Living Witness(21)

There were no real issues to be resolved between Bennis and himself. They had been together long enough, and she had been enough of a pain in the ass, so that most of those things had been worked out long ago. No, it was the two of them and their relationship to Cavanaugh Street that needed to be worked out, because up to now they had been winging it. It was odd how that went. There was no such thing as a free lunch, and what you paid for a place like Cavanaugh Street was a certain amount of respect and obedience to the morals and traditions of the place.

And that, of course, they had not done.

Gregor put shampoo in his hair. It was a new shampoo Bennis and Donna had brought him from Antwerp when they were off doing—he didn’t know what. That was months ago. The shampoo smelled like peaches, which he didn’t think was a very good choice, given Antwerp. Was he really making that kind of cultural connection in his head? Apparently he was.

That was the problem, though. That had been the problem all along, and he had been privileged to pretend it was no problem at all, because mostly nobody had brought it up. But six weeks from now or so, there was going to be a wedding, and there was no way that wedding could take place in Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church.

Gregor put his head against the side of the shower. There. He had said it.

There was an issue, and the issue was about religion.





2




Actually, for most of Gregor Demarkian’s life, religion had been not so much an issue as a fact of life. It was a fact of life for every immigrant community, and Cavanaugh Street had been an immigrant community when Gregor was growing up there. In then mostly Catholic Philadelphia, belonging to something called the “Armenian Apostolic Church” was just odd. It didn’t engender hostility as much as incomprehension, and once the worst of the incomprehension was gotten through—yes, that was a Christian church, and yes, Armenian families did celebrate things like Christmas—most non-Catholics simply assumed it was a way of being Catholic. By the time Gregor had reached the eighth grade he thought he understood that. Protestant churches were plain and had a lot of singing from the congregation. The minister stood at the front and talked a sermon, wearing either ordinary clothes or the sort of robe people wore to graduate from college in. Catholic churches had priests in robes that were very elaborate and embroidered with thread that shined in the light of the candles flickering at the shrines that lined the sides of the sacristy. Instead of sermons there were rituals, with lots of raising up of things and bowing down to them, all in a foreign language. Even most Catholics in Philadelphia couldn’t have told the difference between Armenian and Latin. Gregor himself knew only because he spoke enough Armenian to get by at home.

When had religion become an issue again? he wondered, picking up the bar of black clear soap Bennis liked to use because—well, he had no idea why. She just did. He didn’t think it had been an issue when he first came back to Cavanaugh Street after he’d retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That was just after his wife had died, and she had been buried out of Holy Trinity Church with no fuss or bother whatsoever, even though neither she nor Gregor himself had been inside a church of any kind for years, except to go to other people’s weddings and funerals. That was when the priest at Holy Trinity had been an old man from Armenia who was inches from retirement. Gregor had wondered why the man hadn’t wanted to go straight back to the old country on the nearest boat, since he spoke almost no English at all and made it clear he wasn’t interested in learning. Maybe the only reason religion hadn’t been an issue when Elizabeth died was that Gregor and Father What’s-His-Name had no effective means of communication. Maybe Father What’s-His-Name would have objected if he’d realized that Elizabeth hadn’t so much as taken communion   on Holy Thursday in a decade, and that Gregor thought he might not believe in God at all. It was hard to know what would or would not have been an issue, though, because Gregor had not been in good shape after Elizabeth died. It was possible that Father What’s-His-Name had asked all kinds of questions about his and Elizabeth’s spiritual life, and he had just answered with whatever had come into his head at the moment. If he hadn’t already fallen away from whatever faith he’d been raised in, Elizabeth’s dying would have made religion an issue with him. It had taken so long, and it had been so goddamn ugly.

He had, at the moment, no serious excuse for staying in the shower. He was washed clean, and his skin was beginning to wrinkle. The sound of the water hitting the walls of the shower stall drowned out any sound of Bennis’s voice that might be coming from the living room. He wondered if she was still worrying about swans crapping on the buffet, and where the swans had come from. He couldn’t remember any swans in the plans she had discussed with him up to now. That did not matter a great deal, of course. The plans she discussed with him seemed to change as soon as he left the room, or maybe she felt it was better not to tell him everything. He was a little alarmed at the idea of swans wandering around the reception . . . possibly eating the flowers.