Seven
1
LATER, GREGOR WOULD THINK how odd it was that Candida DeWitt had known exactly whom to introduce herself to, exactly where to go after she had come in the door. It bespoke careful planning of the kind that can sometimes make poor people rich, if they stick to it. It bespoke cleverness too. Gregor thought Candida DeWitt was very clever in the way the English used that word. She was smart and insightful about men and women and how they would behave in tense situations. She was good at putting herself first.
When the doorbell rang, Paul Hazzard had been holding forth to a little circle of women that included one of the old ladies (Mrs. Vartenian, looking fierce) and all six of the Devorkian girls. The Devorkian girls looked as awestruck as if they’d wandered into Madonna’s dressing room. Hannah was hovering around at the edges. She seemed to have a compulsion to touch him, just a little, so gently it might never be detected. A light whispering rub of sleeve on sleeve. The side of a hand along the hem of a jacket. Paul Hazzard didn’t notice. His face was lit up, as if a powerful light had gone on inside him. He was in his element. He had an audience.
“What you have to understand,” he was telling the women clustered around him, “is that there are no hierarchies of pain. That’s the worst of the sickness of the society around us. That’s how that society keeps us in line. Here we are, so damaged we can barely function, and what do we hear? We hear that we shouldn’t be, because somewhere in the next street or next town or next county or wherever, somebody has it worse than we do. And if we insist on naming our pain and owning our anger, we get hit with the big guns. Hiroshima. Dachau. How can we possibly say we’ve been damaged when people have been through things like that and lived perfectly good lives?”
“But that’s true, isn’t it?” Linda Melajian said. “My great-grandmother came from Armenia, and you should have heard the stories she used to tell about what happened to her. She had a baby and a husband, and they were both killed when the Turks came through during the massacres. She had pictures of them she used to keep in her room. But then she came here and married my great-grandfather and had other children, and she was fine.”
“She was in denial,” Paul Hazzard said promptly.
“I came from Armenia,” Mrs. Vartenian said ominously. “In 1916.”
“What you have to understand,” Paul Hazzard said, “is that the human being is a delicate instrument. A very delicate instrument. Especially in childhood. Something like Hiroshima, or the concentration camps, or these massacres you’re talking about—major traumas like these can affect the lives of the people who suffer from them forever. I’m not denying the power of experiences of that kind. What I’m trying to explain is that experiences that are much less dramatic may in reality be much more damaging. After all, the Nazis were the enemy. Nobody expected them to be anything else. Not even the children. A child is much more deeply and permanently hurt when someone close to him abuses him—when he’s the victim of parental neglect, for instance.”
“I’ve heard of things like that,” Traci Devorkian said. “Junkies, usually. They get high as kites and don’t clean the house or feed their kids for weeks at a time and the cops come in and the kids’ beds are wet with pee and I don’t know what and then it gets in the papers and the pictures are really gross.”
“Pee?” Kelli Devorkian said. “Why would the kids pee in bed?”
“They don’t have any control of their bladders,” Debbi Devorkian said. “They haven’t been brought up right.”
“If our parents didn’t pay attention to us for a couple of weeks, I wouldn’t pee in bed,” Kelli Devorkian declared. “I’d go out with Bobby Astinian and neck till my brains fell out.”
“Shut up,” Staci Devorkian said. “Mother is right over there. You’ll get us all grounded.”
“I was thinking of something a little more subtle than gross neglect,” Paul Hazzard went on. “I was thinking of the kind of mother who always makes her children wait a minute before she gets them the milk they ask for, or always has one more thing to do—one more thing that takes only a minute—before she can look at the pictures they’ve painted or hear the story they want to tell.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Linda Melajian said. “That sort of thing happens all the time. That’s just life.”
“Not really,” Paul Hazzard contradicted her. “It’s a kind of control. It’s one of the ways parents ensure that their children stay within the preferred family pattern—within the preferred family sickness, if you will. Middle-class children today are really at much higher risk for permanent psychological damage than children were in earlier eras, or even than poor children are today. There’s no excuse, you see.”