North River

“Jackie Norris on the phone,” she said. “He says you know what it’s about.”

  He got up to go to his office. “Talk to this young man, will you?”

  All cops had the same voice, clipped and laconic, and Jackie Norris had been a cop since he came back from the war. They exchanged hellos and Jackie then got right to it.

  “Doc, your daughter, Grace, left New Year’s Day on a Spanish freighter out of Hoboken. Bound for Barcelona, Spain. It arrives in, oh, ten days. Depending on the ocean. She had a U.S. passport, under her own name, and two pieces of luggage. She didn’t use the married name you gave me.”

  “Is there any way I can send her a cable?”

  “Of course. I mean there must be. Let me find out the details.”

  “No, Jackie. You have things to do.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “By the way,” Delaney said, “how’s the knee?”

  “This weather, it kills me. Hard to sleep. Fucking Heinies . . .”

  “Come by. I’ll take a look.”

  “I can’t for a while. We got a double homicide on Morton Street. They drafted me ’cause I know the neighborhood. A man and a woman, dead in his bed, and her husband on the lam. The usual shit.”

  “Anybody we know?”

  “Nah. The dead guy’s from Brooklyn, lived two months on Morton Street, a furnished room. The couple’s Irish. Might be just off the boat. Love is wonderful.”

  “Well, stay off the ice, Jackie. And thanks.”

  In the kitchen, Carlos was gnawing on a crust of bread. He was sitting now on a plush red cushion, taken from the upstairs living room. He pointed to the snow in the yard.

  “O,” he said.

  “Okay, lad. Let’s finish eating first.”

  They played in the garden for a while, but it was hard to make snowballs from the iron crusts of old snow. Delaney could see the boarded-over back windows of the Logan house, right next door to the west, number 97 Horatio. Taller by a floor than his own. Brownstone, not brick, like a vagrant visiting from Gramercy Park. The windows on the street side were sealed too. Even the hard kids and the rummies avoided the place. They all believed that ghosts lurked within. Perhaps they did. Above all, the ghost of poor Jimmy Logan. He had grown rich in the good times after the war, import-export, the trade of the river; bought this house; added a second in the Poconos; had two cars and three daughters. Insisted that people call him James, not Jimmy. Suits from Brooks Brothers. Shoes from England. After the Crash, his stocks and bank accounts vanished. He got rid of the cars. Then one Friday, his business ended too, the movers carted away the furniture, and he came home and shot his wife, and two of the daughters, and himself. Jackie Norris helped clean up that mess too. So did Delaney, when Monique heard the shots. The story was all over the tabloids, and a judge ordered the house sealed until the youngest daughter, four years old, grew up. She was staying with relatives in New Jersey and would be a long time growing up. The house stood there now, part of the parenthesis within which Delaney lived. Ghosts to the left. Bitterness to the right. He looked away.

  After a while, the boy began to shiver. They went back inside. Rose was coming in the front door with a battered suitcase and a shopping bag. She laid the bag on a chair beside the kitchen table. She was definitely moving in.

  “Give me ten minutes, I unpack,” she said. “Come on, Carlos.”

  The boy went up the stairs behind her, taking one step at a time. The house was getting fuller, and somehow richer.

  Delaney went to his consulting room and worked on a cable. YOUR SON IS SAFE. HE WANTS TO KNOW WHEN YOU’RE COMING BACK. DAD. No, that was wrong, making her feel guilty. ALL IS FINE WITH CARLOS. I HIRED A WOMAN TO HELP CARE FOR HIM. WHEN WILL YOU RETURN? Too many words, too expensive. This is a cable. CARLOS FINE WOMAN HELPING WHEN YOU RETURN QUERY DAD. One, two, nine words. Better . . .

  Monique came in.

  “Three house calls waiting. Also the mail. Some bills for the electric, the telephone, the usual first-of-the-month stuff. I also gave Rose ten dollars for food. Hey, you look wiped out. Maybe you should grab a nap.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I mean, if you get sick, the whole thing stops.”

  He laughed. “I can’t afford to stop now.”

  “You ain’t kidding. You got ninety-seven dollars in the account, and now you gotta feed three people, plus coal and kerosene.”

  “Maybe I could tend bar after house calls.”

  “Maybe you could do a novena.”

  She turned and he held the text of the cable, the two early versions crossed out.

  “If Jackie Norris calls with an address, send this, okay?”

  She looked dubiously at the text and hurried away to answer the ringing telephone. He went up to see the boy. Carlito was sitting on the floor in Rose’s room, watching her lay clothes neatly in the dresser drawers. The suitcase was open on the bed. On the small lamp table, an Italian-English dictionary was laid upon a copy of the Daily News. Just as Monique told him. Rose was smiling as she moved, and in the hard snow-bright light he noticed that she had a fine white scar from her left cheekbone to the lobe of her ear. The slice of a knife. It did not affect her smile, so he knew the blade had missed the crucial tendons.

  “Looking good now,” Rose said, her smile showing a slight overbite. She unfolded a framed photograph on a small easel and placed it on the dresser top. The frame was brass. “That’s my mother, my father. My brothers, my sisters. There’s me too.”

  The father was dressed in a badly-fitting black suit, starched collar, wide knotted tie, squinting sternly at the camera. The mother looked blank and uncomfortable in a dark skirt that reached her shoe tops. Rose was probably fourteen and resembled her mother. The oval shape of her head. The young men were all smiling, perhaps preening, their suits pressed, their shoes glistening with polish. The girls were glum, except for Rose, who was flashing her wonderful smile and her intelligent eyes. Delaney thought: She was thirty pounds lighter then and two inches shorter.

  “It’s a Sunday,” Rose said. “My father’s birthday. We all went to eat together. I’m fourteen. My brothers left after the picture, chasing girls.” Beyond the Verga family there was a bay filled with anchored fishing boats and a distant line of mountains. “Long time ago.”

  After a melancholy moment, she turned her back on the photograph and took blouses from the suitcase and started hanging them in the shallow closet.

  “You gotta get this boy some more clothes,” she said. “I know the bargain places. Or up at Klein’s, on Fourteen’ Street. And that window in his room, it don’t close right. I put the towel to close it up, see? So the boy don’t catch a cold. And you, Dottore, go down and sleep a little, okay? You look terrible.”

  Wearing a bathrobe, Delaney slipped under the covers and fell into an hour of deep dreamless sleep. He came suddenly awake, rose quickly, brushed his teeth and washed, and then, feeling refreshed, went off into the blue twilight to make three house calls. When he returned, Bootsie was waiting in the hall. The fat man rose from the bench, wheezing slightly.

  “You keep too many hours,” Bootsie said. “Even your nurse went home.”

  Delaney opened the door to his office.

  “How’s the boss?”

  “Much better. He wants to go home. He wants you to put in a word with that Zimmerman.”

  “He’ll go home when he’s ready. That’s not up to me. What can I do for you, Bootsie?”

  Bootsie took a long tan envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Delaney.

  “Mister Corso sent you this.”

  He turned to go.

  “Hold it a minute, Bootsie.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say? What’s his message?”

  Bootsie smiled without humor.

  “He said, you don’t take it, he kills you.”

  He smiled again, then went out through the hall. Delaney heard the gate clang shut behind him. From the high floor he could hear the murmur of Rose?
??s voice, talking with the boy. He closed the office door and laid the envelope on the green blotter of his desk. He sat looking at it for a long moment. Then he used a letter opener to slice through the seal.

  There was no note. He spread the contents on the blotter. There they were: fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. Five thousand dollars in cash.

  “God damn you, Eddie,” Delaney whispered.

  FOUR

  AT HIS DESK, DELANEY HELD THE PHONE FOR A LONG TIME, WHILE off in St. Vincent’s one of the nuns went to find Zimmerman. The news on Larry Dorsey was good: no fracture, no brain damage. He’d be playing saxophone in another week. But it was Eddie Corso he wanted to know about. He heard granular rain lashing at the back window. It would either wash away the scabbed snow or glaze it with ice. He wanted the goddamned snow to be gone. He wanted to walk around the neighborhood with the boy, to give him some basic geography, to show him the North River. He wanted to tell him about springtime in New York, and how the bony trees would burst with leaves, and how the Giants would soon play ball in the Polo Grounds again. They would go together. The boy would be three on St. Patrick’s Day, a good age to begin looking at the most beautiful of sports. He would explain to Carlito what a hot dog was too, and how it wasn’t a dog at all. They would eat hot dogs while sitting together in the sun.

  “Hello?”

  “Zim, it’s Delaney. How’s our patient?”

  “He’s some tough old bastard,” Zimmerman said. “He wants to leave tomorrow.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Two more days, at least. He’s healed well, the pain is almost gone, no signs of infection, but . . .”

  “Want me to take a look?”

  “If you like, but he seems . . . I don’t know, a guy gets shot like he was, you think he’d stay in bed for a month.”

  “He’s been shot before.”

  “I know. You told me, and I saw the scars. I don’t know why you didn’t become a surgeon.”

  “Someday I’ll tell you all about it. Did he talk about anything else?”

  “Well . . .”

  “What do you mean? Well, what?”

  A pause. A smothering hand on the phone at the other end, a lowering of the voice.

  “He gave me some money,” Zimmerman said. “He gave the nuns money too.”

  “And what did you do, Jake?”

  “I told him to forget it. Then he told me if I didn’t take it, he’d have me killed.”

  Delaney chuckled. “The nuns too?”

  “That wouldn’t scare them. Aren’t they in, what do you goyim call it? A state of grace?”

  “Yeah, they die, they go straight to Heaven. If you see a nun driving a car, get off the street.”

  “Anyway, I don’t know what they did about the money. And I don’t want to know.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Try to come in and talk him down. He says he wants to drive to Florida.”

  “I’ll call tomorrow. Thanks, Zim. For everything.”

  “Thank you.”

  Delaney hung up the telephone and sat for a few minutes, staring at a framed browning photograph of his father standing with John McGraw, before the war. In the days when his father was Big Jim and Delaney was Little Jim, even though he was two inches taller than Big Jim. At that time a lot of people received cash in envelopes, almost certainly including Big Jim. He placed the bills back in the envelope and opened the wall safe where he kept his passport, the deed to the house, his marriage license, along with morphine and other dangerous items. He laid the envelope on top of the small pile, then twirled the dial to lock the safe. He put out the lights and closed the doors and went quietly up the stairs. The only sound from the top floor was Rose’s light snoring. He went into his bedroom.

  In the darkness, wrapped in a cotton nightshirt, the covers pulled tight, Delaney listened to the hard rain and could not sleep. He wished he had someone to talk to. Someone who could listen while he discussed the money. He wished he could explain how torn he was, how he was trying to balance the sudden presence of the boy in his life with the ancient sense of corruption that he was feeling about those five thousand dollars. Big Jim wouldn’t think about it for a minute. He was Big Jim Delaney, district leader, ward heeler, and he knew how the world worked. He had never read Niccolò Machiavelli, but he had graduated from the University of Tammany Hall. He always said his favorite color was green, and not because he was Irish. Delaney’s mother would have placed the child and his future before the legal concerns, knowing in her chilly way that what was legal was often not the same as what was moral. New York had taught her that, and so had Ireland. You must be daft, he could hear her saying. You’ve helped thousands of people for free, not taking a bloody dime, and here is a gift that will make a boy’s life more possible. Take it. It’s yours. God sent it to you. With Eddie Corso’s money, he could have the house steam-heated, putting heat into the arctic top floor without the stench of burnt kerosene. He could pay for clothes for the boy, warm winter clothes, lighter things for the summer. He could buy a small used car and do even more house calls and perhaps help even more people. There’d be no need for the bicycle, except for exercise. He could deliver the endless New York casualties to the doors of the hospital. Then he remembered dimly a phrase from a high school religion class, something about an “elastic conscience,” and how its possession was the worst example of the sin of vanity. That’s me, Delaney thought, here in this monk’s bed. The man with the elastic conscience. . . . He wished he could pray, but all of that faith and belief and certainty had ended forever in the Argonne. After seeing true horror, no sane person could believe again in a benevolent God.

  He could see and hear Izzy the Atheist at the bar in Finnegan’s last summer, railing at all the big gods. Izzy, who was half Jewish, half Italian, full of sarcasm, his teeth yellow and framed by a biblical beard. “What kind of god tells a man to kill his son? Like Abraham and Isaac? I’ll tell you what kind of a god! An egotistical, cruel, son of a bitch of a god!” Someone shouted at him to shut up. Izzy went on without fear. “God comes to me and tells me I gotta kill my son? To prove I love God? You know what I tell him? I tell him: Hey, pal, go fuck yourself, you fat-headed prick!”

  Delaney smiled fondly in the darkness. Izzy the Atheist had lived in the trenches too, in the mud and shit and fear, and sometimes raved in Delaney’s office, waiting for his quinine. He wasn’t the only man, sound of body, who had a hole chopped out of his brain by what he saw. Nobody who had gone to France ever said a word to him. Those who tried to stop Izzy’s ravings were all men who had stayed home. The vets knew that God was just another form of bullshit.

  But if God was gone, or simply deaf to all cries for help, Delaney did wish that he could speak to his daughter, Grace. Urging her to return. Come and take your son, Grace. Do not hand me this cup. Come and retrieve him, and I’ll give you Eddie Corso’s five thousand dollars. Not as a bribe, but to give you a means to begin again here in New York with your son. With or without your man, the son of a bitch. You can pick up the pieces of your life, you can stretch canvas and mix paint and create. You can become again the woman you started to become when you were sixteen and seventeen, when the whole world awaited you. Goddamn you, Grace. And then he fought against his bitterness, trying to place it in a cage, and then to shrink it. He addressed himself out loud: “Stop it, stop this self-righteous horseshit.” And thought of Grace at three years old, the age of the boy. And addressed himself. You put your marks on her too. You broke the balance. You went off to the goddamned war when you didn’t have to go. You could have fought the call-up in 1917, claiming truthfully that you had two dependents. You didn’t fight the draft. You went to the war and you were gone more than two years. When you returned, you were at once so numb and so busy trying to get back lost time and lost money that you had no time for that little girl. You were there, and you were not there. She learned to live without you. She needed you, because . . . because her mother was drifting into the c
old numb isolation that came from rage. Or because all little girls need their father. Or because . . . But then you don’t truly know why, do you? You weren’t there. Grace needed you and you went to the war. You were sworn to do no harm, and then you went ahead and did it.

  “Stop it.”

  He let the boy rise in his mind, with those bright intelligent brown eyes and his wonder at the snowy world. He could be here for three weeks or twenty years. There was no way of knowing. Grace was out wandering the dangerous world. Across oceans lurked dragons. The boy was here. The boy was alive. He was a fact, not an abstraction. He is asleep upstairs, while the cleansing rain falls on the city. I can do for him what I did not do for Grace. I can take his hand. I can love him . . .

  After a while, Delaney fell asleep. And dreamed a dream almost as familiar as the older dream of snow. He was in a long gray concrete corridor, trying to find an exit. The dying, the injured, the wounded, were all around him, writhing, moaning, seething with pain. There were soldiers with tin pots on top of their heads and blood streaming from their eye sockets. Slum kids from Brooklyn and the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen stood at an angle to the wall, erupting with strands of yellow mucus. Old women pulled robes against shriveled bodies. There were bashed women and stabbed women and women crazy with disease. The floor was slippery with blood and shit and urine. Someone screamed for morphine. Many held out hands, demanding to be touched, to be healed, and he would not touch them.

  Then he was awake, his heart pounding.

  The clock said three-fifteen. He could hear a few cars making a tearing sound through the rain. The snow was surely gone.

  Then he heard the music.

  The piano.

  Brahms.

  He threw off the covers and reached for his robe in the chilly room. The music stopped. It was the melody she played that summer evening before going on her walk to the North River, never to return.

  He dozed again in the silent bedroom and conjured images of Molly, with her lustrous black hair and her crooked grin. Molly at the Battery gazing at the October harbor and the lights glittering off the waves. Molly in Tony Pastor’s on the Fourteenth Street Rialto, laughing at the comics and the jugglers, and later humming the melancholy ballads as they walked toward home. They’re all sentimental rubbish, she said, but they get into your head. . . . Molly announcing she was pregnant that first time, her face transformed, radiant, luminous, and then the bitter tears when the child came too soon and was dead. He saw that it would have been a boy, but he did not tell her for more than a year. He saw her beside him on the streets of Vienna, joyous as they skipped together through the evening crowds to the opera house; or walking beside him across Central Park to the Metropolitan, where she stared at the Vermeer and said she could hear the Dutchman’s music. She was seated with him in the Polo Grounds, enjoying his happiness even though the game baffled her and she knew nothing of the legend of John McGraw. They went together to Coney Island on a few summer Sundays. They took the ferry to and from New Jersey, with the cool salt spray dampening them both and the towers rising in the downtown city. They took the subway to the end of the line. They rode the Third Avenue El and the Ninth Avenue El to the same destinations, her eyes taking in everything, from the dark subway tunnels to the tenement living rooms where the human beings lived with the constant roar of trains, and then she tried to put all that she had seen into music. I want to make this all into music, she said. American music. No: New York music. Full of car horns, not cattle; gangsters, not cowboys; poor women working street corners; thieves locked away in cells. All of that. . . . He heard her arguing for socialism. He heard her saying that this was no democracy if women could not vote, more than 120 years after the Revolution. He heard her talking about Berlioz and Schoenberg and how her instructor in Vienna thought that all the past was now dead. He heard her tell him as they sat together near a cleared space on the North River that she was again pregnant, and how he hugged her in delight, and kissed her tearful face, and started to sing the song.