North River

SEVEN

WHEN THEY TURNED INTO HORATIO STREET, THE WATCHERS were still there. Two of Knocko’s boys. A plainclothes dick sent by Shapiro. One was facing the house from across the street, the others off to left and right, guarding the block, each with a view of the house. Delaney nodded to each of them. They nodded back, seeing Rose carrying the bag with the pint of ice cream. The shades were drawn in the Cottrell house, the boards still nailed shut in the house to the left, where so many Logans died in so few minutes.

They went into the front yard, and Delaney gave the watchers a little wave.

“We have to get these guys some coffee,” he said.

“Of course.”

The boy was in Monique’s room, seated on a chair, his small legs dangling. The paddleball on the floor. He leaped up and ran to Rose. An odd emotion brushed across Monique’s face: annoyance. Or relief. But she said nothing.

He called Knocko and then Shapiro and told them about his meeting with Frankie Botts. Each said the same thing: It ain’t over, so watch your ass.

Rose brought coffee in a thermos to the watchers and handed each a cup. When she returned, her face was still ruddy from the cold. They had cheese sandwiches, each grilled into what she called a panino, and then they ate the ice cream. Delaney felt it move cleanly into his stomach, calming him. He was sure he felt even more creamy pleasure from the ice cream than the boy did himself. On the radio, Bing Crosby was singing “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby.”

“You okay, Dottore?” Rose said.

“For now. What about you?”

“For now,” she said. “For now.”

Delaney hugged the boy and then dressed to go out on house calls. He returned at dusk. Kids were everywhere. He saw Mr. Cottrell step out of his daily taxi, locked in his permanent solitude. Knocko’s men were still there. He dined with Rose and the boy on soup and bread, the boy delighted with both. Then the telephone rang in Delaney’s office.

Rose gave him an ominous look. The phone kept ringing. Delaney hurried into his office and lifted the black receiver.

“Dr. Delaney here,” he said.

“Hey, what’s doing?”

Danny Shapiro, with a chuckle in his cop’s voice.

“Hey, Danny,” Delaney said, trying to smother the nerves in his voice. “Everything’s normal here. Thanks to you and the rest of the neighborhood.”

“Just checking,” Shapiro said. “Hug that little boy.”

“I will.”

He stood there for a beat, then returned to the kitchen. Rose saw the relieved look on his face and smiled.

Alone in bed, Delaney saw again the metallic sunken eyes of Frankie Botts. Actors worked long hours in front of mirrors to master that look. But actors fired blanks. Botts had killed people, and would kill more. The offense didn’t matter. Killing was a form of power. He imagined a ballpark. A river in flood. The olive tree in the garden, bursting into life. Anything but Frankie’s eyes. He fell into a light sleep. There were no phone calls.

But in a dream, Delaney saw the boy in pajamas, walking the shoulder of a midnight highway. Trucks and cars roared by, while the boy kept saying, “Mamá… Mamá… Mamá.” Over and over again. Then a Packard pulled over on the shoulder, behind the boy. A man in a fedora and long coat stepped out. Delaney started running to them, and then the snow came. No highway now. No trucks. No Packard. No coiled man in a long overcoat. No boy. Just the snow whining and blowing.

And Delaney woke up with his heart beating fast and the echo of a word in the dark room. He knew that the word must have been “Carlito.”

In the morning, Rose smiled in a tentative way. The radio was on, with news from distant places. The boy walked into the kitchen, still bleary with sleep.

“Good morn’, Rose. Good morn’, Ga’paw.”

Rose hugged him.

“Good morning, Carlos. You wash your hands?”

He nodded yes, then corrected himself.

“No,” he said, and hurried off to the upstairs bathroom.

“First he tells a lie, like all kids,” she said. “Then he changes his mind and tells the truth.”

“That’s a good habit to develop.”

“He’ll never be a politician,” Rose said.

“You never know.”

When the boy returned, his face was damp from washing. The room filled with the odor of frying bacon. He smiled.

“Goody,” he said. “Bay-con!”

“You said it, boy,” Rose said. “Very goody.”

Delaney glanced at the Daily News. In Germany, the Nazis had rewritten the Psalms. In Vienna, there was talk of a socialist rising and Chancellor Dollfuss promised to smash it with all the power of the state. He remembered seeing Dollfuss at a street rally in Vienna: a small, vehement young man, lashing out at journalists who made fun of his size. Now he had power. And small men with guns were dangerous people.

He turned to the back page, where only sports mattered. There was a photo of Mel Ott after connecting with a ball during a spring training game in Miami Beach. Behind him in the box seats could be seen the blurred faces of exultant fans. Delaney was sure that a man in the third row, shaking a fist, was Eddie Corso. Out of focus. With a beard. And thought: Frankie Botts must read the News too.

He went on his house calls, charged with wary energy as he moved through the cold bright afternoon. He walked with energy, climbed stairs with energy, spoke energy into his patients. As he walked, he ignored the three feet of sidewalk directly in front of him and looked at everything. At men. At strange faces. At cars. It was dark when he came home. A lone guard sat in a parked car, a lone window open an inch to cut the steam on the windows. One of Knocko’s muscle boys. They exchanged waves. Rose was humming some vagrant tune as she heated his meatballs and dropped pasta into boiling water. Carlito was upstairs in his bed.

“You look better,” Rose said. “Color in your face…”

“It’s the wind, not me, Rose.”

“No phone calls today — I mean, from those guys.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re right. There’s too much goddamn worry around here.”

She ladled out the pasta and added the sauce, placed the food before him, and sat down to a cup of tea. The bread had been freshened in the oven.

“And Carlito?” Delaney said.

“Okay. He’s a good boy. But I told him, no more ice cream till his birthday.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll get fat, that’s why not. Get to look like a balloon in the Thanksgivin’ Day parade.”

Delaney laughed and so did Rose. He felt that this was now her domain, the room she ruled, as if she had been here for years.

After dinner he went into his office, the door open behind him. There were two new medical magazines, mail from St. Vincent’s, and a large envelope from the alumni association at Johns Hopkins, surely soliciting money. He put aside the medical magazines. For a long time now, he only glanced at the journals of his trade, looking at them within the context of his patients. He wanted to read about a vaccine that would cure their ailments. Stop gangrene. End tuberculosis. Dry up gonorrhea. These breakthroughs never came. And he never read the articles on advances in surgery.

Underneath the newspapers was a sealed letter. Addressed to him in Grace’s handwriting. With a Spanish stamp and postmark. He held it for a long moment. Then Rose was at the door, and he slipped it into his pocket.

“You better go read that upstairs,” Rose said. Her eyes were full of some unsettled mixture of pity and resentment.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Then go,” she said. “I’ll close up down here.”

“See you in the morning,” he said. Feeling all energy flee.

He laid the letter on the bed while he undressed. He washed and brushed his teeth, hearing Rose climbing the stairs, and then was alone in the silence. He donned pajamas and his robe and the old battered leather slippers. There was no sound from the street either, except the whine of the wind. He built a small fire to take the chill off the room. Then he was ready to sit down to read.

This time he did not weep. He read Grace’s letter again, and looked for his fountain pen to write a reply. Full of anger. The pen was not in his jacket. He must have left it on his desk. And now, a sense of relief brought on drowsiness, and he did not want to go back down the stairs. He knew where Grace was. At least he had that. He knew that five days earlier she was safe enough to sit at a café table and write to him. His reply could wait until morning. Perhaps by then his fury would be gone, like the end of a fever. He moved to the bed and picked up Byron, but he did not read. He thought: Tomorrow I must buy a camera.

He slipped a hundred-dollar bill inside the envelope, and a second sheet of blank paper to hide it better, then addressed the envelope and sealed it. He sat there for a long moment. He had erased his anger. He hoped his words were not too cold or pompous. Then he heard the boy jumping down the stairs. “Ga’paw!” the boy shouted. “Ga’paw!”

They came in a steady line: two men who needed quinine; a sixteen-year-old girl with permanent headaches; a haggard man who had been coughing for seven weeks; a man suffering from what was surely leukemia; a fat wheezing woman whose swollen legs refused to take her across a room; a woman with tuberculosis who could never afford the pampered exile of Saranac Lake. He did what he could.

Monique went off to mail the letter to Barcelona and to buy a cheap camera and some film. Her annoyed look was still in place. I have to talk to her, find out… Then the last patient was gone, and Delaney sat there looking at old mail. He tore some of it in half and dropped it in his wastebasket. He riffled through the Daily News. The phone kept ringing, but Delaney ignored it. Then an aggravated Rose came through from the kitchen and lifted the receiver.

“Dr. Delaney’s office,” she said, the way Monique always answered the phone. She listened, then picked up a pencil.

“What’s the address, you know, where you live?”

She wrote down the details. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll tell the doctor. No, I don’t know what time he can come. Fast as he can. But in the afternoon, after he eats.”

She started for the kitchen, and the telephone rang again. She sat down in Monique’s chair and picked it up.

“Dr. Delaney’s office. Okay, what’s the problem? You got stabbed? Where? No, I don’t mean your house, I mean what part of your body? The knee? Where was your boyfriend — on the floor? Lady, listen to me, listen to me, okay? The doctor don’t do house calls for stabbings! That’s for the cops. You call the cops right now, okay?”

Now Carlito was there too, trying to understand what was keeping Rose from the kitchen, and Delaney was standing in the open doorway to his office, looking down at Rose and smiling.

“You’re doing great, Rose.”

“These people, your patients, they’re all a little crazy, ain’t they?”

She looked at him in a blank way.

Delaney smiled again and said: “They have good reason, some of them.”

Monique came in near the end of lunch, her face ruddy from the cold, carrying a small bag. She sat at her desk, saw the notes made by Rose. Delaney came to her.

“Someone’s been sitting at my desk,” she said in an arch way, as if telling a child a story about bears.

“Yeah, the phone kept ringing, and Rose —”

“It’s my desk, Jim,” she said in a clipped way.

“Of course it is.”

“You want her to do my job, send me home.”

She was more than annoyed now; she was angry.

“Ah, Monique, for God’s sake —”

“She’s taking over this house. I don’t like it.”

Delaney sighed. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Better you than me.”

“I need you, Monique.”

“Yeah.”

She took a new Brownie from the bag and explained it in a crisp way to Delaney, the two of them examining the apparatus and reading the instructions and inserting a roll of film.

“You can figure out the rest,” Monique said, and sat down at her desk. Delaney thought: Maybe her boyfriend has moved to Alaska.

On Sunday morning, puttering in the kitchen with Carlito, Delaney saw Rose as she was leaving. She had light makeup on her cheeks and a faint trace of lipstick on her mouth. Her long blue coat was brushed clean, and the wide shoes were polished. She did not say where she was going, and he did not ask. It was Sunday. Her day. And it would be foolish to worry about her. She smiled as she handed him the camera. Carlito hugged her hips.

“You remember how you do this?” she said.

“I think so.”

“Maybe you better get more film, Dottore.”

She said “film” the way the Irish said it. Two syllables.

“Maybe you could get a shoeshine too.” She smiled. “You de-serve it.”

“Okay, Rose.”

Then she was gone. He thought: Maybe she goes to church. Maybe she has relatives here that she’s never mentioned. Maybe she has a lover.

Delaney and Carlito walked under a cold sun to Astor Place, to pick up the Lexington Avenue local. The boy’s mittened hand was warm, and he gazed at everything he saw. Delaney helped him in the naming of the world. Newsstand. Garbage can. Bus. Taxi. Car. Lamppost. Sidewalk. Street. All nouns. He was still too young for most verbs.

“This is the subway,” Delaney explained, as they entered the kiosk at Fourth Avenue. He glanced left at the many used-book stores that stretched to Union Square. A woman carried a heavy bag of books into one of them, perhaps to raise the cash to eat for three days.

“Ubway,” Carlito said.

“S-s-s-subway,” Delaney said.

“S-s-s-subway,” Carlito said.

“Good!”

“Sssssubway!”

They passed through the turnstile to the crowded platform. Fewer trains were running on Sundays, to save money, but nobody seemed irritated by the long wait. It was Sunday. Delaney held the boy’s hand more tightly. Many people were reading the Daily News, starting with the sports section in the back of the paper and moving forward. Others were absorbed by Dick Tracy or Orphan Annie in the Sunday color comics. In the distance, they could all hear a train deep in the tunnel, and they shifted, stepped back from the edge of the platform, tucked the newspapers under their arms. Carlito’s eyes widened as the train rolled into the station, its wheels squealing, the air shoved aside, and lurched to a sudden halt.

“Tray!” the boy said. “Big tray!”

They stepped inside the car, the boy absorbing everything: the many people, their woolen odor. Every seat was taken on the long straw-covered benches, and Delaney grabbed an overhead handle and held on to Carlito with his free hand, after checking the bulk of the camera in his pocket. He did not explain to the boy about pickpockets. Carlito was standing directly in front of a heavy light-skinned black woman with a flowered hat. She was reading a Bible. No doubt heading uptown to church. He looked down and realized that Carlito was staring at the woman. She was not as dark as Bessie, the woman who came to clean. Her skin was more golden than black. The boy looked up at Delaney, and mouthed the word “Mamá” with a puzzled look on his face. Delaney squeezed his hand, thinking: Perhaps he’s thinking of the bronze skins of Mexico. Perhaps this woman reminds him of what was left behind, and thus of his mother. The woman could feel the boy’s stare. She looked at him, smiled, and returned to the Old Testament. Carlito smiled too.

They made all the stops, Union Square, Twenty-third Street, Twenty-eighth Street, Thirty-third Street, and finally came into Grand Central. They turned to leave with almost all the other passengers, but the black woman sat there, determined to go on to a place where she could worship her God among her own people. Carlito smiled at her and said, “Bye.” She smiled back and said, “Bye-bye, little boy.”

Delaney took the boy’s hand to climb the stairs out of the subway. They were halfway to the top when the boy paused and looked behind him, as if memorizing the route. It was as if his eyes were also shutters. Delaney reached down and started to lift him, but the boy resisted: he did not want to be carried. They came to the top, and the boy stopped to watch a man in a business suit getting his shoes polished. What was this?

“Shoeshine,” Delaney said.

“Hoo-shy,” the boy said.

Delaney pointed at his own scuffed shoes and repeated the word, and remembered Rose in her wide men’s shoes.

“Hoo-shine,” the boy said, and they moved on. They saw a small crowd gathered around a bone-thin banjo player who was singing “Swanee” for the New Yorkers. Carlito stared at the man’s hand, strumming the banjo. He stood blinking, remembering something. Does he hear the guitars of Mexico? Is some memory of his father making a move? The boy turned to Delaney and pointed at the banjo player’s rat-colored boots, worn without socks.

“Hoo-shine,” the boy said.

“Yes, Carlito. He needs a shoeshine. But then, so do I.”

They walked on and passed under a wide arch, and then they were in the main concourse, and Delaney felt again as astonished as the boy must feel. He and Carlito just stood there, as some people hurried past them to departing trains while others stared at announcement boards, listening to an amplified voice barking about tracks and times. The voice caromed off such an immense plenitude of marble that it was almost unintelligible, and many people turned to one another, as if saying, “What track?”

Delaney could tell from their clothes and movement which people had jobs. The best-dressed people walked with a sense of destination. The others were in a permanent waiting room. The boy gazed around him, seeing beams of light pushing down from high arched windows to the station floor, and a ceiling that was blue and flecked with stars, and a wide marble staircase rising as if in a palace.

“Grand Central,” Delaney said, waving his arms in an encompassing way, holding the Brownie in his left hand. The boy did not try to say the two words. It was as if the place was so filled with grandeur and complexity that it could not have a name.

Then they walked around the great wide spaces, Delaney wishing there were enough light to make photographs, deciding there wasn’t. Then he saw another shine parlor, with three tall chairs for customers. And thought: Rose was right, I need a shoeshine. I might even deserve it. He led Carlito into the parlor and climbed onto a chair, placing his feet on the polished steel footrests. A small Italian man in his forties started brushing away the stains of winter.

“How’s business?” Delaney said.

“Lousy. Nobody got money for shoeshines.”

“They say it’s getting better.”

“Yeah? I don’t believe dem.” He was applying black polish to the shoes now. The skin of his hands was blacker than the polish.

Standing below him, Carlito was fixed on the process of the shoeshine. A fat man in a velvet-collared overcoat climbed into the empty chair beside Delaney.

“Christ, that’s the best exercise I had in months,” the man said, wheezing. “Climbin’ into this chair, it’s like going to the fifth floor somewhere.”

Delaney glanced at him. The face was familiar, from Big Jim’s club in the old days. And once in a while, at Angela’s. Pink face, veiny nose. He couldn’t remember the name. Delaney nodded a hello.

“Carmine,” the man said, “you gotta make one chair close to the ground. A chair for fat guys.”

“Den where am I gonna work, Judge?” Carmine said. “On my knees?”

They all laughed, and now Carmine was working on the final stage of Delaney’s shine, using saliva to help bring each shoe to a high glistening polish. The boy looked as if he’d seen a magic act. In a way, Delaney thought, given the state of my shoes, that’s what it was.

Delaney smiled in thanks at Carmine and started climbing down from the chair. The fat man paused. He squinted down at Delaney, who passed fifty cents to Carmine’s blackened hand.

“I thought that was you,” the man said. “You’re Big Jim Delaney’s kid, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Harry Flanagan,” the man said, offering a pudgy hand to be shaken. “Please’ to meet ya. I seen you box, before the war, some smoker down Baxter Street. You had a good right hand, I remember that.”

“Thanks.”

“Fast. Right on the button.”

“It’s a long time ago.”

A pause. “It was terrible what happened to your folks.”

“It was.”

“Your father took care of my mother one winter, when we didn’t have what to eat.”

“He took care of a lot of people.”

“You keep boxing in the army?”

“No, I hurt my arm in the war.”

“That goddamned war…”

Carmine was working hard now, while Carlito ignored the talk, staring at Delaney’s shoes.

“Just last night, at the club, I heard you had some trouble, downtown,” Flanagan said, speaking out of an unmoving mouth like an old Whyo, or a Hudson Duster, the baddest of the West Side Irish gangsters.

“We’re working on it,” Delaney said.

Flanagan sighed and shook his head. “These new guys,” he said. “They gotta work it out.” He took a wallet from his jacket pocket and removed a business card.

“I’m a judge now,” he said, handing Delaney the card. “Thanks to your dad.” He smiled at Delaney. “You need anything, call me.”

Then he nodded down at Carlito. “Who’s this guy?”

“My grandson.”

“How are ya, kid?” the judge said. “Don’t let your grandfather make you into a doctor. Get a job that pays.”

“Take care, Judge,” Delaney said, with a laugh. The boy squatted down and touched the gleaming surface of Delaney’s shoes.

“Hoo-shine, Ga’paw,” he said. “Hoo-shine.”

Delaney took the boy by the hand and walked out into the marble grandeur of the station.

They came out onto Lexington Avenue, easing past a man selling the remains of the Sunday newspapers, and two silent men peddling apples, and a woman beggar. They walked to the corner of Forty-second Street. Taxis arrived in a steady line at the station entrance halfway up the block. A heavyset cop in a long coat sipped from a cardboard cup of tea. Horns blared.

“Look up,” Delaney said to Carlito, gesturing above him with the camera.

The boy looked up and released a whoosh of astonished air.

Rising above the sidewalk across the street, glaring white in the hard sun, going higher and higher and higher, aimed into the sky, was the Chrysler Building. Neither Delaney nor the boy could see the top of the spire. They could not see the gargoyles on the sixty-first floor, designed like hood ornaments on Mr. Chrysler’s automobiles. The boy would see them in some future year. But now, on this cold Sunday, he was seeing the largest thing he had ever seen in his life. Delaney named it for him. Then he peered into the viewfinder and framed Carlito as the boy was looking up. He snapped that photograph. Then he snapped another, of the boy pointing, and then a third, squatting low, trying to get the Chrysler into the frame. He was sure he had failed, that the building would be out of focus. Carlito was still gazing into the sky.

They walked now to Forty-third Street, for another view of the immense building. Delaney snapped a few more pictures. They moved toward Third Avenue, where so many little restaurants were clustered under the El. There was a long line of men on the south side of the street, waiting to enter the basement of St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church. To Delaney they looked like prisoners of war. Carlito was puzzled about the mass of men, looking up at their faces, unshaven, gaunt, bleary. Delaney did not try to explain about a soup kitchen. Up a wide slate stoop, the doors of the red-brick church opened and parishioners streamed out, most with pink Irish faces, hats pulled low, scarves around necks. They did not look toward the men waiting for soup. Bells began to ring, calling parishioners to the noon mass. A few arriving men and women saw friends coming out while they went in. They smiled, shook hands, and kept moving. The line of defeated men now reached all the way to Lexington Avenue.

“Let’s eat,” Delaney said to the boy.

Carlito smiled: “Eat! Sí!”

At Third Avenue, they stopped on the corner as an elevated train pulled into the station. Delaney made a picture of Carlito with the El behind him, something that Grace would recognize. He had taken her on the El when she was a little girl, after the war.

“Subway!” the boy said in an excited way.

Delaney pointed at the ground. “No, the subway is down below. This is the El.”

“El?”

“Yes, and we’ll go up those stairs later and ride the El home. Let’s eat first.”

The odor of frying frankfurters drew him into a small place with stools at the counter and three small tables against the wall. The stools and table were full, a sure sign that the food was good. He saw some faces from the stoop of St. Agnes, all chewing, and leaned over the counter and ordered two franks and two orange drinks.

“Hot dogs,” Delaney said.

“Hot dog-sss,” the boy said, perfectly.

“This is mustard,” Delaney said, slathering his own frankfurter with the bright yellow sauce. “You might not like the taste, so first try mine…”

The boy examined Delaney’s hot dog with suspicious eyes. He pushed a tentative finger into the mustard and then tasted it. He made a face. No. He didn’t like mustard. Delaney handed him the plain frankfurter. With his small bare hand, Carlito had some trouble handling the roll and the hot dog together, and after the first bite, which he chewed earnestly, even thoughtfully, he took the frankfurter out of the roll and chewed it with increasing energy, alternating with bites of the roll. Delaney finished his own hot dog.

“That was good,” Delaney said.

“Mmmm. Hmmmm,” the boy said, working on the last succulent inch of his frankfurter.

“Want more?”

Carlito shook his head up and down, smiling with his mouth full. He swallowed and said, “Yes, please, Ga’paw.”

Please? It was the first time he’d heard the boy use the word. Did he teach him to say it, or did Rose? Delaney waved at the counterman and held up two fingers.

They climbed the stairs to the El, both a bit drowsy, their stomachs full. Delaney made a final photograph as the downtown train came into the station. There were plenty of seats, and the boy sat beside him and then turned and gazed out the window at the passing tenements. A light snow was falling. Across the aisle, a young Italian woman sat primly, purse on her lap, avoiding all eye contact. High cheekbones. High unlined brow. Long nose, a trace of down on her upper lip. She wore rouge and lipstick too. Where does Rose go on Sundays? Is there a relative, friends? Is there a lover? The woman got off at Fourteenth Street.

“Next stop,” Delaney said.

The boy turned from the window. Delaney squeezed his hand. Soon they would be home.