Love or Honor Read Online Free PDF Page A

Chris was only nine when George moved the family to a better neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan, a block from Central Park, but he’d already heard a name he thought was funny: Three-Finger Brown. All he knew then was that it was a silly name, and that his father had great contempt for this man and all of his kind. “I spit on them!” Chris heard his father say, one day, and although Chris never knew if any specific thing had provoked his father’s unusual outburst, the depth of George’s scorn for men who dishonored their family name was abundantly clear.
    Family was not just an important thing to George and to Chris’s mother, Katrina; it was everything. George never sat down and talked to Chris about it, but from conversations Chris overheard, through the years, scraps of information he picked up, he was able to piece the story together.
    George was born in Cyprus, though he didn’t know the exact date, and he had several brothers, though he didn’t know exactly how many. Their mother died when George was young, and his stepmother whipped him. He never went to school. He spent his days tending sheep, until he ran away when he was about fourteen, working as a deckhand on a freighter that just happened to be going to Argentina. He spent about ten years there before coming to America. Chris was always impressed that his father spoke Spanish so fluently.
    At home, everyone spoke Greek, although as Chris and his two sisters got older, they spoke English to one another. When Chris went to kindergarten, he didn’t know a word of English. When his teacher said something to him, and he didn’t respond, she gave him a little push, and he began to cry. His mother just stood there, looking frightened. The teacher pointed Katrina toward the door, indicating that she should leave. When Katrina didn’t move, the teacher gave her a little push, too. By then, Chris was crying hysterically.
    He settled down when Mrs. Fletcher handed him a box of crayons and a sheet of drawing paper. Crayons and paper were the only art supplies available in public school kindergartens in the forties, but that was all Chris needed. He had a natural ability in art: When the other children were drawing stick figures, Chris was drawing faces, with eyes and ears, noses and mouths and hair, everything in proportion. When the class picture was taken at the end of the school year, Chris was standing right next to Mrs. Fletcher, who had her arm around him.
    Chris’s liking for school continued through the early years, thanks to his talent for drawing and music. By third grade, he was designing the sets for class plays. The teacher would lay out large pieces of posterboard and tell Chris what to draw—for a Western setting, some trees, mountains, a campfire—then the other children would color in the drawings. In fifth grade, he joined the drum-and-bugle corps. He’d had a set of drumsticks since he was three years old—no drums, just the sticks—and he’d gone around the house banging enthusiastically on pots and pans, tables, chests of drawers, any available surface. His first public performance with the drum was disastrous: At a school parade, he banged his drum so fiercely that he put a hole in it, and marched with his arms at his side, crying. It didn’t occur to him until it was too late that he could have turned the drum around, as it hung around his neck, and beat it on the other side.
    Except for music and art, he was uninterested in school, restless and fidgety. He was always embarrassed, at the beginning of each school year, when the teacher would ask each child, “And what does your father do?” As it got close to his turn, Chris would begin to squirm. George was cook and counterman and part-owner of three coffee shops, and Chris would mumble, “My father works in a restaurant.” He thought that sounded dumb, and he envied a kid who could say, proudly,