North River (10 page)

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?”