Little Moses tapped the shell against his tooth. Next he tapped the other end. “The space is in the bottom!”
“Right,” I said, reaching for another egg. Moses Bodjakanian stretched his hand toward the basket at the same moment, and our hands brushed. A current rushed up my arm. My anger faded to pity, and then longing. What a wasteful thing the human heart is. I avoided his eyes.
Moses Bodjakanian, cradling a red egg in his hand, said, “If only one could choose everything with such care and precision, there would be less trouble in the world.”
Little Moses intently tapped another egg against his tooth. He wasn’t paying attention to our conversation.
I glanced at Moses Bodjakanian and then away. “Sometimes God, or fate, or circumstance, makes our choices for us.”
“Then we must live with those choices,” Moses said.
I looked into his solemn face. Shrugging, we both raised our shoulders, tipped our heads, and turned up our wrists. The sameness of our gestures almost made me smile.
“I found a good one!” shouted little Moses.
The boy handed the egg to me. I checked it and agreed.
I said, “Now I’m going to show you another trick.” I gripped the egg tightly, its tip just showing in the circle made by my thumb and forefinger. “Squeeze as tight as you can, and always try to get the other person to hit your egg, and not the other way around.”
“I’m going to win!” Moses said happily. Suddenly his face clouded. “You haven’t told anyone else?”
“No,” I said, closing his fingers around the prize egg. “It’s our secret.”
After that Easter, Moses Bodjakanian and I never saw each other again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Conversion
(WATERTOWN, 1941)
By the time Joy graduated from the crib to a bed, I had taken command of the kitchen. Vartanoush’s eyesight was failing, and she had little sense of taste. She still seemed as strong and stubborn as a donkey, though. I expected she would outlive me, if only for spite.
Even if she did give up the ghost before me, I was sure Vartanoush’s decline would be a long and noisy one that we all suffered. Instead, one morning, when she didn’t appear at the breakfast table, I climbed to the attic and found her cold as stone in her bed. She hadn’t been laid up with illness a day since I had known her, but she was old. Years of bitterness had weakened her heart.
No one was shocked by her death, except Toros. He wandered through the rooms of the house, silent and dry-eyed. We didn’t dare talk to him. Then, a week after his mother’s burial, my husband came down with a mysterious malady. He burned with fever. His arms and legs were brittle as stale breadsticks, and his joints swelled like overripe figs.
Dr. Avakian huffed into the apartment, carrying a black leather bag filled with instruments and ointments. He told me he didn’t know what was the matter with Toros and prescribed some pills. Der Hayr from the Saint James Church—the same Der Hayr who said words over Vartanoush’s casket—came to intone some prayers. He anointed Toros with holy oil, but my husband’s condition remained the same.
Later in the week the fever went down, but Toros didn’t feel any better. He stayed in bed, the blinds drawn and his face turned toward the wall. We were observing the forty-day mourning for Vartanoush, so visitors filed in and out of the house. Platters and casserole dishes covered the dining-room table and the pantry counters. The sounds of eating and conversation must have filtered under his door, but Toros didn’t come out of the darkened room.
Three old ladies from the church sat like crows on a telephone wire, bunched together at one end of the couch. Whispering loudly enough for everyone to hear, they said that the undertaker hadn’t properly closed Vartanoush’s eyes. They said that her ghost was pulling Toros toward the grave. This made me so mad, I was ready to dig that woman up and give her what she had coming to her. I also wanted to chase those old aunties off with a broom.
Toros wouldn’t allow anyone in his room but me. He pushed the food I brought him from one side of the plate to the other. Keep the kids away from the door, he growled, their noise disturbs my rest. When I mentioned the market, he groaned and turned his back to me.
Moses, who wouldn’t speak to us in Armenian since he’d started junior high school, wrote a big sign in English saying the store was closed until further notice. I gave Moses the keys, and he took Jack and Joy with him down the block to hang the sign in the front window. I told them they could each choose a candy bar from the counter. I would follow later to throw away what would rot on the shelves.
I had never written a check in my life. I didn’t know how much money we had or where he kept it. I prayed that he would recover before the bills came due. But he just faded deeper into the pillows. His eyes were like dried-out prunes, and each breath whistled through his nose and rattled in his throat. He asked me to sleep on the couch, because he could rest better that way. Then he requested a bedpan, because he didn’t want to get up and go to the bathroom. That was the last straw.
I shut myself in the bathroom to brush my hair and think. What should I do? How could I get my husband to join us back in the land of the living? I wound up the long strands from the brush and set a match to a small nest of hair.
The next day, when Toros tossed the newspaper to the floor without opening it, I phoned Arsinee. She called in sick to her job at the Edison Electric Illuminating Company and rushed over. Arsinee and I dragged four carpets and the rug beater into the yard, out of Toros’s earshot.
“What did Avakian say?” Arsinee batted at a rug draped over the clothesline’s wooden frame.
“He doesn’t know what’s the matter. The fever’s gone, but Toros is worse. What am I going to do?” I groaned. “First Mother, and now this.”
“You should be happy to be rid of that old screech owl, may she rest in peace,” Arsinee said. She pulled the rug down.
“Don’t speak of the dead like that,” I said. I glanced around the yard and at the porch uneasily. The long shadow of Vartanoush’s ghost hung over us.
“She was worse than a stone in your shoe. Thank the Lord she didn’t put nails in your coffin. My husband was in the ground before forty, and my mother-in-law is as healthy as a heifer and twice as loud. My father-in-law will never die. He’s like an old country villager who lives to one hundred and twenty.”
When Arsinee’s husband had died suddenly of a heart attack, she sold his store and took a job at Edison as a telephone operator to support her family. Toros was shuffling down the cemetery road, I had no idea about money, and I would be a miserable telephone operator.
“Oh, my God,” Arsinee said impatiently, “would you stop crying.”
I started crying harder.
Arsinee dropped the rug beater and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Come on! Act like a man, or at least remember you’re a mother.”
“Who’s going to run the store? How will I pay the bills?” I saw myself and my children cast out onto the street, forced to beg for bread.
“He’s probably got money in a cracker tin, and the rest of it stashed in the bulgur jar. Anyway, he’s not dead yet.”
“What can I do?” I asked.
“What is he, fifty years old?” Arsinee demanded.
“Forty-nine.” I blew my nose.
“He’s got twenty or thirty years left, Lord help you. Don’t let his rank-smelling weed of a mother drag him into the next world.”
“She’s dead, and still that witch—”
Arsinee interrupted. “Don’t whine. Like I said, he’s not dead yet.”
When I brought Toros his lunch, he waved it away. I asked him how he was feeling. He said, “Pharisees, Turks, moneylenders, politicians, barkeepers …” He trailed off. A fat black fly landed on his nose, and he didn’t even bother to brush it away. I swatted at it. “Leave me be,” he said.
While Toros lay on his deathbed, I searched for money. I looked in the canisters, the bread box. I took off my shoes and stood
on the pantry counter, feeling around the top shelves. I found a cache of quarters, dimes, and nickels in an old creamer on the top shelf, but I had put that there myself. I realized I was looking in the wrong places. I went through Toros’s desk and found all sorts of papers—fire insurance for the store, the deed to the store, the deed to the house, the cemetery deed, a bank passbook. I didn’t have the nerve to open up the passbook and see how much was in there.
I decided that the children would help me drag Toros from his coffin of a bed. That evening, instead of taking his dinner in myself, I sent Joy and Jack, whom Toros hadn’t seen in days. Both of them were a little afraid of their father.
“I want you to sit on the bed and talk to him,” I told them. If his own big-eyed babies—on the brink of poverty and starvation—weren’t reason enough for Toros to get out of bed and go back to the store, I didn’t know what was.
“What should we say?” asked Joy, nervously twisting a long strand of hair around her finger.
“It doesn’t matter. Ask him how he’s feeling.” I suddenly imagined Toros launching into a list of complaints. “No, don’t do that. Tell him what you did in school today.”
The children lingered outside the bedroom door. Joy balanced a tray of food, and Jack carried a glass of tahn, a mixture of yogurt and water.
Joy said, “He’s going to yell.”
Jack added with a note of hope, “Maybe he’s too sick.”
From the kitchen I urged, “Go on!” I came and stood behind them.
When they entered the darkened room, Toros switched on the bedside lamp. His face was all hollows and bones in the light and shadows. The kids sidled closer to each other.
“Put the tray here,” Toros said weakly, gesturing to a table by the bed. “Come sit next to me.”
Joy set down the tray, and Jack, one step behind her, leaned to put down the glass. He tripped over Joy’s foot, and the tahn shot across the blanket and across the front of Toros’s nightshirt. The glass dropped from Jack’s hand and smashed on the floor. The boy covered his ears.
Toros, with more energy than he had shown in weeks, roared, “Zabelle! Get them out of here. Bring me a clean shirt! Clean up this mess!” He collapsed back onto the pillows. “Even on his deathbed, a man can’t get any peace!”
On Saturday morning Dr. Avakian showed up again with his bag. I wiped the already spotless kitchen counters while I waited for his report. Finally Avakian appeared. He nodded gravely and tugged on his striped suspenders, which seemed to be holding his belly in place.
“Do you want some coffee, Doctor?” I asked.
“Thank you, Digin Chahasbanian.”
“Sit down, sit down.” I rushed into the pantry and uncovered a plate of ghurabia, which I set on the table.
“How is he, Doctor?” I asked, pouring him a cup of coffee.
“Not any better, not any worse,” the doctor said as he bit into a cookie. “The rash, the stiffness in his bones, and the weakness of his heart are all the same. It’s strange with cases like this, because tomorrow he might be up and around, or he could be.…” He ate another cookie. “It’s like he has one foot in this world and one in the next.”
I stared at the doctor’s mouth. White powdered sugar clung to his lips, and a small piece of walnut dangled from his mustache. He picked up a third ghurabia.
“If you don’t mind my saying. …,” he continued.
“Tell me, Doctor….”
“These are excellent cookies, and I’d love to get your recipe for my wife.”
“Of course. I’ll write it down for you. But what about Toros?”
He replied, “I suspect this illness might have something to do with his mother.” The piece of walnut dropped to his lower lip and disappeared with a flick of his tongue.
“What can we do?” I asked. I saw him eyeing the cookies and wanted to slap his pudgy hand as it reached for more.
“Well, Digin,” the doctor said, pocketing three cookies as he rose to go, “pray, and try to cheer him up. Give him some of these delicious cookies. That might spark his interest in life.”
* * *
Arsinee arrived with Henry and Dahlia in the afternoon. From the front porch we watched the kids raking fallen leaves on the lawn. Dahlia pretended she was shot and toppled into a pile of leaves. Moses and Henry buried her and Jack, while Joy stood to the side, cheering them on. They were having fun for the first time since Vartanoush’s funeral. But when they got noisy, I thought it would bother Toros, and I made them go in the garage.
I told Arsinee what the doctor said.
“Some genius Avakian is,” Arsinee remarked. “Did he have any ideas about how to get that skunk cabbage’s arms from around your husband’s neck?”
“I wish there were a pill for it,” I said.
“In the old country, a healer would come and send Vartanoush’s ghost over the bridge of hair into the afterlife. Maybe we should do it. Sprinkle some salt, a little holy water, say a few words …”
“Toros would kill me if he found out.”
“Are you going to let her drag him into the next world without a fight? We’ll do it while he’s sleeping.”
I was ready to try anything. “Do what?” I asked.
“Leave it to me. I’ll talk to Digin Haygouhi. She lives by me. Her mother was a healer in the mountains near Zeytoun.”
“Is she still alive? She must be over a hundred.”
“She sweeps the sidewalk every day, and lives on tahn. See if you can get Toros to drink some.”
“He needs something stronger than yogurt to wake him up,” I commented gloomily. “Like kerosene.”
Arsinee laughed and patted me on the back. “That’s the spirit.”
It was late evening toward the middle of the next week, and Toros wasn’t any better. I checked out the front window for Arsinee, who had called as she was leaving to say she was on her way. Joy and Jack were in bed, and Moses was at the dining-room table, finishing his homework. I watched his pencil move across the paper. His hair shone gold under the lamp. I knew he was worried about his father and about the store. But at that moment I needed him out of the way.
“Moses, you should go to bed,” I said.
“Ma, I’m thirteen years old. It’s early,” he protested.
“Be a good boy. You can read in bed. Make sure you shut the light. Edison is richer than me.”
Moses gathered up his books and papers. He stopped at the stairs leading to the attic. “Ma, you think Pa’s going to get better?”
I went to him, resting my hand on his head. His eyes were always serious, even when he was a baby. Would he have to quit school and take a job delivering coal to keep us from the poorhouse?
“Pa’s going to be all right, honey. Go to bed.”
Just as Moses disappeared up the stairs, Arsinee arrived. She carried a pillowcase that bulged in all directions. “I’ve got everything we need,” she said, dropping onto the sofa.
I imagined a sheep’s head, curling chicken feet, a vial of cypress oil, some dried leaves. Maybe a shriveled umbilical cord and some fingernail parings.
“First thing, we bundle up all Vartanoush’s belongings, and burn them,” said Arsinee.
“We can’t do that!” I saw a bonfire shooting flames into the night sky. How would I explain a charred patch in the backyard to Toros?
“All right. It won’t be as good, but we can shove them in a closet in the attic. Next we scatter salt in the corners of her room, and in Toros’s room. We sprinkle some holy water on Toros.”
I was so nervous, my palms were perspiring. I wiped them on my skirt.
She continued, “Then you make sure he wears something blue every day for a week. There’s more, but I’ll explain as we go along.”
“Did Digin Haygouhi tell you this?”
“She’s a little mixed up—her mind’s not so good anymore—but I got the idea. I remembered a few things myself.”
“This has the devil’s hand in it.”
&nbs
p; “Oh, hush up. You want to save your husband or not?”
“I think he’s asleep.”
Arsinee snorted. “I can hear the snoring from here.”
We snuck to Vartanoush’s room in the attic. Arsinee tied up the dresses inside a sheet. I emptied the bureau drawers and stuffed the pillowcases. I stopped to look at the things in the top drawer—a cracked hand mirror, a gilt-edged comb, a stack of bookmarks inscribed with Bible verses, a stray hairpin. I fingered a black button that had fallen off the old lady’s favorite sweater the day before she died. It was true she had been a thorn in my side. Still, there were times when she had been sweet to the children. Over the years, Vartanoush had become part of my life the way a sticky cabinet door did. You grew accustomed to jerking the handle in a particular way, and if the door somehow began opening easily, it would take awhile to unlearn the old trick. I slipped the button into my pocket and returned to work.
In the back of the drawer, behind a worn copy of the Armenian Bible, there was a knotted gray sock. I undid the sock and shook out its contents. A brooch—a wreath of blue stones dotted with small pearls—glittered in my palm. This was the only piece of jewelry Toros had ever given me.
It was my tenth wedding anniversary gift. The pin had disappeared a few weeks later. Toros had accused me of misplacing it or losing it, but I knew I had left it on the lapel of my coat. I searched every corner of the house, every pocket, every drawer, except for Vartanoush’s room. My mother-in-law had suggested that the clasp might have loosened and the pin might have fallen into the street. Maybe this was God’s way of letting me know I shouldn’t take pride in material things, she had said. The old harpy had hidden the pin in her drawer for all those years.
I squeezed the brooch until the settings dug into my hand. I felt steam rushing through my veins. I fished the button from my pocket, dropped it onto the floor, and stomped on it with the heel of my shoe.
Arsinee grabbed my arm. “Khentes? You’re making enough noise to wake the dead. Come on, help me.”
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