Maybe, Gregor thought, it would have been easier to remember accurately if Cavanaugh Street had been the same as it was then. Everything was too clean, and too well taken care of. The fire escapes had all been moved around to the back. The brownstones had been scrubbed free of dirt and pollution and age. The stoops had been transformed into entryways, complete with low, white stone pillars and polished slate inlays on the surfaces of the steps. He remembered playing on this street when he was nine or ten years oldlong after Stefan was dead-and hitting a ball into a clothesline stretched from a window on one side of the street to a window on the other. Mrs. Bagdinian had stuck her head out and cursed him in Armenian, and he and all the other boys had run away.
Down the hall at the back of the apartment, the bathroom door opened and closed. Bennis said, “Gregor?” but kept on moving, into the bedroom, where she already had her things laid out on the bed. The bedroom door did not close. That was something else that had changed. Gregor’s late wife always closed the door when she dressed, even after they’d been married for twenty years, and Gregor was willing to bet that his own mother had done exactly the same. That apartment had been a cramped series of small boxes on the fourth floor of a tenement, where half the apartments had to share a bathroom in the hall. He had felt rich beyond measure because his own family’s apartment had had a bathroom to itself, and he had not been kind to the children he had seen tramping back and forth to the little cubicle at the back of the floor. Then he had gone to school and for the first time met people who did not live in places like Cavanaugh Street, and from that day to this he had never felt rich again.
Bennis came into the living room. Gregor did not turn around. The construction crews were unpacking their equipment. Some people had stopped to watch them begin work. One of those people was Fr. Tibor Kasparian.
“Tibor’s up and around already,” he said. “It’s incredible that we never hear him leave in the mornings. He’s like a ghost.”
“He’s on the floor below us. Are you watching the construction? Can you see it from here?”
“Not really. I can see the trucks. They just came in. We must be late.”
“It’s eight. Granted, we’ve been going to breakfast at seven for a while now, but there’s no real need for it if you’re not on a case, and you’ve turned down four cases in the last three weeks. More, in the last eight months. Do you ever intend to get around to telling me what all that’s about? Have you decided to stop working?”
“Would it bother you if I had? Would it be too much as if I’d turned into a gigolo?”
“Christ,” Bennis said. “Sometimes you are truly and sincerely one of the most annoying men I’ve ever met. Nobody even uses words like ‘gigolo’ anymore.”
“No, I suppose they don’t.”
“And we live in your apartment, not mine. And you won’t let me share expenses. And the last I heard, your investments were doing just fine, which beats mine, since you’re apparently clairvoyant and know exactly when to pull out of the stock market—”
“The trick with the stock market is to never get into it.”
“Whatever. What brought this up, Gregor? ‘Gigolo’ is a nasty word, especially in this context, especially since it’s not even close to true. Or maybe that’s my background. It’s the principal paranoia of every rich girl’s parents that somebody will marry her for her money.”
“I don’t know what brought it up,” Gregor said. “I was looking at the street and thinking about my brother. Did I ever tell you I had a brother?”
“Yes. Older. Died in the army.”
“Right. He’s buried where my mother is, in the same cemetery where my wife is buried. I haven’t been there inages, and the last time I went I only went for Elizabeth. There ought to be something on the street to remember them by. I don’t know what. I keep thinking of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, but that isn’t what I mean at all, really. I don’t know. Maybe we could carve something into the sidewalks. ‘At this spot stood a five-story walk-up tenement where the apartments were all too small and where Sofia Valdanian Demarkian heard that one of her sons was dead and the other had been admitted to Harvard Business School.’”
“On the same day?”
“No, of course not. Nearly two decades apart. Doesn’t it ever bother you? Or are all the places you grew up in still intact so that you can go back and see them exactly the way they were?”
“My childhood home has been inherited by a nonprofit foundation, and I wouldn’t want to go back and see it in any case, especially if it were still intact, as you put it. Gregor, why aren’t you working? I know I used to complain about how much time you spent on it, and I know I used to worry that you’d end up getting shot, but this isn’t good for you. It really isn’t. And it’s not as if nothing interesting has come up. John Jackman—”