Grief Street

her throat, something from behind. Sister tried screaming, producing nothing but a hoarse puff-Something caught her flailing left hand at the wrist, yanked it behind her, pulling her arm so hard she heard bone break.
    Then down she went, kicking and clawing through the struggling vegetable plants. Something dark, strong, and silent—and stinking—rode her back.
    Her face went slamming into damp soil. Something straddled above her, something with overwhelming weight and power.
    Sister Roberta used what breath she had to whisper prayers of self-preservation into the dirt. And prayers for the forgiveness of sin, even as she heard the tearing away of her skirts and knew, in clenching horror, the violation to come.
    But before that, an unanticipated violence: the fierce stabbing pain in her broken arm; a swoon of dark colors behind her eyes; blood bursting from her wrist, slicking bared thighs and buttocks.

Twenty-seven

    H ere now are Ruby and I, stepping out of a taxicab in front of Nixon’s place on East Sixty-fourth Street. Stuart Godwin’s place, that is, he being the Broadway type who had a lot of answering to do about Grief Street. Ruby had her questions, I certainly had mine.
    For the moment, Ruby and I were the only ones who arrived in a car that was yellow. The curb was lousy with BMWs and Jags. Everybody stepping out of the Beamers belonged to the same raffish contingent: young goombata from Bay Ridge or someplace who looked like and acted like the sons of don’t-ask-who kind of men in the don’t-ask-what kind of business. The Jags were transport for another class: men who were prettier than a lot of women I have seen in my life.
    Also there was a parade of plain black cars with tinted windows. Liveried drivers would step out and open doors for the type of silver-templed, suntanned guys who have so much money they do not carry actual cash.
    Some more regular taxicabs like ours started showing up-White women in their thirties piled out of these. They all wore black dresses and blond hair, and came in groups.
    “You always see them at rich guys’ houses, and they always bring girlfriends,” Ruby whispered as we walked up to the door, pointing at these groupings. “You’re going to see squadrons of them tonight, looking for men and pretending
    not to.”
    There was a party going on inside the house, audible every time the butler opened up to admit somebody. As he was letting us in, a couple of hammered, sweaty-faced young guys with low-ball glasses in their hands stumbled out into the street to have themselves a puke break.
    “So this is show biz?” I asked Ruby.
    “It’s the part we call Deep Backstage, it’s not always pretty,” she said. “Don’t you know that all the wrong people own the money?”
    Nixon’s old salon—the big oblong room at the lower back end of the house, French doors leading out to a Japanese garden—was crawling with wrong people. Ruby and I snaked through a path of Armani suits and Donna Karan cocktail frocks in the general direction of the bar.
    I managed to get us a pair of seltzers with lime. Myself because I am a drunk, and Ruby because she had to perform.
    A squadron of black dresses gave me the once-over and moved on, unimpressed. They nibbled low-fat carrot cake covered in low-fat cream cheese frosting, poking at it with sterling forks that had prongs sharp enough to break skin. The goombata hovered over a long table full of shucked oysters fanned out on a bed of crushed ice. A couple of silver-templed guys were talking investments: derivatives, whatever they are. Two ladies who fill their days with shopping and starving themselves were having a lively discussion about a scandal at the neighborhood prep school where their boys Spencer and Porter were students.
    Spencer? Porter?
    “My son tells me they snort it for extra concentration just before a test.”
    “Has Porter actually used it?”
    “Well of course not. But everybody knows it’s going on. Sorter says the snorters use Bic pen barrels.”
    “And Spencer says they cut the Ritalin into lines, just like coke. But where do they get it?”
    Porter says the bigger boys steal the pills from little dorks with A.D.D.—attention deficit disorder. Twenty milligrams goes for four dollars.”
    “Oh—and have you heard what the girls do?”
    “No.”
    “They carry around the stash in those adorable black and yellow Carmex lip gloss tubs from Caswell-Massey.”
    We were spared anything further on the