True Believers(34)

Gregor was sitting in the big window booth, opposite Tibor and Russ Donahue, who was married to Donna Moradanyan. Next to him, Donna’s son Tommy was bent over a hot chocolate covered by a mountain of whipped cream. The cup was big enough to be a soup mug, except that it had a handle. Outside, on Cavanaugh Street, the pavements were slick with ice. There was a needle-fine rain falling, the kind that turned to ice in the air.

“So,” Russ Donahue was saying, “what I told her was, she should apply to all the places around here, Temple and Penn and that kind of thing, even Bryn Mawr. It wouldn’t be that much of a commute. And so she did. And Penn took her right off, early admissions, first thing.”

“So,” Tibor said. “She will go to Penn.”

“Right,” Russ said. “And she was ecstatic, at first. But then, right after Christmas, it started to get odd. She’s all wound up. She’s, uh, decorating. If you know what I mean. You can see what she’s done to the front of our house.”

Everybody could see what Donna Moradanyan Donahue had done to the front of the house she shared with Russ and Tommy. It was wrapped in red and white satin ribbons, and had a heart the size of a Volkswagen beetle on its roof.

“She has also decorated the church,” Tibor said. “Not inside the church, where it would be a sacrilege, but the front where the sign is. We have now Cupids with arrows pointing to the time of the liturgy on Sunday.”

“Now she’s going to go decorate your house,” Russ said, nodding at Gregor, “just the way she used to do. According to her. I think she’s talked to Bennis about it, but I can’t, because Donna’s the only one who can talk to Bennis these days. I’m all for Bennis’s quitting smoking, but you know, Gregor, she’s having a really hard time with it.”

“She’s not having nearly as hard a time with it as I am,” Gregor said.

“My mom is going to go to college,” Tommy said. “She’s already the second smartest person in the world, but now she’s going to get a paper that says so so she can show people when they want her to prove it.”

“The second smartest?” Russ said. “Who’s the smartest, Father Tibor?”

“You.”





Gregor lifted his coffee cup and waved it at Linda Melajian, who was on the other side of the room trying to placate one of the Very Old Ladies. Gregor thought the Very Old Ladies had to be at least a hundred years old by now. They looked a hundred years old, and every time there was any news about Armenia they seemed to be able to remember events that took place in the seventeenth century. Even the assassination that had happened last fall had brought up memories of other assassinations, and of coups, and of Turks rampaging through the countryside. Gregor thought that what was really going on was a kind of emotional displacement. What they really remembered was the fear, and the sense of living in a landscape of chaos and uncertainity. There was something about the bad emotions of childhood that no adult could ever completely shake. Gregor was the same way about fires. His childhood had been full of fires, back in the days when Cavanaugh Street had been nothing but tenements cut up into meager cramped apartments, and when the people who lived here had had no money to speak of and no space to breathe. Even after all these years, Gregor could remember the light of the flames flickering in his window from a fire devouring one of the houses across the street. Three of them had gone up in a single year, when he was seven, and Gregor could still remember himself lying as still as possible in the narrow bed in the room he shared with his older brother, as if any movement of his might attract the fire’s attention, might make it leap across the street and begin to destroy his own. Then there would be the sound of sirens and screeching tires. The adults in the rooms around him, his parents, his Aunt Vida and his Uncle Michael, the Velaskians from across the hall, would gather in the Demarkian living room to look out on what was going on. They would talk rapidly, in panicked squeals, and in Armenian, so that the children might not understand. Maybe that was why Gregor had fought so hard against learning the language with any degree of competency. He’d always thought it was because he’d wanted to be a Real American, instead of the hyphenated kind. Across the street, the houses that had burned down all those years ago—and been left as rubble for decades—were now town houses owned by well-heeled women who spent their winters in fur coats. His parents’ old apartment was now one of the storerooms above the Ararat. Gregor, waved again. Linda Melajian caught his eye and nodded.

“So,” Russ Donahue was saying, again, “that’s it. I mean, I thought that when I got married, you know, over time, I’d start to understand her. Not just love her or like her, but really understand her. And instead, she gets more incomprehensible every day.”