“What am I doing, exactly?” he asked himself.
Then he went out into his foyer and took his best navy blue cardigan sweater off the coatrack next to the door. It always seemed to be chilly in the mornings on Cavanaugh Street, except in August, when it was wet and muggy and hot. Gregor let himself out his front door and locked it carefully behind him. He wouldn’t be caught dead treating Cavanaugh Street as if it were a village in the old country, with nothing to worry about from thieves and junkies. He went down the stairs to the second floor and looked at Bennis Hannaford’s door. If he knew Bennis, she would have stayed up all night working and reading and be in no shape to go to breakfast now. He went down another flight of steps to the front hall and looked at old George Tekemanian’s door as if just looking at it could tell him if the old man was awake or not. Old George usually was, in spite of the fact that he was well over eighty. Gregor hesitated only a moment before he knocked. Old George’s voice called out “come in” almost immediately, as if he had been awake in there for hours, just waiting for somebody to show up.
Old George didn’t lock his door either. Gregor opened it. Old George was sitting in splendor in his bright yellow wing chair, wrapped in a red silk dressing gown, sporting thick socks with bats embroidered on them on his long, thin feet. Old George’s grandson Martin was always buying him things to make him look more sophisticated, but making old George look more sophisticated was a lost cause. Old George’s grandson Martin’s wife was always buying him “healthful” food to snack on, but at the moment old George was eating a Twinkie.
“Krekor,” old George said. “Would you like to come in and have a Twinkie?”
Gregor let the Twinkie pass. “I’m going over to get Tibor out of bed,” he told the old man. “Want to come with me?”
“You won’t get Tibor out of bed,” old George said. “He wakes up at four to read.”
“Whatever. Maybe we’ll go to the Ararat and have some breakfast.”
“I don’t think so, Krekor. The Ararat these days is not what it used to be. It is too full of wedding things.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I am very glad Donna is getting married, Krekor, but this is truly crazy. She came down here yesterday with samples of satin ribbon to tie the favors and wanted to know which one I like best. She had two dozen samples, Krekor, and they were all some kind of white.”
“That sounds more like Donna’s mother than like Donna.”
“And then there are these showers,” old George went on. “In my day, parties of this kind were for women only. Now they’re all having them and they all expect me to come. Lida. Hannah. Sheila Kashinian. Helen. Everybody.”
“They expect me to come too. I just don’t go.”
“You have legitimate excuses. I have nothing. Do you know what they do at these parties?”
“No.”
“They play games about sex. That is what they do. They make me blush.”
“I’m going to go get Tibor,” Gregor said. “Wedding craziness or no wedding craziness, I still have to eat.”
“I keep telling myself it will be a very good thing for Tommy to have a father who is around the house and wants to take care of him. That is how I get through it all.”
“I keep telling myself that if it gets very, very bad, I can always take off for the Caribbean for the duration. You’re sure you don’t want to come down with me?”
“Yes, Krekor. I’m sure.”
“Say hello to Donna and Bennis when you see them then. I’ve got to be downtown for most of the day.”
Old George Tekemanian took another large bite of his Twinkie, and sighed.
2.
For years, Father Tibor Kasparian had been like nobody else on Cavanaugh Street. An immigrant from Soviet Armenia, a veteran of the gulags and the free-floating religious persecution of the old Soviet empire, he had been not only an oddity but an object of awe. That he should have come through All That and still be as sane and stable as he was seemed like a miracle to people whose idea of adversity ran to rather fuzzy memories of the Great Depression. That he should still be so convinced of the truth of the religion he had been ordained to serve was more than a miracle. It was, according to Mary Ohanian’s passionate declaration, proof positive of the existence of God. Over the years, though, Tibor had become less exotic. The Soviet union had broken up, making Armenia independent for the first time in almost a century. Refugees had poured onto Cavanaugh Street, as they had onto the streets of every Armenian-American neighborhood in the country. There were other people there now who had been through the kinds of things Tibor had been through, if not for the same reasons. Bennis had put it best one night in the Ararat. The thing about Tibor was not that he had suffered for his faith under the Soviets, it was that he had suffered on purpose. Even now Gregor thought he had never known anybody so determined to get into trouble for his principles.