“Legends of Glory and other stories” by Harry Mark Petrakis

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

There’s nothing more glorious than getting a new collection of short stories by the legendary master of the short form, Harry Mark Petrakis: his fourth collection spanning half a century of celebrated work.

As in previous collections, Petrakis gives a brief introduction to the genesis of each of his stories: “For years, each time I entered a certain bakery owned by a sullen-faced Greek man and his lovely, more amiable and pleasant wife, I wondered at the odd pairing and if that public image reflected their private lives. That is all a writer requires, a seed giving birth to reflection that spawns the words to make a story.” (Beauty’s Daughter)

The stories have the familiar Petrakis themes (unrequited wives married to hard men—in this case, a baker); unrequited men married to faded loves and faded lives (The Birthday); tragic racial disunion (A Tale of Color); comically-mismatched union (The Wisdom of Solon); the heartbreak Madonna (Christina’s Summer); wizened sidewalk philosophers (A Dishwasher’s Tale); the common man’s bid for freedom (Rites of Passage).

The anchor of the collection is the grim novella, Legends of Glory, which was borne out of Petrakis’ perennial outrage over the senselessness of war and a more recent conflict: “I began this novella to vent my feelings of despair and frustration about the human cost of war in Iraq, both the wounding and deaths of our own soldiers and the wounding and deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. By the time I had finished, however, the story no longer concerned the politics of a war that has bitterly divided our nation but became an effort to convey the enormity of a loss that tears asunder the natural cycle of the generations whereby sons and daughters bury their parents.”

The story concerns a father in Indiana, Dan Scott, a son, Noah, and the military tradition in the family represented by the grandfather, Thomas Joshua Scott: “Although Dan had grown up between the country’s wars and never felt any compulsion to enlist in the armed services, Scotts had fought and died in every war since the Civil War.”

Influenced by his grandfather’s military aura, the son enlists in the army, breaking his mother Molly’s heart, and the parents anxiously wait out the months of their son’s enlistment. When tragedy strikes, the mother is crushed and blames the old man bitterly, and her husband becomes the mediator, but somehow, despite his own broken heart, he finds the means to cope with their loss:

”To have shared such love with Molly and to have had their love conceive and embrace the jewel of Noah for even the brief span of his life was a matchless bounty. Was it so remote a hope that somewhere such love—so powerful that it overshadowed the majesty of the sovereign planets—that such love, once separated, might again be reunited?”

Legends of Glory and Other Stories (Southern Illinois University Press, $25, www.siu.edu/~siupress)