, to attempt suicide. She told me that it was only because she didn’t want me to be without a mother that she held herself back.
    I gave my mother trouble from the beginning. My breech birth nearly cost my mother her life. The damage to her uterus and vagina were so severe that her doctor warned her never to have another child and that, for the sake of her own health, she should not even try.
    Five years later, my mother went against the doctor’s advice to have my brother, Apollo. She later explained to me that she didn’t want me to be alone in life.
    These were two gestures I didn’t understand until I was nearly grown myself, but looking back, they illuminate for me the true depth of her love—and the irony that in the first instance, my existence was what kept her alive, and in the second, the risk she took for me could have killed her.
    It was around this time that we moved back into the house my mother grew up in on Claire Street. We rented out the second floor and we took over the first. Because her pregnancy was life threatening, she had to stay in bed after the first two months. I recall these times with great fondness, because for the next seven months, I had my father and my yia yia, who I adored, all to