Grief Street

had no stomach for listening close to the details of a sister’s true sex concerns, the tales they invented having terrified us so.
    Eddie maintains a sense of humor about his deformity. With one hand cupped to his lone ear and a finger of the other pointing to the flat side of his head, he says, “I must be the smartest guy in the world. What goes in one ear, it don’t got nowhere to come out.”
    He enjoys thinking of himself as one of my snitches, even though I have never paid him a dollar out of the department’s squeak budget. So the least I can do for Eddie the Ear when I see him is to indulge him with his favorite conversational gambit. Which is what I did now, by asking, “What do you hear lately, Eddie?”
    Eddie pushed up his spectacles with a thumb. “Besides a kid being on the way to you and your missus,” he said, “I hear Ruby’s planning a return into show biz.”
    “I guess, maybe…”
    I meant I guess about Ruby and show biz. There was little doubt as to the meaning of Ruby’s belly. I looked at my wristwatch. It was time for me to be sitting around the apartment agitating about dinner and otherwise talking with my wife, after which I would nap and read; after which I would have reason to slip into a troubled sleep, with a sweaty dream about crimes against memory. As for right now, I had been gone plenty long enough to please Ruby.
    “Anyhow,” I said to Eddie, who was now wearing a look of anticipation, “a script came in the mail.”
    “Yeah, I heard that. Heard it’s a real inter-restin’ play.”
    “You know more about it than me, Eddie. Ruby was raving about the writing—and the politics of the piece, what-1 ever they are. She never told me the title.”
    “I hear it’s called Grief Street. I hear it’s about the ] Kitchen.”

Two

    L ater into the night, as I lay sweating and dreaming, others in Hell’s Kitchen were wide awake. These were fourteen elderly congregants of Congregation Ezrath Israel, called the Actors Temple since it is near so many Broadway theaters. Their heads were bowed as they sat stiffly in the pews, listening intently to a friend of mine by the name of Rabbi Marvin Paznik read...
    …After which they were horrified by something they would all describe as a “shadow.”
    Can a shadow have a smell? Fourteen old men and women agreed it could. They said the shadow reeked like something that thrives on death, something like maggots. They said the shadow that smelled was just “suddenly there.”
    They said the shadow covered their rabbi in darkness, like a black cloak. They said this shadow, whatever it was, smothered my friend; and with some unseen blade, slashed an d hacked at him. And when the attack was over, the shadow vanished into the Hell’s Kitchen night.
    Rabbi Marvin Paznik had been celebrating a midnight observance of Yom Hashoah—the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust, which happens to coincide with my own holiday of Good Friday. My friend Marv was leading a Kaddish, in respect for the millions of slaughtered souls, known and unknown.
    From a page in his prayer book—marked with bloody whorls of his right index finger, which Marv likely used to follow the ritual reading—I know the last words he uttered:
    “Man is feeble and perishable; many of his devices and efforts are vain. Like a shadow he appears and passes away, and no trace is left of his footprints. From the hour of his birth, he begins a journey fraught with pain and disappointment, and hourly hastens on toward the night of his grave.... The closed eye is only then satisfied with seeing...”

Three

    A t twilight, the eve of midnight’s holiday murder, I stood at the west window of my apartment. Thanks to the gauzy scrim of pollution that colors the air over New Jersey, with glassy particulates serving as thousands of prisms, sunsets can be spectacular.
    Right now, in fact, I was absorbing an inspirational view of a flattening sun bleeding to death over the Jersey horizon. Closing in was the darkening color of a Hell’s Kitchen night: black and blue, like bruises. Hanging just over the steeple of the Croatian church at West Forty-first was the trace of a full moon, its cheese yellow light growing stronger as the sun exhausted itself.
    “So what do you think, Irish?”
    Ruby asked me this from the couch. She was sitting there under the south window, shoes and socks on the floor, bare feet tucked beneath her thighs. In pregnancy, she was not entirely