He had no idea why he was thinking about all that now: Cavanaugh Street in the early fifties; his own father, usually the calmest of men, breaking out at least twice a year in fits of fury so irrational and so uncontrollable that there was nothing for him to do but hide in a closet somewhere until it was over. And then it wasn’t bad. His father never did much more to his mother than slap her. He wasn’t a brutal man. Howard Kashinian’s father was a very brutal man, and at least three times before Howard was eight, his mother had landed in the hospital with bones broken and worse. The absolute worst was that Howard’s mother always landed in a charity ward. She had to. The Kashinians had no more money than anybody else on Cavanaugh Street in those days. Mikhel Kashinian was a steady worker at the kind of jobs men got when they knew little or no English and had no education even in their native tongue. He was a day laborer at times, a driver of light trucks in local markets, a ditchdigger, a man who hauled dirt and debris at construction sites. Gregor remembered him as an enormous man, built more like an ox or a yak than a human being, with hands the size of shovels. When Howard’s mother would be in the hospital, broken and bleeding from what Mikhel had done to her, Mikhel would not go to see her. He did not want to feel sorry for what he had done, and he would not show his face on the charity ward, where the utter, uninhibited evidence of his failure at all things American would be impossible to avoid.
That’s what Gregor would tell the writers who wanted to “celebrate” “ethnic Philadelphia,” including the ones who were building nostalgic dreams of the lives of their own grandparents and great-grandparents, people who had lived in a world that the writers themselves had never had any real contact with. People come to America to build a better life, and it is the genius of America that most of them are able to do it; but the better life they build is one that their children and grandchildren live. For most immigrants, life in the United States is one long litany of failure, one long, twisted fairy tale of never being able to meet the standard because the standard keeps moving. Gregor guessed that the circumstances of Mikhel Kashinian’s life on Cavanaugh Street were no worse than what he had had in Armenia and probably better. No matter how awful those old tenements had been, they’d been better than the huts and hovels the Kashinians and the Demarkians had left behind in the villages outside Yerevan. There were central heating and running water and indoor plumbing. The Kashinians had to use a bathroom in the hall, but Gregor couldn’t help believe that that had to be better than a privy in the yard. Mikhel would not have done more interesting work in Armenia than he did in Philadelphia. He was a beast of burden. It was all he had been trained for. It was all he would have known, no matter what the place.
Still, if his relatives from the village could have seen Mikhel and his apartment and his family full of children going every day to a free school, they would have considered him rich; and if he had been able to keep their perspective, he would have considered himself rich, too. The problem was that he couldn’t keep their perspective. His children went to school with children whose families owned whole houses on pleasant, tree-lined streets. His daughters wore plain dresses from Montgomery Ward, while the girls they sat beside in class had Bobbie Brooks and Villager. The exodus to the suburbs had begun. “Successful” men—real Americans—didn’t stay in Philadelphia. They took their families out to subdivisions where their children would have real lawns to play on and school buses to pick them up every day with their Howdy Doody lunch boxes in tow.
Howdy Doody lunch boxes, Gregor thought. It had been years since he’d remembered Howdy Doody lunch boxes. He had no idea why he was suddenly on this tear about the “old” Cavanaugh Street He doubted if Howard himself remembered much about it, although he just might Howard being Howard, Gregor, like everybody else, often didn’t give him much credit; but there was this to be said about him. He’d absorbed the ethic of America as thoroughly as any of them; and when he’d turned sixteen and realized that he’d grown larger and heavier and more powerful than his father, he put an end to Mikhel’s fits of rage and his mother’s trips to the hospital, charity ward or not.
He’d been thinking about Mark DeAvecca, that was it He had been thinking about how much he and Mark were alike—or had been alike, a year and a half ago, when they’d first met—and that had made him think about the ways they were not alike at all. He didn’t think Mark had ever seen the kinds of things he had, never mind seen them on a regular basis, so that they felt entirely normal. He wondered if Mark had ever approached any place the way he himself had approached his local branch of the Philadelphia Public Library. Other people believed in God and prayer. He believed in the Philadelphia Public Library. It was the place he wentto feel that there was a way to make his life more like what he wanted it to be.