North River

by Pete Hamill

  He heard water running in the bath upstairs. Rose. Her heavy peasant tread. To the room. Back to the bath. The boy surely asleep, hugging Osito. Then silence. The water taps closed. Rose in the bath. His mind filled with images. How many nights did I spend in that tub with Molly? She murmurous with pleasure. Leading me wet to the music room, to stretch upon a yellow beach towel, to scream. Laughing once and saying: That was a C over G. But more often silent. More often humming some vagrant tune.

  Delaney dozed then, hugging a pillow. After a while, he was snapped into clarity. The door had cracked open. A dim figure in the dark. He could smell the soap before he saw her. Rose. She said nothing. The door closed behind her. He heard her remove her robe. By the time she slipped in beside him, he was already hard.

  He reached for her, to touch her flesh.

  Rose was not there. The only flesh was his own.

  For days, as the winter gave way to the first rumors of spring, he maintained a formal distance from her, afraid of making a mistake. Rose went shopping with Carlito and his teddy bear. She bathed the boy, and cleaned his clothes, and prepared lunch and supper for the three of them. In small awkward ways, Rose showed Delaney that she knew something had shifted in him, but she gave him no obvious signs of her unspoken knowledge. She never used the language of affection, except to the boy. She did not touch Delaney, even in the most casual way, nor did he touch her. He was always Dottore. Not Jim. Everything was as before, and at the same time, it was not.

  But across the days of other people’s illness and damage and painful unhappiness, the days of endless casualties, he carried Rose with him now. She and the boy had formed a current in his life, like a secret stream flowing south through the North River, all the way from the distant mountains. It was a stream that was always in the present, not in the past, nor the future.

  Then as February drew to an end, the past came rushing back. Delaney came down into the kitchen for breakfast on Monday morning and Rose and Carlito smiled at him. The boy’s mouth was full of bread. The teddy bear dozed. The radio played at low volume.

  “Some baseball guy died,” Rose said. “It was on the radio.”

  “What was his name?”

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

  He turned up the volume, while Rose busied herself at the stove. He moved around the dial. Finally he heard the name McGraw.

  “John McGraw,” he said. “It was John McGraw.”

  He tried to explain to Rose that John McGraw was the manager of the New York Giants, the manager for as long as anyone could remember, from before the Great War right up until two years ago, when Bill Terry took over.

  “You knew this McGraw?” Rose said.

  “Not really,” Delaney said. “He was a friend of my father’s. But I met him many times.”

  “I’m sorry he died,” she said in a soft voice.

  “So am I,” Delaney said.

  The morning patients were all sorry too, even the women. Delaney listened to the patients, and examined them, and spoke banalities, and wrote prescriptions for them. He wished he could go to the Polo Grounds and say a proper farewell. When the last morning patient left, Monique handed him a letter.

  “For you,” she said.

  He took the letter, addressed in Grace’s handwriting to a Harry Miller on West Nineteenth Street, and slipped it under his desk blotter. Then he called in one of the malarial vets for his quinine. The letter would wait. It had spent days crossing the Atlantic. A few hours would make no difference now.

  On every house call, the talk was of McGraw. Do I have that thing that killed John McGraw? said one flabby man, gray from the long winter. Sure, he was a grand tough fellow, wasn’t he? said another.

  “You’ve got a ruptured appendix, Eddie,” he said to a heavy longshoreman named Doyle on Jane Street. “You’ll have to go to the hospital.”

  “Not me.”

  “There’s no choice. You stay here, Eddie, you die.”

  “Shit,” Eddie Doyle said, as if he’d been sentenced to the electric chair. After a while, he reached for his trousers, hanging on the bedpost. Delaney would have to make still another call to St. Vincent’s for still another ambulance to pick up still another man who lived alone with the sour odor of age and isolation. His wife was dead of “the con,” tuberculosis, which Eddie still called consumption. A man whose three daughters were gone off to the distant Bronx with their husbands and kids. A man left alone with Jimmy Walker on the wall.

  “I hear McGraw is dead,” Doyle said softly.

  “True. They’ll have a mass for him at St. Patrick’s.”

  “Uptown St. Patrick’s or downtown?”

  “The one with the most seats.”

  “Your father woulda been there for sure,” Eddie Doyle said.

  “For sure.”

  “They were real good friends, wunt they?”

  “They were.”

  “Help me on with this, Doc, will ya? I’m hurtin’ too bad to move.”

  Delaney called for the ambulance from the corner candy store, where everybody was talking about McGraw. Almost all working men, with nowhere to go, least of all home.

  Before dinner that night, he sat by the bedroom fire and read the letter from Grace.

  Dear Daddy,

  I got your note. It’s hard to believe that you have been visited by the FBI. There is great hope here for Roosevelt, that he will change things in America, that he will recognize how many people have been hurt by the Depression. Not just in America, but in Spain too, and in all of Europe. But how can there be true hope if people with badges come to your office? You, who have never done anything except try to help people?

  That’s why there are many Spaniards who believe there is no hope unless the people take up arms. The communists sneer at Roosevelt as a tool of Wall Street, and maybe they’re right. I don’t know. I’m not a true part of it. But do not be surprised if there is a rising. Or a civil war. The fascists have their supporters here too. They love Mussolini. They are happy about Hitler. Who knows what might happen?

  I met a man yesterday who saw my husband a few months ago. He said he will try to get a message to him. I will let you know.

  I miss Carlito with all my heart. Send me news. Send me photos. I am at the same place. But American Express is best. Use the name Leonora Córdoba. I miss you too, Daddy.

  Saludos, y mucho cariño, G.

  He wrote a brief note and enclosed snapshots of Carlito on the streets of New York, and one with Rose and Monique. He hoped they would fill her with longing, not only for her son, but for Grand Central and the Chrysler Building and the Third Avenue El. Her city. Home. Where she lived with Molly while he was away at the war, where she did not know him when he returned. The place where she made ten thousand drawings on the way to the future. Where she was determined to find her own way in the world even if it meant leaving. Even, indeed, if it meant leaving her son in a vestibule. To pursue a man who blew up buildings in the name of utopia. And maybe blew up people. For a moment, he felt a treasonous flutter around the heart. One part of the truth was that he didn’t want Grace to return. He wanted the boy for himself. And so did Rose. For Rose, it was even worse. She needed him.

  He told Rose that he had to go to the Wednesday funeral of John McGraw at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  “Why?” Rose said.

  “He was a friend of my father’s,” he said in a cool way. “I never made it to my father’s funeral. Or my mother’s.” She looked at him and waited for the reason. “They died in the flu epidemic. I was in a hospital in France.” A pause. “So that’s why I have to go to St. Patrick’s, Rose.”

  She touched his shoulder, then quickly removed her hand.

  “Do you want to go to the funeral, Rose?” Delaney said.

  “Alone?”

  “Of course not. With me. With Carlito.”

  She furrowed her brow in a thoughtful way.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.r />
  “Why not?”

  “I don’t believe all this church stuff.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “So why you want to go?”

  “It’s about a man. McGraw. It’s not about God.”

  She looked at the boy, then into the yard. The snow was now all gone, and she leaned forward at the window and squinted at the sight of a yellow bird in one of the skeletal trees. Abruptly the hardy scout flew off into the sunny cold.

  “The truth?” Rose said. “I want to go, jus’ to see for myself. But I won’t go. First, I don’t have clothes. All the fancy people, the big shots, politicians, and actors and all that? With them, I can’t wear what I got. Not and walk in the door with you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said.

  “Silly to you. Not to me. I don’t want to shame you, Dottore.”

  “You couldn’t shame me if you showed up in overalls.”

  But he knew what she meant. Even now, even in the Depression, the codes of class prevailed in certain parts of New York. The schools you went to and the accents of speech and the clothes you wore. Delaney was a doctor, with degrees on the wall from fine schools. He was the son of a politician who was a friend of John McGraw’s. He owned a house. He was surviving the worst times. And Rose? She was a housekeeper, a kind of governess, who went to the fourth grade in Sicily. There were women like her still, in Gramercy Park, on Lower Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side. Her clothes were what she could afford. She carried a bloody secret about her husband. She must be certain, Delaney thought, that the observers in the pews of St. Patrick’s would know her. They would sneer, more at Delaney than at her.

  He saw that her eyes were moist, and she was gnawing at the inside of her cheek. The same cheek that carried the fine scar.

  “Well,” she said, and breathed out. “Maybe.” A pause. “Okay.”

  She gazed into the yard. “That’s an olive tree, right?” she said. “All wrapped up.”

  “Yes.”

  “Soon we gotta take its coat off,” she said. “An olive tree, it needs the sun. Us too.”

  When Monique arrived, Delaney gave her fifty dollars to buy a dress and boots for Rose to wear to the McGraw funeral. He asked her to go with Rose and prop up her confidence. Monique gave him an insulted look.

  “What am I now?” she said. “A fashion consultant?”

  “No, but if we go to the funeral, I don’t want her to feel, you know . . .”

  “Like a maid? A cook? A governess? That’s what she is, Jim.”

  “That’s not very kind, Monique,” he said, thinking: She’s jealous, for Christ’s sake. No, she’s also right. She’s saying what everyone at St. Patrick’s might say. Or enough of them who cared to watch closely. And he thought: Maybe I should just tell Rose that I’ve had second thoughts. That I want to relieve her of any feelings of pressure or obligation. I should tell her that, well, anyway, the crowd will be too immense. That I can tell her all about it when I get home. And then he thought: No, I might wound her even more deeply. She might think I’m ashamed of her. That I believe she is just what Monique thinks she is: a servant, and nothing more. And I will inflict another scar.

  The phone rang. Monique murmured, took down information, and hung up. Then she sat there, in a sullen little pool.

  Delaney went into his office. Through the door, he could hear the voices of Monique and Rose. The door opened, and the boy walked in, smiling.

  On Wednesday morning, Delaney placed the milk beside the cornflakes and crisped the Italian bread, and Carlito kept glancing at the door, looking for Rose. So did Delaney. The funeral was at ten, which meant they’d have to leave before nine if they were to have any hopes of getting into the cathedral. It was now after eight. Knocko Carmody had told him the night before: “Keep an eye out for Danny Shapiro. He’s working the funeral. The main door, Fifth Avenue. And look for me too. Don’t worry. We’ll get you in.” A pause, and a chuckle. “I can’t guarantee how good the seats’ll be.”

  Carlito suddenly raised his head over his cereal. He could hear sounds upstairs, then harder steps on the stairs, then a pause. The door opened.

  Delaney sucked in some breath. Carlito froze, as if he had been expecting someone else, not this stranger.

  Rose had pulled a wide-brimmed black hat low over her brow, like Greta Garbo. Her conservative black dress fit loosely, the hem below the knee. The twenties were long gone, and Rose was certainly never a flapper. She wore a black scarf, no lipstick, light rouge. The color in her cheeks deepened as she smiled shyly. The scar was covered with powder.

  “Hoo-shine, Rose!” the boy said, pointing at her feet. They were encased in high laced black boots, brought to a brilliant polish. The boy hurried over and lightly touched the polished leather. “Gran’pa! Look!”

  Delaney said: “You look beautiful.”

  “Ah, shoosh,” Rose said.

  And blushed even more deeply. She moved around the kitchen in a tentative way, like a girl wearing her mother’s shoes.

  Before they reached the subway, Rose had begun to totter awkwardly on her high-heeled boots.

  “Ooof,” Rose said. “It was easier walking in these at the shoe store.”

  “We can get a cab,” Delaney said. “Or we can go home.”

  “No. A cab costs too much. Let’s go.”

  They moved on to the subway.

  Her hobbling was worse as they walked toward the crowd around the cathedral on Fifth Avenue, with the RCA Building rising across the street, high above its incomplete neighbors in Rockefeller Center. Under her hat, Rose was now wide-eyed, seeing actresses in mink stepping out of limousines, their skin tanned from Florida or California, and the Tammany pols moving somberly up the steps of the cathedral wearing black armbands, and some of the old ballplayers moving among them, big and wide-shouldered in camel’s hair coats. Carlito was between Delaney and Rose, each of his hands held tightly in the thickening human swarm. He seemed awed, perhaps even frightened, by the size of the ballplayers and the sight of more human beings than he’d ever seen in one place, even Grand Central. Suddenly Delaney was nervous too. In this crowd, a knife would be better than a gun. Silently jammed into belly or back. Some random hoodlum, maybe even Gyp Pavese himself. Spotting them in the crowd, striking, then hurrying to Club 65 for a payday. He gripped the boy’s hand and glanced around. Rose squinted at him, as if sensing his thoughts.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, using a shoulder to force a way through the gawkers.

  Reporters and photographers were everywhere, scribbling notes or aiming Speed Graphics, attending the arrivals of saloon royalty. Delaney recognized old bootleggers and stagedoor Johnnies and Ziegfeld girls and at least one woman who was a famous madam. There were men in shabby clothes among them, brothers of those human ruins that Delaney had seen so often on breadlines or on house calls. Some were wiping at tears with their coat sleeves. Weeping for McGraw. Perhaps for themselves when young.

  Rose took Delaney’s ruined arm as they came closer to the steps, her hand holding him tight, and she lifted the boy and whispered to him, calming him with her soothing tone. On the top steps, Delaney saw Danny Shapiro, pressed back into uniformed duty for the day, his lean face alert, his dark eyes scanning the crowd. Shapiro pointed at Delaney and gestured to himself, and they nudged their way to him, and Shapiro got them into the cathedral.

  “You’re on your own now, Doc,” Shapiro said, and laughed. “I’m a Dodger fan and a Jew. I can’t help with anything else in this ballpark.”

  They stood with others against the back wall, Delaney gazing down the empty center aisle, which awaited the pallbearers and the coffin. As they arrived, each man removed his hat, some holding them to their chests, others letting them dangle from their hands. Delaney placed his fedora over his heart. There were many bald heads in the cathedral now and women with white gloves. To the right Delaney spotted Knocko Carmody flashing a thumbs-up and gesturing toward the aisle on the right. They went that way.

>   The boy was pointing at the soaring ceiling, the chapels, the paintings of men in robes, and the many other things he could not name. A man nailed to a cross, bleeding from his hands and head. A grieving woman in thick robes. Rose removed the boy’s gloves and shoved them in her pocket, and then she too gazed around her. Everything was luminous with electric lights, a thousand candles, stained-glass windows, an unseen organist playing Handel. They went down the side aisle, slowed by two veterans on crutches, and followed the turning of a thousand heads as John McCormack walked down the center aisle with his wife, guided by an usher. The great tenor was pudgier now than he had been before the war. The McCormacks were led to the front pews where McGraw’s family would sit. Against the far wall, on the left, Delaney saw Izzy the Atheist standing alone, wearing a necktie. Delaney knew that he was not there because the funeral of John McGraw was a religious event. For Izzy the Atheist this must be extra innings.

  As he, Rose, and Carlito inched forward, he saw Harry Flanagan, the Tammany judge who got his shoes shined in Grand Central. He gestured to Delaney to take the tight space in his own row. He and Rose started easing into the pew, the boy held by Rose, and others moved to the side. There were hard oaken kneelers on the floor before them and little room for feet. Delaney sat next to Flanagan with Rose beside him and the boy on her lap. She sighed as weight came off her feet. Delaney smiled at Flanagan.

  “Hello, Judge,” Delaney said. “Thanks for making room.”

  “I liked church better when I was smaller,” Flanagan said. His coat was folded high off his lap, a derby on top. His suit jacket was open to allow for his stomach. Flanagan shook hands with Delaney and nodded amiably at Rose.