“What probably is?” The coffee in the pot on the stove was still very warm, if not hot. Gregor got a clean cup out of Hannah’s cabinets, poured it half full of coffee, took the rum bottle from the back of the counter, poured the cup most of the rest of the way full of rum, and topped the whole thing off with a gigantic helping of sugar. It was going to taste awful, but it would bring her out of this funk. He put the concoction down next to her elbow and said, “Drink that.”
Hannah took a sip and made a face. “Too sweet,” she said.
“Too good to be true,” Gregor prompted her.
Hannah took a good, long swallow. She shuddered. “Yes,” she said. “That was it. Too good to be true. Underneath, I don’t think I ever fooled myself. Only on the surface. You know, Krekor, I am fifty-eight years old.”
“That’s right,” Gregor said. “You would have to be, you and Lida. Because you’re all a year older than I am and I’m fifty-seven.”
“Yes,” Hannah said. “And I’ve known it all along, you know, even when I was a little child. Except, of course, when you are a child, you think it will change when you grow older.”
“What will change?”
“What you look like,” Hannah said. “I remember being six years old and sitting in front of the mirror in my mother’s bedroom and telling myself, ‘When I grow up, I will be beautiful.’ Well, Krekor, I am all grown-up and I am what I have always been. I am an ugly woman, and nothing on earth is ever going to be able to change that.”
Then Hannah Krekorian put her face in her hands and burst into tears.
Two
1
IT WAS JAMES WHO was home when the police called, and James who went to the morgue to formally identify the body—a ritual he was shocked to discover was impossible to escape. The police sent a car for him. James didn’t know if they were worried about the dangers he would face trying to get a car of his own out of a parking garage or off the street (muggers), or the dangers the populace of Philadelphia would face if he tried to drive home after seeing his father lying on a slab like that, dead-white and looking faintly annoyed. Maybe they just thought it would be difficult to find a cab at—what?—eleven o’clock at night. James hadn’t been thinking of it as “late” when he got the call. Coming out of the morgue, though, it felt infinitely late, some kind of metatime eternally stuck between the eleventh and twelfth tolls of midnight. James kept hearing the theme from The Twilight Zone playing in his head.
All the way home from the morgue, sitting up front next to the uniformed driver who seemed to view traffic as a form of war game, James thought about how odd Paul looked, dead. He looked odd because he looked the same. James had had to lean far over the body to be sure Paul wasn’t breathing. He’d leaned so far he’d started to fall. The police matron had to catch him. After a while, James decided that there was a difference. Paul looked too thin. Paul had always been too thin, but alive he had covered it with personal magnetism and force of personality. James couldn’t call it force of character. Christ only knew, Paul had never had any character.
The police driver pulled up to the door of the town house and waited at the curb while James got the front door unlocked. He was like a worried date or the kind of taxi driver women fell in love with. James got the door unlocked and let himself inside. There were lights on that hadn’t been when he’d left. He felt instantly relieved.
“Who’s home?” he called out. “This is James.”
“James, it’s Alyssa.”
Musical voice pouring down from the second floor. Light on the second floor landing. James climbed the stairs.
“Alyssa? What are you doing here? Where’s Caroline?”
“Caroline’s working.” Alyssa came out of the second floor sitting room to meet James in the hall. She looked frazzled and upset. Her wispy clothes seemed to be emotionally shredded, like frizzed hair. “She’s in her studio. She’s got the intercoms off. I can see her in the security monitor but I can’t get her attention.”
“She’s been working like that for hours,” Nick Roderick said, coming out to the hall too. “We left her just like that when we went out to dinner, and you know what she’s like when she gets like that. She could be in there until morning.”
“We heard it over the radio,” Alyssa said. “We were at Palace of Glass, and then we went on to Dominique, you know, for dessert. And we were sitting in the bar, waiting for a table, when the news started, and it was the very first thing.”