North River

by Pete Hamill

  “Thanks, Doc. Again.”

  “Thank Dr. Zimmerman.”

  “I did. But it was you, Doc. Without you . . .”

  “Enough already.”

  A longer pause.

  “I hear you got someone staying with you at the house.”

  “I do. My grandson.”

  “Where’d his mother go?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Russia.”

  “Russia? Is she nuts? There ain’t enough snow right here for her?”

  “The truth is, I’m not really sure where she is. I think Spain. Which means she has a passport, and had a ship to catch. I called Jackie Norris at the Harbor Police and asked for his help.”

  “He’s a good cop. You didn’t mention me, did you?”

  “Never. Jackie says he’ll do what he can.”

  “He always keeps his word.”

  Corso closed his eyes and looked as if he were drifting. Delaney came closer.

  “You hurting, Eddie?”

  He opened his eyes.

  “Nah. Well, just a little. You got someone to help with this boy?”

  “Angela sent me a woman.”

  “Good. She’s a Wop, I hope?”

  “I think she’s Italian, but I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “Angela sent her, she’s a Wop. Good for you, with a kid on your hands. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know what the fuck you were doing.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  They were silent for a while.

  “Your daughter Gracie don’t come back, Doc, the kid could be there a long time.”

  “I’ve thought about that.”

  “How old is the boy?”

  “Three in March. On St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “Jesus Christ. Another goddamned Mick. And fifteen years from now, when you’re an old man, he’ll be graduatin’ from high school.”

  Delaney laughed. “I thought about that too.”

  Corso seemed to be fading away by the second. Delaney thought he should call Zimmerman, maybe something . . .

  “You got any money?” Corso said, coming back from where he had gone.

  “Enough.”

  “Come on. Don’t bullshit me, Doc. I know you spent a mint when Molly, you know . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. The missing words were took off.

  “I remember you put ads in the newspapers,” Corso went on. “You had them leaflets on every lamppost from Twenty-third Street to the Battery. You hired some private dick. That must have took a lot of dough.”

  “I’ve got enough, Eddie. I saved some, I have patients. The boy won’t starve.”

  “Las’ time I was in your house, when I had that thing with malaria, I froze my nuts off. You don’t have steam heat, Doc. That kid’ll be runnin’ around bare ass and —”

  “The woman will watch him.”

  “Freezing her own ass off too.”

  Corso turned his head to the wall and sighed.

  “How long’s it been now?” he whispered. “Since Molly went —”

  “Sixteen months,” Delaney said.

  “Christ.”

  Corso’s hand moved to the flap of the tent, then fell to his side.

  “I’m thinkin’ of gettin’ out of this thing.”

  “Good.”

  “I don’t like the way the thing is going. Moving booze, runnin’ clubs, that was one thing. That was fun, f’ Chrissakes. But that’s over. It died with Prohibition.” A pause. “I don’t like what some of these guys want to do now. And they don’t like that I don’t like it. Especially the fucking Neapolitani . . . bunch of cazzi. That Frankie Botts . . .”

  He cleared some phlegm from his throat, and Delaney put a tissue to his mouth so he could spit it out. The sputum was pink.

  “Besides, I got three grandchildren myself now, Doc. I sent them and their mother away this morning . . .”

  “They’re good kids. I delivered two of them, remember? And gave all three their shots.”

  “Right, right . . .” He closed his eyes again briefly. “I want to see them graduate from high school.”

  “And college too.”

  “Hey, wouldn’t that be something? College. They’d be the first kids in the history of the Corso family to . . .”

  They were both quiet for a while. Then Delaney said, “If you get out of . . . the business, what’ll you do?”

  “Maybe become a priest.”

  Delaney laughed.

  “Nah. Maybe I’ll move to Florida. Or out west someplace.”

  “You’d go nuts.”

  “I’d rather be nuts than dead.”

  Delaney moved slowly west, into a river wind. The snow was now ice, blackening in the streets like an untreated wound, and he could not feel his face. As always, in icy winter or torrid summer, he looked down at the two or three feet ahead of him, because when he gazed into the distance he felt he could never make it. As always, he fought off the things he had seen on his house calls, the need, the pain, the false comfort he had given to these hurt people. He was a doctor, but medicine was not an exact science. There was no cure for everything. As in life. The cause of death was always life. Across many years now, he had comforted people he knew would soon die. He hoped his consoling whispers would do them no harm. He hoped too that he could reduce their immediate pain. But he could not carry them around in his head like luggage. He had to examine them with all the intensity he could muster, do what he could, avoid harm, and then forget them.

  He could not forget Eddie Corso. Eddie wasn’t a patient. He was a friend, the friendship created in rain and blood. And now, slipping, tottering, pausing on the black ice, Delaney saw Eddie again in the driving rain of France, knee-deep in the water of the funk hole, canteens slung around his neck, his eyes wide and half-mad. He was going to the water hole at the foot of the cliff. Knowing the Germans were up there somewhere, knowing they had machine guns and potato mashers, knowing they had what the Americans didn’t have: overcoats, boots, ammunition, food, and water. The Americans had tried catching water in stretched ponchos, but the Germans shot holes in them. And shot one of the soldiers too. The remnants of the battalion could not go back, ease away in retreat, because the Germans were there too, and later it would be said that they were a lost battalion. On that night they weren’t a battalion anymore. And they were not lost. They were surrounded. But Eddie said he would go for the water, as dirty as it was, and he would frisk the dead for bread or hardtack hidden beneath their tunics. Delaney told him not to go. Eddie said even the Germans had to sleep, and it was better with the pounding darkness of the rain to go now. And so he went, up over the lip of the funk hole, a New York rat slithering through broken trees and gouged earth and unburied bodies, gripping the canteens so they would make no jangling noise. See ya, Eddie said. And was gone. Delaney heard nothing except the rain hammering around them, and the snoring of soldiers up and down the trench. Then the sky was lit up by a star shell, sending spears of light through the ruined forest like something from the Fourth of July, and then the machine gun opened up. Brrrraaaap. Brrrraaaap. The light burned itself out. And then there was silence. The men beside Delaney did not even stir. Then, away off, he heard moaning. And he grabbed the first aid kit and lifted himself out of the funk hole and went to look for Eddie. He found him on his back in a thicket, a dozen feet from the water hole. His eyes were wide. Fresh slippery blood, thin and watery in the rain, soaked his shoulder and his arms, and there was a hole torn in one of the canteens. At least one round in the back, and blood leaking over his boots from a leg wound. Holy Jesus, Doc, it hurts like a bastard. Delaney undraped the canteens and left them in the drowned mulchy leaves. Then he saw the wound in Eddie’s leg and knew he could not walk. He grabbed him under the armpits, dragging him into the denser foliage and then turned him and heaved him onto his shoulders and carried him, slipping, falling, wet with blood, back to the line. One of the other doctors, Hardin from Oklahoma, hurried from another hole, and together they r
ipped open Eddie’s clothes and cleaned the wounds as best they could with alcohol, and tied coarse tourniquets on the ripped thigh and the smashed shoulder, using strips of uniforms from the dead because there were no bandages left. The fuckin’ pain, Doc, hurts like a fuckin’ bitch. Delaney gave him a shot of morphine, his own hands trembling, and the rain falling hard, and after a few minutes Eddie looked dreamy. Delaney sat for a long time in silence, thinking that if relief did not come soon, Eddie would surely die. If relief did not come soon, they all would die. He would never see Molly again. He would not see the little girl Grace. He would not ever walk with them again beside the flowing summer waters of the North River.

  And here he was, walking into a hard wind on Horatio Street, the North River in sight, and the house waiting for him at number 95. On the corner, he saw four young kids riding a familiar object up and down a snowy hill. The stroller. Rose didn’t waste time. A narrow path had been shoveled through the snow along the sidewalk. And into the front yard too, right to the gate under the stoop. And where now is my little girl, who is now a woman? And where is my dear Molly-O?

  There were seven patients waiting in the hall, two of them standing for lack of space on the bench. Three were reading the Daily News, and all looked relieved to see him, smiling tentatively or nodding in approval. Five of them were women. A normal day. “Give me a few minutes,” he said, and eased into the consulting room. Monique was busy with files and mail. She smiled and told him to take off his coat and galoshes. “Or you’ll end up a pneumonia case yourself.”

  He hung coat, hat, scarf on the oak clothes tree and sat down to peel away the galoshes. Heat flowed from a small kerosene stove out past Monique, near the low barred windows.

  “Where’s the boy?” Delaney said.

  “Upstairs with Miss Verga. Rose. They’re fixing the rooms. His room and her room.”

  “She’s moving in?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know anything about her, Monique.”

  She lifted a sheet of paper and glanced at her notes.

  “Her name is Rose Verga. Angela told me that, at least, is true. She says she’s thirty-two, so figure she’s thirty-eight. She’s from Agrigento in Sicily and went to school there for six years. Figure four. She can read and write. In English too, which she learns from the Daily News and a dictionary. She was married for a while after the war, but the guy died and she came here.”

  “Did she ever take care of children?”

  “No. She worked in three sweatshops, sewing dresses. She cleaned offices nights down Wall Street, she was a waitress in different places, including a place run by Angela before she got her own joint.”

  “She never had children?”

  “She says she can’t.”

  He folded his arms and looked vacantly through the front windows at the street. Kids went running by, heading for the river.

  “What do you think, Monique?”

  She sighed.

  “I don’t know . . . She’s a little sure of herself. But what the hell, give her a try. You can always can her if it don’t work out.”

  The telephone rang.

  “Dr. Delaney’s office, how can I help you? Oh. Yes. He has office hours until four. Just come on over, Mrs. Gribbins.”

  Monique hung up.

  “And what do we pay her?” Delaney said.

  “She wanted ten dollars a week plus room and board. I got her to take eight, for the first few weeks, maybe months. Then we’ll see.”

  “You’re a hard woman, Monique,” Delaney said. Then he sighed, and nodded at the door leading to the reception area. “Who’s first?”

  “You’d better try Mrs. Monaghan. If she’s not already dead.”

  Mrs. Monaghan came into the small office, where Delaney sat behind his cluttered desk. She was about forty, had been in a few years earlier with a broken hand, after falling on ice. She had six children, the oldest only eleven, no husband, and worked in a movie house on Fourteenth Street. Her manner was breathless and tentative. She had kept her wool coat on, but she was still shaking. When the door closed, he asked her what was the matter, although he already knew.

  “Oh, Dr. Delaney, it’s been dreadful, dreadful. I woke up with the chills, with a fever, cold and burnin’ at the same time. I had a dreadful pain here, in the right side of my chest, dreadful, dreadful. I went into the jakes and spat up guck with blood in it.”

  “Take off your coat.”

  She did. He took a sputum sample, then tapped with his finger on the right side of her chest, above her breasts. He listened with the stethoscope and heard the bubbly breathing start and stop. It was surely lobar pneumonia.

  “You’ll have to go to St. Vincent’s, Mrs. Monaghan,” he said softly. “You’ve got pneumonia.”

  “Sacred heart of God,” she said, and moaned. “Oh, I can’t go there, Dr. Delaney. I’ve got the children at home, I’ve got to work, I can barely walk, and, oh God, I can’t go there. Please, Dr. Delaney, can’t you give me something here?”

  He told her there was no choice, that she had to go in, and he’d call for an ambulance if she couldn’t walk, and he’d ask Monique to try to get some help with the children, and also call her job. She began to weep.

  “If I go there, I’ll die for sure,” she said. “And all the weans’ll be orphans.”

  “If you don’t go, Mrs. Monaghan, you’re sure to die.”

  And sobbing, trembling, tottering uncertainly, she went into the hall to wait for an ambulance. Delaney thought: I have to call the hospital and ask about Larry Dorsey too.

  Then Frankie Randall came in, his face a pale yellow. He wished Delaney a belated Happy New Year and took his quinine for the malaria he’d contracted at a training camp in Louisiana in 1917. He was in and out, with nothing else to say. Then Mrs. Harris took a seat, big and blowsy, a pasty-faced veteran of the old bordellos behind the warehouses on the North River, and he gave her some mercury to help control the lingering presence of a disease of the trade. She went to pay Monique. Mickey Rearden was another malaria case. Unlike Frankie Randall, he liked to talk. He talked about the Giants’ coming season and how great Bill Terry would be as a successor to John McGraw, playing and managing, and how it would be grand to be down in that Florida for the spring training when it started. Delaney was curt with him, briefly thinking about the boy and the need for money. For food and clothes and the woman named Rose. Mickey, please take the quinine and go, and for fuck’s sake stop talking. I’ve got to earn some money.

  He heard a banging, then heavy footsteps above him coming in from the top of the stairs. He opened the door and asked Monique what all the racket was about.

  “The bed,” she said. “For the boy. They’re taking it up top.”

  “What bed?” he said. “I don’t have any cash to pay for a bed.”

  “It’s only a dollar,” she said.

  “You found a bed for a dollar?”

  “Rose did. She called somebody and here it is, an hour later.”

  Delaney thought: Rose Verga doesn’t fool around. He reached into his left pocket for money.

  Monique said: “Can I tip the guys a quarter?”

  When the last patient left, he hurried up the stairs, while Monique added up the fees and wrote numbers into the ledger book. He could hear Rose talking to the boy before he saw them.

  “Okay, Carlo, you grab that end, yeah, right there, then you pull.”

  “That end,” the boy said.

  Delaney turned on the top landing and saw Rose and the boy on either side of the bed, pulling sheets tightly across the narrow mattress.

  “Hey, Doctor,” she said and smiled. “We doing good. He’s workin’ hard, this Carlo. He swept the floor all by himself.”

  The boy grinned in a shy way and stared at Delaney.

  “What’s his name?” Rose said to the boy and pointed at Delaney.

  “Ga’paw.”

  “You remember! Gran’paw. You’re smart, Carlos. That’s your
gran’paw, all right.”

  Delaney reached down and lifted the boy and hugged him. He was warm in his arms. Delaney held him tight and felt a little ice melting in his frozen heart.

  “Ga’paw,” the boy said.

  Rose explained that the boy had a spiced ham sandwich for lunch and some mushroom soup, and she walked with Delaney outside the bedrooms to the upstairs bathroom. The cheese box was already in place. “I gotta paint that,” she said. “A real good yellow. You know, like the sun.” Towels were draped neatly on the rods of the holders, soap lay in a glass dish. Then they paused outside Molly’s room.

  “Rose, this room is locked,” Delaney said in a soft, polite voice. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s just —”

  “This was your wife’s room, right?” she said.

  “Right,” he said, thinking, Women know everything important. She glanced at Delaney with a dark gaze, tinged with pity.

  “You want some food? I got soup in a pot, some good bread.”

  “I’ll help myself.”

  “I can do it. Then I gotta go someplace and pick up clothes.”

  They went down the stairs together, Rose now holding the boy. The odor of kerosene got stronger. There were two more patients waiting on the bench, both women.

  “Take care of them,” Rose said. “I get the soup ready.”

  She put Carlito down and went through to the kitchen, the boy holding her skirt. Delaney saw the women patients: a heavy cold with a hacking cough, a twisted ankle. When they were gone, he walked back to the kitchen, and Rose ladled out some soup and laid the Italian loaf and a slab of butter on the table. He thanked her and she went out. The soup was tasty, the bread fresh, with a crisp seeded crust. The boy watched him eat.

  “She’s a nice woman, Rose is,” he said to the boy. “You make sure you do what she says, because she will be very good to you.”

  The boy wore a serious face as Delaney spoke. Soon he would be fluent in English, and Italian too. Or Sicilian. How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one? The telephone rang once, and then Monique poked her head in.