Middlesex

Cal’s grandfather, an impresario with a flair for business, is dumbstruck with love the moment that Cal is born. He, like his wife, has survived conflagration and displacement from his homeland. Unlike Desdemona, however, he takes to his new homeland with aplomb and affection. In contrast to her attachment to the past, Lefty looks toward the future: “The new country and its language have helped to push the past a little further behind” (99). This spares him from the guilt that Desdemona feels: “The sleeping form next to him is less and less his sister every night and more and more his wife” (99). Thus, Lefty’s acclimation to the new country allows him the ability to reinvent himself; Desdemona, conversely, is more comfortable with old-world customs and culture.

However, once Cal is born, Lefty becomes a different figure. He’s no longer a striving immigrant of cliché but a devoted grandfather. As Cal notes, “My grandfather was like a dignified, unpainted mime, and I was almost five before I realized anything was wrong with him” (224). As he enters his older years, he’s as devoted to his family as he once was to his beloved Zebra Clubs. His son, Miltiades (Milton), is in some ways much like him—a workaholic who stays away from home in an attempt to avoid emotional contact—and in others very different. Lefty engages with his grandchildren and the household in a significant way. He wants to alleviate the guilt that he feels over gambling away his fortune and wholeheartedly embraces his role caring for his extended family.

It’s notable that Lefty has a stroke at the moment of Cal’s birth, as if his silence is the cost of Cal’s voice. Like Desdemona, he gives Cal permission, in a totally different way, to tell the story and the history of the family. In many ways, Cal models himself after his grandfather: “I loved my Chaplinesque papou. His speechlessness seemed to be an act of refinement” (261). The bespoke clothing and expensive cigars that Cal adopts later in his life are a way of honoring his grandfather. Once Cal returns to Detroit from California and visits Desdemona (for the first time since she knew him as Callie), she recognizes him as Lefty. This signifies the extension of a family dynasty that can only continue via the storyteller himself.