The Headmaster's Wife (22 page)

“It's one of the reasons you don't really belong here,” Alice said; “you don't understand the hermeneutics of oppression. You really don't. We've tried to teach it to you, but you resist it. You're like so many people. You aren't willing to give up your white skin privilege, your white male privilege. Michael wasn't like that.”

“Michael was in way over his head,” Mark said carefully. “I don't know what you want from me.”

“I want you to promise that you will not tell Gregor Demarkian about the relationship between Michael and myself.”

“What if I already have?”

“Then there's nothing I can do about it, is there? But I don't think you have. I think if you had told him, I'd know about it already. The news would be out.”

“The news is going to be out one way or the other, sooner or later,” Mark said. “I'm not the only one who knows. Everybody knows.”

“Nobody else would tell.”

“And Michael's mother is here. She'll tell.”

“Michael didn't tell his mother about us. I asked him not to, and he gave me his promise, and I'm sure he wouldn't have broken it. You don't understand that either, but we were so close, so perfectly in touch with each other, not only physically but in every other way—we were so perfectly matched. We trusted each other without reservation.”

“How very nice for both of you.”

“You ought to learn not to be envious of other people, Mark. It isn't a very attractive trait in someone like you, someone who's had all the advantages. It's not as if you've done anything to deserve the things you've had. It's all been handed to you. You ought to take it in good grace when other people sometimes get a few of the crumbs from your table.”

The head fuzz was more than back in force. It was completely out in the stratosphere. The only reason he wasn't twitching anymore was that he'd willed himself not to. He kept seeing a vision of himself and his mother and his little brother, Geoff, in the cabin they had rented on Lake Candle-wood the year after his father had died, when they were all out of money and his mother wasn't working, and the whole world seemed to have gone to hell, and his life seemed to be effectively over. He'd been ten years old at the time, and he could still see them sitting on chairs with their feet up because the cabin flooded with an inch of water in every bad rain. He could still see the Christmas with no tree and nostockings and nothing for presents but boxes of Russell Stover candy that his mother had managed to get hold of he never knew how. He did not mind those memories. His life had been much more complicated than Alice Makepeace would ever understand. He did mind Alice's soft, sad, condescending smile.

“I have to go back to Hayes House,” he said again, again trying to get up.

Alice's smile grew more pitying as she pushed him down yet again. “Please,” she said, “let me get you your coffee.”

Gregor Demarkian found the note from Mark DeAvecca on his bed when he returned to his room, but he had expected that. He only read the note with enough attention to be sure that Mark had gone back to school, something he'd only half expected him to do. Mark was not the sort of boy who “hated” school and spent his time playing truant or hiding a Game Boy Advance behind the upraised back of his textbook in biology class. Gregor was willing to bet that, until this year, Mark hadn't ever wanted to be somewhere else in the middle of a school day. He revised that. There were times when any sane human being wanted to be somewhere else in the middle of a school day. What he meant was that he had always thought, before this visit, that Mark DeAvecca was a lot like he himself had been at the same age—a boy who truly loved books, and whose mind was the most noticeable thing about him, but not a “bookish” boy. There is a difference, Gregor thought, between intelligence and scholarliness. He didn't know if “scholarliness” was even a word. But there was a difference, and he had never been scholarly. He had loved to read, and he had read everything, from Popular Mechanics magazines to Jean-Paul Sartre novels that had been stupefying in their nihilism. He had loved school because in school, for at least some of thetime,
he
was out of the maelstrom that was Cavanaugh Street in the days before everybody had enough money to turn tenements into town houses. School and the public library were his two most distinct memories of growing up, but the background music for both was the sound of people arguing, men shouting, women crying, the crash of rickety wooden chairs and cheap crockery against the walls of apartments too thin to contain either the sound or the anger. He had read those articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer bent on “celebrating ethnic Philadelphia,” and he had wanted more than once to talk some sense into the writers who produced them. He would say:

Ethnic Philadelphia was like ethnic everywhere else. The people who came here were poor, and ignorant, and scared to death. They came from a world where women were not much better than cattle in the social scheme of things, and men expected to have authority whether they had earned it or not. They came to a world where men have authority only as the result of striving and achievement, and women sometimes have authority, too. The schoolteachers were women. The family court judges were women. They went back to their neighborhoods and their wives and their children after a day of working in the Anglo-Saxon world, and they were running on panic and rage.

He had no idea why he was thinking about all that now: Cavanaugh Street in the early fifties; his own father, usually the calmest of men, breaking out at least twice a year in fits of fury so irrational and so uncontrollable that there was nothing for him to do but hide in a closet somewhere until it was over. And then it wasn't bad. His father never did much more to his mother than slap her. He wasn't a brutal man. Howard Kashinian's father was a very brutal man, and at least three times before Howard was eight, his mother had landed in the hospital with bones broken and worse. The absolute worst was that Howard's mother always landed in a charity ward. She had to. The Kashinians had no more money than anybody else on Cavanaugh Street in those days. Mikhel Kashinian was a steady worker at the kind of jobs men got when they knew little or no English and had no education even in their native tongue. He was a day laborer at times, a driver of light trucks in local markets, a ditchdigger, a man who hauled dirt and debris at construction sites. Gregor remembered him as an enormous man, built more like an ox or a yak than a human being, with hands the size of shovels. When Howard's mother would be in the hospital, broken and bleeding from what Mikhel had done to her, Mikhel would not go to see her. He did not want to feel sorry for what he had done, and he would not show his face on the charity ward, where the utter, uninhibited evidence of his failure at all things American would be impossible to avoid.

That's what Gregor would tell the writers who wanted to “celebrate” “ethnic Philadelphia,” including the ones who were building nostalgic dreams of the lives of their own grandparents and great-grandparents, people who had lived in a world that the writers themselves had never had any real contact with. People come to America to build a better life, and it is the genius of America that most of them are able to do it; but the better life they build is one that their children and grandchildren live. For most immigrants, life in the United States is one long litany of failure, one long, twisted fairy tale of never being able to meet the standard because the standard keeps moving. Gregor guessed that the circumstances of Mikhel Kashinian's life on Cavanaugh Street were no worse than what he had had in Armenia and probably better. No matter how awful those old tenements had been, they'd been better than the huts and hovels the Kashinians and the Demarkians had left behind in the villages outside Yerevan. There were central heating and running water and indoor plumbing. The Kashinians had to use a bathroom in the hall, but Gregor couldn't help believe that that had to be better than a privy in the yard. Mikhel would not have done more interesting work in Armenia than he did in Philadelphia. He was a beast of burden. It was all he had been trained for. It was all he would have known, no matter what the place.

Still, if his relatives from the village could have seen Mikhel and his apartment and his family full of children going every day to a free school, they would have considered him rich; and if he had been able to keep their perspective, he would have considered himself rich, too. The problem was that he couldn't keep their perspective. His children went to school with children whose families owned whole houses on pleasant, tree-lined streets. His daughters wore plain dresses from Montgomery Ward, while the girls they sat beside in class had Bobbie Brooks and Villager. The exodus to the suburbs had begun. “Successful” men—real Americans—didn't stay in Philadelphia. They took their families out to subdivisions where their children would have real lawns to play on and school buses to pick them up every day with their Howdy Doody lunch boxes in tow.

Howdy Doody lunch boxes,
Gregor thought. It had been years since he'd remembered Howdy Doody lunch boxes. He had no idea why he was suddenly on this tear about the “old” Cavanaugh Street He doubted if Howard himself remembered much about it, although he just might Howard being Howard, Gregor, like everybody else, often didn't give him much credit; but there was this to be said about him. He'd absorbed the ethic of America as thoroughly as any of them; and when he'd turned sixteen and realized that he'd grown larger and heavier and more powerful than his father, he put an end to Mikhel's fits of rage and his mother's trips to the hospital, charity ward or not.

He'd been thinking about Mark DeAvecca, that was it He had been thinking about how much he and Mark were alike—or had been alike, a year and a half ago, when they'd first met—and that had made him think about the ways they were not alike at all. He didn't think Mark had ever seen the kinds of things he had, never mind seen them on a regular basis, so that they felt entirely normal. He wondered if Mark had ever approached any place the way he himself had approached his local branch of the Philadelphia Public Library. Other people believed in God and prayer. He believed in the Philadelphia Public Library. It was the place he wentto feel that there was a way to make his life more like what he wanted it to be.

I'm making no sense at all
he thought, sitting down on the side of the bed and staring at the phone. He thought about calling room service, but that didn't feel right. He'd just eaten, and the last thing he needed was more coffee. He thought about calling Bennis, but that didn't feel right either. He didn't think he could face the wall of coldness he was expecting from her. It was just the wrong night for it. It was something about that school, he decided, something about Brian Sheehy's visceral anger at all things Windsor, about Mark's scattershot descriptions, about his own gut instincts just walking through town. Somehow, Windsor Academy and the old days on Cavanaugh Street connected. He just didn't know how.

I'm not only not making any sense; I'm positively incoherent,
he thought. He picked up the phone, considered his options, and dialed Tibor. He got a message that said the number had been disconnected and he had to dial again. He kept forgetting. Tibor's apartment had been destroyed in the explosion that had destroyed Holy Trinity Church. Tibor was now living in Bennis's old apartment on the second floor of Gregor's building. That meant Gregor had to call Bennis's number to get Tibor because …

This whole thing is beginning to sound like a sitcom,
Gregor thought. Besides, it might all fall apart in a week or two. If Bennis continued to be not much interested in talking to him, she probably would be not much interested in going on living with him. He wondered what she would do if that day ever came. Would she move back to the second floor, or would she leave Cavanaugh Street altogether and go back to the Main Line world she'd come from?

The thought of Bennis leaving Cavanaugh Street made his stomach lurch. The phone rang and rang in his ear, making him think that Tibor had gone out somewhere, to the Ararat, to old George Tekemanian's to play cards. It was only eight o'clock.

He was about to put the phone back on the hook and try tothink of something else to do with himself for the evening when Tibor picked up.

“Is Kasparian,” Tibor said.

That was new. In the old days all Tibor said when he picked up the phone was, “Hello.”

“It's me,” Gregor said. “I called your old number first. I don't know why I can't get used to this.”

“Nobody can get used to this, Krekor. Three or four times a day, I have phone calls from people looking for Bennis, and people who should know better: Lida, Hannah Krekorian.”

“Bennis,” Gregor said.

Tibor cleared his throat. “You are all right where you are? You have determined that the suicide was really a murder?”

“I'm fine, but the suicide was almost certainly a suicide. I talked to the chief of police today. He took me to dinner. He gave me chapter and verse. I can't see why he'd lie to me.”

“To protect the people at this school maybe? You said when you left it was a rich school.”

“I know, but Brian Sheehy hates the place. I don't think he'd do a thing to save it embarrassment. No, it was definitely a suicide.”

“Then you will be coming home,” Tibor said.

Gregor hesitated. “I don't think so, no. Not right away.”

There was the sound of rapid-fire typing on the other end of the line. Gregor thought Tibor must be on the Internet. “Why are you staying if there is no murder?” Tibor asked. “It's what you do, looking into murders.”

“I know. Right now I'm looking into Mark DeAvecca.”

“The boy.”

“Exactly, the boy, who is a complete mess. I don't know how to describe it. You didn't meet him last spring. I did. He's done a one-hundred-eighty-degree personality turn, for one thing.”