North River

  “You’d have loved them,” she said in a numb voice. “Everybody did.”

  He heard the gate clang and the outside door open and slam shut and Rose’s voice and the laughing of Carlito. Bumping. Jumping. Shoes on wood. Blurred Italian. The boy’s squealing laughter.

  “Excuse me,” he said to his patient, and went to greet them, smiling.

  FIVE

  LATER — AFTER THE BOY HAD PRACTICED WITH HIS PADDLEBALL until falling into a nap; after Delaney had written three notes to his daughter and folded them into the stamped envelopes; after he had hung his suit neatly in the bedroom closet and peeled off the union suit; after he had spoken with Jimmy Spillane about a Monday-morning visit to check out a system for steam heat; after reading the newspapers in a hot bath; after dressing again in warmer clothes — after all of that, he and Rose and the boy went to Angela’s restaurant for an early dinner. He dropped the letters in a corner mailbox.

  “This kid already grew half an inch in a week,” Angela said, leading them to a corner table.

  “The cooking,” Rose said. “Whatta you expect?”

  “He’s gonna be bigger than the doc,” Angela said.

  “Bigger than the Statue of Liberty.”

  Carlito was indeed 33 inches tall and weighed 32 pounds. A big kid, from the genetic line that had given Delaney his six feet. They sat down and Angela suggested veal or a nice piece of fish and the boy said “bagetti” and then they ordered. Veal for Delaney. Sole for Rose. Carlito had already said what he wanted. Then Delaney asked for a glass of the house red, and Angela raised her eyebrows.

  “That’s the second glass a wine you had this year!”

  “It might be the last.”

  “An’ you, Rose — you on a diet or something?”

  Rose blushed. “Just bring me the fish, Angela.”

  The place was half-empty. They talked and laughed and said hello to people they knew. Knocko Carmody came in with his camarilla, asked Delaney if Spillane had called, smiled when told he had. He kissed Rose on the cheek while murmuring, “Hey, you hoodlum, how are you?” Carlito squirmed in his high chair and Rose took him by the hand back past the kitchen to the bathroom. Delaney watched a fresh snowfall drifting softly on the street. The flakes were thick and there was no wind. Parked cars were now glistening from the melting snow. Some had not been moved since the New Year’s storm. There was snow on the hats and shoulders of the new arrivals too. A few more people stopped to say hello to Delaney, exchanging small talk, giving him brief updates on the health of old patients. Nobody mentioned Eddie Corso. Or, for that matter, his daughter, Grace. He saw Rose emerge with Carlos by the hand. Angela threw her a conspiratorial glance. Then from the tables, a few men and more women reached for Carlito, touching him, talking baby talk, petting him as if he were a puppy.

  They were silent through most of the meal, the food too delicious for chatter. The wine, alas, was too sweet, so Delaney sipped. Rose was very concentrated, lifting her food in a dainty way, as if remembering advice from the woman’s page of the Daily News. She tamped down her shimmering vitality too. The restaurant was now crowded, and when Carlito finished, Angela came over.

  “What about dessert?” Angela said.

  Delaney ordered a cannoli, the boy wanted ice cream, Rose passed on both and asked for tea.

  “You’re gonna waste away, ragazza,” Angela said, a thin smile on her face, as she touched Rose’s shoulder. She glanced at Delaney and turned her back on Rose and hurried to another table. The mixed sound of men and women was higher now, a growly male baritone punctuated by shrill female whiskey laughter. The boy grinned every time someone laughed out loud.

  They finished the desserts too quickly.

  “This can’t be good for us,” Delaney said, “but I don’t care.”

  “Once in while,” Rose said, waving a hand in dismissal. “You eat dolces three times a day, you weigh four hundred pounds. But one cannoli? Faniente, nothing.”

  The boy rubbed his eyes, and Delaney called for the check and paid it. Dessert and the glass of wine were on the house. Rose buttoned up Carlito’s jacket and then her own long coat, while Delaney pulled his hat tight on his brow. Angela hugged them all and said something in Italian to Rose, who smiled thinly and jutted her chin in a gesture of defiance. Delaney waved to the blur of crowded tables and they went out. The snow was emptying the streets and gathering on the fenders of the glistening cars. They turned left toward Horatio Street.

  Then a car door opened. An angular, sallow man, with yellowing eyes under a wide-brimmed hat, stepped out of the backseat. He jammed his hands in his overcoat pockets, as if they contained something dangerous. There were three other men in the car and a lot of cigarette smoke. They had been waiting a while.

  “Hey,” the sallow man said.

  Delaney looked at him, while Rose pulled Carlito closer.

  “Me?” Delaney said.

  “Yeah, you. I wanna talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “You know what.”

  “Tell me what.”

  “About Eddie.”

  “Eddie who?”

  “Eddie Corso, that’s who.”

  “What about him?”

  “Where is he?”

  Christ. Another punk gangster who’s seen too many goddamned movies.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know. You saved his fuckin’ life.”

  Rose stepped in, blurting in Italian: “Vai!” The sallow man looked as if he’d been slapped. Then she turned to Delaney, her tone shifting into deference. “Don’t talk to this guy. Come on.”

  “Stay outta this, Rose,” the sallow man said.

  “Ah, bah fongool.”

  The man took out a pistol, letting his gun arm hang at his side.

  “Put that away,” Delaney said, stepping in front of Rose and the boy. Thinking: I can manage one left hook.

  “There’s three cops inside Angela’s restaurant, pal,” Delaney said calmly. “This is a very bad idea.”

  The sallow man glanced at the lights of Angela’s and then at the car. An older man shook his head. No. The sallow man returned the gun to his pocket.

  “You better remember where Eddie is,” he said. “And let us know fast.”

  “Let’s go,” Delaney said, and took Rose by the arm and started for home through the falling snow. He felt himself breathing hard.

  “Bah fongool,” Carlito said.

  They had gone half a block when the boy stopped and looked bleary. He couldn’t move his feet. Delaney lifted him, carrying him home, feeling his puppy warmth through thick coats and falling snow. He remembered Eddie Corso’s tutoring him in Italian that time in France. Palle were balls. A cazzo was a prick. Fottere meant fucking. But Eddie didn’t know where bah fongool came from, although he did know what it meant. In search of precision, they went to see Lieutenant Rossetti, whose father was a writer for Il Progresso in New York. The lieutenant smiled. Yeah, he said, it comes from va f’an culo, which roughly means, Up your ass! Don’t say it to anyone, unless you want to get shot. The next afternoon, Lieutenant Rossetti had the front of his brow blown off by a German sniper.

  “I’m sorry I used a bad word back there,” Rose said. “The boy, he remembers everything you say.”

  “Don’t worry, Rose,” Delaney said. “The guy deserved it. Just be careful. This is about me, not you.”

  “You didn’t seem scared about the gun.”

  “Every gun is scary,” he said. “But I’ve seen them before.”

  “In the war?”

  “The war,” he said. “And yes, around here too.”

  From long habit, he didn’t elaborate. Rifles, mortars, grenades . . . and he’d seen gunshot wounds too. A lot of them. Too many of them. Way too many dead people too. But he hated talking like a tough guy.

  “I know that guy,” Rose said quietly. “The cafone with the gun.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I’ll tell you later,
” she said, glancing behind her at the empty sidewalk and the snowy stillness of the street. Her face was harder now.

  When they reached the house, Rose opened the doors beneath the stoop, then gazed once again at the street. She locked the doors behind them, and Delaney carried the boy upstairs to the top-floor bedroom. Rose followed, removing her coat and hat, then draping them over the top-floor banister. In the light from the hallway, Delaney laid the boy on his bed, where the teddy bear was tucked under the covers. The ache was back in his right arm.

  “Here, let me do this,” Rose said, as if sensing that both arms were not the same now. She began to undress the boy. Delaney removed his coat and placed it on the banister beside hers. The boy’s eyes opened. He blinked, gazed at Rose, then at Delaney. He did not look frightened.

  “Okay, come on now,” Rose said, lifting the boy. “Brush your teeth, make pee pee.”

  She carried him into the bathroom. Delaney stood there, hearing flushing water, and Rose’s murmuring voice. He glanced into her room. There was a notebook on top of the Italian-English dictionary. On the wall a calendar from Il Progresso showed Roman ruins. Delaney thought: I’m a sort of ruin too. And chuckled.

  “Okay,” Rose said, after flushing the toilet. “Now you go night-night, boy.”

  She pulled the covers aside and laid him down, and he hugged the teddy bear as she covered him. His eyes moved from Delaney to Rose. He turned his head to face the wall and whispered: “Mamá.” He hugged the bear. Then he closed his eyes and fell into sleep. Rose glanced at Delaney, who saw unspoken emotion in her eyes. Pity. Or sorrow.

  “Come on,” she said. “I make you some tea.”

  He drank his tea in the Irish way, with milk and two sugars. Rose used a wedge of lemon and resisted the sugar. She folded her thin, sweatered arms and leaned on the table and talked about the man with the gun.

  “They call him Gyp,” she said. “Like one out of three gangsters. Once a week in the Daily News, they find some dead cafone in Brooklyn and his name is Gyp. Gyp Santucci . . . Gyp Ferraro . . . This guy, his name is Gyp Pavese. He lives with his mother up Spring Street. Thirty-fi’ years old, he lives wit’ his mother.”

  “How do you know all this?” Delaney said, wanting to know about Gyp, wanting to know more about Rose.

  “When I first come to America,” she said, “ I live in the same block as Gyp, across the street with a family from Genoa. I see him every day, dressed in clothes he can’t afford, so I know he’s a gangster. The people in my house say he’s a knife guy. Couldn’t fight Carlito and win, so he uses a knife on people.” She turned her head as if embarrassed at what she was about to say. “One time, he comes to me, he says, ‘Hey, baby, you gotta go out with me.’ I say, ‘No thanks.’ Well, that makes him crazy, ’cause he thinks he’s Rudolph Valentino. He asks me again, then again, until I say, ‘Don’t ask me again, Gyp.’ ” She smiled. “Or else, goddamn it.”

  About six strands of her hair had fallen loose, like brushstrokes. She sipped her tea, then went silent, as if she did not want to go on. She was like so many patients who had sat across from him and told only part of their story.

  “But that wasn’t the end of the story, was it?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Tell me the rest.”

  She took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Well, the people from Genoa, my landlords, they worry all the time, they don’t want trouble with gangsters. And so I move away, and live in Angela’s house awhile.” A muscle twitched in her cheek. “All this is, what? Five, six years ago . . .”

  She drummed her nails on the tabletop. They were square and blocky and carefully trimmed. She seemed hesitant, as if afraid she was telling Delaney too much about herself.

  “But Gyp didn’t give up?” Delaney said.

  She looked at him, then at the wall above the stove. “No. For a long time, I don’t see him. Then I hear he’s in jail. Good, I think, that’s where he belongs, with his crazy mother too. I relax. Then I hear he’s out of jail. Still, I’m okay. You know, it’s New York: you move five blocks away, it’s a different world. And I had lots of work. Cook-ing. Making hats. Sewing dresses. Stuff like that. Piecework, too, blouses . . .”

  “And then Gyp came back.”

  “You got it, Dottore,” she said. Nodding her head. “One morning I come out of the house, there’s Gyp. Dressed all sharp, with a gray hat like tonight. He says he wants to see me, he’s been in love with me for years, and then he says, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody else can have you.’ ”

  She poked at the tea with a spoon. “What’s the word? A threat?” Delaney nodded, encouraging her to go on. “Anyway, I think about going a long ways away, like California. Maybe China! I explain everything to Angela, and she says, ‘Don’t worry, I take care of this.’ And she does. She talks to someone, and Mr. Someone talks to someone else, and Gyp stays away.” She moved her head from side to side. “Until tonight.”

  Delaney sipped his tea, which was turning cold.

  “He was there because of me, not you.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Delaney said, “Who were the guys in the car?”

  “From the Frankie Botts mob. Up by Bleecker Street. The Naples boys.”

  “Frankie Botts?”

  “Frankie Botticelli.”

  “Like the painter?”

  “You know Sandro Botticelli?” she said, and smiled. “From Firenze? There’s a painting he painted, you know, very famous. A naked lady with long hair, coming out of a clamshell. You know that painting? Venus! I used to look like that, except I’m never a blonde.” Then she blushed, as if afraid the doctor might think she was flirting. She waved a hand in an airy way. “You know . . .”

  For the first time, Delaney tried to imagine Rose naked. And stopped. And remembered buying a large framed print of Birth of Venus for Grace, on her fourteenth birthday. Her young eyes widened, and she stood before it, breathing deeply, flexing and unflexing her hands. Her hands then moved toward the tabouret, for paint and a brush. Poor Venus hung on the wall upstairs for a long time, and when Grace left with her man, the Botticelli went with her. Wherever that might be.

  Rose broke the flash of reverie. “When Eddie Corso got shot, most people knew what happened. There’s no secrets in Little Italy. They know he is shot by guys from Frankie Botts.” A pause. “From Club 65, on Bleecker Street.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? These people kill you for stepping on their shoes sometimes. But what I hear, it’s about Eddie Corso saying no to shmeck.”

  “Heroin.”

  “I guess. Shmeck, shmeck . . . it’s like a Jewish word, they use it all the time now.”

  Delaney finished the tea. He gazed out at the snow falling in the yard and remembered Eddie calling for morphine in a muddy field.

  “Me? I think Gyp is the guy shot Eddie. Anybody else would of killed him.” She got up. “You want more tea?”

  “No. Thank you, Rose. No.”

  She took his cup and rinsed it.

  “I hear four other guys got killed this week,” Rose said flatly. “The News had some little story in the back about two of them, but it didn’t mention Eddie Corso or Frankie Botts. Tonight? I guess they want to find Eddie and finish the job.”

  Delaney sighed.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ got nothing to do with it.”

  He couldn’t sleep in the silent house. He glanced at the newspapers, reading about Roosevelt and the Import-Export Bank, and how La Guardia had ordered a big trash basket for his office, one he could use, he said, as his main filing cabinet. In the Times there was a story about the Nazis on page 23 and what Chancellor Hitler was planning, but there were few details. He lifted the books of poetry beside the bed: Yeats and Lord Byron and Walt Whitman. On some nights he tried to read at least one poem as if it were a prayer. But on this night his eyes glazed. He kept thinking about Gyp and the hoodlums and the danger that never goes away from the world. br />
  He turned out the bedside lamp and lay in the dark, wishing he could pray. Not just mouth words. But pray as he did as a boy at Sacred Heart, in hope of divine intercession. He wanted to pray, above all, for Carlito, asking that he be kept safe to live a life. Safe from incurable disease. Safe from idiots with guns. Or knives. He wanted to pray for Grace too, for her to be safe wherever she was, on her way to the strange cities of the world. If he could pray, he would whisper something for Eddie Corso too, that he would be free of ambush or accident in his plunge along southbound roads. He would pray for Rose, that she stay alive through what was coming with the boy, that she could help him be for the boy what he had never been for Grace. That she could keep pushing her tough warmth into the house, and her street wisdom, and her decent heart. He hoped she would not fall in love with some man and vanish from their lives. He would pray for Rose, and pray for Angela too, and Knocko, and Zimmerman, and the nuns, and all the imperiled people of his daily passage.

  But he had lost prayer somewhere along the way, along with faith. He had been educated to deal with the body, not the soul. In the Argonne, he lost what remained of the affairs of the soul, among the torn and broken bodies of the young, until the day came that he cursed God.

  Now he lay without sleep. He knew all the magic potions that men and women used in order to sleep: pills and powders and whiskey and sex. But after his own wound, after the red mist that enclosed him for more than a week, after the hospital and the months of recovery and the return to New York, he had determined to live his life without anesthesia.

  Who are you, mister? Grace said on the day he came home. She was just five years old.

  I’m your father, Grace.

  I don’t believe you.

  And Molly said: Yes, Grace, he’s your father.

  The girl burst into weeping and fled to the next room.

  And Molly said: You see what you’ve done?

  Yes, he could see what he had done. He saw it in Grace. He saw it in Molly. Over the weeks that followed, the little girl came around. She was cautious at first. Tentative. But she started hugging his good arm and sitting on his lap and giggling when he tickled her. But Molly never came around. He was certain that she had taken a lover while he was at the war. He did not confront her with his suspicion. She said nothing that would feed it. But if she had found someone else, at least for a while, he could not blame her. She was young, and handsome, and full of longings. Right here. In the world of aching flesh. But he was Quixote without a lance. Off to the war, to save human beings, a knight errant with a scalpel and a stethoscope. But the Illustrious Don of Cervantes had no children. And no wife. And he had Sancho Panza to ground him in the real world. And when the enchanters returned the Don for the final time to his home, there were no unspoken accusations. Before Delaney could strip away his ribbons and his medals and send his uniform to the army-navy store for sale to some fortunate young man who had skipped the war, he knew how much had changed. Delaney was standing in the dock, indicted by his wife’s chilly scorn and his daughter’s initial flight — even if that flight was only from one room to another. And it wasn’t only Molly and little Grace. On the streets of the neighborhood he picked up the bitter glances of those who had lost sons in France while Delaney had survived. They would never forgive him for living. And there were other charges in the indictment. While he was at the war, his mother and father had died in a vile way, two days apart. So had others, of course, including many thousands of soldiers. No doctor could have saved any of them, surely not Delaney. But he could not ever be certain what might have happened had he stayed. Molly had sent him newspaper clippings saying that Big Jim and his wife had one of the largest funerals in the history of the West Village, on a day when no wind blew off the North River and the sun glared on the old cobblestones. On one clipping Molly had scrawled: “You should have been there. M.” He could not tell whether she was scolding him or comforting him, or both. But some facts were beyond argument: his parents had died of the influenza, his wife and child were in danger, and Delaney wasn’t there. He was in the hospital in France. And when he came home at last, he could not even pray for them.