The Headmaster's Wife(28)

“And there will always be a couple of dozen more out there whom I don’t get off the street. Nobody can get them all off the street. They’re—part of us. That’s what we don’t ever accept, I think. We want them to be monsters and aliens, and they’re just the kids next door and the women at the PTA meeting.”

“So what? So we take the police off the streets and don’t even bother to try?”

“I didn’t say that,” Gregor said. “I was just trying to explain why I’m not interested.”

“Bullshit,” Bennis said. “You are interested. I’ve seen you sitting up watching American Justice and City Confidential. It’s not that you’re not interested; it’s that you don’t want to get involved.”

Gregor pressed his face against the glass. Father Tibor had been joined by Grace Feinmann. That was two people from the building who were out and about without his having noticed their leaving, and Grace lived above them, so it wasn’t that. She was carrying a thick sheaf of papers and waving them around in front of Tibor’s face. The papers were probably sheet music, and later today she would probably begin the practicing that would fill the house with harpsichord music until whenever it was her next concert started. Probably probably Gregor thought. Everything was probably, or probably not.

“I’m going to the Ararat,” Bennis said. “I’ve got nothing against keeping you company under ordinary circumstances, but it ruins my day to spend breakfast with you in a funk. Get your coat and come with me.”

“I’ll still be in a funk.”

“I’ll have a lot of other people to take my mind off it.”

Grace and Tibor had left the construction site and were on their way up the street. They would be going to the Ararat, too. Directly across from Gregor’s apartment, Lida Arkmanian came out the front door of her town house and squinted in the direction of the construction. When Gregor got particularly maudlin, he wondered what would have happened to him if he had married Lida right after they’d both graduated from high school, which is what everybody but his mother had expected him to do. His mother had expected him to take advantage of that scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania, and Lida had married Frank Arkmanian and settled down on Cavanaugh Street.

“You know,” he said, “maybe we ought to stop circling the question and just get married.”

There was absolute silence from the couch behind him.

“This is good,” he said. “I expected a lot of answers to that suggestion, Bennis, but I will admit I never anticipated silence.”

“Is it a suggestion?” Bennis asked. “I couldn’t tell. It sounded like an … observation.”

“It was.”

“Ah. Maybe you ought to try again if you ever decide to turn it into a suggestion.”

“You’re making this very hard for me, you know.”

Bennis got up off the couch. “Maybe I’d just feel a little better if you’d actually look at me when you said things like that. I’m going to the Ararat, Gregor. Come if you want to.”

There was more movement, more rustling, the sound of Bennis’s feet slipping into clogs, the sound of clogs on the hardwood floor of the entry way, the sound of the apartment door opening and snicking quietly shut. Gregor stayed where he was until he saw Bennis come out the front door of their building and start up the street, a small, thin, irrepressibly elegant woman with a cloud of black hair that floated around her head like a storm. He tried to decide if he’d just proposed marriage to her or not. He really didn’t know.

I don’t want to get myself involved in anybody else’s criminal conspiracies, he thought, but the sentence sounded pompous to him even as it echoed inside his head, and it wasn’t what he had meant anyway. If he could figure out what he did mean, he might be able to do something about Bennis, and about a great many other things.





2


Gregor had been thinking about his brother, Stefan, because Stefan had had a fiancée when he went into the army, a Cavanaugh Street girl with Armenian parents who went to Holy Trinity Church every Sunday and worked part-time at a little bakery that had once existed two doors down from Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food. There was something that had changed for the worse about Cavanaugh Street. Gregor had loved that bakery when he was a child. He could take a quarter into that place and come out with a big piece of loukoumia, or those round honey pastries with the pistachio nuts whose name he could never remember anymore. Lida would know what they were called. She would probably even make him some. Once, about three weeks after they’d had the news that Stefan had died, Gregor had come across the girl he’d been engaged to sitting on the stoop in front of the bakery with her apron held up over her face, weeping silently and steadily and without the sobbing convulsions he had come to assume were natural to women in tears. The sight of her had fascinated him. She was crying for Stefan. He was sure of that. She was only crying, though, and not going to pieces, and for some reason that made her grief much deeper and all the more real. He had wanted to cry for Stefan himself, but he hadn’t been able to. He had lain in bed night after night, staring into the dark in the direction of the ceiling, thinking about nothing. Stefan had been, and now he was not. He was nothing. There was nothing in the other bed in the room, and there would never be something again. Death had seemed to him then to be literally absence—not the absence of life, but absence in its essence, the definition of absence. He had really been very, very small, less than five years old, and he hadn’t had the words he needed to describe what he felt. It was as if a great, gaping hole had opened up under his feet. It wasn’t the pit of hell, the way the priest sometimes said. There was no fire down there. There was no devil. It was just a hole, going down, never stopping, a hole with nothing in it. That was what the girl seemed to understand, sitting there without sobbing, that nobody else around him did. He’d wanted to go up to her and sit beside her. He didn’t think he could comfort her. He didn’t think there was any comfort left in the world. He hoped that she could calm him. He was not afraid. You couldn’t be afraid of nothing. He was only paralyzed, and for days it had seemed to him that there was no point in breathing.