North River

  “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

  THE MIDNIGHT VISION OF MOLLY 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 g
ently 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.”

  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.