Skeleton Key(32)

Gregor Demarkian found Valkyries.

There was a moral in there somewhere, but Gregor was too tired to think of what it was.





2


The ride up to Connecticut was more than just long. It was interminable. From Philadelphia to New York was not too bad. It was fast, at least, although it did seem as if Amtrak stopped at every small town in the hinterlands. The shuttle from Pennsylvania Station to Grand Central wasn’t too bad, either, although it was definitely strange. Gregor always forgot just how odd New York really was, especially underground. Today there were three transvestites in the shuttle with him, obviously coming off an unbroken night of something. One of them had his wig off and lying in his lap, so that it looked as if his legs were erupting into curly blonde hair. Gregor didn’t mind the transvestites at all. He did mind the two young men huddled in the seats at the front of the car, clearly wasted on drugs and close to being sick. This was how he understood that he was not a modern man. It was inconceivable to him that anybody would want to do this with his life—and yet they were everywhere, these people, cowering in doorways, curled up in abandoned buildings. It was even more inconceivable to him that anyone could fail to realize that this was the kind of thing that happened to you if you insisted on taking drugs, and yet children—even intelligent children—started taking drugs every day.

In the world in which Gregor Demarkian grew up, even alcohol was confined to parties, and those came only two or three times a year. He couldn’t imagine anything more shameful on the Cavanaugh Street of his childhood than for a man to be known as someone who drank. Women never had more than two or three glasses of wine a year. Nobody had ever heard of drugs—or if they had, it was mostly rumors, passed on from people who had been to other places, like the army, where farm boys from Texas and mechanics from New Mexico sometimes brought little bags of marijuana to sell to anybody who would pay.

Gregor got off the shuttle at Grand Central and made his way upstairs. He found the next train to Bridgeport on the New Haven line and headed for track 19 on the main concourse. He had only fifteen minutes before the train left. That meant that the train would be parked in its appointed slot and open to take on passengers. That was a good thing, because there didn’t seem to be anyplace to sit in Grand Central anymore. Everything looked boarded up, or worse. The concourse itself was full of litter. The boards that hid what had once been the seating areas were covered with graffiti. You had to ask yourself how quick these kids were, with their spray cans. Grand Central was policed continually, from what Gregor could see. Patrolmen paced the corridors from one end to the other without stopping. When did anyone have time to spray three big red initials and a number on a barrier, without getting caught?

When Gregor was growing up on Cavanaugh Street, even almost-grown children, boys of seventeen, girls as old as twenty, went to church every week with their parents, walking in straight and unyielding lines down the block to the high steps of Holy Trinity Church. The old priest from Armenia who had been at the church in those days would stand out in front of the big doors and wait for them all to come in. He was a filthy old man, and nasty in his habits in more ways than one, but they all stopped in front of him and greeted him. They took his hand and wished him well. That was God’s representative on earth, that old man. You could feel the power of omniscience behind him.

When it got close to time for the liturgy to start—the old liturgy, the one that seemed to take hours and probably had—the priest would turn his back to them and go inside. He would disappear behind the iconostasis to dress. The children would sit in the long wooden pews with their hands held together in their laps and wait, unprotesting, until it was time to pray. They all had special clothes for church. The girls had white dresses and white socks. The boys had miniature little suits with ties they borrowed from their fathers and tucked inside their shirts. The old ladies wore black lace kerchiefs on their heads and black lace gloves.

The church itself was a cavernous space, filled with icons, and many of the icons were bloody. A saint pierced in the breast by a long sword. Another tied to a stake with his back whipped into shreds of skin and bright red wounds. They were all reminded, over and over again, that the martyrs had died horrible deaths for the faith, that it wasn’t so much to ask them to sit still and be quiet for a couple of hours every week.

And then, of course, when it was over, there was always a little reception in the basement of the church. The ladies put out thick black coffee and little pastries on a table covered with a plain white cloth. The fast before Communion   was so long that everybody was starving. They took little round plates and passed from one kind of pastry to another, trying to decide. Nobody ever took more than one. That might have meant that somebody got nothing. Gregor remembered Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian, standing side by side, in an agony of indecision—until two of the old ladies came up and took the last of the banirov kadayif and the indecision was over. There was nothing but loukoumia left.