Into the white blank nothingness of his serene mind, into the clear empty space surrounded by air transparent and pure, into this carefully controlled empty blankness came the single image of a boy pushing a grocery cart, and he obliterated this image at once, forcing it out and away, leaving the clean open space again and the blankness which nothing could invade the apartment building in red brick facing the water and the service elevator with the colored operator who always offered him cigarettes he suspected they were marijuana he told him his father was a cop and he wasn’t allowed to smoke ha his father wasn’t even a cop, he closed his mind down again. If whiteness didn’t work, you went to black; you closed the mind in tight like the diaphragm of a camera, tighter and tighter, the shutter closing and blotting out everything in contracting blackness, the straight-edged circle in the center coming down smaller and smaller, showing less and less light, until there was only a pinpoint, and then you forgot the allusion of a camera’s shutter entirely, a camera was a thought, you obliterated the camera image, and with it the pinpoint of light in the center of your mind, you closed down to total darkness, you swam, not swam, you floated, not floated, you allowed the blackness, dark and darker.
Nothing.
He looked like Grandpa.
No, he did not look at all like Grandpa; he was an old Jewish man, and he sat with his shawl wrapped around him, and his yarmulka on the back of his head, and his hands shook, and he coughed all the time, I did not want to go near him at first, I was afraid I would catch his disease, whatever it was.
Into the blackness now, he knew it would not work, into the blackness, you taught me a trick that doesn’t work, you son of a bitch, into the blackness came memory, pushing back the blackness, seeping into the center of the dark plane, and shoving the blackness back like a parting curtain, pushing its edges out of the mind until only the memory was there, vague and badly defined, the first time he delivered groceries to Apartment 4A, 2117 Riverside Drive, and the colored girl opened the door, and the old man with the shawl and the yarmulka was sitting by the window in sunshine.
Into the memory, a side theme of the memory, came the image of his grandfather lying in his coffin, and he knew now why his grandfather did not look the same. They had taken off his glasses. He had never seen his grandfather without glasses before, and this man in the coffin looked particularly vulnerable, as though expecting a blow in the face, I told her fifty dollars wasn’t enough. And then the second memory, the memory of the apartment, expanded and grew, brighter now, its edges more clearly defined with a sharpness that was painful, and he knew that terror lurked just beyond the pain, and he tried again to shut out the memory, but it would not go. It came instead in flashing vignettes, seconds long, the first time he had explained to the old man about the Zwieback in the order the day before, the time the old man asked him to stay a while and talk to him, the time the old man
A shudder ran up Buddwing’s spine.
There had been a gentleness about that old Jewish man, a blue-veined, translucent gentleness as he sat in the sun and chatted with Buddwing each time he delivered an order. The shawl he wore on his shoulders was made of silk, blue and white, with white tassels, and he wore the black yarmulka perched precariously, almost rakishly, on the back of his skull. They never talked for more than ten minutes at a time, sitting by the window overlooking the Hudson River, the sunlight streaming in past the lace curtains, the colored girl humming around the house as she did her work, and the old man’s voice gently asking questions, wanting to know all about the job, wanting to know what Buddwing’s future plans were, wanting to know all about Buddwing’s friends, all about Buddwing’s dreams. He told the old man that his closest friends were L.J. and Beethoven and Red Vest, and he explained how Beethoven was an excellent artist and hoped to go to Pratt Institute after he got out of high school. He told the old man about Doris, and how he had given her his silver scholarship pin — “You gave her a medal?” the old man asked. “You’re serious with this girl?” — and sitting there in the warm sunshine with the old man was somehow reminiscent of coming to the tailorshop and going into the back room where Uncle Freddie had the pressing machine going, and Grandma was making hot chocolate, and then coming out to join Grandpa at the counter, leaning on the counter and sipping his chocolate and telling Grandpa everything that had happened. Ten minutes at a time, perhaps once or twice a week, until Buddwing began to look forward to his visits, and then the end of the summer grew near.
The woman who answered the door that day was not the colored girl. He had never seen this woman before in his life, but she was wearing black, and the apartment behind her was ominously still, and then he saw the other people, strangers, and he froze on the sill of the apartment.
His eyes opened wide. The strange woman standing in the doorway looked at him curiously.
He saw the coffin.
He saw the old man in the coffin.
He must have asked, “Is he dead?” because the woman was saying, “Yes. Yes, he is dead.” He dropped the package of groceries and turned and ran and almost collided with the wall. The colored elevator operator asked him why he was crying, and he said, “My grandfather is dead,” and then went down to where the grocery cart was waiting. He did not deliver any of the other orders in the cart. He went back to the store and told Di Palermo he was feeling sick, and then he took the subway home and thought all the while that if he had only insisted, if he had only convinced Mandy to spend seventy-five dollars instead of fifty, if only they hadn’t given him such a lousy cheap crumby wreath, Sure, it’s good enough, the old man would still be alive.
Now, sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, tears came into his eyes again, and he tried to blink them away, looking across at the steps of the school again, and desperately willing Grace to appear.
Oh, Jesus, why did you have to die? he thought, and he rubbed his fists against his eyes, and blinked at the building, and knew suddenly that Grace would not come, there was no Grace. He rose from the bench. His feet were unsteady beneath him. He stumbled, regained his footing, and looked about him curiously, as if uncertain where he was. Who... who was I waiting for? he wondered. Grace? But there is no Grace, you see. There is no grace for a cheap son of a bitch who defiled his grandfather’s memory, God, God, even the ribbon was shabby, “In Loving Memory,” you piano-legged bitch, you hated the old man, you said so, there is no grace, you will find no grace in this secret park.
Where is she? he thought, and suddenly all reason seemed to leave him, the hope of finding Grace mingling with the despair of never finding her again until he wanted to shriek aloud, and then did shriek the single word, “Grace!” and knew he was insane.
He stopped in the middle of the footpath and stared at the ground helplessly. He suddenly felt robbed of all volition, void of any sense of direction, powerless to move. He had come here to find a girl named Grace, G.V., the initials in his ring, and now those twin memories had caused him to realize she would not be here, had caused him to know with terrifying certainty he would not find her at N.Y.U., though this was where he had found her, why wasn’t she here now? Why? he asked, and suddenly he did not want to know more, he did not want memory. Jesse, teach me, he thought, teach me to make my mind a blank, I do not want to know the rest, there is no Grace.