Not a Creature Was Stirring(25)

“No place is.”

“Do you remember the dances they used to have, at the church, when we were children? Teenagers, they call them now. In those days, the grandmothers sat in the chairs against the wall and if you talked to a boy your parents knew about it before you got home.”

And you hated it, Gregor thought. They had more than hated it. They had spent their high-school lives envying the hell out of their Anglo Saxon classmates, who seemed to live in a world where nobody knew anybody. And everybody necked.

Lida put the fresh coffee and the new clean cup down on the table, and then, as an afterthought, got the milk and sugar. Then she sat down in the seat directly across from him and stared at her spoon.

“Well,” she said. “Here we are. After all these years.”

“It hasn’t been that many years, Lida.”

“I think it’s been forever,” Lida said. She watched him put milk and sugar into his coffee, frowning a little, as if she wanted to give him the same lecture Elizabeth had been so fond of. Then she turned her head away and said, in an oddly abrupt tone, “You think I don’t remember. How awful it was. That feeling that we were different, not so shiny and bright as all the rest of them. And you going off to college, nervous all the time, because in those days they were always looking for excuses not to give scholarships to ‘minority groups.’ Oh, I remember. It was terrible. It just wasn’t as terrible as this.”

“This?”

“Things have changed, Gregor. Oh, I know. Things have changed everywhere. But this isn’t everywhere. This is here. This is home. I think we—the older people, you know—I think we thought that if we stayed here, if we didn’t move out to the Main Line or Bucks County or someplace else that really belonged to them, that it would be all right. That we could go on being us. But it didn’t work.”

Gregor threw up his hands. “What do you want? To speak Armenian at home and gain fifty pounds with every baby? To be so afraid of doctors you go to church instead of to the hospital when you’re ill, no matter what the priest tells you? Or maybe you want old Karpakian instead of Father Tibor?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Gregor. I’m not senile. I just—I just want the world to make sense.”

If Gregor hadn’t been thinking the same thing himself, less than half an hour before, he would have smiled. There it was, the one thing everybody wanted, and the one thing nobody got. He felt suddenly sorry for her. She’d lived a life that made the unpleasant truth easy to avoid—and now she must have run into something that made it so clear, she couldn’t get around it.

Gregor got up and started to search his cabinets for a plate to put the vine leaves on. It would be polite to offer her something, and he had nothing else. Not even cookies.

“So,” he said, when he came back to the table, “is that what this visit is all about? You want me to help you make the world make sense?”

“Don’t be silly,” Lida said. “I came because—I came because Father Tibor said something, in passing you understand, the other day. You’re going into business as a private detective?”

“Of course I’m not,” Gregor said, surprised. “Whatever gave him that idea?”

“I don’t know,” Lida said.

“It would be a mess,” Gregor said. “I’d need a license. I could probably get one, but then what would I do? I don’t have any interest in adultery and I couldn’t care less about insurance fraud.”

Lida looked at her hands. “What about missing persons? Would you need to get one of these detective licenses to find a missing person?”

“I suppose anyone could go looking for a missing person, if they didn’t charge for it.” Gregor was curious. “Who have you got missing? I can’t believe your son-in-law would have taken off on that beautiful child of his—”

“No, no.” Lida hesitated, then seemed to make up her mind. She reached into the pocket of her coat without the card in it and came up with a small photograph. “Here,” she said. “This is the boy. This is the one I want to find.”

“Nice-looking boy,” Gregor said. He was, too—clean, well dressed, even featured, young. He was not, however, particularly memorable. The photograph had been taken in a studio someplace. It showed a young man with a taste for crewneck sweaters and button-down shirts, posed against a hazy blue background as bland as his clothes.

“Not the sort of young man to stick out in a crowd,” Gregor said.

“No,” Lida said. “But he stuck out, Gregor. Believe me. At least once, he stuck out much too far.”