Grief Street

bathroom. Afterward, she returned to the bar and forced herself to ask some more questions.
    “But how was it squared, Johnny? Legally I mean.”
    “In those days, there was a doctor working out of a rented room in a shylock’s house, here in the neighborhood. The guy had a good business in treating bullet wounds for Westies and keeping his mouth shut about it.”
    “And the cops knew about this doctor.”
    “You’re a cop wife. What do you think?”
    “That your cop father leaned on the doctor to sign a death certificate.”
    Johnny Kay laughed his father’s laugh again, and then said, “As my old man says—whatever needs doctoring, you can always find a doctor.”
    Ruby left the Savoy, hurrying four blocks home on her high heels. She had to be sick again. But first she paused in the street just outside the apartment building, and stood there thinking for a long moment.
    What was it Hock had said?
    There are things I’m not noticing, even though I’ve seen \ them all my life. Things I’m not hearing for that matter.
    Then she hurried upstairs. She was sick.
    She telephoned the lawyer holding the escrow account-“I have to see you,” Ruby told him.

    Father Morrison heated lasagna left from the day before and set this out on the table by the fire, along with corn bread and the last of the peas canned up in Mason jars from last year’s garden harvest. There was also milk, fresh from the cow that morning. Being a city hike, I had never in my life tasted milk so direct from the source, milk so thick and butter sweet.
    “I couldn’t be sorrier for calling you the name,” I said. This was about midway through the meal. “We were fool kids."
    “Nae, then you was only a bunch of little shits. It’s when you was all grown and still calling me Creepy that you graduated to fools.”
    “I thought you said that name was like a favorite tune.”
    “Ha! You remember that much, do you?”
    “Remembering is supposed to be my trade,” I said. “By the way, did I remember to tell you about an old man named Sam Glick?”
    “Not yet.”
    “He was the temple caretaker and sort of Paznik’s assistant. The old fellow was devoted to the rabbi. Sam Glick was absolutely paralyzed by Paznik’s murder. Afterward he died himself, of natural causes, if you can call a broken heart natural. He left me a message, in Hebrew. Just a single word, Zachor. Which reminds me, I still have to find out the meaning in English.”
    “It’s a simple translation you’re needing? Who do you suppose you’re talking to? I’m a Jesuit, for the love of Christ. I should say I speak the mother tongue of our Lord. Zachor —it means remember.”
    “Remembrance is the message of the play...”
    “A cliché from the Holy Bible itself—Isaiah, chapter forty-four, verse twenty-one: God saith, ‘Never forget Me.’ ”
    “God speaks in clichés?”
    “Only when he’s preposterously quoted by men writing for the Bible. Come now, are we to believe that God actually told man he’d appreciate being remembered? What possible difference could it make to God and his rather busy schedule if some mortal idiot forgot him? And who but a idiot—some Bible scribe, some forefather of Robert Waller in the school of mass market literary treacle—entertains the arrogant notion of forgetting God?”
    ‘You would have made an interesting book critic.”
    “Sorry to be contrarian, boy, but seldom is a critic more interesting than a brusher of noblemen’s clothes. Professional critics, simply put, are incapable of writing what they’re reviewing.”
    “I’d like to review some of what we discussed earlier today.”
    “Query to you first, boy: do you not like cherry pie?”
    “Yes... No. I mean, I do like cherry pie.”
    “Good then, I’ve half a one left. I’ll pop it into the oven. We’ll have it warm after walking off a bit of dinner.”
    The wind across the mountains was high that night, as cutting as any I know that skim across the Hudson River. The windows of the hermit’s house rattled. My sweater would hardly do for a walk in the mountain air. So I borrowed one of Father Morrison’s heavy jackets, and we set out.
    Beyond the clearing that surrounded the house at the crest of the mountain, the hermitage was set up as a rustic campus for a student body of one. There was an adjoining single-room chapel, a small barn and day pen for the animals out back, an aviary, garden, and orchard. Hillside trees were farmed for firewood needs.