ONE
1
In the beginning, the problem of the body of Anne Marie Hannaford had not been as simple as it should have been. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had seemed reluctant to give it back, as if they were afraid she had become an icon, like Jeffrey Dahmer, and that people would make a shrine out of her grave. When they finally did give it back—three days late, and not embalmed—Bennis had decided that there was nothing she could do. In spite of the Hannaford tradition of being buried in the big family plot in the cemetery behind the Episcopal Church in Ardmore, where Hannafords had gone to rest since 1762, Anne Marie would have to be cremated. Bennis tried to consult her brothers about this decision, but it was hopeless. Christopher didn’t care. Bobby had other things on his mind. Teddy didn’t want to talk to her. It felt, she sometimes told Gregor, as if they were all still children growing up in Bryn Mawr, where boys were the ones that mattered and girls were supposed to fend for themselves as much as possible, unless they were debutantes, when they deserved the kind of attention that would make it possible for them to marry well.
After Anne Marie was cremated, her body was put into a small brass urn with handles that looked like a bowling trophy and then—because nobody could decide what was going to happen with that, either—left on the top of Bennis’s low dresser in her own bedroom in her apartment on the second floor of the brownstone house on Cavanaugh Street. It would have been a morbid thing, except that Bennis never slept in that bedroom anymore. She rarely even went to that apartment, except to work, and these days she had her work station set up in the living room on a big table pushed up against the plate-glass window that looked down to the street. She said she never thought about it, but Gregor did. He thought about it all the time, and once a day, when he knew Bennis would be out at the Ararat or at Donna Moradanyan’s, he went down to look at it for himself, just to make sure it was still there. He had no idea why he thought it might be gone. She couldn’t very well bury it, or place it in a vault, without a good deal of formality. The people who ran cemeteries were sticklers for paperwork. Dead bodies could be dangerous, even if they had been burned to ashes. That was why the Commonwealth insisted that anyone who wanted to scatter ashes within its precincts get permission. Maybe, Gregor thought, he was afraid that she’d open the urn and scatter the ashes on her own, without permission. He just didn’t understand where she would scatter them. God only knew, she didn’t want them on Cavanaugh Street. She said that often enough, and vehemently, when Tibor brought up the possibility that the ashes could be placed at Holy Trinity Church. Maybe she would take them out to Ardmore herself, or take them with her to one of those “events” she was always being invited to but never agreeing to attend, like the Philadelphia Assemblies. Maybe she would eat them. The whole thing had become a matter of annoyance, because Gregor didn’t really know what he thought of it, but he couldn’t stop obsessing about it. He felt like Lida, or Hannah, whenever it looked as if someone new would be moving onto the street. They obsessed, too, and also to no good purpose. Eventually whoever it was moved in and got settled, and they knew no more about it than when they had started staying up nights to speculate to each other on the phone. Sheila Kashinian would have stayed up with them, but Howard couldn’t stand it when Sheila talked on the phone in bed.
Actually, somebody was moving onto Cavanaugh Street this morning. That was why the building was nearly deserted, and why Gregor felt completely easy about looking in on the urn for the first time in weeks. Bennis, like the rest of them, was out in the street, watching the moving men bring what looked like a small, oddly shaped piano up to the fourth floor of their own brownstone, into the apartment that had been Donna Moradanyan’s before she married Russ and moved into a town house on the other side of the Ararat. It was a rental, at least for the moment, that was all that anybody knew. Bennis had been out the door before the Ararat opened this morning, to hear what Donna had to say about the new tenant one more time—although, Gregor thought, she couldn’t really believe that Donna, or Russ, would turn the apartment over to somebody who wouldn’t be good for Cavanaugh Street. It was just that this was the first time an apartment here had been advertised in the classifieds, the way apartments were when they were anywhere else. Usually, apartments on Cavanaugh Street were passed from tenant to tenant by way of family connections, church connections, and a tenuous network of refugee contacts that Tibor kept up as part of his attempt to make it possible for every single Armenian who wanted to be resettled in Philadelphia. This time, Russ had insisted—there were antidiscrimination laws, after all, and he was not only a lawyer with a reputation to maintain, but he approved of the laws to begin with.