There was more typing. Tibor must be on RAM. The typing stopped and Tibor said, “This is a poor place you are in, Krekor? A, what, inner city?”
“Hardly. It’s one of the richest suburbs I’ve ever seen in my life. And it’s precious to the point of being lethally so.”
“I don’t understand ’precious,’ except in ’precious metal.’ That isn’t what you mean.”
“No,” Gregor said. “It’s hard to explain. It’s a famous place in American history. Battles were fought here in the American Revolutionary War. In fact, next to Lexington and Concord, it may be the most famous place in that period of American history; and then in the fifty years or so immediately after, it was home to a whole pack of American writers and intellectuals, people we were all forced to read in school during the time when that sort of thing mattered.”
“I see. So this is a place precious to American culture.”
“No,” Gregor said. “‘Precious’ in this sense means—quaint, but worse. I can’t explain it. They’ve turned the town into a parody of itself, in a way, is what I suppose it means. It’s not real. It’s a theme park, except people live in it. The stores on Main Street are all in clapboard buildings that look like houses and might once have been houses. The dormitories at Windsor Academy are houses, too, real ones that have been here for two hundred years. Everything is verycarefully preserved, except it isn’t. It’s history cleansed of factuality.”
“Like history without the bad parts?” Tibor said. “This is why I do not like Walt Disney, Krekor, because he makes Disney World, and there are exhibits about history but it does not show the pain.”
“You’ve been to Disney World?”
“Twice, Krekor, yes. With Lida when I go to visit her at the house she has in Florida. I liked the roller coasters.”
Gregor tried to wrap his mind around Fr. Tibor Kasparian, an immigrant refugee from Yerevan, who had been tortured and imprisoned by the old Soviet government, whirling around on Space Mountain—and found that the vision was entirely believable. He left it alone.
“They’d show the pain here,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be pain. They’d put it in a museum dedicated to the lives of people oppressed by gender, race, and class, and it wouldn’t be pain anymore. It would be an ideological version of what you don’t like about Disney World. The whole thing is staged.”
“And this made you think of Cavanaugh Street when you were a child?”
“Yes. And don’t ask me why. I don’t entirely know. I was thinking about Howard Kashinian.”
“We all think about Howard Kashinian sometimes, Krekor. We are all still in amazement about the miracle of the fact that nobody has indicted him yet.”
“Yes, well. The tiling is, Howard’s father, Mikhel, was this huge man, this unbelievably huge man. Armenians aren’t very tall, you know that—”
“Krekor, you yourself must be six three or four.”
“But they’re not usually,” Gregor insisted, “but Mikhel was tall and broad. Built like an ox, people used to say then. He was also bone stupid.”
“Then Howard comes by it honestly, as Bennis would say.”
“Oh he was a lot stupider than Howard,” Gregor said, “and it wasn’t just education. He was slow. It was Howard’smother who had the brains, but of course in those days and among those people it didn’t matter if she did. He never adjusted. Mikhel, I mean. A lot of those men never adjusted. They were angry all the time. Mikhel used to blow up at least twice a month. There was a bill he couldn’t pay. Something had gone wrong at work. He’d lost another job. No reason at all, maybe. When he blew up, he’d beat the hell out of Howard’s mother—”
“Tcha,” Tibor said.
“Are you going to try to tell me it doesn’t happen in the old country all the time?”
“No, Krekor. It does happen in the old country all the time, and it is tolerated there far more than here. But not so much now as it was thirty or forty years ago.”
“And this was longer ago than that. So he’d beat her up, and a few times she’d end up in the hospital, and when she did she’d always land up a charity patient, and that would make everything worse. I remember one time when Mikhel came out of his apartment while she was coming up the stairs with the groceries, two big, brown paper bags in her arms, and when she got to the landing he swiped the bags onto the floor and punched her in the eye. Just like that. Right there. We lived underneath them for a while, and we’d hear it. He’d pick her up and throw her on the floor. He’d break furniture. My parents would sit in our living room and get very still. My mother would sew. My father would read the newspaper. They’d give no indication at all that they heard any of it.”