Living Witness(39)

He looked up and down the street again, but the person he saw was not Gary Albright but Leda Kazanjian Arkmanian, crawling down the pavement at a lordly ten miles an hour. Leda always crawled in that car of hers. Gregor thought she only owned it because her children insisted on giving it to her, and he had to admit it was a very impressive car.

“Swedish,” she’d said, when she’d first gotten it, and everybody was asking her about it in the Ararat. “They started out saying they were going to give me a Mercedes, but I couldn’t have that. It’s a German car. I mean, German.”

Gregor had wanted to say, at the time, that it could have been worse. It could have been a Turkish car. He said nothing, because he knew better than to interfere when people started fighting World War II all over again. Now he watched while Leda pulled up to the curb just across the street from him, making the vehicle make funny noises as she parked. If Gregor had had someplace to go that wouldn’t inconvenience Gary Albright when he finally got here, he would have gone there.

Leda got out of the car and looked up and down the street. There was no traffic. There rarely was at this time of day on Cavanaugh Street. She did something that beeped with her key ring. Gregor thought it was a device that automatically locked or unlocked all the doors of the car. He wasn’t up on cars. He didn’t understand them. Leda waved to him and began to cross the street. She didn’t look happy. Gregor wished he didn’t already know what she was going to say.

“Gregor,” she said, when he reached him.

Gregor looked up and down the street again. Surely, Gary Albright couldn’t be hopelessly lost. If he had been, he would have called. That was what Gregor had a cell phone for. “I’m waiting for the police officer from Snow Hill,” he said, as if Leda was going to listen.

Leda was looking impressive as only Leda could look these days. She might be an old lady, but she was a magnificent old lady. She was wearing three-and-a-half-inch stiletto heels and a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat. Here was the great payoff of raising your children to work hard and study and get as much education as they could. Leda’s children had done very well.

“Gregor,” she said again, as if she hadn’t said it the first time, “I came to apologize.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Gregor said. “We’ve got it all worked out. We really do.”

“And you’re getting married in the church?”

Gregor sighed. This would be an easier conversation if Leda had been concerned that Gregor and Bennis get married in the Church, with a capital C. That would mean she wanted them to have the blessing of the Armenian religion, and Gregor would have had an answer to that that would have been easy for anyone to understand. Unfortunately, Leda was only concerned that the ceremony for Gregor and Bennis’s wedding take place inside the physical building of Holy Trinity Church, and she wasn’t the only one who was concerned about it.

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “I do need to apologize. To apologize for Father Tibor. To apologize for the whole neighborhood. I never dreamed that he’d be this stubborn, and about what? About a technicality.”

“It’s not exactly just a technicality,” Gregor said.

“Of course it is,” Leda said. “And it’s un-American, too. Tibor’s always so proud of being an American. My niece Alison got married to a Jewish boy not three months ago, and they had the ceremony right in her Catholic church with a rabbi present to give his side of it. And that’s the Catholics. The Armenians were never as unreasonable as the Catholics.”

Gregor thought that he could possibly dispute this, but he let it go. “Bennis and I don’t want to get married in Holy Trinity Church,” he said, thinking that this was closest to the right thing to say. It was out of the question that he could explain to Leda what the issue really was. He knew that because he had tried, on several occasions. “We really aren’t looking to have a religious ceremony.”

“It’s not a matter of a religious ceremony,” Leda said. “It has nothing to do with religion. It’s a matter of community. You’re one of the family here on Cavanaugh Street, and he’s treating you as if you were an outsider.”

“No,” Gregor said. “Really. He’s not. He’s even agreed to perform the actual ceremony, the civil version, you know, just not in the church.”

“Hannah and Sheila and I have come up with a plan,” Leda said. “We’re going to make him change his mind. Don’t you worry. We know how to make Father Tibor see reason. And if not, well, what of it? I don’t want to belong to a church that wants to keep people out more than it wants to bring them in. That isn’t what Christ came to teach us. Why should I go to a church that’s more snobbish than one of those Main Line country clubs?”