Grief Street

could be folded into a wallet. There were three television sets suspended over the long curving bar, each the size of an icebox from my tenement youth, each tuned to a professional golf tournament. (As nearly as I understand it, golf is the same as playing marbles, only more expensive.) Underneath the TV golfers and their rainbow Coogi sweaters was a crawling line of video letters and numbers: the daily stock quotations. The meaning of You’re not going to like what’s in there was slowly but surely dawning on me. Father Declan rubbed more salt. “All this you see, it’s only the first phase of destruction,” he said. “Wait until they get around to ruining the outside. With a canopy, with velvet ropes—”
    “Here? In the Kitchen?”
    “I’d not lie to you, Neil. It’s what they’re talking about. Besides the canopy and such, there’s to be a doorman, too.”
    “What? Some guy wearing a black suit and a thick neck, deciding whether you’re hip enough to get inside?”
    “Exactly the type.”
    “This bar, it was a neighborhood treasure—the last of the Hell’s Kitchen forty-cent draught joints. And now here they’re killing it.” Even as I spoke, a couple of workmen were busy dismantling the window fixtures, which were covered in layers of grease and smoke thick enough to please an archaeologist. The bartender coming our way was a brisk young guy who looked like he ought to be serving double lattes instead of liquor. I found the sight of him sobering-So I ordered a seltzer and fruit, and the same for the Roman collar next to me. I asked Father Declan, with a long-lost sigh that set the mood for a moment of nostalgia between an odd couple of ex-boozer harps, “Where did all the old beer boyos go?”
    “God only knows, the poor sods.” Father Declan wiped dry lips with the back of his hand. Some drinker’s habits never die. I suppose it was strange for the coffee latte bartender and the tiny yuppies to see us sitting there: Father Declan, sixtysomething, plump, and purple-clad; wiping his lips Bowery-style and chatting with his brogue to another one, younger and with a New York-born tongue, yet also wearing the map of Ireland for a face; stranger yet, two harps drinking charged water in place of whisky. “And poor, poor Forty-second Street,” my homeboy lamented. “It seems only yesterday how all these pubs stretching from Hudson docks to the Deuce were meant for our crowd.”
    “Well, but, Father—that whole waterfront life, it’s all gone, all of it. And the Deuce is under new ownership.”
    “When I think how many times I prayed for cleanliness and godliness to take root in these sorry old blocks...” Father Declan looked heavenward and shook his head, then entertained a second thought. “On the other hand, is it possible the Holy Father never answered my earnest prayers? After all, what we see now of these changes is sterility and eviction. Which are different things than clean and holy.”
    “Or else he did answer, and here we are again, faced with an act of God resulting in unintended consequences.”
    “Hear you, son, you’re talking like one of them doubledome Jesuits. Well, but it’s better than how I’m sounding...” Father Declan paused, and wiped his lips again. It was easy to read his mind, since the same idea crowded my own head: the want of a real drink. His hand trembled. Poor Declan Byrne, here he had come to rescue me- I touched his shoulder, and it calmed him. “Forgive me” he said, sighing as I had sighed. “I’m like a codger moaning for a past gone rosy-colored in the crust of his brain.”
    “We have our soft spots for the old days, that’s all,” I said. Me—forgive a priest?
    “That—and appreciation for such streets that provide the Justice of common ground,” said Father Declan, chuckling at his own remark.
    I asked him what he meant.
    “The finest of all the many revelries on the used-to-be Deuce came upon a blue and sunny day of June, better than fifty years ago,” he said. “It was mostly a good-hearted mob filling Times Square that day, cheered up and larky by the news of the Japanese surrender—meaning an end to the long war. Among the celebrants was a darkly smiling sailor from California with wiry black hair, a swoop nose, and— this pains me to say—an Irish name.”
    I had an idea who the priest was talking about.
    “The young sailor, a lieutenant he was, had come to spend the thousands he’d cheated off his mates in tricky