“And Cavanaugh Street likes that,” Gregor said.
“Well, Cavanaugh Street likes Karen Arkmanian, too. Brilliant. Ambitious. Successful. That’s fine. What wouldn’t be fine would be a lot of men. Do you think Donna Moradanyan has known a lot of men?”
“I still can’t get used to the fact that she’s known one.”
“Exactly. So here we have a very nice Armenian-American girl, a sweet girl, a vulnerable girl, a girl who is twenty-one but still a child. Karen Arkmanian is the same age. You’d never call her a girl. Do you see what I mean?”
“Maybe.”
“Of course you do,” Tibor said. “The old women on Cavanaugh Street admire Karen Arkmanian. They’re proud of her. They don’t understand her. But Donna Moradanyan. Here she is, what you would call old-fashioned, and one morning she wakes up with a very old-fashioned problem. And the boy ran away, Gregor. There is that.”
“Meaning that by running away he makes himself the villain?”
“Exactly. But right now what we have here is practicality. When a peasant girl gets pregnant, her mother makes sure she also gets married. That solves everything. Then, soon, there is a grandchild, and everybody’s happy.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” Gregor said drily.
Tibor wagged his finger. “Now, now. You are talking like an American. Use your imagination, Gregor.”
Gregor used his hands, to pick up the wine bottle and refill both their glasses. The wine was nearly gone. They were both getting pleasantly tipsy in the middle of the afternoon. Gregor put the bottle back in its bucket—chardonnay was a room-temperature wine, but at Leitmotif it came in a bucket anyway—and watched Tibor light a Marlboro cigarette. In deference to American prejudices about smoking, he’d left his Egyptian specials at home.
“Have you talked to Donna Moradanyan about this?” he asked Tibor. “Does she want this boy of hers found?”
Tibor sighed. “I have talked to Donna Moradanyan, yes. She doesn’t want her mother to know-—but her mother already knows, because Lida Arkmanian told her.”
“Lida Arkmanian would,” Gregor said.
“Also, she does not want to have an abortion or give the baby up for adoption. Both of which are very good decisions, because to have decided the other way in either case would have made her mother crazy. And Donna is very close to her mother. Do you see what I mean?”
Gregor saw what Tibor meant. This was a grandchild. Donna’s mother wouldn’t want to lose it, no matter how she had acquired it. As for abortion—well. People thought the Roman Catholic Church was fanatically opposed to abortion. People thought that because they knew nothing about the Eastern Churches, which gave new meaning to the word “fanaticism” any time they decided to get serious.
Which, fortunately, was almost never.
Gregor stretched his legs and poured himself still more wine. “In the first place,” he said, “you’ve got to understand that finding this boy is going to be easy, unless Donna picked him up in a singles bar. I take it she didn’t.”
“She met him at a dance at the Assumption Church. The one that calls itself American Orthodox.”
“All right. So he’s connected. People know him. Donna probably has his right name. She knows where his parents live?”
“In Boston,” Tibor nodded.
“Well, that could mean Boston or any one of a dozen suburbs. Still, it won’t be hard. Did she know him long?”
“Eight months.”
“Not a drifter, then. And not a one-night stand—”
“Gregor,” Tibor winced.
“You have to consider these things, Tibor. But not a one-night stand, meaning not a man who went on the prowl one night and maybe lied about half a dozen things to get what he wanted. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t lie about something, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, we have what appears to be a perfectly ordinary boy. Did you ever meet him?”
“Once. Donna brought him to a—a pot luck supper? It was Sheila Kashinian’s idea. To raise money for the Sunday school.”
“What was he like?”
“He wasn’t like anything,” Tibor said. “He was in a pair of blue jeans and a sweater, like they always are. And he was very polite.”
“No alarm bells going off in your head?”
“Oh, no,” Tibor said. “I remember thinking it was nice she had found such a nice boy.”
“What about the older women? Any alarm bells going off there?”
Tibor bit back a smile. “Lida met him, and I thought she was going to have the engagement announced then and there. Even though there was no engagement.”