North River (12 page)

She looked exhausted and distraught now, shifting her body, clenching her hands. Delaney wanted to place his good hand on her and comfort her. He didn’t move.

“I’m glad you told me all this, Rose,” Delaney said quietly, and felt stupid for the clumsiness of his words.

“You not gonna fire me?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m a murderer.”

“In this country, self-defense is not murder.”

She waved a hand as if dismissing the distinctions. She now seemed older, her thin face more drawn, as if debating the wisdom of saying anything at all. Delaney ended the silence, saying: “You’d better get some sleep, Rose.”

Her eyes were full. She stood up and placed the cup in the sink. Then she turned on the faucet and watched running water quickly spill over the brim of the cup. She didn’t say another word about her husband. She didn’t mention Gyp Pavese. She said nothing at all about the boy she needed so much.

Instead, she said, “Buona notte, Dottore,” and hurried to the hall. He heard her footsteps rising heavily on the stairs. Her aroma lingered in the kitchen, roses melding with garlic. He had learned again that sometimes a kitchen was more intimate than a bedroom. Or even a doctor’s office, where he had listened to so many confessions without any hope of granting absolution.

In the gray morning, wrapped in his bathrobe, he pushed aside the life within the house and glanced through the newspapers: 400,000 on relief in New York, Hitler ranting in Germany, fighting in China, a volcano erupting in Mexico. There was a photograph of the erupting mountain with a peasant in the foreground, dressed in white pajamas and sandals and holding a machete. You missed this, Grace. You missed the volcano. What paintings it might have inspired. I always thought that you had married Mexico even more than Santos. You were not a communist. You were an artist. Or so I thought. And never said.

Delaney sighed and skipped through the
Daily News
, where a story told about the glories of a new theater in Harlem called the Apollo, and he thought: I should go up there and see it. To listen. To see. Another story told about a woman in Brooklyn who had shot her husband dead. Delaney tried to imagine Rose on her final night in Agrigento. The husband with his knife. His eyes mad in the light of candles. Coming at her. Then Rose reaching for the three-legged stool. What have I done? She is here now. She is caring for the boy. And yet within her is a woman who killed. He imagined himself under oath in a court of law, explaining that yes, he had known about the death of her husband. But he could not imagine her ever killing again. Except to protect Carlito.

He dropped the newspapers on the carpet and got up to brush his teeth.

The boy played with his paddle and his teddy bear. Rose moved through the day without saying a word about her confession. Patients demanded help. The watchers kept watch on the street. That night, in a light trembling sleep, Delaney was on a melancholy strand of beach and something was behind him. An immense creature. He could not see it but heard the great weight of its body, feet smashing into sand, the foul gnashing of its breath, and he was running and running and running . . .

The ringing phone snapped him awake. He was still breathing in the darkness, still fleeing the unseen beast. He fumbled for the telephone. Something fell. From the sound, surely a book. Surely Lord Byron.

“Hello,” he said softly.

He heard someone laughing. And then a man singing. Gyp Pavese.

Oh, you.

Forgot.

To re-mem-berrrrr . . .

“Listen to me, pal,” Delaney said. “I want you to take a message to Frankie Botts.”

There was silence, except for the man’s breathing.

“Tell him I’m coming to see him today. Right after lunchtime. The Club 65.”

Delaney hung up. The man, almost certainly Gyp Pavese, didn’t call back. Delaney stretched out in the dark, taut and angry, flexing and unflexing his hands, his head teeming with scenarios.

In the morning, his guts were churning and his head ached. I can’t live like this, he thought, but I can’t die either. Too many people depend upon me. He imagined himself at Club 65, tape pasted over his mouth, punched in the stomach, bundled into a car. Racing away. And then told to get out an hour later, shot once, twice, six times, and dropped into a lime pit in Jersey. What if that happened? He descended to the kitchen, drawn by the sound of Caruso on the radio and bacon frying in a pan. He went in and Carlito came charging, to be lifted, hugged. “Ga’paw, g’mornin’, Ga’paw! Buenos días!” The boy’s warmth infused him with life.
They will not harm you, boy. I will hurt them first.
He glanced at Rose and remembered her saying the same words — they would have to go through her — and she gave him a troubled look and then a smile.

“Everything okay, Dottore?” Rose said.

“Nothing that can’t be cured.”

He whispered to Carlito. “You okay, big boy?”

The boy smiled in a cheeky way. “Okay.” He pointed at his plate. “Bay-con an’ egg!”

Delaney sat him back in his chair. Rose touched his plate.

“What’s this?” she said, pointing at the plate.

“Play!” he said.

“Play-tuh.”

“Play-t.”

“And this?”

“Fook.”

Rose laughed out loud, and Delaney grinned.

“No fook. That’s a bad word. Faww-rrrrrr-kuh.”

“Fork.”

“And this?”

“Mesa!”

“No, no, in English!”

He paused, then blurted: “Table!”

He was naming the world, one glorious word at a time, but enough was enough. Time to eat. Carlito scooped up the scrambled eggs, dropping some of them off the fork, which he held firmly in his left hand. Rose came from the stove with Delaney’s plate. The Italian station had a female soprano on the air now, but in his own skull he heard Jolson singing, in some lost year at the Winter Garden.
When there are gray skies, I don’t mind gray skies, you make them blue, Sonny Boy . . .
And Molly scoffing at the sentimental rubbish, and then laughing when Delaney stood on a Broadway corner and sang the words, and promised her, in Jolie’s voice, You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet . . .

He ate quickly, sipped the jolting dark coffee, kidded with the boy and with Rose. But the headache nagged. He would need an aspirin. There was one appointment he wished he could avoid. One that put fear in his guts and an ache in his head. Then he heard Monique come in, and she poked her head into the kitchen and smiled.

“Morning all,” she said. “Looks like, uh, a busy day. They’re already waiting outside, and it’s thirteen degrees in the sun.”

“Better bring them in, Monique.” Then he raised an open palm. “Give me a bit of time first.”

He hugged the boy a final time and thanked Rose and then went to his consulting room. He made some notes: Call Zimmerman. Call Knocko. Call Danny Shapiro at the station house. He took an aspirin, telling himself: Leave instructions, in case I’m killed. Then he sat there, guts churning again. What if Frankie Botts was a real animal, as Rose had called him? And then thought: After the war, I promised myself I’d never live again in fear. But now it’s not just about me. It’s the boy too . . . it’s Rose.

He took a piece of stationery from his desk drawer and unscrewed his fountain pen. At the top he wrote the month, day, and year. Nineteen thirty-four. He addressed a note:
To Whom It May Concern.
He stated clearly that the bulk of his estate, his money, would go to the boy and his mother, Grace Delaney Santos. Monique and Rose would each receive ten percent. Mr. Carmody of the Longshoreman’s Union would serve as executor. He wrote down the combination to the wall safe. Then he signed the note and sealed it in an envelope, which he marked
Just In Case.
Monique would know where to put it.

He took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened the door to the waiting area.

“Who’s first?”

He was ready to vanish into their pain and not his own. The headache disappeared.

At ten-thirty, with no patients waiting and the room disinfected, Rose and Carlito came in. She was carrying a tray with a sandwich of prosciutto and mozzarella, and a glass of water. She seemed to know that there would be no more patients for a while. Carlito went to Delaney’s leather bag.

“Ga’paw’s bag,” he said.

Rose placed the tray on Delaney’s desk and said, “Eat something. You look terrible.”

“No, I feel —”

“No back talk. Eat.”

Carlito leaned an elbow on his thigh, and Delaney began to eat. Suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He gave the boy a crackling crust and he munched away.

“Pan bueno.”

Rose said: “In English.”

“Bread
good.
”

Was that his first adjective?

“The radio says good weather’s on the way,” Rose said. “Maybe two more days.”

“I hope so. The sidewalk’s like glass.”

“Two more days, you use the bicycle.”

“Pray for it, Rose.”

“I don’t pray, but it’s gotta come. You gotta get sun. You don’t have any color. You’re gonna get sick.
You,
the dottore!” Then suddenly: “Carlito, don’t eat your gran’father’s sandwich.”

“Samich.”

They both laughed. Then Rose turned to Delaney.

“What are you worry about?” she said.

“The usual.”

“Well, stop,” she said. Then to the boy: “Come on, boy.”

She took the tray and the plate with its crumbs and started for the door. She left the water.

“Rose?”

“Yeah?”

“That was the best damned sandwich I’ve had since I came home from the war.”

She blushed slightly, then waved a dismissing hand at him.

“Baloney.”

“No,” Delaney said, and smiled. “Prosciut’.”

“Puh-shoot,” the boy said.

Around noon, when the last morning patient was gone, Delaney was still for a while and thought about Frankie Botts and how stupid it would be to die. Then he took a breath, exhaled slowly, lifted the envelope, and stepped into Monique’s area. He handed it to her. “Just in case?” she said. He nodded. She told him that Rose had gone shopping with the boy, where various people would be watching.

“I have to go see a guy on Bleecker Street. Tell Rose I’ll skip lunch.”

“How long’ll you be?”

“Two hours, most.”

She looked at the schedule of house calls and the stack of bills. Delaney saw from the clock that it was twelve twenty-five.

“But if I’m not back by three, call Danny Shapiro, the detective, and Knocko Carmody. Tell them I went to Club 65. They’ll know what to do.”

She jotted a note on a pad. Then her eyes narrowed. “What’s this all about?”

“I can’t tell you till I get back.”

He was donning his hat, scarf, and coat. She lifted the envelope again.

“Just in
case?
I don’t like this even a
little
bit.”

“Just in case I get hit by a car,” he said, and forced a smile. “Just in case a flowerpot falls off a roof. Just in case a woman aims a gun at her husband and hits me. This is New York, Monique.”

She started to say something, but he was gone, clanging the gate behind him.

He walked south and east, shivering on the corners when he stopped to let traffic pass. If it was thirteen degrees this morning, it must be twenty by now. The glaze of ice was melting in the noon sun, and as he walked more quickly, the movement warmed him. He was walking the long way, refusing train, trolley, or taxi, and he knew the true reason was fear. He was delaying his arrival at Club 65, like a patient facing surgery. Alone, he could feel his own trembling uncertainty. At Club 65 they might, after all, kill him. And he would be cursed as a goddamned fool.

On his walk the Depression was everywhere. Even on Broadway. Huge TO LET signs were taped inside the windows of abandoned stores. At every corner men in army greatcoats sold apples. When they first started to appear, three years earlier, all with VETERAN signs displayed in their racks, there were many photographs of them in the
Daily News.
Not anymore. Now they were almost as common as lampposts. He gave one hollow-eyed man a quarter and left the apples. “This,” he explained, “is from Sergeant Corso.” The man grunted something and stood there against the wall, out of the wind. Down the street, Delaney saw a woman, sagging with abandonment, trudging with two children, her gloveless hand outstretched. Her hair was wild and dirty. Her shoes flopped and she wore no socks. He gave her a dollar, and she looked astonished and burst into tears.

He turned east at West Third Street and saw more than a dozen grizzled men in a lot huddled around a fire in a battered garbage can, one of them roasting a potato on a stick. Maybe a baked or roasted potato would sop up the acids in his churning stomach. The lot was piled with anonymous rubble, strewn garbage, splintered timber, a dead dog picked apart by rats. The far wall was scorched by an old fire. One man took a swig from a wine bottle and passed it on. A half-block away he saw a line of men waiting for entrance to a government building. Most wore dirty overcoats, shirts with curling collars, neckties, old fedoras, as if trying to retain a lost respectability. Scattered among them were men with caps, union buttons, heavy boots. None talked, silenced by humiliation. A few read the meager listing of want ads in the
Times
or the
Herald-Tribune
or the
World. Come home and paint this, Grace. Come home.
And then he realized something large: He didn’t really want her to come home. He wanted to be with the boy. He wanted to do what he was about to do, and live. And then he would make certain that the boy would live too.

The wind blew harder when he reached Bleecker Street. Up ahead he saw his destination. He shuddered in the wind.

Club 65 was a corner saloon, older than the century, with a triangular cement step at the main entrance. A side door opened into the back room, where long ago men could bring women. Once before the war, he’d even taken Molly here. Then it was called the Fenian Cove, and on Friday and Saturday nights they played the old music from Ireland. Not the Tin Pan Alley stuff of the Rialto on Fourteenth Street, with its sentimental delusions, its cheap stage-Irish jokes, but music made before anyone on the island spoke English. It was all flutes and drums and fiddles and pipes, and Molly loved it. Listen, she said, it’s Smetana. Her face amazed. And he didn’t know anything about Smetana, and she explained the way he used folk melodies from Czech villages in his music, and she was sure those villages had once been Celtic. “Just listen, James.” A year later she took him to a concert of Smetana and said: Do you remember? The Fenian Cove? He didn’t really remember clearly what was played there, but said of Smetana, Yes, I hear it, I hear Ireland.