North River

FOUR

AT HIS DESK, DELANEY HELD THE PHONE FOR A LONG TIME, WHILE off in St. Vincent’s one of the nuns went to find Zimmerman. The news on Larry Dorsey was good: no fracture, no brain damage. He’d be playing saxophone in another week. But it was Eddie Corso he wanted to know about. He heard granular rain lashing at the back window. It would either wash away the scabbed snow or glaze it with ice. He wanted the goddamned snow to be gone. He wanted to walk around the neighborhood with the boy, to give him some basic geography, to show him the North River. He wanted to tell him about springtime in New York, and how the bony trees would burst with leaves, and how the Giants would soon play ball in the Polo Grounds again. They would go together. The boy would be three on St. Patrick’s Day, a good age to begin looking at the most beautiful of sports. He would explain to Carlito what a hot dog was too, and how it wasn’t a dog at all. They would eat hot dogs while sitting together in the sun.

“Hello?”

“Zim, it’s Delaney. How’s our patient?”

“He’s some tough old bastard,” Zimmerman said. “He wants to leave tomorrow.”

“What do you think?”

“Two more days, at least. He’s healed well, the pain is almost gone, no signs of infection, but…”

“Want me to take a look?”

“If you like, but he seems… I don’t know, a guy gets shot like he was, you think he’d stay in bed for a month.”

“He’s been shot before.”

“I know. You told me, and I saw the scars. I don’t know why you didn’t become a surgeon.”

“Someday I’ll tell you all about it. Did he talk about anything else?”

“Well…”

“What do you mean? Well, what?”

A pause. A smothering hand on the phone at the other end, a lowering of the voice.

“He gave me some money,” Zimmerman said. “He gave the nuns money too.”

“And what did you do, Jake?”

“I told him to forget it. Then he told me if I didn’t take it, he’d have me killed.”

Delaney chuckled. “The nuns too?”

“That wouldn’t scare them. Aren’t they in, what do you goyim call it? A state of grace?”

“Yeah, they die, they go straight to Heaven. If you see a nun driving a car, get off the street.”

“Anyway, I don’t know what they did about the money. And I don’t want to know.”

“Neither do I.”

“Try to come in and talk him down. He says he wants to drive to Florida.”

“I’ll call tomorrow. Thanks, Zim. For everything.”

“Thank you.”

Delaney hung up the telephone and sat for a few minutes, staring at a framed browning photograph of his father standing with John McGraw, before the war. In the days when his father was Big Jim and Delaney was Little Jim, even though he was two inches taller than Big Jim. At that time a lot of people received cash in envelopes, almost certainly including Big Jim. He placed the bills back in the envelope and opened the wall safe where he kept his passport, the deed to the house, his marriage license, along with morphine and other dangerous items. He laid the envelope on top of the small pile, then twirled the dial to lock the safe. He put out the lights and closed the doors and went quietly up the stairs. The only sound from the top floor was Rose’s light snoring. He went into his bedroom.

In the darkness, wrapped in a cotton nightshirt, the covers pulled tight, Delaney listened to the hard rain and could not sleep. He wished he had someone to talk to. Someone who could listen while he discussed the money. He wished he could explain how torn he was, how he was trying to balance the sudden presence of the boy in his life with the ancient sense of corruption that he was feeling about those five thousand dollars. Big Jim wouldn’t think about it for a minute. He was Big Jim Delaney, district leader, ward heeler, and he knew how the world worked. He had never read Niccolò Machiavelli, but he had graduated from the University of Tammany Hall. He always said his favorite color was green, and not because he was Irish. Delaney’s mother would have placed the child and his future before the legal concerns, knowing in her chilly way that what was legal was often not the same as what was moral. New York had taught her that, and so had Ireland. You must be daft, he could hear her saying. You’ve helped thousands of people for free, not taking a bloody dime, and here is a gift that will make a boy’s life more possible. Take it. It’s yours. God sent it to you. With Eddie Corso’s money, he could have the house steam-heated, putting heat into the arctic top floor without the stench of burnt kerosene. He could pay for clothes for the boy, warm winter clothes, lighter things for the summer. He could buy a small used car and do even more house calls and perhaps help even more people. There’d be no need for the bicycle, except for exercise. He could deliver the endless New York casualties to the doors of the hospital. Then he remembered dimly a phrase from a high school religion class, something about an “elastic conscience,” and how its possession was the worst example of the sin of vanity. That’s me, Delaney thought, here in this monk’s bed. The man with the elastic conscience… He wished he could pray, but all of that faith and belief and certainty had ended forever in the Argonne. After seeing true horror, no sane person could believe again in a benevolent God.

He could see and hear Izzy the Atheist at the bar in Finnegan’s last summer, railing at all the big gods. Izzy, who was half Jewish, half Italian, full of sarcasm, his teeth yellow and framed by a biblical beard. “What kind of god tells a man to kill his son? Like Abraham and Isaac? I’ll tell you what kind of a god! An egotistical, cruel, son of a bitch of a god!” Someone shouted at him to shut up. Izzy went on without fear. “God comes to me and tells me I gotta kill my son? To prove I love God? You know what I tell him? I tell him: Hey, pal, go fuck yourself, you fat-headed prick!”

Delaney smiled fondly in the darkness. Izzy the Atheist had lived in the trenches too, in the mud and shit and fear, and sometimes raved in Delaney’s office, waiting for his quinine. He wasn’t the only man, sound of body, who had a hole chopped out of his brain by what he saw. Nobody who had gone to France ever said a word to him. Those who tried to stop Izzy’s ravings were all men who had stayed home. The vets knew that God was just another form of bullshit.

But if God was gone, or simply deaf to all cries for help, Delaney did wish that he could speak to his daughter, Grace. Urging her to return. Come and take your son, Grace. Do not hand me this cup. Come and retrieve him, and I’ll give you Eddie Corso’s five thousand dollars. Not as a bribe, but to give you a means to begin again here in New York with your son. With or without your man, the son of a bitch. You can pick up the pieces of your life, you can stretch canvas and mix paint and create. You can become again the woman you started to become when you were sixteen and seventeen, when the whole world awaited you. Goddamn you, Grace. And then he fought against his bitterness, trying to place it in a cage, and then to shrink it. He addressed himself out loud: “Stop it, stop this self-righteous horseshit.” And thought of Grace at three years old, the age of the boy. And addressed himself. You put your marks on her too. You broke the balance. You went off to the goddamned war when you didn’t have to go. You could have fought the call-up in 1917, claiming truthfully that you had two dependents. You didn’t fight the draft. You went to the war and you were gone more than two years. When you returned, you were at once so numb and so busy trying to get back lost time and lost money that you had no time for that little girl. You were there, and you were not there. She learned to live without you. She needed you, because… because her mother was drifting into the cold numb isolation that came from rage. Or because all little girls need their father. Or because… But then you don’t truly know why, do you? You weren’t there. Grace needed you and you went to the war. You were sworn to do no harm, and then you went ahead and did it.

“Stop it.”

He let the boy rise in his mind, with those bright intelligent brown eyes and his wonder at the snowy world. He could be here for three weeks or twenty years. There was no way of knowing. Grace was out wandering the dangerous world. Across oceans lurked dragons. The boy was here. The boy was alive. He was a fact, not an abstraction. He is asleep upstairs, while the cleansing rain falls on the city. I can do for him what I did not do for Grace. I can take his hand. I can love him…

After a while, Delaney fell asleep. And dreamed a dream almost as familiar as the older dream of snow. He was in a long gray concrete corridor, trying to find an exit. The dying, the injured, the wounded, were all around him, writhing, moaning, seething with pain. There were soldiers with tin pots on top of their heads and blood streaming from their eye sockets. Slum kids from Brooklyn and the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen stood at an angle to the wall, erupting with strands of yellow mucus. Old women pulled robes against shriveled bodies. There were bashed women and stabbed women and women crazy with disease. The floor was slippery with blood and shit and urine. Someone screamed for morphine. Many held out hands, demanding to be touched, to be healed, and he would not touch them.

Then he was awake, his heart pounding.

The clock said three-fifteen. He could hear a few cars making a tearing sound through the rain. The snow was surely gone.

Then he heard the music.

The piano.

Brahms.

He threw off the covers and reached for his robe in the chilly room. The music stopped. It was the melody she played that summer evening before going on her walk to the North River, never to return.

He dozed again in the silent bedroom and conjured images of Molly, with her lustrous black hair and her crooked grin. Molly at the Battery gazing at the October harbor and the lights glittering off the waves. Molly in Tony Pastor’s on the Fourteenth Street Rialto, laughing at the comics and the jugglers, and later humming the melancholy ballads as they walked toward home. They’re all sentimental rubbish, she said, but they get into your head… Molly announcing she was pregnant that first time, her face transformed, radiant, luminous, and then the bitter tears when the child came too soon and was dead. He saw that it would have been a boy, but he did not tell her for more than a year. He saw her beside him on the streets of Vienna, joyous as they skipped together through the evening crowds to the opera house; or walking beside him across Central Park to the Metropolitan, where she stared at the Vermeer and said she could hear the Dutchman’s music. She was seated with him in the Polo Grounds, enjoying his happiness even though the game baffled her and she knew nothing of the legend of John McGraw. They went together to Coney Island on a few summer Sundays. They took the ferry to and from New Jersey, with the cool salt spray dampening them both and the towers rising in the downtown city. They took the subway to the end of the line. They rode the Third Avenue El and the Ninth Avenue El to the same destinations, her eyes taking in everything, from the dark subway tunnels to the tenement living rooms where the human beings lived with the constant roar of trains, and then she tried to put all that she had seen into music. I want to make this all into music, she said. American music. No: New York music. Full of car horns, not cattle; gangsters, not cowboys; poor women working street corners; thieves locked away in cells. All of that… He heard her arguing for socialism. He heard her saying that this was no democracy if women could not vote, more than 120 years after the Revolution. He heard her talking about Berlioz and Schoenberg and how her instructor in Vienna thought that all the past was now dead. He heard her tell him as they sat together near a cleared space on the North River that she was again pregnant, and how he hugged her in delight, and kissed her tearful face, and started to sing the song.

He heard her laughing at the silly words.

And thought: I do not believe in ghosts. But I know they exist, because I live with one.

He woke before seven and shadowboxed in the chilly room for five minutes with his hands open. Jab, left hook, right hand. Jab-jab, right hand. Hook, hook, double ’em up, step back, right hand. Jab, then bend, then the hook. The way he had been trained long ago in Packy Hanratty’s gym upstairs from the saloon on Ninth Avenue. Except that now the right hand had no snap, would never again be a punch, was shoved into the air instead of tearing at space. The hand that once had painted, the hand that once punched. Long ago. Still, he could hear the roar from the packed smokers in Brooklyn and East Harlem, in those years when every other Irish kid wanted to be a fighter, even those kids who wanted to be doctors. Packy’s motto was Above All, Do Some Harm. And he did.

Then he went into the bathroom, where he shaved at the sink and stepped under the shower, an ache in his right shoulder, some migrating sliver of shrapnel loosened by the shadowboxing, working its way to freedom. Or the shrapnel of worry. The shower was an ancient device, reminding him of the insane inventions of Rube Goldberg in the Journal. Knobs, pipes, the water sometimes scalding, sometimes tepid, always sputtering. He dried himself with a towel that was too small, thinking: I could get all this goddamned plumbing fixed, I could buy big towels, and fresh underwear. I could do all those things put off after the bank on Canal Street failed in ’31 and took everything with it. I could…

As he dressed, the aroma of frying bacon penetrated the room and he could hear voices from below: the small voice of Carlito, the deeper, more plangent voice of Rose. Rose smiled as he entered the kitchen, spears of loose black hair falling over her brow, and the boy rose from his chair and embraced him. Both wore sweaters against the morning cold. Without a scarf, her neck looked more than an inch longer.

“Ga’paw! Look: baking!”

“Bay-con,” Rose said. “Not — ing. Say it, boy, bay-con.”

“Bay-con. Bay-con.” He laughed and left Delaney and took his seat. “Bay-con.”

Rose turned the bacon in the heavy black pan. “What a smart kid he is,” she said, her back turned to both of them. “You’re smart, Carlito.”

Delaney faced the yard, while Rose removed the bacon to a sheet of newspaper, cracked eggs into the pan, and basted them with the hot fat. In the yard the snow was gone, except on the wrapping of Mr. Nobiletti’s olive tree. The bushes seemed scrawny and barely alive. There were stains in the paint above the window, and paint was flaking on the wall behind the stove. I could get a real paint job, not just a cat’s lick. The whole kitchen, the bedrooms, everywhere, make it bright, make it alive… Rose poured coffee into his cup and returned to the stove. Her wrists were very thin, but they must be strong too. Cabled with tendons and muscle under the olive skin. Delaney sipped the dark sweet coffee and wondered about his heart. Coffee this dark and this strong can’t be good for you, he thought. It tastes too good. Tastes like… hell, like Vienna. In the crowded coffeehouse that time with Molly, they were eating sweets, splurging on the bounty of scholarship money from Andrew Carnegie and Tammany Hall, and she saw Gustav Mahler come in with Alma, the pride and torment of his life. Molly trembled with excitement, wanting to go over to Mahler, to thank him, to embrace him, but didn’t, because she didn’t want to play the fool, didn’t want to trigger Alma’s jealousy either, and so she sent a note anyway in her imperfect German, and told Delaney that her heart would be pounding for a week.

Then suddenly the bacon and eggs were before them, and Rose turned off the stove and took her place at the table, her back to the yard. Five days had passed since Carlito arrived in his vestibule, four days since he met Rose Verga, and for the first time in many years, the feeling of family had entered James Finbar Delaney.

Rose gave him a list of things they needed for Carlito and for the house, written in a swift slanted hand in English: shoes and a sweater (spelled “swetter”) and underclothes for Carlito; towels and sheets; food. He took forty dollars from the petty cash box in his desk but did not open the safe. “Oh, yeah, toys,” Rose said. “The boy needs something he can, how d’you say it? Play. He’s got to play with something. He’s a boy.” Her eyes were wide and serious and oddly comic. Delaney smiled as he handed her the money. Then he remembered Grace at three, going to bed each night with a stuffed monkey, and wondered if they made them anymore. He would find one himself. It was too cold still for a baseball, but he would get one for the boy’s birthday in March. He told Rose that he was going to St. Vincent’s, to do what they called rounds, and would be back around one. Monique knew all about it. He went into the kitchen to say good-bye to Carlito.

“Another thing,” Rose said, furrowing her brow, a vertical line pointing down at her long nose.

“Yes?”

“That suit. You been wearing it five straight days.”

He looked down at the suit, rumpled and lumpy, the trousers without a crease.

“I have another one,” he said. “But it’s too light for the winter.”

She looked at him, amusement and pity mixed in her eyes.

“You’re a doctor.”

“I know that, Rose, and —”

“You gotta dress good.” She smiled, without showing her teeth. “You got those long underwears?” Delaney said yes, he had. “Then wear them, and you could put another suit on top of it.”

“They itch,” Delaney said.

“I wash them so hard there’s nothing left to itch.”

He smiled. “Whatever you say, Rose.”

Carlito was now up on a chair, waving a spoon held in a small fist. He was trying with his free hand to take the lid off the sugar bowl.

“He’s a real Irisher, this boy,” Rose said, fully smiling now. “He wants sugar to put on top of butter on top of bread! That’s why the Irish got the wors’ teeth in New York!”

“I’ll be right back,” Delaney said.

He hurried up the stairs, chuckling as he went, and moved into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He unlaced his shoes, then removed the rumpled suit and laid it on the bed. He rummaged in a bottom drawer and found a neatly folded flannel union suit. He was fastening the buttons on the seat when the door burst open and Carlito ran in, giggling, waving his spoon. Rose was in swift pursuit. Then she stopped abruptly, looked at Delaney, and laughed out loud.

“You better not go to no hospital like that!” she said.

“Get out of here.”

Carlito ran behind Delaney, and Rose went after him, bending to scoop him up. As she rose, her left breast brushed against Delaney’s arm. Soft and full. She paused, glanced at him with uncertain eyes, then hurried away with Carlito. A fresh scent hung in the air of the room. A suggestion of flowers.

Zimmerman was in the hall of the first floor when Delaney came down in his light suit, scratching where the union suit itched. Zimmerman was dressed for the river wind. The door was open, and he could see Monique bent over records at her desk.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Zimmerman said.

“Come in, but we’ve got to make it fast. I’ve got rounds today.”

Delaney led the way into his office and closed the door behind them. Zimmerman took off his wool hat and scarf. His eyes moved around the crowded room.

“Well, he’s gone,” Zimmerman said.

“That’s what I figured when I saw you.”

“They came for him around five, three of them, carrying a stretcher with a heavy blanket, and went out a side door.”

“What shape is he in?”

“Pretty good, considering.”

“He always was a thick-headed son of a bitch.”

“As we say down the Lower East Side, he’s got the guts of a burglar.”

They stood in silence for a few awkward seconds, while Zimmerman looked at the framed diplomas and certificates on the wall.

“You went to Johns Hopkins?”

“I did,” Delaney said.

“Jesus Christ,” Zimmerman said, looking at Delaney in a new way. “How’d you manage that?”

“I passed the exam,” Delaney said. “The rest was luck, and the financial resources of Tammany Hall. My father was a leader and had a few bucks.”

“I’ll be goddamned. You never mentioned it before. Johns Hopkins…”

“You never asked.”

“When was this anyway?”

“I finished in 1913. A long time ago. Before the war. You must have just been getting born.”

“A couple years earlier. At 210 Allen Street. My father was a socialist, like everybody from Minsk, and hated Tammany.”

“He wasn’t alone.”

Zimmerman stared at the diploma.

“Let me ask you a question. Don’t answer if you don’t want to.”

“How’d I end up a GP on Horatio Street?”

“Yeah.”

Delaney now looked at the framed diploma from Johns Hopkins.

“I wanted to be a surgeon, and for a while, a few years, I was. Then the war came. A few weeks before it ended, I got wounded.” He turned to face Zimmerman and started flexing his right hand. “Everything got torn up and I lost my strength. The strength any surgeon must have. I’ve got feeling. I can examine a patient. I just don’t have strength. So I decided to be a GP. As simple as that.”

“That’s terrible.”

“No, it’s not. A lot of guys I used to know wish they had my problem, but they’re all dead. Here I can help a lot of people. And in a way, they’re my own people. So —” He glanced at the clock. “Hey, Jake, I’ve got to go.”

Zimmerman paused, then cleared his throat.

“I want to tell you something else,” he said.

“I know,” Delaney said. “So tell me.”

“I’m keeping the money,” Zimmerman said. “The money Eddie gave me.”

“You earned it.”

“It’s not even for me. My parents, well, this goddamned Depression, it has them —”

“Don’t explain, Jake.”

“I could get in a shitpot of trouble if —”

“Stop. Let’s walk to the hospital.”

Zimmerman exhaled, the tension draining out of him.

“I can’t. I’ve got to meet one of the other interns for a bite.”

Delaney opened the door.

“I’ll walk you to the corner.”

After grand rounds at St. Vincent’s, Delaney walked down the west side of Sixth Avenue, the El rising above him, the Jefferson Court House looming in the distance. At the corner of Tenth Street he saw the toy store. McNiff’s Toys. Run by Billy McNiff, who had opened it in 1928, three weeks after leaving prison, with a grubstake from one of his friends who were in on the holdup for which Billy took the fall. The shop’s windows were opaque with frost. Delaney went in. The small dark store was empty.

“Hello? Billy, you here?”

There was no answer, and he looked at the dusty toys in their bins. Tiny metal cars in bright colors, most of them Buicks. Bald, pink spaldeens, waiting for a stickball summer. Dolls with moving eyes, frozen into paralysis. Roller skates. A Flexible Flyer that nobody in the neighborhood could afford to race down a snowy hill. Surely stolen, Delaney thought. Somewhere uptown. Then, a dusty set of ice skates. A small red fire truck with a yellow ladder on top. Then he saw what he wanted: a bin full of teddy bears. He remembered an article in the Times where various pediatricians said that teddy bears gave young children a sense of security. There were no stuffed monkeys, and that was just as well. They would only remind him of the boy’s mother. Ah, Grace, goddamn you. We should be in this dump together, looking at the toys, and you could pick out what the boy might like and I could pay. You could tell me what you know about him that I don’t know. And then you could go, in pursuit of your goddamned husband, your last vision of utopia. You could give him a teddy bear too. I’ll take care of the boy.

The door opened abruptly, with a draft of cold, and slammed shut as Billy McNiff walked in.

“Hello, Doc,” he said, in a surprised way. “What the hell are you doin’ here?”

“Looking for a few presents,” Delaney said.

“We got ’em. At a good price too. Everything reduced ten pissent since Christmas. Who they for? Boy or girl?”

“Boy.”

McNiff was a small wiry man who seemed to bounce while he was standing still. His face was pared down, fleshless, lipless, like a skull. His skin seemed sprayed on his bones. As he came closer to Delaney, the odor of rum rose from his mouth and his body. From the saloon across the street. McNiff produced a paddle with a ball attached by a stapled rubber band.

“This is a hot item,” McNiff said. His eyes were glassy, and he started batting the ball with the paddle, missing three out of six times. “Kids love it.”

“I’ll take that, Billy,” Delaney said. “And this teddy bear.”

“What’s he? A Teddy Roosevelt fan?”

Delaney didn’t want a long talk, and said curtly: “Not at the moment.”

McNiff started wrapping the toys in a copy of the Daily News.

“The kid is your grandson, I guess.”

“You guess right.”

“The mother on vacation?”

“Sort of.”

“When’s she get back?”

“Billy, just wrap the stuff. No interrogation, please.”

McNiff laughed, his teeth brown and splintery.

“Sorry. It’s a habit from my youth.”

“What do I owe you?” Delaney said.

Out on the street, kids were everywhere, freed from the tenement flats.

Knocko Carmody came around a corner, in a gray fedora and long blue coat with a velvet collar. He grinned and embraced Delaney and asked how things were going and whether he needed anything.

“As a matter of fact…” Delaney paused. “As a matter of fact, I do need something. You know a steam heat guy?”

“Of course. My brother-in-law, Jimmy Spillane. Want me to send him over?”

“When he’s free, Knocko,” the doctor said. “I need an estimate.”

“Done.”

Knocko pulled out a pen and notebook and scribbled a reminder to himself. The way Big Jim did when he was doing his own form of grand rounds. Then Knocko stared for a moment at Delaney.

“You okay?” he said.

Delaney smiled. “Better than I thought I would be.”

“That Rose Verga is a pisser, ain’t she? Skinny as a rail, but she’d scare the shit out of a stevedore. A real hoodlum.”

Hoodlum was high praise indeed from Knocko Carmody. Knocko glanced at his watch.

“I’ll see you soon,” Delaney said, picking up the message. “Maybe at Angela’s. The boy likes bagetti.”

“You blame him? You wouldn’t want to give him Irish food, for Chrissakes.” He paused, then said: “Well, I gotta go bribe a judge.”

Knocko grinned, tapped Delaney on the shoulder, and went into a saloon called the Emerald Isle, walking the way Big Jim did, with an old-time West Side swagger, putting the weight on one foot and dragging the other.

Delaney got off the El at Twenty-third Street, hurrying down the rickety steps, Carlito’s bundle under his good arm. He walked north. At Twenty-fifth Street, he turned left into the wind off the North River. There was an ambulance in front of Eddie Corso’s brownstone, and a couple of cops inside a green-and-white cruiser, and a young gunsel in the uniform of gray fedora and long blue coat, leaning against the iron fence. The gate under the stoop opened and Bootsie stepped out. He gestured to Delaney with his head. Meaning “follow me.”

“How is he?” Delaney said.

“I ain’t the doctor,” Bootsie said. “You are.” He shook his head. “But he looks all right to me. Not great, but all right.”

Bootsie led the way up a flight of stairs and into the bedroom. Eddie Corso was lying in bed, paler and leaner and subtly older. He smiled when he saw Delaney.

“Hey,” he said, waving Bootsie out of the room. “You came.” He sat up. “What’s in the package? Cannoli?”

“Toys for the boy.”

“None for me?”

“You’re out for the season.” Then: “I have to check you out, Eddie.”

“I’m great. That kid you got me, Dr. Jake, he did a great job.”

“Let me look.”

Sighing, Eddie unbuttoned his nightshirt and with Delaney’s help slipped it off his shoulders.

“I suppose you’re leaving town,” Delaney said, as he gently lifted a bandage to look at the wound. “I guess the cop car will escort you at least as far as the Holland Tunnel.” Corso nodded, smiled, said nothing. Delaney said: “Let’s see… ” Eddie Corso was right: the incision was clean, the stitches removed. Healing well. Zimmerman had done a fine job. Delaney started tamping down the adhesive of the bandages.

“Yeah, I’m going. Maybe Florida. I need a tan.”

“You got a nurse to go with you in that ambulance? These things have to be changed twice a day.”

“She’s down in the kitchen. I stole her from St. Vincent’s for six months.”

“You’re taking a nun to Florida?”

“She’s not a nun. You think I’m nuts? Her name’s Stella.”

“Want me to talk to Stella before you go?”

“We’ll call from the road we need advice.” He smiled. “Maybe she’s a plainclothes nun. She’s definitely big on Hail Marys and Our Fathers.”

“Maybe she’ll save your soul, Eddie.”

“Too late for that, I guess,” he said, and laughed. Then winced. “Jesus, don’t make me fuckin’ laugh.”

A pause. Then Delaney took Eddie Corso’s hand.

“I wanted to thank you for… you know…”

“Shut up, you dumb Mick. Just use it for that kid. And if you need anything else, you know, like getting somebody killed, just call me. I’ll be out by the pool.”

Delaney took the El back downtown, looking around at the sparser crowd of passengers. He sometimes felt in trains the way he felt in emergency rooms. There were too many people to ever know them all. Every one had a story that he’d never hear, and he had heard more stories of human grief than most people. He met them in the present, but each of them had a past. Better to shut down, stop imagining, deal with all other human beings the way he dealt with patients. Cage the past. Deal with them, gently if necessary, and then seal them out of memory. They could vanish like the words of a song, recovered only in isolated fragments. Worry about your friends, he often thought, and the few people you love, and leave the rest to Providence and, as Big Jim used to sing, Paddy McGinty’s goat. A song that always made Molly laugh. A song from the past.

From the moment he first saw her, he knew that Molly had a past. She was losing a child on a North River pier, and someone had helped place that child in her emptying womb. Someone from her very recent past. He knew that from the beginning, but never asked her about it. Not in St. Vincent’s, as he tried to convince her to live, with soft words and gentle touches of her wrist. Not later. The nuns never asked either. They had seen too many humans move through those wards to judge any of them. So had Delaney. He never asked her about the past when she left the hospital, still full of sorrow and some form of muted anger. He didn’t ask her when he saw her on Greenwich Street seven months later, healthy now, working at Wanamaker’s as a salesgirl, living in a woman’s boardinghouse. Nor did he pry in any way when they went together to Tony Pastor’s on the following Saturday night. There he first saw her beautiful smile when the comedians started their routines, a smile full of release from sorrow, and later they walked across Union Square in the dim snowy night, and she took his arm and repeated three of the jokes and then laughed out loud, and they went into the restaurant, and still he did not ask. He knew that he must listen if she ever told her tale, but he could not ask. He did not ask when they were married. He did not ask in Baltimore, when they arrived to find the way to Johns Hopkins. He did not ask when they moved into Horatio Street, or in the years that followed. He did not ask in his letters from the war. He never asked, and she never told the tale. But he came to know something large and heavy about her: the tale lay within her, wordless, a wound unhealed.

Sitting alone at the end of the rattling elevated car, Delaney saw a young man at the other end, seventeen or eighteen, dressed in the sharp clothes of the apprentice hoodlum. He stood with his back to the door, hands before him like a prizefighter waiting to be introduced at the Garden, unwilling to sit and risk the ruin of his razored creases. And Delaney thought of Eddie Corso, and hoped he would be all right. He hoped Eddie would live many more years. He hoped the wound would not suddenly fester. He hoped there would be no stupid accident on the long road to Florida. He hoped no hired gunsel would hunt him down.

He got off at Fourteenth Street, glancing one final time at the apprentice hoodlum, who didn’t move an inch. He walked past the Spanish church and the Spanish Benevolent Society and the Spanish grocery and turned left at the meat market and into Horatio Street. Kids were everywhere, defying the icy wind off the North River. Playing tag. Running after one another. Shuddering in doorways or vestibules, scheming, smoking cigarettes. He had treated most of them and would treat them again. The Rearden kid. The Caputo kid. The Corrigan twins. They moved in packs of six and seven, and he tried to imagine Carlito among them. They carried all the normal dangers: measles and scarlet fever and whooping cough. In summer there was polio, and all the filthy things they could contract while swimming off the North River piers. The normal diseases were just that: normal. Mayor La Guardia said a few days ago that he’d make vaccinations for kids mandatory, and maybe he’d be the rare politician who kept his word. Maybe.

The streets were full of other dangers. Knives and guns and the logic of the pack. He had treated people for such things too. Soon the boy gangsters would no longer swing aboard the Tenth Avenue trains, taking their percentage, not after the New York Central opened the elevated High Line above the street. Closer to the river, they were working on the Miller Highway too, that would carry automobiles above the cobblestones. But the High Line was something else, a commercial overpass that even cut through buildings above street level. But he could imagine the youth packs heaving ladders against walls and hopping the slow trains and hurling booty to the street. Children of the old Hudson Dusters, the vanished Whyos. Some of them learned too young to love trouble, and the more difficult the trouble, the better.

For most of a block, he was scared about Carlito. If the boy stayed here a long time, if he was to be here for years, he’d go to those streets on his own. The boy couldn’t have Delaney with him every hour of the day. He couldn’t have Rose Verga there either, for she could be gone in a month. Even if she stayed, the other kids would mock him if he used any woman as a bodyguard. Or a creaky, respectable grandfather. But he couldn’t just move away. Couldn’t afford another house. Couldn’t just go. This was his place and he had made a vow. Promised himself in the mud and shit of France that if he lived he would serve his own people. For the rest of his fucking life. If he fled with Carlito to some leafy suburb, or to Brooklyn or the Bronx, the broken vow would eat his guts. He must find a way to stay.

But in spite of the vow, Delaney knew he must deal with practical matters. Where would the boy go to school? Sacred Heart was better than the public school. But there was trouble there too, and danger. Demented priests, seething with God’s furies and their own tormenting desires. They planted the fear of Hell in their young charges along with hatred of the flesh. Carlito could be subjected to all those small mutilations that could leave scars for life. God damn you, Grace.

He went in under the stoop, and on the bench in the hall he saw a weeping young woman holding an infant. She rose when he entered, trying to speak. The child was silent and still. Behind her on the bench was Japs Brannigan, his high-cheekboned yellowed Asian face more like a wood sculpture than part of a living creature. He was there for the quinine. And there was old Sally Wilson, staring into the darkness at the far end of the waiting room. Delaney held up a hand, gesturing to them all.

“I need five minutes,” he said. “Just give me that.”

Monique was at her desk, her face flat and void of expression, her eyes tired. He closed the door behind him. He flashed on that morning, the first of May, 1909. Knocko was calling, a dock walloper then, not the president of the union. He said there was a woman on Pier 41 and she was in trouble. “She’s a Mick,” Knocko said. “I don’t want the immigration idiots to send her out to the Island for lyin’ or somethin’.” Delaney pedaled the bike to the pier. In a dark corner Knocko had placed some longshoremen around the woman, holding blankets to shield her from the inspection of strangers. She was young, pale, beautiful, and semiconscious. She had just arrived alone in steerage from Ireland and was having a miscarriage. Molly.

“A guy named Jackie Spillane called,” Monique said. “About steam heat.”

Knocko had made the call. Again.

“I’ll call him later,” Delaney said. Then: “Where’s the boy?”

“Rose took him with her, food shopping.”

He held up the paper sack.

“I brought him a few things.” He passed the sack to her, and Monique peered inside and smiled.

“Aw, that’s great. He needs something to play with, that boy.” She handed the sack back to him. “I found those American Express addresses for you too. Barcelona, Madrid, Paris.”

“Just address the envelopes, and I’ll mail them later. I still have to write the notes.”

He paused again, then nodded toward the door to the waiting room.

“Is that child alive out there?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The baby started bleeding from the nose and mouth last night. I tried to get the mother to go to the hospital. She said, ‘Absolutely not. I want this girl to live.’ ”

“Send her in first. Get the quinine ready for Brannigan, no charge. And what’s ailing Princess Wilson?”

“She wants her husband back.”

“I can’t help her with that. He’s been dead six years now.”

“She thinks you can bring him back.”

Delaney sighed. He noticed that Monique was chewing the inside of her mouth.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. No. Ah, hell, Doc, it’s the usual. We got bills here, a slew of them, and when Rose gets back with the kid, they’ll be worse.”

“Hold on.”

He went into his office and closed the door behind him. He turned the dial on the small safe, found the envelope, and removed a crisp hundred-dollar bill. He creased it and then went out and handed it to Monique.

“Change this somewhere. Not the bank. Pay some of the bills. And send in the woman with the baby.”

Monique stared at the hundred-dollar bill.

“You rob a bank?”

“Sort of.”

The woman’s name was Bridget Smyth, “with a y.” She was nineteen, unmarried, and her baby girl was seven weeks old. She was also dead. He looked at the dead girl on his examination table, and his eyes wandered to the browning photograph of John McGraw and Big Jim. The woman sobbed. Touch her, for Chrissakes. Her baby is dead.

He gently touched her bony forearm but didn’t speak. She did.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Delaney said. “Pneumonia.”

She lifted the dead infant and hugged her close and began to bawl. No words came from her, just the wracking wail of grief.

Delaney put an arm around her and held her tight and the door opened and Monique came in. He nodded at her, and Monique came over and eased him aside. She put an arm on her shoulder, whispering, trying to move her to the outer room.

Bridget Smyth snapped.

“Don’t give me that effin’ rubbish! She’s dead! And there’s no effin’ food at me room and no effin’ water, ’cause the pipes is froze, and no effin’ heat, and her father is an effin’ eejit, gone off some effin’ place!” She bawled wordlessly, Monique holding her tight, Delaney caressing her bony arm. With his right hand.

“I’ll call someone at Sacred Heart,” Monique whispered. “Get a priest to help —”

“A priest? Never! I went to them and they turned me away. I sinned, I must pay!”

Her eyes were wide now, and mad. She looked at them and held the child fiercely and then rushed the door. Delaney moved in front of her.

“Out of me way!”

“I won’t let you go this way,” Delaney said, trying to sound both gentle and commanding. “We’ve got to arrange a proper burial. Wait. Just wait. We’ll —”

“I know where to have the proper effin’ burial! The two of us, together! In the effin’ North River!”

Then she dissolved again, sobs mixing with wails, squatting with her back to the door and her unmoving child tight against her chest. Delaney whispered to Monique: “Get your coat. Stay with her, no matter where she tries to go.” He mouthed the word Moriarty, which was the name of the undertaker on Ninth Avenue. She rubbed thumb and forefinger together, indicating the unspoken word “money,” and raised her eyebrows.

“Use what I gave you,” he said. “I’ll get some more.”

Together they raised Bridget Smyth from the floor and led her into the anteroom. She was silent now, and limp, as if her body was empty of the fuel of rage. The infant seemed like an extension of her own body, posed as a small Madonna awaiting some draftsman with a sepia stick.

Delaney closed his door now, breathing hard. The effing North River… That summer evening, Molly walked toward the North River. There were still people on the streets, people she knew. Jackie Norris learned that in a few hours, with the help of his policeman’s badge. She was alone, wearing a blue dress, saying to one old lady that she was going to the ruined pier to watch the sunset. No surprise. Delaney had gone there with her many times, finding the scorched but solid timbers that served as small bridges between more solid planks. Sitting with her in silence as the sky reddened over New Jersey. She would draw up her knees, her arms hugging them, staring at nothing. Now and then she’d mention some moment from the years before the war, some character, some song. She’d mention a play they’d seen. She’d mention a café in Vienna. But that summer evening, she went alone, wrapped in a shroud of her own hard solitude, for there were five patients waiting for Delaney. She never came back. O my Molly-O.

He rose slowly and went to the safe and took another hundred-dollar bill from the envelope, to cover expenses after Monique paid for the infant’s funeral. And the woman’s rent. And some food. Thinking: The North River is jammed with ice. Thank God.

Brannigan took his quinine and left, angling past Monique’s empty desk. Then Sally Wilson came in. At twenty, she had been a star at Tony Pastor’s, a lush princess of the Rialto. Delaney had never seen her perform, but she had once showed up at his old office on Jane Street carrying her scrapbook. As if to prove that she existed. There she was, in big bustles, or in tights, and the stories said that she had a wonderful contralto voice. Her hair was so blond it seemed white in the photographs. Now it truly was white, but she had added forty years and fifty pounds. Along the way, she’d had two sons and three husbands. The sons were gone, one now working in despair for the Republicans in Franklin Roosevelt’s Washington, the other in California in the movie business. Or so she said. She only mourned the last husband.

“I can’t sleep,” she said abruptly. “I keep seeing Alfie, and when I turn over in bed, he’s not there.”

“Are you still drinking coffee?” Delaney asked gently.

“Of course.”

“Stop,” he said.

“You think it’s just coffee?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t even examine me!”

“Well, do you have any physical symptoms?”

She always wanted him to examine her. She always had vague worries about her breasts, which were soft and heavy. She seldom said the word “cancer,” but it must have been in her dreams.

“I have these flutters, especially at night, Dr. Delaney.” She squeezed her left breast. “What do you call them flutters?”

“Palpitations.”

“Right.”

Delaney sighed. “Well, let’s have a listen.”

She stood up and unbuttoned her blouse, then turned her back and unfastened her white brassiere. Delaney had long ago trained himself to be objective when examining human beings, but Sally Wilson had not. Her breasts were large, fallen, blue-veined, but she lifted the left breast as if offering it to Delaney. The breast seemed to blush.

“They used to be beautiful,” she said sadly.

“Breathe, please.”

He listened. Then removed the stethoscope from his ears.

“The heartbeat is strong and regular, Miss Wilson.”

She folded her arms under her breasts to form a shelf.

“I’m worried about lumps.”

“There’s a wonderful specialist at St. Vincent’s, Miss Wilson. I can make an appointment if you want.”

“I don’t trust strangers. I need you to check.”

He did, while she inhaled through clenched teeth, her eyes closed for almost a minute. Her body grew tauter.

“Everything seems fine,” Delaney said. “No lumps, Miss Wilson. But I can make that appointment if…”

She relaxed, arms folded under breasts again.

“You can get dressed now, Miss Wilson.”

He turned his back on her, heard her moving, a rustling of something silky. Her breathing was heavy.

“Every time I think of Alfie, I get the condition, the papulations.”

He chuckled. “Maybe you should think about your second husband.”

“That bastard.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what. Stop the coffee for a week and then come back. We’ll see how you’re doing.”

When he turned she was wearing the brassiere but not the blouse.

“You’d have loved them,” she said in a numb voice. “Everybody did.”

He heard the gate clang and the outside door open and slam shut and Rose’s voice and the laughing of Carlito. Bumping. Jumping. Shoes on wood. Blurred Italian. The boy’s squealing laughter.

“Excuse me,” he said to his patient, and went to greet them, smiling.