Arapian’s was a brick house with a tin roof—a house that couldn’t be burned, to replace one that had. He hadn’t felt the loss strongly—he didn’t own mementos from his youth; he didn’t treasure books or pianos the way Harriet did. He didn’t care if people called him a Turk or an Armenian, a Greek or an American. He had what he needed to get what he wanted, which is to say, money. He wasn’t a bad man, but he wasn’t a fool, either; he knew how money had protected him and Harriet and their son, William, and he knew how if he was smart, it always could.
From the couch, Harriet and Arapian could see William through the window, no longer young, a little drunk and worrisome, out on the porch. Arapian had taken, in retirement, to writing long letters to William, full of instruction on the making of a man, letters he hand-delivered, but that neither of them ever discussed. The letters seemed to be having little effect, at least not a positive one.
Upstairs in a bathroom, refusing to come down and bear witness, was William’s wife; their two children were asleep in Arapian and Harriet’s bed—a problem to be solved later.
The living room was full of young men: navy men who’d been brought to the party by local girls, as well as the sons of Arapian’s old friends and employees, most of them underemployed and eyeing the mainland, or underemployed and eyeing the navy. In the kitchen were their mothers, talking loudly, as if they didn’t see each other most days. Their fathers were largely missing, most having died years ago, in what had felt like a sudden mass extinction. Only the Greek, not yet arrived, was left from the old days.
The Greek’s father and his two uncles had been Symi divers mangled by the bends; none of them had lived to turn thirty. Still the Greek had followed them into the family business; and then he had followed the family business to Florida. He became Arapian’s engineer, always looking for, and often finding, ways to improve the boats, the nets, the warehouse. Arapian liked to say that the Greek’s ingenuity made him his fortune. Arapian liked, too, to say, that he had made the Greek.
They hadn’t been close since they took opposite sides on the issue of the union, twenty years before, when Arapian threatened the men who tried to organize. But still the Greek’s letter had come as a surprise, and Arapian had yet to answer it.
“I don’t think he’s coming,” Arapian said loudly in Harriet’s direction, and her response was to rise from the couch and go to the telephone to find out what had happened to Anahid.
At first Harriet had thought Anahid was simply running late, not so unusual given the sometime difficulties of traveling to Key West from the mainland, but when she called the hotel a nurse picked up and said Anahid was lying down a minute before setting out. She wasn’t feeling well.
ANAHID HAD NOT been well for some time. How nice it would be if this story could present her as otherwise, but Anahid was in the midst of a complete emotional breakdown, perhaps brought on by wartime starvation, by rape, by the loss of her entire family, or maybe by the fact that she now lived in a country where she knew almost nobody, or by the fact that the American couple acting as her benefactors had become increasingly demanding and, in answer to Anahid’s requests for a break in her touring, had begun referring to her contract, a document she had no memory of signing.
Remember, she was only nineteen.
At the time of Harriet’s call, Anahid was lying stiffly atop her still-made hotel bed sobbing, holding the hand of her Armenian-American translator, Lucintak, Lucy for short, a girl of seventeen who had been traveling with Anahid for the past month. The nurse who had answered the phone, Mrs. Brown, was an employee of Near East Relief, and Anahid’s chaperone. She was trying to give Anahid a shot that might calm her.
The room felt damp. All of Key West felt damp, but inside the hotel room, the damp felt as if it had pooled in the corners, as if it clung to the walls and the carpet, and Mrs. Brown’s skin.
“You will feel better outside, both of you will,” Mrs. Brown said, as she tried to shift one girl aside in order to catch the then-flailing arm of the other. But the girls had wrapped each other in a tangle, and eventually Mrs. Brown gave up and crossed the room to sit in an armchair, also damp, and wait out the hysteria.
Mrs. Brown hadn’t been east herself, but she had seen the photographs of orphan camps and starving women and deceased men. She understood that Anahid needed care, or at least rest, but she had also seen the response of the crowds when Anahid spoke. She had seen the donation receipts, and the shipments of food, medical supplies, and workers funded by those receipts, and she had decided the sacrifice of this one girl might well be acceptable in light of the greater cause. Mrs. Brown was a Christian woman and she believed in sacrifice.
After a time, the crying quieted, and the two girls became separate beings again, lying side by side—and as Mrs. Brown looked at them there on the small motel bed, how close they were in size and manner, she was the first to realize that Anahid did not always have to be the one to be Anahid.
“Get up,” Mrs. Brown told Lucy, who looked at her with sudden alarm.
WHEN MRS. BROWN and Lucy arrived on Arapian’s porch, Mrs. Brown ushered the girl past a bench full of uniformed navy boys, who barely had time to open their mouths before Mrs. Brown had Lucy safely inside. Immediately she and Lucy were surrounded by Arapian, Harriet, the lesser Vanderbilt, and two local girls Harriet had hired to help out. Each seemed to be trying to force a drink into their hands, and Lucy shrank against the side of Mrs. Brown, who automatically wrapped an arm around her shoulder.
“We’re so glad you were able to make it. You look much recovered,” Harriet said, first to the shrinking girl and then to Mrs. Brown, who unexpectedly found herself holding a plate piled with conch fritters, yellow turtle eggs, and a tiny turtle steak.
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Brown said with a glance at Lucy, who took a deep breath.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” Harriet said softly as she clasped Lucy’s hand in both of hers. “This is my husband, Edward,” she said, gesturing to Arapian, who in response took a step back, and out of the orbit of Harriet’s arm, which tried to draw him in closer. His retreat had been in response to the stern manner of Mrs. Brown rather than out of reluctance to meet the pretty young girl in front of him, but still he did not step forward again. He had forgotten how tired these parties made him.
“Hello,” Lucy said, remembering to speak Armenian, as Mrs. Brown had instructed. Arapian took another step back. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
Mrs. Brown squeezed Lucy about her shoulders, and Lucy said, “Thank you for helping our people,” this time directly to Arapian, who took yet another step back. His steady retreat had become so noticeable that Mrs. Brown actually took a step forward, drawing Lucy, who was under her arm, and Harriet, who still held Lucy by one hand, along with her. The four of them were so close to a serving table piled with food that Arapian accidentally brushed his hand against a pile of buttered shrimp. He held his greasy hand out to the side, careful not to touch his suit.
“Oh dear,” he said, a smile engulfing his face, as everyone turned their eyes from his hand to him. “I’ve always been nervous around young ladies.” He looked to Harriet as if for affirmation, but the expression on her face did not serve his purposes, and so he changed tack. “It’s been a long time since I heard the language of my parents,” he said in Armenian, to Lucy. “I’m sorry for your suffering,” he added, and Harriet and Mrs. Brown both nodded as if in approval, though neither understood what he’d said. Lucy looked at her feet.
I have to be Anahid, she thought. Lucy, too, had seen the donations and the photos of orphan camps that Mrs. Brown had seen. I must do the things Anahid would do, and yield the same results, she thought.
AT THE HOTEL, alone at last in a quiet room, Anahid sank deeper and deeper into her bed. She felt the balmy air through the window Mrs. Brown had left open in an attempt to combat the damp. In the distance, she could hear the sounds of people talking—the party she was missing, perhaps. A sound that made her room s
eem more silent.
Anahid’s despair spread over the room’s silence. Alone and quiet, alone and quiet, the very things she had wanted, yet she sank deeper and deeper.
What to say here? How can you expect me to know her suffering!
Each night for 379 nights, Anahid had taken the shadow that filled her each day, and folded it and folded it and folded it until it became a tiny black seed inside her, which she delicately coughed into her hand. Each night, so that she could sleep, she placed that black seed in a glass cup she kept by her bedside. Each morning, she tipped the seed back into her palm and swallowed it, where inside of her it unfolded and unfolded and unfolded, so that once again it became the whole of her, and she began again the process of refolding it and refolding it and refolding it, so that it wasn’t the whole of her.
But that night, try as she could to contain it, Anahid felt the shadow spread across her skin, covering her nails and her hair and every inch of her. Alone and quiet was no cure. She got out of bed, left the hotel, and walked toward the sound of the party.
LUCY HAD HER FIRST DRINK—ever—at Arapian’s party: a glass of champagne that appeared in her hand while people were asking her questions—it was surprising how free people felt to ask her questions—and at some point she found herself separate from Mrs. Brown, out on the porch, speaking entirely in English, flirting with sailors, and laughing as if she had never heard of suffering. Lucy did not feel she had stopped being Anahid; instead she had become the Anahid she wanted Anahid to be. Why couldn’t Anahid forget all she had been through and be happy?
Besides, wasn’t Lucy also a survivor? Hadn’t her parents had the good sense and the good fortune to leave the Ottoman Empire years before the atrocities—as Arapian himself had—and didn’t that give all three of them—Anahid, Arapian, and Lucy—reason to be happy? Lucy resolved to stop crying with Anahid, to stop embracing Anahid’s pain and trying to absorb Anahid’s story; instead she would teach Anahid to be an American, to start over and lift herself up—to be happy.
It was as Lucy reached this conclusion that Arapian saw her through the window, laughing on the porch of his sturdy home, and he felt pride at the resilience of her spirit, he felt a sense of accomplishment, as if somehow by bringing her to his house he had been the one to save her.
FROM THE STREET, Anahid also saw Lucy laughing.
How young she was.
Anahid had a long history of laughing, of course, but long histories sometimes have abrupt endings.
“You’ll recover,” Anahid told herself in the voice of her benefactor. “You’re young,” she told herself in the voice of Mrs. Brown, and then in that of her benefactor’s wife. You’re young you’re young you’re young. Just then Lucy caught Anahid’s eye and abruptly froze, but Anahid put a finger to her lips and gave a soft smile.
Lucy started to move toward Anahid, who was on the porch steps then, but Anahid quickly shook her head, and Lucy stopped, frozen again, while the men and women all around her kept laughing and talking.
Anahid slipped into the party quiet as she could. Right away, she was handed a glass of champagne by a girl who looked run off her feet—it was just time for the toast.
Arapian, though Anahid did not know that name or anything, really, of this party she had been asked to attend, was at the center of the living room, in his fine suit, waving his now clean hands, calling out, “Gather round, everyone, gather round.”
“Anahid,” he called out loudly—to Lucy on the porch, of course, but Anahid shrank slowly into herself anyway. She had learned to project invisibility.
Lucy came slowly in through the front door with all the denizens of the porch crowding behind her. If she’d stopped, they would have surged ahead, knocking her over. She sought Anahid out with her eyes, but Anahid gave another tiny shake of her head, and Lucy looked away. Soon Mrs. Brown appeared beside Lucy, her eyes even wider than Lucy’s at the sight of Anahid stock-still in the middle of the living room in what appeared to be her nightgown.
“I’m so grateful to you all,” Arapian began once Lucy and Mrs. Brown were beside him, “for gathering to celebrate my birthday. As you know, it is my wife, Harriet, who does the work for this party, so first, as always, we toast her.” At that, the majority of party guests raised their glasses—a ritual with which they were familiar.
“And,” Arapian continued, “I raise my glass to God, who has granted me another year, and I raise my glass to all of you who have made Key West my only home—”
At this, the Greek came in the door.
“Especially to you, old friend,” Arapian said smoothly. The Greek nodded, perhaps begrudgingly but in accordance with old times. He had learned that Arapian paid his friends, never his enemies, and the Greek had grown old without growing rich.
“Tonight,” Arapian continued, “I will not give my usual speech but will instead turn the floor over to our special guest, Anahid Restrepian, who has found refuge and safety in our great country, and who is here to ask for your support for those who have not found refuge or safety. A pretty girl like her,” Arapian said, and here he paused as if he had lost his thought, “she deserves our attention.”
“Speech,” Arapian called out suddenly, and the whole room, including Anahid, turned to Lucy. Lucy gulped visibly, and the real Anahid put a hand to her face and, behind it, smiled.
MRS. BROWN HAD TOLD Lucy to speak only in Armenian, and very little at that, but what with the champagne, with the sudden embarrassment of being placed at the center of the crowd, and with the responsibility of having to speak for Anahid in front of Anahid, the poor girl panicked.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said in English.
“No,” Arapian said, “it is we who don’t know what to say. It is we who cannot imagine what it would be like to be in your shoes. You must tell us.”
He spread his arms then, and smiled, in a way that suggested he had no idea of the world. And then, perhaps Lucy did feel like Anahid. She looked directly at Arapian and started. “If you were in my shoes,” she said, “you would have been arrested and then killed because you were thought too old for the labor battalions—which is where your son would have been sent.” She looked at William, irreparably drunk and sprawled next to his mother, who sat ramrod straight on the couch. “Your son would have been forced to construct the railroads, which would then be used to transport other Armenians to towns where they could be more conveniently killed. His children, your grandchildren, would have been told to march—with or without their mother”—Lucy looked at Arapian’s daughter-in-law, perched on the stairs, only halfway down from her hideout in the bathroom—“who probably would have been killed or raped sometime earlier.” At that, the daughter-in-law fled back upstairs, and Lucy turned back to Arapian. “Your grandchildren would have marched until they fell, dead of starvation, or until they froze in the night, or until they had their heads bashed in by a soldier who had suddenly grown irritated at the sight of them.”
The Greek stepped toward her then, perhaps to stop her, but Arapian reached out and grabbed the Greek’s shoulder, clutched it, his fingers pressing deep into his friend’s soft flesh. Arapian had had a sister once. She had stayed behind, in Constantinople, with their parents.
“Or maybe you”—Lucy looked at Arapian, then William, then Harriet, then all around the room—“maybe you would have been one of the lucky ones who slipped away, who found a cave to hide in, or a sympathetic family to shelter with.” She paused. “But probably not. Probably you wouldn’t have been as lucky as you think you are. Or maybe your grandson would be one of the orphans—unsure what happened to the rest of you—”
It was Anahid who stopped her. Anahid who put a hand on her arm, as good as putting it over Lucy’s mouth.
The seed folded and unfolded inside of her.
The two girls stood in the center of the room, at the center of the room’s attention.
“Maybe,” Harriet said, slowly rising from the couch, then turning to Mrs. Brown, who had
stepped close to her girls still holding the full plate of food she had never felt comfortable eating or putting down, “you ought to take Anahid home now.”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Brown said, handing the plate off to Harriet, with an odd smile.
It was, Mrs. Brown would think later, one of the proudest moments of her life, though why she should lay any claim to it, she really didn’t know.
As Lucy and Mrs. Brown stepped out the door, Anahid trailed after them without a word.
NOT MANY GUESTS stayed long after that, though most of them made any number of donations and pledges. A few tried to make remarks about the ways of teenagers and foreigners; William offered a stirring defense of Lucy/Anahid’s spirit, but by then everybody was too embarrassed by his behavior to listen to him.
Neither Arapian nor Harriet said anything about the toast or Anahid. They seemed to give up on their charitable effort the moment the women went out the door. They accepted the money that was handed to them with generous thanks, but nothing more. At the end of the night, they passed the donations on to the lesser Vanderbilt, who would deliver them to New York.
Eventually they found themselves alone on the porch, the position they had taken after every party thrown in their house since it was built. William and his wife were upstairs, engaged in a hushed argument meant not to wake their sleeping children; the two local girls were in the kitchen cleaning up; and everyone else had gone home or gone to continue the party elsewhere.
“Did I ever tell you about the woman who was my nanny?” Harriet asked.
Arapian shook his head. How moved he had been when he’d first met Harriet. This serious young girl who wanted so much to talk to him, who was so overjoyed to see him whenever they met.
“She was an obeah woman.”
“In Nassau,” Arapian said.
The Trojan War Museum Page 12