North River

THREE

THE WOMAN ARRIVED JUST BEFORE SEVEN O’CLOCK THE NEXT morning. At the first ring of the bell, Delaney was in the cellar, shoveling coal into the small boiler that heated the water. A flashlight was perched on a milk box. The sound of the bell first made him think it was Bootsie again. Some demand in the ringing. A feeling of alarm. And Monique was not yet at her desk. He closed the furnace door, laid down the shovel, grabbed the flashlight, and went up the darkened stairs, afraid the sound would wake the boy. But Carlito was already awake, sitting on the stairs near the bottom, his pajamas blotchy with urine. He must have tried, Delaney thought. He must have stood on the bowl and tried. The boy hugged Delaney’s leg as if consumed with shame, and the doctor hefted him and carried him to the door under the stoop. This should take only a minute, boy, he whispered. Hug me to stay warm.

The woman stood beyond the gate, snow on her wool hat and shoulders. She was in her middle thirties, with olive skin, a longish nose, a strong jaw, a faint mustache. Her body looked heavy under her dark blue coat, and she was wearing men’s boots. Her black eyes glistened. She was carrying a woolen bag and a cheese box.

“I’m Rose,” she said in a gruff voice. “Angela sent me.”

“Come in, Rose. Come in.”

She stepped in as Delaney backed up, her feet crunching on the hard snow that had blown in through the night. She pulled the gate shut. Steam was easing from her heavy lips. She stomped her boots on the mat and, as Delaney held the vestibule door open, passed into the hallway. Delaney closed the second door behind her.

“This is him, huh?” she said, and smiled.

“This is Carlito.”

She grinned more widely, showing hard white teeth, and turned to Delaney.

“Okay. Where’s the bathtub?”

Still in bathrobe and work shirt, Delaney brushed his teeth and washed at the sink while water ran into the small bathtub. An old showerhead rose above the tub. Steam drifted from the running water, and he used his fingers to wipe a space in the fogged-out mirror. The bathroom door was still open, and he saw Rose drape her coat over a chair. She looked thinner in a long dark dress that went below her knees, over the men’s boots. Then she pushed into the bathroom and placed the cheese box at the foot of the bowl. She removed the boy’s clothes, dropped them on the floor, and wrapped him in a large beige towel to keep him warm. The boy’s eyes were wide. What was this? Who was this? How many people were there in this world?

“Okay, get out,” she said to Delaney. “Get dressed. I gotta wash this boy.”

Delaney wiped his face, dried it, smiling as he shut the bathroom door behind him. He pulled on trousers, a clean shirt, socks, and boots. He could hear her low affectionate voice through the door: “What a handsome boy. All nice and clean now, you’re gonna be nice and clean. Hey, what’s this thing? What you got there? Nice and clean now. And your hair? Gotta wash that too. Pretty blond hair. Can’t wear it dirty.”

Thank you, Rose. Thank you, Angela.

There was a slight New York curl in her voice, “doity” instead of “dirty.” She dropped the d off every “and.” The h was banished from “thing.” She must be here a while. She’s definitely not just off the boat. Then the telephone rang for the first time in many hours. He lifted it.

“Hey, it’s me,” Monique said. “I’m at the telephone company. I told them we need the goddamned phone. I told them, hey, the man’s a doctor, people could die. Then I shot three guys at the front desk. That worked.”

Delaney laughed.

“What would I do without you, Monique?”

“You’d be doing house calls, that’s what. The patients must be going nuts trying to get through to you. I’ll be there in maybe twenty minutes.”

“I’ve got a surprise waiting for you.”

“I don’t like surprises.”

“You might love this one.”

“See you.”

She hung up. He buttoned his shirt. How long have you been here, Monique? How long have you been nurse and secretary and bouncer? Since we laid out the office. Since before the goddamned Depression. Since Hoover was president. Since the time when Molly found her secret garden on the top floor, her aerie, her retreat. Away from Monique, who annoyed her with her energy or her precision or her daily presence. Away from the patients. Away from me. The bathroom door opened and Rose was there, smiling a lovely smile, her face glistening from the small steamy room, snuggling the boy with one arm to her generous breasts and lifting clothes from the stroller with her other hand. Carlito was smiling too, pointing a finger at Delaney, then curling it. She dressed him quickly in two shirts and corduroy trousers.

“Now, where’s the kitchen?” she said.

Delaney led her downstairs again to the kitchen, the boy back in her arms.

“This is small,” she said darkly.

He tried to explain how he needed space on this floor for a waiting area, a consulting room, a small bathroom for patients, but she wasn’t really listening. They went into the kitchen and she put the boy down on a chair. And Carlito pointed to the pantry.

“Co’flay,” he said.

“You want co’flakes? Okay, boy. ”

How did she know co’flay was cornflakes? The telephone rang and Delaney hurried into the consulting room to answer it. Annie Haggerty. About her mother, around the corner on Lispenard Street. She was hurt. Bleeding and moaning.

“Where’s your father, Annie?” he said, knowing he was talking to a girl who was about fourteen.

“Out.”

“Is your mother awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she bleeding?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Face.”

“Nose? Mouth? Ears?”

“Yeah.”

“All of them?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be over as soon as I can. Keep talking to your mother, Annie. Keep her awake.”

“Okay.”

He wrote a note to himself: the name Haggerty, the word “blood.” He knew the building too well. The telephone rang again. Hurry, Monique. This was Larry Dorsey’s wife. He was a saxophone player in some Times Square hotel.

“Doc, it’s Larry. He got hurt New Year’s Eve, some fight, drunks throwin’ chairs. You know. He got hit on the head, but he won’t go to St. Vincent’s. Goddamned Irish, don’t want to go to hospitals.”

He took her address on Bank Street and then went to the kitchen.

“You get more calls than a bookmaker,” Rose said. Her English is good, Delaney thought, but who is she? Carlito was delighted with his cornflakes.

“Many more.”

She was going through the pantry.

“Not many pots and pans. The icebox is great, electric and all. But we gotta get some food in here for this boy.”

“Yes, we do, Rose. Plenty of food. Maybe when my nurse, Monique, gets here, you can —”

“And we gotta get rid of that stroller,” she said, pronouncing it “strolla.” “That thing will give you a disease or something.”

The telephone rang again.

The snow was piled high on Lispenard Street as Delaney trudged toward number 12, shifting his heavy leather bag from gloved hand to gloved hand. Today a change in routine. House calls in the morning or Mary Haggerty might die. Trucks were pushing for passage to the meat market, where Harry Haggerty was a butcher. Delaney knew the street well. Herman Melville had worked here, right in that building, waiting for ships to arrive so he could clerk the cargo. A job that he needed because nobody was buying his books. Even today nobody anywhere around here had heard of the white whale. Or Ahab. Or Queequeg. Or Melville himself… He climbed to the second floor and knocked.

"Yeah?” came the girl’s voice.

“Dr. Delaney.”

She unlocked the door and Delaney went in. The girl was trembling and pale, her hair frazzled, her eyes wet. There was an odor of excrement in the air.

“Where’s your mother, Annie?”

She led him to the back bedroom, where the odor was stronger. The woman’s face was swollen blue. Her husband had literally beaten the shit out of her. One eye was closed. The other was skittery with fear. Her nose had been pounded to the side.

“Annie,” he said to the girl, “boil a pot of water, will you, dear?”

All the way to Bank Street on his second call, he struggled with his rage. The story was too familiar. Big tough Harry Haggerty had come home loaded, demanded his supper, and when his wife served it cold, he started pounding her. He had to punch real hard. After all, he only had seventy-five pounds on her. Then he passed out on the couch, and went off to work at dawn. Big tough guy. Knowing that the cops would do nothing. Just another domestic dispute. If she died, maybe they’d make an arrest… Delaney had done what he could: cleaned the wounds, applied bandages, checked for broken bones, gave her some aspirin and a painkiller, and told Annie to hold ice to her face. She should come see him when the swelling went down, and they would discuss what to do about her broken nose. The wounds in her mind would need much more time, and he could do little to heal them. Physician, heal thyself…

Larry Dorsey was in bed in the first-floor flat on Bank Street. The place was spotless, the wood polished, no dust. Wallpaper from an earlier time still looked fresh. It was an apartment without children, except Larry. Delaney could see a piano in the living room, topped with framed photographs of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Bix Beiderbecke. A gallery of heroes, just like Molly’s, but with different names and faces. Louise was heavy, wearing full makeup, her face twitching.

“Look at that,” she said, pointing to her husband’s head. “That ain’t kosher.”

She was right. There was a bulge on the right temple. Larry was conscious, but when Delaney gently touched the lump, he pulled away in pain.

“That hurt,” he said.

“Is it getting larger?” Delaney said to Louise.

“Yeah,” Louise said. “When he come home last night, there wasn’t even a bump.”

Delaney leaned in close. “Listen, Larry, we gotta get you to St. Vincent’s —”

“No hospital. Not for me. Not now, not never. Everyone I ever knew went to a hospital never came back. Including my father.”

“Larry, you might have a fractured skull. You might have bleeding in the brain. We need X-rays. And I don’t have an X-ray machine in my bag.”

“Not a chance.”

Delaney sighed in an exasperated way.

“Okay, I can’t force you. But tell me this: Who’s your favorite undertaker?”

Louise sobbed and turned away.

“Don’t make jokes, Doc,” Larry whispered.

“It’s no joke, Larry.”

Larry said nothing. Delaney put his hands on his hips, trying to look stern.

“Come on, you dope,” he said. “I’ll go with you. I want to hear you play ‘Stardust’ again.”

Delaney and Louise walked him east on icy streets to St. Vincent’s. Larry Dorsey grumbled all the way. The wind rose, and they shuddered together in their heavy winter clothes. Boys shoveled snow in front of the shops. An elevated train moved slowly along the tracks into a crowded platform. The street in front of the emergency room had been plowed since he’d taken Eddie Corso through the secret door a hundred feet away from this entrance. They walked in past an empty ambulance. Delaney explained the problem to a buxom nurse named McGuinness. He saw nuns like black haystacks walking the corridors beyond.

“Thanks, Dr. Delaney. We’ll take care of it. Call later and we’ll know what it is.”

“Thanks, Miss McGuinness. Is Dr. Zimmerman on duty?”

“Wait, I’ll get him.”

Zimmerman emerged from an inner room, smiling, shaking hands with Delaney, while Dorsey was led away and a second nurse took notes from Louise. The two doctors stepped to the side. Zimmerman was in his twenties, skinny, freckled, with reddish hair and bulging, inquisitive eyes. He had some Lower East Side in his voice.

“Like Grand Central around here today,” Zimmerman said. “They’re all digging their way out and falling down with heart attacks.”

“How’s our patient?”

“He’s a tough nut, all right. He keeps asking for morphine and then laughing.”

“Can I see him?”

“Third floor, at the end.”

Zimmerman turned to see a man with a white face being carried in by two younger men. Delaney touched the intern’s sleeve.

“Thanks, Doctor.”

“If we get caught,” Zimmerman said, “we’ll do the time together.”

Eddie Corso was in a bed in his private room, covered with a heavy blanket, a transparent oxygen tent over his head. He needed a shave. To the side of the door was Bootsie, looking suspicious, even anxious, trying to appear casual by examining the state of his fingernails. The shade was drawn, a light burning on a side table. Delaney parted the flap of the tent.

“Morphine, morphine…”

“That’s a bad old joke now, Eddie.”

“So am I.”

Palm down, Corso curled his fingers at Bootsie, and the fat man eased out the door to stand guard in the hall. Corso smiled weakly.

“Thanks, Doc. Again.”

“Thank Dr. Zimmerman.”

“I did. But it was you, Doc. Without you…”

“Enough already.”

A longer pause.

“I hear you got someone staying with you at the house.”

“I do. My grandson.”

“Where’d his mother go?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Russia.”

“Russia? Is she nuts? There ain’t enough snow right here for her?”

“The truth is, I’m not really sure where she is. I think Spain. Which means she has a passport, and had a ship to catch. I called Jackie Norris at the Harbor Police and asked for his help.”

“He’s a good cop. You didn’t mention me, did you?”

“Never. Jackie says he’ll do what he can.”

“He always keeps his word.”

Corso closed his eyes and looked as if he were drifting. Delaney came closer.

“You hurting, Eddie?”

He opened his eyes.

“Nah. Well, just a little. You got someone to help with this boy?”

“Angela sent me a woman.”

“Good. She’s a Wop, I hope?”

“I think she’s Italian, but I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Angela sent her, she’s a Wop. Good for you, with a kid on your hands. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know what the fuck you were doing.”

“That’s for sure.”

They were silent for a while.

“Your daughter Gracie don’t come back, Doc, the kid could be there a long time.”

“I’ve thought about that.”

“How old is the boy?”

“Three in March. On St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Jesus Christ. Another goddamned Mick. And fifteen years from now, when you’re an old man, he’ll be graduatin’ from high school.”

Delaney laughed. “I thought about that too.”

Corso seemed to be fading away by the second. Delaney thought he should call Zimmerman, maybe something…

“You got any money?” Corso said, coming back from where he had gone.

“Enough.”

“Come on. Don’t bullshit me, Doc. I know you spent a mint when Molly, you know…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. The missing words were took off.

“I remember you put ads in the newspapers,” Corso went on. “You had them leaflets on every lamppost from Twenty-third Street to the Battery. You hired some private dick. That must have took a lot of dough.”

“I’ve got enough, Eddie. I saved some, I have patients. The boy won’t starve.”

“Las’ time I was in your house, when I had that thing with malaria, I froze my nuts off. You don’t have steam heat, Doc. That kid’ll be runnin’ around bare ass and —”

“The woman will watch him.”

“Freezing her own ass off too.”

Corso turned his head to the wall and sighed.

“How long’s it been now?” he whispered. “Since Molly went —”

“Sixteen months,” Delaney said.

“Christ.”

Corso’s hand moved to the flap of the tent, then fell to his side.

“I’m thinkin’ of gettin’ out of this thing.”

“Good.”

“I don’t like the way the thing is going. Moving booze, runnin’ clubs, that was one thing. That was fun, f’ Chrissakes. But that’s over. It died with Prohibition.” A pause. “I don’t like what some of these guys want to do now. And they don’t like that I don’t like it. Especially the fucking Neapolitani… bunch of cazzi. That Frankie Botts…”

He cleared some phlegm from his throat, and Delaney put a tissue to his mouth so he could spit it out. The sputum was pink.

“Besides, I got three grandchildren myself now, Doc. I sent them and their mother away this morning…”

“They’re good kids. I delivered two of them, remember? And gave all three their shots.”

“Right, right…” He closed his eyes again briefly. “I want to see them graduate from high school.”

“And college too.”

“Hey, wouldn’t that be something? College. They’d be the first kids in the history of the Corso family to…”

They were both quiet for a while. Then Delaney said, “If you get out of… the business, what’ll you do?”

“Maybe become a priest.”

Delaney laughed.

“Nah. Maybe I’ll move to Florida. Or out west someplace.”

“You’d go nuts.”

“I’d rather be nuts than dead.”

Delaney moved slowly west, into a river wind. The snow was now ice, blackening in the streets like an untreated wound, and he could not feel his face. As always, in icy winter or torrid summer, he looked down at the two or three feet ahead of him, because when he gazed into the distance he felt he could never make it. As always, he fought off the things he had seen on his house calls, the need, the pain, the false comfort he had given to these hurt people. He was a doctor, but medicine was not an exact science. There was no cure for everything. As in life. The cause of death was always life. Across many years now, he had comforted people he knew would soon die. He hoped his consoling whispers would do them no harm. He hoped too that he could reduce their immediate pain. But he could not carry them around in his head like luggage. He had to examine them with all the intensity he could muster, do what he could, avoid harm, and then forget them.

He could not forget Eddie Corso. Eddie wasn’t a patient. He was a friend, the friendship created in rain and blood. And now, slipping, tottering, pausing on the black ice, Delaney saw Eddie again in the driving rain of France, knee-deep in the water of the funk hole, canteens slung around his neck, his eyes wide and half-mad. He was going to the water hole at the foot of the cliff. Knowing the Germans were up there somewhere, knowing they had machine guns and potato mashers, knowing they had what the Americans didn’t have: overcoats, boots, ammunition, food, and water. The Americans had tried catching water in stretched ponchos, but the Germans shot holes in them. And shot one of the soldiers too. The remnants of the battalion could not go back, ease away in retreat, because the Germans were there too, and later it would be said that they were a lost battalion. On that night they weren’t a battalion anymore. And they were not lost. They were surrounded. But Eddie said he would go for the water, as dirty as it was, and he would frisk the dead for bread or hardtack hidden beneath their tunics. Delaney told him not to go. Eddie said even the Germans had to sleep, and it was better with the pounding darkness of the rain to go now. And so he went, up over the lip of the funk hole, a New York rat slithering through broken trees and gouged earth and unburied bodies, gripping the canteens so they would make no jangling noise. See ya, Eddie said. And was gone. Delaney heard nothing except the rain hammering around them, and the snoring of soldiers up and down the trench. Then the sky was lit up by a star shell, sending spears of light through the ruined forest like something from the Fourth of July, and then the machine gun opened up. Brrrraaaap. Brrrraaaap. The light burned itself out. And then there was silence. The men beside Delaney did not even stir. Then, away off, he heard moaning. And he grabbed the first aid kit and lifted himself out of the funk hole and went to look for Eddie. He found him on his back in a thicket, a dozen feet from the water hole. His eyes were wide. Fresh slippery blood, thin and watery in the rain, soaked his shoulder and his arms, and there was a hole torn in one of the canteens. At least one round in the back, and blood leaking over his boots from a leg wound. Holy Jesus, Doc, it hurts like a bastard. Delaney undraped the canteens and left them in the drowned mulchy leaves. Then he saw the wound in Eddie’s leg and knew he could not walk. He grabbed him under the armpits, dragging him into the denser foliage and then turned him and heaved him onto his shoulders and carried him, slipping, falling, wet with blood, back to the line. One of the other doctors, Hardin from Oklahoma, hurried from another hole, and together they ripped open Eddie’s clothes and cleaned the wounds as best they could with alcohol, and tied coarse tourniquets on the ripped thigh and the smashed shoulder, using strips of uniforms from the dead because there were no bandages left. The fuckin’ pain, Doc, hurts like a fuckin’ bitch. Delaney gave him a shot of morphine, his own hands trembling, and the rain falling hard, and after a few minutes Eddie looked dreamy. Delaney sat for a long time in silence, thinking that if relief did not come soon, Eddie would surely die. If relief did not come soon, they all would die. He would never see Molly again. He would not see the little girl Grace. He would not ever walk with them again beside the flowing summer waters of the North River.

And here he was, walking into a hard wind on Horatio Street, the North River in sight, and the house waiting for him at number 95. On the corner, he saw four young kids riding a familiar object up and down a snowy hill. The stroller. Rose didn’t waste time. A narrow path had been shoveled through the snow along the sidewalk. And into the front yard too, right to the gate under the stoop. And where now is my little girl, who is now a woman? And where is my dear Molly-O?

There were seven patients waiting in the hall, two of them standing for lack of space on the bench. Three were reading the Daily News, and all looked relieved to see him, smiling tentatively or nodding in approval. Five of them were women. A normal day. “Give me a few minutes,” he said, and eased into the consulting room. Monique was busy with files and mail. She smiled and told him to take off his coat and galoshes. “Or you’ll end up a pneumonia case yourself.”

He hung coat, hat, scarf on the oak clothes tree and sat down to peel away the galoshes. Heat flowed from a small kerosene stove out past Monique, near the low barred windows.

“Where’s the boy?” Delaney said.

“Upstairs with Miss Verga. Rose. They’re fixing the rooms. His room and her room.”

“She’s moving in?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know anything about her, Monique.”

She lifted a sheet of paper and glanced at her notes.

“Her name is Rose Verga. Angela told me that, at least, is true. She says she’s thirty-two, so figure she’s thirty-eight. She’s from Agrigento in Sicily and went to school there for six years. Figure four. She can read and write. In English too, which she learns from the Daily News and a dictionary. She was married for a while after the war, but the guy died and she came here.”

“Did she ever take care of children?”

“No. She worked in three sweatshops, sewing dresses. She cleaned offices nights down Wall Street, she was a waitress in different places, including a place run by Angela before she got her own joint.”

“She never had children?”

“She says she can’t.”

He folded his arms and looked vacantly through the front windows at the street. Kids went running by, heading for the river.

“What do you think, Monique?”

She sighed.

“I don’t know… She’s a little sure of herself. But what the hell, give her a try. You can always can her if it don’t work out.”

The telephone rang.

“Dr. Delaney’s office, how can I help you? Oh. Yes. He has office hours until four. Just come on over, Mrs. Gribbins.”

Monique hung up.

“And what do we pay her?” Delaney said.

“She wanted ten dollars a week plus room and board. I got her to take eight, for the first few weeks, maybe months. Then we’ll see.”

“You’re a hard woman, Monique,” Delaney said. Then he sighed, and nodded at the door leading to the reception area. “Who’s first?”

“You’d better try Mrs. Monaghan. If she’s not already dead.”

Mrs. Monaghan came into the small office, where Delaney sat behind his cluttered desk. She was about forty, had been in a few years earlier with a broken hand, after falling on ice. She had six children, the oldest only eleven, no husband, and worked in a movie house on Fourteenth Street. Her manner was breathless and tentative. She had kept her wool coat on, but she was still shaking. When the door closed, he asked her what was the matter, although he already knew.

“Oh, Dr. Delaney, it’s been dreadful, dreadful. I woke up with the chills, with a fever, cold and burnin’ at the same time. I had a dreadful pain here, in the right side of my chest, dreadful, dreadful. I went into the jakes and spat up guck with blood in it.”

“Take off your coat.”

She did. He took a sputum sample, then tapped with his finger on the right side of her chest, above her breasts. He listened with the stethoscope and heard the bubbly breathing start and stop. It was surely lobar pneumonia.

“You’ll have to go to St. Vincent’s, Mrs. Monaghan,” he said softly. “You’ve got pneumonia.”

“Sacred heart of God,” she said, and moaned. “Oh, I can’t go there, Dr. Delaney. I’ve got the children at home, I’ve got to work, I can barely walk, and, oh God, I can’t go there. Please, Dr. Delaney, can’t you give me something here?”

He told her there was no choice, that she had to go in, and he’d call for an ambulance if she couldn’t walk, and he’d ask Monique to try to get some help with the children, and also call her job. She began to weep.

“If I go there, I’ll die for sure,” she said. “And all the weans’ll be orphans.”

“If you don’t go, Mrs. Monaghan, you’re sure to die.”

And sobbing, trembling, tottering uncertainly, she went into the hall to wait for an ambulance. Delaney thought: I have to call the hospital and ask about Larry Dorsey too.

Then Frankie Randall came in, his face a pale yellow. He wished Delaney a belated Happy New Year and took his quinine for the malaria he’d contracted at a training camp in Louisiana in 1917. He was in and out, with nothing else to say. Then Mrs. Harris took a seat, big and blowsy, a pasty-faced veteran of the old bordellos behind the warehouses on the North River, and he gave her some mercury to help control the lingering presence of a disease of the trade. She went to pay Monique. Mickey Rearden was another malaria case. Unlike Frankie Randall, he liked to talk. He talked about the Giants’ coming season and how great Bill Terry would be as a successor to John McGraw, playing and managing, and how it would be grand to be down in that Florida for the spring training when it started. Delaney was curt with him, briefly thinking about the boy and the need for money. For food and clothes and the woman named Rose. Mickey, please take the quinine and go, and for fuck’s sake stop talking. I’ve got to earn some money.

He heard a banging, then heavy footsteps above him coming in from the top of the stairs. He opened the door and asked Monique what all the racket was about.

“The bed,” she said. “For the boy. They’re taking it up top.”

“What bed?” he said. “I don’t have any cash to pay for a bed.”

“It’s only a dollar,” she said.

“You found a bed for a dollar?”

“Rose did. She called somebody and here it is, an hour later.”

Delaney thought: Rose Verga doesn’t fool around. He reached into his left pocket for money.

Monique said: “Can I tip the guys a quarter?”

When the last patient left, he hurried up the stairs, while Monique added up the fees and wrote numbers into the ledger book. He could hear Rose talking to the boy before he saw them.

“Okay, Carlo, you grab that end, yeah, right there, then you pull.”

“That end,” the boy said.

Delaney turned on the top landing and saw Rose and the boy on either side of the bed, pulling sheets tightly across the narrow mattress.

“Hey, Doctor,” she said and smiled. “We doing good. He’s workin’ hard, this Carlo. He swept the floor all by himself.”

The boy grinned in a shy way and stared at Delaney.

“What’s his name?” Rose said to the boy and pointed at Delaney.

“Ga’paw.”

“You remember! Gran’paw. You’re smart, Carlos. That’s your gran’paw, all right.”

Delaney reached down and lifted the boy and hugged him. He was warm in his arms. Delaney held him tight and felt a little ice melting in his frozen heart.

“Ga’paw,” the boy said.

Rose explained that the boy had a spiced ham sandwich for lunch and some mushroom soup, and she walked with Delaney outside the bedrooms to the upstairs bathroom. The cheese box was already in place. “I gotta paint that,” she said. “A real good yellow. You know, like the sun.” Towels were draped neatly on the rods of the holders, soap lay in a glass dish. Then they paused outside Molly’s room.

“Rose, this room is locked,” Delaney said in a soft, polite voice. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s just —”

“This was your wife’s room, right?” she said.

“Right,” he said, thinking, Women know everything important. She glanced at Delaney with a dark gaze, tinged with pity.

“You want some food? I got soup in a pot, some good bread.”

“I’ll help myself.”

“I can do it. Then I gotta go someplace and pick up clothes.”

They went down the stairs together, Rose now holding the boy. The odor of kerosene got stronger. There were two more patients waiting on the bench, both women.

“Take care of them,” Rose said. “I get the soup ready.”

She put Carlito down and went through to the kitchen, the boy holding her skirt. Delaney saw the women patients: a heavy cold with a hacking cough, a twisted ankle. When they were gone, he walked back to the kitchen, and Rose ladled out some soup and laid the Italian loaf and a slab of butter on the table. He thanked her and she went out. The soup was tasty, the bread fresh, with a crisp seeded crust. The boy watched him eat.

“She’s a nice woman, Rose is,” he said to the boy. “You make sure you do what she says, because she will be very good to you.”

The boy wore a serious face as Delaney spoke. Soon he would be fluent in English, and Italian too. Or Sicilian. How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one? The telephone rang once, and then Monique poked her head in.

“Jackie Norris on the phone,” she said. “He says you know what it’s about.”

He got up to go to his office. “Talk to this young man, will you?”

All cops had the same voice, clipped and laconic, and Jackie Norris had been a cop since he came back from the war. They exchanged hellos and Jackie then got right to it.

“Doc, your daughter, Grace, left New Year’s Day on a Spanish freighter out of Hoboken. Bound for Barcelona, Spain. It arrives in, oh, ten days. Depending on the ocean. She had a U.S. passport, under her own name, and two pieces of luggage. She didn’t use the married name you gave me.”

“Is there any way I can send her a cable?”

“Of course. I mean there must be. Let me find out the details.”

“No, Jackie. You have things to do.”

“I’ll find out.”

“By the way,” Delaney said, “how’s the knee?”

“This weather, it kills me. Hard to sleep. Fucking Heinies…”

“Come by. I’ll take a look.”

“I can’t for a while. We got a double homicide on Morton Street. They drafted me ’cause I know the neighborhood. A man and a woman, dead in his bed, and her husband on the lam. The usual shit.”

“Anybody we know?”

“Nah. The dead guy’s from Brooklyn, lived two months on Morton Street, a furnished room. The couple’s Irish. Might be just off the boat. Love is wonderful.”

“Well, stay off the ice, Jackie. And thanks.”

In the kitchen, Carlos was gnawing on a crust of bread. He was sitting now on a plush red cushion, taken from the upstairs living room. He pointed to the snow in the yard.

“O,” he said.

“Okay, lad. Let’s finish eating first.”

They played in the garden for a while, but it was hard to make snowballs from the iron crusts of old snow. Delaney could see the boarded-over back windows of the Logan house, right next door to the west, number 97 Horatio. Taller by a floor than his own. Brownstone, not brick, like a vagrant visiting from Gramercy Park. The windows on the street side were sealed too. Even the hard kids and the rummies avoided the place. They all believed that ghosts lurked within. Perhaps they did. Above all, the ghost of poor Jimmy Logan. He had grown rich in the good times after the war, import-export, the trade of the river; bought this house; added a second in the Poconos; had two cars and three daughters. Insisted that people call him James, not Jimmy. Suits from Brooks Brothers. Shoes from England. After the Crash, his stocks and bank accounts vanished. He got rid of the cars. Then one Friday, his business ended too, the movers carted away the furniture, and he came home and shot his wife, and two of the daughters, and himself. Jackie Norris helped clean up that mess too. So did Delaney, when Monique heard the shots. The story was all over the tabloids, and a judge ordered the house sealed until the youngest daughter, four years old, grew up. She was staying with relatives in New Jersey and would be a long time growing up. The house stood there now, part of the parenthesis within which Delaney lived. Ghosts to the left. Bitterness to the right. He looked away.

After a while, the boy began to shiver. They went back inside. Rose was coming in the front door with a battered suitcase and a shopping bag. She laid the bag on a chair beside the kitchen table. She was definitely moving in.

“Give me ten minutes, I unpack,” she said. “Come on, Carlos.”

The boy went up the stairs behind her, taking one step at a time. The house was getting fuller, and somehow richer.

Delaney went to his consulting room and worked on a cable. YOUR SON IS SAFE. HE WANTS TO KNOW WHEN YOU’RE COMING BACK. DAD. No, that was wrong, making her feel guilty. ALL IS FINE WITH CARLOS. I HIRED A WOMAN TO HELP CARE FOR HIM. WHEN WILL YOU RETURN? Too many words, too expensive. This is a cable. CARLOS FINE WOMAN HELPING WHEN YOU RETURN QUERY DAD. One, two, nine words. Better…

Monique came in.

“Three house calls waiting. Also the mail. Some bills for the electric, the telephone, the usual first-of-the-month stuff. I also gave Rose ten dollars for food. Hey, you look wiped out. Maybe you should grab a nap.”

“Maybe.”

“I mean, if you get sick, the whole thing stops.”

He laughed. “I can’t afford to stop now.”

“You ain’t kidding. You got ninety-seven dollars in the account, and now you gotta feed three people, plus coal and kerosene.”

“Maybe I could tend bar after house calls.”

“Maybe you could do a novena.”

She turned and he held the text of the cable, the two early versions crossed out.

“If Jackie Norris calls with an address, send this, okay?”

She looked dubiously at the text and hurried away to answer the ringing telephone. He went up to see the boy. Carlito was sitting on the floor in Rose’s room, watching her lay clothes neatly in the dresser drawers. The suitcase was open on the bed. On the small lamp table, an Italian-English dictionary was laid upon a copy of the Daily News. Just as Monique told him. Rose was smiling as she moved, and in the hard snow-bright light he noticed that she had a fine white scar from her left cheekbone to the lobe of her ear. The slice of a knife. It did not affect her smile, so he knew the blade had missed the crucial tendons.

“Looking good now,” Rose said, her smile showing a slight overbite. She unfolded a framed photograph on a small easel and placed it on the dresser top. The frame was brass. “That’s my mother, my father. My brothers, my sisters. There’s me too.”

The father was dressed in a badly-fitting black suit, starched collar, wide knotted tie, squinting sternly at the camera. The mother looked blank and uncomfortable in a dark skirt that reached her shoe tops. Rose was probably fourteen and resembled her mother. The oval shape of her head. The young men were all smiling, perhaps preening, their suits pressed, their shoes glistening with polish. The girls were glum, except for Rose, who was flashing her wonderful smile and her intelligent eyes. Delaney thought: She was thirty pounds lighter then and two inches shorter.

“It’s a Sunday,” Rose said. “My father’s birthday. We all went to eat together. I’m fourteen. My brothers left after the picture, chasing girls.” Beyond the Verga family there was a bay filled with anchored fishing boats and a distant line of mountains. “Long time ago.”

After a melancholy moment, she turned her back on the photograph and took blouses from the suitcase and started hanging them in the shallow closet.

“You gotta get this boy some more clothes,” she said. “I know the bargain places. Or up at Klein’s, on Fourteen’ Street. And that window in his room, it don’t close right. I put the towel to close it up, see? So the boy don’t catch a cold. And you, Dottore, go down and sleep a little, okay? You look terrible.”

Wearing a bathrobe, Delaney slipped under the covers and fell into an hour of deep dreamless sleep. He came suddenly awake, rose quickly, brushed his teeth and washed, and then, feeling refreshed, went off into the blue twilight to make three house calls. When he returned, Bootsie was waiting in the hall. The fat man rose from the bench, wheezing slightly.

“You keep too many hours,” Bootsie said. “Even your nurse went home.”

Delaney opened the door to his office.

“How’s the boss?”

“Much better. He wants to go home. He wants you to put in a word with that Zimmerman.”

“He’ll go home when he’s ready. That’s not up to me. What can I do for you, Bootsie?”

Bootsie took a long tan envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Delaney.

“Mister Corso sent you this.”

He turned to go.

“Hold it a minute, Bootsie.”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say? What’s his message?”

Bootsie smiled without humor.

“He said, you don’t take it, he kills you.”

He smiled again, then went out through the hall. Delaney heard the gate clang shut behind him. From the high floor he could hear the murmur of Rose’s voice, talking with the boy. He closed the office door and laid the envelope on the green blotter of his desk. He sat looking at it for a long moment. Then he used a letter opener to slice through the seal.

There was no note. He spread the contents on the blotter. There they were: fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. Five thousand dollars in cash.

“God damn you, Eddie,” Delaney whispered.