North River

by Pete Hamill

  Then he realized that in the list of people for whom he wished he could pray, he had left out Molly.

  Yes, Molly: I would pray for you too, if I could.

  At last, he slept.

  The telephone rang in the morning dark. He reached for it and knocked some books off the night table.

  “Hello?”

  He heard breathing, but no words.

  “Hello? This is Dr. Delaney.”

  “You better remember, Doc,” the voice said. Low. Menacing. Burred by cigarettes.

  Delaney sighed, reached over, and switched on the light. It was ten after six.

  “Listen, pal,” he said, in a tough voice that he tried to make reasonable. “Don’t do this. I have nothing to remember. I don’t know where Eddie Corso is or where he went. He could be in Staten Island. He could be in Utah. He could be in Russia. I don’t have a clue. Don’t call me again.”

  “We know where you live.”

  “The whole neighborhood knows where I live.”

  A pause, then: “We know where the kid lives.”

  Then Delaney felt the old West Side hardness rise in him for the first time in years, the fury of every street kid that came off the North River.

  “You son of a bitch, Gyp,” he said. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

  “Remember fast.”

  Then a click and silence.

  Delaney got up then, stepping on Yeats and Lord Byron, pulsing with fear and rage. He ripped off the nightshirt. He faced the mirror and threw savage punches at the air. Hook after hook after hook. His mouth was clamped shut and he snorted through his nose. He snarled. He shuddered. Touch that boy, he thought, and I’ll fucking kill you.

  Delaney washed quietly in the hour before daylight. He dressed in silence, before easing down the stairs to his office. As soon as it was light, he would call his friends on the cops: Danny Shapiro and Jackie Norris. He would call Knocko Carmody. One of them would find Gyp and lean on him a little. If they can’t find him, he thought, I will.

  He could smell the coffee before he saw Rose. The aroma moved under the door, through the cold morning air. Then there was a knock.

  “Come in.”

  Rose entered, with a single cup on a tray, steam rising in the chill, a sugar bowl, a spoon. Her bathrobe was pulled tight.

  “You want some toast, Dottore?” she said softly.

  “Let’s wait for the boy,” he said. He stared at his desk. “I got a call a little while ago.”

  “I know,” she said. “I hear it ringing.”

  “It was Gyp,” he said.

  “That bastid. Excuse me. What’d he say?”

  He told her, and laid out plans for defending themselves. Defending the house. Defending Rose and Monique and the boy. She listened carefully.

  Then the boy was there, squinting at them. He paused, then hurried to hug Rose’s hips.

  Later in the morning, he and Rose and Monique began building their fortress. Time moved quickly, although it seemed like only a few hours in a day busy with patients, here in the hall, out there in the tenements, off at the hospital. In fact, the work took four days. A locksmith arrived and added locks to the doors in front and back. An ornamental ironworker named Buscarelli took measurements for window guards, and they were in place two days later. Jimmy Spil-lane, wiry and dour, arrived with a short mustached carpenter named Mickey Mendoza, and Rose showed them into the basement with the boy tagging along. They went floor by floor, looking for places to install steam pipes and radiators. When they were finished, and Delaney left a patient to say good-bye, Mendoza said, in wonder:

  “This kid speaks Spanish!”

  “That’s right,” Delaney said.

  “Sicilian too,” Rose said.

  “Where’d he learn Spanish like that? I’m from Puerto Rico and —”

  “Mexico. He was there with his mother. He’s a fast learner.”

  “I’m very impressed,” Mendoza said, rubbing the boy’s head as he moved to the door. “Hasta pronto, joven.”

  “Hasta pronto,” the boy said. “Que le vaya bien!”

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Mendoza said, and smiled as he and Jimmy Spillane went out. Spillane said glumly that they’d have an estimate the following morning. He said almost nothing else. When they were gone, Rose looked at Delaney.

  “Why’s this guy Spillane so unhappy?” she said.

  Delaney sighed. “His mother came here one morning, maybe six years ago. I sent her to St. Vincent’s. She died there.”

  Rose nodded but said nothing.

  “Excuse me, but I have to work,” Delaney said. He leaned down and hugged Carlito. “Be good, joven.”

  By afternoon there were new rules. The boy could no longer come to the area where the sick assembled. He couldn’t come while they were there. He couldn’t come when they were gone until after the place had been scoured of germs and microbes. Or at least most of them. The boy had to be kept safe from many things.

  “I’ll get someone to come in every day,” Delaney said to Rose. “You’ll never have time. Someone who can scrub the place down with disinfectant.”

  “I can do it.”

  “No, you can’t. Help me find someone.”

  By the end of the week, Rose had found a black woman named Bessie. She was bone thin, and asked Delaney to examine her for tuberculosis before she started working around the boy. “My brother Roy, he got it,” she explained. “You never know.” Delaney examined her. She didn’t have it. She began to arrive every afternoon for an hour, when the patients were gone. She wore gloves and a surgical mask, and was paid two dollars a week. The boy looked at her with curiosity, a woman with ebony skin, and resisted his banishment from the bottom hall, but Rose enforced the new rules.

  “You can’t get sick,” she said to the boy. “You got too much to learn.”

  It wasn’t only sickness that Delaney feared. Patients arrived without appointment. The door must be open. It could be open to some gunsel too. A punk like Gyp might fire shots at everyone. Or act on his implied threat and snatch the boy. On that first morning, Delaney explained to Rose and Monique about the phone call, and made his own calls to Danny Shapiro at the precinct, to Angela, to Knocko Carmody. They would watch the streets, listen for rumors, issue warnings. Shapiro was a tough young wiry detective, and said: “They won’t get close enough to that kid to tell the color of his eyes.”

  And Rose blurted out fiercely: “They try to snatch Carlito, they gotta go through me.”

  Delaney said that wouldn’t be necessary, but he was not truly sure. Once every hour or so, fear opened and closed in his stomach like a fist. He warded it off by focusing on the fear rising from his patients, but when the last patient was gone, the last house call made, he imagined gunmen in the shadows. Or the knife artist named Gyp.

  “There’s someone across the street in a car,” Monique said on the second morning.

  Delaney went upstairs to his bedroom window and peered out through the curtains. He smiled and came downstairs.

  “It’s two of Knocko’s boys,” he said. “Keeping an eye out.”

  “That didn’t take long,” she said.

  “Make sure they get some coffee.”

  Later, Delaney rummaged deep into a bedroom closet and found the old Louisville Slugger that Big Jim had given to him in 1894, when he turned eight. Dried black tape was loose on the handle. He hefted the bat, feeling its weight, sensing its memory of doubles and ground-outs, and then leaned it against the wall between the bed and the night table. After rounds, he stopped by Billy McNiff’s and bought two more bats, each engraved with the signature of Mel Ott.

  “A little cold for baseball,” McNiff said.

  “Spring is coming, Billy.”

  “That kid play ball?”

  “He will.”

  “How old is he anyway?”

  “Old enough.”

  On the way home, he began thinking of cutting a separate stairway into the back kitchen. To keep the boy away fr
om patients and anyone else who might come in the door. He could not close the kitchen to Carlito, because the boy loved its Sicilian aura of plenitude, its position as a kind of warm center of the chilly house, and its entry into the garden. Delaney thought: I’ll call Knocko to send over a carpenter to make an estimate. At home, Delaney placed one new bat beside Monique’s desk and gave the second to Rose. She gripped the handle awkwardly, then smiled at Delaney.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about baseball,” she said.

  “I’ll teach you if you want. But this isn’t for playing ball.”

  “It’s for breaking a head, right?”

  “Right.”

  She smiled in an odd way, then swung the bat sharply through the air, upper teeth clamped over her lower lip. He showed her how to hold the bat, and she swung again. This time something cold came into her eyes.

  If Eddie Corso indirectly had created the sense of siege on Horatio Street, the bounty of Eddie Corso was providing solutions. Delaney thought with a chuckle: Maybe I can cut into the cornice on the roof and set up archers. To peer across the empty lot toward Jane Street. Aiming arrows. To pierce the hide of anyone they see with a mortar. Or a lance. Maybe we can take over the roof of the empty Logan house, the high ground. Maybe we can arrange snares that fall on a signal. Or string barbed wire all the way to the North River. Maybe . . .

  The weather warmed on Thursday and the snow was gone on Friday. When Delaney went on house calls now, he noticed men standing in small groups at all corners of the block and on one of the rooftops across the street. The faces were not always the same. But he could pick out Knocko’s boys, with their derby hats, and Danny Shapiro wandering from the precinct, and a few of the regulars from Angela’s. All of them protecting their own, which, Delaney thought, in this case happens to be me. And the boy. And Monique. And Rose. I can never move now.

  “It’s like a block party around here,” Rose said, and laughed. “How many of these guys — I mean your guys — you think have guns?” Delaney said he didn’t want to know. In the places where he made house calls, neighbors nodded, and waited in the vestibules like guards. The word was out. This wasn’t just a neighborhood. Delaney knew that it was a point of view, a way of looking at the world and living in it. They all believed in the unions, the longshoremen, the teamsters, the carpenters, the steamfitters, and so did their wives. Even out of work, the men were out of work as union men. In the twenties, more than a few of them had had their heads cracked in fights on picket lines, men like little Patty Rafferty, who sat now with vacant eyes in the dock wallopers’ union hall. Some had cracked a few heads themselves. But they got the union, forever. They had voted for Roosevelt and said so, and some had voted for La Guardia and didn’t say so, because they had never voted for a Republican in their lives. Now some of them were communists, vehement and certain, but Delaney was sure that wouldn’t last. The communists did not easily forgive sin. On the West Side, sin and its forgiveness were part of the deal.

  That’s why he’d come back here. That’s why he’d returned to make a second life with Molly and Grace after the war had destroyed so many things, including the certainties of that first life. These were his people. They needed him. They still did. And he needed them. They would fight if threatened, and he would fight for them, and with them. He would try to prolong their lives. Or save them. He would help them move their children through the ceaseless dangers of the streets. He would try as hard as he could to ease their pain. To bring them sleep. To give them another day, another week, another year. The reason was simple. Here all sins were forgiven. Even the sins of James Finbar Delaney.

  On Sunday, the blessed day without patients, Rose was off work, wandering alone into the city. Delaney tried to convince her to stay home, but she only laughed. “Those bums can’t fight when the sun is out. Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.” And was gone.

  Delaney took Carlito by the hand and walked down to Washington Street. The sun was bright and hard. They stood for a long time watching a lone freight train move on the High Line, testing the track, groaning, pulling loads of unseen cargo, bells ringing, steel wheels squealing, entering buildings from the north side and emerging on the south. He tried to see this wonder through the boy’s eyes. Were these huge right-angled animals? Were they controlled monsters? Whatever he thought, the boy didn’t want to leave.

  “Tray,” he said, pointing a mittened hand at a train. And adding, when it was gone, “More tray.”

  I will get him a picture book about trains, Delaney thought. And about animals. And the alphabet. He will learn to name the world. All of its plants and living creatures, its seas and ships, its cabbages and kings. In the spring, I will get him a book about baseball. And show him the photographs in the Daily News, of a man sliding into second base with the shortstop above him, firing to first for a double play.

  Then they walked to the North River, empty on this cold day of rest. Only the train was moving behind them. He saw one of Knocko’s boys watching from a discreet distance, hat pulled low, hands jammed in pockets. The boy stared in wonder at three huge ships tied to the few waterfront piers that were not emptied by the Depression. He saw a seagull descending in a diminishing circle and landing on a grimy piling. Then Delaney led him onto the abandoned pier where he and Molly had walked on summer evenings. He held the boy’s small hand all the way, feeling the warmth. He wondered where Rose had gone on this empty Sunday. The North River was filled with broken boulders of ice, and Delaney explained the chunks to the boy, and how the river carried them away to the harbor to the left and then to the ocean, and the boy watched with great intensity. I will find a book about ships and rivers and the ocean sea.

  Standing on the timbers of the pier, holding the boy’s hand, Delaney realized that after a long frozen time, there was a fresh current in his own life too.

  When he was in bed in the dark, longing for sleep, Delaney’s patients vanished. The commandos of the neighborhood’s self-defense corps had retired to quarters. Monique was off in her night place. Rose was upstairs with her dictionary and her Daily News beside her and a baseball bat in the corner. There were no sounds in the dark house. And yet he trembled. Afraid of sleep. For the boy now filled too many of his dreams.

  One night he saw Carlito falling from the Brooklyn Bridge, calling, calling, his voice pathetic and pleading, vanishing into the black waters. On another night, the boy was running on Horatio Street toward the High Line and fell into an open sewer, into the place where cholera lived, and typhoid and polio. On a third night, the boy was at the rail of a freighter glazed with ice, carrying him away from a North River pier into the unseen Atlantic. And on another night, on the same icy ship, the boy started to climb the rail, as if to dive in and swim to shore, and his mother was suddenly there, Grace herself, pulling him back, the faces of both distorted with fear. That night he called to Grace to hold the boy, and then woke up at the sound of his own voice.

  On this Sunday night, he huddled there in the dark, his heart thumping. Longing for sleep to come, in spite of dreams.

  He woke abruptly from a dream of Carlito one night, the boy wedged in the gluey mud of a trench, wearing pajamas among helmeted men while explosions shook the earth. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. Delaney lay there, heart pounding, his eyes blinking, and then saw a glow.

  Against the far side of the room the glow was pale white, tinged with blue, as shimmery and pale as a watercolor. He stared. And then, like atoms coalescing, a figure formed, sitting in the wing chair.

  It was Molly.

  “Hello, James,” she whispered.

  He started to get up, to go to her.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “Stay there.”

  He rose to his elbows, his heart now racing.

  “Is it really you?” he said.

  She didn’t answer for a while.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said. She was wearing an overcoat and laced boots, but he could see her high cheekbones, the wide-spaced eyes
, the lustrous hair, the long-fingered hands.