North River

by Pete Hamill

  Delaney dozed then, hearing nothing, free of all images.

  He was woken by the telephone.

  “Doc?” a growly voice said.

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Brick O’Loughlin.”

  “Hello, Brick, what’s the problem?”

  “I think I hoit my wife. Bad.”

  Ah, Christ.

  “I oney hit her once. She gave me lip, and I bopped her, and now she’s on the floor, and she ain’t movin’.”

  Delaney sighed. “You better call the coppers, Brick.”

  “I can’t, Doc. I gotta be sure. I wanna help her, I don’t want her dead.”

  Delaney switched on the lamp and glanced at the clock: seven thirty-five. What day? Or what night? St. Patrick’s Day. Then thought: O’Loughlin’s two blocks away.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t move her.”

  He removed the robe, pulled on clothes and shoes, went upstairs. The boy was asleep, snuggled against Rose’s breasts.

  “I have an emergency,” he whispered. She nodded sleepily. And he was gone.

  Brick answered his knock, reeking of whiskey but looking sober.

  “Where is she?”

  Brick led him to the kitchen. Poor thin middle-aged Maisie O’Loughlin was flat on the worn linoleum floor. Her eyes were open and sightless. The left side of her face was swollen. Delaney squatted and took her pulse.

  “I oney hit her one shot, Doc, I swear.”

  “That’s all you needed, Brick. She’s dead.”

  Brick sobbed. “Aw, fuck. Aw, shit.” He began weeping. “Oh, Maisie, I’m so fuckin’ sorry. Why’d you make me do it? Why’d you hafta fuckin’ die on me?”

  He started to lift her by the shoulders, and Delaney told him to stop, that the cops wouldn’t want her moved, and the man laid her down gently and kept whispering her name, Maisie, Maisie, and Delaney said he would go to the corner and call the cops.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t do anything, Brick. Don’t do anything at all.”

  Brick was still weeping twenty minutes later when two sour, chubby detectives arrived, dressed in plain clothes. They also smelled vaguely of whiskey. Delaney thought: It’s a great day for the Irish.

  The dark streets were full of drunks as he walked home. Some were singing. Some were alone and staggering, holding the fences of the areaways to stay erect. None of them were with women. A hard wind was now blowing off the North River, and he heard a foghorn blowing and some muted Irish music from an unseen place. The song was called “Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door.” Harrigan and Hart. Every door in the neighborhood needs a horseshoe, he thought, starting with mine. Delaney’s mind wandered. He wished he could go somewhere else. He needed sun and laughter and the colors of the earth. He needed a sky streaked with orange. He needed always, day after day, the aroma of basil and tomatoes, of garlic and oil. He needed Titian and Tintoretto and Botticelli. And a horseshoe on the door. He needed laughter. He needed flesh.

  In the kitchen, the boy was awake again, wearing blue pajamas and knitted blue slippers and pushing himself hard on the fire truck, making the sound of sirens, while Rose sat in a kitchen chair and watched.

  “This guy makes me tired just watchin’,” she said, and smiled.

  “We going to a fire, Gran’pa!”

  Death and pain and longing went away, like smoke rising from a ruin.

  Later, after eating the last bits of the braciole, and some pieces of birthday cake, they all went upstairs. Rose sat on the foot of the boy’s bed, and Delaney started reading the new Babar book to Carlito. The elephant was now the king, floating in a balloon through the sky with his bride, Queen Celeste. They find their way to the shores of the Mediterranean, above a tiny ship on blue water, and a curving harbor town, a golden vision far from the North River. But then they are blown far out to sea and crash on a desert island. They ride on a whale. They explore the island. Then a massive black ship appears . . .

  “Wow, look at that! A ship, Gran’pa!”

  A lifeboat arrives and an animal trainer takes over, and then they are in a circus. A king and queen turned into performers! They escape and find the Old Lady from the first book, and then they are among snowcapped mountains, and they are skiing. But they are homesick for their own country, and the Old Lady arranges an airplane to take them home and goes with them.

  But when they arrive home, the country of the elephants is destroyed. There has been a war with the rhinoceroses . . .

  Delaney thought: Only a Frenchman could have written this book. Someone from a country wrecked by war, soaked with blood, for nothing. Someone who knew about Verdun. Rose came around and stared at the pages about the war, but said nothing, perhaps locked into memory of what happens when wars end. Delaney and the boy got to the scene where Babar and the others painted giant eyes on each other’s asses and frightened the rhinos away, and where everything started to be the way it used to be. Carlito laughed at the scene with the elephants’ butts, and this time he did not say that he wanted his mama. Rose hugged him as Delaney closed the book.

  “Okay,” she said. “Time for to sleep.”

  “I want Babar again, Rosa!”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, and then, as if remembering the next day was Sunday, added, “or Monday.”

  The boy slammed the pillow with a fist, and his brows furrowed and his face reddened. A tantrum. At last.

  “I want Babar!” he screamed, and held the book to his chest and turned on his stomach. He screamed into the pillow. Rose looked alarmed.

  “Stop that! Stop it now, Carlito!”

  He screamed and twisted.

  “Stop!” Rose shouted. Delaney reached for her arm and squeezed it gently.

  “Let him get it out,” he said softly. “It’s his birthday, Rose. And he’s crying for a book.”

  She looked ashamed and stepped back.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and turned away.

  “For God’s sake, don’t be sorry, Rose. I know what you’re doing.”

  “I never seen him like this.”

  “Nor have I.”

  “Maybe he wants his . . . you know.”

  “No, he just wants Babar.”

  The screaming had stopped. They sat on different sides of the boy’s bed. He was very still, but not asleep. Rose put a hand on his shoulders.

  “Okay, boy. You got Babar.”

  He turned, his eyes red, his face distraught. Both arms were wrapped around his book. He said nothing.

  “But no more screaming, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let me read it to you,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Delaney hugged the boy. “Happy birthday, big fella,” he said.

  He went down to the kitchen and filled a cup with the last of the coffee. He felt oddly better. Have we spoiled him by giving in? Okay, we spoiled him. It was for a book. For a book.

  He sat there for a while, thinking about the end of poor Maisie O’Loughlin, and the fate of her poor stupid husband Brick, and wondered how many similar events he had been a part of in that neighborhood, as a bit player at other people’s tragedies. Faces and bodies flashed before him in fragments: beaten faces, bloodied and swollen, not all of them female. What was the man’s name who had his head split open with a ballpeen hammer? Houlihan? Or was it Harrigan? They didn’t always save the mayhem for St. Patrick’s Day. And none of them meant to kill anyone. Just hurt them very badly. He remembered someone at Big Jim’s club giving him advice when he was sixteen or seventeen: “Never marry a girl you can’t knock out with one punch.” And the guy laughed, and the other men laughed, and Delaney laughed too. But it wasn’t funny, and the people were not always Irish. They had no monopoly on kitchen or bedroom violence. Some of the Italians were pretty good at it too. And a few of the Jews. And he tried to imagine Rose when she lifted the three-legged chair and broke her husband’s skull. An act of pure clarity, one that sent her into exile. Sendin
g her here. He wondered if she had regrets.

  Then she was there, coming into the kitchen.

  “That boy’s gonna sleep for two days,” she said. “You want fresh coffee?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I bet he gets up tomorrow while it’s dark.”

  She started pouring water in a pot, her hands busy in an effort-less way.

  “Let me ask you something,” Delaney said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  She looked at him warily. “Sure.”

  “Where do you go on Sundays?”

  She didn’t turn to face him.

  “Here and there,” she said.

  “I see.”

  “Why d’you want to know?”

  “There’s a show — I mentioned it to you — up at the Metropolitan. Botticelli. I thought maybe tomorrow we could go to see it. You and me and Carlito.” He paused. “And tomorrow is Sunday.”

  She looked at him in a tentative way.

  “The guy from Firenze? He’s pretty good. . . .” She smiled. “The problem is he got the same name as that shadrool Frankie Botts.”

  “What’s a shadrool?” he said, and smiled.

  “Like a — never mind. It’s a bad word, that’s all you need to know.”

  He laughed. “I think I know a lot of shadrools.”

  “It really means a kind of a, in English, you call it a squish.”

  “A squash.”

  “Yeah. That’s it, a squash. A vegetable. But, ah, never mind.”

  The aroma of fresh coffee started filling the room. She took his cup.

  “What time you want to go see this show?”

  “Around one o’clock.”

  She chewed the inside of her mouth as she placed the cup before him.

  “Maybe I could do that,” she said. “I got to do something first, in the morning. But hey, Carlito can’t bring the fire engine to a museum.”

  He didn’t ask her where she went on Sunday mornings.

  She came back that Sunday at twelve-thirty. Carlito hugged her and said, “Hurry, hurry, hurry, Rosa.” She excused herself and went upstairs. When she returned she was wearing the boots that had caused her so much grief. Stretched and widened by Mr. Nobiletti. Carlito pointed at them. “Shoes, Rosa, your shoes.” His English getting better every day. She smiled at Delaney in a confident way and said: “Let’s go.”

  When they came up from the Lexington Avenue subway at Eighty-sixth Street, the neighborhood was still filthy from the parade, with garbage rising in pyramids from corner cans. The sanitation men did not work on Sunday. And the street was still carpeted with discarded paper flags, all of them Irish, sandwich wrappings, beer bottles, scattered newspapers, at least two crushed hats, and things without names. One older man in a frayed coat was examining the trash, pocketing some objects, moving on. Delaney took them left on Park Avenue, then right on Eighty-fourth Street, and here it was cleaner, with the old haughty mansions peering down at them in limestone disdain. And up ahead was the museum, a palace fit for Versailles.

  “That’s it,” Delaney said. “Right there across Fifth Avenue.”

  “It looks like kings live there,” Rose said.

  “They do,” he said.

  They went up the wide stairs, and Delaney turned to look at the far side of the avenue, remembering the years before the Great War, when some of the mansions, built to last forever, were being torn down after thirty years of life to make room for apartment houses, and how one St. Patrick’s Day there were rumors of impending violence and plywood boards covered many of the windows. Not even a stone was thrown, but the rumors themselves made the morning papers. Most of the Irish just laughed. After all, they had the votes, and the votes were not rumors.

  They entered the museum’s great hall, and the boy took a breath and stared around him at the stone columns and arches and the sense of invincible power. To Delaney it was always like something out of the drawings of Piranesi. To the boy, it was something else.

  “A church!” he said.

  “In a way,” Delaney said. “But not for any god. It’s a church of art, boy.”

  Rose looked around uneasily, seeing women in pairs, with clothes that fit exactly and fancy hats and small feet. The sort of women who had sniffed at her from the pews of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There were men too, of course, men who seemed to be surviving the Depression without pain, wearing the long well-cut coats you saw on Wall Street, making remarks to each other and laughing, or looking at lone women with special interest. A few paused to examine Rose, but she stared at them until they looked away. Delaney thought: Say nothing rude, fellas, or she’ll bite your fucking noses off.

  “You come here a lot?” she said to Delaney.

  “Not often enough,” he said. “When I was young, I used to come every week.”

  He remembered coming here for the first time when he was twelve, in a year when he dreamed about becoming an artist. He was alone. He made it to the door but not through it. A guard stopped him and said, This is no place for you, sonny. Looking at his downtown clothes, his soiled knickers, his rough street-scuffed shoes. The Delaneys weren’t poor, but there was no dress code downtown on the West Side. Young Delaney just wanted to see Rubens and Caravaggio and Vermeer, the painters he’d seen in black-and-white in the only art book at school. He wanted the real thing. But he just wasn’t dressed for them. He left in tears, and that night he told Big Jim. The next day his father went to see the Tammany bosses, and they started a campaign to open the Metropolitan to all New Yorkers. A few months later, all the Irish and all the Italians, all the poor Jews and all the black kids, all the Chinese, all the poorest of the poor, all started coming to the great museum. They were coming still. God bless Tammany.

  Then Carlito made an excited sound and pulled Rose along and into a room full of medieval armor. All visors and polished metal and swords, rising above him. Mysterious. Malignant. Scary.

  “You see, Carlito,” Rose said, “in olden times, these dopes always had wars. They would fight about God. Fight about land. But most of all, they would fight to get swag.”

  “You better explain swag,” Delaney said.

  “Swag is stuff you steal,” she said. “You go into some castle, the guy has paintings, silver, nice chairs, beds, fancy stuff. You kill all the people in the castle, then you take the swag home.”

  The boy pointed at two glassed-in shields encrusted with jewels.

  “Swag!” he said.

  “You see,” Rose said. “This kid understands everything!”

  The boy wanted to stay all day, but Rose told him they had to go upstairs and see something else. They would come back later. He took her hand with a grudging look on his face. He clearly wanted to stay with the swag.

  They climbed the wide central stairs to the second floor and followed signs to the Botticelli show. Then it was Delaney’s turn to suck in his breath. The gallery was more crowded than he expected, murmurous with talk, and he understood why. There on one wall was the Primavera and on another The Birth of Venus. On loan from the Uffizi, as a gesture of international goodwill by Benito Mussolini. Delaney lost his awareness of Rose and of Carlito. There were Botticelli drawings too, and smaller Botticelli paintings, but he stood in front of the Primavera like a predator. The painting was food. He wanted to caress it, hold it in his hands, lick its glazed surface, plunge into it, dive into the Florentine light. Years vanished, decades were erased, and he was again the boy who had come here to the feast of art.

  Thinking: Great paintings made me want to be an artist. They made me want to be Mantegna or Verrocchio, Rembrandt or Vermeer. Made me want to put brush on canvas or boards, to make marks that would last forever. Thinking: I was so young that I thought it was possible, that I could actually do it. And the great paintings sent me into art classes on Saturdays and on two evenings a week. Aged sixteen. They made me want to see. To see everything in the world around me, really see it, the buildings and the streets and the many colors of the sky.


  He wasn’t conscious of turning, of moving through knots of other people, but he was being pulled, pushed, lifted toward Venus. His heart was beating fast. There were the delicate hands, the thick dark blond hair, the sinuous outlines, the frank, intimate eyes. More powerful than any reproduction in an art book. Thinking: Rose said she used to look like this, except she was never a blonde. Here there were no bleeding Christs, no kings or dukes, no transported martyrs. Botticelli loved pagan flesh. Pagan eyes. A pagan landscape, washed by the sea.

  “You okay?” Rose whispered.

  “Oh, yes, sure, I’m okay,” Delaney said.

  “You got tears in your eyes.”

  He smiled, and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Aaah, it’s okay. It’s just — they’re beautiful.”

  “I better take Carlito back to the guys with the iron masks.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, he’s like, you know, look at him —”

  Carlito was standing alone, staring at Venus rising from her shell. Some of the adults were amused at his presence before her, and his intensity.

  “Your daughter — his mother — she is a blonde?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Well . . .”

  An older man turned to Delaney, a smile on his face, his eyes twinkling.

  “That boy is either going to be an artist or a critic,” he said. “Look at that concentration!” He peered at Rose through rimless glasses. “He is certainly a beautiful boy, and you, I take it, are his mother.”

  “Well, I —”

  “He certainly has his father’s hair,” the man said, glancing at Delaney. “Congratulations, sir and madam.”

  The man walked away, and Delaney thought: With his mannered style, he has to be an actor. And remembered the old line: I’ll never forget what’s-his-name. Rose was lost in thought. He took Carlito’s hand and said to Rose: “Let’s see the other things.”