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If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. - William Morris
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Esther Sabin was an artist–Print, Fabric, Costume, and Decorative Arts– immersed in an interdisciplinary arts and crafts major at the prestigious University of Chicago (UC). Life was good.
When friends described Esther, they inevitably used the word “exotic”. Dark brown eyes slightly slanted and almond-shaped, high cheekbones, fair skin, and a mane of thick, dark brown hair that she wove into a complex French braid every morning. At Halloween, she would transform herself into a gypsy princess. Bold colors suited her.
She always won first place.
Esther was devoted to her art, with plans to open her own multimedia craft studio after graduation. But then she surprised her college friends with the announcement that she was going to marry at the end of her senior year and transform herself into Dottie Mitkus, symbolically adopting a childhood nickname along with her husband-to-be’s last name. Esther would be leaving behind her own lauded art school successes to support her spouse’s professional advancement. She would become that creature of legend: a faculty wife.
And her husband’s recent inheritance would give her the money and time to indulge herself in her avocation even as she helped promote her husband’s career full time.
They were going to be a team, she said, sitting next to her brilliant, kind, gorgeous husband-to-be at her department’s impromptu engagement party. She would be marrying the scholar Lukas Mitkus, a Lithuanian-American native of the South Side’s Marquette Park neighborhood and a rising star at UC’s Anthropology Department; he was an expert in all things obscure in linguistics and early religions.
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They made a striking couple. Lukas was tall, blond, and slender, with startling blue eyes. He looked a little, if you squinted, like Paul Henreid in the movie Casablanca: the brave, saintly Viktor Laszlo.
Esther met Lukas the first day of her first semester of college, as she was running down the broad green sloping lawn called the Midway, heading towards her freshman orientation meeting. He called out to her as if he knew her. She stopped, and they talked. She couldn’t explain why he yelled or why she stopped; she didn’t remember what they talked about.
But she was very late for orientation.
They dated discreetly, off-campus, and, by her sophomore year, she had moved into his nearby apartment. He asked her to marry him at the end of her junior year.
In the university’s microcosm (90 Nobel Laureates and counting) Lukas was perched in the upper levels of the pantheon. He also was sweet, with Victorian-era manners, as if he has been born and raised in an earlier century. He was a secular Catholic who spoke of God and Jesus as if they were old friends of the family with whom he had coffee and kringle on Thursdays. And he was a spiritual man, influenced by his studies and respect for world religions and devout practices.
And full of surprises. He worked out regularly, but he chose martial arts over tennis or bicycling and was an active member of the Fencing Club. Under his conservative attire Bruce Lee-grade muscles layered his lanky frame. He vanished twice a week to a mysterious downtown Chicago location, which he finally admitted was a gun club with an indoor firing range.
Lukas also had some unusual scars, which precipitated a disconcerting conversation the night of their first sleepover before so much as a shoe had been discarded. He said they were remnants of a mugging when he was a kid and side effects of his enthusiasm for the combat arts. And only then did he undress with the lights on. Since that night, Esther would be kissing those scars many times.
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Esther’s immigrant Polish mother, Rose Sabin, her only living relative, claimed she would have been proud of Dr. Mitkus and happy for her totally besotted daughter if he hadn’t been Catholic, even though she had little patience for organized religion. (She called the rules for maintaining a kosher household “barbaric superstitions”.)
And he was Lithuanian, which, to her old-country mind, meant a snake-worshipping pagan who spoke a weird tongue unrelated to the honest, hard-working Slavic languages like Polish, Russian, or her native Germanic Yiddish.
Both mothers threatened to boycott the secular wedding that the couple had planned for the world-famous Rockefeller Chapel–a perk of being an official part of the University of Chicago community. So, Esther and Lukas eloped. When Esther Sabin returned as Dottie Mitkus, she and her mother had nothing much to say to each other for the next ten years.
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The problem, Lukas would come to realize, was that Esther/Dottie always was and always would be an artist. And artists are a curious species, with an eye for details, and they are never satisfied. Endless questions about scars and gun clubs and a body that looked more like a weapon than a vessel for someone immersed in the details of ancient tombs.