Grief Street

doctor?”
    “His name was Eoin Monaghan.”
    “As in Monaghan the squatter?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Dr. Monaghan... of the West Side Family Clinic.” Ruby said this thoughtfully. I started thinking myself. “So Monaghan was Rosenbaum’s downstairs tenant. Upstairs, there was a family. Hock, did you ever know anybody in the neighborhood named Wollam?”
    “No.”
    “Malachy was the husband’s name. He and his wife had a boy and a girl. The girl died young, of tuberculosis.”
    “There was a lot of that.”
    I remembered no such family. But something in what Ruby said made a great fog of time lift, a fog covering dark possibilities.
    “There’s something I do remember, though,” I said. “There was a doctor who’d take care of things. Embarrassing, inconvenient things that people wanted to keep off the record books.”
    “Such as what?”
    “Gunshots, abortions, social diseases.” More fog lifted, and what I saw grew darker and darker. “The nuns used to whisper about it.”
    “Interesting.”
    “Are you sure you want to go through with buying this place, Ruby?”
    Ruby was quiet for a while. Then she asked, “Do you remember hearing the bells ring on that ice cream truck?”
    “You mean the truck rolling along Fortieth Street last Sunday? A street with no kids? At least I didn’t see any kids.”
    “Neither did I. That’s the point.”
    “You believe now in cosmic signs?”
    “I believe in little Patrick, or Patricia. I believe in ice cream.”
    “We can see the place in the morning if they let you out of here. Ruby. Take a wild guess who’s going to open up for us?”
    “Eddie the Ear.”
    “How did you know?”
    “I didn’t. You said take a wild guess.”
    “Anyway, if you’re up to it.”
    “I’ll try my best.”
    “That’s sweet about the ice cream truck. Ruby. This is a good time for sweet. Any other time I might have gagged.”
    “Speaking of sick...”
    Ruby told me the story she had heard from Johnny Kay-About a boy waking in his bed in the dark of morning—to the sound of his mother cooing a deadly lullaby over the crib where his baby brother slept. About a dark and shameful thing that happens to some new mothers; something that forever stained the lives of Eva and Joseph Kowalski, and one son who survived; something families hide, and family doctors, too.
    “So after she killed the baby...” I regretted saying the words straight out like that. How else to say them? “After that, Kowalski squared things by going to this friendly neighborhood gang doctor—Eoin Monaghan? He had Monaghan call it a crib death for the health department?”
    “Hyperthyroid, that’s what Monaghan certified. It’s what the doctors usually said, and probably still do. They used to call it ‘crib death’ or ‘blue baby’ syndrome. Now they call it SIDS, for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.”
    “It’s common, isn’t it? I’ve heard of SIDS.”
    “Common enough to cover up something you’ve never heard of. Something I never heard of either, until Johnny told me.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Postpartum neurotic depression. Johnny says that’s what the doctors these days call his own mother’s sickness.”
    “So what does Johnny know about it?”
    “He knows he was a fool.” Ruby sighed. “A fool for all the years he tried to forget seeing his mother in the dark that morning, tried to forget seeing what she did with a pillow.”
    More fog lifted, and more.
    “There was a line in the play, Ruby. About blood running in the streets. Can you remember it?”
    “Annie Meath says, ‘It’s a senseless time we’re living, ain’t it? Shame on people finding comfort in being deaf, dumb, and blind to the sorrows of folks kept down. But I tell you—the last straw’s coming. And blood will run in the streets.’ ”
    “That’s the one.”
    “Johnny learned there’s no comfort in forgetting.”
    “And to believe what he witnessed.”
    We were thinking out the case together now.
    “He came to terms with his father, and his father’s blind and misdirected rage,” Ruby said. “You asked me what Johnny knows. I’d say he knows a lot.”
    “His mother’s sickness, what did he learn about that?”
    “That it’s something nobody likes talking about. Because 't goes against all that sugar and spice we’re fed about mothers and motherhood. That this sickness—postpartum neurotic depression—makes a woman weepy and crazy, and makes some of us kill our babies.”
    Ruby and I lay