North River

by Pete Hamill

  “And never in a bathing suit,” he said. “What else?”

  “I want to go to a bookstore on Fourth Avenue and get that boy a book about trains.”

  “That’s on my list too.”

  “That boy is crazy about trains and boats and fire engines.”

  “He sure is.”

  They were both quiet for a long while.

  “And I want to go dancing with you,” she whispered. “Get dressed up, get Angela to mind the boy, and just go dance.”

  “Fred Astaire I’m not.”

  “So what? I’m no Dolores Del Rio either.”

  She inhaled, held her breath, exhaled.

  “I just want to do that,” she whispered. “To remember it. That’s all.”

  Delaney felt his own tears welling, then fought them off.

  “Let’s try to do them all,” he said.

  There was still no word from Grace on Wednesday, and he plodded through the day as if it were any other day in a hot June. Some patients were talking again about the Giants. They were playing good ball. Terry was hitting, and so was Ott, and Hubbell was still the best pitcher in the National League. Delaney started reading the sports pages again and only glanced at the news pages.

  “Terrible stuff is coming,” Zimmerman said over a hurried lunch near St. Vincent’s. “Look at Bulgaria: a fascist dictatorship. Look at Lithuania: a coup that failed, but more coming. Look at Austria: Dollfuss is a dictator, a fascist, and they just made a deal giving the Catholic church control of all state education. Fuck the Jews, or the Protestants, or the atheists. Look at Latvia: another fascist dictatorship. Look at Estonia —”

  “Look at the Phillies. They keep winning.”

  “Come on, Dr. D., this is fucking serious.” His face was tense and grim. “Hitler’s meeting for the first time with Mussolini tomorrow! All the people down the East Side, they read the Forvetz and figure the Nazis are getting ready to land in Staten Island.”

  “Forgive me, Jake,” Delaney said. He squeezed Zimmerman’s bony forearm. “I was trying to cheer you up and made things worse.”

  Zimmerman looked suddenly alarmed. “Hey, Doctor, please,” he said, his voice rising. “I could never get mad at you. It’s just that — these Nazi fucks are killing Jews because they are Jews! Not because they’re murderers or rapists or perverts, or anything else. Because they’re Jews!”

  Two men at an opposite table looked at Zimmerman and Delaney. One of them seethed with anger. The other sneered. Delaney counted out some change and motioned to the waiter.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Zimmerman said.

  “It’s me that’s sorry, Jake.”

  They walked to the door. As it closed behind them, they could hear the words “fuckin’ kikes . . .” Zimmerman stopped and reached for the door handle to go back inside. Delaney locked his left hand on the younger man’s wrist.

  “Not now,” he said. “Not yet.”

  The telegram arrived Thursday morning, delivered by a Western Union messenger. He handed it to Monique, who gave him a dime tip. Delaney was consoling an agonized woman named Margaret Devlin, who had permanent migraines, when Monique entered.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “This is what you’ve been waiting for, Doctor.”

  He excused himself to his patient and opened the telegram.

  ARRIVING JUNE 23 SS ANDALUSIA SPANISH LINE STOP WAIT FOR ME STOP MUCH LOVE GRACE.

  Delaney thought: I’ll tell Rose tonight.

  And so he did. First they made love until she covered her face with the pillow and held it with both hands and screamed as if wounded. They were quiet for a long time, except for their breathing. Then he spoke.

  “The telegram came today,” he said. “She gets home on the twenty-third.”

  Rose was quiet, as if figuring out a calendar. Today was the fourteenth.

  Then: “That’s nine days from now.”

  “Right.”

  She was quiet again, then spoke in a soft, controlled voice.

  “I knew she would come,” she said. “It’s her mother. It’s you. And she has to get back what is hers. Her room. Her son.”

  Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, a chord of desolation.

  “One thing I learned in this world? Things don’t last. People say they do. They don’t. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don’t.”

  There was nothing bitter in her voice. Only acceptance. Or a kind of rough wisdom. He pulled her close to him. He wanted to tell her that everything would turn out all right. He couldn’t. He simply didn’t know, and he could not harm her with a cheap lie. Too many lies were told in bed. He did not want to add to them.

  He dozed for a time, and then she reached for him with her hand, and they made love again, erasing dread for a little while.

  The boy remained unaware of what was coming. The arrival of his mother was never mentioned. At night, Delaney read to him about Oz. Across the days, he played with Osito, and pushed his fire engine around, and went to the garden and batted the small ball with his paddle under the branches of the olive tree. Rose introduced him to a new passion: watermelon.

  “Don’t spit the seeds on the floor, boy,” she told him. “Put them on this little plate. Later we’ll plant them in the garden.”

  He looked at her uncertainly, and then at Delaney, as if not sure what seeds did, or why they would be taken to the garden. But he loved the chilled watermelon, taking big bites from his slice, the juice wetting his cheeks and running down to his chin. He removed each glistening black seed and placed it carefully on the plate and then took another bite.

  “Good, Rosa,” he said. “This is good!”

  “You bet,” she said. “And good for you.”

  “Wahtuh-melon,” he said. “I like it!”

  Delaney was busy all Monday morning with people scorched, scalded, and blistered by the weekend’s sun. One man showed up shirtless, the touch of any fabric causing agony. Another was white with Noxzema, and still hurting. It was so predictable that Delaney laughed when one casualty of the sun god left, and was grinning when the next arrived. In between there were the normal cases: a man with a fractured jaw, a woman with a TB cough, a child with a fever. All the hurt and harm that made up the dailiness of his life.

  That night in the dark, he told Rose that they would go dancing on Friday night. He did not have to remind her that Grace would arrive on Saturday.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she said.

  “No. Monique found me someone to watch Carlito.”

  “Not some crazy person?”

  “Her sister.”

  “Monique’s got a sister?”

  “She works at Metropolitan Life.”

  “For me, it’s hard to think Monique even has a mother.”

  “Hey, she’s not that bad.”

  “Not to you. To me, it’s another story.”

  They were quiet for a long while.

  “Friday night,” she said. She did not mention that it might be their last night together, and neither did he. “Dancing.”

  She kissed him on the forehead.

  Monique’s sister Yvette arrived just before seven. She was a plumper, more cheerful version of Monique, and a few years older. She wore a business suit that was wrinkled by the heat. Monique was waiting for her, and they talked in a sketchy way with Delaney about their childhood and Yvette’s three sons and their father and mother. Rose was upstairs getting ready. Carlito looked apprehensive.

  “He sure is a handsome boy, all right,” Yvette said. “You’re right about that, Sis.”

  “With a great tan too,” Monique said. “And it’s only June. Wait till August.”

  “By August he’s gonna look like a movie star.”

  Monique said good-bye and left. She had made her point: she was not a babysitter. Then the hall door opened and Rose was there. She was wearing a white summer
dress and flat white shoes, and the whiteness set off the rich gold of her skin. A small white purse dangled from her wrist. A plump rose from the front garden was pinned to the dress. She wore no jewelry. Her lipstick was pale and pink, and she needed no rouge. Delaney thought: God damn, she is beautiful.

  “Oh, Rosa,” the boy blurted out, as if thinking the same thing, without words. He rushed to her. She smiled and hugged him.

  “Don’t get watermelon juice on the dress, boy,” she said. He smiled and touched his face.

  “Gran’pa make me wash,” he said, holding out his hands with the palms up.

  “You see? Gran’pa thinks of everything.”

  Rose and Yvette shook hands and then talked in a corner of the room about the yellow box in the upstairs bathroom, the boy’s toothbrush, and his books. There was a piece of cake in the icebox and some milk. Rose smiled and turned to Carlito.

  “Okay, Carlito, we’re going out. So you be a good boy and do what Yvette says, and we’ll see you later.”

  The boy looked uneasy, as if he wanted to go with them. But Rose kissed him on the cheek and went out first, as if to avoid inspection by neighbors while holding the arm of Delaney. Yvette took Carlito’s hand and said, “Let’s look at the kitchen.” Delaney left three minutes after Rose. They would meet on Ninth Avenue and take the subway into the night. He imagined the arrival of the Andalusia in the morning and then drove the image away. What will be, will be. Tonight we dance.

  Times Square was bright, noisy, packed. It was not New Year’s Eve, but the crowds moved and eddied in the same way. Rose took his arm, holding her purse close to her breasts, gazing around at the gaud and the glitter, or watching the sidewalk in front of her so that she would not stumble. They paused to listen to a street band that featured a black boy tap-dancing for coins, then slowly continued uptown. Delaney remembered when it was all called Longacre Square, and was here in 1904 when the Times opened its new headquarters, extorting the name change from the Tammany boys downtown. It was at first a place for swells, for men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns, for midnight places like Rector’s and Shanley’s and Churchill’s, Healy’s and Bustanoby’s. They came with chorus girls and mistresses and even, occasionally, with their wives, for steaks and chops and champagne and dancing to stringed orchestras. Delaney had often been among them, inhaling perfumed shoulders on dance floors. He had even believed that the great lesson of Times Square was a simple one: sin could be elegant. A long time ago. When he was young.

  But the swells were all gone now, along with their watering holes, driven out by Prohibition and now the goddamned Depression. Hypocrisy and bad times had served as the great social levelers. He looked up at the hotels and wondered if Larry Dorsey was working again in one of them, after his terrible New Year’s Eve. He hoped so. And vowed to call him. On every street he saw patrols of hard boys from Hell’s Kitchen, lean and furtive and angry, moving through the crowds after walking east from the tenements on the North River. A few were shining shoes. Most searched for careless marks, with their wallets plump in back pockets. Some women were offering swift joy in side street hotels, and never mentioned gonorrhea. Where was the building that he visited that time with Big Jim, where they sat for an hour with George M. Cohan? And what was the name of that dancer from Earl Carroll’s Vanities, the one with the creamy skin and the long legs? For weeks he had danced with her every night. Now it had been seven years since he had danced with anyone.

  He and Rose moved slowly through packed streets, bumping into other people, laughing at the sights. A fat old woman in a shawl sang “Mother Machree” and offered apples for two cents. A tenor proclaimed his passion for Madame Butterfly in a cloud of frying hot dogs. Another man put a dancing cocker spaniel through his routine, in which the dog always did the opposite of what he was ordered and made people laugh. Rose and Delaney didn’t laugh at the veterans they saw on almost every corner. One held a scrawled sign on cardboard. LOST LEG IN FRANCE NEED HELP. Delaney slipped him a quarter and moved on with Rose. They paused to look at the tall beefy cops planted on their big Morgan horses, easy and laughing, but ready for trouble. “Carlito would love these guys!” Rose said. Delaney squeezed her arm in agreement. Above them, the lights of huge signs blinked in crazy syncopation, sending out fragments of nouns, and no verbs. RUPPERT WRIGLEY BABY RUTH BARS. Others were pieces of movies. CRIME DOCTOR. STINGAREE. WITCHING HOUR. Behind them, the electric ribbon on the Times Tower said something about Albania and kept moving. Another message said: GIANTS LOSE TO CUBS 5–4. They passed more hot dog places and skee-ball parlors and a place called the Pokerino. Every movie house lobby was guarded by sour uniformed young men, who served as bouncers and barkers. Newsstands waited for the bulldog editions of the News and Mirror. Inside every restaurant, above the counter, there were framed photographs of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Delaney and Rose could hear music everywhere. Moving through the great crowd, Delaney felt his own kind of relief. Here nobody could ever care about his problems. Your daughter arrives tomorrow? Fine, let her sleep on the couch. But don’t bother me right now, sport.

  Then they reached Fifty-first Street.

  “Here we are,” Delaney said, and looked up at the sign.

  She followed his look, and moved a hand gently to his neck.

  “Goddamn you,” she whispered in a hoarse voice. “You should of told me.”

  They paused while she wiped her cheeks dry with a small frilly handkerchief. Then they walked together into Roseland.

  There were no empty tables or chairs and the bar was packed, so they went directly to the crowded dance floor. There must have been eight hundred people in the place, old people and kids, many red from the sun, most sweating, some pressed hard against each other. The lights were muted. The band was playing “You Made Me Love You.” He put his right hand on her waist and took her right hand in his left, and they began to move. A fox trot. He could feel her tension, her fear of clumsiness, and he was careful not to step on her feet. She was smaller in his arms than she seemed in bed. At first Rose maintained a formal distance between them, and then as she relaxed, she pressed against him. Everybody seemed to know the words of the tune.

  I didn’t want to do it,

  I didn’t want to do it . . .

  Rose whispered the words too, and then Delaney followed. A mustached young trumpet player played a solo without changing the beat, and when the tune ended, there was loud applause. The dancers were making clear that they wanted nothing complicated, nothing sweaty. They wanted romance. So did Delaney and Rose. Here they could be in the real world and still be intimate. Here, for a few hours, they could believe that they would be together forever.

  And so they danced and danced, Rose growing more skillful as she went along, more relaxed, following his body and the slight pressure of his hands, then trying small moves of her own. “You know how to do this,” she said. “You must’ve done it with a lot of women.”

  “But never with you,” he said. “And not for a long, long time.”

  In the midst of the intimate crowd, and the music, and the sound of sliding shoes, he realized that strangers probably saw them as an older man with a handsome younger woman. Which was true. Or as a boss with his secretary. Or even as husband and wife, as the man believed at the museum. And why not? His hair was whitening and hers was a lustrous black. She will outlive me, if she has any luck at all. She will not outlive the boy. If the boy’s luck holds too. Then the set ended, many dancers applauded, the band stood up, and a four-piece combo replaced them. They started playing Dixieland. Rose took Delaney’s good hand and moved off the floor.

  “Wait here for me,” she said. “I got to go to the ladies’ room.”

  He stood next to a pole and watched her walk away. So did some men and a few women. Then she was gone, and he watched a dozen older couples doing the Charleston, crossing hands from knee to knee, laughing, happy, indomitable. They were his age, at least. For these precious moments they could forget the bad times. They could for
get defeat. Once they were young. Once they had danced. They were doing it again.

  From the packed bar he heard trills of bright female laughter, and male growls, and more laughter. Maybe the whiskey was laughing. But maybe it was just people having a good time, making loss into triumph, sorrow into life. Tonight was last night’s tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day. Or night.

  The Dixieland band departed, and the house band of Larry Ellis returned. The oldest player was hauling a bass fiddle. He was about thirty. They started to play “Stormy Weather” just as Rose returned.

  “More women in there than at S. Klein,” she said. “Powdering their nose, spraying themselves. Talking about men. Nothing else! Men and men and men.”

  Delaney laughed. “As long as they weren’t talking about baseball.”

  “Come on, Fred. Let’s dance.”

  “Whatever you say, Miss Del Rio.”

  They danced along with hundreds of others, and eased without effort into “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” Long extended versions, not the clipped three minutes of phonograph records, with each of four musicians taking a solo, on trumpet, clarinet, trombone, and tenor sax. Delaney thought: I have lived too long in the country of numbness. I won’t live there again. I want to become a citizen of Roseland.

  “Compared to you, that Fred Astaire is a show-off,” she murmured.

  “Compared to you, Dolores Del Rio is ugly.”

  “You are a liar.”

  Then a singer came onstage, skinny, in a jacket a size bigger than he was, black hair, high cheekbones. He was holding a microphone. Without introduction he began to sing in a thin intense voice.

  Life is just a bowl of cherries

  Don’t take it serious —

  Some of the dancers took up the lyrics.