Fiction | September 01, 1984

“In the Balance” is from the author’s novel, The Greek Garden,which takes place in the spring and early summer of 1942 in the spring and early summer of 1942 in Chicago’s Greek American community.  A family of Greek intellectuals with an obsessive “savior complex” take a strange and wonderful assortment of characters under their wing, and the novel chronicles the adventures and sometimes misadventures that are the consequences of these adoptions.

  For days Athos Anderson had been shuffling back and forth in front of the golden balance but always edging nearer.  Forth and back through the three tiny rooms of the laboratory, through pungent fumes and the shafts of April sunlight piercing dirty windows to fall upon the microscope and retort, Bunsen burner and balance.