North River

ELEVEN

ROSE DID NOT LEAVE. NOR DID SHE SPEAK TO HIM THE NEXT morning about what had happened. Perhaps nothing had happened, except that he had held her until she fell asleep. A moment of intimacy, one lonesome human consoling another. Nothing big, nothing major. But Delaney knew it was a lot more than nothing.

At seven-thirty, Mr. Nobiletti arrived carrying shears, and smiling when Rose greeted him in Italian. Both were from Sicily, although the towns were far apart. Both must have dreamed on certain nights about olive groves. They went into the yard together, with Delaney and Carlito after them, and Mr. Nobiletti stared at the wrapped tree.

“It should be okay,” he said to Delaney.

“A tough New York tree,” Delaney said.

The older man began cutting through the cords and tar paper, dropping strips on the earth, which was softening into grassy mud. He said nothing. Carlito lifted each strip as it fell, carried it to the back door, and made a neat pile. Then the last strips fell away and the tree stood before them. To Delaney it was as scrawny as a girl of twelve, each branch curving and seeming to reach for the distant sun.

Rose clapped her hands and then whispered: “Che bello! Che bello!”

Tears were brimming in her eyes as she caressed the branches. Here was Sicily in a yard near the North River. She hugged Mr. Nobiletti. She squeezed Carlos. She smiled in an embarrassed, teary way at Delaney. Sicily was here.

Later in the morning, after Nobiletti had gone off with her punishing boots, Delaney gave her the Babar book to read, so that she would see that it was not about the mother, really, but about having a life, no matter what. It was a story. That’s all. A story for kids. It was also a story about the consolations of cities. She carried the book to her room, but she did not speak about it. Across the morning, in abrupt moments between patients, Delaney remembered the beating of her heart.

Around the house, Rose moved with purpose, in and out of the yard as if expecting instant life from the olive tree, showering the boy with affection. She thanked Delaney for the raise and said, with deadpan irony, that she was thinking of investing in the stock market. She showed the boy how the sun was falling on the tree and the other growing things in the yard, and how soon they would be full of life. “You’ll see,” she told him. “Life is green.”

Three days later, she tried on her widened shoes and wore them in the house for a few hours at a time, always with white cotton socks. “Black socks are for cops,” she said. She listened to the Italian radio station, and hummed arias to herself. If Rose had been frightened that things would fall apart, the moment seemed to have passed.

In the warming evenings, they began to take walks after an early dinner. They went down to the North River piers, and Delaney sometimes thought about the many evenings when he had grieved here for Molly. One night in the second week after his return from the war, he told her: “I’ll never go away again, Molly. I promise you that.” She looked at him with such angry suspicion in her eyes that it struck him as permanent hostility. But as months slipped into years, Delaney kept his word. He did not go away again, not even for a night. But their lives were not the same. To be sure, there was surface civility. They would talk in a cool way about Grace, and her schooling, and her affection for painters and for the game of baseball, and Molly kept reminding Delaney that he was spoiling the girl. He would mumble something about lost time and shrug, and Molly would seethe. They sometimes discussed politics. They talked about what might be coming to the world after the stock market collapsed in October 1929. But Delaney often felt as if he could be talking to a neighbor. Her anger was always there beneath the civility. It wasn’t simply about the war. It was about him, about his being a doctor, about his obligation to help others, about many things. He taught himself to live with it, telling himself that Molly, after all, was Irish. Everything could be forgotten, except the grudge. Their bed became a place almost exclusively devoted to sleeping. Molly would turn her back to him, sending a familiar signal that another day was over. He would sometimes long for flesh and intimacy. For hair and teeth and wetness. Or a simple night of dancing. Until she finally turned her back on him for the final time and walked to the river.

But he did not, of course, mention any of this to Rose. On their walks, the boy was between them, a link, a bond, a kind of gift. And Delaney made no moves that could be seen by Rose, or by strangers, as expressions of intimacy. The boy was all. He loved to see a liner moving at dusk on the river, with the sun vanishing into New Jersey. He loved seeing a train grind slowly south on the High Line.

Then one evening as the sun began to fade, they went to Jane Street to show the boy the firehouse. The doors had been closed through the hard winter days, but now they were open, and the engine was gleaming and redder than the vanishing sun. Two mustached firemen were smoking cigarettes and nodded to Delaney, right out of the days when the fire companies supplied the infantry to Tammany Hall. Then suddenly bells began to ring loudly, metallically, and the cigarettes were flipped into the street and other men were thumping down stairs and sliding down the fire pole, pulling on rubbery raincoats and boots and reaching for axes stacked against the wall. The boy backed away from the fierceness of the sight, and then the lights of the engine came on, and a siren screamed, and the engine pulled out, making a slow turn toward the city, with men hanging off the sides, and then, all power and controlled passion, it roared away.

The boy was frozen in astonishment. Rose lifted him and hurried him to the middle of the street so he could watch the engine on its way to work.

“Fire engine,” she said. “That’s a fire engine, ragazzo.”

The boy’s jaw was slack with awe. And Delaney knew what he must do in the next few days.

St. Patrick’s Day fell on Saturday, and in the morning they stood three feet apart in the areaway watching the neighborhood empty. The boy peered through the grillwork of the fence while Irish music came from everywhere, out of open tenement windows, from the old streets of the Five Points, from Tin Pan Alley, from distant Kerry and Antrim and Mayo. They watched the entire student body of Sacred Heart, garbed in maroon uniforms, march east to the subway. They saw men in green ties, long coats, and a few vaudeville green derbies, coming from the saloons beyond the High Line, and clusters of women following the men. Some wore green buttons that said ENGLAND, OUT OF IRELAND. Most of the men nodded to Delaney as they passed. They were all going uptown to the parade.

“They must wonder why you’re not going to the parade, Dottore.”

“They know I’ve got patients,” he said.

Rose sat on the second step of the stoop, and Carlito climbed up behind her, to see better.

“Some of these guys,” Rose said, “they’re gonna need you tonight. After they beat the hell out of each other.”

Delaney laughed. “Let’s hope whatever they do, they do it uptown.”

He had taken part in many of these parades before the war, starting in the ranks of Sacred Heart, and later marching with his father, and he hated them and loved them too. Above all, he loved the defiant pride of the marchers. When he was twelve he asked Big Jim why the parade was on Fifth Avenue, where all the rich lived and the only Irish were doormen and maids. And his father said, Big fella, it’s simple: to show those bastards that they got the money but we got the votes. Delaney loved that part, the Tammany tale, and the sense among all of them that they too owned a piece of New York, they had purchased it with sweat and will, they were New Yorkers forever. He hated other things, starting with the clergy, plump and sleek, and how they insisted that the parade was a Catholic event, not just an Irish event. That meant they had no room for Jonathan Swift or Wolfe Tone, for Oscar Wilde or William Butler Yeats. He hated the drunkenness too, men embracing the stereotype and careening around the Irish joints on Third Avenue after they had marched. Hated above all what would happen to them in the night, or to their wives. He had treated too many of them. He knew all the reasons: the way the British refused to give them power of any kind, except to get drunk and assault their women. Drunks were no threat to power. Knew the reasons, but hated seeing their leftovers on the streets of New York. Still, in other ways, the Irish tale was a noble one, all about people who kept getting knocked down and kept getting up. He would tell that tale to Carlito too. Eventually.

“I went to the parade, five, six years ago,” Rose said. “Lots of guys throwing up on their shoes.”

Delaney said: “Were they at least nice to you?”

“Falling all over me,” she said, and grinned, and turned her attention to the last stragglers heading east, three old women of the type who used to be called shawlies, widows who stayed in church for hours each day. They wore shawls now too, and long dresses and warm coats.

Rose said: “I should walk wit’ these women. Look at them feet.”

They indeed had huge feet. Larger, by far, than Rose’s, but from similar histories. They had worked the stony fields of Connemara or Donegal, before embarking forever for New York. He knew one of them. The one in the center, with blue eyes like ice water. Dunn. Bridey Dunn. He remembered her fury when he told her that her son had polio and there was nothing to be done. There was no cure. The boy would live all of his life with a maimed leg. Bridey stopped and gazed from Delaney to Rose.

“So here you are with your whore,” Bridey said. The word was pronounced “who-uh.” The New York style. Rose tensed, as if preparing for combat.

“Good morning, Mrs. Dunn. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Bad cess to you and your good wishes, Dr. Delaney.”

The two other shawlies were at her elbows, trying to move her along, but Mrs. Dunn shook them off.

“You’re a bloody disgrace,” she said. “Living in sin with this trollop.”

“Hey, you,” Rose said, with heat in her voice. “Shut up and go to the parade.”

Delaney stepped in front of Rose, his back to Mrs. Dunn. “Ignore this fool,” he said. “I’ll explain later.” But Rose stepped to the side and hissed at Mrs. Dunn. “Go on, get the hell outta here!”

“I’ll sic the coppers on the pair of yiz. I’ll get the priest over here! Yiz are a disgrace to all of us!”

“Bah fongool!” Rose shouted. And then her friends led Mrs. Dunn away to the east, snarling and sputtering all the way. Carlito ran to Rose and embraced her hips.

Delaney explained to Rose about Mrs. Dunn’s son, who probably picked up polio swimming in the North River and was now almost twenty, with a permanently maimed leg. He explained how Mrs. Dunn was like many other people: she had to blame someone for misfortune, and the doctor was the easiest target. In cases of incurable disease, a doctor was only a messenger, but they chose to blame the messenger.

“But she was after me too,” Rose said. “Not just you. But me! And she doesn’t even know me!”

“She knows you a little better now.”

Rose looked away, with some shame in her face.

“I’m sorry I used bad words,” she said.

“I don’t blame you,” Delaney said. “But it wasn’t you she wanted to hurt, it was me.”

“You feel hurt?”

“A little,” he said. “I should have defended you better.”

“Hey, I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can,” he said, remembering the affectionate way that Knocko Carmody called her a hoodlum. To him the word was a compliment.

“I just don’t like it when there’s some secret going on and I don’t know what it is.” She was silent for a beat. “Know what I mean?”

Then he told her about the single phone call with the breathing sound but no voice. He told her about seeing the bartender from Club 65 on the Sunday walk, and about Callahan and his friend in the tweed coat.

“Thanks for telling me,” she said. “I gotta watch even better now.”

And then went upstairs to work.

At one-thirty that afternoon, after dealing with a scattered lot of Saturday-morning patients, Delaney sat down at the kitchen table. There would be no house calls on this day of celebration. It was as if the entire neighborhood had gone up to Fifth Avenue to sing and march. In the warmth of the kitchen, he felt almost dizzy from the aroma of olive oil, basil, garlic, and simmering beef. Osito was on the chair to Delaney’s left, Carlito to his right. As always, Italian music was playing very low. Then Rose turned from the stove, grinning, to present the meal.

“Okay, something special, somethin’ new!”

“What is, Rosa?” the boy said.

“Braciol’,” she answered. “With pasta in oil!”

She laid plates in front of Delaney and Carlito and then one for herself. Carlito stared in a suspicious way at the mysterious new food. A rolled tube of beef, covered with dark red sauce.

“Watch,” she said to the boy, and reached over to cut his rolled beef in pieces.

“You see? Beef, with cheese inside, and sauce!”

He stared at the braciole, not moving. Delaney took a piece and started chewing.

“This is great,” he said. Carlito lifted a piece with his left hand and took a tentative bite. His face was dubious and then subtly relaxed. He began to chew. Rose looked relieved.

“This great!” the boy said.

The boy lifted another piece on his fork. Now he was eating, not merely chewing, and began splashing sauce to his left and right, spearing pasta with his fork, making sounds but no words. Mmmm, uh. Mmm, mmm, mmm. Rose winked at Delaney, who answered with sounds too.

“Mmmm, mmmmm, mmmmm, uh!”

The boy shared another piece of braciole with Delaney, and chewed away on the pasta, and then his plate was empty and he sat back and belched.

“Hey, don’t do that, boy! That’s bad manners. They think you a mameluke!”

“A what?” Delaney said.

“A mook! It’s like some kind of Arab. You know, they eat, they like it, they make a sound like —” She groped for the word, gesturing at her throat with a little wave of the hand. “Uh —”

“A belch,” Delaney said. “Or a burp.”

“Burp!” the boy said.

Rose got up, and so did Delaney, and they laid the plates on the side of the sink. Rose took four smaller plates and placed them on the table. One was for the bear. Then she smiled and said to the boy: “I gotta go burp.”

She went out to the hall, closing the door behind her.

“You liked the braciol’, didn’t you?” Delaney said.

The boy shook his head up and down, with much energy: “Good! Very good. Ba-zhoal… very, very good, Gran’pa.”

Then the door opened and Rose was there with a vanilla cake on a platter and three green candles burning brightly and a huge grin on her face. She began to sing.

Delaney was up now and into the song:

Rose placed the cake on the table and took a large flat knife from a drawer, while Delaney hugged the boy. The boy looked as if some memory was forcing its way into his mind, a memory of another birthday in another country. Delaney knew that at three, the events of turning two could be a long time ago. A third of a lifetime.

“It’s your birthday, boy! You, today” — she touched his chest —“you are three!”

She held up three fingers, then pointed at the cake and the three burning candles and said: “Now, you blow them out!” She turned her head and started blowing. “Just blow out the candles!”

The boy didn’t move. Delaney now demonstrated the minor art of blowing.

“Blow them out, big fella,” he said. “You’re three years old!”

Carlito stood up on the chair and braced himself with his hands on the table and looked at the candles and took a deep breath and started to blow. One candle went out, and then he pounced on the other two, blowing wetly and hard, and then all three were out, with little tendrils of smoke rising from the wicks. Rose hugged him hard and he grinned widely. “Three,” the boy said, and Rose lifted the candles out of the cake and laid them carefully on the table and cut a slice for each of them, including Osito, the bear. She placed two cups of black Italian coffee on the table and filled a small glass of milk for Carlito. The boy loved the cake and then stole Osito’s portion, and smeared his cheeks with cream, and licked his fingers. He got up and pushed a small lump of cake into the bear’s mouth, and then Rose was standing again.

“I gotta burp another time,” she said. In ten seconds she was back with two brightly wrapped packages. One was very bulky, and she placed it on the floor. The other was a book. That was from her to Carlito, and Delaney didn’t know what it was.

“This is for you, Carlito, for your birthday…”

He took it and felt its shape.

“It’s a book!” he said.

“Yeah,” Rose said, “but what book?”

“Take the paper off, Carlito,” Delaney said.

The boy began to remove the paper, tentatively, cautiously, and then more quickly. He burst into a squeal.

“Babar!”

He held the book and stared at the cover. The Travels of Babar. He started turning the pages quickly. Delaney looked at Rose, who was smiling while tears welled in her eyes. God, she is tough, he thought. Lovely and tough. And he hoped the boy would not call for his mother.

“Open the other one, ragazzo,” she said in a softer voice.

The boy was standing on the floor now. He put the book on Osito’s chair and turned to the much bulkier package and began to attack it. The paper seemed to fly away. And there it was, red and gleaming and beautiful: a fire engine.

“Fi’ engine, Gran’pa, it’s a fi’ engine!”

Rose whooped and clapped her hands. The boy jumped up and down. The fire engine was low and strong with a seat for a driver to sit upon, so that he could propel himself with his legs, and a wheel for steering. Delaney showed the boy how to slide onto the seat and how to use his legs, and then Carlito was propelling himself all around the kitchen, as Rose jumped out of his way in mock horror and Delaney stood up on a chair, feeling young, exuberant, full of delight and something like joy.

After an hour, the boy started fading. He pedaled more slowly. He sagged in his seat, leaning on the steering wheel. His eyes, which had been so bright with excitement, began to close. The telephone rang in the office. Delaney went to answer it, gesturing upstairs. Rose nodded agreement and lifted the boy. Delaney paused as he picked up the black telephone receiver, wondering if this would be another heavy breather. It was Zimmerman.

“Your neighbor?” Zimmerman said. “I just heard from one of the guys at Bellevue. And that Mr. Cottrell, he’ll be discharged tomorrow.”

“Great!”

“He a friend of yours?”

“No, but I’m glad he’ll live. How’s it going there, Jake, on this day of Irish days?”

“It’s a little like what the Somme must’ve been. The casualties are rolling in.”

“Stay alert,” Delaney said, “and make sure there’s plenty of iodine for the wounded.”

He put the fire truck in the shed leading to the yard and straightened out the dish towels and chairs and then went to the top floor. He could hear water running. He could hear Rose speaking softly, telling the boy he shouldn’t worry: the fire truck would be there later. Delaney turned and went down the stairs. He could hear Rose humming an aria.

In the office, he wrote a note to Grace, describing the boy’s birthday and how they had avoided the parade, afraid of spoiling him, and how he was sure the boy now wanted to grow up to be a fireman. He enclosed fifty dollars and sealed and addressed the envelope to Leonora Córdoba and slipped it under the blotter. Then he went to his bedroom. He undressed and donned his robe and stretched out above the covers in the gray light. From a long way off, he could hear a raw tenor singing about the mountains of Mourne, his voice full of longing and melancholy along the early evening streets. What was his name? The writer of the song? French. Of course. Percy French. Before the war, before Vienna, he and Molly had gone to see the famous Mr. French at a recital in Steinway Hall. Delaney thought the man’s songs would make Molly smile. Instead they provoked her anger. He never took her to another Irish evening or even to the parade. On this day, the Irish laughter and the Irish brawling and the rowdy Irish songs were all uptown. Down here in the West Village, there was only this lone tenor. Singing Percy French. It was as if the unseen singer was standing on the High Line flinging the words down the North River to the harbor and then through the Narrows and across the Atlantic to some Irish village that was forever lost.

Delaney slipped under the covers, seeking warmth, and was awake a long time. He thought about Grace, off in Barcelona, and realized that his anger at her had ebbed. In his mind now, when he faced his daughter, he had stopped shouting. And he was thinking in a cooler way about Molly. Soon he must open her locked room and put her things in cartons and store them in the basement, on new shelves, high and dry. He would wrap her framed photographs too, the silvery faces of her heroes, separating them with the musical scores, and seal them with tape. The piano would stay. Perhaps when the boy gives up his fire engine he will play piano. Here, or somewhere else. But Delaney now felt that Grace was almost surely right about her mother. That top-floor room contained Molly’s ghost. It reeked with death. He must open the door, and leave it open, and give it over to life.

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. Sending 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.”

They looked at many elegant drawings, and a sketchbook in a glass box, and then paused before Botticelli’s portrait of Dante Ali-ghieri: hawk-faced, oddly dangerous for a poet.

“I don’t want to look at this,” she said.

“Why?”

“Don’t you see it? The face, I mean. Don’t you see who it looks like?”

Then he saw it: Frankie Botts.

“Let’s go back to the swag.”

“No,” Delaney said. “Let’s go home.”

On the way out, Carlito turned a final time to look at the blond Venus rising from the sea.

On the subway downtown, his mind was full of questions. How does Rose know what Frankie Botts looks like? Then answered himself: Because she knew Gyp Pavese and must have seen him with his boss, with Frankie Botts. She definitely knew that he ran things out of Club 65. But that didn’t explain her deep silence, sitting now on one side of Carlito, with the boy dozing against her as the packed train squealed through tunnels. It had to be the actor. The older man thought they were married, and that the boy was theirs. That must be it. And she must be thinking about how impossible that would be. How impossible all of it would be. That Grace would surely come home. Rising from the sea. She would take away what was hers. This boy. And then Rose would go too.

Delaney retreated into his own silence.

A frail rain was falling when they came up from the subway, and the skies were as gray and leaky as their mood. He lifted Carlito, and they began walking quickly to the west. When they reached Ninth Avenue, the wind was blowing hard from the North River. Then Rose took Carlito from him, and he realized that his right arm was aching again. They turned into the areaway on Horatio Street, and while Delaney fumbled with his keys, the door opened at the top of the stoop next door. A stout woman in an overcoat came out on the wide top step. He hadn’t seen her for a long time but knew it was Mrs. Cottrell.

“Dr. Delaney,” she said, brushing a hand against the rain. “Wait, Doctor, wait!” She stepped into the vestibule and emerged with an umbrella. A gust of wind flopped it into uselessness. She dropped the umbrella and came clumsily down the steps.

“Come on,” Rose said, opening Delaney’s gate with her own keys. “You’ll get pneumonia out there.”

“Yes, but —”

Mrs. Cottrell had reached their areaway. Her ruined umbrella was careening on her stoop, rising, falling. Delaney tensed for a blow.

“I just want to thank you, Doctor,” she said. “You saved my husband’s life. The doctor at Bellevue told me about it, all about it. Another ten minutes, he’d have been gone. I know we’ve been mean to you, no, nasty. That was my fault. But I was so — Anyway, thank you, thank you.”

She took his good hand in both of hers.

“Get inside, Mrs. Cottrell. Take care of your husband.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Delaney said, and hurried into his own house.

Rose was inside the second door and helped him off with his coat and hung it on the coat tree. She opened the door again and shook the rain off his hat. Carlito came racing from the kitchen on the fire engine. Delaney shuddered.

“That hypocrite,” she said, her use of the word rhyming with “light.”

“Ah, it’s only human,” Delaney said.

“She doesn’t talk to you, for what? Four years? And then she’s sorry.”

“Well —”

“Go upstairs and get dry clothes,” she said. “I’ll make something to eat.”

The boy made the sound of a siren.

Delaney was in bed that night, reading Byron’s very funny poem about George III while the rain drummed steadily on Horatio Street. Rose and the boy were sleeping, and he craved sleep himself, but it would not come. The words blurred on the page. He tried to imagine Mrs. Cottrell on the day her son was killed and Delaney could not save him. She was thinner then, even pretty, but rage is always ugly. She must have raged at the driver of the car and at her husband and at God. She certainly raged at Delaney. Standing by the ambulance, pointing a long finger. “It was you! You could have saved him! You could have saved him! You! You!”

And he knew he hadn’t saved her husband. Anybody in Washington Square would have found the cop, and the cop would have called Bellevue, and there the interns and nurses would have done everything possible. As they had done. But maybe now it would at least be better. Nothing could be done about 97 Horatio, with its colony of ghosts. But maybe Mrs. Cottrell would come to the back garden of 93 and talk across the fence with Rose, about the weather and the birds and the olive tree. But no: she would have to look at Carlito and think of her son, and —

The telephone rang. At ten forty-seven. Again. Then again. He lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” Delaney said.

“It’s me. The guy from Bleecker Street.”

“Hello, Mr. Botts.”

“I been trying to fine you.”

“You didn’t leave a message.”

“I don’t leave messages.” He could picture Botts smiling in the movie gangster style. “I deliver them.”

Ah, Christ, Delaney thought, then said: “What’s the problem?”

“My mother’s sick.”

“Is she in pain?”

“Some. But you know these people from the old country: they never admit nothin’.”

“If she’s hurting, Mr. Botts, go to a hospital.”

“Somethin’s the matter, but she won’t tell me.”

“Can it wait until tomorrow afternoon?”

“I guess.”

“Give me the address,” Delaney said, lifting the pencil from the bedside table, moving the pad. He wrote down the address on Grand Street, and Botts told him it was upstairs from Di Palo’s cheese store.

“There’s one other thing,” Frankie Botts said. “She don’t speak much English.”

“And I don’t speak Italian.”

“I thought maybe you could bring that hoodlum that takes care of the kid. So she could translate, know what I mean?”

“I’ll ask,” Delaney said.

“Don’t worry,” Botts said. “You’ll be safe.” A pause. Then: “I hear you got the G-men on your ass.”

“They came by,” Delaney said.

“Looking for Eddie Corso too?”

“His name never came up. If it did, I couldn’t tell them anything anyway, because I don’t know where he is.”

Botts sighed. Then: “Tomorrow at two-thirty? Before you start your house calls.”

“You know my hours pretty good, Mr. Botts.”

“I know a lot of things.”

Botts hung up, and Delaney sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the carpet. It could be a setup, he thought, a way to get me out of this neighborhood, and the men who guard me, and then do what he wants to do. But that made little sense. Botts was no fool. He knows the Feds are watching me. He knows I’ll probably tell everyone where I’m going. Monique. My friends. The cops.

No, Botts might be telling me the truth. His mother is sick. And every gangster Delaney had ever known was sick in the head about his mother. Irish gangsters most of all. But the Jews too, and the Italians. They all insisted they had accepted a bitter cup in order to make life better for Mama. Maybe that’s all it is. Again.