18

Lourdes died. My wife died. I hated Hollywood. It hated me back. I was old, which for the new breed of studio suits meant anyone over the age of thirty. (“How would these geezers know what teenagers want?”) I’d never done the party scene or made more than a couple of really true friends out there, at least none who were still alive, so at eighty I packed it in and moved back to New York, where I was shocked to see sunlight falling on sidewalks that once had known only shadow and dust beneath the Second and Third Avenue els. They had now been torn down, so that the streets looked like the Champs Elysées with delicatessens. Other things had changed, although not to the good, and I fell into a deep and quite possibly borderline paranoid interest in newspaper ads for a “Walking Stick for the Elderly New Yorker” that at the press of a conveniently located button turned it into a sword cane fitted with a blade at its end that had been tipped with the venom of the Boston Harbor blowfish, the same one that they said had killed Einstein. I bought two, one with a dark oak finish and the other in a light bamboo, and thus equipped I filled most of my days with jaunty doddering around the old nabes. The park and the handball courts were still there on 37th and First, but when I went looking for 469 Second Avenue—where Foley and his family used to live in a top-floor walk-up and I used to yell up at him to “Come on down!”—there was no such address, a sprawling supermarket now taking up the whole block. St. Stephen’s was different too: it was now called the Church of Our Lady of the Scapular, the even bigger difference being that weekdays and Saturday the doors to the church were now locked, as were the tall black iron gates to the school yard—not only during the summers but also both before and right after school hours. Amazingly, the Madame Monique Arrigo fortune-telling shop was still there, although now with the name “Your Future Told” and, of course, different personnel, and one day for the fun of it, for the insouciant je ne sais quoi of it, I walked slowly and carefully up those old brownstone steps and then into the shop to have my palm read by a pretty young blonde wearing heavy eye shadow and golden earrings. She told me that I still had a “very long life” ahead of me in which I could pursue my “true gift,” which she said was “accounting.” True enough, I suppose. Of course I spent a lot of hours sitting alone on a bench along the East River walkway and remembering things.

Very nice. Very sad as well. But cheap.

One winter’s day I took the BMT to Coney Island. Most things were boarded up, of course, the rides still, the boardwalk empty, and the ocean darkly biding its time. I found the bench where Not Nathan’s used to be and sat down and stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat. It was cold. The sky was cloudy and looking like it wanted to rain. Good fishing weather. The gulls and the pelicans knew it; they were circling very quietly, as if they were planning a sneak attack. My thoughts drifted for an hour or so until I saw a huge four-masted sailing ship silently and gracefully crossing the horizon as if it had slipped through a crack in time. I knew some big historical maritime event was coming up, and thought maybe it was headed to the gathering site, or even to some motion picture filming location. Just then a patch of sky opened up in the clouds so that a narrow shaft of sunlight caught the ship’s sails, softly washing them in gold and vermilion, and though my lips barely moved and I didn’t at all mean to speak, I could hear myself murmuring almost inaudibly:

“‘Oh, Lucia, what we’ve missed!’”