“It’s a woman, that’s all I know,” Donna had said, a couple of weeks ago, in Gregor’s kitchen, as she stacked her books for her Literature of the English Renaissance course into a pile. The books were huge, and the pile was not little. Bennis sat drinking coffee and reading the titles on the spine: Imagery and Iconography in Tudor Poetry; The Figure of the Virgin in the Work of Edmund Spenser. Gregor thought it looked like one of the piles in Tibor’s apartment, except that there was nothing out of place in it. Donna needed a copy of I, the Jury or Passionate Remembrance , or both.
“Anyway, that’s all he’ll tell me,” Donna said, “except that she’s some kind of a musician. A classical musician. She plays in some orchestra—”
“The Philadelphia Philharmonic?” Bennis suggested.
“No,” Donna said. “It had an odd name, and then when I asked him to tell me again, he wouldn’t. He says we all worry too much about stuff like this, and I suppose he’s right, but it’s Cavanaugh Street, for God’s sake. What does he expect us to do? Anyway, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Russ likes her a lot, whoever she is, and he says she’s met Gregor sometime or the other, although I don’t suppose that’s much of a recommendation. A lot of mass murderers have met Gregor at some time or the other.”
“Thank you very much,” Gregor said.
“Well, it’s true. She’s moving in on Wednesday, for whatever that’s worth, and we can all find out then. Lida is threatening to throw a reception for her. Wouldn’t that be something? One poor defenseless woman and those Medusas on the warpath. Mrs. Valerian grilling her about birth control.”
“They might like her just as much as Russ does,” Bennis said, reasonably.
“Ha! That would be worse. Then they’d try to marry her off, if she isn’t married already, and if she is they’ll try to find out why she isn’t with her husband and if he hasn’t been beating her into a pulp on a regular basis for years, they’ll try to get them back together. And they’ll bring food day and night until she’s gained at least twenty extra pounds, and then she’ll probably be too fat to play in that orchestra she’s in and she’ll get fired, and she won’t pay her rent, but Russ won’t be able to evict her, either, because they’ll kill him if he tries, and then she’ll get a job at the Armenian Christian school because Father Tibor will feel sorry for her, and that won’t be enough to cover the rent either, but that won’t matter because we won’t be charging her any by then, because how could we do that with a woman who’d lost her job just because her employers thought it was okay to discriminate against fat people?”
The urn was still on the dresser, sitting on top of a copy of Janson’s History of Art, exactly where Gregor had seen it yesterday. There was still a thick coat of dust on the top of it, so thick that if he ran his finger through it he would make a deep-sided groove, gritty and jagged. Bennis was telling at least this much of the truth. She was not tending this urn, the way she might tend the grave of somebody she had cared deeply about, or somebody she felt so guilty about that she was forced to make reparations and atonement on a daily basis. It was just here, as neglected as Janson’s book and the scattered pages of old newspapers that covered the rest of the dresser’s surface. Gregor would have felt better if the old newspapers hadn’t all contained stories announcing the execution of Bennis Hannaford’s oldest sister.
“It would be a lot easier to handle this,” Bennis said at the time, “if I hadn’t always disliked her so much.”
Gregor went over to the urn and put his finger on the dust. He took his finger off and wiped it on the white handkerchief he still kept in the front vest pocket of his good suit jacket, as if, even in this small way, he was stuck in the time warp Bennis always accused him of inhabiting whenever she was angry with him. Then he went out of the bedroom and down the hall to Bennis’s living room, which no longer had much in the way of furniture in it. He went over to the worktable and looked out over the computer, through the window, and the moving men still struggling with whatever it was. They were trying to hoist it up to the fourth floor and bring it through the living-room window. There was probably no other way to get it upstairs at all. Bennis and Donna and Lida and Hannah and Sheila were all sitting across the street on the steps to Lida’s town house. The very old ladies were not in evidence at all, but they would be somewhere, at one of their windows, taking notes in Armenian. Tibor would be in his own apartment, posting messages to rec.arts.mystery, having forgotten the time. Old George Tekemanian would be sitting on the sidewalk under the umbrella at the outdoor table-and-chair set his nephew Martin had ordered for him at L. L. Bean. Gregor checked his hip pocket—it wouldn’t be the first time he’d forgotten his wallet—and then left Bennis’s apartment and headed down the stairs to the street. There had never been a chance that he would be able to leave today without passing through crowds like a movie star on her way in to the Oscars. Except, Gregor thought, that the movie star would probably be pleased with the crowds, and she’d never have to see anybody in them again.