It didn’t matter what Bennis had been telling Donna about Sheila Kashinian or anybody else. Gregor backed out of the room and closed the door, feeling a little easier in his mind. Surely nobody who was dieting would have been eating the sort of thing Bennis had been eating. And surely nobody who was making herself vomit after every time she ate could be so concerned with hapless refugees like the Kaldikians, who were now sleeping in Father Tibor’s apartment and defying the best efforts of the Support for an Independent Armenia Society to resettle them in America.
Gregor made his way to the stairs, then down to the lobby, then out onto Main Street, feeling better with every step he took. Franklin Morrison might not have a problem worth bothering with, but discussing forensic impossibilities with a small-town policeman had to beat holding Tibor’s hand when he was in the grip of one of his fanaticisms.
Gregor thought he’d let Bennis do that this time. After all, she was the one who had started it.
Five
1
TO GET TO THE police station, Gregor had to go down Main Street to Carrow and then down Carrow to Williams. Williams was easy to miss, because it was just a finger-dart to the left of the road. The major intersection on Carrow was with Delaford. Gregor walked through town slowly, his hands in the pockets of his coat, his scarf pulled up over his skin. It was very cold, but he seemed to be the only one who noticed. Main Street was full of activity. It probably wasn’t, usually. Gregor imagined it on an ordinary day as half-deserted, inundated irregularly by children getting out of school or choirs being released from practice at the Congregational Church. Even with the out-of-town tourists clotting up the sidewalks, Bethlehem looked like the inspiration for all the usual subjects: Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell, Pissaro’s painting Winter. That was why the usual subjects were usual. It helped that the tourists all seemed to be either wearing a uniform or costumed for the next production of a science fiction circus. Half of them were identically attired in Baxter State parkas, baggy blue jeans and neon orange- and lemon-striped snow boots. The other half were like fruit salad. Gregor saw a woman in leopard-print Lycra stretch pants so tight they looked like skin. She was wearing a bright blue feathered jacket with silver spangles that jingled when she walked. Then there was the woman in the spike-heeled boots and the Victorian riding costume, right down to the little velvet hat. Gregor had a vision of the older women on Cavanaugh Street—Lida and Hannah and Sheila and the rest of them—sitting around an outdoor table the way they would have sat on the church steps in a village in the old country, watching these oddly dressed women go by. Gregor did not speak Armenian, but sometimes he thought he could hear it in his head, and this was one of those times. His mother’s voice came to him out of nowhere and he got the word for menopause, intact.
He passed the offices of the Bethlehem News and Mail and looked through the big plate-glass window on the ground floor to see a dozen people scurrying around, apparently being directed by a young blonde woman with Alice-in-Wonderland hair. A tiny evergreen tree had been set up on a desk near the middle of the room and decorated with twinkly lights and too much tinsel. Gregor had always been partial to too much tinsel. He passed the pharmacy and looked in its window at a display of spray-snow and Santa Claus. He passed the town’s only three parking meters—all in front of the Town Hall—and saw that red ribbons had been tied just at the top of the poles holding up each one. The small town park was almost exactly at the intersection of Main and Carrow, so he passed that, too, but he didn’t stop to look at it. Nothing was going on there that hadn’t been going on yesterday. The first of the week’s performances would start tonight at eight. Anything he might be interested in that might be going on in the park would keep till then.
Gregor got to Carrow, turned the only way he could, and went on walking. The townscape changed from blocks of stores to blocks of houses with shingles on their lawns, advertising treasures within. Gregor passed a small Victorian that called itself Ethan Allen’s Used Books, a smaller colonial that promised Hand-Sewn Quilts, and a positively minuscule Cape Cod whose sign read “Yankee Fashions—Original Needlework and Crochet.” All the houses had wreaths on their doors and some sort of bright abeyance to Christmas in their front windows. The Cape Cod had a hanging row of knitted reindeer with bits of glitter in their fur. Gregor thought Christmas stockings would have been more to the point, but admitted he didn’t really know. Who patronized shops like these on out-of-the-way streets? Who turned in at the sign in front of the decaying farmhouse that said “Fish Taxidermy Done Here”? Who bought birdhouses from the stack in the yard of the small brick ranch? The houses were all so small and so close to the road and so close to each other—old for real, then, and not just built recently to look old. Just how old, Gregor couldn’t tell. The Cape Cod might go back as far as the Revolutionary War. The small brick ranch probably dated from the end of the Second World War. The people who lived in these houses could be anybody at all, but Gregor was willing to bet they were people who had moved here from other places. In his experience, people who grew up with antique houses didn’t appreciate them half as much as people who’d spent their childhoods in splendid suburban comfort, complaining all the time that perfect plumbing and instantaneous heat made their lives “plastic.”