North River

TWO

Delaney sat in the old worn chair beside the fireplace, the pages of the letter on his lap. He pictured his daughter out in the raging snow, pushing her son in a two-dollar stroller with the river wind at her back, and he thought of her life, and his own, and he began to weep.

He woke in the blue light of evening, to the boy’s angry wailing for his mother. Delaney placed a hand on his shoulder, tapping rapidly and gently with his fingers, saying over and over that it was okay, boy, don’t cry, boy, everything’s gonna be okay. The boy then wept in a clogged way, punctuating his lament with a single word: Mamá.

Delaney switched on the lamp, took a tissue from beside the bed, and touched the boy, then placed the tissue at his nose. “Blow,” he said. The boy froze for a moment, his eyes full of tears, rivulets of tears marking his cheeks. Delaney gestured with his own fingers at his nose. “Blow.”

The boy blew. Once, then again. Then looked around at the strange world.

“Everything’s okay,” Delaney said, as the boy stared at him. “Todo bien.”

The boy’s lower lip jutted out, as if he would cry, then he seemed to gather himself. Delaney pointed at his own chest.

“I’m your Grandpa,” he said. He jabbed his chest again. “Grandpa.”

The boy whispered, “Ga’paw.”

“That’s right!” Delaney said, smiling. “Grandpa.”

The boy smiled too.

“Ga’paw.”

Delaney lifted him. “Let’s get dressed.” The boy’s head was beside Delaney’s ear.

“Co’flakes, Ga’paw…”

“No, something better than that.” Delaney glanced at the front windows. The snow had nearly stopped. He tickled the boy and Carlito giggled. “How about spaghetti!”

Carlito couldn’t figure out the word, but they washed and dressed and then went out to the evening streets together. The snow was lighter now. The boy’s eyes widened. Hundreds of kids were pushing each other on sleds, throwing snowballs like warriors, climbing great piles of snow that had buried all the parked cars. Long dark blue shadows were cast by the tenement on the corner, that grim factory for making children, and criminals, and illness. But all was luminous in the general whiteness. The sidewalks were gone under the snow, and the only path was in the middle of the street. Adults hurried along with modest bags of groceries, fighting for traction, shouting at the snowballers for a cease-fire while they passed. Carlito stopped walking, the snow near his knees, and watched. Then he reached down and tried to pack a snowball, but the dry cold powder blew out of his small hands. His brow furrowed. “Take a little time,” Delaney said, squatting and holding fresh snow tightly in his own hands until it annealed. “See, like this…” Then he packed a ball and handed it to Carlito. “Now you can throw it, boy,” Delaney said, making a gesture. “Throw the snowball.” Carlito heaved it awkwardly with his mittened left hand toward a snow mountain and laughed in delight. He grabbed more snow in both hands. “Wait,” Delaney said. “Easy now. Pack it, and count. One, two, three, four, five — how’s that?” The boy had his snowball now and then he threw it three feet into a snowbank and clapped both mittened hands. “Hoe-ball! Hoe-ball!”

Then Delaney got hit between the shoulder blades. He turned to the gang of young snipers and sappers and shouted, “Hold it, hold it! Cease fire!” His words were muffled by the snow and the ferocity of combat. The ambush artists shouted their taunts, and Carlito seemed alarmed. But Delaney laughed and lifted him with his left hand to his own shoulders. They hurried together out of no-man’s-land, where nothing at all could remind the boy of his mother.

They made a right at Hudson Street, moving south on the wide avenue. No trains were in sight on the elevated railroad. The streetlights were out, telling Delaney that the storm had knocked out the electricity, which was why the El was not working and the phones were dead. The bars and food shops were open, with candles lighting their interiors, and the street itself was a kind of party, Horatio Street multiplied by a factor of ten. Not like Times Square the night before, if Times Square was as it always was on New Year’s Eve. But close. More a downtown version of Brueghel. In a few Italian stores, including Nobiletti’s shoemaking shop, the front pages of the News and Mirror had been taped to the inside of the front windows, showing La Guardia being sworn in at midnight. The headlines shouted: IT’S MAYOR FIORELLO and HERE’S THE MAYOR! And Delaney realized he had not yet read the newspapers. He wondered if any Republican had ever been honored this way in the history of Hudson Street, so deep in the heart of what his father always called Tammanyland. Certainly this was unique, because Fiorello was the city’s first Italian mayor, fifty years after the first Italians came down the gangways onto Ellis Island. They called them Wops then, which stood for “without papers.” Now one of them was the mayor of the greatest city in America. Tribal pride. But there were no other signs of politics on Hudson Street. There was only the snow and the kids and the sense of shared natural disaster, which always gave New York a special exuberance. And placed images into the very young, which would return in trembling dreams, as the Blizzard of ’88 had returned to Delaney just this morning. Carlito would probably dream of this day for the rest of his life.

They finally reached Angela’s restaurant at the moment when electricity returned to the western side of the street. Cheers erupted along with more barrages of snowballs, and Delaney lowered the boy and hurried with him into the restaurant. Thinking: Goddamn you, Grace, you should be here with us. You should be whispering to your son. This sweet baffled boy that you’ve abandoned to my incompetent arms. Goddamn it all to hell.

There were about a dozen customers at the tables, couples, parties of four, a few of them blowing out the emergency candles as the surging electricity reached Angela’s. The aroma of garlic and oil filled the room, and from somewhere in the rear, beside the kitchen, an Italian radio station suddenly played music. At one corner table, four Tammany politicians poked glumly at their pasta, one of them smoking a cigarette while he ate. Delaney tried to remember the name of the presiding pol. A judge now. A friend of his father’s. Since midnight, the Republicans, and that goddamned La Guardia, owned City Hall, and the pols’ world was turned upside down. They all nodded at Delaney and looked curiously at Carlito.

In another corner was Knocko Carmody, his black derby hat firmly in place over his Irish face of pink cement. He had three union lieutenants with him. Delaney tipped his union cap to Knocko and the man’s eyes brightened. He smiled, his fork wrapped with pasta, threw Delaney a thumbs-up with his free hand, and made a sign that they would talk later. They knew each other from grammar school, and during the past summer, Delaney had saved his wife from peritonitis when her appendix burst. He realized that half the crowd had been in his office at one time or another.

Then from the rear, an enormous smiling woman came forward to greet them, her makeup heavy, gold bangles bouncing from gold posts in her earlobes. She had immense breasts, and a button was open at the top of her blouse, showing her cleavage. Her olive skin was glazed with fine perspiration from the heat of the kitchen. A wide white apron was tied behind her back.

“Angela, Happy New Year!” Delaney said.

“Same to you, Doc,” the woman said, her voice burred by tobacco. “And who’s this little movie star?”

“My grandson. He’s staying with me for a while.”

“Whatta you mean, a while?” she said softly.

She gave Delaney a look that said: This must mean trouble.

Delaney shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

Angela nodded, sighed, took them to a small corner table, where Delaney hung the boy’s mackinaw on a wall peg and placed his own jacket and cap above it.

“Wait,” Angela said. “I got a thing he can sit on.”

She went into the back, past the kitchen, and returned with a high chair. She put the boy on the floor and tied a bib under his chin. She lifted the tray of the high chair, put the boy snugly into the seat, lowered the tray, then pushed the chair to the table. All in a few expert seconds. The boy was to Delaney’s right, the perfect spot for a left-hander.

“You want some clams?” Angela said. “I got some in from Georgia. Just two days ago. Before the trains stopped wit’ the snow.”

“Let me think a minute,” Delaney said. “I promised him spaghetti, so…”

“So I give him a kid portion, and you —”

“Why not? Spaghetti. With the clams…”

As they waited, the boy’s brown eyes moved around the crowded room, with its haze of burnt nicotine, and the pictures on the ochre walls. The Bay of Naples. A view of Palermo. Both gauzy with nostalgia. Both painted by Fierro, the sign painter, who had a shop on Ninth Avenue, a Sicilian married to a Neapolitan in what some people called a mixed marriage. There were other pictures in Angela’s gallery. A heroic painting of Garibaldi, brought over from the old country by a customer. A painting of flowers on green fields. Photographs of Angela when she was younger and thinner. Her family in the old country, a year before they took the ship to La Merica, where Angela was born a few doors away from Transfiguration Church on Mott Street. Mother and father were still alive, both patients of Delaney’s. And there on the wall, standing alone, was Frankie Fischetti, the first kid from Hudson Street to be killed in the war. Carlito blinked, his eyes like a camera shutter, as if freezing each new thing he saw into memory. He had been taken by his mother to a world of many rooms.

A young waiter arrived with a basket of Italian bread, a fat slab of butter, a dish of olive oil. He rubbed the boy’s blond hair and hurried away. The waiter was quickly replaced by Angela, carrying a bottle of Chianti.

“For the New Year,” she whispered, so the Tammany boys would not hear. “And for Fiorello. Don’t get use’ to it.”

She laughed and went away. Delaney poured an inch of the wine into his glass, tore off a crust of bread, and handed it to the boy.

“This is a restaurant, Carlito,” Delaney said, waving a hand around the long room. “Where people come to eat.”

The boy listened but said nothing, trying to decode this new, secret script. He must have learned some English in New Mexico, Delaney thought, while his mother peddled paintings of mountain ranges. He must have been in restaurants there, even with his mother saving every dollar for the search for her husband. He must know more than he lets on. The way his mother was when she was three. He must remember the watercolor painter too. The door opened and a pair of St. Vincent’s interns came in, overcoats buttoned tight over green uniforms, their eyes frazzled and hungry. Neither man was Jake Zimmerman, savior of Eddie Corso. They stood by the door, eyeing a tiny empty table to their left, the last one in the place. Delaney recognized them from the hospital but couldn’t remember their names. They smiled when they saw him, mouthed greetings for the New Year. Delaney beckoned to one of them, and the young man leaned over.

“How’s that special patient of Dr. Zimmerman?”

The intern paused, then said: “Okay. He’ll live. He doesn’t exist, but he’ll live.”

“Good,” Delaney said. “Had a rough twenty-four hours?”

“Everything. People falling in the snow and breaking arms, elbows, wrists, and heads. Old ladies tripping down stairs. Babies close to death ’cause there’s no goddamned heat. Everything. Hell, you know how it is.”

Delaney nodded. “Well, stay safe.”

“Thanks, Dr. Delaney.”

Yes, he knew how it was. He had interned at Bellevue, bigger and crazier than St. Vincent’s. Before the war. They owned one of the first ambulances, after cars came to the city, but it didn’t work in snow or ice, and not very well in rain. Thirty-six hours on, eighteen hours off. Just Delaney and a driver. The calls came from the police, and then they raced to the scene, to the man trapped in an elevator pit, to the woman who slashed her wrists after discovering she had a dose of the clap passed to her by her husband, the four-year-old boy whipped into unconsciousness by his father, the girl who gave birth in the vacant lot, her child strangled on the umbilical cord. He knew how it was. Caging emotion. Accepting numbness. Good training for a war. Or a marriage.

The door opened and two more Tammany guys arrived in search of consolation.

He’ll live. Eddie Corso will live.

“Here ya go,” said Angela, breaking his reverie with two bowls of spaghetti on a tray. She placed the larger one, dotted with clams, in front of Delaney. The boy stared at his bowl. It had no clams, but he did not ask why.

“I know it’s a real New Year now,” Delaney said. “Service by the boss.”

He lifted his small glass of wine in a wordless toast and smiled.

“Like I said, Doc. Don’t get use’ to it.”

The interns were seated now, and the room was noisier, a full house, with a steady murmur of talk, Puccini now playing on the hidden radio. It was like being at an opera where the audience talked though the performance. The murmur was punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter, except from the politicians.

“Spaghetti,” Delaney said, pointing at the bowls.

“Bagetti,” the boy said.

With his left hand, he tried to twirl the slippery strands of spaghetti on his fork, but they kept falling, and Delaney leaned over and cut them into smaller pieces. The boy stabbed at them with his fork and then grabbed a few strands and started chewing. He made a face — what is this taste? — and then decided he liked it, and tried again with the fork, and this time succeeded. Delaney smiled.

“Bagetti,” the boy said. “No co’flake.”

“Right. Spaghetti.”

Chairs scraped on the floor, and Delaney turned. Knocko Carmody was approaching him, smiling. The others from his table were standing now too.

“Does this kid have a union card?” he said, his voice a growl but his eyes twinkling. The other three stayed back, as respectful as lieutenants to a general.

“He’s coming to the hiring hall this summer, Knocko.”

“Just bring him around. He gets a card, just showing up.”

At the hard sound of Knocko’s voice, Carlito stopped eating but then quickly resumed.

“Who’s this?” Knocko whispered.

“My grandson.”

“Grace’s kid?”

“Yeah.”

“And where’s the beautiful Grace?”

“Away.”

He said the word as if naming something permanent.

“Shit,” Knocko said.

“Yeah.”

They’d known each other too long to invent a story.

“You need some help, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks, Knocko.”

Out he went, into the snowy street. He was flanked by two of the men, and the third walked directly behind him. There was a clatter of dishes as the waiter cleared their table. Delaney glanced at Carlito. All the spaghetti was gone from his bowl. Some was on the checkered tablecloth, some on the bib or the floor. Delaney lifted a portion of his own pasta and placed it in the boy’s bowl. He sipped his wine and finished eating. Angela returned with a wet cloth and began cleaning the boy’s face and hands.

“This kid don’t fool around,” she said.

“He’s an eater.”

“He’s gonna be pretty big,” she said. “Look at them feet.”

“With any luck.”

Carlito must have sensed that they were talking about him, but he said nothing.

“I got something else for you,” she said to the boy.

She waved at a waiter, made a spooning gesture. The waiter shouted something into the kitchen, then hurried over to take away the pasta dishes.

“You’re gonna need help,” Angela said, her face grave. “A lot of help.”

“I know.”

“You can’t go running out on house calls carrying a three-year-old with you.”

“I know.” He laughed. “But you know what I really need first? I need a cheese box. The boy can’t reach the bowl when he stands in front of it.”

Angela laughed.

“I don’t have one here, and the cheese store is closed. Wait’ll tomorrow.”

The waiter arrived with two dishes of vanilla ice cream and two spoons. The boy smiled. This was food he had seen before his journey to New York.

“You’re gonna need a woman,” Angela said.

He carried the boy part of the way on his shoulders, leaning into the wind, fighting to keep his balance, but bumping the boy up and down in a kind of dance. Carlito laughed in delight. Then he stopped laughing, and Delaney slipped him off his shoulders, saw that his eyes were closed, and held him close for the rest of the journey west on Horatio Street. A taxi pulled up in the center of the snow-packed street. A well-dressed man and woman stepped out. The Cottrells from next door. Both were Delaney’s age. From 93 Horatio. His neighbors. They didn’t look at him. They never did. Not since that summer afternoon four years earlier, when their son was knocked down by a speeding car driven by a drunk. At the sound of screeching brakes, Delaney rushed outside. He did what he could for the boy while an ambulance slogged through traffic from St. Vincent’s. But it was too late. The boy was dead. Nine years old. The only boy among three sisters. The Cottrells chose to blame Delaney and never spoke to him again.

As the gate of the Cottrells’ house clanged shut, he could feel the boy’s warmth, and his vulnerability on this street in the perilous city. Don’t worry, boy, he thought. I’ll make everything work. Or die trying.

Later, by the light of candles, he sat in his big chair with a notebook in his lap. Through the open oak doors that separated the bedroom from the rear, he could hear the shallow breathing of the sleeping Carlito. He began to write down the things he would need. Maybe fit out one of the maids’ rooms upstairs. A good bed. Clothes, guards for the stairs. Food. Including spaghetti. Monique will help, after she returns tomorrow. Money too. Money most of all. Not easy, at two dollars for a consultation, three for a house call.

This goddamned Depression. When will it ever end? He couldn’t charge a patient who had sixty cents to last a week. He couldn’t turn away anybody because of money, or the lack of it. He couldn’t ever charge a veteran. Not ever. In the week before Christmas, he had earned forty-two goddamned dollars. And he paid Monique twenty.

He thought about applying for a loan. From St. Vincent’s. Or some bank. Maybe one of the vested old Tammany pols knew a banker. That judge, whatever the hell his name was. But in all the years since his father had died, Delaney had asked them for nothing. Ah, Big Jim, would I even ask you? If you were here, would you come to my rescue? Could I even ask? He dozed, and saw himself filling in a form under the lipless stare of a bank manager.

Name James Finbar Delaney. Address 95 Horatio Street, New York, N.Y. Age 47. Almost 48. Date of birth June 24, 1886. I was two during the Blizzard of ’88. Place of birth New York, N.Y. Names of parents James Aloysius Delaney and wife Bridget George (both deceased) Their country of origin Ireland Did they love each other? Of course. Did they love you? With everything they had in them. In their own separate ways. Other siblings None alive. Two died when very young. Marital status Married, with an explanation Name of spouse Molly O’Brien (Delaney) Her place of birth Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland Citizenship American (naturalized: 1912) How did you meet? On a dock over at the North River. She was ill. I’m a doctor. Issue Daughter Grace, born July 1, 1914 Your education Sacred Heart grammar school (graduated 1899) Xavier HS (graduated 1903) City College of N.Y. (graduated 1907) New York Medical School (graduated 1909) Internship, Bellevue Hospital, N.Y., 1909–1911 Johns Hopkins, 1911–1913 Postgraduate studies in surgery, Vienna, 1913–1914 Military service United States Army (AEF medical corps), 1917–1919 Employer’s name Self-employed Annual income $1900–$2200 p.a. (avg.) That’s all? It used to be more. Until 1929…

Delaney could feel the banker’s chilly rejection. He listened for the boy, who was breathing in a steady way.

Any persistent ailments? Heartbreak.

He lifted the candle and his daughter’s letter. Time to go upstairs. To Molly’s floor. The shrine of the past, soon to be filled with the future.

Delaney opened the small rooms first, two of them, with single windows facing the backyard. The rooms of the Irish maids, who served a haughty family long ago. The shades were drawn. In the light of the candle, he saw an old-fashioned lamp on a small table beside a bed. He lifted it and felt the weight of oil, turned up the wick, placed the candle against the wick. Orange light filled the room, along with the burnt, sour odor of stale oil. Thank you, Lord, for small miracles. He blew out the candle. There were paintings by Grace on the walls of each room, done while she was a teenaged girl at the Art Students League. A gypsy. A man with a turban. An old woman. The brushstrokes were bold. God, she was so confident then.

There was a bed for Grace in one of the low-ceilinged rooms, but the other was empty. When she was thirteen, that became her studio, with her ceramic tabletop and her easel and her tabouret. She loved that room, especially when morning light came streaming in. He noticed splatters of old paint on the floors, and opened the closet door to see her brushes and various jars and cups and tubes of paint. He lifted one tube of burnt sienna. It felt like iron.

He looked into the bathroom, saw the old tub with its lion’s feet upon the tiles and the ceramic sink with its chipped edge. He turned the tap. The water flowed, rusty and coughing and then clear. When Grace made watercolors, she washed her brushes here. Never oils, she said. Because they would clog the drains. She soaked those brushes in turpentine, then used the faucet in the garden. Now on the top floor, the cold was total, like an apartment in Siberia. Delaney wished he had risked everything before the Crash to install steam heat. Each small room had a kerosene heater, and in the winter when they were all together here, Mr. Lanzano would lug the kerosene cans up the stairs without complaint, while his son helped deliver the blocks of ice through summer heat. The kerosene odor was awful, but Grace as a teenager said she loved it. Oh, Daddy, it’s so real! How long did she live here? Eight years? No, seven. And is it the odor of kerosene that urges me even now, in blizzards, to sleep with the window open?

Delaney paused before unlocking the door to the large room at the front of the house. Molly’s room. He hadn’t opened this door since that August night when he heard her playing one of the preludes. She had been gone for a year then, and now it was January, which meant it was sixteen months since Molly vanished. Last August he was alone in bed in the vast oaken emptiness and hurried upstairs and opened the door. The music stopped. He called her name. Molly! O my Molly-O.

But she wasn’t there. There was no sound at all in the empty house, except his own heavy breathing.

That night was twelve months after she had vanished, and tonight she still wasn’t there. She might never be in this room again. This room that was her secret garden of books and music and dreams. Right up to the moment when she went down the stairs and started walking to the river, the breeze ruffling her blue dress. Other people saw her go, but I was out on house calls. Goddamn it all to hell.

He took a breath, exhaled, and went in.

The room was as it always was: wide, the ceiling higher than in the small maids’ rooms in the rear. The hardwood floors looked gray under a coat of fine dust. The fireplace awaited a fire. The piano stood near the windows, properly grand in spite of the dust, filling the space between the windows. Delaney sat down on the wide sturdy bench and could see Molly’s heroes, framed upon the wall. Mr. Bach. Mr. Mozart. Mr. Brahms. Mr. Scott Joplin. Mr. Arnold Schoenberg. In the years after the war, he was away so much on calls, or at the hospital doing grand rounds, or tending to patients, that she often played only for her masters

The wall on the right was stacked from floor to ceiling with his books and hers. Many of his were on the top shelves, near the ceiling, some going back to high school, dozens from Johns Hopkins before the war. The textbooks were filled with the medical ignorance of the day, now worthless rubbish that could not even be sold to the dealers on Fourth Avenue. And yet he could not throw them out. Once he loved them and learned from them. They were now like aging teachers whose time had passed. Then his eyes fell to the lower shelves, full of treasures. Dickens and Stevenson and Mark Twain. Conrad and Galsworthy, Henry James and Edith Wharton. On one shelf, Theodore Dreiser leaned against Dostoyevsky, and he remembered how sure he once was that they were snarling at each other, each filled with certainty. To their left, unable to soothe them, was the good Dr. Chekhov. With any luck, these books will be the patrimony of the boy. And who will teach him how to read?

There too was his chair, with its thick rounded arms and its ratty green brocaded covering. The place into which he would sink at the end of a fatiguing day. There he would read novels to know more about human beings, who were, after all, his basic subject, and still were. The medical books didn’t tell such stories. Only novels did. Sometimes Molly would play a concert for him alone. When she wanted to annoy him, or irritate him for some infraction of decent manners, she would play Schoenberg, knowing that Schoenberg would always break his trance. When she wanted to move him into sleep, she played Brahms. She knew that men broken by war need lullabies. O my Molly-O.

He opened a closet filled with dusty luggage and Molly’s old summer dresses, and lifted a small valise down from a high shelf. He turned a small key in the lock and clicked it open and then placed his daughter’s letter into a folder with her other notes from distant places. The folder was on top of those from Molly. Letters Molly wrote to him in France. Earlier letters full of plans and hope. The 1918 letter sent to his hospital bed in Paris, as his ruined arm slowly healed. The letter telling him about his mother and father and how they had died in the influenza epidemic. Along with thirty thousand others in New York alone and millions all over the planet. Some of the older letters were full of longing for him, pulsing with love and desire. From the time before the slow darkness fell. Letters that made him bubble with happiness. Letters that made him weep. Only later, as time dragged and healing slowed and his stay in the French hospital was prolonged, only then did Molly’s tone alter into icy anger. Have you forgotten you have a daughter? she wrote. Have you forgotten you have a wife? And why did you go to that stupid war anyway? You didn’t have to go. You were never going to be drafted. You volunteered! Why? Over and over. Why? Those letters were there too. He clicked the valise shut, locked it, and placed it back on the shelf.

Then he lighted the candle again and shut down the oil lamp, locked the door behind him, and went down one flight to bed. His pajamas felt cold. He placed more coal on the fire and looked at the sleeping boy in his corner of the huge bed. There were no sounds from the street, as the silent neighborhood huddled under the smothering blankets of snow.

He slipped into bed in the dark.

O Molly. Come home, Molly. I need you now. Come and play for me. Come and play for this boy. Come home, my Molly-O.