Baptism in Blood(43)

In the meantime, Tiffany was lying dead somewhere, buried in a funeral Ginny hadn’t been allowed to see, and Clayton Hall was finding less and less to say, and those newspeople from New York and Chicago and Atlanta were camped out on Main Street, waiting for what they thought was the inevitable to happen. Because Ginny knew, of course. She knew that everybody thought she had murdered Tiffany and carved those marks on her body and then served her up like a pot roast, proof positive that the Devil was doing his dirty work at Zhondra Meyer’s camp. Ginny, however, knew she had done no such thing.

Reverend Holborn was always saying that nobody could go to Heaven if he hadn’t been baptized. Babies like Tiffany who died before they could accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior were full of corruption and original sin. They went to Hell like any other unbeliever. What Ginny had been trying to do over the last few weeks, whenever they let her alone long enough to let her think, was to try to talk herself out of believing this. She wanted to think of Tiffany in Heaven with God and the angels. She wanted to think of Tiffany wearing wings.

Mostly, though, she didn’t want to think. She wanted to float. Pain was an ocean, warm water holding her up, holding her high over the heads of all these people who had never understood a thing. Pain was a tidal wave, and if they would just let her go, she would gladly drown in it.

Bobby kept talking about what they would do once all of this was over, but Ginny didn’t believe this would ever be over. It would go on and on, on and on, on and on. There would never be anything called the future, and she would never be alive again.





Four


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS TWENTY-FIVE years old the first time he slept in a bed that didn’t have a city surrounding it, twenty-five years old and finished with college and his first year of graduate school and newly inducted into the United States Army. Lying awake in the guest bedroom of David Sandler’s small but spectacular post-and-beam beach house reminded Gregor very much of that first country bed. That one had been in the South, too, far away from here, in Alabama. The young men who slept around him had been younger than he was and less well educated. Those were the days when there were unspoken assumptions, in the U.S. military and the U.S. government and U.S. society at large, about who you were and who you could be based on what you had been born into and the kind of last name you wrote down on application forms. Most young men who had graduated from an Ivy League college and gone on to get a master’s degree at Harvard were shuffled right into officers’ training, or advised in the direction of the National Guard. Gregor was dumped right in with the farm boys and the juvenile delinquents from Queens. The first drill ser­geant who saw him thought he was Jewish, and told him so, in language Gregor did his best not to remember. The U.S. Army, at the time, was not famous for its efforts against anti-Semitism, and that in spite of the fact that this was after World War II. The camp in Alabama had been flat and hot and clogged with Spanish moss. The campgrounds im­mediately around the barracks had been barren, but oddly so, as if it had been done deliberately. Up until that point, Gregor had either lived with his mother—his father was dead; his older brother was dead, too, killed at the end of World War II in a battle that probably should never have been fought—or in university dormitories, where there were people whose job it was to make him feel at home. It had never occurred to him that there were places where he would naturally not be at home. He had expected to be comfortable anywhere in the United States, and maybe in Armenia, too, although he had never been in Armenia. Peo­ple on Cavanaugh Street in those days made a point of showing everyone how thoroughly American they were. Those were the days when Cavanaugh Street was poor. A big tenement had stood where Lida Arkmanian’s town house was now. The apartments at the back of it had had no windows. A pawnshop had stood next door to where Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store was now—and had been then, for that matter—but in the pawnshop’s place there was now a gift store that sold fancy glass balls and vases painted over with purple flower petals.

Gregor turned over in David Sandler’s guest bed. There was nothing poor about David Sandler’s house, al­though David had been poor once. He had been a scholar­ship student in Gregor’s class at the University of Pennsylvania. The ceiling above Gregor’s head rose into a high peak. The beams that threaded across the air beneath it smelled of cedar. David seemed to have come to some sort of accommodation with the changes life had brought him that was more graceful than anything Gregor had man­aged for himself. Gregor thought he spent too much time remembering what it had been like when he was twelve, with the bare linoleum on the walls and the window in the back bedroom they couldn’t afford a shade for at all and the nights when all that would be on the table was pasta and bread, because that was all they had left. A picture of that pasta and bread had once come back to him, full force and in Technicolor, while he sat over dinner in a Washing­ton restaurant with the then vice president of the United States. He had looked around and seen Henry Kissinger at the next table and Barbara Walters two tables away, and been so disoriented he thought he was going to pass out. Right now he just wished he was female. Women could ask themselves questions like this. How did you learn to forget? What did you do to help yourself start believing in your life? Men thought about things like this and then talked about fishing.