1
It was on the fourth of November, one year and some weeks after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that Father Tibor Kasparian received the letterâand realized, without much shock, that he had spent a decade living in a fantasy. Maybe, he thought, sometime in the middle of the afternoon, when his head was pounding so badly that he would have willingly cracked it open on a brick wall, maybe all of America was a fantasy, a kind of Brigadoon, outside space and time, outside reality. Father Tibor's own reality had begun fifty-five years before on the flat dirt floor of a back room in a midwife's house in Yekevan, Armenia. There were hospitals in Yekevan, and doctors, but his mother hadn't trusted them. Those were the days beforeâjust beforeâthe Soviet occupation, but she hadn't trusted them anyway. She hadn't liked the condescension of the medical staff, who seemed to think women knew nothing about giving birth. She hadn't liked the soldiers in the street, who belonged to one side or the other, but never hers. Most of all, she had wanted a priest, a real Armenian priest, from an Armenian church, willing to give baptism on the spot just in case the worst decided to happen. All these years later,
that
was the
one thing about his mother that Father Tibor Kasparian had not been able to accept. He could not fully love anyone who thought so little of God as to think that He would send an infant into eternal hellfire simply because it had happened to die before someone had been able to baptize it.
I have become Americanized
, he thoughtâbut it didn't bother him, because he was a little proud of it. Some people grew up wanting to be doctors or lawyers or astronauts or spies. He had grown up wanting to be an American. The first time he had ever risked his life, he had done it to see a movie. It was 1962, and he was fifteen years old. The movie was
The Parent Trap
, starring Hayley Mills. He had no idea how the two young men who ran the floating American movie concession had got hold of their copy. They were students at the university, and people said they were traitors. At least, that's what they said publicly, but by then everyone knew the doublespeak that went on where the authorities could hear. Patriots were traitors. To be Armenian was to be a traitor. To be anti-Soviet was to be a traitor. To be caught in a cellar watching contraband American movies was to risk jail, or worse. For the two young men whose names he had never known, the result had been worse, in the long runâtwo years after the night on which he had seen
The Parent Trap
, Tibor had watched one of them gunned down in the street and the other captured when the police had raided a showing of an Elvis Presley movie called
Fun in Acapulco
. Hayley Mills, Elvis Presleyâit seemed incredible to him now, that they could have taken it all so seriously, studying the films as if they were ancient sacred texts, the secret of the universe, the meaning of life. When he'd first come to America for real, many years later, he had made a point of seeing all those movies again. He'd been shocked at how awful most of them were, something that had been masked at his first viewing by the fact that they had been shown in English without subtitlesâwhere were two university students going to find American movies subtitled in Armenian? or even Russian?âand by the further fact that they had been completely incomprehensible.
People talked about culture shock, but they didn't understand what it meant. He could still see himself in the dark of that small room, sitting next to Anna Bagdanian without the courage to take hold of her hand, wondering in bewilderment why, if the girls were attending the obligatory patriotic training camp, nobody ever sang patriotic songs or marched with flags.
Stupid
, he thought now, but not about himself, or even about Hayley Mills and Elvis Presley. He was feeling a little lightheaded, and had been, ever since the mail had come at ten thirty-five this morning. It was now almost six o'clock, and cold for this early in November. Outside the door of the small apartment he lived in behind Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Christian Church, in the little bricked courtyard, wind was blowing leaves and stones into gutters. On any other day, he would have been headed down Cavanaugh Street to the Ararat Restaurant, to meet Bennis Hannaford and Krekor Demarkian for dinner. Tonight, they were on their way to some party a friend of Bennis's was giving to benefit UNICEF, and he was on his way to do a little business for the church. If the letter hadn't come, it wouldn't have mattered. It was only because he knew that he needed advice, and needed it desperately, that he felt so completely at sea. Or maybe not, he thought, irritated at himself, and at everything about himself. He looked around his living room at the stacks of books that lined all the walls and cluttered most of the furniture, at the carpet that he should have replaced a year ago, at the big framed poster of the World Trade Center twin towers lit up at night. He did the same things over and over again these days. He saw the same people. He read the same books. He had this small church in his charge, to be pastor of, to celebrate the liturgy in, out in the open, without fear. He had more food in his refrigerator than he would be able to eat in a year. He published his articles about theology in good journals and was asked to conferences to sit on panels with people whose names he had once known only as the authors of banned books. He knew that if he sat down and tried to
write out all the things he had wanted when he was still in Yekevan and Anna was still alive and his wife, he would have achieved every single one of them with the exception of a life with Anna herselfâbut he was sure he had come to terms with that years ago. He didn't know what was wrong with him. He didn't know what it was he wanted that he hadn't wanted a week ago. He only knew that he was suddenly ill at ease, and unhappy in his own skin. The world inside him felt flat. The world outside him felt dangerous and deliberate. Maybe reality was something that slept, and now it had woken up.
Don't dramatize
, he told himself. Then he went into his vestibule and got his long good coat out of the closet there. There was a time and a place for wearing hairshirts, and Philadelphia on a cold winter night was neither. He started to button the coat from the bottom and then stopped. He put his hand in under the coat and felt around for the inside pocket of his jacket, where the letter was, wadded up so many times that it felt like a stone. He ought to leave it here, where it would be safe. If he got mugged while he was out in the city, the muggers might take it, thinking it was cash. When they found out it wasn't, they might rip it up. He left it where it was and buttoned his coat the rest of the way to his chin. He got his gloves out of his coat pockets and put them on. He got the Stewart plaid muffler he had been given for Christmas last year and wound it around his neck. The muffler was cashmere. The gloves were leather and lined with cashmere. He wasn't a rich man, or even close, but he had rich things. Maybe that was part of what was wrong, tooâbut that was worse than stupid, because he was as nearly oblivious to what he ate and what he wore as it was possible for a man to be without going naked and starving. He was just mixed up, tonight, that was all, mixed up and frightened to the bone, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He checked his pockets for change for the bus and then stepped out his door into the courtyard behind the church. He pulled the door shut and looked at the brass knocker,
shined so flawlessly it glowed gold in the light from the street lamp. When he and Anna were first married and he had just newly been ordained, he had celebrated a liturgy in a cramped little apartment on a side street in Toldevan, a Godforsaken mining town in the middle of nowhere, full of people whose names no one else on earth would ever have been able to recognize. It had been a cold night then, too, and November, but he hadn't had a coat that would protect him from much of anything. The apartment had heat only between midnight and six in the morning. It was eight in the evening. The only warmth came from a paper-fueled fire the grandmother of the family had built up in a large can that had once held lard. You had to be careful with the cans. Some of them melted more quickly than you'd expect. Fires broke out that way all the time, and whole apartment blocks went down in flames. At this liturgy there was only himself, and Anna, and the family, and three other families from the same building, carefully chosen, part of the elect. Still, that had made nearly forty people, and the room they were in was very small. There were no lights in the room. Electricity was expensive, and he was expected to know the liturgy by heart. It was dangerous to carry liturgical books, or books of any kind that had not been published by government publishing houses. His hands were cold. His fingers were stiff with the beginning of premature arthritis, brought on by too many nights consorting with the dark. He had given communion to everyone in the room and felt relieved. He had promised to return to perform a wedding on the third of June. The room smelled of urine, and worse. The only facility was down the hall and not working very well. The people in the apartments used tins, like the one with the fire in it, so that they wouldn't have to go down the hall in the middle of the night.
“Listen,” the grandmother had said to him, in a sibilant whisper, snaking her thin hand around his wrist as he started to pack up. “Listen. God made evil, just the way He made the good. Never forget that.”
“God didn't make evil,” he said, a little too loudly. Anna
looked up from the other side of the room, alarmed. “God could not make evil. God is all-good.”
“God made evil,” the grandmother said again, and then she smiled, the worst smile he had ever seen, worse even than the smiles of the secret police ten years later when they murdered Anna. The old woman had had a stroke. One of her eyes was half closed and out of control. The “good” one was rheumy and full of water. Her clothes were crusted over with dirt. She stank. Tibor thought she was decomposing in front of his eyes, except that her grip was so strong. He couldn't get his wrist away from her.
“God made evil,” she said againâand then, suddenly, she let go, and he staggered backwards, into something soft, someone not expecting him.
“God made evil,” he said now, coming back to the present, staring still at that brass door-knocker. It had his name engraved on it, in script. He unbuttoned his coat again and checked the inside pocket of his jacket again. The letter was still there. That was the worst smile he had ever seen in his life, but that wasn't the only time he had seen it. He had seen it twice more, and in only the last few weeks. He had seen it just a few hours ago, today.
Somewhere out on the street, around to the front of the church where he couldn't yet see, two women were talking. Their voices were high and light and giggly. Their steps on the pavement were sharp, as if they were wearing very high heels.
I should have worn a hat,
he thought, superfluously. He didn't own a hat.
Then he turned around and did something he had never done before on Cavanaugh Street.
He locked his door.
All the way back from New York in the car, Anthony van Wyck Ross had been considering the advantages of poverty. It wasn't sentimentality. He had no use for Hallmark card emotions, or Lifetime movie epiphanies, or those Great Morals taught by shows like
Leave it to Beaver
and
Dawson's
Creek
. He only knew what Hallmark and Lifetime were because, unlike most men in his position, he had taken the trouble to find out. But then, Tony Ross was not like most men in his position, and his unlikeness had been evident almost from the beginning. “He's a throwback,” his mother used to say, vaguely, to the sort of people who came to their lodge in Maryland for hunting. He'd liked hunting the way he later found he liked all blood sports. He had a natural instinct for the kill. What he couldn't stand were the hunt breakfasts that came afterward, the long dining room lined with buffet tables, the longer ballroom with its doors propped open to let in the cold damp of the spring morning, the endless Bloody Marys. He sometimes amused himself, idly, by trying to pinpoint the exact moment when he had realized that at least half his parents' friends were almost-drunk almost all the time. It was like walking around among people who lived in a permanent mistâand what worried him was that, if they were anything like his mother, they might live in that mist even when they
weren't
drunk. By the time he was ten-years-old, stupidity enraged him. There was some part of him that could not believe it wasn't deliberate. By the time he was twelve, he had mapped out his life with the kind of precision and attention to detail that would have done credit to a General of the Army in the middle of a major war. That had been the last straw in a long history of straws, between himself and his mother. She had always disliked him. When he entered puberty, she started to hate him, and the hate lastedâhot and resentful and meanâuntil the day she died, at eighty-six, of a ruptured appendix. She was in the house at Bryn Mawr at the time. He was in London, at a private meeting with the Prime Minister, the American ambassador, the Belgian ambassador, and two representatives of the Rockefeller banking interests in Europe. When the call came, he'd seen no reason to take it.
The reason he was considering the advantages of poverty, at the moment, was that he wanted to murder his wife. He wanted to do it right here, right now, as they sat, without
having to think twice about the implications of the scandal that would followâor even of the possibility of any scandal at all. The car was bumping along the roadway in the right lane, moving carefully, staying within the speed limit. It wouldn't do to be stopped for speeding, and it was always necessary to be careful with other drivers on the road. Resentment was out there, just beneath the surface, waiting to erupt. Charlotte was playing with the pearls she always wore around her neck for day. It was an atavistic custom that belonged more to their parents' generation than their own, but Charlotte was nothing if not atavistic. The skin along the edges of her jaw sagged. Celebrities and jet-setters got face lifts, but women of good family from the Main Line did not. The single square cut diamond on her left hand and the plain gold wedding band behind it were the only rings she wore. No woman of her background would wear more, just as no woman of her background would wear earrings that dangled. In traditional religious orders before the travesty of Vatican II, there were nuns calling “living rules,” women whose behavior so perfectly conformed with the order's rule of life that it could be recreated just by recording the things they did and how they did them. Charlotte was a living rule for the Philadelphia Main Line, the part of it that wasn't supposed to exist any more, the part of it that wasn't supposed to matter. She did not live under the delusion that she was an anachronism.