Blood in the Water(23)

“I don’t have to imagine it,” Tibor said carefully. “There’s nothing to imagine. It’s just the reality of the real world. Of course he would remember all that. He had a good mind and it functioned well and he was a hundred years old.”

“And now he’s gone,” Gregor said, “and all that is gone with him, and it makes no sense at all. It’s wasteful, and arbitrary, and it makes no sense at all. You have to see that.”

“What I see,” Tibor said, “is that perhaps this time Bennis has a point. Perhaps you are depressed.”

They were right in front of the Ararat now. The lights gleamed out into the dark of the November morning. Behind the glass, Linda Melajian was running back and forth with a Pyrex pot of black coffee.

“I’m not depressed,” Gregor said. “I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed and offended, if you want to know the truth. It’s a waste of time and resources and everything else I can think of that somebody like old George Tekemanian would die of nothing but old age. And it is not the way a well-ordered universe would be constructed to run.”

Gregor grabbed the plate glass door, pulled it open, and went inside. The door sucked back toward Tibor, who stood unmoving on the sidewalk.

Gregor thought he should feel guilty about that, but he couldn’t do it.

He was, he thought, right in everything he was saying, and he’d been thinking about it for weeks.

Cavanaugh Street was not the same without old George down there on the first floor, and it never would be.

3

Twenty minutes later, Gregor was sitting with Tibor and Bennis in the big benched booth near the windows, and Linda Melajian was delivering a platter with his favorite breakfast. He had two scrambled eggs, two pieces of buttered toast, two round breakfast sausages, three rashers of bacon, and a huge pile of hash brown potatoes. Tibor was having almost exactly the same. Bennis was having black coffee and a half of grapefruit, and glaring.

“Look at it this way,” Gregor told her as he picked up his fork, “if I die on you in the middle of the night, it won’t be because of old age.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis said.

Linda Melajian swung around to see if anybody wanted more coffee, then took one look at Bennis’s face and decided that they did not. She swung away again, back through the crowded dining room with its little knots of people bending over coffee cups and talking without bothering to take breaths.

There were times when Gregor sat looking at Bennis and marveling that he had ever married her. It was unusual to get lucky twice with wives. It was even more unusual to have reached the age he was now and never have been divorced. Bennis made him feel lucky most mornings, but this was not one of them.

He could look around the Ararat right now and see old George sitting there, at one of the interior tables, having breakfast with Lida and Hannah and Sheila or with Donna Moradanyan Donahue and both of her children, or with, well, anybody. Everybody had breakfast with old George once in a while.

He could see both Linda Melajian and her mother bending over old George’s chair, scolding him about forgetting his gloves or his hat or eating the real butter instead of the nonsaturated-fat margarine.

These were the ordinary markers of an ordinary life. They were not vices, or risks, or natural disasters. They were not diseases or injuries. They were nothing but what everybody did everywhere with perfect safety, and there was something gravely wrong with the idea that someone would be punished for them after all.

I am being childish, Gregor thought. This is not the way grown-up people respond to death and dying. There are supposed to be stages of grief, and then at the end you are supposed to be all calm and accepting and ready to go on with your life. He had figured out in no time that what he was thinking and feeling did not fit into them.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,” he said.

“What?” Father Tibor said.

“It’s a poem by a man named Dylan Thomas,” Gregor said. “Bennis probably had to read it at Vassar. He wrote it to his father when his father was dying. Do not go gentle into that good night. Death is the enemy.”

“He’s been like this for days,” Bennis said. “Sometimes I get it, but sometimes I just want to kill him.”

“Then there’s the other thing,” Gregor said. “The wages of sin are death.”

Tibor shook his head. “If you’re going to read the Bible, you should read the whole thing, not just bits and pieces of it that suit your mood. It doesn’t do anybody any good taken apart like that. We’ve started wars doing that. We’ve killed people.”