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Fighting Chance

By:Jane Haddam

PROLOGUE

1

Once, long ago, Father Tibor Kasparian had come to Cavanaugh Street on a temporary assignment, a sacrificial lamb meant to placate all sides in an impossible situation. Father Tibor himself was one side of that situation. He had appeared suddenly and out of nowhere from the never-never land of religious persecution, eyes sunk into the back of his head, weight barely enough to keep him standing upright. Priests used to come out of the old Soviet union   like that, and then the Church had done what it could for them. It had no other choice.

By the time Tibor arrived, the situation was different. Persecution was still going on, but there were rules to the game. There were procedures. The Church was not expecting a ghost on its doorstep, one who needed not only help but affirmation.

The other side of the situation was Cavanaugh Street itself, one of the oldest Armenian churches in America and, by then, one nobody wanted. In those days, all Armenian priests were trained in Armenia, and all of them had grown to adulthood in Armenia. They had expectations about the relationship between a priest and his parishioners. The priest should be the most educated person in the parish. He should be the intermediary between his parishioners and the outside world. His parishioners should defer to him on all things, even the naming of their children.

When the bishops and the patriarchs asked their priests why they wouldn’t go to Cavanaugh Street, the priests had very good answers. The parish was “too worldly,” most of them said, or “the people are falling away from God.” One inventive priest claimed that he had visited there and found the place impossible. It was full of people with “Roman tendencies.” If there was one thing no Armenian priest was going to put up with, it was a parish full of people with “Roman tendencies,” the kind of people who would be Catholic if they could, but didn’t know how.

The bishops listened to all this talk and said nothing to contradict it, even though they knew it wasn’t exactly true. The real problem with Cavanaugh Street was both simple and unfixable. The people of Cavanaugh Street were, indeed, “worldly,” in the sense that they had a lot of money. What had once been a small immigrant Armenian enclave of tenement houses had changed over the years into a street of elegant town houses and co-ops as expensive to buy as a Harvard education and almost as expensive to rent.

And it wasn’t the money alone. The first generation of immigrants had given way to a generation of American-born overachievers. That generation had given way to one where every last child was pushed at colleges and universities with famous names and serious social pretensions. By the time Father Tibor arrived, the street was full of people who not only thought they knew better than any immigrant priest from Armenia, but probably did.

Tibor Kasparian took up residence in the cramped little apartment next to the old church, and a very odd thing happened. The people of Cavanaugh Street, who had driven away six priests in less than seventeen months, decided that they liked this one. The bishops waited patiently for the complaints to start rolling in, but it never happened. They sent observers, just in case Father Tibor was preaching the prosperity gospel or maybe Marxism instead of good solid orthodoxy. They could find nothing objectionable in his celebrations of the liturgy.

Eventually, the hierarchy had decided it was best to leave well enough alone. The impossible parish had a priest it could live with. The office of the Eastern Diocese was not being flooded with reports about how the man had to be shipped back to Yerevan or angry Monday-morning phone calls about how the man was impossible. The Armenian Church in America was growing. There was a lot to do. The Church even had Web sites, and Armenian American experts to run them.

Tibor Kasparian never asked why things worked out so well. He’d heard all about Cavanaugh Street before he got there. He’d heard how terribly they treated priests, and how little they had of piety and charity, and how they had become “Americanized” in the worst possible way. Then he showed up at the church door, and a small woman in an enormous chinchilla coat had taken his books out of his right hand, shaken the hand vigorously, and said, “Valley of the Dolls? I love Valley of the Dolls. Wherever did you find a copy at this late date?”

Tibor would have told her where he’d found the copy if she’d stopped talking long enough to listen. She hadn’t, and she’d made no comment on the rest of the books, which included both Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in Greek and Saint Thomas’s Summa in Latin.

On the morning of September 9, Tibor got dressed in the oversized bedroom of the new rectory apartment that the parish had built him when they rebuilt the old church. There were too many mirrors in the room, which he did not like to look into. He hadn’t been all that attractive when he was a young and healthy man. These days, he was neither young nor particularly healthy, and he thought he looked like the less colorful kind of garden gnome. Still, the mirrors were a fact of life, along with the Jacuzzi built for eight and the refrigerator the size of a railway transport vehicle. He wasn’t going to complain about them.