Not a Creature Was Stirring (16 page)

“Ah,” Tibor said.

“You can’t just say ‘ah,’ Tibor. You have to elaborate.”

Tibor nodded slowly. “Were you born here? In the United States?”

“In the United States, in Philadelphia, and about half a block from here. There used to be a hospital in this neighborhood called Philadelphia Lying-in.”

“You had no sisters?”

“I had one brother. Much older. He died fighting at Anjou.”

“That explains it, then,” Tibor said. “The trouble with you, Gregor, is that you’re a middle-class man. A middle-class American man.”

“By the criteria you’re using, Lida Arkmanian is a middle-class American woman.”

“Mothers keep daughters closer to them than they keep sons,” Tibor said. “Or they used to. The women of Lida’s generation on Cavanaugh Street were brought up by peasant women. The very old women there are peasant women.”

“So?”

“So, peasants don’t have the same sort of attitude to these things the middle and upper classes have. The initial reaction of these women to a pregnant and unmarried daughter will be negative, of course, but after the anger is out they’ll get very practical. It’s the practical that matters. Would you say Donna Moradanyan was a nice girl?”

“She’s a very nice girl.”

“Yes,” Tibor said, “nice, and not very bright. No—drive? Ambition is what I mean. She’s respectful of older people. She comes to church. She doesn’t swear. She likes going to school, but she doesn’t really know what she’s doing there, and she doesn’t really care. If she didn’t think people would laugh at her—people like Lida’s daughter Karen—she’d probably tell you what she wants to do with her life is be a wife and mother.”

“And Cavanaugh Street likes that,” Gregor said.

“Well, Cavanaugh Street likes Karen Arkmanian, too. Brilliant. Ambitious. Successful. That’s fine. What wouldn’t be fine would be a lot of men. Do you think Donna Moradanyan has known a lot of men?”

“I still can’t get used to the fact that she’s known one.”

“Exactly. So here we have a very nice Armenian-American girl, a sweet girl, a vulnerable girl, a girl who is twenty-one but still a child. Karen Arkmanian is the same age. You’d never call
her
a girl. Do you see what I mean?”

“Maybe.”

“Of course you do,” Tibor said. “The old women on Cavanaugh Street admire Karen Arkmanian. They’re proud of her. They don’t understand her. But Donna Moradanyan. Here she is, what you would call old-fashioned, and one morning she wakes up with a very old-fashioned problem. And the boy ran away, Gregor. There is that.”

“Meaning that by running away he makes himself the villain?”

“Exactly. But right now what we have here is practicality. When a peasant girl gets pregnant, her mother makes sure she also gets married. That solves everything. Then, soon, there is a grandchild, and everybody’s happy.”

“It sounds like a fairy tale,” Gregor said drily.

Tibor wagged his finger. “Now, now. You are talking like an American. Use your imagination, Gregor.”

Gregor used his hands, to pick up the wine bottle and refill both their glasses. The wine was nearly gone. They were both getting pleasantly tipsy in the middle of the afternoon. Gregor put the bottle back in its bucket—chardonnay was a room-temperature wine, but at Leitmotif it came in a bucket anyway—and watched Tibor light a Marlboro cigarette. In deference to American prejudices about smoking, he’d left his Egyptian specials at home.

“Have you talked to Donna Moradanyan about this?” he asked Tibor. “Does she want this boy of hers found?”

Tibor sighed. “I have talked to Donna Moradanyan, yes. She doesn’t want her mother to know-—but her mother already knows, because Lida Arkmanian told her.”

“Lida Arkmanian would,” Gregor said.

“Also, she does not want to have an abortion or give the baby up for adoption. Both of which are very good decisions, because to have decided the other way in either case would have made her mother crazy. And Donna is very close to her mother. Do you see what I mean?”

Gregor saw what Tibor meant. This was a grandchild. Donna’s mother wouldn’t want to lose it, no matter how she had acquired it. As for abortion—well. People thought the Roman Catholic Church was fanatically opposed to abortion. People thought that because they knew nothing about the Eastern Churches, which gave new meaning to the word “fanaticism” any time they decided to get serious.

Which, fortunately, was almost never.

Gregor stretched his legs and poured himself still more wine. “In the first place,” he said, “you’ve got to understand that finding this boy is going to be easy, unless Donna picked him up in a singles bar. I take it she didn’t.”

“She met him at a dance at the Assumption Church. The one that calls itself American Orthodox.”

“All right. So he’s connected. People know him. Donna probably has his right name. She knows where his parents live?”

“In Boston,” Tibor nodded.

“Well, that could mean Boston or any one of a dozen suburbs. Still, it won’t be hard. Did she know him long?”

“Eight months.”

“Not a drifter, then. And not a one-night stand—”

“Gregor,” Tibor winced.

“You have to consider these things, Tibor. But not a one-night stand, meaning not a man who went on the prowl one night and maybe lied about half a dozen things to get what he wanted. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t lie about something, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, we have what appears to be a perfectly ordinary boy. Did you ever meet him?”

“Once. Donna brought him to a—a pot luck supper? It was Sheila Kashinian’s idea. To raise money for the Sunday school.”

“What was he like?”

“He wasn’t like anything,” Tibor said. “He was in a pair of blue jeans and a sweater, like they always are. And he was very polite.”

“No alarm bells going off in your head?”

“Oh, no,” Tibor said. “I remember thinking it was nice she had found such a nice boy.”

“What about the older women? Any alarm bells going off there?”

Tibor bit back a smile. “Lida met him, and I thought she was going to have the engagement announced then and there. Even though there was no engagement.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “Now. Do you know what he was doing in Philadelphia? Did he have a job?”

“He was taking a course in archaeology at the university. He was very interested in Greek ruins.”

“When was the course supposed to be over?”

Tibor thought about it. “It
was
over,” he said finally. “At the end of the summer, I think. You will have to ask Donna about this, Gregor. From what I heard, I had the impression he had stayed in Philadelphia to be with Donna, after his course was over. But I’m not certain.”

“All right, I’ll ask Donna,” Gregor said. “Assuming she wants to talk to me.”

“She wants to talk to you.”

“The point is, nothing about this sounds as if there was anything strange about the boy. Fine. But that brings me back to the problem I had with this in the first place.”

“Problem? But Gregor, I don’t understand. I thought you just said there wasn’t going to be any problem.”

“There may not be any problem finding the boy,” Gregor said. “There may be a problem about whether or not we want him found.”

“But Donna—”

“Even if Donna wants me to find him, it may be a better idea if I didn’t do it. Shotgun weddings aren’t such a good idea, Tibor. I don’t care if they’re all the rage back in the old country. In this country, they far too often end up with a wife who gets her bones broken once a week.”

“Gregor.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of such a thing,” Gregor said. “And don’t tell me you don’t think it could happen to Donna.”

“In America,” Tibor hesitated.

“People are the same in America as they are everyplace else.”

Tibor looked away. His face was flushed. The restaurant suddenly seemed much too warm. Gregor wondered what was going through his mind. Maybe he’d spent so much of his life dealing with big evils, the little ones had escaped his notice. Persecution, torture, genocide—in the middle of all that, a little wife beating or an everyday rape might not seem very important, if they registered at all. But the little evils were important. Gregor was sure of that. Out of them, everything else flowed. In them, the very essence of being human was fully and irrevocably destroyed. Genocide was impersonal. Child abuse made the worst sort of paranoid delusion look like a badly managed Halloween party.

Tibor was fussing with his cigarette lighter and his cigarettes, like a boy who had never used either. Finally, he pushed them away and folded his hands on top of the tablecloth. He looked like he was about to deliver a lecture, maybe on those verses in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians where wives are admonished to be dutiful to their husbands.

Instead he said, “Gregor, does this mean you won’t look for the boy at all?”

Gregor felt immensely relieved, although he couldn’t have said why. “Of course not,” he told Tibor. “I’ll be happy to look for him. Given one or two conditions.”

“Yes?”

“In the first place, I want to talk to Donna Moradanyan alone. I want her to tell me she wants the boy found.”

“Yes,” Tibor said. “Yes, yes. That is very sensible.”

“In the second place, when I do find him, the only person who’s going to know I’ve found him will be Donna. I’ll give her a name, an address, a phone number. Whatever she needs. She can do what she wants with them. Including not tell the rest of you that she has them.”

Tibor’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead, as slowly and evenly as if they’d been raised by hydraulic drift. “Not even Donna’s mother?” he said.

“Especially not Donna’s mother.”

“You’re a very intelligent man, Gregor.”

Gregor didn’t know how intelligent he was, but he thought he’d at least been rational, in this case. He picked up the bottle of wine, found that it was empty, and waved for the wine steward. First the Hannaford murder, then Elizabeth’s grave, then Donna Moradanyan’s little problem. The world seemed to be full of depressing situations.

The wine steward was doing his best to indicate, without actually saying anything, that chardonnay was not the sort of thing one should use to get definitively drunk on in the daytime. Gregor ignored him. He’d never had a strong taste for alcohol, but there were times it was absolutely necessary for medicinal purposes. This was one of them.

The wine steward came back with a fresh bottle, went through his little dance, and departed. Gregor filled both the wineglasses and got Tibor started on the happiest topic he could think of.

Meaning the traffic in Jerusalem.

I
N THE EASTERN CHURCHES
and in Orthodox countries, Christmas is not as heavily celebrated a holiday as Epiphany. Children get their presents on Epiphany. Adults get their liquor on Epiphany. Priests get to say one of the most beautiful eucharistic liturgies ever written on Epiphany. Gregor had never lived in an Orthodox country—and wouldn’t have wanted to—but he had grown up in an Armenian household. He was geared to Epiphany. Downtown Philadelphia, with its stores full of after-Christmas sales and its streets full of shoppers and pickpockets, disoriented him.

Either that, or his headache was even worse than he thought it was. This was why he hadn’t become an alcoholic after Elizabeth’s death. Not willpower, not strength of character, not common sense, not any of the things he prided himself on—-just the simple fact that liquor always gave him a wicked headache, and soon. Some people could drink and feel high and happy for hours. For Gregor, the hangover always started in the middle of the third glass of wine.

On the sidewalk in front of Independence Hall, Gregor hailed a cab and put Tibor and himself into it. Tibor was happy. The wine seemed to have gone right through him, making him cheerful but not drunk, and he was stuffed full of something called a hot fudge crepe. He was also entranced by the American Christmas spirit, Philadelphia style. To Tibor, after-Christmas sales, overstuffed Christmas stockings, straining credit card limits and mountains of discarded silver foil paper were not vulgar. They were miracles.

“It’s a good thing I’m not a Puritan,” Tibor said. “I have never understood the Puritans. I understand them intellectually, of course. But I don’t understand them.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “they always sounded to me like a very unpleasant group of people.”

“Illogical,” Tibor said. He had lit a cigarette, rolled down his window, and stuck his head into traffic. Now he pulled back again. “What these Puritans did, Gregor, their theology, it was not Christian. Fate and money, that was all. And no enjoyment of the money.”

“I thought money was the root of all evil.”

“Gregor, Gregor. It is the love of money that is the root of all evil, and love in that passage means—means—obsession? Yes, obsession. Lust, like with people who are insane with sex and think of nothing else. It doesn’t mean being happy you can buy a microwave oven.”

“Do you have a microwave oven?”

“I have two. Anna Halamanian gave them to me. She thinks I never eat.”

The cab turned onto Cavanaugh Street at the north end, onto that block that was only nominally part of the neighborhood, where the Armenian-American families were interspersed with student artists and student writers and student actors. From here, they could see the painted dome of Holy Trinity Church, glittering gold even in the half-hearted sun. The cab began to slow down.

“Do you think he’ll miss the church?” Tibor said. “All the cabdrivers, they always miss the church.”

“They do?” Holy Trinity wasn’t an especially large church, but it was large enough. And it didn’t look like anything else in the neighborhood.

“You tell them church and they think of spires,” Tibor said. “They get to Cavanaugh Street and there are no spires and they go right past.”

“Oh.”

“I’m very disappointed in you,” Tibor said. “Money is the root of all evil. That is trite, Gregor. That is the kind of thing American college students say when they think they can show how intelligent they are by letting you know how much contempt they have for their fathers.”