North River (11 page)

“He will.”

“How old is he anyway?”

“Old enough.”

On the way home, he began thinking of cutting a separate stairway into the back kitchen. To keep the boy away from patients and anyone else who might come in the door. He could not close the kitchen to Carlito, because the boy loved its Sicilian aura of plenitude, its position as a kind of warm center of the chilly house, and its entry into the garden. Delaney thought: I’ll call Knocko to send over a carpenter to make an estimate. At home, Delaney placed one new bat beside Monique’s desk and gave the second to Rose. She gripped the handle awkwardly, then smiled at Delaney.

“I don’t know nothin’ about baseball,” she said.

“I’ll teach you if you want. But this isn’t for playing ball.”

“It’s for breaking a head, right?”

“Right.”

She smiled in an odd way, then swung the bat sharply through the air, upper teeth clamped over her lower lip. He showed her how to hold the bat, and she swung again. This time something cold came into her eyes.

If Eddie Corso indirectly had created the sense of siege on Horatio Street, the bounty of Eddie Corso was providing solutions. Delaney thought with a chuckle: Maybe I can cut into the cornice on the roof and set up archers. To peer across the empty lot toward Jane Street. Aiming arrows. To pierce the hide of anyone they see with a mortar. Or a lance. Maybe we can take over the roof of the empty Logan house, the high ground. Maybe we can arrange snares that fall on a signal. Or string barbed wire all the way to the North River. Maybe . . .

The weather warmed on Thursday and the snow was gone on Friday. When Delaney went on house calls now, he noticed men standing in small groups at all corners of the block and on one of the rooftops across the street. The faces were not always the same. But he could pick out Knocko’s boys, with their derby hats, and Danny Shapiro wandering from the precinct, and a few of the regulars from Angela’s. All of them protecting their own, which, Delaney thought, in this case happens to be me. And the boy. And Monique. And Rose. I can never move now.

“It’s like a block party around here,” Rose said, and laughed. “How many of these guys — I mean
your
guys — you think have guns?” Delaney said he didn’t want to know. In the places where he made house calls, neighbors nodded, and waited in the vestibules like guards. The word was out. This wasn’t just a neighborhood. Delaney knew that it was a point of view, a way of looking at the world and living in it. They all believed in the unions, the longshoremen, the teamsters, the carpenters, the steamfitters, and so did their wives. Even out of work, the men were out of work as union men. In the twenties, more than a few of them had had their heads cracked in fights on picket lines, men like little Patty Rafferty, who sat now with vacant eyes in the dock wallopers’ union hall. Some had cracked a few heads themselves. But they got the union, forever. They had voted for Roosevelt and said so, and some had voted for La Guardia and didn’t say so, because they had never voted for a Republican in their lives. Now some of them were communists, vehement and certain, but Delaney was sure that wouldn’t last. The communists did not easily forgive sin. On the West Side, sin and its forgiveness were part of the deal.

That’s why he’d come back here. That’s why he’d returned to make a second life with Molly and Grace after the war had destroyed so many things, including the certainties of that first life. These were his people. They needed him. They still did. And he needed them. They would fight if threatened, and he would fight for them, and with them. He would try to prolong their lives. Or save them. He would help them move their children through the ceaseless dangers of the streets. He would try as hard as he could to ease their pain. To bring them sleep. To give them another day, another week, another year. The reason was simple. Here all sins were forgiven. Even the sins of James Finbar Delaney.

On Sunday, the blessed day without patients, Rose was off work, wandering alone into the city. Delaney tried to convince her to stay home, but she only laughed. “Those bums can’t fight when the sun is out. Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.” And was gone.

Delaney took Carlito by the hand and walked down to Washington Street. The sun was bright and hard. They stood for a long time watching a lone freight train move on the High Line, testing the track, groaning, pulling loads of unseen cargo, bells ringing, steel wheels squealing, entering buildings from the north side and emerging on the south. He tried to see this wonder through the boy’s eyes. Were these huge right-angled animals? Were they controlled monsters? Whatever he thought, the boy didn’t want to leave.

“Tray,” he said, pointing a mittened hand at a train. And adding, when it was gone, “More tray.”

I will get him a picture book about trains, Delaney thought. And about animals. And the alphabet. He will learn to name the world. All of its plants and living creatures, its seas and ships, its cabbages and kings. In the spring, I will get him a book about baseball. And show him the photographs in the
Daily News,
of a man sliding into second base with the shortstop above him, firing to first for a double play.

Then they walked to the North River, empty on this cold day of rest. Only the train was moving behind them. He saw one of Knocko’s boys watching from a discreet distance, hat pulled low, hands jammed in pockets. The boy stared in wonder at three huge ships tied to the few waterfront piers that were not emptied by the Depression. He saw a seagull descending in a diminishing circle and landing on a grimy piling. Then Delaney led him onto the abandoned pier where he and Molly had walked on summer evenings. He held the boy’s small hand all the way, feeling the warmth. He wondered where Rose had gone on this empty Sunday. The North River was filled with broken boulders of ice, and Delaney explained the chunks to the boy, and how the river carried them away to the harbor to the left and then to the ocean, and the boy watched with great intensity. I will find a book about ships and rivers and the ocean sea.

Standing on the timbers of the pier, holding the boy’s hand, Delaney realized that after a long frozen time, there was a fresh current in his own life too.

When he was in bed in the dark, longing for sleep, Delaney’s patients vanished. The commandos of the neighborhood’s self-defense corps had retired to quarters. Monique was off in her night place. Rose was upstairs with her dictionary and her
Daily News
beside her and a baseball bat in the corner. There were no sounds in the dark house. And yet he trembled. Afraid of sleep. For the boy now filled too many of his dreams.

One night he saw Carlito falling from the Brooklyn Bridge, calling, calling, his voice pathetic and pleading, vanishing into the black waters. On another night, the boy was running on Horatio Street toward the High Line and fell into an open sewer, into the place where cholera lived, and typhoid and polio. On a third night, the boy was at the rail of a freighter glazed with ice, carrying him away from a North River pier into the unseen Atlantic. And on another night, on the same icy ship, the boy started to climb the rail, as if to dive in and swim to shore, and his mother was suddenly there, Grace herself, pulling him back, the faces of both distorted with fear. That night he called to Grace to hold the boy, and then woke up at the sound of his own voice.

On this Sunday night, he huddled there in the dark, his heart thumping. Longing for sleep to come, in spite of dreams.

He woke abruptly from a dream of Carlito one night, the boy wedged in the gluey mud of a trench, wearing pajamas among helmeted men while explosions shook the earth. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. Delaney lay there, heart pounding, his eyes blinking, and then saw a glow.

Against the far side of the room the glow was pale white, tinged with blue, as shimmery and pale as a watercolor. He stared. And then, like atoms coalescing, a figure formed, sitting in the wing chair.

It was Molly.

“Hello, James,” she whispered.

He started to get up, to go to her.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Stay there.”

He rose to his elbows, his heart now racing.

“Is it really you?” he said.

She didn’t answer for a while.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. She was wearing an overcoat and laced boots, but he could see her high cheekbones, the wide-spaced eyes, the lustrous hair, the long-fingered hands.

“I had to go away,” she said. “It was the only way I could live.”

“Where did you go?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “To green fields. To soft rain. To music in mountains. Everywhere, James.”

“But why?”

“To be free. And so you could be free too. Free of me.”

“I didn’t want to be free of you.”

“But look at you. You have the boy. And you look happier than you ever were with me.”

“Please, Molly, stay. Don’t go away. Stay with me. And the boy, and we’ll wait for Grace to return, and —”

He slipped out of bed now to go to her, to hold her, to embrace her, to weep into her hair.

“I must go,” she said.

He took a few steps. And then she was gone. The glow faded into blackness.

Delaney turned to his pillow but did not weep.

SIX

T
HE MIDNIGHT VISION OF
M
OLLY WAS WITH HIM AT BREAKFAST,
and stayed while he tended to the morning patients, and as he ate a sandwich with Rose on the lunch break in the kitchen, and while Carlito showed off his growing skill with the paddleball. Molly was with him later, as Delaney moved through the neighborhood on house calls, leaning into the wind, and while he examined a cancer case and a raving late stage of syphilis in a woman he knew as a child. An old longshoreman moaned with diabetes, all feeling gone from fingers and hands, and tried to hide his terror about amputation. A thirtyish daughter explained that her sixtyish mother had fallen into some valley of depression and would not come out. An infant wheezed with croup. He looked at each of them, focused on them tightly, touched them gently, recommended remedies in a voice he hoped was soothing and kind and knowing, and moved on, and Molly was still with him.

Goddamn it, Molly, give me some fucking peace. I have done enough penance.

He remembered that morning last April, after she’d disappeared the previous August, the whole empty winter gone by, when Jackie Norris from the Harbor Police showed up with a sheaf of papers filled with the names of floaters and jumpers, the grisly harvest of the spring harbor. “If she jumped,” Norris said in a soft voice, “there’s a small chance that she was carried out to the Narrows and then on to the Atlantic. That’s pretty rare, Doc. Most times they end up around the horn in the East River, or they bump up against the shore in Brooklyn. Most times we find the bodies.” He sighed. “But then again, maybe she didn’t go in the North River at all.”

“Maybe,” Delaney said.

And yet he was filled with images of her swirling through the river waters, her long hair streaming as she floated free. Free of me. Free of the world. On some nights he saw her bumping against a roof of winter ice, separated from the air and the sky. On other nights, he saw her hand jutting from the water, desperate for rescue. All through the neighborhood that day, keeping his appointments with the sick and maimed, he saw her in her watery place, or remembered her sitting in the chair in the bedroom the night before, or heard her playing the piano in the sealed room on the top floor.

He returned at last to Horatio Street. Cottrell was walking from the subway, still dressed in the severe clothes of a banker, but he would not even glance at Delaney. Monique had gone home. On his desk he looked at the estimates on the steam heat system ($300, to start after April 1) and the cutting of new stairs directly into the kitchen ($100, to be started immediately), and checked phone messages at Monique’s desk and the mail that looked personal. Nothing from Grace. There were two notes from patients who were now well, thanking him for his help. There was an invite to a Democratic Party Valentine’s Day dance. There was a notice from the Metropolitan Museum about the opening of a show of art from the Renaissance. Among the artists was Botticelli. He should tell Rose. And then he thought about Frankie Botts, trying to imagine his face and his voice.

Delaney hurried upstairs to see Carlito and Rose. It was after seven now, and they already had eaten. Rose was seated on her bed, back against the wall, her legs extended, big downy slippers on her feet, reading the
Daily News
and marking it with a red pencil. She put the paper down and looked at him in an annoyed way. He went to the boy’s bedroom. Carlito leaped from his bed and jumped at Delaney, who scooped him up and hugged him.

“Ga’paw! Ga’paw! Rose, Ga’paw home!”

She came in and the boy slithered out of Delaney’s arms and grabbed the paddleball and started batting away.

“Dos, tres, quatro . . .”

He made it to nine and then missed.

“You okay?” Delaney said to Rose.

“Your dinner, it’s cold,” she said. Her face was stern, perhaps angry.

“I had all these patients, Rose . . .”

“Tell them you gotta eat.”

“I’ll eat it cold,” he said. “Thank you, Rose. I’ll just eat it cold.”

Rose sighed and tightened the belt on her housecoat, which was covered with printed roses.

“Come on, I’ll heat it up. I hope it’s not too dry. Hey, boy. Put on your bathrobe.”

In the warmth of the kitchen, the boy kept batting away, and counting in Spanish and English, while Rose fiddled at the stove, and the room filled with the garlicky aroma of simmering veal and tomatoes. Delaney watched the boy and glanced at Rose, her back to him, her waist more defined by the belt of the housecoat. She had hips, all right, and slender legs. Fat women must have called her skinny, but she would live a lot longer than they would. Her hair was brushed and gleaming. She placed a bread basket beside Delaney, then spread the veal and tomatoes on his plate and took it to him.

“Okay,” she said. “Eat.”

The boy sat down at his chair too, prepared to eat again.

“Not you, boy. Just your gran’pa. You ate already!”

The child sulked, a mixture of disappointment and confusion. He stretched an arm out on the table, his fingers fiddling with the sugar bowl, and then laid his head on his forearm. He was either exhausted or sulking. Probably both.

“I better take him up. You eat, Dottore. I’ll come back and make tea.”

The veal was still moist, and as he ate Delaney marveled at his good fortune. This woman was now essential to his life, and he knew almost nothing about her, except, perhaps, the most important things. Her ferocious passion for the child in her care. Her skills with food. Her intelligence. He knew the outlines of her life, as told to Monique on the first day that she arrived here. He knew about Gyp Pavese and the dangers of the streets that she had resisted. But little else. Who had scarred her face? Who were her lovers during the American years as a cook or a pieceworker? Perhaps he should not try to learn more. The potential for disaster, living in the same house, was too obvious. But if he knew nothing about her it was also possible that he would unwittingly insult her. He was sopping up sauce with the crisp Italian bread when she returned.

“This is great, Rose,” he said. “Just great.”

“It’s even more great two hours ago.”

He tried to explain how he couldn’t always be sure how long a house call would last. She’d have to get used to his uncertain routines. Some patients need more time than others, he said. They’re not machines.
That’s what I told Molly too, but after a while she just didn’t care.
In some way, he said to Rose, a house call was like baseball. There was no script. You didn’t know who would win. Above all, there was no clock. It took as long as it needed.

“Don’t say any more,” she said. “I understand. You gotta go help people. It’s not easy. I just want it, the food, to be
good
for you. You earn it. You work hard, I know that, and you got all these other things to worry about.” She paused, slowing herself down. “So when you eat, it should be simple. You and the food. Besides, I told you: I don’t know nothing about baseball.”

She took his plate and laid it in the sink and ran the water. She grunted, flicked off the faucet. The kettle began to whistle on the stove. She lifted it and poured water into cups and laid a tea bag on each saucer. She placed his cup before him almost gently and he knew she was no longer angry.

“It must be hard, all them sick people,” she said, taking a seat facing him, examining a wedge of lemon.

“Sometimes.”

“I guess you dream about them?”

“When I was young, I did. I dreamed about them every night. Not so much now, except for the war.”

“You were a doctor in the war, right?”

“Yes.”

“You musta seen lots of terrible things.”

“Yes,” he said.

She squeezed lemon juice into her tea.

“My husband, he was in Caporetto.”

“So he saw terrible things too.”

“They made him crazy.”

He waited for her to go on. She was very still, as if afraid of saying too much.

“Tell me about him,” Delaney said, as if asking a patient how she was injured. Rose turned away.

“He wasn’ my husband then, when he was at the war,” she said, her voice wavery with recall. “I was thirteen when the war starts, and Caporetto was, I think, three years later.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, the war ends. He comes back, and there’s a parade, and he’s with the other soldiers, all with no legs or no arms, and his head is all bandages, and I notice him, because of the bandages. What I can see, he’s very handsome. My father sees me looking and another year goes by, and then my father says I got to marry this man. That’s when I hear his name the first time. Enrico Calvino. A beautiful name, no? But I don’t know him, except for the bandages in the parade. So I say this to my father. I say, let this Enrico Calvino come and see me. And he does. He comes for three months, and takes me for to walk, and to the new cinema in Agrigento . . . He don’t talk much. He has headaches, and he tells me, inside his head there’s a, a —”

“Silver plate?”

“Sì, a plate inside. Made of silver. To hold his head together. Right that minute I should have left Agrigento. A man with metal in his head, he ain’t ever gonna be normal. . . . But he’s a hero of the war. How can I run away from a hero of the war?”

Most patients had a narrative that explained many things, and he had learned to be gentle in discovering it. But he wanted to stop now. To stop the process of knowing her. She was not a patient. She was not asking to be healed. He should leave her to tend the boy and cook and provide warmth to the house. But he wanted to know her too.

“And so?” he said.

“You want to know the whole story?”

“If you want to tell it.”

“I didn’t tell it to Monique. I didn’t lie. But there’s another story.” A pause. “Maybe I better tell you, maybe you should know about me, if I’m gonna be here for the boy.”

He waited, looking at her, and she began to talk.

Rose and her wounded husband got married and moved into a tiny house out where Agrigento ended and the olive groves began. A kitchen, a bedroom, that was all. Enrico Calvino was an old thirty-two and she was a very young nineteen. She discovered he was a fanatical Catholic and something of a mama’s boy, but she tried. She offered no clinical details but implied that he was not a hero in bed.

She worked. He didn’t. A year or two went by, and he started talking more and more about Benito Mussolini. “That was his job, talking about Mussolini,” she said, and paused. “By then, I’m working in a fish house down by the water, because he can’t work. I buy a used bicycle and go down in the morning, with big boots on my big feet, and back up the hills at night . . .”

Her face hardened and a sliver of bitterness came into her voice.

“But because I don’t give him a baby boy, a nice little fascisti boy, he starts to hit me.” Another pause. “A slap, then another, and after a while, punches.”

Her chin jutted out, and she said, “Eh . . .” The sound of contempt. She stood up and poured more hot water in her cup and did the same for Delaney.

“Finally, I know I can’t live with this Enrico no more. I can’t live with him punching me no more. I can’t take his sitting there, smoking cigarettes, not workin’, not talking about anything except that goddamned Mussolini, and I start planning to get away.”

She saved money, a few lire at a time. She checked boat schedules to Naples and trains to Torino and Genoa and Milano. She thought about La Merica. In the telling, the old buried rage blossomed. Her words came more quickly, her voice shifted to a higher pitch.

“One night, I come home late, and Enrico’s there, drunk and pissed off. The big hero starts to yell. Where’s my dinner? Where’s my dinner and where’s my baby boy? He calls me bad names, and I call him bad names, and then he comes for me with a knife, and I turn around and grab a stool, one of those small stools? With three legs?” She took a quick breath. “And I hit him in the head. The head with the, the, with the
plate.
” Her voice fell. “And he goes down on the floor.” A pause. “There’s no blood, but I know he’s dead.”

She sipped the tea. She lowered her head, not looking at Delaney.

“I’m very scared,” she said. “I mean, worse than scared. What’s the word?
Panico
?”

“Panicked,” Delaney said.

“Yeah, panicked. I think about burning the house down with Enrico inside. I think about going on the bike to the cliffs and jumping into the sea. I think: My life is over. I think: My parents, they’ll be disgrace. I think a lot of things. Then I think: I want to live.”

She looked up at Delaney as if trying to decode his face. Then turned away again.

“I wait a long time, till some clouds cover the moon. Then I drag Enrico out to the olive groves and leave him there. I go back to the house and make sure there’s no blood, and I pack some clothes and get out the bike. I put Enrico down a dry well and drop big rocks on him, the rocks they use to mark the fields. Then I go. There’s a midnight boat to Naples. I get on the boat with the bicycle and my bag of clothes, and I’m on my way. To America. To here. This house. This kitchen.”