Even the sixty-six-year-old attorney Nick Milonas, the protagonist in Stephanie Cotsirilos’ novella My Xanthi, learns over thirty years of legal practice that justice has its own terrain, and sometimes jurisprudence may not be what it should be or how he expects it to act. Milonas—“Hardass in denial”— has not faced a “crisis of conscience” like the one Tessa, his seventeen-year-old daughter, has thrown at him: “Dad, how can you defend those people?”
In fact, Milonas’ tough guy approach to the law has more to do with fidelity to his client base than anything else, as he witnesses on a daily basis “shipwrecked mothers and fathers” who bring “spiritual strength” into his office when their child faces ten years or more for a nonviolent drug offense; or young women and men who get mixed up with law enforcement find themselves lingering in California’s prison system; or, as his childhood nanny Xanthi knew, “hazard’s malignancy, its capacity to drill open a great chasm between law and justice.” Milonas knows the law and he knows justice, and he wonders how parents survive when it lacks the justice part.
Tessa’s questioning him about his defense of the shipwrecked population throws him into the past when he first learns the meaning of fidelity from his Greek nanny Xanthi in 1954. Mr. Milonas and Mrs. Helen—Xanthi’s terminology—both fluent speakers of Greek, hire her to help with their three children at the suburban Oak Park home near Chicago while Mrs. Helen has breast cancer surgery. Nick’s problem lies, however, in the letters that Xanthi’s daughter Koula sent him a year ago, letters he has not read. A lawyer would tell Nick that reading the letters is an open-and shut-case, but the journey of memory is rife with fears that Nick’s recollections don’t match the content in the letters. Tessa’s challenge puts this reckoning front and center. Now, he is pushed from behind, and he begins to catch up one night at 12:17 a.m., reading, remembering, and discovering the truth.
Synchronicity? So, what if the signs point to a simultaneous occurrence of events that Nick can no longer avoid, a simultaneity of memory that he hopes will hold up under epistolary examination. The truth is that he can no longer close off those ten years with Xanthi, beginning when he was four years old. He must follow through, now that his teenage daughter confronts his truth, just as the lawyer Nick Milonas must persist even in “the teeth of doubt.”
Nick settles in for an epistolary journey of seven letters translated from the Greek: the first is dated October 1954 and the last June 1964, and between those are letters dated February 1955, December 1957, February 1960, November 1963, and January 1964, a timespan that begins when Niko—Xanthi’s spelling— is four and ends when he is fourteen. In the October 1954 letter, Xanthi writes to Koula that she is having trouble acclimating to the Milonas style of living, one that is foreign to her: getting new teeth when arriving in America without any; undressing when at a doctor’s examination; hearing gossip about her from behind the kitchen door; learning how to use the “devices,” such as a washing machine and dryer. She likes the children and Mrs. Helen, who she feels sorry for because of her bouts with cancer, and she describes Niko as “timid and rebellious . . . an interesting little boy.”
The escalated nature of the letters between 1954 to 1964 shows Xanthi’s acclimation to an American style of living, and even though she can understand English, she doesn’t want to speak it. She and Mrs. Helen share the Greek language, and over the years they become best friends, watching out for each other. When mother and father are out for the evening or when Mrs. Helen is hospitalized for breast cancer surgery, Xanthi cares for the three children as if they are her own. She describes for Koula a poignant description of young Niko walking “into his parents’ bedroom to lie down on the floor at Mrs. Helen’s bedside,” and his mother blows him a kiss. Xanthi understands his needs when his mother is away at the hospital.
In her letters to Koula, Xanthi doesn’t mince words about Mrs. Stella, Mr. Milonas’ mother, who, jealous of Xanthi’s relationship with the children, tries to strike Lydia, the oldest child. When Xanthi steps between them and shields Lydia, Mrs. Stella strikes three blows on Xanthi’s left shoulder and neck and another around her waist. She never tells the parents about the encounter with Mrs. Stella, but Xanthi sizes her up like one of those Greek men who throw rocks at a girl, foreshadowing the death of her younger daughter Eleni. Xanthi teaches Niko that life is not a joke; demands that he behave sensibly, so as not to harm himself; and teaches him lessons he must abide given the trouble that brothers George and Sam are in—younger cousins of Mr. Milonas—one accused of impregnating a young woman. Then, there is Ernie, who George and Sam trick to be part of the scheme. Xanthi writes to Koula detailing the evening when the fathers of the three cousins seek legal help from Mr. Milonas, their evening turning into a brawl, and Xanthi charging into the fray with a pot of cold water and throwing it on the fighting men.
It would make sense to see Xanthi as the protagonist in the novella, which is named after her; much of the action is about her as described in the seven letters that Nick reads in the early morning hours; and her ten-year presence in Nick’s childhood permeates his adulthood. It would be a mistake, however, not to see Nick as the protagonist and narrator who examines what he thought he knew and then discovers that his childhood was more than memories but truths forcing him to re-examine his life.
At 4:21 a.m. Janet, Nick’s wife, visits his office and Nick tells her that he has learned facts about Xanthi in the final seventh letter that have upended the truth he had built around her. Xanthi lied to him, he tells Janet, just as she was leaving to return to Greece, and the fourteen-year-old at sixty-six experiences an existential moment of truth: what the truth is and what it means for his family and himself.
Tessa has changed her mind. At the conclusion of My Xanthi, she has written in her college essay that she will study law and work for social justice. Nick thinks: “I hope even more fervently Tessa will be on the side of mothers fearing deportation raids, of young men enslaved by school-to-prison pipelines, the flower of youth decomposing in California’s prison system, of people whose names she won’t betray, even to me.”
In Riverside, California, Nick believes the truth of justice is real. Maybe, in fact, it is a language.
