Glass Houses(39)

Here was the thing again. It didn’t matter how well you swam. You had to swim. You couldn’t float. Life was a constant and unrelenting challenge. Every moment of it had to be earned. Every step forward was bought at the cost of constant vigilance. First there was learning English. Then there was learning English without an accent. He didn’t know, then, that he was only learning it with a Philadelphia accent. Philadelphia was better than Armenia, as far as accents went. After you got through that part, there was more. There was schoolwork, which had to be near perfect. Rich American kids from the Main Line went to the Ivy League with mediocre grades in those days, but Armenian kids with no money only went if they were spectacular in almost every way. Gregor had made himself spectacular in almost every way. He had been valedictorian of his high school graduating class. It was only the local public high school, but it was a good one in those days. It was a period when the city had taken public education seriously.

He wondered sometimes if he would have applied to the University of Pennsylvania if he had understood that it was not the state university. Penn State was the state university. The University of Pennsylvania was private and Ivy League, and Gregor had gone walking up to his interview without a clue as to what he was getting himself into. He had made the most fateful decision of his life—to live at home and commute, rather than asking his parents to foot the bill for a dorm room—without knowing what he was getting himself into either. The next thing he knew, he was a ghost: academically talented and a stand-out student in all of his classes, but invisible otherwise to a student body that not only lived on campus but went home to suburbs where the houses stood back on green lawns and the families never raised their voices above a whisper.

He had married Elizabeth because he was a ghost and because he knew he would go on being a ghost when he went to Harvard Business School. The ghostlike quality was a function of something at the core of himself that he could not change. He would only learn to use it to his advantage in the army. Elizabeth, though, was exactly what he needed. Like him, she did not fit any-where anymore by the time she was in her early twenties. She didn’t fit in at Beaver College, where she had a scholarship and did live in a dorm, but couldn’t dress the way the other girls did and didn’t understand the things they talked about. She didn’t fit in on the old, immigrant Cavanaugh Street anymore either. They fit together because they understood each other. If they had had children, they would have raised them, scrupulously, to be “Americans.”

This, Gregor thought, realizing that the cab was stuck in traffic yet again, and it was the middle of the night. There weren’t supposed to be traffic backups in the middle of the night in Philadelphia. That was for Washington, D.C. This was the difference, between him and Bennis. This was why Bennis’s behavior made no sense to him, and why his behavior made no sense to Bennis.

He didn’t want to underestimate, for a moment, the hell her childhood had been. He’d heard all about it, and he’d met both her parents and all her brothers and sisters, and he was ready to testify before the gate of heaven that Bennis’s growing up had been hell on wheels. But—and this was a significant but—it had not been a childhood of being out of place. If Bennis Day Hannaford was anything, it was spectacularly in place. She didn’t have to earn the right to be an American. She’d had relatives who’d earned it for her: two signers of the Declaration of Independence; four dead in the Revolutionary War; three delegates to the Constitutional Convention; five congressmen; six senators; two captains; and four ordinary soldiers in the union   army during the Civil War. It went on and on and on. Bennis’s family was like a living history of the United States.

It was also a living history of the Philadelphia Main Line, which meant that no matter what she did, how odd she was next to the people she grew up with, she automatically belonged. Subdeb subscription dances, deb balls, country club memberships, women’s club memberships, invitations to sit on the boards of charities: all of those things were hers because she was Bennis Day Hannaford, automatically, without any effort on her part. So was admission to the Madeira School and later to Vassar College. So were invitations to fox hunts in Virginia, which she never accepted because she didn’t like horses and she had nothing against letting the poor foxes live. So were a hundred other things that Gregor knew about only vaguely because Bennis was sure enough in her right to them not to care if she had them or not.

And that, right there, was what he had been trying to get at during all these long months she had been gone. That was the issue, the real issue, no matter what it was that made her leave or what it was she was going to want to talk about once he finally got home. Gregor Demarkian had had what other people would probably have called an illustrious career. He had been hired by the FBI as a special agent right out of business school. That was good because he had gone to business school in order to be able to join the Bureau. He certainly hadn’t been interested in going to work for a widget manufacturer. But the Bureau had obliged, and even in the days when Hoover was in power and didn’t much like “ethnics,” it had promoted him rapidly. It had given him the job of forming and implementing the new Behavioral Sciences Unit that was supposed to track the interstate movements of serial killers and compile re-search on how those killers operated. It had introduced him to presidents of the United States and senators and congressmen without number. What it had never been able to do, what even leaving and losing Elizabeth had not done, was make him fit.