This story had its inception when I was researching the family mystery of what happened to my great-grandfather who disappeared when my grandmother was only two years old. Things weren’t discussed back then the way they are now, so all that was really passed down was that his name was Charles Patrons, but even that wasn't entirely true. I learned when I was in my twenties that someone had changed the name on my grandmother's christening announcement. When I was going through my grandmother's papers after her death, I looked very closely and could see an "i" in the last name that had been written over. After doing my research, I learned his given name was Constantine Anthony Patrinos. It had been Americanized to Charles Patrons. For the first time in my life, I learned I was not strictly of British decent, but 1/8 Greek (finally explaining my mediterranean complexion).
No one really knows what happened to him. One version is that he went to Canada to enlist in WWI before America entered the war. No one ever talked about the fact that he didn’t come home. I suppose we were meant to assume he died in the war. Another story has my great great grandparents running him off. The few details shared with that version are that my great times two grandparents were wealthy and did not approve of him so they put an end to it. No one ever said how.
Nothing I heard rang true. What would provoke him to enlist in a war his country wasn’t even fighting? And if my great great grandparents were rich, what happened to all that money? It surely hasn’t been passed down. Then there are of course the more pedestrian possibilities. He was a coward who ran off leaving his pregnant wife and unborn child behind. Or, they were never married at all.
I began to research. This was before the internet so I wasn't able to find a lot. In addition to learning his true name, I was able to discover that he and my great grandmother were married. They appear on one census together with their two year old daughter (my grandmother) and then he disappears. I hired an historical/geneaological consultant, Diane Rapaport, who was able to find so much more than I and who informed me my great grandfather had been admitted into a TB sanatorium in NY in 1917, filed a draft card for WWI the same year, but was exempt due to illness. There is a divorce intention for reasons of desertion filed by my great grandmother which indicated a Boston hospital as his last known address, seemingly my great grandmother didn't even know her husband had been sent to a sanatorium. Back then, TB was often a death sentence, but Charles apparently survived. There are records of him filing for citizenship in 1941 and being sworn in as a U.S Citizen in 1942. He also remarried at the age of 50 and listed my grandmother as his only child. By then she would have been 30 years old. He died in 1967 having lived long enough not only for my grandmother to have found him, but her children and their children as well had anyone known where to look.
There was one other anecdote that my grandmother shared with me. It was after she had moved into the assisted living facility. On this day my aunt and cousin were there as well. We were all talking and it was one of the rare occasions when my grandmother was giving us glimpses into her past. She talked of sword dancing as a young girl and of a limited stint in vaudeville theatre. I was aware that the afternoon was pressing on. I would need to leave for home shortly, but I was pushing it back five minutes, and another five minutes and then another, because I was enjoying the stories and the camaraderie, as was my grandmother. She sat in a chair across from the window in the center of the little circle we had formed around her. Something brought her further back to her girlhood, although I can’t recall what. And although the story was unremarkable on its surface, I was fascinated by it.
She told us that she could remember seeing a man outside her grammar school. He was there occasionally, sitting on a bench and she felt as if he were watching her. She didn't recognize the man, but she didn't feel like he was a threat. She said, " I didn’t think much of it back then. But from time to time as I've gotten older, I’ve wondered if that man was my father. I wish I knew what happened to him."
It was that anecdote that sparked my research and the fire for the novel. After Ms. Rapaport furnished me with the facts that my great grandfather had survived and not remarried for 28 years, I couldn't help but imagine that the man my grandmother had seen was her father wanting desperately to see his little girl. I began to believe he had not deserted his family and imagined that he had left to protect them. I wanted to tell the story of the loving husband and father I imagined Constantine Patrinos to be. I created a fictional story, one possible tale, from the bits and pieces I had been given. The result is my first novel THE IMMIGRANT'S WIFE