North River

FIVE

LATER — AFTER THE BOY HAD PRACTICED WITH HIS PADDLEBALL until falling into a nap; after Delaney had written three notes to his daughter and folded them into the stamped envelopes; after he had hung his suit neatly in the bedroom closet and peeled off the union suit; after he had spoken with Jimmy Spillane about a Monday-morning visit to check out a system for steam heat; after reading the newspapers in a hot bath; after dressing again in warmer clothes — after all of that, he and Rose and the boy went to Angela’s restaurant for an early dinner. He dropped the letters in a corner mailbox.

“This kid already grew half an inch in a week,” Angela said, leading them to a corner table.

“The cooking,” Rose said. “Whatta you expect?”

“He’s gonna be bigger than the doc,” Angela said.

“Bigger than the Statue of Liberty.”

Carlito was indeed 33 inches tall and weighed 32 pounds. A big kid, from the genetic line that had given Delaney his six feet. They sat down and Angela suggested veal or a nice piece of fish and the boy said “bagetti” and then they ordered. Veal for Delaney. Sole for Rose. Carlito had already said what he wanted. Then Delaney asked for a glass of the house red, and Angela raised her eyebrows.

“That’s the second glass a wine you had this year!”

“It might be the last.”

“An’ you, Rose — you on a diet or something?”

Rose blushed. “Just bring me the fish, Angela.”

The place was half-empty. They talked and laughed and said hello to people they knew. Knocko Carmody came in with his camarilla, asked Delaney if Spillane had called, smiled when told he had. He kissed Rose on the cheek while murmuring, “Hey, you hoodlum, how are you?” Carlito squirmed in his high chair and Rose took him by the hand back past the kitchen to the bathroom. Delaney watched a fresh snowfall drifting softly on the street. The flakes were thick and there was no wind. Parked cars were now glistening from the melting snow. Some had not been moved since the New Year’s storm. There was snow on the hats and shoulders of the new arrivals too. A few more people stopped to say hello to Delaney, exchanging small talk, giving him brief updates on the health of old patients. Nobody mentioned Eddie Corso. Or, for that matter, his daughter, Grace. He saw Rose emerge with Carlos by the hand. Angela threw her a conspiratorial glance. Then from the tables, a few men and more women reached for Carlito, touching him, talking baby talk, petting him as if he were a puppy.

They were silent through most of the meal, the food too delicious for chatter. The wine, alas, was too sweet, so Delaney sipped. Rose was very concentrated, lifting her food in a dainty way, as if remembering advice from the woman’s page of the Daily News. She tamped down her shimmering vitality too. The restaurant was now crowded, and when Carlito finished, Angela came over.

“What about dessert?” Angela said.

Delaney ordered a cannoli, the boy wanted ice cream, Rose passed on both and asked for tea.

“You’re gonna waste away, ragazza,” Angela said, a thin smile on her face, as she touched Rose’s shoulder. She glanced at Delaney and turned her back on Rose and hurried to another table. The mixed sound of men and women was higher now, a growly male baritone punctuated by shrill female whiskey laughter. The boy grinned every time someone laughed out loud.

They finished the desserts too quickly.

“This can’t be good for us,” Delaney said, “but I don’t care.”

“Once in while,” Rose said, waving a hand in dismissal. “You eat dolces three times a day, you weigh four hundred pounds. But one cannoli? Faniente, nothing.”

The boy rubbed his eyes, and Delaney called for the check and paid it. Dessert and the glass of wine were on the house. Rose buttoned up Carlito’s jacket and then her own long coat, while Delaney pulled his hat tight on his brow. Angela hugged them all and said something in Italian to Rose, who smiled thinly and jutted her chin in a gesture of defiance. Delaney waved to the blur of crowded tables and they went out. The snow was emptying the streets and gathering on the fenders of the glistening cars. They turned left toward Horatio Street.

Then a car door opened. An angular, sallow man, with yellowing eyes under a wide-brimmed hat, stepped out of the backseat. He jammed his hands in his overcoat pockets, as if they contained something dangerous. There were three other men in the car and a lot of cigarette smoke. They had been waiting a while.

“Hey,” the sallow man said.

Delaney looked at him, while Rose pulled Carlito closer.

“Me?” Delaney said.

“Yeah, you. I wanna talk to you.”

“About what?”

“You know what.”

“Tell me what.”

“About Eddie.”

“Eddie who?”

“Eddie Corso, that’s who.”

“What about him?”

“Where is he?”

Christ. Another punk gangster who’s seen too many goddamned movies.

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you know. You saved his fuckin’ life.”

Rose stepped in, blurting in Italian: “Vai!” The sallow man looked as if he’d been slapped. Then she turned to Delaney, her tone shifting into deference. “Don’t talk to this guy. Come on.”

“Stay outta this, Rose,” the sallow man said.

“Ah, bah fongool.”

The man took out a pistol, letting his gun arm hang at his side.

“Put that away,” Delaney said, stepping in front of Rose and the boy. Thinking: I can manage one left hook.

“There’s three cops inside Angela’s restaurant, pal,” Delaney said calmly. “This is a very bad idea.”

The sallow man glanced at the lights of Angela’s and then at the car. An older man shook his head. No. The sallow man returned the gun to his pocket.

“You better remember where Eddie is,” he said. “And let us know fast.”

“Let’s go,” Delaney said, and took Rose by the arm and started for home through the falling snow. He felt himself breathing hard.

“Bah fongool,” Carlito said.

They had gone half a block when the boy stopped and looked bleary. He couldn’t move his feet. Delaney lifted him, carrying him home, feeling his puppy warmth through thick coats and falling snow. He remembered Eddie Corso’s tutoring him in Italian that time in France. Palle were balls. A cazzo was a prick. Fottere meant fucking. But Eddie didn’t know where bah fongool came from, although he did know what it meant. In search of precision, they went to see Lieutenant Rossetti, whose father was a writer for Il Progresso in New York. The lieutenant smiled. Yeah, he said, it comes from va f’an culo, which roughly means, Up your ass! Don’t say it to anyone, unless you want to get shot. The next afternoon, Lieutenant Rossetti had the front of his brow blown off by a German sniper.

“I’m sorry I used a bad word back there,” Rose said. “The boy, he remembers everything you say.”

“Don’t worry, Rose,” Delaney said. “The guy deserved it. Just be careful. This is about me, not you.”

“You didn’t seem scared about the gun.”

“Every gun is scary,” he said. “But I’ve seen them before.”

“In the war?”

“The war,” he said. “And yes, around here too.”

From long habit, he didn’t elaborate. Rifles, mortars, grenades… and he’d seen gunshot wounds too. A lot of them. Too many of them. Way too many dead people too. But he hated talking like a tough guy.

“I know that guy,” Rose said quietly. “The cafone with the gun.”

“Who is he?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she said, glancing behind her at the empty sidewalk and the snowy stillness of the street. Her face was harder now.

When they reached the house, Rose opened the doors beneath the stoop, then gazed once again at the street. She locked the doors behind them, and Delaney carried the boy upstairs to the top-floor bedroom. Rose followed, removing her coat and hat, then draping them over the top-floor banister. In the light from the hallway, Delaney laid the boy on his bed, where the teddy bear was tucked under the covers. The ache was back in his right arm.

“Here, let me do this,” Rose said, as if sensing that both arms were not the same now. She began to undress the boy. Delaney removed his coat and placed it on the banister beside hers. The boy’s eyes opened. He blinked, gazed at Rose, then at Delaney. He did not look frightened.

“Okay, come on now,” Rose said, lifting the boy. “Brush your teeth, make pee pee.”

She carried him into the bathroom. Delaney stood there, hearing flushing water, and Rose’s murmuring voice. He glanced into her room. There was a notebook on top of the Italian-English dictionary. On the wall a calendar from Il Progresso showed Roman ruins. Delaney thought: I’m a sort of ruin too. And chuckled.

“Okay,” Rose said, after flushing the toilet. “Now you go night-night, boy.”

She pulled the covers aside and laid him down, and he hugged the teddy bear as she covered him. His eyes moved from Delaney to Rose. He turned his head to face the wall and whispered: “Mamá.” He hugged the bear. Then he closed his eyes and fell into sleep. Rose glanced at Delaney, who saw unspoken emotion in her eyes. Pity. Or sorrow.

“Come on,” she said. “I make you some tea.”

He drank his tea in the Irish way, with milk and two sugars. Rose used a wedge of lemon and resisted the sugar. She folded her thin, sweatered arms and leaned on the table and talked about the man with the gun.

“They call him Gyp,” she said. “Like one out of three gangsters. Once a week in the Daily News, they find some dead cafone in Brooklyn and his name is Gyp. Gyp Santucci… Gyp Ferraro… This guy, his name is Gyp Pavese. He lives with his mother up Spring Street. Thirty-fi’ years old, he lives wit’ his mother.”

“How do you know all this?” Delaney said, wanting to know about Gyp, wanting to know more about Rose.

“When I first come to America,” she said, “ I live in the same block as Gyp, across the street with a family from Genoa. I see him every day, dressed in clothes he can’t afford, so I know he’s a gangster. The people in my house say he’s a knife guy. Couldn’t fight Carlito and win, so he uses a knife on people.” She turned her head as if embarrassed at what she was about to say. “One time, he comes to me, he says, ‘Hey, baby, you gotta go out with me.’ I say, ‘No thanks.’ Well, that makes him crazy, ’cause he thinks he’s Rudolph Valentino. He asks me again, then again, until I say, ‘Don’t ask me again, Gyp.’ ” She smiled. “Or else, goddamn it.”

About six strands of her hair had fallen loose, like brushstrokes. She sipped her tea, then went silent, as if she did not want to go on. She was like so many patients who had sat across from him and told only part of their story.

“But that wasn’t the end of the story, was it?” he said.

“No.”

“Tell me the rest.”

She took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Well, the people from Genoa, my landlords, they worry all the time, they don’t want trouble with gangsters. And so I move away, and live in Angela’s house awhile.” A muscle twitched in her cheek. “All this is, what? Five, six years ago…”

She drummed her nails on the tabletop. They were square and blocky and carefully trimmed. She seemed hesitant, as if afraid she was telling Delaney too much about herself.

“But Gyp didn’t give up?” Delaney said.

She looked at him, then at the wall above the stove. “No. For a long time, I don’t see him. Then I hear he’s in jail. Good, I think, that’s where he belongs, with his crazy mother too. I relax. Then I hear he’s out of jail. Still, I’m okay. You know, it’s New York: you move five blocks away, it’s a different world. And I had lots of work. Cook-ing. Making hats. Sewing dresses. Stuff like that. Piecework, too, blouses…”

“And then Gyp came back.”

“You got it, Dottore,” she said. Nodding her head. “One morning I come out of the house, there’s Gyp. Dressed all sharp, with a gray hat like tonight. He says he wants to see me, he’s been in love with me for years, and then he says, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody else can have you.’ ”

She poked at the tea with a spoon. “What’s the word? A threat?” Delaney nodded, encouraging her to go on. “Anyway, I think about going a long ways away, like California. Maybe China! I explain everything to Angela, and she says, ‘Don’t worry, I take care of this.’ And she does. She talks to someone, and Mr. Someone talks to someone else, and Gyp stays away.” She moved her head from side to side. “Until tonight.”

Delaney sipped his tea, which was turning cold.

“He was there because of me, not you.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Delaney said, “Who were the guys in the car?”

“From the Frankie Botts mob. Up by Bleecker Street. The Naples boys.”

“Frankie Botts?”

“Frankie Botticelli.”

“Like the painter?”

“You know Sandro Botticelli?” she said, and smiled. “From Firenze? There’s a painting he painted, you know, very famous. A naked lady with long hair, coming out of a clamshell. You know that painting? Venus! I used to look like that, except I’m never a blonde.” Then she blushed, as if afraid the doctor might think she was flirting. She waved a hand in an airy way. “You know…”

For the first time, Delaney tried to imagine Rose naked. And stopped. And remembered buying a large framed print of Birth of Venus for Grace, on her fourteenth birthday. Her young eyes widened, and she stood before it, breathing deeply, flexing and unflexing her hands. Her hands then moved toward the tabouret, for paint and a brush. Poor Venus hung on the wall upstairs for a long time, and when Grace left with her man, the Botticelli went with her. Wherever that might be.

Rose broke the flash of reverie. “When Eddie Corso got shot, most people knew what happened. There’s no secrets in Little Italy. They know he is shot by guys from Frankie Botts.” A pause. “From Club 65, on Bleecker Street.”

“Why?”

“Who knows? These people kill you for stepping on their shoes sometimes. But what I hear, it’s about Eddie Corso saying no to shmeck.”

“Heroin.”

“I guess. Shmeck, shmeck… it’s like a Jewish word, they use it all the time now.”

Delaney finished the tea. He gazed out at the snow falling in the yard and remembered Eddie calling for morphine in a muddy field.

“Me? I think Gyp is the guy shot Eddie. Anybody else would of killed him.” She got up. “You want more tea?”

“No. Thank you, Rose. No.”

She took his cup and rinsed it.

“I hear four other guys got killed this week,” Rose said flatly. “The News had some little story in the back about two of them, but it didn’t mention Eddie Corso or Frankie Botts. Tonight? I guess they want to find Eddie and finish the job.”

Delaney sighed.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Jesus Christ got nothing to do with it.”

He couldn’t sleep in the silent house. He glanced at the newspapers, reading about Roosevelt and the Import-Export Bank, and how La Guardia had ordered a big trash basket for his office, one he could use, he said, as his main filing cabinet. In the Times there was a story about the Nazis on page 23 and what Chancellor Hitler was planning, but there were few details. He lifted the books of poetry beside the bed: Yeats and Lord Byron and Walt Whitman. On some nights he tried to read at least one poem as if it were a prayer. But on this night his eyes glazed. He kept thinking about Gyp and the hoodlums and the danger that never goes away from the world.

He turned out the bedside lamp and lay in the dark, wishing he could pray. Not just mouth words. But pray as he did as a boy at Sacred Heart, in hope of divine intercession. He wanted to pray, above all, for Carlito, asking that he be kept safe to live a life. Safe from incurable disease. Safe from idiots with guns. Or knives. He wanted to pray for Grace too, for her to be safe wherever she was, on her way to the strange cities of the world. If he could pray, he would whisper something for Eddie Corso too, that he would be free of ambush or accident in his plunge along southbound roads. He would pray for Rose, that she stay alive through what was coming with the boy, that she could help him be for the boy what he had never been for Grace. That she could keep pushing her tough warmth into the house, and her street wisdom, and her decent heart. He hoped she would not fall in love with some man and vanish from their lives. He would pray for Rose, and pray for Angela too, and Knocko, and Zimmerman, and the nuns, and all the imperiled people of his daily passage.

But he had lost prayer somewhere along the way, along with faith. He had been educated to deal with the body, not the soul. In the Argonne, he lost what remained of the affairs of the soul, among the torn and broken bodies of the young, until the day came that he cursed God.

Now he lay without sleep. He knew all the magic potions that men and women used in order to sleep: pills and powders and whiskey and sex. But after his own wound, after the red mist that enclosed him for more than a week, after the hospital and the months of recovery and the return to New York, he had determined to live his life without anesthesia.

Who are you, mister? Grace said on the day he came home. She was just five years old.

I’m your father, Grace.

I don’t believe you.

And Molly said: Yes, Grace, he’s your father.

The girl burst into weeping and fled to the next room.

And Molly said: You see what you’ve done?

Yes, he could see what he had done. He saw it in Grace. He saw it in Molly. Over the weeks that followed, the little girl came around. She was cautious at first. Tentative. But she started hugging his good arm and sitting on his lap and giggling when he tickled her. But Molly never came around. He was certain that she had taken a lover while he was at the war. He did not confront her with his suspicion. She said nothing that would feed it. But if she had found someone else, at least for a while, he could not blame her. She was young, and handsome, and full of longings. Right here. In the world of aching flesh. But he was Quixote without a lance. Off to the war, to save human beings, a knight errant with a scalpel and a stethoscope. But the Illustrious Don of Cervantes had no children. And no wife. And he had Sancho Panza to ground him in the real world. And when the enchanters returned the Don for the final time to his home, there were no unspoken accusations. Before Delaney could strip away his ribbons and his medals and send his uniform to the army-navy store for sale to some fortunate young man who had skipped the war, he knew how much had changed. Delaney was standing in the dock, indicted by his wife’s chilly scorn and his daughter’s initial flight — even if that flight was only from one room to another. And it wasn’t only Molly and little Grace. On the streets of the neighborhood he picked up the bitter glances of those who had lost sons in France while Delaney had survived. They would never forgive him for living. And there were other charges in the indictment. While he was at the war, his mother and father had died in a vile way, two days apart. So had others, of course, including many thousands of soldiers. No doctor could have saved any of them, surely not Delaney. But he could not ever be certain what might have happened had he stayed. Molly had sent him newspaper clippings saying that Big Jim and his wife had one of the largest funerals in the history of the West Village, on a day when no wind blew off the North River and the sun glared on the old cobblestones. On one clipping Molly had scrawled: “You should have been there. M.” He could not tell whether she was scolding him or comforting him, or both. But some facts were beyond argument: his parents had died of the influenza, his wife and child were in danger, and Delaney wasn’t there. He was in the hospital in France. And when he came home at last, he could not even pray for them.

Then he realized that in the list of people for whom he wished he could pray, he had left out Molly.

Yes, Molly: I would pray for you too, if I could.

At last, he slept.

The telephone rang in the morning dark. He reached for it and knocked some books off the night table.

“Hello?”

He heard breathing, but no words.

“Hello? This is Dr. Delaney.”

“You better remember, Doc,” the voice said. Low. Menacing. Burred by cigarettes.

Delaney sighed, reached over, and switched on the light. It was ten after six.

“Listen, pal,” he said, in a tough voice that he tried to make reasonable. “Don’t do this. I have nothing to remember. I don’t know where Eddie Corso is or where he went. He could be in Staten Island. He could be in Utah. He could be in Russia. I don’t have a clue. Don’t call me again.”

“We know where you live.”

“The whole neighborhood knows where I live.”

A pause, then: “We know where the kid lives.”

Then Delaney felt the old West Side hardness rise in him for the first time in years, the fury of every street kid that came off the North River.

“You son of a bitch, Gyp,” he said. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“Remember fast.”

Then a click and silence.

Delaney got up then, stepping on Yeats and Lord Byron, pulsing with fear and rage. He ripped off the nightshirt. He faced the mirror and threw savage punches at the air. Hook after hook after hook. His mouth was clamped shut and he snorted through his nose. He snarled. He shuddered. Touch that boy, he thought, and I’ll fucking kill you.

Delaney washed quietly in the hour before daylight. He dressed in silence, before easing down the stairs to his office. As soon as it was light, he would call his friends on the cops: Danny Shapiro and Jackie Norris. He would call Knocko Carmody. One of them would find Gyp and lean on him a little. If they can’t find him, he thought, I will.

He could smell the coffee before he saw Rose. The aroma moved under the door, through the cold morning air. Then there was a knock.

“Come in.”

Rose entered, with a single cup on a tray, steam rising in the chill, a sugar bowl, a spoon. Her bathrobe was pulled tight.

“You want some toast, Dottore?” she said softly.

“Let’s wait for the boy,” he said. He stared at his desk. “I got a call a little while ago.”

“I know,” she said. “I hear it ringing.”

“It was Gyp,” he said.

“That bastid. Excuse me. What’d he say?”

He told her, and laid out plans for defending themselves. Defending the house. Defending Rose and Monique and the boy. She listened carefully.

Then the boy was there, squinting at them. He paused, then hurried to hug Rose’s hips.

Later in the morning, he and Rose and Monique began building their fortress. Time moved quickly, although it seemed like only a few hours in a day busy with patients, here in the hall, out there in the tenements, off at the hospital. In fact, the work took four days. A locksmith arrived and added locks to the doors in front and back. An ornamental ironworker named Buscarelli took measurements for window guards, and they were in place two days later. Jimmy Spil-lane, wiry and dour, arrived with a short mustached carpenter named Mickey Mendoza, and Rose showed them into the basement with the boy tagging along. They went floor by floor, looking for places to install steam pipes and radiators. When they were finished, and Delaney left a patient to say good-bye, Mendoza said, in wonder:

“This kid speaks Spanish!”

“That’s right,” Delaney said.

“Sicilian too,” Rose said.

“Where’d he learn Spanish like that? I’m from Puerto Rico and —”

“Mexico. He was there with his mother. He’s a fast learner.”

“I’m very impressed,” Mendoza said, rubbing the boy’s head as he moved to the door. “Hasta pronto, joven.”

“Hasta pronto,” the boy said. “Que le vaya bien!”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Mendoza said, and smiled as he and Jimmy Spillane went out. Spillane said glumly that they’d have an estimate the following morning. He said almost nothing else. When they were gone, Rose looked at Delaney.

“Why’s this guy Spillane so unhappy?” she said.

Delaney sighed. “His mother came here one morning, maybe six years ago. I sent her to St. Vincent’s. She died there.”

Rose nodded but said nothing.

“Excuse me, but I have to work,” Delaney said. He leaned down and hugged Carlito. “Be good, joven.”

By afternoon there were new rules. The boy could no longer come to the area where the sick assembled. He couldn’t come while they were there. He couldn’t come when they were gone until after the place had been scoured of germs and microbes. Or at least most of them. The boy had to be kept safe from many things.

“I’ll get someone to come in every day,” Delaney said to Rose. “You’ll never have time. Someone who can scrub the place down with disinfectant.”

“I can do it.”

“No, you can’t. Help me find someone.”

By the end of the week, Rose had found a black woman named Bessie. She was bone thin, and asked Delaney to examine her for tuberculosis before she started working around the boy. “My brother Roy, he got it,” she explained. “You never know.” Delaney examined her. She didn’t have it. She began to arrive every afternoon for an hour, when the patients were gone. She wore gloves and a surgical mask, and was paid two dollars a week. The boy looked at her with curiosity, a woman with ebony skin, and resisted his banishment from the bottom hall, but Rose enforced the new rules.

“You can’t get sick,” she said to the boy. “You got too much to learn.”

It wasn’t only sickness that Delaney feared. Patients arrived without appointment. The door must be open. It could be open to some gunsel too. A punk like Gyp might fire shots at everyone. Or act on his implied threat and snatch the boy. On that first morning, Delaney explained to Rose and Monique about the phone call, and made his own calls to Danny Shapiro at the precinct, to Angela, to Knocko Carmody. They would watch the streets, listen for rumors, issue warnings. Shapiro was a tough young wiry detective, and said: “They won’t get close enough to that kid to tell the color of his eyes.”

And Rose blurted out fiercely: “They try to snatch Carlito, they gotta go through me.”

Delaney said that wouldn’t be necessary, but he was not truly sure. Once every hour or so, fear opened and closed in his stomach like a fist. He warded it off by focusing on the fear rising from his patients, but when the last patient was gone, the last house call made, he imagined gunmen in the shadows. Or the knife artist named Gyp.

“There’s someone across the street in a car,” Monique said on the second morning.

Delaney went upstairs to his bedroom window and peered out through the curtains. He smiled and came downstairs.

“It’s two of Knocko’s boys,” he said. “Keeping an eye out.”

“That didn’t take long,” she said.

“Make sure they get some coffee.”

Later, Delaney rummaged deep into a bedroom closet and found the old Louisville Slugger that Big Jim had given to him in 1894, when he turned eight. Dried black tape was loose on the handle. He hefted the bat, feeling its weight, sensing its memory of doubles and ground-outs, and then leaned it against the wall between the bed and the night table. After rounds, he stopped by Billy McNiff’s and bought two more bats, each engraved with the signature of Mel Ott.

“A little cold for baseball,” McNiff said.

“Spring is coming, Billy.”

“That kid play ball?”

“He will.”

“How old is he anyway?”

“Old enough.”

On the way home, he began thinking of cutting a separate stairway into the back kitchen. To keep the boy away from patients and anyone else who might come in the door. He could not close the kitchen to Carlito, because the boy loved its Sicilian aura of plenitude, its position as a kind of warm center of the chilly house, and its entry into the garden. Delaney thought: I’ll call Knocko to send over a carpenter to make an estimate. At home, Delaney placed one new bat beside Monique’s desk and gave the second to Rose. She gripped the handle awkwardly, then smiled at Delaney.

“I don’t know nothin’ about baseball,” she said.

“I’ll teach you if you want. But this isn’t for playing ball.”

“It’s for breaking a head, right?”

“Right.”

She smiled in an odd way, then swung the bat sharply through the air, upper teeth clamped over her lower lip. He showed her how to hold the bat, and she swung again. This time something cold came into her eyes.

If Eddie Corso indirectly had created the sense of siege on Horatio Street, the bounty of Eddie Corso was providing solutions. Delaney thought with a chuckle: Maybe I can cut into the cornice on the roof and set up archers. To peer across the empty lot toward Jane Street. Aiming arrows. To pierce the hide of anyone they see with a mortar. Or a lance. Maybe we can take over the roof of the empty Logan house, the high ground. Maybe we can arrange snares that fall on a signal. Or string barbed wire all the way to the North River. Maybe…

The weather warmed on Thursday and the snow was gone on Friday. When Delaney went on house calls now, he noticed men standing in small groups at all corners of the block and on one of the rooftops across the street. The faces were not always the same. But he could pick out Knocko’s boys, with their derby hats, and Danny Shapiro wandering from the precinct, and a few of the regulars from Angela’s. All of them protecting their own, which, Delaney thought, in this case happens to be me. And the boy. And Monique. And Rose. I can never move now.

“It’s like a block party around here,” Rose said, and laughed. “How many of these guys — I mean your guys — you think have guns?” Delaney said he didn’t want to know. In the places where he made house calls, neighbors nodded, and waited in the vestibules like guards. The word was out. This wasn’t just a neighborhood. Delaney knew that it was a point of view, a way of looking at the world and living in it. They all believed in the unions, the longshoremen, the teamsters, the carpenters, the steamfitters, and so did their wives. Even out of work, the men were out of work as union men. In the twenties, more than a few of them had had their heads cracked in fights on picket lines, men like little Patty Rafferty, who sat now with vacant eyes in the dock wallopers’ union hall. Some had cracked a few heads themselves. But they got the union, forever. They had voted for Roosevelt and said so, and some had voted for La Guardia and didn’t say so, because they had never voted for a Republican in their lives. Now some of them were communists, vehement and certain, but Delaney was sure that wouldn’t last. The communists did not easily forgive sin. On the West Side, sin and its forgiveness were part of the deal.

That’s why he’d come back here. That’s why he’d returned to make a second life with Molly and Grace after the war had destroyed so many things, including the certainties of that first life. These were his people. They needed him. They still did. And he needed them. They would fight if threatened, and he would fight for them, and with them. He would try to prolong their lives. Or save them. He would help them move their children through the ceaseless dangers of the streets. He would try as hard as he could to ease their pain. To bring them sleep. To give them another day, another week, another year. The reason was simple. Here all sins were forgiven. Even the sins of James Finbar Delaney.

On Sunday, the blessed day without patients, Rose was off work, wandering alone into the city. Delaney tried to convince her to stay home, but she only laughed. “Those bums can’t fight when the sun is out. Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.” And was gone.

Delaney took Carlito by the hand and walked down to Washington Street. The sun was bright and hard. They stood for a long time watching a lone freight train move on the High Line, testing the track, groaning, pulling loads of unseen cargo, bells ringing, steel wheels squealing, entering buildings from the north side and emerging on the south. He tried to see this wonder through the boy’s eyes. Were these huge right-angled animals? Were they controlled monsters? Whatever he thought, the boy didn’t want to leave.

“Tray,” he said, pointing a mittened hand at a train. And adding, when it was gone, “More tray.”

I will get him a picture book about trains, Delaney thought. And about animals. And the alphabet. He will learn to name the world. All of its plants and living creatures, its seas and ships, its cabbages and kings. In the spring, I will get him a book about baseball. And show him the photographs in the Daily News, of a man sliding into second base with the shortstop above him, firing to first for a double play.

Then they walked to the North River, empty on this cold day of rest. Only the train was moving behind them. He saw one of Knocko’s boys watching from a discreet distance, hat pulled low, hands jammed in pockets. The boy stared in wonder at three huge ships tied to the few waterfront piers that were not emptied by the Depression. He saw a seagull descending in a diminishing circle and landing on a grimy piling. Then Delaney led him onto the abandoned pier where he and Molly had walked on summer evenings. He held the boy’s small hand all the way, feeling the warmth. He wondered where Rose had gone on this empty Sunday. The North River was filled with broken boulders of ice, and Delaney explained the chunks to the boy, and how the river carried them away to the harbor to the left and then to the ocean, and the boy watched with great intensity. I will find a book about ships and rivers and the ocean sea.

Standing on the timbers of the pier, holding the boy’s hand, Delaney realized that after a long frozen time, there was a fresh current in his own life too.

When he was in bed in the dark, longing for sleep, Delaney’s patients vanished. The commandos of the neighborhood’s self-defense corps had retired to quarters. Monique was off in her night place. Rose was upstairs with her dictionary and her Daily News beside her and a baseball bat in the corner. There were no sounds in the dark house. And yet he trembled. Afraid of sleep. For the boy now filled too many of his dreams.

One night he saw Carlito falling from the Brooklyn Bridge, calling, calling, his voice pathetic and pleading, vanishing into the black waters. On another night, the boy was running on Horatio Street toward the High Line and fell into an open sewer, into the place where cholera lived, and typhoid and polio. On a third night, the boy was at the rail of a freighter glazed with ice, carrying him away from a North River pier into the unseen Atlantic. And on another night, on the same icy ship, the boy started to climb the rail, as if to dive in and swim to shore, and his mother was suddenly there, Grace herself, pulling him back, the faces of both distorted with fear. That night he called to Grace to hold the boy, and then woke up at the sound of his own voice.

On this Sunday night, he huddled there in the dark, his heart thumping. Longing for sleep to come, in spite of dreams.

He woke abruptly from a dream of Carlito one night, the boy wedged in the gluey mud of a trench, wearing pajamas among helmeted men while explosions shook the earth. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. Delaney lay there, heart pounding, his eyes blinking, and then saw a glow.

Against the far side of the room the glow was pale white, tinged with blue, as shimmery and pale as a watercolor. He stared. And then, like atoms coalescing, a figure formed, sitting in the wing chair.

It was Molly.

“Hello, James,” she whispered.

He started to get up, to go to her.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Stay there.”

He rose to his elbows, his heart now racing.

“Is it really you?” he said.

She didn’t answer for a while.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. She was wearing an overcoat and laced boots, but he could see her high cheekbones, the wide-spaced eyes, the lustrous hair, the long-fingered hands.

“I had to go away,” she said. “It was the only way I could live.”

“Where did you go?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “To green fields. To soft rain. To music in mountains. Everywhere, James.”

“But why?”

“To be free. And so you could be free too. Free of me.”

“I didn’t want to be free of you.”

“But look at you. You have the boy. And you look happier than you ever were with me.”

“Please, Molly, stay. Don’t go away. Stay with me. And the boy, and we’ll wait for Grace to return, and —”

He slipped out of bed now to go to her, to hold her, to embrace her, to weep into her hair.

“I must go,” she said.

He took a few steps. And then she was gone. The glow faded into blackness.

Delaney turned to his pillow but did not weep.