North River

by Pete Hamill

  “Hey,” he said, waving Bootsie out of the room. “You came.” He sat up. “What’s in the package? Cannoli?”

  “Toys for the boy.”

  “None for me?”

  “You’re out for the season.” Then: “I have to check you out, Eddie.”

  “I’m great. That kid you got me, Dr. Jake, he did a great job.”

  “Let me look.”

  Sighing, Eddie unbuttoned his nightshirt and with Delaney’s help slipped it off his shoulders.

  “I suppose you’re leaving town,” Delaney said, as he gently lifted a bandage to look at the wound. “I guess the cop car will escort you at least as far as the Holland Tunnel.” Corso nodded, smiled, said nothing. Delaney said: “Let’s see. . . .” Eddie Corso was right: the incision was clean, the stitches removed. Healing well. Zimmerman had done a fine job. Delaney started tamping down the adhesive of the bandages.

  “Yeah, I’m going. Maybe Florida. I need a tan.”

  “You got a nurse to go with you in that ambulance? These things have to be changed twice a day.”

  “She’s down in the kitchen. I stole her from St. Vincent’s for six months.”

  “You’re taking a nun to Florida?”

  “She’s not a nun. You think I’m nuts? Her name’s Stella.”

  “Want me to talk to Stella before you go?”

  “We’ll call from the road we need advice.” He smiled. “Maybe she’s a plainclothes nun. She’s definitely big on Hail Marys and Our Fathers.”

  “Maybe she’ll save your soul, Eddie.”

  “Too late for that, I guess,” he said, and laughed. Then winced. “Jesus, don’t make me fuckin’ laugh.”

  A pause. Then Delaney took Eddie Corso’s hand.

  “I wanted to thank you for . . . you know . . .”

  “Shut up, you dumb Mick. Just use it for that kid. And if you need anything else, you know, like getting somebody killed, just call me. I’ll be out by the pool.”

  Delaney took the El back downtown, looking around at the sparser crowd of passengers. He sometimes felt in trains the way he felt in emergency rooms. There were too many people to ever know them all. Every one had a story that he’d never hear, and he had heard more stories of human grief than most people. He met them in the present, but each of them had a past. Better to shut down, stop imagining, deal with all other human beings the way he dealt with patients. Cage the past. Deal with them, gently if necessary, and then seal them out of memory. They could vanish like the words of a song, recovered only in isolated fragments. Worry about your friends, he often thought, and the few people you love, and leave the rest to Providence and, as Big Jim used to sing, Paddy McGinty’s goat. A song that always made Molly laugh. A song from the past.

  From the moment he first saw her, he knew that Molly had a past. She was losing a child on a North River pier, and someone had helped place that child in her emptying womb. Someone from her very recent past. He knew that from the beginning, but never asked her about it. Not in St. Vincent’s, as he tried to convince her to live, with soft words and gentle touches of her wrist. Not later. The nuns never asked either. They had seen too many humans move through those wards to judge any of them. So had Delaney. He never asked her about the past when she left the hospital, still full of sorrow and some form of muted anger. He didn’t ask her when he saw her on Greenwich Street seven months later, healthy now, working at Wanamaker’s as a salesgirl, living in a woman’s boardinghouse. Nor did he pry in any way when they went together to Tony Pastor’s on the following Saturday night. There he first saw her beautiful smile when the comedians started their routines, a smile full of release from sorrow, and later they walked across Union Square in the dim snowy night, and she took his arm and repeated three of the jokes and then laughed out loud, and they went into the restaurant, and still he did not ask. He knew that he must listen if she ever told her tale, but he could not ask. He did not ask when they were married. He did not ask in Baltimore, when they arrived to find the way to Johns Hopkins. He did not ask when they moved into Horatio Street, or in the years that followed. He did not ask in his letters from the war. He never asked, and she never told the tale. But he came to know something large and heavy about her: the tale lay within her, wordless, a wound unhealed.

  Sitting alone at the end of the rattling elevated car, Delaney saw a young man at the other end, seventeen or eighteen, dressed in the sharp clothes of the apprentice hoodlum. He stood with his back to the door, hands before him like a prizefighter waiting to be introduced at the Garden, unwilling to sit and risk the ruin of his razored creases. And Delaney thought of Eddie Corso, and hoped he would be all right. He hoped Eddie would live many more years. He hoped the wound would not suddenly fester. He hoped there would be no stupid accident on the long road to Florida. He hoped no hired gunsel would hunt him down.

  He got off at Fourteenth Street, glancing one final time at the apprentice hoodlum, who didn’t move an inch. He walked past the Spanish church and the Spanish Benevolent Society and the Spanish grocery and turned left at the meat market and into Horatio Street. Kids were everywhere, defying the icy wind off the North River. Playing tag. Running after one another. Shuddering in doorways or vestibules, scheming, smoking cigarettes. He had treated most of them and would treat them again. The Rearden kid. The Caputo kid. The Corrigan twins. They moved in packs of six and seven, and he tried to imagine Carlito among them. They carried all the normal dangers: measles and scarlet fever and whooping cough. In summer there was polio, and all the filthy things they could contract while swimming off the North River piers. The normal diseases were just that: normal. Mayor La Guardia said a few days ago that he’d make vaccinations for kids mandatory, and maybe he’d be the rare politician who kept his word. Maybe.

  The streets were full of other dangers. Knives and guns and the logic of the pack. He had treated people for such things too. Soon the boy gangsters would no longer swing aboard the Tenth Avenue trains, taking their percentage, not after the New York Central opened the elevated High Line above the street. Closer to the river, they were working on the Miller Highway too, that would carry automobiles above the cobblestones. But the High Line was something else, a commercial overpass that even cut through buildings above street level. But he could imagine the youth packs heaving ladders against walls and hopping the slow trains and hurling booty to the street. Children of the old Hudson Dusters, the vanished Whyos. Some of them learned too young to love trouble, and the more difficult the trouble, the better.

  For most of a block, he was scared about Carlito. If the boy stayed here a long time, if he was to be here for years, he’d go to those streets on his own. The boy couldn’t have Delaney with him every hour of the day. He couldn’t have Rose Verga there either, for she could be gone in a month. Even if she stayed, the other kids would mock him if he used any woman as a bodyguard. Or a creaky, respectable grandfather. But he couldn’t just move away. Couldn’t afford another house. Couldn’t just go. This was his place and he had made a vow. Promised himself in the mud and shit of France that if he lived he would serve his own people. For the rest of his fucking life. If he fled with Carlito to some leafy suburb, or to Brooklyn or the Bronx, the broken vow would eat his guts. He must find a way to stay.

  But in spite of the vow, Delaney knew he must deal with practical matters. Where would the boy go to school? Sacred Heart was better than the public school. But there was trouble there too, and danger. Demented priests, seething with God’s furies and their own tormenting desires. They planted the fear of Hell in their young charges along with hatred of the flesh. Carlito could be subjected to all those small mutilations that could leave scars for life. God damn you, Grace.

  He went in under the stoop, and on the bench in the hall he saw a weeping young woman holding an infant. She rose when he entered, trying to speak. The child was silent and still. Behind her on the bench was Japs Brannigan, his high-cheekboned yellowed Asian face more like a wood sculpture than part of a liv
ing creature. He was there for the quinine. And there was old Sally Wilson, staring into the darkness at the far end of the waiting room. Delaney held up a hand, gesturing to them all.

  “I need five minutes,” he said. “Just give me that.”

  Monique was at her desk, her face flat and void of expression, her eyes tired. He closed the door behind him. He flashed on that morning, the first of May, 1909. Knocko was calling, a dock walloper then, not the president of the union. He said there was a woman on Pier 41 and she was in trouble. “She’s a Mick,” Knocko said. “I don’t want the immigration idiots to send her out to the Island for lyin’ or somethin’.” Delaney pedaled the bike to the pier. In a dark corner Knocko had placed some longshoremen around the woman, holding blankets to shield her from the inspection of strangers. She was young, pale, beautiful, and semiconscious. She had just arrived alone in steerage from Ireland and was having a miscarriage. Molly.

  “A guy named Jackie Spillane called,” Monique said. “About steam heat.”

  Knocko had made the call. Again.

  “I’ll call him later,” Delaney said. Then: “Where’s the boy?”

  “Rose took him with her, food shopping.”

  He held up the paper sack.

  “I brought him a few things.” He passed the sack to her, and Monique peered inside and smiled.

  “Aw, that’s great. He needs something to play with, that boy.” She handed the sack back to him. “I found those American Express addresses for you too. Barcelona, Madrid, Paris.”

  “Just address the envelopes, and I’ll mail them later. I still have to write the notes.”

  He paused again, then nodded toward the door to the waiting room.

  “Is that child alive out there?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The baby started bleeding from the nose and mouth last night. I tried to get the mother to go to the hospital. She said, ‘Absolutely not. I want this girl to live.’ ”

  “Send her in first. Get the quinine ready for Brannigan, no charge. And what’s ailing Princess Wilson?”

  “She wants her husband back.”

  “I can’t help her with that. He’s been dead six years now.”

  “She thinks you can bring him back.”

  Delaney sighed. He noticed that Monique was chewing the inside of her mouth.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. No. Ah, hell, Doc, it’s the usual. We got bills here, a slew of them, and when Rose gets back with the kid, they’ll be worse.”

  “Hold on.”

  He went into his office and closed the door behind him. He turned the dial on the small safe, found the envelope, and removed a crisp hundred-dollar bill. He creased it and then went out and handed it to Monique.

  “Change this somewhere. Not the bank. Pay some of the bills. And send in the woman with the baby.”

  Monique stared at the hundred-dollar bill.

  “You rob a bank?”

  “Sort of.”

  The woman’s name was Bridget Smyth, “with a y.” She was nineteen, unmarried, and her baby girl was seven weeks old. She was also dead. He looked at the dead girl on his examination table, and his eyes wandered to the browning photograph of John McGraw and Big Jim. The woman sobbed. Touch her, for Chrissakes. Her baby is dead.

  He gently touched her bony forearm but didn’t speak. She did.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Delaney said. “Pneumonia.”

  She lifted the dead infant and hugged her close and began to bawl. No words came from her, just the wracking wail of grief.

  Delaney put an arm around her and held her tight and the door opened and Monique came in. He nodded at her, and Monique came over and eased him aside. She put an arm on her shoulder, whispering, trying to move her to the outer room.

  Bridget Smyth snapped.

  “Don’t give me that effin’ rubbish! She’s dead! And there’s no effin’ food at me room and no effin’ water, ’cause the pipes is froze, and no effin’ heat, and her father is an effin’ eejit, gone off some effin’ place!” She bawled wordlessly, Monique holding her tight, Delaney caressing her bony arm. With his right hand.

  “I’ll call someone at Sacred Heart,” Monique whispered. “Get a priest to help —”

  “A priest? Never! I went to them and they turned me away. I sinned, I must pay!”

  Her eyes were wide now, and mad. She looked at them and held the child fiercely and then rushed the door. Delaney moved in front of her.

  “Out of me way!”

  “I won’t let you go this way,” Delaney said, trying to sound both gentle and commanding. “We’ve got to arrange a proper burial. Wait. Just wait. We’ll —”

  “I know where to have the proper effin’ burial! The two of us, together! In the effin’ North River!”

  Then she dissolved again, sobs mixing with wails, squatting with her back to the door and her unmoving child tight against her chest. Delaney whispered to Monique: “Get your coat. Stay with her, no matter where she tries to go.” He mouthed the word Moriarty, which was the name of the undertaker on Ninth Avenue. She rubbed thumb and forefinger together, indicating the unspoken word “money,” and raised her eyebrows.

  “Use what I gave you,” he said. “I’ll get some more.”

  Together they raised Bridget Smyth from the floor and led her into the anteroom. She was silent now, and limp, as if her body was empty of the fuel of rage. The infant seemed like an extension of her own body, posed as a small Madonna awaiting some draftsman with a sepia stick.

  Delaney closed his door now, breathing hard. The effing North River. . . . That summer evening, Molly walked toward the North River. There were still people on the streets, people she knew. Jackie Norris learned that in a few hours, with the help of his policeman’s badge. She was alone, wearing a blue dress, saying to one old lady that she was going to the ruined pier to watch the sunset. No surprise. Delaney had gone there with her many times, finding the scorched but solid timbers that served as small bridges between more solid planks. Sitting with her in silence as the sky reddened over New Jersey. She would draw up her knees, her arms hugging them, staring at nothing. Now and then she’d mention some moment from the years before the war, some character, some song. She’d mention a play they’d seen. She’d mention a café in Vienna. But that summer evening, she went alone, wrapped in a shroud of her own hard solitude, for there were five patients waiting for Delaney. She never came back. O my Molly-O.

  He rose slowly and went to the safe and took another hundred-dollar bill from the envelope, to cover expenses after Monique paid for the infant’s funeral. And the woman’s rent. And some food. Thinking: The North River is jammed with ice. Thank God.

  Brannigan took his quinine and left, angling past Monique’s empty desk. Then Sally Wilson came in. At twenty, she had been a star at Tony Pastor’s, a lush princess of the Rialto. Delaney had never seen her perform, but she had once showed up at his old office on Jane Street carrying her scrapbook. As if to prove that she existed. There she was, in big bustles, or in tights, and the stories said that she had a wonderful contralto voice. Her hair was so blond it seemed white in the photographs. Now it truly was white, but she had added forty years and fifty pounds. Along the way, she’d had two sons and three husbands. The sons were gone, one now working in despair for the Republicans in Franklin Roosevelt’s Washington, the other in California in the movie business. Or so she said. She only mourned the last husband.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said abruptly. “I keep seeing Alfie, and when I turn over in bed, he’s not there.”

  “Are you still drinking coffee?” Delaney asked gently.

  “Of course.”

  “Stop,” he said.

  “You think it’s just coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t even examine me!”

  “Well, do you have any physical symptoms?”

  She always wanted him to examine her. She always had v
ague worries about her breasts, which were soft and heavy. She seldom said the word “cancer,” but it must have been in her dreams.

  “I have these flutters, especially at night, Dr. Delaney.” She squeezed her left breast. “What do you call them flutters?”

  “Palpitations.”

  “Right.”

  Delaney sighed. “Well, let’s have a listen.”

  She stood up and unbuttoned her blouse, then turned her back and unfastened her white brassiere. Delaney had long ago trained himself to be objective when examining human beings, but Sally Wilson had not. Her breasts were large, fallen, blue-veined, but she lifted the left breast as if offering it to Delaney. The breast seemed to blush.

  “They used to be beautiful,” she said sadly.

  “Breathe, please.”

  He listened. Then removed the stethoscope from his ears.

  “The heartbeat is strong and regular, Miss Wilson.”

  She folded her arms under her breasts to form a shelf.

  “I’m worried about lumps.”

  “There’s a wonderful specialist at St. Vincent’s, Miss Wilson. I can make an appointment if you want.”

  “I don’t trust strangers. I need you to check.”

  He did, while she inhaled through clenched teeth, her eyes closed for almost a minute. Her body grew tauter.

  “Everything seems fine,” Delaney said. “No lumps, Miss Wilson. But I can make that appointment if . . .”

  She relaxed, arms folded under breasts again.

  “You can get dressed now, Miss Wilson.”

  He turned his back on her, heard her moving, a rustling of something silky. Her breathing was heavy.

  “Every time I think of Alfie, I get the condition, the papulations.”

  He chuckled. “Maybe you should think about your second husband.”

  “That bastard.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. Stop the coffee for a week and then come back. We’ll see how you’re doing.”

  When he turned she was wearing the brassiere but not the blouse.