Quoth the Raven(18)

Gregor managed to find the keyhole under all the crepe paper, tried his key, and found it wouldn’t work: the door was already unlocked. He let himself into the vestibule in a rising state of exasperation. None of the doors on Cavanaugh Street were locked these days. Lida and Hannah and all the rest of those silly women were much too concerned that the small children who came to their doors wouldn’t be able to reach the doorknobs. They intended to keep their doors not only unlocked, but open, all Halloween night. What kind of a world did they think they were living in? Cavanaugh Street was a prosperous neighborhood, ten blocks of miraculous self-styled urban renewal—but it was surrounded by nastiness. Even if all they did was pass through the neighborhoods on their periphery while safely ensconced in the backseats of cabs, they ought to know that.

He got to the third floor, saw that his own door was standing open, and barged in.

“Bennis?” he said. “Bennis, come out here for a minute. I want to talk to you.”

“Bennis is in the bathroom,” Donna Moradanyan said, emerging from the kitchen in a cloud of fair wispy hair and flour. Donna Moradanyan looked less Armenian-American than anyone Gregor had ever met, but she was definitely Armenian-American. Not only both her parents, but all four of her grandparents, all eight of her great-grandparents, and all umpteen-thousand of her other ancestors were of Armenian extraction. Exactly how she had come out looking like a virginal Swedish exercise nut, Gregor didn’t know.

“We’re almost all packed,” she said now, taking the heavier of the two bags out of Gregor’s right arm, “so if you want to add something we haven’t counted on, I don’t know what we’ll do. And the kitchen’s a mess. Tommy got into the flour when I wasn’t looking, and it’s all over the place.”

So that was what the flour was about, Gregor thought. Tommy was Donna Moradanyan’s infant son, just now going on six months old and threatening to become seriously mobile.

“I don’t want to add anything to what you’re packing,” Gregor said. “I’m not crazy. I just want—”

“—to ream us out about the doors,” Bennis finished for him.

Gregor turned around to see her emerging from the living room, which led to a little hall at the back with the bedroom and bathroom off it. She had her great cloud of trademark Hannaford black hair pinned haphazardly to the top of her head, the tails of her flannel shirt hanging out, and nothing but knee socks on her feet. She looked impossibly beautiful and impossibly disorganized. She was, in reality, both.

“I have,” Gregor said, “a perfect right to ream you out about the doors. I know I seem to be talking to thin air on this subject, but whether it has dawned on either of you or not—and on Lida, and on Hannah, and on Sheila Kashinian and all the rest of them—this is not a Hollywood movie set in the thirties. This is Philadelphia in the nineties. Not three blocks from this apartment there’s a crack house that operates twenty-four hours a day and gets raided once a week. You leave the doors on this street standing open and unlocked all Halloween night, and somebody is going to get killed.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “I hope you’re wrong, because there’s nothing I can do about it. Every time I try to tell Lida what you tell me, she pats me on the head and says, ‘Yes, dear, and now, that boy who took you out last week, is he responsible?’ ”

Donna smiled. “Lida wants to fix Bennis up with Hannah Krekorian’s son Johnny. He just got divorced.”

“But it’s okay,” Bennis said, “because he got divorced from a non-Armenian girl who wasn’t even Greek Orthodox or anything, and any food with a spice in it gave her indigestion, and Hannah and Lida couldn’t stand her.”

“I have to get back to Tommy,” Donna said. “He’s probably breaking plates by now.”

Donna whirled and went back through the kitchen door, cooing out mother-sounds in advance. Bennis turned to Gregor and shrugged.

“Look,” she said, “I know how you feel about the doors. I don’t even think you’re wrong. But there really isn’t anything I can do about it. They treat me like a pet.”

“Do you mind that, Bennis?”

“No.” Bennis paced around his foyer, stopping to look at his badly framed pen-and-ink drawing of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, stopping again to look at the vase of wilted flowers on the small occasional table. It wasn’t much, but it beat the way the foyer had looked for the first six months after he bought this apartment—meaning empty.