Grief Street

offices until such time as a bona fide artist such as your fine self has had opportunity to evaluate its potential. Thus, the play is submitted for your approval, with my attendant high hopes. Naturally, you will see yourself in the principal rôle of Annie Meath. I shall take the further liberty of telephoning one day soon, at which time we may enjoy proper discussion of our future—including a reading of the piece I have arranged for Monday evening next. Until then, my special blessings upon you & yrs.

    There was no signature.
    “Exactly what stage of development is the guy talking about?” I asked. I was now standing by the couch where Ruby sat, her face uptilted and enthusiastic. I gave the letter back to her and tried to muster something positive to say. “The guy writes a letter like he’s living back in the time of his characters.”
    “We’re talking about a backer’s audition on Monday night, the day after Easter. A staged reading for potential angels is what I mean.” Ruby talked like a teacher addressing a dunce. “And even at this early point in a long process—which is longer than I’m planning on being pregnant— the guy actually cares about artistic judgment.” Ruby grabbed the letter out of my hands. She was irritated with me, probably because I was not saying what she wanted to hear. Which is what I mean by actors being tricky when they ask for advice. “By the way, what makes you think the playwright’s a man?”
    “I don’t know—”
    “You don’t know much else about it either. You should read the play.”
    “When do I get a chance? It came in the morning mail. You looked it over while I made coffee, you glommed onto it all to yourself, then you shooed me out of the house for I the day—”
    “Read it now. Who’s stopping you?”
    “Could a guy get his dinner first?”
    “Stop worrying about your stomach all the time. People are going to start thinking you’re the preg-o.”
    Another thing about Ruby: the bigger she grows these days, the more she tries to convince me how I should slim down by going to one of those gyms full of painful contraptions left over from the Middle Ages. Maybe some of my ancestors were tortured on such contraptions. This is how she nags me: You should be fit, you’re going to be a daddy. Don’t even think of dropping dead on me when the tuition bills come rolling in. I tell her I probably have a finite number of heartbeats and so I should not be wasting any of them sweating through exercises on torture racks.
    “I’ll look at it tonight,” I promised.
    “Fat chance. First you’ll eat dinner, then you’ll put on the radio while you’re reading some novel. Not the beach kind. Then you’ll fall asleep in your chair with your mouth open and your belly pooching over your belt. After which I’ll have to drag you into bed and you’ll fall dead asleep.”
    “Okay then, tomorrow. It’s Good Friday tomorrow. I’m off in the afternoon.”

    So all right, Ruby knew my habits. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of Robertson Davies’s final novel— The Cunning Man, about a police surgeon and the mysterious death of an Anglican priest, on Good Friday yet—and somewhere toward the end of Rich Conady’s Big Broadcast program on WQEW. The radio show had just started when Ollie’s Noodle Shop & Grille over on West Forty-fourth delivered our order of mu shu pork, shredded chicken with yellow leeks, and curry-flavored Singapore mai fun. When I nodded off, I remember Conady was playing a medley of Bix Beiderbecke.
    Maybe it was the food that put the pictures in my head. I have vivid dreams when I eat from the Ollie’s menu. Or maybe it was the nagging thought of Ruby’s play, set in the very darkest of the Kitchen’s dark days, which I knew without having to read some mysterious playwright’s script.

    I remember drifting off to those Bix tunes, to dark neighborhood memories, and to a dream about memory itself.

Murals spray-painted on scarred walls of Kitchen buildings, portraits surrounded by images and symbols and people’s names. What was this art? Memorials to the ones slaughtered in our streets. Paintings by survivors, telling us that the murdered must not be forgotten.
When we forget, memory is corroded. That is devastating.
Memory makes it possible for people to be responsive, and responsible: to learn, to plan, to choose, to create, to love. Memory civilizes us. Memory is the power to make connections, which is the whole idea of