Grief Street

marble. “Don’t cry, it’s bad for the baby.”
    “There are worse things in the life of a child than his mother’s tears.”
    “What’s this mood of yours?”
    “Another case full of dread is about to consume a part of you, a part of us.”
    “Ruby, don’t—”
    “Don't pat my hand and say, There-there, little gal, you’re pregnant. I wouldn’t be the first woman in history to know that all by herself. This case—it’s about your rabbi friend, isn’t it?”
    “I wouldn’t be the first cop working a job that’s close to home.”
    “You always manage somehow to make it personal. Which is boneheaded. Not to mention that it goes against lesson number one at police academy.”
    “I don’t need you to be calling me stupid.”
    “Correction. I called you a bonehead.”
    This is where Ruby might have laughed at me, and made me like it. Instead she cried. The tears came abruptly, and it was a few seconds before she realized them. Then again, that apprehensive look in her uptilted face. This was disconcerting to me, and it struck me how much—how selfishly— I relied on Ruby for my own sense of balance.
    “I see you’ve been studying the bashful playwright’s script.” I thought a change of subject was in order. How could I then know I had done no such thing? “Still high on your role?”
    Ruby’s hands clenched, then relaxed. The pages of the Script, which she had unclipped to look at one by one, spilled to the floor. I leaned forward and gathered up the onionskin Papers, among them the title page and the page immediately following—on which a poetic inscription had been penned, ink the same pale cherry color as the handwritten letter from the anonymous author.
    ». Go ahead, read at least the epigraph if nothing else,” Ruby said. Even without her glasses, she saw which page held.
    I first read the epigraph to myself, nodding my head in agreement. Then I recited the line from Pablo Neruda “ ‘Out of every dead child comes a rifle with eyes, every crime breeds bullets that will one day find their way to your heart.’ ”
    “Disturbing, wouldn’t you agree?” Ruby said.
    “Also beautiful in a way.”
    “Isn’t that just like your precious Hell’s Kitchen?” Apprehension remained in Ruby’s face. “I heard on the radio that it was not beautiful today in your briar patch.”
    “No, it wasn’t.”
    “Tell me. Don’t skip anything just because I’m a pregnant lady.”
    I told her everything, or practically: about the crime scene at Temple Ezrath Israel, a remembrance of Marv telling me about Shabbatai Sevi and his notion of a wounded God; about old Mr. Glick and his confusion about a “shadow,” and his apartment that smelled of kasha; about Pauly Kerwin sleeping in Bob’s Park because the Midget Arms and just about everything else on the Deuce was going Disney; about my brief temptation on seeing the swirly orange windows, a bar chat with Father Declan Byrne, my confession to him of feeling out of my depth in an unholy case, his suggestion that I make an uneasy journey to consult a hermit.
    “All very interesting, especially the unlikely part about your leaving the city to go talk to some lonesome priest up in the Catskills,” Ruby said. “But you edited, didn’t you. dear? You left out something nasty, didn’t you? Something with a tail—?”
    There was a lot of sudden noise from the street below, interrupting Ruby. We both looked out the window, and Ruby asked, “Speaking of holy questions, what’s with the mob down there?”
    Striding righteously down Tenth Avenue in sandals and raggedy caftans—against the snarl of theater-rush traffic was a pack of earnest-looking pillars of Catholic laity-Seven good men and true, engaged in a passion play straight from devoutest Eire: sullen-faced marchers, shoulders high, sharing the burden of a wooden cross the length of a city bus. As kids, I pegged these guys as the type who irritated me and my own crowd with their unseemly eagerness to know by heart all the prayers—the Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Confiteor, the Apostles’ Creed, the Act of Contrition, the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary—equally as well in Irish, English, and Latin. They preferred Latin, of course, this being the language of Christian martyrs; so attested Creepy Morrison and all others of the Holy Cross School faculty, including even the otherwise dear and reasonable Sister Roberta, who were horrified by the official scrapping of the Latin