Grief Street

shooed me away. I tried sleeping at home, but failed.
    Ruby’s second overnight at Roosevelt came and went.
    There was a third night.
    Then finally the news, which was not good.
    We lost our baby.

Epilogue

    A couple of weeks before Independence Day, on the Saturday afternoon of a perfect blue and sunny day in June, a man by the name of Mike Taylor telephoned Ruby and me.
    “All right,” he said, “I’ve got enough done so that I want you over here to see what a genius I am.”
    Mike Taylor the genius was the general contractor we had hired to overhaul the house on West Fortieth Street. He started this work of his only after I had arranged for three other jobs to be done.
    First, I paid a lot of money to have the basement dug up, drained, cleared, and cemented over. Next, I hired an exterminator to fumigate the place from top to bottom. And lastly, I persuaded a hermit priest to come down off the mountain and into the city to perform an exorcism of the house.
    Many people in this day and age believe an exorcism is a big deal. Which it is not, usually. Certainly not in the case of a house, which involves only a little holy water being tossed about and a lot of “I cast thee out, Satans” hollered by a priest duly authorized by some mortal higher-ups. Creepy Morrison was happy to do the hollering. And I was the genius—no, Ruby said, merely the just-in-case type of Catholic—who figured that an exorcism at our new house was good medicine for the whole neighborhood.
    That sunny day in June, we entered the house by walking up Mike Taylor’s sturdily rebuilt stoop and through the grand front door. Taylor the genius had personally repaired the ceiling, buttressing the crossbeams and replacing delicate plaster. The front windows were being fitted with new oak frames, inside and out, by a fine carpenter named Roger Padgett. New lath work was being installed in the corridors and parlor, and in the walls of the sweeping central staircase. Both fireplaces had new brick and marble foundations ready for mantelpieces.
    Taylor had hired a gang of women from the church-sponsored shelter next door and put them to work, too. This was all Ruby’s idea: her newest project, on-the-job training for an all-female architectural restoration crew. Two women were busy replacing rosettas and cherubs in the parlor mouldings when we arrived. Four more were at work in the back of the house, tiling the kitchen counters, and painting the walls a lacquered green and yellow. They had put up a sign outside the kitchen entrance that read SINNERS REPAINT!
    Home.
    “When can we move in?” Ruby asked Taylor.
    “A little more time, a little more money—well, a lot more money—and your genius contractor will have you all tucked in by Labor Day, give or take a few weeks. Let’s hope, anyway.”
    Hope.
    When we were back in the parlor, standing around admiring the future, I said to Ruby, “Remember my telling you about Tyrone Matson, the young cop who backed me up that terrible night?”
    “He’s recovered?”
    “Yes, he was lucky. He asked me once, Is there any hope?”
    “What did you say?”
    “I laughed it off then. But I’ve been thinking about hope ever since.”
    “And now?”
    “I think this neighborhood of ours is the meaning of hope. People who don’t know the place, they’ll look at Hell’s Kitchen and say there’s no hope. But people like us who live here, we just keep trying.”