North River (22 page)

He screamed and twisted.

“Stop!”
Rose shouted. Delaney reached for her arm and squeezed it gently.

“Let him get it out,” he said softly. “It’s his birthday, Rose. And he’s crying for a
book.
”

She looked ashamed and stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and turned away.

“For God’s sake, don’t be
sorry,
Rose. I know what you’re doing.”

“I never seen him like this.”

“Nor have I.”

“Maybe he wants his . . . you know.”

“No, he just wants Babar.”

The screaming had stopped. They sat on different sides of the boy’s bed. He was very still, but not asleep. Rose put a hand on his shoulders.

“Okay, boy. You got Babar.”

He turned, his eyes red, his face distraught. Both arms were wrapped around his book. He said nothing.

“But no more screaming, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Let me read it to you,” she said.

“Okay.”

Delaney hugged the boy. “Happy birthday, big fella,” he said.

He went down to the kitchen and filled a cup with the last of the coffee. He felt oddly better. Have we spoiled him by giving in? Okay, we spoiled him. It was for a book. For a book.

He sat there for a while, thinking about the end of poor Maisie O’Loughlin, and the fate of her poor stupid husband Brick, and wondered how many similar events he had been a part of in that neighborhood, as a bit player at other people’s tragedies. Faces and bodies flashed before him in fragments: beaten faces, bloodied and swollen, not all of them female. What was the man’s name who had his head split open with a ballpeen hammer? Houlihan? Or was it Harrigan? They didn’t always save the mayhem for St. Patrick’s Day. And none of them meant to kill anyone. Just hurt them very badly. He remembered someone at Big Jim’s club giving him advice when he was sixteen or seventeen: “Never marry a girl you can’t knock out with one punch.” And the guy laughed, and the other men laughed, and Delaney laughed too. But it wasn’t funny, and the people were not always Irish. They had no monopoly on kitchen or bedroom violence. Some of the Italians were pretty good at it too. And a few of the Jews. And he tried to imagine Rose when she lifted the three-legged chair and broke her husband’s skull. An act of pure clarity, one that sent her into exile. Sending her here. He wondered if she had regrets.

Then she was there, coming into the kitchen.

“That boy’s gonna sleep for two days,” she said. “You want fresh coffee?”

“Sure,” he said. “I bet he gets up tomorrow while it’s dark.”

She started pouring water in a pot, her hands busy in an effort-less way.

“Let me ask you something,” Delaney said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

She looked at him warily. “Sure.”

“Where do you go on Sundays?”

She didn’t turn to face him.

“Here and there,” she said.

“I see.”

“Why d’you want to know?”

“There’s a show — I mentioned it to you — up at the Metropolitan. Botticelli. I thought maybe tomorrow we could go to see it. You and me and Carlito.” He paused. “And tomorrow is Sunday.”

She looked at him in a tentative way.

“The guy from Firenze? He’s pretty good. . . .” She smiled. “The problem is he got the same name as that shadrool Frankie Botts.”

“What’s a shadrool?” he said, and smiled.

“Like a — never mind. It’s a bad word, that’s all you need to know.”

He laughed. “I think I know a lot of shadrools.”

“It really means a kind of a, in English, you call it a squish.”

“A squash.”

“Yeah. That’s it, a squash. A vegetable. But, ah, never mind.”

The aroma of fresh coffee started filling the room. She took his cup.

“What time you want to go see this show?”

“Around one o’clock.”

She chewed the inside of her mouth as she placed the cup before him.

“Maybe I could do that,” she said. “I got to do something first, in the morning. But hey, Carlito can’t bring the fire engine to a museum.”

He didn’t ask her where she went on Sunday mornings.

She came back that Sunday at twelve-thirty. Carlito hugged her and said, “Hurry, hurry, hurry, Rosa.” She excused herself and went upstairs. When she returned she was wearing the boots that had caused her so much grief. Stretched and widened by Mr. Nobiletti. Carlito pointed at them. “Shoes, Rosa,
your
shoes.” His English getting better every day. She smiled at Delaney in a confident way and said: “Let’s go.”

When they came up from the Lexington Avenue subway at Eighty-sixth Street, the neighborhood was still filthy from the parade, with garbage rising in pyramids from corner cans. The sanitation men did not work on Sunday. And the street was still carpeted with discarded paper flags, all of them Irish, sandwich wrappings, beer bottles, scattered newspapers, at least two crushed hats, and things without names. One older man in a frayed coat was examining the trash, pocketing some objects, moving on. Delaney took them left on Park Avenue, then right on Eighty-fourth Street, and here it was cleaner, with the old haughty mansions peering down at them in limestone disdain. And up ahead was the museum, a palace fit for Versailles.

“That’s it,” Delaney said. “Right there across Fifth Avenue.”

“It looks like kings live there,” Rose said.

“They do,” he said.

They went up the wide stairs, and Delaney turned to look at the far side of the avenue, remembering the years before the Great War, when some of the mansions, built to last forever, were being torn down after thirty years of life to make room for apartment houses, and how one St. Patrick’s Day there were rumors of impending violence and plywood boards covered many of the windows. Not even a stone was thrown, but the rumors themselves made the morning papers. Most of the Irish just laughed. After all, they had the votes, and the votes were not rumors.

They entered the museum’s great hall, and the boy took a breath and stared around him at the stone columns and arches and the sense of invincible power. To Delaney it was always like something out of the drawings of Piranesi. To the boy, it was something else.

“A church!” he said.

“In a way,” Delaney said. “But not for any god. It’s a church of art, boy.”

Rose looked around uneasily, seeing women in pairs, with clothes that fit exactly and fancy hats and small feet. The sort of women who had sniffed at her from the pews of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There were men too, of course, men who seemed to be surviving the Depression without pain, wearing the long well-cut coats you saw on Wall Street, making remarks to each other and laughing, or looking at lone women with special interest. A few paused to examine Rose, but she stared at them until they looked away. Delaney thought: Say nothing rude, fellas, or she’ll bite your fucking noses off.

“You come here a lot?” she said to Delaney.

“Not often enough,” he said. “When I was young, I used to come every week.”

He remembered coming here for the first time when he was twelve, in a year when he dreamed about becoming an artist. He was alone. He made it to the door but not through it. A guard stopped him and said, This is no place for you, sonny. Looking at his downtown clothes, his soiled knickers, his rough street-scuffed shoes. The Delaneys weren’t poor, but there was no dress code downtown on the West Side. Young Delaney just wanted to see Rubens and Caravaggio and Vermeer, the painters he’d seen in black-and-white in the only art book at school. He wanted the real thing. But he just wasn’t dressed for them. He left in tears, and that night he told Big Jim. The next day his father went to see the Tammany bosses, and they started a campaign to open the Metropolitan to all New Yorkers. A few months later, all the Irish and all the Italians, all the poor Jews and all the black kids, all the Chinese, all the poorest of the poor, all started coming to the great museum. They were coming still. God bless Tammany.

Then Carlito made an excited sound and pulled Rose along and into a room full of medieval armor. All visors and polished metal and swords, rising above him. Mysterious. Malignant. Scary.

“You see, Carlito,” Rose said, “in olden times, these dopes always had wars. They would fight about God. Fight about land. But most of all, they would fight to get swag.”

“You better explain swag,” Delaney said.

“Swag is stuff you steal,” she said. “You go into some castle, the guy has paintings, silver, nice chairs, beds, fancy stuff. You kill all the people in the castle, then you take the swag home.”

The boy pointed at two glassed-in shields encrusted with jewels.

“Swag!” he said.

“You see,” Rose said. “This kid understands
everything!
”

The boy wanted to stay all day, but Rose told him they had to go upstairs and see something else. They would come back later. He took her hand with a grudging look on his face. He clearly wanted to stay with the swag.

They climbed the wide central stairs to the second floor and followed signs to the Botticelli show. Then it was Delaney’s turn to suck in his breath. The gallery was more crowded than he expected, murmurous with talk, and he understood why. There on one wall was the
Primavera
and on another
The Birth of Venus.
On loan from the Uffizi, as a gesture of international goodwill by Benito Mussolini. Delaney lost his awareness of Rose and of Carlito. There were Botticelli drawings too, and smaller Botticelli paintings, but he stood in front of the
Primavera
like a predator. The painting was food. He wanted to caress it, hold it in his hands, lick its glazed surface, plunge into it, dive into the Florentine light. Years vanished, decades were erased, and he was again the boy who had come here to the feast of art.

Thinking: Great paintings made me want to be an artist. They made me want to be Mantegna or Verrocchio, Rembrandt or Vermeer. Made me want to put brush on canvas or boards, to make marks that would last forever. Thinking: I was so young that I thought it was possible, that I could actually do it. And the great paintings sent me into art classes on Saturdays and on two evenings a week. Aged sixteen. They made me want to see. To see everything in the world around me, really see it, the buildings and the streets and the many colors of the sky.

He wasn’t conscious of turning, of moving through knots of other people, but he was being pulled, pushed, lifted toward Venus. His heart was beating fast. There were the delicate hands, the thick dark blond hair, the sinuous outlines, the frank, intimate eyes. More powerful than any reproduction in an art book. Thinking: Rose said she used to look like this, except she was never a blonde. Here there were no bleeding Christs, no kings or dukes, no transported martyrs. Botticelli loved pagan flesh. Pagan eyes. A pagan landscape, washed by the sea.

“You okay?” Rose whispered.

“Oh, yes, sure, I’m okay,” Delaney said.

“You got tears in your eyes.”

He smiled, and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief.

“Aaah, it’s okay. It’s just — they’re beautiful.”

“I better take Carlito back to the guys with the iron masks.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, he’s like, you know, look at him —”

Carlito was standing alone, staring at Venus rising from her shell. Some of the adults were amused at his presence before her, and his intensity.

“Your daughter — his mother — she is a blonde?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Well . . .”

An older man turned to Delaney, a smile on his face, his eyes twinkling.

“That boy is either going to be an artist or a critic,” he said. “Look at that concentration!” He peered at Rose through rimless glasses. “He is certainly a beautiful boy, and you, I take it, are his mother.”

“Well, I —”

“He certainly has his father’s hair,” the man said, glancing at Delaney. “Congratulations, sir and madam.”

The man walked away, and Delaney thought: With his mannered style, he has to be an actor. And remembered the old line: I’ll never forget what’s-his-name. Rose was lost in thought. He took Carlito’s hand and said to Rose: “Let’s see the other things.”

They looked at many elegant drawings, and a sketchbook in a glass box, and then paused before Botticelli’s portrait of Dante Ali-ghieri: hawk-faced, oddly dangerous for a poet.

“I don’t want to look at this,” she said.

“Why?”

“Don’t you see it? The face, I mean. Don’t you see who it looks like?”

Then he saw it: Frankie Botts.

“Let’s go back to the swag.”

“No,” Delaney said. “Let’s go home.”

On the way out, Carlito turned a final time to look at the blond Venus rising from the sea.

On the subway downtown, his mind was full of questions. How does Rose know what Frankie Botts looks like? Then answered himself: Because she knew Gyp Pavese and must have seen him with his boss, with Frankie Botts. She definitely knew that he ran things out of Club 65. But that didn’t explain her deep silence, sitting now on one side of Carlito, with the boy dozing against her as the packed train squealed through tunnels. It had to be the actor. The older man thought they were married, and that the boy was theirs. That must be it. And she must be thinking about how impossible that would be. How impossible all of it would be. That Grace would surely come home. Rising from the sea. She would take away what was hers. This boy. And then Rose would go too.

Delaney retreated into his own silence.

A frail rain was falling when they came up from the subway, and the skies were as gray and leaky as their mood. He lifted Carlito, and they began walking quickly to the west. When they reached Ninth Avenue, the wind was blowing hard from the North River. Then Rose took Carlito from him, and he realized that his right arm was aching again. They turned into the areaway on Horatio Street, and while Delaney fumbled with his keys, the door opened at the top of the stoop next door. A stout woman in an overcoat came out on the wide top step. He hadn’t seen her for a long time but knew it was Mrs. Cottrell.

“Dr. Delaney,” she said, brushing a hand against the rain. “Wait, Doctor, wait!” She stepped into the vestibule and emerged with an umbrella. A gust of wind flopped it into uselessness. She dropped the umbrella and came clumsily down the steps.