North River

by Pete Hamill

  “Mamá!” the boy said, pointing. “Mamá!”

  “Yes,” Delaney said, “that’s your mama.”

  The coals were ashen gray in the fireplace, and Delaney squatted, crumpled an old newspaper, built a small house of kindling, struck a match. He thought: What the hell is this, anyway? I’ve treated about three thousand kids this size, this age, but I don’t know a goddamned thing about taking care of them. Not even for a day. I didn’t even know how to take care of my own daughter when she was this boy’s age. I went to the war instead. The boy watched him, his dark eyes widening as the flame erupted. He glanced back at the photograph, then looked again at the fire, as Delaney used a shovel to lift a few chunks of coal from the scuttle. Delaney felt his right shoulder begin to ache. Not from the cold. But he would have to do something to keep the boy warm in this large, drafty house. In the good years before the Crash, Delaney had installed a hot-water system in the house, not easy because it was built in 1840. Before he could convert the house to steam heat, the banks had failed, taking his money with them. The heat still belonged to the nineteenth century. Wood and paper and coal in a manteled fireplace. The boy seemed to love it, flexing his small hands for warmth. I’ve got to feed him too. But almost no restaurants would be open on New Year’s Day. Not until tonight. He must need to eat. Christ, I need to eat. Breakfast. Christ, no: lunch.

  “How about some food, Carlos?” Delaney said. “I think I’ve got cornflakes and eggs and stuff like that.”

  The boy looked at him blankly, and Delaney realized that he didn’t understand the words. For almost three years, they had been in Mexico, where the boy’s father had family and friends. They surely had spoken to him each day in Spanish, even Grace. So had the maids. And the cook. For Santos was not a peasant, according to Grace’s meager letters. He came from money, as so many revolutionists did. Delaney knew a few words in the language, but he wished he and Molly had spent their European time in a land of vowels, instead of among the consonants of Vienna.

  “Quiere . . . comer?” he said, making a spooning motion with his empty hand.

  The boy nodded, Delaney took his hand. I’ll have to keep him off these stairs. Have to buy some of those folding gates. I’ll have to do a lot of things.

  The boy ate two bowls of cornflakes and kept sipping from a cup of cocoa. He was watching Delaney, as if trying to understand who this strange man was. And where they were now, in this vast house. He started to imitate Delaney too, shifting his spoon awkwardly from hand to hand, the spoon too large, slopping the wet flakes on the table, spilling some milk. His mother must have fed him for too long. Or a maid. Spoiling him rotten. The boy was propped up on a cushion, and his eyes kept glancing from Delaney through the two kitchen windows to the yard. Glancing at the blinding whiteness.

  “O,” the boy said, gesturing with the spoon.

  Delaney followed his gesture.

  “O,” the boy said.

  Delaney smiled, suddenly understanding.

  “Yes, that’s snow.”

  Thinking: At least your mother found time to teach you one word of English. You probably never saw snow before this morning. And your mother waved a hand and said its name. Before abandoning you in a goddamned doorway.

  “Want to see the snow?”

  Delaney got up and lifted the boy off his cushion.

  “Wait,” he said, groping for the words of the Cuban orderlies at the hospital. Wait. What was the word? And said it: “Espérate.”

  Delaney climbed the hall stairs two at a time, retrieved the boy’s wool cap and new hooded jacket with mittens attached, and came back down, again wearing his winter clothes. The boy was at a window, squinting at the glaring snow.

  “Let’s go,” Delaney said, pulling on the jacket, shoving the boy’s hands into the mittens, tying the hood under his chin. “Vamos, boy. Let’s see the snow.”

  He opened the door leading to the outside shed. This was the place of everything that didn’t fit anywhere else: shelves stacked with boxes of detergent; stacks of old magazines and newspapers, tied with twine; unused Christmas decorations; milk bottles; a rake hanging on a nail; a wide-bladed snow shovel; a large red toolbox. Most of the space was taken by Delaney’s Arrow bicycle, its pedals and gears wrapped tightly in oiled cloth. He and the boy eased past the bicycle to a second door, leading to the yard. Delaney had to push hard on the door to move the piled snow.

  Then it was before them, and the boy took a deep breath and exhaled. The North River wind was not as strong here, the buildings making a brick-walled fortress of the backyards. But it still had the magical power to whirl snow into small mountains, some of them taller than the boy. The rosebushes were blocky and irregular and white. And the olive tree, a gift from Mr. Nobiletti, the shoemaker, stood in its corner, wrapped for the winter in tar paper, so white it seemed like a giant ice-cream cone. The bases of the three fences had vanished under drifts. Delaney reached down and made a snowball.

  “Snowball,” he said, hefting it for the boy to see.

  “O-baw,” the boy said.

  With his left hand, Delaney lobbed it toward the nearest fence, where it exploded in powder. He said, again, “Snowball!” The boy was awed. Delaney made another and threw it harder against the back fence. A snowy bas-relief fell off the fence. Now Delaney’s lower right arm ached, though he had not used it for throwing. The boy pulled some snow off a small mountain and tried to make it into a ball. The first ball crumbled in his hands. Then he tried another, and this one was packed better, and he threw it about two feet and saw it vanish into another small mountain. He laughed in delight.

  “O-baw!”

  He made another snowball and threw it, and another and another. Always with the left hand. Delaney understood why he kept shifting spoons over his cornflakes. Looks like we’ve got a southpaw here. Like his grandmother. Like Molly.

  “O-baw!” the boy squealed. “O-baw.”

  He looked at Delaney, as if trying to decide how far he could go. Delaney smiled. And then the boy dove into one of the snow mountains and rolled and pummeled the snow with his arms and kicked with his small legs.

  “O! O! O! O!”

  The boy fell asleep in his arms as he carried him up the stairs. Delaney laid him on his own unmade bed and removed the heavy clothes and the shoes. The boy came suddenly awake, his eyes taking in the strange room and Delaney’s face. He didn’t move and looked afraid.

  “Mamá? Dónde está Mamá?”

  “Don’t worry. She’s coming back.”

  Thinking: She’d better come back. Fast. I can’t do this. He felt a wash of dread. Something out of rainy dawns with fixed bayonets. Thinking: I must read the letter. Afraid of it too. Thinking: I want to hit someone. Anyone. But not this boy.

  “Everything’s okay,” Delaney said softly. “Todo bien, Carlos.”

  The boy’s eyes moved around the room. His left hand went to his crotch.

  “Oh, okay, I understand, come on.”

  He lifted the boy and took him to the bathroom between the bedroom and the living room. He lifted the seat and helped the boy stand on the ceramic rim of the toilet. Delaney thought: I need to get a box in here. A cheese box, low and flat and strong. I can paint it red. Or maybe yellow. What else do I need? What does the boy need that I cannot give him? When the boy was finished, Delaney showed him the chain for flushing and how to do it, and then turned on the hot water in the sink. He washed with a facecloth, and then the boy took the warm, wet cloth and washed his own face. Delaney dried him, lifted him, and took him back to the bed. He covered the boy with sheet and blanket, and the boy pushed his face into the pillow. He was still for a long moment. Then he sobbed.

  “Mamá, Mamá, dónde está?” he murmured.

  Delaney went to the boy and sat beside him. The boy’s need and uncertainty — perhaps even fear — were almost tangible. He patted the boy on the back, swift, steady pats like an extra pulse, and spoke in a low voice. It’s all right, boy. You’re safe here. You wi
ll eat. You will sleep. Your mama will be back. But as the child’s sobs ended, Delaney could sense unspoken questions rising in the warming air: Where am I, and who is this man, and where is my mother? He placed his hand firmly on the boy’s back, steadying him the way he had steadied so many people who were injured, hurting, confused, and full of fear. On beds all over the neighborhood. At last the child fell into sleep.

  The clock told Delaney it was two thirty-seven in the afternoon. The end of a very long morning. He stood up as silently as possible and put some fresh coals on the fire. And now? What now? The letter. I must read the letter from Grace. He fought off a shimmer of dread by thinking only of the immediate needs of the boy. I can lay out a bed for him on the floor, made of blankets and pillows, just for tonight. Or take him to one of the two bedrooms upstairs. But what if he wakes up in the dead of night? I can’t have him roaming the stairs in the dark. Christ . . .

  His own exhaustion was eating at him now. As he undressed and donned pajamas, he wondered about Eddie Corso. About who shot him and why. About whether he would live. As always, questions but no answers. He’d have to wait. The nuns had taken Eddie into their consoling hands. Now he had other things to do. Or one big thing. He had to read the fucking letter.

  TWO

  New Year’s Eve.

  Dear Daddy,

  I am so sorry to do this to you. I hate doing this to me too, because I love this boy. But I’ve come to realize that I can’t be his mother right now. My mind is a mess, as it has been for a long time, something you must know better than anyone. Something is sure to snap. I feel that I might do harm to myself, and to the boy. You don’t need that to happen.

  I remember the time you first took me to the Frick, when I was eleven, and I saw for the first time the Vermeer. It was an image of domestic perfection on the earth and it made me long for a life of such perfection. It also made me want to be a painter. To live in the safety of a studio, to create my own world. I seem to have failed at all that. When you wrote me last year about Momma’s death, if that is what it is, I didn’t answer because I was convinced that the world was basically shit. Only my son made me believe that it was worth going on.

  His name is Carlos Zapata Santos. He answers to Carlito. He talks some good Spanish and a few words of English. His father’s name is Rafael Santos, as you know. I don’t know where Rafael is. He could be in Spain, which is where he said he was going, or in Moscow. I don’t know. We’ve been apart for four months. I’m going to try to find him.

  Carlito will be three on St. Patrick’s Day. Día de San Patricio, as they say in Mexico. Viva Irlanda! He does not wet the bed. He takes a nap, una siesta, every afternoon, and he sleeps well at night. He’s had a shot for smallpox and shots in Albuquerque for diphtheria and tetanus. He seems very healthy. You will know better than anyone what else he might need. He is very intelligent. He was never baptized. Ni modo, as the Mexicans say. No matter.

  I don’t know how much Carlos remembers his father. Even in Mexico, he saw very little of him, while Rafael was working at the Secretaría de Educación Popular, creating education programs for other people’s children. Rafael left last July, saying he was going away to continue his revolutionary education and would send for me and Carlito later. He said he was going to Spain and then possibly to Moscow, and would bring his lessons back to Mexico. He never came back. He never sent for me. And so I must find him or go mad. I am, after all, my mother’s daughter.

  I stayed on with his family, a kind of prisoner, for three months, hoping to hear from him, and then took Carlito and slipped away in the night. I went to Taos in New Mexico, where some New York painters have settled, and I supported myself selling insipid landscapes to tourists. God help me, but I was so lonely I even had an affair with a watercolor painter! I should have come home to your house, but my vanity was too powerful. I couldn’t even ask you for help. Until now.

  Even now, I cannot knock on your door, cannot face you. Forgive me. Before everything else, I must find Rafael. Wherever he is. Carlito needs his father. I need my husband. After that, I can live a human life, in what I hope becomes a better world. Please, Daddy, try to understand. Please . . . If you call me selfish, or spoiled (as Mother so often did), fair enough. But understand that I must do this in order to live. And to give Carlito the life he deserves.

  None of this is your fault. You were never anything but a wonderful, loving father. You gave me the gifts of art, of music, of literature, and above all, the example of simple human kindness. The way you have given so many gifts to the people of our neighborhood, comforting them, saving their lives. You taught by example. By doing. The problem was never you. The problem was me. I have some flaw in me, some kind of emptiness that can’t be filled. At least not so far. I am almost twenty years old and nothing at all seems certain. There’s something in me that causes me to hurt everyone who loves me.

  I don’t want to pass that flaw, whatever it is, to Carlito.

  I ask only one thing. That you don’t put him up for adoption. I realize that you have so many things to do, and so little money, but if he is adopted by someone, he’ll vanish as surely as his father has. America is too big. So is New York. Please don’t let him vanish. My first stop is Barcelona. I will check American Express every day. I will send you an address, and if you say that you are giving up on my son, I’ll be on the next boat home.

  I’ve saved almost eight hundred dollars and will use it to find Rafael, to come back with him, to try one final time to make something that can last, or to end it. Please forgive me for everything. I will love you for as long as I have life.

  Your daughter, Grace

  Delaney sat in the old worn chair beside the fireplace, the pages of the letter on his lap. He pictured his daughter out in the raging snow, pushing her son in a two-dollar stroller with the river wind at her back, and he thought of her life, and his own, and he began to weep.

  He woke in the blue light of evening, to the boy’s angry wailing for his mother. Delaney placed a hand on his shoulder, tapping rapidly and gently with his fingers, saying over and over that it was okay, boy, don’t cry, boy, everything’s gonna be okay. The boy then wept in a clogged way, punctuating his lament with a single word: Mamá.

  Delaney switched on the lamp, took a tissue from beside the bed, and touched the boy, then placed the tissue at his nose. “Blow,” he said. The boy froze for a moment, his eyes full of tears, rivulets of tears marking his cheeks. Delaney gestured with his own fingers at his nose. “Blow.”

  The boy blew. Once, then again. Then looked around at the strange world.

  “Everything’s okay,” Delaney said, as the boy stared at him. “Todo bien.”

  The boy’s lower lip jutted out, as if he would cry, then he seemed to gather himself. Delaney pointed at his own chest.

  “I’m your Grandpa,” he said. He jabbed his chest again. “Grandpa.”

  The boy whispered, “Ga’paw.”

  “That’s right!” Delaney said, smiling. “Grandpa.”

  The boy smiled too.

  “Ga’paw.”

  Delaney lifted him. “Let’s get dressed.” The boy’s head was beside Delaney’s ear.

  “Co’flakes, Ga’paw . . .”

  “No, something better than that.” Delaney glanced at the front windows. The snow had nearly stopped. He tickled the boy and Carlito giggled. “How about spaghetti!”

  Carlito couldn’t figure out the word, but they washed and dressed and then went out to the evening streets together. The snow was lighter now. The boy’s eyes widened. Hundreds of kids were pushing each other on sleds, throwing snowballs like warriors, climbing great piles of snow that had buried all the parked cars. Long dark blue shadows were cast by the tenement on the corner, that grim factory for making children, and criminals, and illness. But all was luminous in the general whiteness. The sidewalks were gone under the snow, and the only path was in the middle of the street. Adults hurried along with modest bags of groceries, fighting for trac
tion, shouting at the snowballers for a cease-fire while they passed. Carlito stopped walking, the snow near his knees, and watched. Then he reached down and tried to pack a snowball, but the dry cold powder blew out of his small hands. His brow furrowed. “Take a little time,” Delaney said, squatting and holding fresh snow tightly in his own hands until it annealed. “See, like this . . .” Then he packed a ball and handed it to Carlito. “Now you can throw it, boy,” Delaney said, making a gesture. “Throw the snowball.” Carlito heaved it awkwardly with his mittened left hand toward a snow mountain and laughed in delight. He grabbed more snow in both hands. “Wait,” Delaney said. “Easy now. Pack it, and count. One, two, three, four, five — how’s that?” The boy had his snowball now and then he threw it three feet into a snowbank and clapped both mittened hands. “Hoe-ball! Hoe-ball!”

  Then Delaney got hit between the shoulder blades. He turned to the gang of young snipers and sappers and shouted, “Hold it, hold it! Cease fire!” His words were muffled by the snow and the ferocity of combat. The ambush artists shouted their taunts, and Carlito seemed alarmed. But Delaney laughed and lifted him with his left hand to his own shoulders. They hurried together out of no-man’s-land, where nothing at all could remind the boy of his mother.

  They made a right at Hudson Street, moving south on the wide avenue. No trains were in sight on the elevated railroad. The streetlights were out, telling Delaney that the storm had knocked out the electricity, which was why the El was not working and the phones were dead. The bars and food shops were open, with candles lighting their interiors, and the street itself was a kind of party, Horatio Street multiplied by a factor of ten. Not like Times Square the night before, if Times Square was as it always was on New Year’s Eve. But close. More a downtown version of Brueghel. In a few Italian stores, including Nobiletti’s shoemaking shop, the front pages of the News and Mirror had been taped to the inside of the front windows, showing La Guardia being sworn in at midnight. The headlines shouted: IT’S MAYOR FIORELLO and HERE’S THE MAYOR! And Delaney realized he had not yet read the newspapers. He wondered if any Republican had ever been honored this way in the history of Hudson Street, so deep in the heart of what his father always called Tammanyland. Certainly this was unique, because Fiorello was the city’s first Italian mayor, fifty years after the first Italians came down the gangways onto Ellis Island. They called them Wops then, which stood for “without papers.” Now one of them was the mayor of the greatest city in America. Tribal pride. But there were no other signs of politics on Hudson Street. There was only the snow and the kids and the sense of shared natural disaster, which always gave New York a special exuberance. And placed images into the very young, which would return in trembling dreams, as the Blizzard of ’88 had returned to Delaney just this morning. Carlito would probably dream of this day for the rest of his life.