Not a Creature Was Stirring(45)

“Maybe they don’t think.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tibor said. “Thinking is more natural to human beings than sex.”

Fortunately, at that moment the wine steward came back with the chardonnay. Gregor didn’t know what he would have done with that last comment—or with a discussion about drugs, either. It got a little complicated, trying to explain that he had ended up investigating serial murders because he hadn’t wanted to end up investigating drugs. Most Americans seemed to think the Great Drug War was the most exciting, most noble, most glorious crusade the Republic had ever engaged in. Witness all the time they spent watching movies about it, reading novels about it, even setting up educational programs to combat it. Maybe only law enforcement officers realized how truly boring it all was. To Gregor’s mind, a thirty-year-old lawyer getting himself hooked on cocaine wasn’t “not thinking.” He was brain dead.

The wine steward wanted to go through the whole elaborate ritual of smelling and tasting. Gregor let him do it, to buy time, even though he had the distinct feeling that neither one of them knew what he was doing. When the charade had been played out to its inevitable conclusion—polite murmurs of appreciation all around—the wine steward filled both glasses on the table halfway up and left.

Gregor picked up the bottle and topped Tibor off. “So,” he said, “Donna Moradanyan.”

“Donna Moradanyan,” Tibor agreed.

“Do you mind if I tell you something? I haven’t talked to Donna yet, and the situation may be very different after I do, but at the moment, I’m very confused about this.”

Tibor was surprised. “Confused? What’s there to be confused about? The girl’s pregnant.”

“Yes, Tibor, I know.”

“And the boy ran,” Tibor said. “Panic. Is that unusual, in your experience?”

“Not at all. It isn’t Donna and her boy I’m thinking of. It’s Cavanaugh Street.”

Tibor had already finished half his wine. Now he finished the other half and reached for the bottle. “Are you going to give me one of those lectures like Lida’s daughter does? About time warps? Because if you are—”

“No, no,” Gregor smiled. “Look. When I was with the Bureau, I had a young woman working under me, as a technician. This is the mid-sixties. She was a very smart woman, and there wasn’t much chance of promotion for women in those days, so she quit and went to graduate school. She got a doctorate in sociology and wrote a book. Which I read. I wouldn’t have read it, but I knew her—”

“I know how that is,” Tibor said. “I always read books when I’ve met the people who wrote them. Sometimes this means I read very bad books.”

“Well, this wasn’t a very bad book. It was a little dry, but it was her dissertation. I’d guess that was normal. It was a book about community responses to illegitimate pregnancies. Maybe it was ‘cultural’ responses. Whatever. According to this woman, it’s the pregnant girl who gets ostracized, not the boy. And now I have a lot of old women telling me they want to—”

“Ah,” Tibor said.

“You can’t just say ‘ah,’ Tibor. You have to elaborate.”

Tibor nodded slowly. “Were you born here? In the United States?”

“In the United States, in Philadelphia, and about half a block from here. There used to be a hospital in this neighborhood called Philadelphia Lying-in.”

“You had no sisters?”

“I had one brother. Much older. He died fighting at Anjou.”

“That explains it, then,” Tibor said. “The trouble with you, Gregor, is that you’re a middle-class man. A middle-class American man.”

“By the criteria you’re using, Lida Arkmanian is a middle-class American woman.”

“Mothers keep daughters closer to them than they keep sons,” Tibor said. “Or they used to. The women of Lida’s generation on Cavanaugh Street were brought up by peasant women. The very old women there are peasant women.”

“So?”

“So, peasants don’t have the same sort of attitude to these things the middle and upper classes have. The initial reaction of these women to a pregnant and unmarried daughter will be negative, of course, but after the anger is out they’ll get very practical. It’s the practical that matters. Would you say Donna Moradanyan was a nice girl?”

“She’s a very nice girl.”

“Yes,” Tibor said, “nice, and not very bright. No—drive? Ambition is what I mean. She’s respectful of older people. She comes to church. She doesn’t swear. She likes going to school, but she doesn’t really know what she’s doing there, and she doesn’t really care. If she didn’t think people would laugh at her—people like Lida’s daughter Karen—she’d probably tell you what she wants to do with her life is be a wife and mother.”