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The cars in the cramped garages were made in Germany and various shades of maroon and grey. The women had switched their allegiances from Sears to Saks. Cavanaugh Street had been a theater of grinding poverty in the thirties, a prison of lower-middle-class anxiety in the fifties. This latest change should have been a happy one. Instead, the people Gregor met, even the ones he had known for years, lived behind defensiveness and cynicism, as jumpy and frightened as guests at a Washington cocktail party.
    Maybe that was why he had made no effort to develop a social life. Maybe he had found no one here he wanted to socialize with. On the other hand, “socializing” had never been one of his strong suits. While he’d had Elizabeth, she’d been enough. Once she was gone, he’d found it hard to connect with other people.
    He climbed the five stone steps to the door of the small house where he had his apartment and searched through his pockets for his key. It was after five and getting dark. He could feel a wet sting against his hands that was the first of this winter’s snow. He was beginning to regret his months of coldness. With the coming of the season, Cavanaugh Street had been transformed. He’d missed Christmas, he realized—not Christmas as it was celebrated in Washington and New York, but real Christmas with children and grandmothers and too much food, with colored lights strung in windows and ribboned wreaths hanging on doors. That, Cavanaugh Street had not lost.
    He got the door open—he’d had so much trouble with it because it hadn’t been locked in the first place—and as he swung into the vestibule he heard George Tekamanian fumbling at the first-floor apartment door. Gregor shut the outer door against the wind and waited. George was quick for eighty-six, but he was still eighty-six. And just now, Gregor wanted to talk to someone. Badly.
    The door scraped, screeched, popped. George stuck his tiny grey head into the vestibule, looking for all the world like a geriatric punk.
    “Krekor,” he said, using the Armenian pronunciation, the way all the old people did. “I thought it was you. Come in, come in. I have the rum punch, yes?”
    “Does your doctor let you drink rum punch?”
    “If it was up to my doctor, I’d live on grass.” George swung the door wide and grinned. “Hot rum punch,” he promised. “Real butter. Cholesterol city.”
    Gregor shook his shoes off on the vestibule carpet and followed George into the apartment—the Impossible Apartment, he thought of it, because the first time he’d seen it he’d thought he was hallucinating. George’s grandson Martin had made a killing in the stock market—six or seven killings, from the look of it—and since George had adamantly refused to leave Cavanaugh Street for the Main Line, Martin had decided to bring the Main Line to George. George’s apartment had been gutted and remodeled, its rooms made larger and airier, its soft plywood floors replaced with polished oak, its plain walls adorned with plaster moldings. In its present incarnation, it could have been a cover for Metropolitan Home , or a page from one of those catalogs for Yuppies Who Have Everything. Martin had bought George a “total entertainment center” in a walnut cabinet, complete with forty-inch TV and compact disc player. There was also an electric pencil sharpener, an electric waffle maker, an electric yogurt maker, a food processor that did nothing but roll meatballs and a set of sterling silver swizzle sticks in the shape of miniature golf clubs. There were also paintings, but both Gregor and George tried to ignore those. Martin had an unfortunate passion for postmodern art.
    The rum punch was in a Baccarat crystal bowl surrounded by half a dozen matching cups—$8,000 worth of glass. The bowl and cups were sitting on a sterling silver serving tray—another $2,000. The tray rested on a butler’s table that looked like a museum quality-antique—with a price tag Gregor