North River

SIXTEEN

DELANEY WOKE UP ALONE AT FIVE IN THE MORNING AND KNEW HE could not return to sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed, his mind full of Molly’s bones. In some way, they were beautiful. A watercolor made of earth colors. Something Thomas Eakins could have painted. He wondered how they had been streaked, what chemicals had flowed around them, making such subtle marks. They had been scoured and bleached and stained. Now they would be returned to the earth.

He stood up and went into the bathroom to shower. The bones stayed with him. He had lived for many months with an image of Molly moving through the current, her hair streaming out behind her, and he wondered which part of her flesh went first and which went last. He imagined her scalp and hair were last, but he could never be sure. Perhaps she had hit her head on a piling when she fell, and gashed that part of her flesh, and the current started to lift it, to peel it away. That scalp he had grasped in ecstasy. That hair that he had curled in his fingers. Ah, Molly.

He dressed in the dark and went out at the top of the stoop, his ring of keys twined in his fingers. He stood there, in the place where Carlito had come into his life, and looked toward the North River. Then he turned back into the house.

On Monday morning, he took the bicycle and rode with Carlito to get the bread and the newspapers. The Daily News headline said, in a disappointed way: MOB TRUCE? The News did have the best police reporters in the city, and they said that leaders of the Corso and Botticelli clans had a “sitdown” on Saturday night. Not in Little Italy. In the Bronx. Delaney smiled. If Eddie had been asked, he would have insisted on New Jersey. Never the Bronx. The News reporters added that one test of the cease-fire would take place Monday at the funeral of Frankie Botts, expected to be one of the biggest in Mob history. The cops were mobilizing more than eight hundred men to help keep the peace. Mayor La Guardia urged all decent citizens to stay home or go to work. But the News underlined a simple fact: as of early Monday morning, when they went to press, there had been no reported deaths for twenty-four hours.

There was nothing in any of the newspapers about Molly. Jackie Norris had made certain of that. So Delaney sat down at his desk and wrote a telegram to Grace. SAD NEWS STOP MOTHER’S REMAINS FOUND STOP CAN YOU COME FOR BURIAL QUERY ADVISE SOONEST DAD. He clipped a note to the text for Monique, telling her to send it to the address on the Plaza Real and to American Express in Barcelona and Madrid.

Then Carlito ran in with his teddy bear. Smiling and happy. Rose brought Delaney a fried egg sandwich and lifted Carlito. The smudges under her eyes were darker. She seemed desperately in need of sleep, and he was sure he knew what was keeping her awake.

Monique arrived, and he handed her the telegram message. She glanced at it, then turned to him.

“Oh, Jim,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“At least we know,” he said.

She glanced toward the kitchen.

“What’s gonna happen?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

Then he went to work, nodding toward the door at the unseen patients. More than ever he understood that he needed their pain to keep from thinking about his own.

That afternoon Monique asked Delaney about arrangements. “How are you gonna do this?” she said. He told her there would be no wake and no funeral mass, and that Molly’s bones might be buried in the same plot occupied by Big Jim and his wife out at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. “I have to call the cemetery,” he said. “Or maybe you could.” Monique looked at him in a dubious way. “You sure?” she said. “No mass?” He reminded her that Molly had left no will and no instructions, not even about the music, and had never mentioned any relatives in Ireland.

“I do know that she hated the church,” he said. Then shrugged. “Well, maybe just a ceremony at the funeral home. Or at the grave. Family and friends. I have to ask Grace. If she comes home.”

“That could be a long time. Maybe never.”

“True.”

“You’ve got to have something.”

He was deliberately vague. “Well, we have a little time…”

Monique shook her head. And Delaney wondered why Monique was reacting this way. She had never much liked Molly, and Molly had never much liked Monique. They tolerated each other, with crisp efficiency. Perhaps it was about Rose. Perhaps Monique wanted to be in charge, with no role for the bossy new interloper. No: that was probably not it. Monique was suggesting that he wasn’t reacting with sufficient ceremonial grief. That he was not gilding himself in platitude. It was like so much of life now: she wanted him to perform grief, and she would perform sympathy, even if she did not feel it.

“Let’s talk later,” he said, and retreated to his office. He called Casey the undertaker and asked him to take custody of Molly’s remains from the hospital and hold them until a date was chosen for the burial. “The date’s not set yet, Mr. Casey.” And Casey said he understood. He did not explain that the date depended upon Grace. Burial would take place soon if Grace did not want to return. Molly would be buried without the presence of her daughter. The date would be later if Grace found a ship for New York. He began to imagine a small ceremony in Green-Wood. When it was over, they could walk up the slope to the peak of the hill and look down upon the Narrows.

He didn’t eat much that evening and began to doze at the table. Rose touched him gently.

“You go up to bed,” she said. “You need sleep. You need to clear your head.”

“I do,” he said. “We have to talk about all this.”

“Not tonight,” she said, turning to the drowsy Carlito. “You look worse than he does.”

“But —”

“I won’t come down tonight,” she said, a slight chill in her voice. “I can’t. It’s not right.”

“I got over Molly a long time ago, Rose.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but this, it’s all still alive.”

That night Delaney did not sleep a real sleep. It was not Molly who kept him awake. It was Grace. She would determine the future. How would she react to Rose? With snooty contempt? With the cold eyes of the women in St. Patrick’s that morning? In spite of all her glib talk about socialism and class equality, Grace could be haughty too. She was, after all, Molly’s daughter. He wondered what Grace would do. She might plan to move back into 95 Horatio, to reclaim her room as she reclaimed her son. Or she might go somewhere else, up to the Village, back to the West, or even Mexico, taking her son with her. I could not stop her, but if she tries to take him to Spain, I would try.

He tossed in the darkness, but could not find a position that eased the ache in his bad arm. His mind teemed with questions that had no answers. How would Rose react to Grace? She had done what Rose could not imagine doing: she had left her child to the tender mercies of others. He imagined Rose staring at Grace, arms folded, full of Sicilian vehemence. And, of course, all of this might never happen. Rose might simply pack and go.

He changed positions again, and pulled a pillow over his face, and smelled Rose on it, and moved to his left, pushing the pillow to the right. That hot night, he finally slept and dreamed once more about the snow.

In the morning, Delaney did not want to read the newspapers, but Rose pointed out the photograph on the front page of the Daily News. The gleaming coffin of Frankie Botts was being carried into Our Lady of Pompeii by six burly pallbearers. Behind them were the other mourners, all properly dressed in black, most of them male, except for Frankie’s mother. She was directly behind the coffin. Three rows behind her was Bootsie.

“You see this?” Rose said.

“I see it now.”

“It’s like a, uh, un simbolo?”

“A symbol of what?” Delaney said.

“That it’s over, at least for now. Bootsie, they all know he’s from the Corso gang, and here he is, dressed in black, showing some kind of respect. Right behind the mother. Even the cops know. And those guys beside him? They are Corso guys too.”

“What do you think?”

She placed the newspaper on a chair. “I think, wait and see.”

Delaney laughed and told her what Danny Shapiro had told him, that if the Sicilians and the Neapolitans ever got together, we’d all be in trouble. Rose smiled, but her eyes remained wary. She looked around the kitchen with focused eyes, as if forcing every detail into memory. He touched her arm.

“A day at a time,” he said, ashamed of his own banality. “A day at a time.”

Later, when the hour of house calls arrived, he wheeled the Arrow through the areaway under the hot sun and saw Izzy the Atheist sitting on the stoop. He was wearing a sweat-stained denim shirt, dungarees, and sneakers. He stood up, came to Delaney, and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, Doc,” he said. “I heard about Molly.”

“Thanks, Iz. At least the mystery is over. Or most of it.”

“There anything I can do?”

“Just stay healthy, Izzy.”

Izzy lit a Camel with a wooden match he scraped into flame on the back of the dungarees.

“You having any kind of ceremony?” Izzy said.

“Something small. Private. No mass.”

“Good. And Grace? She comin’ to it?”

“I’m waiting to hear.”

Izzy exhaled a small cloud of smoke.

“Ah, well,” he said. “You and me, Doc, we come from a long line of dead people.”

“That we do, Iz. That we do.”

Then he was off to the emergency wards of the neighborhood.

There was no word that day from Grace, and that night Rose returned to his bed. In the hot dark, they made love almost desperately. It was as if both knew that time was running out. In bed, after all, they could erupt into the certainties of flesh. Afterward they lay together, holding hands. The room was thick with her various aromas, including sex.

“You know what I feel bad about?” she said quietly. “There were some things I wanted to do.” Her voice had fatalism in it, but no self-pity. “For Carlo. With you.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “What are you driving at, Rose?”

“If your daughter comes back,” she said in a cool way, “it means I have to leave.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Come on, Dottore. How do you say? Face the facts.”

He held her tightly, inhaling her aromas.

“We can work it out,” he said. “I’m sure of that, Rose.”

She turned her head, but he could feel her breathing on his hand. They were quiet a long time.

“These things you wanted to do,” Delaney said. “What are they?”

“It doesn’t matter now,” she said, in a tone that implied: It’s too late.

“Like what, Rose?”

“Like going to Coney Island.” A pause. “The three of us.” Another pause. “Just like the people I see in the Daily News on Mondays. With a blanket, and food, and Carlito with a pail and a shovel.” She exhaled. “The merry-go-round. Steeplechase the Funny Place. I been there before, you know, been to Coney Island. But never on the sand. Never with you and the boy.”

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

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

“That’s on my list too.”

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

“He sure is.”

They were both quiet for a long while.

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

“Fred Astaire I’m not.”

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

She inhaled, held her breath, exhaled.

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

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

“Let’s try to do them all,” he said.

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

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

“Look at the Phillies. They keep winning.”

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

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

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

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

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Sorry,” Zimmerman said.

“It’s me that’s sorry, Jake.”

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

“Not now,” he said. “Not yet.”

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

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

He excused himself to his patient and opened the telegram.

Delaney thought: I’ll tell Rose tonight.

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

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

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

Then: “That’s nine days from now.”

“Right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wahtuh-melon,” he said. “I like it!”

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

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

“You’re kidding, right?” she said.

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

“Not some crazy person?”

“Her sister.”

“Monique’s got a sister?”

“She works at Metropolitan Life.”

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

“Hey, she’s not that bad.”

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

They were quiet for a long while.

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

She kissed him on the forehead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then they reached Fifty-first Street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on, Fred. Let’s dance.”

“Whatever you say, Miss Del Rio.”

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

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

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

“You are a liar.”

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

Some of the dancers took up the lyrics.

Now the dancers were louder.

They all knew the next verse, even Delaney, and all of Roseland was singing it, except Rose. She didn’t know the words.

They roared the final lines, living tough and laughing at the whole goddamned world.

“Who is this Wop?” Rose said.

“I doubt he’s without papers. The voice is pure New York.”

“His mother should be ashamed. That kid needs to eat!”

The young singer began a version of “Melancholy Baby,” somehow making the words romantic without being sentimental. The voice was urban, pure, new. Not Crosby. Not Russ Columbo. Definitely not Jolson. Delaney was sure his father was a fireman or worked three days a week in a factory. And thought: The strongest oak must fall. He pushed his face into Rose’s hair, inhaling the aroma of soap and oil. One ballad led to another for more than fifteen minutes. Then the singer said into the microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen, the national anthem.”

Without missing a beat, he began to sing, while the band supported him with a kind of Times Square dirge.

Some of the older men, the men Delaney’s age, stopped dancing. They knew this song too. They knew every word because in a big way, it was about them.

The singer was crooning the song, making it into a kind of blues, and more and more people stopped dancing and started singing.

Delaney and Rose were not dancing now either, and as they looked around and the verses continued he could see the anger in the men and some of the women. Many men punched out each word with a clenched fist. Some of them surely had been shot at. Some of them surely had been hit. Delaney thought: This singer must have been four when the war ended. Same as Grace. And yet he is making it his song too.

The drummer added a rim shot and someone in the reed section yelled Hey! Then the singer lowered his voice, almost speaking the final lines of the anthem.

They all roared the final line, Delaney among them.

Then the young singer was gone, and Rose leaned into Delaney and held him tight, one hand pressed into the back of his neck. The band began to play “Stardust” in the packed intimacy of Roseland. He took her hand.