North River

THIRTEEN

JUST BEFORE EIGHT-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, THEY BOARDED THE local train going downtown to Chambers Street. Rose was dressed in the same black clothes and stretched boots she wore to St. Patrick’s, but her face was bare of powder. She was hatless, her hair held tight with oyster-colored clasps. Walking beside her to the station, Delaney absorbed her tense silence. Monique had arrived early, after Delaney’s call. The patients would have to wait. But the tension was surely not about the boy. It was about everything else.

On the crowded train, the knuckles of her hand were white as she gripped the long bar above the packed seats. Delaney saw a film of sweat on her upper lip. She nodded when he said, “Just two stops and we’re there.” He stared at the reflection of her distracted face in the window glass as they moved through the black tunnel. She was looking at nothing. Or at things stirring vividly within her head. The blood seeping from Callahan’s scalp. Tillman’s badge. And perhaps most important: the visit later to Delaney’s bed. Delaney himself was still full of what had happened between them in the dark. They had crossed a line together. In the morning, everything had been the same, and utterly changed.

He glanced at the reflections in the windows: shopgirls anxious to be on time, Wall Street clerks in linty double-breasted suits, a uniformed cop with a drained face, heading to Brooklyn. Many read newspapers. All seemed gripped by the seediness of the Depression. None could have imagined what was filling Rose’s mind, or Delaney’s.

They came up onto Chambers Street, in the bright morning river light, slanting to the west from Brooklyn. They started walking to Broadway, and at the corner a small ice truck made a sudden turn, angrily blaring its horn. Rose jumped in alarm, shouted in Sicilian, and took Delaney’s arm. He squeezed it closer.

“Easy, Rose,” he said, and smiled. “Usually guys like that just run you over.”

She threw him a dark glance but said nothing. They walked uptown two blocks to Duane Street, and he could feel her gathering her strength for what awaited them. Her face was harder, her brow furrowed, her eyes focused on the sidewalk directly in front of them. Her grip on his arm grew tighter. They turned east on Duane Street, and saw up ahead the vast brightness of Foley Square. It was named for Tom Foley, who ran a saloon and was a chieftain in Tammany Hall and a good friend of Big Jim’s. Long ago, Foley gave a job to a kid named Al Smith, who had never finished the eighth grade, and Smith went on to become governor of New York and the Democratic candidate for president in 1928. Smith didn’t forget that Foley had given him his life, and pushed hard to name the square after him, as it was constructed on the site of the old Collect Pond and the Five Points slum. On the far side of the square, Delaney could see the new federal courthouse, its steel frame rising more than thirty stories into the sky, to be finished in another year. The FBI office was a block to the north. He mentioned none of this to Rose. She was rehearsing her secret script. Questions. Answers.

They turned into an office building on Duane Street and took an elevator to the sixth floor. She released her grip on his arm. They stepped out of the elevator into a small reception area, with a woman behind a sliding glass window.

“Dr. Delaney to see Judge Flanagan, please,” he said.

“One moment, sir.”

She hit a button, whispered into the phone, then turned to Delaney and motioned to an oaken door.

“Go right in, sir.”

Across the carpeted room, Harry Flanagan rose from a swivel chair behind a cluttered desk, a wide smile on his face. He was not wearing a jacket, and the many curves of his body were emphasized by his wilting white shirt.

“Good morning, Dr. Delaney,” he said, extending a hand for Delaney to shake. “And this must be, Miss, uh —”

“Verga,” Rose said. “Rose Verga.”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Verga,” he said.

“Likewise,” she said.

“Have a seat,” he said, and Rose sat in one of the two chairs facing the judge’s desk. Then Flanagan gestured with his head to Delaney and walked to a wall covered with framed photographs. Delaney followed. There were pictures of ballplayers and prizefighters, soldiers and politicians. Al Smith was there and Jimmy Walker, who was away now in European exile. And there were many group photographs from political dinners and chowder outings and trips to Saratoga and the Polo Grounds. Flanagan pointed a finger at one group shot.

“I noticed this when I came in this morning,” he said. “It’s gotta be, what? Nineteen thirteen? Anyway, before the war. Right there in the middle is Tom Foley, that they named the square after. Look who’s next to him. That’s your father, Doctor. That’s Big Jim.” Delaney squinted. It was Big Jim all right. “And next to him? That’s me. I musta been seventy-five pounds lighter!” He laughed. “But look at this runt, over here on the left? That kid. Know who that is?”

Delaney shrugged. He didn’t know.

“That’s your man Tillman,” he said. “He came out of St. Brigid’s, his father dead, and Tom Foley, bless his heart, helped put him through law school. He ended up at the Justice Department during the war, and Hoover made him part of the Palmer Raids. When they started the FBI, he was right there.”

“I’ll be damned,” Delaney said.

Flanagan wheezed and returned to the swivel chair. Rose was trying hard to decode this conversation and sat very still, her face empty of emotion. Delaney took the other chair.

“Anyway, I called Mr. Tillman this morning,” Flanagan said, in a dry tone. “I reminded him who your father was, I reminded him that this fella Callahan didn’t have a search warrant. I reminded him what the papers would do with all this. He was very nice.”

Then he paused for a beat. He focused on Rose.

“Go home,” he said. “It’s all over.”

Rose went loose, with sounds coming from her, but no words. Uh. Just uh and uh and uh. Her hands moved without purpose. Delaney stood up. He felt as if his own tension was leaking out on the carpet.

“Thanks, Judge,” he said, shaking Flanagan’s hand with both of his own. “Thanks very much.”

“Yes,” Rose said. “Many, many thanks.”

Flanagan glanced at his wristwatch and stood up too.

“What is it the great Boss Tweed once said?” he said, and grinned. “It’s better to know the judge than to know the law.”

Back on Duane Street, she put a hand on a scrawny tree and started to laugh. Bent over. Released. Men and women hurrying past looked at her, and the women smiled and the men seemed baffled. All kept moving. Then Delaney saw that she was sobbing through the laughter. He handed her a handkerchief, and she wiped at her face and giggled like a youngster.

“Oh, Dottore. Oh, thank you. Oh, you crazy Irish. Oh.”

He put an arm around her waist and guided her to Broadway. Across the street was a large cafeteria called the Broadway Café, and they went in. She had not eaten breakfast, and he had only sipped from a cup of coffee. The place was loud with talk and the clatter of dishes and silverware. Many tables were filled: lawyers and defendants, reporters from the Sun, which was a block away, groups of three or four middle-aged uptown women preparing for a day of shopping for downtown bargains. Delaney and Rose paused inside the door, then saw two men get up from a table. One was clearly a lawyer, the other clearly a mug. The mug was dressed in a chalk-striped suit and looked nervous. Delaney nodded as they went to meet their fate, and Delaney and Rose sat down. There were empty coffee cups and some plates on the table, and a cigarette burning in an ashtray. A young man cleared the table, stubbing out the cigarette, and then a waitress in a green uniform came to them and faced Delaney, a pencil poised above her pad.

“What’s yours, sweetheart?” she said.

He explained to Rose: “No menus here.”

“Uh, let me see,” Rose said. “How about a roll with butter, a fried egg, and a jelly doughnut.”

“You want the fried egg on the jelly doughnut?” the waitress said. Then giggled. “Just kiddin’,” she said. She was about forty, with a tough Irish face. Rose said separate plates would be fine. Delaney said, “Just the buttered roll, and coffee, please. Black coffee.”

The waitress hurried away. He looked at Rose across the table.

“I want to dance,” she said.

“Like Dolores Del Rio?”

“Yeah,” she said, and squeezed his wrist. “On the wings of an airplane.”

Across the day, she did not speak about what had happened in the night. In early afternoon, they went to see Mrs. Botticelli, who made jokes in Sicilian and said she was feeling much better. Rose bought cheese in Di Palo’s and some oranges from a pushcart. She showed deference to Monique, and played in the garden with the boy, and Delaney went on house calls. That night she returned to Delaney’s bed. And the night after that. And the night after that.

Delaney did not say anything either. He was happy that she did not affect a girlish shyness, or a giggling modesty. She wasn’t a girl. She was in her middle thirties, not her teens. Through the days, she was as she was before, with only subtle changes. She flashed him intimate smiles, she touched a casual hand to his face, but she did not talk about what they now shared. On their walks with Carlito in the evenings, she showed nothing in the street, did not take his arm, did not hold his hand. She never used the word “love.”

In the luminous dark of Delaney’s bedroom, she was not shy either. They did many things with each other, like humans finding water after drought. One night she straddled him on the armchair. On another, she joined him in the shower, the lights out, and she soaped him and he soaped her until neither could wait another second and they moved barefoot, hair wild and wet, to the bed. Sometimes, in full passion, she covered her face with the pillow, fearful of waking the boy with her screams.

Carlito never woke. He was exhausted from pedaling his fire truck, often now on the sidewalk outside the house. Or he was full of the sly silent contentment of pasta. Or both. Each night, after the boy fell into sleep, Rose slipped beside Delaney, bringing warmth, changing the air and making it more humid, the two of them erasing loneliness. He never heard her leave, but she was always gone in the morning. Her presence now was larger in the house. She walked with greater confidence, exuding a sense that it was her house too. She was more comfortable than ever, and so was Delaney.

They began to talk in the dark before sleep would come to Delaney.

She said: “Is your wife alive?”

“I don’t know. She disappeared and was never seen again. Dead or alive.”

“You miss her?”

“Sometimes.”

“You dream about her sometimes?”

“Sometimes.”

Silence.

“I dream about my husband sometimes too. Calvino, with the plate in his head. Sometimes he’s even that handsome guy I saw after the war. Most times he’s a goddamn monster.”

She was silent then.

“I dream about the boy too. I dream about Carlito.”

“Me too.”

“They scare me, those Carlito dreams.”

He remembered the scarlet sea.

“Me too,” he said.

And laughed.

There was no fresh letter from Grace, and very little news in the papers about Spain. He thought of calling Tillman, asking if the mail from Leonora Córdoba was being stopped by some new young FBI zealot who had discovered the secret address. Then thought Tillman would be embarrassed or angry or both if he asked. Let it alone, he told himself. As he made his house calls, Delaney heard much talk about the Giants, with opening day coming on fast, and how this would be another immense year for the Giants after the great World Series win over the Senators of Washington. McGraw would not see it, of course, but Bill Terry was a great manager, along with being a splendid hitter, and Mel Ott was sure to have a big year at bat, and the pitching was strong, even if Adolfo Luque, the ancient Cuban, was another year older. One afternoon Delaney spent twenty minutes with an old man in Hudson Street, his wife dead, his children gone off to their own lives, his lungs choked by a million cigarettes, and they talked baseball, and how Gus Mancuso was still not able to play, on account of getting typhoid during the off-season. Delaney went to see the mother of Frankie Botts, with Rose beside him, and the old woman said she wanted to know about the Giants. “I just want to go one more time to the Polo Grounds,” she said in Sicilian. Delaney said, “You’ll see a lot more Giant games. Later in the summer.” Tears appeared in her eyes, and later, out on Grand Street, where the two hoodlums remained on guard duty in their car, Rose said: “I don’t understand this. How come one old lady from Sicily cares about this baseball?”

“Because she’s an American now,” Delaney said.

Then it was the Sunday after opening day, and over breakfast he and the boy talked about baseball. The boy still didn’t know what Delaney meant, but he listened intently, looking at the photographs on the back page of the Daily News. Then Rose came into the kitchen, dressed for Sunday, smiling broadly.

“You guys got a big day today,” she said. “The Polo Grounds!”

“Bay-ball,” Carlito said with a grin.

“Base-ball.”

“Bayz-ball.”

“Good, Carlito,” Delaney said. “Baseball!”

“Have a great time,” Rose said, and went off to feed the men who would not be making it to the Polo Grounds anytime soon.

It was dark when Rose came home, and Carlito ran to her and started talking about what he had seen in the Polo Grounds. The words came in an excited rush. The boy was describing the world now, not simply naming it.

“Rosa, they have bats like you! Big bats, all bats in their hands, and they hit a ball, and they run. They run very fast, and they jump into the base. There’s grass all over, and lots of people. They all, they —” He paused, groping for the word, raising his hands in the air.

“Cheer,” Delaney said.

“Sí, they cheer, Rosa. All of them. Many, many people. Then they come with the bat again and they throw the ball and they hit the ball in the air, Rosa! Up high in the air!”

“You got to take me there someday, Carlito,” Rose said. “And explain to me how they play.”

“Yeah! And Osito too! But we can play in, in, the bagyard too.”

“Not when it’s dark, boy!”

“No, in the sun, Rosa.”

Later, they all went up to bed. Later, Rose opened Delaney’s door and entered the intimate darkness.

The next day, there were three letters from Grace, all with different postmarks, Nothing told him that they had been opened, but he was sure that Tillman had sent them on. Delaney couldn’t read them, because the Monday-morning rush was on outside his door.

Later, he thought. Always later. Now the quinine men were there, yellow with malaria. A few strangers. A woman with what was surely leukemia. One lunger. A hernia. A broken nose. And Sally Wilson, hoping again to have her breasts gripped in a man’s hands.

“I’m sure it’s a lump,” she said.

Delaney sighed and said: “Let’s see.”

When they were all gone, he sat heavily at the desk and opened the letters from Grace. Each was brief. Her husband was back in Spain but she hadn’t made contact yet. Somebody would try to bring her to him, or him to her. She was making drawings of Barcelona and its people. She missed Carlito and hoped to see him soon. But the husband, Santos, was essential. “I just have to resolve this,” she wrote, “and then try to get on with my life.” She thanked him for everything and apologized again for leaving the boy on his doorstep. Delaney put the letters back in their envelopes and slipped them under the desk blotter.

Then he filled out records. Sally Wilson: That was wrong. I can’t have her here anymore. The coldness of examination is in me, but not in her, and I’m servicing her. And I can’t go to the Chinese women anymore. I know I’m just providing medical services. But to Rose it would be like an act of infidelity. He thought about Grace. About her possible return. And what it might do to all of them. To him. To the boy. To Rose.

At lunch Rose talked about the Bing Crosby movie she’d seen the day before on Fourteenth Street, and how Crosby was a wonderful singer, and so relaxed, and how she always heard him now on the radio. Mentioning him, she smiled widely. The boy wandered in and out of the back door, which was open to the garden and the olive tree. Rose did not bring him a baseball bat.

Delaney looked at Rose and saw that her face was smoother now, her skin rosier, her smile oddly wider. Some of it must have been from the sun. But maybe it was also from what they did in the night. He wanted now to hold her and kiss her and feel her pressing against him. Then he thought of Grace’s letters, and felt each minute ticking away. He wished for clarity, but it did not come.

That afternoon, at Billy McNiff’s, he bought a baseball and a small child’s glove. At the art supply store near Cooper Union, he picked up three brushes, watercolors, crayons, two pads of paper, some charcoal, and pencils. In Molly’s room, he and Rose set up two facing chairs for Carlito, and a table for Delaney.

“This is great,” Rose said, as she gazed around the room that had always been closed and was now wide-open. She was beaming as Delaney showed the boy how to use the crayons. Now they were both southpaws, and Delaney drew a crude head of a man wearing a baseball cap, with big eyes and a wide grin, then handed the crayons to Carlito.

“You try it now, big fella,” he said.

The boy chose a red crayon and began with his left hand to make a head. Rose went downstairs, but Delaney and Carlito stayed in the room for more than an hour. The boy did little more than scribble, while Delaney tried putting watercolor on paper with his own left hand. He painted a crude house, and a cruder bicycle in a front yard, and the sun shining in the sky. Carlito watched and then tried doing the same with his crayons. When they went downstairs to eat, they left the door open.

That night she held him tightly, as if trying to calm him. Or herself.

“You okay?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Something happened,” she said.

“There were some letters from Grace.”

A pause. Then: “She’s coming home?”

“Maybe.”

He could feel her deflate. Now he held her tight. He touched her damp face. He could feel the faint ridge of the scar.

“Who did this to you?”

“I told you. Some guy.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

She was quiet for a long time.

“I was here almost a year,” she said. “Living in a rooming house. My own room. With a lock.” A pause. “I didn’t know much English. I was lonesome. And I met this guy.”

Her breathing was shallow now.

“An old story… I start going out with him. Here and there, mostly speakeasies, you know… He’s very handsome, thin, a good dancer. His Italian is very bad, all mixed up with American, but so is my English, and anyway… that wasn’t what it was all about.” Another pause. “He had a wife too. I saw her a few times. Everything on her was big, top and bottom. Some kind of an American. I know this could be bad trouble, and I want to break up with this guy, but he won’t let me. Another jealous guinea.” A final pause. “Then one night I’m packin’ to leave and he catches me in the hall and starts yelling and I curse him and his whole family and whoosh: the knife comes out and he cuts my face. Then he says, Okay, go.”

Silence.

“You went.”

“To Jersey City. When I come back, I know he’s around someplace, but it was over. Around this time, I start having my trouble with Gyp, another guinea gangster that used a knife. That’s why I hate these gangster movies.”

He touched the scar again, up now on one elbow.

“What was his name — the guy that cut you?”

“It doesn’t matter. He put a mark on me.” A pause. “Now it’s the past. Nothing can be done.”

He felt her emptying beside him, at once ashamed of her confession and relieved to get it said. He held her closer and kissed the scar.