North River

NINE

THE BOY TOOK HIS TEDDY BEAR WITH HIM TO DINNER, AND REvealed his name. Osito.

“It means ‘little bear’ in Spanish,” Rose said, grinning. “I asked Mendoza, the carpenter. Now the bear has a name, Carlito takes him everyplace. Osito this, Osito that… even bed at night.” A pause. “Someone to hold on to, I guess.”

Delaney thought there was a faint wistful note in her voice, but he did not respond as they walked through the cold evening to Angela’s restaurant. Rose held the boy’s free hand, while the boy hugged Osito.

The restaurant was half-empty, as it was on every Monday night, and a smiling Angela came to greet them. She led them to a table against a wall, out of the cold drafts of the opening door. Italian ballads played on the radio in the kitchen, with many mandolins. Angela waved and a waiter brought the high chair for Carlito. She pinched Rose’s cheek and whispered in Italian, then pushed her breasts against Delaney. She leaned down to Carlito.

“Okay. Wha’s this guy’s name?” she said, pointing at the bear.

“Osito!” the boy blurted.

“An’ what’s he gonna eat?”

“Hot dog!”

“We don’t have no hot dogs in here, boy. This is a good restaurant. So no hot dog!”

“Okay, I want bagetti!”

“That we got!”

Carlito climbed into the high chair and squashed the bear beside him, with its paws on the tray. Delaney and Rose told Angela what they wanted, and she went off to the kitchen. Delaney gazed casually around at the other diners. One stranger, sitting alone, was facing the door and reading the World. He was wearing a badly cut suit but seemed too old to be working for the FBI and too out of style to be a gangster. Others nodded hello to Delaney, and he smiled back. Rose played nervously with a fork, tapping the tines on the tablecloth.

“The guy readin’ the paper,” she said quietly. “I don’t like his look.”

“He’s too old to be a bad guy, Rose,” Delaney said.

“Don’t be so sure.”

“I’m not,” Delaney said. And he wasn’t. There were many kinds of bad guys, and their badness could be as real as blood.

He got up to walk toward the men’s room, casually looking again at the stranger, and near the kitchen he stopped to talk with Angela. They were out of the view of the man reading the newspaper.

“I need something,” he said.

“Like what?”

“A safe address,” he said. “For mail. Nothing else. Where my daughter can write me without getting her letters opened.”

“I’ll give it to you with the check.”

“Also: The guy with the newspaper, alone. You ever see him before?”

“A couple’a days ago.”

“Keep an eye on him for me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Later, drowsy with food and exhausted by the long day, Delaney read Byron for a while in bed, and then turned off the light. Sleep did not come. Images of the day moved through his mind, glimpses of ivory skin, a flash of the absolute certainty in Callahan’s eyes, the metallic look of a man who judged others. But Delaney could never judge the women in Tommy Chin’s house on Mott Street. They did what they must. In some ways, their lives were now better than what they’d left behind. It was true of them. As it was true of some Irish women not long ago, and some Jews and Italians, and all the others who had found their various ways to the indifferent city between two rivers. Some, but not all.

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.

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.

“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.

“This is Rose Verga,” Delaney said. “And you’ve already met my grandson, Carlos.”

“Can he pitch a few innings of relief?”

“Soon. He’s a southpaw.”

“That’s the only kinda relief pitcher.”

Delaney smiled and turned to Rose, who seemed puzzled at men talking baseball when a corpse was about to enter the center aisle.

She whispered: “The Irish are all crazy.”

Now there was a greater stir, and heads turned to see Will Rogers coming down the aisle alone, tanned, lean, dressed in a dark business suit. His rolling gait said that he was a star, but there was no expression on his face and no vanity. Up front an usher was signaling him to come forward, and Rogers slipped into the same pew that had welcomed McCormack.

“That’s that cowboy guy,” Rose whispered. “The guy with the rope.”

“That’s him.”

The boy didn’t look at Rogers. He was growing drowsy with the odor of burnt wax and the heat rising from many bodies, most of all from Rose. He put his head on her shoulder. Then came George M. Cohan, short and pugnacious, in the McGraw mold. He tried to walk with the solemnity required by the occasion, but still slipped into his old Broadway bounce. Delaney remembered that day in the first months of the war in France when the New Yorkers were marching toward the fighting and someone started singing “Give My Regards to Broadway.” And then they all were singing, slowly, like a dirge. Asking someone, anyone, to remember them to Herald Square, and to tell all the gang at Forty-second Street that they would soon be there. Some of them were still in France, forever.

As he turned to look at Cohan, Delaney saw others looking at him, and at Rose. People who knew his father. Downtown people. Two women whispered, then averted their eyes. He saw another vaguely familiar face three rows behind them. Then the McGraw family entered the main aisle, but Delaney glanced again at the man three rows back. Long ago, before the war, before Johns Hopkins, before Vienna, the man was a regular at Big Jim’s club and had gone often to the Polo Grounds with the Tammany braves. With them, but not one of them. He looked exactly the same now as he did then. What was his name? Where had he been? Cormac. Cormac something. A face unmarked by time. Some kind of newspaper guy. Cormac…

The pallbearers were suddenly at the entrance, the coffin on their shoulders. Incense thickened the air. The organ boomed its announcement of requiem. Everybody stood. Rose glanced at Delaney with sad, distracted eyes. A few more women looked at Delaney and Rose, and she must have seen the disdain in their eyes. She held the awakened Carlito, one hand on his small back. And John McGraw was carried toward the altar.

Through the ceremony, Rose seemed to shrink away from Delaney, slumping in her tight seat while the tones of Latin made Carlito doze. Delaney stared at his hands, as always unable to pray. Carlito’s eyes closed. Delaney squeezed Rose’s arm, cradling the warmth moving into his fingers. She looked at him from under the black brim of her hat, surprised, her eyes wary and glistening. Then, on the altar, the mass was over. Ita missa est. They all stood, Flanagan wheezing, the boy stirring. The oaken kneelers were tight and unforgiving against the arches of their feet, as they inhaled the scented air. The pallbearers again lifted the coffin and slowly carried it down the center aisle, with the McGraw family and his closest friends trailing behind. McCormack. Cohan. Rogers. The organist played a muted farewell. Through the open doors, they could hear bagpipes skirling, voices of vanished Celtic kings. Carlito opened his eyes in a sleepy way. It had been a long morning.

“Let them all go out,” Delaney whispered to Rose. “Then we’ll find a taxi.”

“No. no. It costs too much.”

“We’ll take a cab.”

A woman in the row behind them touched Delaney’s arm. She was about fifty, wearing a suitably discreet hat and a coat with a fur collar.

“You’re Jim Delaney, am I right?”

Delaney smiled thinly. “That’s me.”

“I met you at your father’s club, a long time ago, when we still lived downtown. I’m Janet Bradford. I was a Muldoon then. Before the war.”

“Of course,” Delaney said, not remembering her at all. He offered a hand and she shook it. “Nice to see you again,” he said.

She turned to Rose: “And who is this, may I ask?”

“This is Rose Verga, and that’s my grandson,” he said.

Rose nodded. The woman looked at her with the eyes of a prosecutor.

“Buon giorno,” the woman said.

“Good morning to you too,” Rose said, and turned to look at the empty altar.

Flanagan was pulling on his coat and smiled at Delaney as he edged toward the aisle from the emptying pew. Delaney was relieved to turn his back on Janet Bradford, the former Muldoon.

“Good to see you again,” Flanagan said.

“Good to see you too,” Delaney said. “Thanks for making room for us.”

“Hey, the room was there. We just hadda scrunch up a little. Try to come around the club sometime.”

“I will,” Delaney said. “When I get some time. You know, the patients await me. Right now we’re gonna wait for the crowd to leave.”

“I don’t blame you,” Flanagan said, and shook hands. Carlito began making squirming sounds. Delaney hugged the boy. “We’ll go home soon,” he said.

“Home,” the boy said.

A soft rain was falling as the taxi carried them down Fifth Avenue. It was a spring rain, falling straight from the grayness of sky, with no wind driving it from the North River. Rose had pushed herself against the window, holding the boy’s hand. She did not look at the streets.

“How do they feel?” Delaney said, nodding at her boots.

“Not so bad,” Rose said.

Carlito looked at her, as if trying to unravel the meaning of her tone. She did not move, and the boy watched the unreeling streets: the rain, the trolley cars, the other taxis and cars, the few pedestrians. Delaney realized that this was Carlito’s first ride in a car since coming to New York. Perhaps his first ride ever. Occasionally the boy looked hard at the driver, the graying back of his head, the wheel he held in his hands.

Rose looked at nothing, her jaw slack.

“Is there something bothering you beyond your feet?” Delaney said.

“No.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“Ah, you know…”

“No, I don’t.”

She was silent and still for a long moment.

“They look at you,” she said. “Then they look at me. Then they look at you.”

“So?”

“They thinking, What’s he doing with her?…”

She seemed about to weep. He squeezed her hand, then released it. Just affection here. Nothing else.

Delaney said: “Maybe they’re thinking, What’s she doing with him? A beautiful young woman with a scrawny old Mick.”

She turned to him, returning his grin. Then wiped at tears with her bare wrist. Carlito looked confused.

Rose said, “I’m sorry.” Then to the boy: “Hey, Carlito, what d’you want for lunch?”

“Bagetti.”

“Always bagetti. Bagetti, bagetti, bagetti.” Then to Delaney: “You sure he’s not half Italian?”

She looked at him, hugging Carlito. Then she gazed out past the taxi window and its little rivers of rain. In this place a long way from Agrigento. There was a faint smile on her face. She had wiped so hard at her tears he could now see the scar.

They came in under the stoop, and Rose was hurting. Delaney sat her on the empty patients’ bench and knelt to unlace her boots, widening the leather tongues, while Carlito watched. Delaney widened the opening still more and tried to ease the right boot off. Rose grimaced, tightening her mouth. When the first boot was off, and on the floor, Rose moaned. Oh, she said. Oh oh oh. They did the same with the left boot. Her thick black stockings were soaked.

“Rose,” Delaney said. “Listen to me. Go upstairs to your room. Slowly. Get undressed and into bed, and peel off the socks. Very gently. As gently as you can. Leave the socks on for now, I don’t want you getting any splinters. Your feet will hurt going up the stairs, but I’ll be up in a few minutes and do something for the pain. Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Carlito, you stay here with me.”

Rose stood up, bit her lip against the pain caused by her weight, and without a word started up the stairs, holding the banister. Delaney went to his office, Carlito beside him. He checked the contents of his bag. Then he went out to the mailbox on the gate. A few notes, in childish writing, asking for help. Please come when you can. My mother can’t move her legs. My father’s hand is broke. Patients who had found the door mysteriously locked on Horatio Street and could not read the sign saying the office was closed for the day and had their American children write out their pleas for help. Delaney gazed around him. The street was awash with the rain. He thought: I have to work on the olive tree.

He climbed the stairs, two at a time, with the boy lagging behind him. Delaney walked through the open door of Rose’s room. Her black dress was hung neatly on a hanger, the hat slung over the hook. Rose was on her back in bed, wearing her flowered bathrobe, her feet exposed. She did not look at him.

Her feet were swollen. A yellowing blister the size of a quarter had started forming on the sole of her right foot, and the big and little toes of her left foot were rubbed raw. A crevice of skin had opened on the arch of her right foot. Delaney opened his bag as Carlito reached the open door. The boy paused, eyes wide with concern.

“Oh, oh, oh: Rosa, oh!”

He went directly to her and gently touched her face with his small fingers.

“Oh, Rosa. Oh, Rosa!”

She started to bawl. Without looking at Delaney, she took the boy’s hands and kissed them and said his name and bawled.

Then: “Don’t worry, Carlito. The doctor, he’s going to fix me. Don’t worry, this is nothing. I love you, boy, don’t you worry… ”

Delaney cleaned the arch with alcohol, massaging the foot with his good hand. Some blood seeped out. He wiped it, then cleaned the wound again. Gently, easily. She winced when he applied iodine with a glass dropper. Her toenails were trim and clean. He could feel the warmth of her body. Then he wrapped gauze around the arch of her foot and made it firm with adhesive tape, and then he was done.

“Okay, now just rest,” Delaney said. “I’ll bring some ice in a cloth to stop the swelling.”

She took a breath and slowly exhaled, as if calming herself, and then whispered, “I can’t rest. I gotta feed this boy. You too.”

Delaney went past her and drew the window shade.

“We’ll manage, Rose. Today, we feed you.”

She turned her head. The boy touched her face, wiping at tears. His own face was confused and sad. Rose was hurting and he didn’t know what to do about it.

They managed. Delaney used his best physician’s tone to tell Rose to stay off her feet. Angela sent over sandwiches from the restaurant, along with copies of the Daily News and Il Progresso. Rose read the newspapers and applied ice to her feet and dozed. In dreams, she mumbled in Italian. The boy kept watch. The rain slowed and then stopped.

That first evening, Delaney placed a water jug and a glass beside her bed, talked with her for an hour about what they had seen in the morning in the great cathedral. He said he was sorry for putting her through the ordeal of the trip to St. Patrick’s.

“We could have listened to it on the radio,” he said.

“No. It was like a show.”

“That’s exactly what it was.”

“Except for those goddamned women. And my shoes.”

Now the boots were wasted, she said. They cost money and they were a waste. He said there was a shoe repair store on Ninth Avenue that specialized in stretching shoes and boots. Run by Mr. Nobiletti, the shoemaker.

“He gave me the olive tree,” he said. “I was going to call him anyway.”

She said she didn’t want to see the boots again for the rest of her life. She waved a dismissive hand and cursed in Sicilian. Delaney smiled, and then she did too. He changed the dressing again, caressing her wounded feet. Both were awkward in the intimacy of the small room. Several times, Rose began to say something then stopped herself. Delaney realized he was doing the same, but was smoothing the silence with his practiced bedside manner. He felt that Rose was afraid to go past certain boundaries. And so was he. Then he went into the bathroom to run water for Carlito’s bath. By the time the boy was clean and dressed, Rose had fallen into sleep.

While she slept, Delaney moved the radio to the hall outside Rose’s room. Around seven, he heated one of Angela’s sandwiches in the oven and poured a glass of water, and then he and the boy went to the top floor. When they arrived, she reached over and switched on the bedside lamp.

“Dinnertime,” Delaney said.

“Hey, come on, I can’t —”

“Eat,” Delaney said.

“A samich for you, Rosa,” the boy said.

She sighed and sat up with the tray on her lap and her feet hidden beneath the blankets. He laid the radio against a wall and plugged it in. Verdi played on the Italian station, and he turned down the volume.

“God damn you, Dottore,” she whispered. And bit into the sandwich and smiled.

Over the next few days, a new routine took over. Delaney and Carlito brought Rose her food. Delaney explained certain mysterious words that she had found in the Daily News. Carlito entertained her with paddleball and conversations with Osito. When Delaney moved through the warming parish, attending to patients, Angela came by to visit with Rose, and Monique swallowed her resentment or irritation and visited for a while too. Bessie, the cleaning woman, told jokes and made Rose laugh. They all somehow ate, although the house had lost the aroma of garlic and oil. Each night Delaney changed the bandages and told tales of some of the patients.

Alone in his bedroom, he read the newspapers, all about La Guardia and what Roosevelt was planning and what Hitler was doing. The numbers of the unemployed were beginning to stall, and that was mild good news. Maybe the goddamned Depression would be over soon. He leafed through the stack of medical journals. He filled in the records of patients. He heard opera descending from the upstairs rooms and the sounds of Carlito running and bursts of his laughter. The boy was taking care of Rose too. Delaney wrote to Grace, saying little about Rose, and a lot about Carlito’s presence at McGraw’s funeral. He addressed an envelope to Leonora Córdoba at American Express in Barcelona and enclosed the letter and five ten-dollar bills. And spoke in his mind to Grace the words he could not write on paper.

Find your goddamned husband. But don’t worry. We are fine here without you. Just be careful. I don’t like what I’m reading. About tensions in Spain, about rumors of revolt. Stay away from barricades, those new castles in Spain. Your barricades are here, daughter. Your son is here. Rose is hugging him in your place. And the sentence he could never write: Don’t come home.

Have no fear, Delaney told himself. Spring is almost here.