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— Sally?

He can hear her now in the kitchen, the rattle-out of the dishwasher, the clank along the rollers. Why in the world she needs to run the dishwasher he’ll never know, it’s not as if I spoiled a hundred plates with marmalade and toast.

And what is it that he wanted to say to Sally anyway, so deep in thought was he, back in Ireland, the good years, why interrupt them now, except perhaps the memory is so raw, and snow is general all over Eighty-sixth Street, the half-living, and I think she died for love, Eileen, I think she died for love.

— Mr. J.?

— It’s snowing out there.

— Yes, Mr. J.

Looking at him now, expecting something else. Hardly enough to interrupt her from the dishwasher just to tell her what she already knows, the snow coming down like an argument for snow.

— I was just thinking, he says.

She nods and her gold earrings go jangling. Looking at him now very curiously. What is it that goes on in her head? Does she think I’m senile? All age and folly? An old white man in his old white body? Does she think of slaveships coming across the waves? Does she think of her own darling grandson back there in the Caribbean? Isn’t that what she saves for? To send him to school? A good education for her grandson, or is it her nephew? Kindhearted Sally, all her life directed towards that boy. Don’t let him break your heart, Sally. And does she remember the good days I had with Eileen? Does she recall the fine household we had? Though truth be told, they sometimes went at it hammer and tongs, Sally and Eileen, many a good argument indeed, black and white, and Eileen had a sharp tongue on her, she could sometimes cut Sally down, the big tall tree tumbling, and oh, what is it I wanted to say, what did I need?

— I think I’d like to go to Chialli’s today, Sally.

His almost daily ritual.

— Yes, sir. In the snow?

— In the snow, yes, ma’am.

— You made you a reservation?

He scoots backwards in his chair. I do indeed have a reservation, Sally, though truth be told it’s more with your grammar, not the restaurant. Hardly worth it to correct her now, let bygods be bygones.

— What time is it, Sally?

— Ten fifteen, sir.

— Let’s make one for one.

— Sir?

— One o’clock, Sally. Call Chialli’s. And I’ll call Elliot. Maybe he can drag himself away for once.

She is lovely, once and always, Sally James, moonlight in her hair, wherever she walks cool breezes fan the glade, I strolled with her beneath the leafy shade, oh, I never kissed a black woman in my life, but it must be said that many of them have beautiful lips, and teeth to match, but not Sally, more’s the pity, or maybe just as well, no ancient temptations. Still and all, the old songs are always the best.

— Yes, sir, Mr. J.

— Thank you, Sally.

One never forgets the first kiss though, and while there were a few before Eileen — some that were paid for, if truth be told, in Dresden, the shiksas along the barrack walls who were known for their questionable virginity — it was really just all Eileen, and even if she wasn’t the first, she was, she always would be, now and tomorrow and the day after. How many letters did he send to her over the years? Hundreds, thousands even. Eileen Daily, she once called herself. Lovely once and always, with moonlight in her hair. He wrote to her from his high school in the Bronx. He wrote to her from the corridors of Fordham. He wrote to her when he joined the Air Force. And all that time he had never even said a single word to her, face-to-face. How odd it was to know someone so well and never have talked a single word in her presence. There was, of course, the telephone, and they had chatted down the wires, perplexed by one another’s accents, but never face-to-face, and it was not until 1952 when he was stationed in Dresden, an office job, checking flight patterns, an awful bore, day in, day out, reams of paperwork, clouds of pipesmoke, but he still wrote two letters a day, and she wrote back to him, grand professions of love and literature, and then he had a week of R & R, and he shined his shoes, pomaded his hair, stepped aboard a plane to Glasgow, where he hired a car, and met her in Edinburgh where she was studying literature, and neither of them could ever remember the very first words they spoke to each other, quite possibly they were speechless, but later that night he fell to his knees and asked her to marry him, you’re the love of my life, a chuisle mo chroí, you wrote it to me in several of your letters, I don’t know quite what it means, but marry me, please, Eileen, do. She blushed and said yes, and she lowered her eyelids, and his heart hammered in his shirt, and he said it would be a stylish marriage, though if we’re telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, it must be said that very little is ever truly idyllic, except in retrospect, and, to be honest now, he was just a tiny bit disappointed by Eileen Daly when he saw her first, she was not quite how he remembered her, at the window, in Leeson Street, looking out, raindrops across her eyes, no, she had grown a tad pudgier and her skin was of a pallor that tended away from the pink he remembered, and she was rather ordinary of eye-color, though he soon forgot that, and she became lovely again, if not even lovelier, but if another truth be told — a deeper truth — he was hardly a perfect specimen himself, rather he was a long thin drink of water with a big pair of spectacles on his nose, and anxious eyes, and his trousers at half-mast as if his own body was in mourning for what God gave him, and a skinny set of arms on him, not exactly a nautilus man, he couldn’t afford a carriage, a few stray hairs on his chin, already the fuzz on the dome thinning, a little peninsula on top of his head, and truly he had to admit that, later that night, when he tucked himself into bed next door, that he was getting the better end of the deal, marrying Eileen Mendelssohn, née Daly, and they fit rather well together, hand in hand along Anne Street, the whole world open to them, they would be married in six months and living in New York where she tested her new name on her tongue, and wandered along the Avenue of the Americas in full and righteous bloom, oh, she loved Leopold Bloom, too, that’s for sure, and where in the world did I come up with that phrase questionable virginity?

Which reminds me, I must call my errant son.

Where in the world, Sally, did I put my BlackBerry? Is it here, beneath the newspaper, everything that’s fit to print, anchored down by my empty coffee cup?

Oh, Eileen, I miss you. Daily, daily, daily.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendos,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

Poets, like detectives, know the truth is laborious: it doesn’t occur by accident, rather it is chiseled and worked into being, the product of time and distance and graft. The poet must be open to the possibility that she has to go a long way before a word rises, or a sentence holds, or a rhythm opens, and even then nothing is assured, not even the words that have staked their original claim or meaning. Sometimes it happens at the most unexpected moment, and the poet has to enter the mystery, rebuild the poem from there.

There are thirty-four days of footage from each of the eight cameras in Mendelssohn’s building: 59 East Eighty-sixth Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, just two hundred yards from the restaurant. The first camera captures the double glass doorways of the pre-war building, the high steps, the awning. The picture widens to the far sidewalk, the north side of Eighty-sixth Street. A limited angle, poor depth of field, north to south, recorded with a 50 mm lens. Another in the lobby itself. One in the laundry room downstairs. One on the staircase. One on the roof. One in the elevator. One by the boiler room. Another in the storage area downstairs.