Grief Street

to harvest gossip in the fields of the neighborhood.
    The mail in the lobby box was nothing to get excited about: a Lillian Vernon catalogue, a brochure produced at taxpayers’ expense giving me a rundown on my congressman’s latest heroics, a come-on letter from some health food Ponzi scam—complete with a lapel button reading I EAT FUNGUS, ASK ME WHY. Where do these people come from, and how do they get my address?
    I filed these communiqués in the appropriate location, the trash bin under the stairway. Then I climbed up to my place on the third floor.
    Ruby had gone somewhere that required some costume preparations. The telltale signs: her side of the clothes closet was standing open, a wire hanger dangled on the knob, her dresser drawers were left pulled out, the lid of her jewelry box was ajar. My wife is as messy as she is good-looking.

    I spotted Ruby’s red dress on the closet floor. And where had she gone in that number?
    I closed up the closet and stepped into the parlor. Wednesday morning’s tabloids sat in my chair. The Daily News screamed NUN RAPED & MUTILATED AT WOMEN’S SHELTER DIES IN HOSPITAL, whereas Slattery had again somehow won the tip to the tantalizing story behind the story: MOUNTAINTOP HERMIT AIDS COP IN DESPERATE SEARCH FOR KILLER-RAPIST. I skimmed over the reports in each, learning nothing I did not already know except that “sources high in the Police department,” read Inspector Neglio, had revealed my out-of-town trip.
    I did not bother calling Neglio to complain about his leaking to Slattery. With now the dead bodies of a rabbi, seven Catholic martyrs, and a nun, the mayor was no doubt in hysterics. For which I could not entirely blame him. So I Understood the inspector’s need to make it appear as if some headway were being made, if only a detective consulting with the likes of Creepy Morrison.
    Suddenly, an egg salad sandwich and French fries and a chocolate malted seemed like a good idea. So I left the apartment and headed off for the Stardust Dine-O-Mat, with the nagging thought that two hours downtown at the gym would be the cost of my meal.
    Halfway between Ninth and Eighth Avenues, I stopped in front of Holy Cross School.
    Come see me then, Neil, here at the church. I’ll be working Wednesday as usual...
    As a policeman for all these years, I know of moments that stand outside of time. Untimely moments, I call them. As when a heart stops beating, and a man can be both alive and dead. The heart of any matter — true or false — is found in the opening one gives to the other.
    Untimely moments are seldom lucky ones. They mostly contain the events of regret and grief that we struggle to forget, only to have them fly back in our faces with the changed wind of some future year.
    Standing now at the school entrance, remembering yesterday’s brief phone conversation with Father Declan, I felt that what was about to happen—whatever it was, inside Holy Cross and out—had somehow already occurred...
    ... Or that both things might have been prevented if only Ruby and I, walking toward each other from opposite ends of the remarkable street where we live, had met in some luckier moment of that Wednesday afternoon.

Thirty-three

    ”Are you sick? You’ve hardly eaten a thing.”
    Kowalski’s plate had an untouched pork chop on it. Another chop was only half gone, still floating in its bed of lettuce and applesauce. Kowalski held a knife and fork over a baked potato filled with sour cream and chives, picking at it listlessly, making a mess.
    “Yeah, that’s it, I’m sick. Also I am tired. So I am sick and tired.”
    “Eat up your chops at least. They cost almost six dollars a pound.”
    “That’s the kind of thing I remember you saying to the boy. By which I’m talking about the one of them that survived your sweet motherhood.”
    “No need for sarcasm and unpleasantness. We’re at the table now...”
    Kowalski’s wife wore a housedress, pale green cotton with a cabbage rose print. Thousands of women in Queens, feeding their husbands dinner at the breakfast hour after they a(l come home by subway from night shift jobs in Manhattan, wore such dresses. In thousands of homely row houses, such meals were quiet moments in workaday Queens, in Perfect keeping with ordinary time. Thus had it long been so where King Kong Kowalski and his wife lived with their silent, hated secrets. Until now.
    Eva Kowalski banged down her cutlery on the table. Her iron gray eyes went cold