Grief Street

time—indeed seemed somewhat like myself. These parallels Slattery pointed out in his piece, a job as uncomplicated as pointing out himself in a mirror. But the rest was quite beyond him, or myself this late at night, for all the rest was a riddle.
    Exhausted by the mystery of fine writing with no answers, I took to bed a riddle that especially haunted me, a man waiting for his child to be born. The riddle was a poem, composed by a character never seen in the play— a girl dying from tuberculosis. If I understood the playwright’s meaning, the purpose of the girl’s poem was in speaking to generations across the divides of time and culture, and in speaking of the history that unites and dignifies us all—memory:

    When you are outside playing ball,
    please toss one for me.
    Let the grownups mourn and cry,
    and give their hearts some ease.
    But you, please listen, please:
    Live each one of you for one of us.

    I fell asleep dreaming the girl’s poem, and remember dreaming it again as I woke; and thinking, It seems insane to be dreaming such things at once.
    Riddles, and murder, and eloquence...
    But then, dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

Twenty

    “ R emember the Easter we were walking to church with them in the sunny morning like this? My-oh-my, but weren’t we the pride of the parish? Oh, I remember that Easter best of all. My little men—one nestled in your arms, so quiet and cooing, so beautiful. The other toddling along.”
    “Yeah, yeah. They was freaking angels.”
    “I’ll thank you not to cuss today.”
    “What’ll you have, then? An amen face like your own?”
    “Calm yourself, dear.”
    “Dear, she says. Calm yourself, she says. Here’s what I got to say to you—don’t be always living in that past you made up for yourself.”
    “But my dear, we all live in the past. There is nowhere else to live.”
    “Yeah? What do you call the here and now?”
    “Unbearable.”
    “When you’re right,” he said, with a shrug, “you’re freaking right.”
    The fat man in the tight blue suit and the woman in the pink feathered bonnet walked in silence for another block of Queens Boulevard. When their hands touched as they moved along, one or the other of them would draw back, as if intimacy was the most irritating factor of an unbearable married life. Occasionally some passerby would greet them. She would smile, seeming to mean it, and say, “God bless you this morning, the day of the Resurrection of Christ the Lord.” The fat man would wheeze and look away.
    “So,” he asked, snorting, “what do you call the future?”
    “The future is heaven.”
    “Think again, old babe. Maybe the future’s dead.”
    “Don’t say such a horrid thing.”
    “Your precious past—that’s dead for a fact.”
    “It’s not!”
    “You think I wouldn’t give my left nut to turn the clock back?” The fat man had become excited by this. He had to stop a moment to catch his breath, pulling loose a necktie that gagged him as he did so. “But changing time, that ain’t in my ability. No man’s rich enough to buy back his past.”
    “I see him in my sleep—”
    “Jesus H. Christ, here we go again.”
    “Not the one who left us to be with God. I mean the one still out there someplace... someplace. You know who he looks like?”
    The fat man did not answer immediately. His doughy face revealed nothing.
    “I don’t know,” he finally said. “Who?”
    “Like you, Joe. Like a dream of you—from years ago, when the world was right.”

Twenty-one

    S ister Roberta Lowther herself being right next to me as I knelt at the altar to take into my mouth my Easter communion host—the Body of Christ, soon to be followed by His Blood—I naturally felt my head pounding at the sternest of all her many warnings. No teeth, boys! Let the host melt in your mouth, else you’ll risk biting the Son of God in two. For that, you’re sure to roast in hell for eternity. To this day, I am extra mindful of my teeth at Christmas and Easter masses.
    I stole a number of sidelong glances at Sister. Her own eyes remained devoutly shut as the priest, aided by two altar boys in charge of the host tray and wine chalice, moved us through the rite—mumbling the ancient pledge on behalf of Jesus, “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood”—and thereby converting symbol to Lordly tissue and life fluid. Transubstantiation seemed a mystery more easily