It was on the eighth of November, one year and some weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that Father Tibor Kasparian received the letter—and 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 Ti-bor’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 before—just before—the 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 thought—but 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 gotten 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 run—two 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 Presley—it 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 subtitles—where were two university students going to find American movies subtitled in Armenian? Or even Russian?—and 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 light-headed, and had been, ever since the mail had come at 10:35 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 herself—but 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 himself felt flat. The world outside himself 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 was a time and a place for wearing hair shirts, 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 too—but that was worse than stupid, because he was as nearly oblivious to what he ate and what he wore as it was possible 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 streetlamp. When he and Anna were first married and he had just 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 lit 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 himself, Anna, 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 cold. 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 again—and then, suddenly, she let go, and he staggered backward, 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 the 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 permanently in a mist—and 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 lasted—hot and resentful and mean—until 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 follow—or 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 during the 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 called “living rules,” women whose behavior so perfectly conformed with the order’s rule of life that it could be re-created 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 anymore, the part of it that wasn’t supposed to matter. She did not live under the delusion that she was an anachronism.
She was waiting for him to say something. Tony was aware of that. He was also aware of the fact that he would not say something. It wasn’t to his advantage, and there wasn’t any point. The privacy shield that cut them off from the driver was closed. The windows of the car were tinted darkly enough so that nobody on the outside would be able to see in unless they pressed their faces directly to the glass. Tony looked down at the copy of Civitas Dei he had in his hands and wished he’d brought a book light. It was rude to read in front of other people, but he never cared if he was rude to Charlotte.
“I’m not going to shut up and go away,” Charlotte said, the words coming out in that nasal Society whine that made his teeth grate. You’d think, after years of listening to Bill Buckley and Katharine Hepburn, that women like Charlotte would know better. “I’m not going to drop the subject,” she said. “This has gotten completely out of hand, Tony, and you know it.”
“I know no such thing. The only thing that seems to be out of hand is you.”
“You can’t expect me to just sit still while you … well. While you make it plain to everybody we know—”
“It’s been plain to everybody we know since the day we were married. More than plain. Nobody on earth was fooled, not even you.”
“You think it was plain to everybody we knew that from the day we were married you couldn’t stand to fuck me?”
“Where do you get the language, Charlotte? Sometimes I listen to you and I think I’m hearing the boys at the YMCA.”
“You don’t go to the YMCA.”
“I don’t, no. What’s your point?”
Charlotte shifted in her seat. Her fingers were long and thin, but not as long and thin as his own. Her nails were covered in clear polish. “It’s one thing to have the sort of mistress they all do,” she said carefully. “Actresses. That sort of thing. I do understand that sort of thing. But that’s not what you’re up to, and you know it.”
“I’m not actually up to anything. There is no other woman. I am not having an affair. I’m too damned busy to do a mistress any good.”
“Maybe you just hate sex. All kinds of sex. That would be amusing.”
It was already dark outside. The car lit up every time they went under one of the tall arched lamps that lined this part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Tony toyed with the idea of telling the driver to keep driving, to miss their exit, to head for the mountains and Lehigh and that long stretch of road with no exits at all.
“I don’t think you heard me,” Charlotte said.
“I heard you. I don’t consider this discussion worth having.”
“You didn’t always hate sex, though. I should know.”
“Should you?”
“You’ve managed to father four children.”
“At least. I should think that would be enough. I should think that would be enough of me for you, to be precise. What is it you really want here, Charlotte?”
“I want you to give it up.”
“Give what up? You haven’t discovered anything I’m doing that I could give up. There isn’t anything to discover. And you can’t want me to go back to sleeping with you. You barely stood it the first time.”
“I want you to give him up.”
“David?”
“Yes, David. I want you to give him up.”
“Why? Or do you now imagine that I’m sleeping with David? God only knows when he’d have the time, considering the fact that he’s sleeping with half the debutantes in Philadelphia and three-quarters of the debutantes in New York. At last count. And he’s completely in control of the Price Heaven mess, which is a mess, and which is likely to get messier very soon.”
“I don’t see why you stick up for him,” Charlotte said. “He’s not just in charge of Price Heaven now, he set that whole thing up to begin with. He’s managed it from day one. And what did you get? There’s going to be a bankruptcy any day now and you know it. I can’t stand the sight of him. He makes my skin crawl.”
“Why?”
“How should I know why? He’s insidious. And I don’t care who his family is. He’s not—right. I don’t know how to put it.”
“You never did have much of a talent for words.”
“I don’t need that kind of thing from you now, Tony. I really don’t. I need him out of my life. At the very least you can stop inviting him to where I am.”
“David is my confidential assistant. We’re in the middle of a major crisis. You’re behaving like a spoiled brat.”
“You’re always in the middle of a major crisis. To hear you tell it, there’s nothing in life but major crises. The story of American banking.”
“Often, yes.”
“Get rid of him, or I’ll get a very public divorce.”
“Nonsense.”
“Maybe I’ll do something better. Maybe I’ll leak it to the press. Not the press you own, the other kind. The tabloids. I’ll say you are sleeping with David Alden. You know they’ll believe it.”
“The tabloids aren’t interested in me. Their readers don’t know who I am, and wouldn’t care if they did.”
“Maybe I’ll leak it to that man. Michael Harridan. The one with the Web
site.”
“Michael Harridan is taken about as seriously as Bugs Bunny.”
“You don’t take me seriously. And that’s a mistake, Tony. I promise it is.”
“We’re getting off the turnpike,” Tony said. “We’ll be home in less than twenty minutes.”
Charlotte turned her face away, her long neck straining against the stiff white collar of her linen shirt. She was too thin, the way all these women were. The muscles in her neck looked like ropes. He was not afraid of her. There was nothing she could do to him, and nothing she would really want to do, once she thought about it. She made him tired, so that all he could think of was sleep, endless sleep, black sleep, the kind that was supposed to come over you when you drowned in the waters of Lethe.
Still, if he’d been somebody else, somebody poorer, somebody less hedged in by security and position—he would have wrapped his hands around her neck and ripped her windpipe out.
There was a single short moment, at almost exactly six o’clock, when Anne Ross Wyler considered staying home for the evening. She had that priest coming over, for one thing. Lucinda had printed his name in block letters on a three-by-five card and tucked the card in her mirror, so that she could practice pronouncing it: Father Tibor Kasparian. It seemed ironic as hell to her that she had managed to give up almost everything about her former life, but this. She still could not pronounce “foreign” names with anything at all like grace. Tony would probably tell her she was insane, that there was nothing about life with the family that could have made her tone-deaf to Eastern European ca-dences—or maybe he wouldn’t have, because, in his own way, Tony was as odd and contrary a person as she was. Whatever it was, though, she couldn’t do it. Even Italian names threw her, and by now it was practically an Old Philadelphia tradition to be Italian. Every once in a while, she would veer to her mirror and try the name out, stretching the syllables, worried that she was getting it more wrong every time she tried to say it. She was only grateful that she had so many other things tucked into the mirror’s edges and hanging over its top and sides that she couldn’t see herself at all. There was one thing she did miss about the way she had been when she had still been part of All That. She missed the fanatical discipline of the body. God only knew, she didn’t do anything for herself when she was left to herself. She was fifty-five years old, and she looked it. “Stumpy,” one of the newspapers had called her once. One of the local television stations had described her as “the once elegant Mrs. Kendrick Wyler.” She ran her hands through her very thick grey hair and felt it stop abruptly in midair. This last time, she had cut it off herself with a pair of pinking shears one afternoon when she’d been busy and it had got in her way. Other women, millions of them, managed to live sane lives in the world without turning themselves into poster children for bag ladies, but with her it was like the “foreign” names. She couldn’t seem to manage it.
The other reason she had considered not going out was that it was cold, as cold as she could ever remember it being in November in Philadelphia. Down on the first floor, there was ice along the edges of the windowsills. If they ever got enough money together, they would have to replace those windows. Surely it made sense that, in weather like this, the girls would not be out on the street where anybody could see them. That was what she would have thought, her first year at Adelphos House. Before that, she had never even wondered what whores did when it got cold. They could have gone to Florida for the winter, and it would have made sense to her. She hadn’t ever wondered who the whores were, either, or where they came from, and if she had she had probably thought that they must be black. That was what you saw in the movies, when you went to that kind of movie. She couldn’t have said what you saw on television, because at that point in her life, she had never owned one, and never watched one except on trips to Europe, in those five-star hotels where every mechanical convenience was provided for Americans who were assumed to be mad for technology. God, she had been such an incredible, unbelievable snot. Worse, she had been a happily ignorant snot, and there was nothing more evil on this planet than happy ignorance.
The whores would be out tonight, in the cold. They would stand together in tight little huddles near parking meters, wearing fake-fur jackets that shed when they walked, and too much makeup, and fishnet stockings that left huge patches of the skin on their legs bare to the cold. The johns would be out tonight too, but they would be in cars.
She got a black jersey turtleneck out of her wardrobe, to go with her black pants. She would find a black sweater to put over that. She considered pinning her Freedom FROM Religion button to her sweater, and decided against it. There was no point in antagonizing Father Kasparian, who was not representative of the kind of religion she wanted to be free of, at least as far as she could tell. She ran a brush through her hair and then ran her hands through it, ruining everything. It had been weeks since she had had a full day to herself, and she was exhausted.
The would be out, in their cars the way they always were. With the cold this bad, they’d sit well back in their seats. They wouldn’t stick their heads out the windows. That would make it all the harder to get pictures of them, which meant she would have to rely on the pictures of the license plates, which was always problematic. Hell, even when she got a picture of money being passed with the john’s face as clear as it would have been for a video dating service, it was nearly impossible to get the police to do anything. It didn’t matter that the girls were mostly under sixteen or that there had just been a raid on a child porn ring on the other side of the city. She wondered what that meant, that the police jumped right in to protect boys, but looked the other way when it came to teenaged girls, and there were no other kinds of girls on the streets of Philadelphia. Whores might get old in New York and Los Angeles, but here, they seemed to disappear as soon as they hit eighteen. Maybe they just died.
She found the sweater she was looking for and pulled it over her head. She shoved her feet into good black leather sneakers. She felt like James Bond, sometimes, except that she either walked or took the bus. She’d long ago decided it was too expensive to keep a regular car. A couple of centuries ago, her family had come to this part of Pennsylvania as dissenting Quakers, pacifist and dour, with a streak of asceticism in them that some of their neighbors would have considered extreme in Puritans. That was a part of the family legacy she’d hung on to with both hands. “You’ll never be really happy unless you start flagellating yourself,” Lucinda said, whenever she went on a streak of self-recrimination and self-denial—and it was true, but it was limited, because she would never allow it to interfere with her work. Maybe that explained what all those women were doing, like her mother, when they starved themselves into their size twos. Maybe it was just Puritanism come back to haunt them, disguising itself as snobbery.
She took twenty dollars and her driver’s license out of her wallet. When she hit the street, she carried neither her purse nor any significant amount of money. She took the gold chain off her neck and left it on top of her vanity table. The table seemed badly named, since the mirror was unusable and there was no sign of makeup on it. She brushed the hair out of her eyes again and vowed, for the thousandth time in the last two years, to let it grow out long enough to be held back in a rubber band. The three-by-five cards stuck into the mirror’s sides shuddered a little in the draft allowed by the fact that the windowpane here had a crack in it and three tiny pieces missing. Freedom from Religion Foundation: http://www.ffrf.org, one of them said. Lucinda’s birthday, June 26th, said another. Anne looked at the one with Father Kasparian’s name on it, said the name three times in her head and once out loud, and then gave the whole thing up.
Out in the hall, the rest of the house felt deserted. It probably was. Six o’clock on a Friday night was not usually one of their busier times, although with the cold this bad it would get busy later. They’d start lining up outside the front door, looking for shelter, somewhere around ten. She looked at the drawings Lucinda had put up on the walls without really seeing any of them. They had a woman come in once a week who worked with the girls with what she called “art therapy.” Anne didn’t think she was doing any good, but she didn’t think she was doing any harm, and the girls seemed to like it. She got to the stairwell and went down. Nobody was in the foyer, and there was no sign of anybody on the porch. She checked her watch, a plain steel Timex she’d bought at Kmart for seventeen dollars. When she was seventeen, her mother had given her a gold dress watch from Tiffany’s. It had cost 1,500 dollars and she had lost it one day playing tennis at the Coach and Racquet Club. She had had it for less than two months.
At the bottom of the stairs, she turned toward the back of the house. The walls here were lined with drawings too, a lot of them faintly obscene. The girls liked art therapy, but they laughed at the therapist, who always reminded Anne of the woman who had taught her dancing in kindergarten. Everything was cheerful. Everything was obvious. She got to the back of the house and pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen. Lucinda was sitting at the table with her feet propped up on another kitchen chair. The television was on, as it always was whenever Lucinda was near it. When they’d first met, Lu-cinda had announced, without embarrassment, that if she were rich she’d have a television in every room in the house, including the bathrooms. It had taken Anne a while to realize that that feeling she had, as if all the air had been knocked out of her lungs, was culture shock.
Lucinda looked up as Anne came in, her enormous black helmet of hair bobbing vigorously above her thick neck. She had a Holy Bible on the table in front of her, unopened. Lucinda took a Holy Bible everywhere she went, but Anne hadn’t seen her open it yet.
“So what’s it you’re doing?” Lucinda said. “Trying out for a part in The Matrix?”
“Which one is The Matrix?”
“It’s the one with the red pill and the blue pill. Never mind. It’s a movie. We ran it here about a month ago. You came.”
“I get distracted.”
“Don’t I know it. Seriously, though, you ought to wear some kind of reflective clothing. You’re going to get killed out there one of these days.”
“Maybe,” Anne said, “but not in a car accident. Isn’t there something called vehicular homicide?” She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. There was a bucket of fried chicken. It was probably a good three weeks old. There was a package of celery, half-used. She closed the refrigerator door. Lucinda had a big piece of Swiss cheese on the table, with knife and crackers. Anne sat down and started on those. “I take it there’s no sign of our visitor,” she said.
“He’s not due for half an hour, Annie, relax. There’s not going to be anybody out there cruising yet.”
“They cruise all day.”
“Not most of them, they don’t. They like the dark. You ever notice that? That’s what you should do, instead of taking pictures of their license plates. You should buy a whole bunch of big spotlights and set them up down there. That’d drive them off faster than anything.”
“They’d only move to another street. The city’s already tried that.”
“The city got bought off.”
“Probably. What are you watching?”
“Mother Angelica Live. I know she’s a Catholic, but she’s a good woman. Had a stroke, kept right on going. Reminds me of my grandmother.”
“The queen of England reminds you of your grandmother.”
“Well, you know how those things went, back in the colonies. Maybe we’re related.”
Anne tried the cheese. It was hard as a rock. One of the things she would never be able to understand was why, now that she lived in a place where the food was both erratic and awful, she weighed so much more than she had when she’d been able to get the best food on the planet, simply for the asking. At least she’d rid herself of that prejudice about the lack of discipline and self-respect that so often made poor people so fat. Obviously, it just happened, even when you didn’t eat much of anything.
She cut herself another piece of cheese and wrinkled her nose at it. She put the cheese on a Saltine cracker and hoped for the best. The television program went to commercial, except it wasn’t really a commercial. It seemed to be a public service announcement about some kind of novena. She wished Father Kasparian would get here, so that she could do what she had to do in the way of greetings, and then disappear. She was beginning to get hyped-up and adrenalized, the way she always did when she went out. In some ways, it was like a drug. By the time it was over, she’d be so pumped up she wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours. She wouldn’t even be able to think straight. That was when she would hit the Net and the Web sites she’d come to rely on—the Freedom from Religion Foundation; the World of Richard Dawkins; the Marbles game—so that she could keep her mind occupied enough so that she wouldn’t think. When she did think, she thought about what it would feel like to do something real about this. She imagined herself chasing them down on foot, pulling them out of their cars, beating her fists into their heads until the skulls cracked and the skin broke open to spill blood.
“Oh, one thing,” Lucinda said. “Your brother called.”
At first, Kathi Mittendorf had been shocked to realize how easy it was to join America on Alert—easier than it had been to join the Girl Scout troop in Marshford Township where she grew up, where nobody got a chance to wear a green uniform unless Mrs. Davenport okayed it. Kathi missed Mrs. Davenport daily. She didn’t miss Mrs. Davenport’s daughter, Katy. It was hard to miss somebody who was so obviously destined to become one of the anti-American liberal elite. Kathi had known what they were when she was only ten years old, although she wouldn’t have been able to put a name to them. She thinks she’s so much, people used to say about Katy Davenport, and it was true too. She thought she was just wonderful, because she always got the best grades in school and because she read things from New York like the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine, instead of the things everybody else read, which Kathi had to admit wasn’t much. Still, that was suspicious in itself. Good people didn’t read all the time, and they certainly didn’t read things that made them argue with the teachers about what America had been doing in Vietnam, or why the electoral college should be abolished. Now that Kathi understood the way things worked—the way the Illuminati carefully chose from among the regular people, handpicking the ones who would be allowed to “succeed,” so that it wouldn’t look as if they were running the world the way they really were—she found she was a lot less angry with Katy Davenport. That was a good thing, because for a while there she had been caught up in an anger so deep and implacable that she sometimes found herself sinking in it. It had started on the day that the notice had gone up in front of the guidance counselor’s office, saying that Katy Davenport had been accepted to Yale. She remembered herself standing in the hall, staring at the little card with Katy’s name on it, and on all the other little cards, the kids who were going to Penn State and Swarthmore and Concordia and Duke. It had felt as if she were the only one in school who wasn’t going somewhere after graduation. Her shame had been so deep, it had wormed its way into every atom of her skin. She wanted to run away from home before graduation day. At the very least, she wanted to do something that would get their attention for once, instead of being the one whose name nobody would ever remember when the time came around for reunions, which she wouldn’t go to, because she wouldn’t want them to see that she was still in town and working at Price Heaven, when they were off being Important.
Of course, the truth was, they would have remembered her. She hadn’t realized it then, but everything the Illuminati did, every single shudder in the military-industrial complex, was directed against people just like her, and nothing at all like Katy Davenport. This was one of the first things Michael had taught her when she’d gone to her first lecture, almost two years ago.
“They make you think you’re nobody,” he said—not just to her, of course, but to all of them, sitting in a big huddle in the small side room of the Holfield Meeting Hall in south Philadelphia, his voice coming out of a speaker, and blasting out at the crowd. Everybody had drawn a little closer, moving their metal folding chairs silently along the linoleum, hungry. Even then, Michael was in far too dangerous a position to appear in person. “If you think you’re nobody, you think you’re powerless. You don’t do anything. You don’t even try to stop them. And they know that. They know the only force on earth capable of stopping them is real Americans, just like you, and that’s why they know every one of your names.”
If Kathi had been running America on Alert, she would have gone about it differently. She would have made sure there were requirements for membership, maybe even an investigation into each and every person who wanted to come to meetings and join the organization and vote. No matter what Michael said, there was always the danger that the Illuminati would infiltrate them the way they had infiltrated so many other organizations, and good ones too. The John Birch Society was nothing these days if not an Illuminati front. They kept playing the same old record about “communism,” when it was obvious that the Illuminati weren’t interested in communism anymore. It had been a straw man right from the beginning. The real danger was far more insidious, made up of people who thought they were better than you were, smarter than you were, more—more worthy than you were. It had taken Kathi a long time to come up with that word. It contained everything that had ever bothered her about Katy Davenport and all the Katy Davenports she had met since: the politicians she saw on TV; the smug-suited “authors” who flickered by on Booknotes on C-Span; the supervisor at Price Heaven who sent his contributions to the ACLU from the office, brazenly, not caring at all that it would be a red flag to any good American on his staff. The supervisor Kathi Mittendorf worked under was a Jew. She’d found that out the very first week. She’d been ready to quit on the spot, but Michael had stopped her, because according to him some Jews were good Americans, a very few of them, the ones who did not think of themselves as citizens of Israel first. She thought she had known from the contribution to the ACLU that Mr. Goldman wouldn’t be one of those, but there was virtue in vigilance. The longer she stayed, the longer she could keep her eye on the things Mr. Goldman didn’t expect anybody to be looking for, like the ways in which he helped the Price Heaven corporation pump drugs into the air at the store so that the employees and the customers would be more easily bent to the Illuminati’s plans. As far as Kathi could tell, two-thirds of the population of the United States of America was drugged to the gills every day of their lives, programmed and brainwashed to do exactly as they were told. The programming came through their television sets.
Now it was very nearly zero hour of her first important operation, and Kathi found that she was sweating. She had no idea if the nervousness was legitimate or provoked. They got to you in the strangest ways, when you weren’t expecting it. You turned around and realized you’d been caught. The only thing she could do about it was work through it. She went into the bathroom and rinsed her mouth out with water from the big glass tub she got delivered from Crystal Stream twice a week. Crystal Stream was an America on Alert company, owned by one of their oldest members, so you could be sure the water was pure. Tap water in Philadelphia had fluoride in it. Then she went back into the living room and watched Susan checking the switches on the main receiver set. Susan looked worried, but Susan always looked worried. She was in love with Michael, but Kathi didn’t care about that. Every woman in America on Alert was in love with Michael, one way or the other. He had more sense than to fall for any of them.
“I wish he’d call in and tell us where he was,” Susan said. “I don’t like the thought of him wandering around out there in enemy territory. They’re bound to realize he isn’t anything at all like them.”
“He’s done it before,” Kathi said. “I don’t see why there should be anything to worry about now. Have you checked the explosives?”
“I don’t like handling the explosives. I know they’re supposed to be disconnected or whatever it is, but I can’t stop thinking about that time in Greenwich Village in the sixties. Do you know about that time in Greenwich Village in the sixties?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about Greenwich Village no matter when it was,” Kathi said. “Why would I have to know about Greenwich Village?”
“Some people had explosives there. They blew up a building. By accident. They were making a bomb and blew it up by accident. We ought to keep that stuff someplace else, where it couldn’t hurt us.”
“It can’t hurt us here,” Kathi said. “Calm down. Are you getting anything yet?”
“Just people talking about food.” Susan turned back to the receiver. The headset sat across her over-blond head like a snake. It made the color seem even falser than it was. Kathi’s own hair was the same color blond, but for some reason she liked the color better on herself than she did on Susan. What really mattered was that they colored their hair at all. Lesbians never colored theirs, and never wore jewelry, and never wore makeup, either. Once you understood how it worked, you could see all kinds of clues, all around you—the conspiracy at work.
Kathi leaned over Susan’s shoulder and turned up the volume. A high, nasal female voice came pounding out, affected and obnoxious, superior. “I don’t care what the caterer told you, the ice swans do not go on the main buffet table. How we’re ever going to get through this, I really don’t know. There isn’t any room on the main buffet table. You have to put the ice swans with the rest of the pâtés.”
“See?” Susan said.
Kathi stood back. It made her stomach feel odd to know that she had just heard one of Them, a real one of Them, at home and in private, when she thought she wasn’t being watched. They always put on a mask for outsiders. Michael had told them that. Now there was no mask, and this woman seemed—
Stupid, Kathi thought. She wiped the idea out of her head. The Illuminati weren’t stupid. They only wanted you to think they were. Maybe this woman wasn’t really in private. Maybe she was putting on a show for whoever she was talking to. Susan turned the volume back down.
“I’m recording everything,” Susan said, “just like Michael told me to. But so far, this has been all there is. Food. And music too. There are going to be bands. Do you realize there are going to be thousands of people at this thing?”
“Only fifteen hundred,” Kathi said. “Michael has the guest list.”
“Still. Fifteen hundred is a lot. Maybe we should take those explosives over there tonight and set them off. That would get rid of a lot of them, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe I’m crazy,” Susan said. “But it seems to me that it would make more sense than what we are doing. If they really are evil people who want to take over the world, why don’t we just get rid of them? We wouldn’t get them all at once—”
“We wouldn’t get the most important ones,” Kathi said. “Can’t you see that? The ones who run the really big banks, the ones in Europe. They won’t all come to something like this. Only the Philadelphia ones will. And then the rest of them will be on their guard. And they’d find us. And then what would happen?”
“Maybe we’d wake up the rest of the country. Michael is always saying that most Americans would agree with us if they only understood what was going on. Maybe this would be the way we could tell them what was going on.”
“Did Timothy McVeigh tell them what was going on?”
“Michael said McVeigh doesn’t count. He wasn’t really one of us. If he was, he wouldn’t have blown up a building with a lot of babies in it. He was a plant. That’s how the Illuminati work. They close off all the avenues of action. They pre-opt everybody. This would be different.”
“You think blowing up a lot of women in evening gowns would be different?”
“It would really be blowing them up,” Susan said, stubborn. “I don’t understand what goes on here sometimes. You all say you’re patriots, and you all worry nonstop about how the Illuminati have taken over the country, but you won’t do anything about it. You don’t do anything but give speeches and sit around here and—”
“We bugged them tonight. And we have to give speeches. We have to convince the American people—”
“You’re the one who says the American people are all brainwashed. And I believe it. I believe it. If they hadn’t been brainwashed, they’d never have believed all those things about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They’d have seen in an instant that a bunch of Stone-Aged Arabs couldn’t have done anything like that, but—”
The receiver cracked. Kathi leaned forward and turned the volume up again. This time, the voice coming through was neither high nor nasal, although it still had that accent she thought of as “snobby.” They all had that accent. It was as if they had all been taught to speak by the same computer program, and maybe they had.
“No,” the voice said. “It’s all right. Put the rose centerpiece with the swans, just the way the plan calls for, but put them all with the pâtés, and that way we don’t have to worry about Charlotte having another fit. And don’t cry. It’s useless to cry about the way Charlotte behaves. She’s a spoiled brat.”
“Charlotte,” Susan said. “That’s Charlotte Deacon Ross. She’s right there. And Michael is there too. We could have sent a nice little package in with him, and nobody would have known—”
“Of course they would have known,” Kathi said. “They probably have X-ray machines, out of sight, so that the guests don’t notice. They probably have all kinds of security.”
“Maybe we should just gag Charlotte and lock her in a closet,” the voice on the receiver said. “God only knows, that’s the only way we’re getting through until midnight without my killing her. Or worse.”
Kathi turned the receiver down, again. “We’re supposed to make a transcript. We’ll make a transcript. Michael is supposed to find out what they’re going to be up to next. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and they’ll have a ritual right there in the open, and we’ll get it all on tape.”
“I don’t care how reasonable you think you are,” Susan said. “You’re going to have to use them sometimes. You can’t just keep them here in your living room forever.”
“Make a transcript,” Kathi said.
Then she retreated into the front hall, where it was quiet, a claustrophobic space not even large enough to hold a little table. Michael had warned them all about people who tried to push the organization into ill-considered violence. They were almost always enemy agents, pilot fish for the shock troops whose only purpose was to destroy little groups just like this one. If Susan was a pilot fish, they would have to find a way to get rid of her—move the meeting places, change the phone numbers, hide the mailing lists. They wouldn’t hide the literature, because as far as Michael was concerned, the more people who saw the literature the better. Even some of Them might be convinced, or enlightened, or deprogrammed, by reading the truth about who and what they were.
Still, no matter how enormously satisfied Kathi would be if it turned out that Susan was one of Them, the fact was that she was telling the simple truth. They would have to use the explosives some day. They even intended to, and there were a lot more of them than Susan realized. In this house alone, there were at least two-dozen small cluster bombs, made of dynamite and grenades bought on the military hardware black market, any one of which could destroy a store the size of an ordinary 7-Eleven in a couple of seconds flat. There were other things too, bits and pieces of things that could be put together to make a bigger bang than any single piece could do, if you didn’t care too much about precision or accuracy or being able to recognize the target when the mission was over. Then there were the weapons, the ones Michael had shown Kathi how to shoot: Soviet military issue, most of them, bought over the Internet, sent to an address without a real name attached to it, stockpiled in another state. Timothy McVeigh had been an idiot to rely on a fertilizer bomb. He could have done three times the damage if he had known how to go about doing what he was doing.
If the World Trade Center attacks had been for real, instead of for show, they wouldn’t have been carried out with commercial airlines, and they wouldn’t have left those buildings standing for an hour after the explosions went off. The Illuminati were sly. They knew what frightened people. They knew how to make people behave.
Kathi opened the front door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, the cold, the dark. In the middle of the city like this, it was impossible to see the sky. Someday, they would level all the cities. They would flatten all the tall buildings and grids of wires that shut out the stars and the sun and kept them all docile and ready for the kill, and America would be America again, perfect as it had been on the day it was founded, cleansed of all the evil that had come upon it since, the paper money, the multinational corporations, the bureaucrats with their agendas of “health” and “sanity” and tyranny and control.
All that would be gone, and Katy Davenport would be gone with it.
Ryall Wyndham had never understood how anybody, anywhere, could go about life haphazardly. It wasn’t just a question of money, although money counted. He could name two-dozen people in his class at Brown whose approach to money was a lot like their approach to cheeseburgers: Eat it up fast, before it had a chance to get away. None of them seemed to be able to wrap their minds around the idea that someday they would be old. They lived in a continuous present, and that present was filled with enough in the way of alcohol and drugs to addle God himself on a bad day. They were that way about women too, and that was worse. Ryall could remember a time when men worked very hard not to marry. Now they married all the time, for no reason at all, because it was Tuesday. They married women with money and women without it. They married women with background and women without it. Mostly, they seemed to marry women their parents wouldn’t approve of, as if that, and that alone, was enough to qualify a human female to be the mother of children. Ryall Wyndham did not have a wife, and he did not have children, and he did not expect to acquire either until the time was right. The time would be right when he could get one of these silly debutantes he escorted to all the best places to fall hideously, ridiculously in love with him.
The problem, he decided, checking out his tie in the mirror, was that the women he knew did not seem to go about life as haphazardly as the men he knew. Even the really ugly debutantes realized they were sitting on gold mines, and not just their crotches, either. God, he would love it, one day, to go in to one of those places and use a word like crotch. Or cunt. That was a good one. They really hated that one. They’d use words like crotch every once in a while just to show how down-to-earth and unaffected they were, but they’d never use a word like cunt, because it smelled of real vulgarity. The only people who could get away with real vulgarity were members of the Blood Royal. That was what all these people wanted to be, even though they’d never say so out loud. That was why they sent their children to those schools where the teachers worked overtime to instill true liberal guilt. The rich in America hate the poor everywhere in the world. The people of the Third World want only to rise up and throw off their capitalist oppressors and take on the mantle of vanguard communism for the new millennium. The real problem with this country is the Consumer Mentality. Oh, yes. Groton and St. Paul’s, Exeter and Choate. All those places positively despised the Consumer Mentality. It was just so damned tacky, and bad for you. McDonald’s hardened your arteries and ruined the landscape in pristine wildernesses from Maine to California. Television was a drug, meant to take your mind off Really Serious Things and keep you stupid and happy. Wal-Mart was the worst, because it not only did everything morally wrong, from refusing to carry emergency contraception to resisting the formation of workers’ unions, but it killed the very heart of America, the American small town. America had been a much better place when people had been forced to pay very high prices for bedsheets and electronics on their very own local Main Streets. Ryall was sure these people had seen a Main Street or two, once or twice in their lives. There was one in Stowe where they went to ski. There was another in Bar Harbor.
Tacky, tacky, tacky, Ryall thought. Then he closed his eyes and put his forehead against the mirror’s glass. He was very revved up, and he hadn’t even taken anything yet. He hated to medicate himself before he absolutely needed to. It was getting harder and harder for him to keep his mind on the subject when he went to one of these affairs, and yet everything—his whole life—depended on his remembering what he had seen and not writing it down until he was safely in the car and on the way home. Of course, he could cheat a little. He could find his way into the bathroom a couple of times every night and take out his notebook then, getting the details down before they disappeared forever from his head. It wasn’t as good as having the nearly total recall he’d had when he’d started, but it helped. The problem was that it had its natural limits. If he started hitting the bathroom every hour, rumors would be in full swing by the end of the night. They’d have him half-dead of AIDS or addicted to crack before he’d had a chance to file his column in the morning. That would be the end of everything. Reliability was the key. The women really weren’t as addled as their men. They kept their heads, and they kept their eyes on the main chance, and they weren’t about to jeopardize the only thing that mattered to them to hold on to a pudgy little dork whose only amusement value lay in his ability to get their names in the papers. There was a contradiction for you. The men really did things. They ran banks. They determined the economies of nations. The women did nothing but go to parties, and they were the ones with their names in the papers.
Ryall stepped back, reached around on his bureau top for his tape recorder, and switched it on. He really was pudgy, in the way unatheletic teenagers are pudgy. He was round and white and soft, like something that had lain for a long time in the water and bloated. He rubbed the side of his face. His fingers were stubby too. It didn’t make much of a difference that he was always careful to keep them very well-manicured.
“This is Ryall Wyndham reporting from the Around the World Harvest Ball, Philadelphia’s most talked-about event of the preChristmas social season.”
He switched the recorder off. Christ, he thought. He sounded like a Walter Winchell imitation in a forties movie. What was wrong with him these days? If he’d had more money, he could have been married ages ago. The problem was, he could never understand how to get money, and that in spite of the fact that he was very good at keeping it. He tried to imagine himself going in to work every day as a banker, and all he got was an image of Porky Pig in a bow tie. He had actually tried law school—at Georgetown, acceptable but not stel-lar—and lasted less than a month. He could still hear his old English teacher at Canterbury—one more time, acceptable but not stellar—telling him that he just didn’t have a knack for respectability. Respectability. He ought to go into one of these things wired sometime. That would blow the game to pieces in no time at all. He could just imagine the look on Charlotte Ross’s face when she heard her voice coming out of a little black box, screeching, “I’m not going to have some goddamned car salesman spilling drinks on me all night just because he’s got his own foundation.” Car salesman. That’s what Charlotte Ross called the Ford, who didn’t have the right kind of money.
Ryall got his cell phone, and switched it on, and punched in the numbers for his office. He hated to say that he “dialed” the cell phone, even though everybody did, because he so obviously didn’t dial it. A dial was round. He listened to the ring and checked out his cuff links while he waited. They were good gold cuff links, engraved, from Tiffany’s. In the position he was in, he could not afford to settle for the fake. They settled for it, though. It wasn’t only Barbara Bush who wore faux pearls in the daytime.
The phone was picked up on the other end. “Marilyn?” Ryall said. “You have a minute?”
“I thought you were supposed to be at that party.”
“The car is due in about fifteen minutes. Don’t worry. I won’t miss it. Did you do that thing I asked you to, about the records? You didn’t call back—”
“I haven’t had time to call back,” Marilyn said, sounding cross. “And yes, I did do it. I made triplicate copies too, in case you start losing them, which you always do. I don’t know why you bother to do research, really. You can never hang on to anything for longer than a day or two at a time. You’re really pathetic.”
“Yes. Well. I’m sorry to cause you so much distress. Did you happen to notice anything that was in the records?”
“No. Why should I? I’m not a gossip columnist, Ryall. I don’t really give a damn what these people do. I don’t think anybody does. I think the paper just keeps the column on because those people are investors, or something, and they like to get some publicity. I know I never read that stuff. Or Town and Country, either.”
“Yes.” You had to be patient with Marilyn. She was a very good assistant. She kept the appointment book meticulously. She did whatever research she was asked to do. She answered the phone without sounding as if she wanted to bite somebody’s head off. It was just that she was a … cunt.
“I don’t see what your problem is anyway,” she said. “I can’t figure out if you’re obsessed with Anthony van Wyck Ross or with his wife. And neither of them are anything to be obsessed about. I mean, really.”
“Anthony van Wyck Ross is one of the most successful bankers on the planet,” Ryall said. “Get your head out of the social columns for a moment. He’s got more money than God. He determines monetary policy for half the world. Oh, not officially, of course, officially we’ve got all these government agencies. But in reality, that’s how it works.”
“Maybe. Who cares? And what do you need his transcripts from Yale and Harvard Law School for? I mean, truly, even if there was some kind of huge scandal, who would care? It’s not as if he’s Steven Spielberg.”
“You don’t think anybody would care if one of the most important men on earth was involved in something less than honest?”
“No. I don’t even think they’d be surprised. Well, they might be interested if he killed his wife, or she killed him. I don’t suppose you could arrange for that?”
“If they wanted to kill each other, they’d hire hitmen. And not the kind who get caught.”
“Nobody cares about those people anymore. They’re not relevant to real people’s lives. And don’t give me that thing about running the world, because it doesn’t matter if they do. They don’t run my world.”
“You wouldn’t think that if they took it into their heads to shut down the newspaper and you were out on your ear looking for a job.”
“I don’t think anybody would just take it into his head to shut down the newspaper. That’s not the way it works, Ryall. Come into the real world for a time—pretty funny, considering your name. Do people make that joke on your name all the time?”
“No,” Ryall said. “And we’ve had this conversation before. Never mind. As long as you have the material. I’ll come in tomorrow and look it over. Although God only knows, I hate to come in to the office after one of these things. I always have a hangover.”
“It’s like that Enron thing,” Marilyn said. “It was a big scandal, and a big deal in all the newspapers, and it was on CNN and TV for months, but nobody really paid attention. Why should they? It’s just a business thing. It’s not as if they’re—”
“—Steven Spielberg—”
“—Madonna.”
“That’s the car,” Ryall said. “As long as you have them. Put them somewhere safe. I don’t want them getting lost.”
“I never lose anything,” Marilyn said, which was true. She never forgot appointments, either. Ryall was sure that, if she had been alive at the time, she would have been the one person in her class who would have remembered all her homework on the day after the Kennedy assassination. He knew for a fact that the events of September 11 hadn’t fazed her for a moment.
“They’ll be in your private drawer,” she said. “I’ve even taken the care to lock it, since you’ve been so paranoid. But if you ask me, you’re behaving like a lunatic.”
“The car,” Ryall said. Then he switched the cell phone off and put it down. The car wasn’t really here, not yet, and wouldn’t be for a while. He still had to find all his paraphernalia: his money clip; his wallet; his card case; his key ring; his Swiss army knife. The Swiss army knife was made of sterling silver and accented with gold. It was the kind of thing that impressed people like Marilyn.
“Crap, crap, crap,” Ryall said to the air. He didn’t want to spend the night at this party. He didn’t want to file a story about it with the paper and then with Town and Country. He didn’t want to feel like Porky Pig anymore, so that right in the middle of any moment when he was able to think of himself as winning, the image would pop up on the back of his eyelids like a computer virus and there he would be, squat and round, with a little curly tail sticking out of the back of his best tuxedo pants.
“Crap, crap, crap,” he said again. Then he swept all his things off the top of his bureau and headed out his bedroom door and down the stairs.
Lucinda Watkins had been born and raised a Baptist in a world where the most exotic “other” religion belonged to the Catholics at St. Mary of the Fields, and there weren’t many of them. “The preachers say they worship the devil,” Lucinda’s grandmother had said, “but I don’t believe it.” And because Grandma Watkins hadn’t believed it, Lucinda hadn’t believed it, either. In the end, everything that had ever happened to Lucinda had come down to Grandma Watkins, who had taken their residence in Mount Hope, Mississippi, as a kind of purgatory come early, except that she hadn’t believed in purgatory. God was getting them ready for something special. She believed in that. The long back roads that got so hot in the summer they were nothing but dirt, the “schoolhouse” that was nothing but a shack at the edge of a cotton field that had been leached clean of nutrients before the Home War, the good jobs cleaning up in the brick houses along White Jasmine Drive that went to black people and not to them—it was all preparation, all rehearsal, for something they were supposed to do later.
“They think they’re rich, the people in those houses,” Grandma Watkins had told Lucinda one afternoon when Lucinda had come to walk her back after a long day’s work at the diner. “It isn’t true. I’ve been to Atlanta to visit my cousin. Those are the rich people.”
Lucinda hadn’t had the faintest idea what Grandma meant. The people on White Jasmine Drive looked rich enough to her. Not only were their driveways paved and their houses made of brick, but they had cars parked out front and black people to clean up after them. Lucinda held on to the thought anyway. She never lost the conviction that Grandma Watkins was right about everything, from rich people to heaven, and she never would. It was why she didn’t talk slang, like everybody else she knew, not even in front of other poor people. Grandma wouldn’t say ain’t to save her life. Even at work, where white trash were supposed to play an elaborate ritual straight out of a bad MGM screenplay and central casting, Grandma Watkins sounded like she’d just been graduated from Miss Hellman’s School for Young Ladies. Sometimes she didn’t even sound southern.
“You go north,” Grandma Watkins said. “Not that they’re much better in the north, but they’ve got different rules than they’ve got here. There’s a little more room to make your move. You go north and you can go to college.”
Now Lucinda stood up from the kitchen table and picked up the coffee cups and little plates she’d used to serve Father Tibor Kasparian. There were times when she became extremely self-conscious about her life story. She knew how it was supposed to end—the bad MGM screenplay version, the one from central casting. She was supposed to go north to college and do brilliantly. She was supposed to become famous and go back to Mount Hope in a limousine. Or something. Whatever it was, it hadn’t worked out that way. She wasn’t athletic, like Larry Bird. She wasn’t a brilliant writer, like Truman Capote. She wasn’t ambitious and dedicated, like Julia Roberts or Helen Gur-ley Brown. In the end, she had had to face up to the fact that she was a bright, hardworking girl, but not a superstar, and not the material from which media stars are made. She’d gone north, the way Grandma Watkins wanted—but to Gettysburg College, not to Vassar or Smith. She’d found her room to make her move, first into a master’s of social work at Penn State, then into a doctorate in sociology at Temple. If she’d had a different personality, she might have ended up on the faculty of some small college somewhere, happily settled into a routine of teaching and giving little dinners and pottering around her own brick house, only just far enough from the campus so that she wouldn’t have to do what she hated most in the world, drive in bad weather. She had a fantasy about that life that was so real, she almost felt she’d lived it. The problem was, it made her feel ashamed even to think of it. She did not have a different personality, and because she did not, she had landed here, at Adelphos House, where, no matter what else she was doing, she was providing some help to the girls who lined the darker side streets of the inner city. Most of them were younger than sixteen. Most of them were addicted and sick at the same time. All of them were angry, so that helping them was a matter of getting past that barrage of invective that was their first response to anything but a john offering money, and was sometimes their response even then. Through it all, Lucinda kept waiting for something to happen, she wasn’t sure what.
If there was one thing Grandma Watkins had been dead right about, it was that thing about the rich people. The white people on White Jasmine Drive had barely been middle-class by Main Line standards. They’d had the kind of houses you saw in the neat little suburbs for factory workers, the ones that ringed the city close. The real rich people were farther out, and Lucinda could still remember the moment she had first seen one of those houses, spread out across a hill in Radnor like a movie-set castle. Her gut instinct was to call it an institution, a school, a mental hospital, anything. It was impossible that a single private family could have enough money to live in that house. Then there had been other houses, whole big lots of them, some tucked back behind gates and out of sight, some right where anybody could stare at the windows and doors, the long curving drives, the vast stretches of green lawn that nobody ever played on. That was when her own anger had started, white hot and hard. How could people—lots of people, a hundred of them at least, she’d seen the houses—how could all those people have all that money at the same time that the girls walked the side streets for twenty bucks a blow and got AIDS and died before they were twenty-four? How could all those people have big green lawns at the same time that the schools in Philadelphia didn’t have enough books for all the students, and didn’t have enough plumbing, either, so that the toilets backed up into the halls at least once a month and the walls themselves were disintegrating under onslaughts of ooze from broken pipes that nobody had the money to fix? It hadn’t helped, much, that when she’d first come to Adelphos House, Annie had taken her out to Bryn Mawr to see her brother and his wife. They were looking for money, and the brother had money. He had also had a butler, three maids in uniforms that Lucinda had been able to count, and a wife so intensely, poisonously bitchy that Lu-cinda had come very close to stabbing her with a butter knife. It was harder to make the brother out. He seemed to hate being where he was, but Lucinda had the impression that he felt that way everywhere, and with everyone.
It was, Lucinda thought, a good thing that she was both too old and too young for Power to the People and the Weather Underground. If she’d been born a couple of years earlier or later than she was, she would have armed herself to the teeth and died in a bank robbery without having the faintest idea what she was hoping to accomplish. Or maybe she wouldn’t have, because Grandma Watkins would definitely not have approved. Grandma Watkins was dead now, of course—if she was alive, she’d be a hundred and thirty—but she’d lived long enough to see the New Left, and she hadn’t been impressed.
Lucinda considered doing the dishes, and decided against it. It was the first thing the volunteers went for when they came in in the morning. Lucinda more and more often thought she ought to let them at it. She’d spent her entire childhood washing dishes. These girls had spent their entire childhoods visiting the Museum of Fine Arts and having French lessons. She washed her hands under the tap in the sink and dried them on the clean dish towel she always left hanging from the refrigerator door. Sometimes she wondered what the people of Mount Hope, Mississippi, would think of Philadelphia, where there were more Catholics than anything else, and the Catholics weren’t the strange ones. She knew what they would have thought of Annie’s atheism, if they could have been convinced that Annie was an atheist at all. People in Mount Hope tended to think that everybody really believed in God, deep down, even if they said they didn’t. She knew what they would have thought of Father Tibor Kasparian too. They would have been purely convinced that he worshiped the devil.
She went to the swinging door that led to the hall and stuck her head out. The hall was empty, but it almost always was at this time of night. She had been hoping to catch Father Kasparian on his way out.
“There anybody out there listening?” she called.
There was a rumbling somewhere in the distance and a blond head appeared halfway to the foyer. “I’m here, Miss Watkins. I’m doing some paperwork on the lunch project. Can I do something for you?”
“I was just wondering if Father Kasparian was still around somewhere.”
“Oh, no. Should we have held on to him? I mean, nobody told us to. And Mrs. Wyler was here to say good-bye to him—”
“Annie’s back?”
“She came in about ten minutes ago. Really, he hasn’t been gone long. You could probably catch him if you ran. He must be headed toward the bus stop. You know you can’t ever catch a cab on this block. You could just—”
“No, no. It’s all right. As long as he got that package I made up for him—”
“Oh, he did, he did. Mrs. Wyler made sure. I didn’t know that Armenians had their own church different from everybody else’s. Did you? I thought they were just Catholics, like the Greeks.”
“The Greeks aren’t Catholics.”
“They’re not?”
“Never mind,” Lucinda said. “Where did Annie go? Is she all right?”
“She went to her room. I think she’s a little upset about something, although you really can’t tell with her, can you? She’s always so quiet. My mother says the Rosses have always been like that, very odd really, and nothing at all like most people, but—”
“Excuse me,” Lucinda said.
Then she retreated into the kitchen, backing up so quickly she bumped into a cabinet on the way. She blamed the private schools. They took these girls with nothing in their heads and gave them social consciences that were more social than conscience, and then Adelphos House got stuck with them. Community Service Internship Interval. It was awful.
It was also awful that Annie had come back early, and upset. Lucinda counted to thirty, long enough for the blond girl to retreat to her papers, then went back out into the hall and up the stairs. When Annie came back early, it could sometimes be good news. The girls weren’t out tonight or the johns weren’t buying. When Annie came back upset, it was usually the start of a major catastrophe.
If we’re about to go to war with the mayor again, I’ll just spit, Lucinda thought— and then she mentally erased the spit, because Grandma Watkins wouldn’t have had the kind of fit that is only available to goddesses and ice queens.
David Alden checked through the last set of spreadsheets in the file, clicked back to make sure he had looked at everything he was supposed to look at, made a note to himself to find out just how exposed the bank was in the mess that was about to become of Price Heaven, and gave the command to print. That was something he’d learned during the first week of his first real job. No matter how extensive your computer files, no matter how well you’d backed them up with copies and disks, you must always make a hard copy. If you didn’t, some fifteen-year-old slogging his way through a yahoo high school in Dunbar, Oklahoma, would come along and wipe you clean. David always wondered why the CIA and the FBI didn’t hire these kids to make sure their computer records had been sanitized. Hell, he wondered why the bank didn’t—except that he didn’t really wonder, because he knew. The bottom line about the bank was that it kept all records, no matter how damaging, no matter how obscure, and it kept them forever. If they were ever to get hit with a scandal or a meltdown, there would be no point in shredding documents, because there would be far too many of them to shred, and far too many independent computer networks to clean out, and far too many hard copies in far too many file cabinets in far too many home offices. Human beings had a mania for documentation. They took pictures of themselves doing nothing at all. Here’s Uncle Ned, drinking lemonade at last year’s VFW picnic. They kept birth certificates, First Holy Communion records, Confirmation scrolls, high school diplomas, marriage licenses, driver’s licenses, family Bibles, school pictures, postcards. David imagined the average American house as a stockpile of paper, the closets filled to overflow with souvenirs and mementos, the basements and the attics stocked with brown cardboard boxes going to mold and mildew, keeping the faith. Or maybe not. David was sometimes acutely aware of the fact that he had never been in an average American house, not once in all his thirty-six years, not even on a visit to the families of college friends or business colleagues. In the circles in which he moved, nobody would be caught dead with four bedrooms and two-point-five baths on half an acre in New Jersey. No matter how well they played the game of being a friend to Working Americans—the bank’s own television commercials sounded like hymns to Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens—there was a river of distaste running through the upper echelons of every business he knew, and the distaste was for all things suburban and middle-class. Especially middle-class. There was a reason why they sent their children to private kindergartens that cost in tuition more than most public school teachers made in a year, and it wasn’t just for the prestige, or for meeting the right people. It took work to build an adult who never watched television, never listened to pop music and didn’t even know the way to the local mall. It took something more than that to make sure your children would be instantly recognizable, and distrusted, by outsiders. Cocoons are not comfortable things. Nobody ever stayed in them unless they had to.
The printer was finished printing. There was a pile of paper in the well at the top of the machine. David thought he was getting a headache. He sometimes loved his job and sometimes hated it, but he did truly and always hate the peripheral obligations, of which this evening would be one. It helped a little, but only a little, to know that Tony wasn’t any happier about this than he was himself.
He got the papers out of the well: three collated hard copies, one for his desk, one for his file, and one for the attaché case he carried with him everywhere. The rule was the more important the man, the fewer the papers he carried. Only middle-management nobodies without a chance in hell of rising in the hierarchy schlepped two reams of paper with them every time they headed for their cars. His attaché case wouldn’t have held two reams of paper if he’d wanted it to. He felt almost guilty giving it this single thin file, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to talk to Tony about the numbers and he had to talk to him tonight. It would at least help pass the time at this idiotic party if he could spend a few minutes talking reality among the potted palms. The whole mess made him wish he would never have to marry. There were only two choices, in marriage, for people like him. Either he got married to a woman like Charlotte, or he got married to one of those women for whom ambition was more important than plastic surgery. In either case, he would be miserable.
He dropped one of the copies in his attaché case and closed up. He picked up the other two to leave on Adele’s desk when he passed it. He had his own assistant, but in this case it made more sense to give the work to Tony’s, since she had been coordinating this particular project from the beginning. Maybe Adele lived in an ordinary American house, or had, when she was growing up. David knew she went out to Delaware on holidays to visit her sister, who lived there, doing David did not know what. His own family had been reduced over the years to his mother and his two sisters—and nowhere near enough money to keep any one of them. His mother lived in Paris, on the Avenue Haus-mann, in a “small” apartment that had a reception room large enough to stage a cocktail party for five hundred, if she should ever want to stage a cocktail party. She wouldn’t. His sisters were both married to investment bankers and living on the Main Line, in houses exactly like the one they had all grown up in. He was here at the bank, finding out, firsthand, how impossible it was to live decently and amass a safety net at the same time.
He turned off the lights in his office. There were cleaning ladies who came through and turned the lights off, but for some reason he felt guilty for making them do what he could easily do himself. He went down the hall to Adele’s big desk and dropped the copies there. He went back out and down to the reception area, pulling his gloves on as he moved. It had been cold for a week and it was going to get colder.
“I know what’s bothering you,” Anne had told him, when he’d gone out there to take her to lunch last month. “You’ve been there and done that. Your life looks exactly like your father’s. You’re drowning in boredom and at the very, very bottom of your soul, you think you’re going to hell. And I don’t mean that figuratively.”
No, David thought, he didn’t mean it figuratively, either. There was a circle of hell Dante had failed to notice. It was the one full of old boys from Exeter and Hotchkiss and St. Paul’s, who had never for a moment thought beyond their own small circle of self-doubt, and yet who were constantly in danger of falling out of it, of not having the resources, of not being able to keep up.
The phone began to ring almost as soon as he was in the elevator. He took it out of his pocket and switched it on. “Yeah,” he said. “Is something wrong?”
“Just a little nervousness on my part,” Tony said, “and the simple fact that I’m ready to kill Charlotte, which is nothing new. What’s the word?”
“All bad.”
“How bad?”
“You’re looking at eight to fifteen thousand layoffs, more likely the latter. In the month before Christmas. As soon as possible.”
“It can’t be pushed back after the first of the year?”
“Not if Price Heaven expects to survive. Which it shouldn’t, because even with the layoffs, they’re going to be on very shaky ground.”
“How exposed are we?”
“We’ve loaned them a total of two and a half billion dollars—not too bad, but not chump change, either.”
“How much of it do we lose if Price Heaven goes West?”
“Pretty much all of it. Oh, we do have some secured loans in the bunch, but not nearly enough. We’ve bought into way too much of their paper. I told you last July—”
“I know, I know. Crap. The logic of this escapes me. Does the logic of this escape you?”
“Not really,” David said. “It’s not the 1950s anymore. People have more money. They don’t want to buy discounted crap all the time—”
“Some of them must. Not all of them have more money. We’ve got, what, nearly fifty million people who can’t afford health insurance? They have to buy their clothes somewhere. They can’t be going to Laura Ashley to do it.”
“There’s Wal-Mart. And Kmart. And Kmart has been in trouble for a long time. If you bring the prices down low enough to matter, you don’t have the margin you need to make any money. If you don’t bring them down, the people you need to draw never come into the store. And the ones who can buy Laura Ashley won’t come in just because your prices are a little higher than Sam Walton’s.”
There was a long, exasperated sigh on the other end of the line. David felt the elevator bounce to a stop at the lobby level. The doors opened. He walked out. The security guard was on duty in front. Nobody else was around. He had worked past everybody else’s quitting time, again. He sat down on the edge of the big marble planter in the foyer’s center and stretched his legs out in front of him.
“Tony?”
“I’m here. Sorry. Charlotte is having some kind of tantrum about the ice swans. Ice swans. Never mind. How the hell does a company lose thirty million dollars in eight months and not even have a record of where it went? How can anybody be that disorganized? And now we’ve got—what? Is it just layoffs? Are we going to have to push for closings?”
“I think so. I don’t have a complete plan just yet. That’s going to take till the middle of next week. But at the minimum, I think they’re going to have to close down at least a fifth of their stores, maybe a quarter. Anything in direct competition with Wal-Mart, certainly. Maybe some of the smaller places that aren’t doing much volume.”
“Anything right here in Philadelphia or on the Main Line?”
“I don’t know for sure. Off the top of my head, I’d say yes. There’s going to be trouble with all the city stores. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Hartford. They’ve all got the same problem, which is terrific overhead. The real estate taxes alone are crippling.”
“Crap again. So they lay off eight to fifteen thousand right before Christmas, and those heavily concentrated in central cities where there’s practically no other work for their people to find. I can see the headline in The Nation now.”
“Yes, I know. But I don’t see that there’s anything else we can do.”
“Maybe not. But you’re not the one who’s going to be called an ‘Apostle of Greed’ by David Corn. Or maybe, God help us, Gore Vidal.”
“Yes. I know. We need to get this done over the weekend if we can. It would be best if we could do it informally. Do you want me to make the phone call, or will you?”
“No, I’ll make it. It’ll give me another excuse to avoid the ice swans. Are you coming out to this thing?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“I would. Forget it. I’ll talk to you here. We’ll disappear into the cloak room for half an hour and I’ll read through the sheets. Crap, crap, crap.”
“Yes,” David said again, but Tony had already hung up. David shut off the cell phone and folded it up and put it back in his pocket. Suddenly, the world just outside the bank’s tinted glass doors looked worse than cold. It reminded him of that Robert Frost poem: some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. He had no idea if he was quoting that correctly. He hadn’t paid much attention to literature classes when he was at Exeter. He hadn’t paid much attention to anything in all the long years of his education, not at Exeter, not at Yale, not even at the Harvard Business School. He was beginning to think he should have.
“Here’s the deal,” Annie had said, hunching over the big plate of linguine with white clam sauce that she hadn’t even touched. “Once you’ve started asking yourself questions, you’ve only got two choices. Either you do what Tony does and learn to live with the alienation, or you get out. I don’t think you’re the kind who can learn to live with the alienation.”
“I don’t think I’m the kind who can get out,” he’d said—and then he’d downed his entire glass of wine in a single gulp.
He got off the marble planter and went out the bank’s front doors, into the cold that was even more frigid than he had been expecting it to be. If there had been any moisture in the air, it might have snowed. He couldn’t remember a time when it had snowed this early in November. He stuck his gloved hands in his pockets and stepped off the curb to hail a cab.
The real sad thing about this thing tonight was that Annie wouldn’t be there. Charlotte wouldn’t invite her, and if Charlotte did—and hell froze over—Annie wouldn’t come. David wondered when it had gotten to the point that having money meant never being able to do anything you wanted to do.
It was eight o’clock, and Charlotte Deacon Ross was in a state of high piss-off unmatched in all her fifty-two years on earth, except maybe by the time that Marietta Hand had shown up at her own debutante ball in a black dress. Charlotte’s mother had put that particular tantrum down to “Charlotte’s sensitivity to nuance,” by which she meant she thought Charlotte was afraid a black dress would bring bad luck. It wasn’t true. Charlotte did not believe in luck. She did believe in the divine right of kings—and, more to the point, queens—but she saw that as predestined, the way her solidly Presbyterian forebears had seen their election to heaven as predestined. God chose, before the start of time. Charlotte was one of the chosen.
Charlotte had been angry at Marietta Hand because she hadn’t thought of that black dress first. Forever more, when people wrote those over-illustrated histories of Society in its prime, it would be Marietta, not Charlotte, singled out as the daring innovator that nobody could stop talking about. It gave Charlotte a great deal of satisfaction to remember that Marietta had eventually married an impecunious nobody she’d met at college, only to have him fail in one business after the other until Marietta’s money was gone, or nearly gone. Marietta hadn’t had to go to work, of course. She probably had ten million dollars left. Still, ten million dollars wasn’t enough to live like this, or even approximate it. Now, when Charlotte saw Marietta, it was only by accident, at parents’ day at one of the schools, where Marietta’s children were proving to be just as stupid as her husband had been. Really, the whole thing was ridiculous. Anybody with a brain would have known better. If you’re going to marry poor, you wait to see how he’ll turn out. You marry somebody like Steven Spielberg or Steve Jobs. You don’t pick some intense brooder in your Introduction to Philosophy class and decide that he’s a genius.
Marietta’s husband had committed suicide, in the end. It was the kind of thing people like that did. Charlotte had no idea what Marietta did with herself. Now she looked around the longest of the buffet tables, counting china crocks of beluga caviar, and feeling so worked up she almost thought steam might be coming out of her ears. There was the danger of television, and of all entertainment like it. Once the vulgar images got stuck in your head, you could never get them out again. She counted the crocks again. She took a deep breath. She considered blasting the caterer and decided she couldn’t risk it. If he walked out this late, there would be a disaster. She was, she thought, willfully misunderstood, by everybody around her. She wanted only what was best for everybody. She wanted only perfection.
She counted the crocks again. She counted the plates of sliced salmon. She counted the canapés set out in slanting rows on a long silver serving tray. She was nearly six feet tall and, even at this age, and in spite of the Main Line prejudice against plastic surgery, a magnificent-looking woman. Her neck was long and thin. Her eyes were huge and blue. Her hair was as thick as the evergreen bushes that comprised the topiary garden at the bottom of the terrace. She had no idea why she was so angry she could barely see straight, but she had been this way most of the evening, and she was going to be this way for as long as she had to stand here listening to twaddle from people who pretended not to know all the things she knew. Charlotte had never believed all that talk people put out about how different everything was now than it had been in the fifties. Nothing was ever different. Blood will tell. And what it told was the story of the necessity to keep people properly sorted out.
There were exactly as many canapés as there were supposed to be. There were exactly as many china crocks of caviar as there were supposed to be. There were probably as many crackers as there were supposed to be, but she hadn’t counted those, because there were too many of them. She wanted to do something physical, to get the poison out of the veins of her arms, to cause destruction. People would be arriving any minute and, of course, now that it was too cold to open the doors to the terrace, there wouldn’t be enough room.
She looked to the other side of the ballroom and saw Tony deep in conversation with that man Bennis Hannaford had brought. Leave it to Bennis to hook up with some godawful immigrant wreck who couldn’t even look comfortable in a dinner jacket. The man reminded her of Henry Kissinger, although he was better-looking, and a lot taller. It was the tone. You could always tell the ones who were trying too hard. They strained, and the strain radiated out of them like an aura. Charlotte believed in auras, in just the way she believed in reincarnation, and in predestination too. The best people were always the same people, culture after culture, time after time. They’d just been transported from one body and one place to the next ones, and as they shifted, the fate of civilizations shifted too.
Charlotte made a signal in the air, just as Tony was looking up. She saw him freeze momentarily, then lean toward Bennis’s foreign-looking friend, then straighten up again. He did not look happy, but Charlotte did not much care if he was happy. He came toward her.
“Well?” he said, drawing up next to the buffet table.
“Let’s go out to the foyer for a moment,” Charlotte said. “I do think it would be in better taste if we didn’t have full-blown arguments in the middle of the ballroom with Bennis Hannaford and her pet Italian for an audience.”
“He’s not an Italian,” Tony said patiently. “He was born right here in Philadelphia. He graduated from Penn. And from the Harvard Business School. Which is what we were talking about, before you decided to drag me away for no purpose.”
Charlotte was moving, slowly but inexorably. When they got to the ballroom door, she edged into the foyer and watched Tony edge with her. “He’s some kind of foreigner,” Charlotte said, “and not the right kind, either, and you know it. He looks Jewish.”
“He looks like Harrison Ford, who is about as Jewish as New England boiled dinner. And I’d lay off the nonsense about who’s Jewish. These days, it’s likely to get you into a lot of trouble, and not with the journalists, either. It would be a fairly intelligent idea if you didn’t offend the people at Goldman, Sachs. What’s all this about, Charlotte?”
Charlotte opened the front door and went out. It was freezing cold out there, and her gown was both backless and strapless, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t have stood being in that stuffy house one more moment. She felt as if she were suffocating to death.
“There’s nobody from Goldman, Sachs here,” she said, looking down at the lights stretched along the edges of the drive to guide the cars. A man from the caterers was walking along the edge of the walkway, wearing white tie and tails and white gloves, to open the car doors as they came up. There would be somebody around to park the cars too. Nobody was coming in yet. The invitations said eight, but nobody would show up exactly on time, because nobody ever did. This was the part of the evening she always hated most. She wished people would grow up. All this not wanting to be the first to arrive. It was behavior unworthy of ten-year-olds.
“Charlotte?” Tony said.
“I just had to get out of the damned house. Look, there’s a car. Maybe it’s one of your people from Goldman, Sachs. I’ve got a headache. If he isn’t Italian, what is he?”
“I told you. He’s American. He was born in—”
“Philadelphia. God, I hate Bennis Hannaford. I always did. Everybody always did. She was always such a—”
“I always thought she was very beautiful.”
“I’ll bet anything you want she’s shacking up with him,” Charlotte said. “It’s just the kind of thing she would do. She was in People magazine, did I tell you that? As if she were some hopped-up pop star pushing a record.”
“She was a novelist pushing a book.”
“She’s not a novelist. She’s not like Jonathan Franzen or Anne Tyler. She writes—well, I don’t know what you call them. Pulp. About elves.”
“Fantasy,” Tony said.
The car that had been coming down the drive pulled to a stop at the curb. The man in the white gloves leaped forward to open the door in the back closest to the curb. If the car had been an ordinary sedan, driven by whoever owned it, the car-parking man would have come out to take the keys, but it was a limousine—rented, Charlotte could tell from the license plate—and the driver would take it wherever it had to go. The man who stepped out onto the drive was heavyset and tired-looking. The woman who followed him was tired-looking too, but so thin it seemed as if there was nothing at all between her skin and bone. Tony frowned. This was Henry and Delia Cavender. Tony hated them.
“Charlotte,” Delia Cavender said, pecking at the air the way she’d seen somebody do in a movie once. Maybe she was reading the novels of Dominick Dunne. Charlotte pasted a smile on her face and did her best.
“Delia, what a wonderful jacket. You’re the first ones here, except of course for Bennis and her gentleman friend. Henry, you look wonderful.”
“Henry,” Tony said.
“Tony,” Henry said.
Charlotte could not, for the life of her, remember what Henry worked at. He was some kind of lawyer, but she didn’t remember what kind. It was like it was in that Hamilton cartoon. Everybody was a lawyer.
Another car was coming down the drive, and right behind it there were two more.
“I’m going into the house,” Tony said. “There’s no point standing around out here. That’s what we hired the extra help for. You ought to come in yourself before you catch the flu and lay yourself out for a couple of weeks.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlotte said.
And then, everything got strange. The new car pulled up at the curve. The next two queued behind it. The sky was very clear and very black. People began getting out, women in ball gowns, men in dinner jackets. Tony turned his back to them and headed for the front door.
Charlotte felt light-headed and sick to her stomach. Maybe I’m coming down with something already, she thought, and then Tony twisted backwards and he was in the air. His feet came right off the ground. One of the newly arrived women put her hand out to steady him. It was as if he had slipped on some ice and needed to be protected from a fall. Tony put his hand out too, but not to the woman, not to anybody, just out into the air and the dark and the cold and the nothing at all.
A second later, Tony Ross’s face exploded into a mess of blood and skin and bone, and everybody started screaming.
At 8:15, Father Tibor Kasparian got off the bus at the corner of Cavanaugh and Welsh, pulled his collar up around his neck, and started walking the five blocks home. The bus stop was not on what he thought of as Cavanaugh Street proper. The real neighborhood didn’t begin for another block, although it might, someday, with the way they’d all been expanding. He put his hands in his pockets and chided himself for not taking a cab. He always had enough money for cabs these days, and taking the bus one time would not give him enough spare change to really help out at Adelphos House. Besides, he was helping out at Adelphos House. He had just committed himself, the church, and the Ladies Guild to one thousand hours of volunteer work, manning phones, packing and delivering food baskets, serving in the soup kitchen, organizing mailings. It was hard to know what else he or the women of Cavanaugh Street could do. He was impressed with Anne Ross Wyler’s forays into the red-light district. He remembered a time in his own life when he had been willing to go places and do things that put him in direct physical danger, and thought nothing of it, because what he wanted to do was so very important to the world. Now he did not feel that way about anything, and it made him guilty. How can they live the way they do and not be ashamed of themselves? he had wondered, back in Armenia, when all he’d really known about America was what he saw in the movies. Now he knew the answer. He wasn’t ashamed of himself either. It was easier than he’d ever realized to drift through every day unaware that there were people hardly an arm’s-length away who needed more than you had to give. They got too complacent, Americans. Now that he was an American, he got complacent with them. He wrapped his arms around his body and told himself not to be ridiculous. He might be rich by Armenian standards, but it was nothing here. Most Americans would consider him a relatively poor man—“middle class” the way they all were, but at the lowest rung of middle class, without a home he owned, without a car. It wasn’t the luxury that had gotten to him but his age, and it did no good to tell himself that Anne Ross Wyler was no more than two years younger than he was. Maybe he just wasn’t making sense anymore. Maybe he should give up the superfluous things, the walk-in shower, the good coat, the hot and cold running books that lined every wall of his apartment. Maybe he should just accept the fact that he was not a saint, and that Anne Ross Wyler was, in spite of the fact that she had a sign up in her bedroom that said Freedom From Religion. He’d lived long enough to know that saints came in every conceivable package, including atheist ones.
The newsstand on Lida and Gregor’s block was still open. Father Tibor had to remind himself that it wasn’t even nine o’clock. The night was so dark, it felt later. His heart was dark too. He went in and said good evening to the incommunicative man who was the only person he had seen inside this store in the six months since Michael Bagdanian had sold it and moved to Florida. He’d tried a few times to strike up a conversation, to find out the man’s name and where he came from, but he’d never been able to do it. Even Lida hadn’t managed to do it, and she’d brought a huge plate of honey cakes for bait. Ti-bor got some change out of his pocket and picked up a bedraggled copy of the New York Times. He got the Philadelphia papers delivered every day. He didn’t much like news magazines, because they were too preachy. Lately, he didn’t much like CNN, either, because it seemed to have become one long commercial for pop music. Why was it that Americans had so many television stations and all of them were alike, more commercial than content, as if life was about nothing but buying things? Tibor had actually liked commercials when he’d first come to the States. He’d spent so long living in a place where there was nothing to buy and no point in advertising it, commercials had been a novelty. Now it was not so much the commercials he minded as the noncommercial commercials that ate up everything else: the five minutes of every half hour on Headline News devoted to movies and CD albums; the incredible clutter of hype on AOL’s version 7.0 that was one flashing huckster cry after another; the “sponsorship” announcements on PBS that were commercials in everything but name. Even the advertisements in newspapers and magazines had gotten bigger and brighter and worse. He had only been a United States citizen for four years, but he had been careful to vote in every election he was eligible to vote in. He knew that the United States government could not ban advertising, because it would be a suppression of free speech. He still thought he’d vote for any candidate that promised to do something about it, if only to provide every citizen with special viewing glasses that would block out the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes on the breakfast table in the latest sitcom and the banter about Coke and Pepsi in the hot new dramatic series that everybody praised for its “realism.” Seriously, Tibor thought, in real life, people do not argue about Coke and Pepsi. Maybe he ought to stop watching television and change his ISP to something that did not belong to a company that not only owned half the planet, but was trying to sell it.
He put his newspaper down on the counter next to the cash register and said, “Good evening.” He put his money down on top of the cash register and waited. The man behind the counter said nothing, and didn’t look up. Grace Feinman said he made her nervous, but everybody made Grace nervous, especially the audiences she played for in the early-music quintet she had come to Philadelphia to join. Hannah Krekorian said he made her think of evil, but Hannah had written a fan letter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To Tibor, he just looked like a man, too heavyset for his own good, with hair that somebody cut for him at home. He took the two dollar bills and made change. Tibor put the change in his coat pocket and said thank you. There was a country-music station playing softly in the background: Garth Brooks.
“Have a good evening,” Tibor said, suddenly hyperaware of his accent, which was very thick, and always would be. The man grunted and Tibor went out onto the street again. The windows at Lida’s were dark. The windows at Bennis and Gregor’s were dark too, although, these days, the windows at Ben-nis’s were always dark, because Bennis was never there. He tucked the paper under his arm and walked another block up. If he went one block more, he could go to the Ararat and have some coffee. There would be somebody there to talk to, even if it was only old George Tekemanian, who showed no signs of wanting to move to Florida. The spotlights outside the church were lit up, which was how he had left them. Part of him hoped that homeless people would find out the church was unlocked and move in at night to get out of the cold, the way they did at that Catholic church downtown. Maybe Cavanaugh Street was too far off the beaten path as far as homeless people went. Whatever the reason, none had ever shown up. Tibor considered going back to his apartment, but didn’t want to. He considered going in to the church and checking things out, but he didn’t want to do that, either. He felt restless and dissatisfied in every possible way. Maybe when he got himself sorted out, he would sit down with St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel and make himself feel perfectly guilty by witnessing the life of a real ascetic. These days, he could barely make himself give up coffee for Lent.
He went up to the next block, until he was directly across the street from the Ararat. Gregor was always warning him against jaywalking, but he could never take the warnings seriously. There was never any traffic to speak of on Cavanaugh Street. He crossed the street and tried to get a look into the Ararat’s big plate-glass front windows at the same time. They’d gone to candlelight and wall-dimmers already. It was hard to see anything or to know who was inside. Halfway across the street, he looked back over his shoulder at the church, reflexively. He was always checking to be sure it was there. For some reason, a vision popped into his head of that pastor in New Mexico who had burned a lot of Harry Potter books. When, he wondered, did we get to the point where we stopped understanding that witches aren’t real? At least, those kinds of witches, the Harry Potter kind, weren’t real. He started to turn back to the Ararat, to finish crossing the street.
That was when Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church exploded. At first it was just a light, an inexplicable light, blinding, like Saul on the Damascus road. Tibor half thought he had been granted a vision from God. Then the noise came and suddenly the air was full of stones and bricks and glass. They were everywhere. Noise was everywhere. Fire was everywhere too, and in the heat and madness, Father Tibor Kasparian passed out cold.