North River (16 page)

“
I’d better go do the exams,” Delaney said. “I’ve got a dinner date with my grandson.”

“First, sit back and finish your coffee,” Tommy Chin said.

They sipped the last of the coffee and then rose together and went out the door. They could hear music coming from the third floor, then stepped into the parlor, with its couches and bar and chandeliers and odor of perfume. Tommy walked over to the cathedral-shaped Philco and lowered the volume, saying something in Chinese. There were five women, all in heavy bathrobes and slippers, like people waiting for a steam room. They smiled at Delaney. His arrival always told them that they had finished another week in America. Then Liann entered from the door to a smaller room, and gestured for Delaney to follow her. She pointed at one of the women, who stood up in a bored way.

“See you later,” Tommy Chin said. “Do the work of the Lord.”

The first woman went straight to a hard narrow bed and sat on the edge, kicking off her slippers. Liann took a corner chair, an expressionless chaperone. Beside her was a sink. When Delaney had first told Tommy Chin that he wanted someone there, Tommy was surprised and then pleased. A witness. A translator.

The woman was about thirty, and she laid back, closed her eyes, and opened her legs. Like every woman in the house, she had shaved her pubic hair. Delaney donned rubber gloves and went methodically through the examination, peering into all of her openings. The first girl was clean. He nodded, and she smiled and got up, pulling the robe around her. He went out, and a second girl came in, and then a third. All clean. No sign of bumps or lesions, no chancres, nothing running and glistening. They all smelled of soap. They all had smooth ivory skin. After each woman departed, he washed his gloved hands in the hot water of the sink.

The fourth woman was really a girl. Perhaps sixteen, but who knew? And she was shy and trembling. She stretched on the hard bed but did not open her shift. Liann said something in Chinese. The girl turned on her side, facing Delaney, and opened her shift. There was a bandage over her right nipple. He lifted it and saw that her nipple was almost severed. She lifted a leg. The flesh around her vulva was red. He gently turned her over. Her anus was worse, sore and torn. Her buttocks were purple from punches. There were bite marks on her back.

“What happened to her?” Delaney said. He glanced at the girl and her eyes were filled with tears.

“Some big Irishman,” Liann said. “Last night.”

“Jesus Christ.”

He reached in the bag and took out iodine and cleaned her wounded nipple. The girl winced, then sobbed. He bandaged the nipple. Then he handed her a jar of unguent.

“Tell her to use this for a week. Front and back.”

Liann explained in Chinese, and the girl took the jar. She said something.

“She want to know, she have a disease?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about baby? The guy threw away condom.”

“Next week I’ll bring some things for a test.”

Liann explained, but the girl was not consoled. It must have been a savage night.

“Take her off the line,” Delaney said. “At least until I can see her next Monday. And the guy that did this? Don’t let him in the door again.”

The last girl was clean too, and he closed his bag, took an envelope from Liann. and went down to the street.

The night had arrived, dark and windy. An elderly Italian woman stepped out of Transfiguration, steam leaking from her mouth, a lumpy black pyramid. She stood there for a long moment, enclosed in Sicilian solitude.

I want.

That verb.

I want too.

I want. I want.

NINE

T
HE BOY TOOK HIS TEDDY BEAR WITH HIM TO DINNER, AND RE
vealed his name. Osito.

“It means ‘little bear’ in Spanish,” Rose said, grinning. “I asked Mendoza, the carpenter. Now the bear has a name, Carlito takes him everyplace. Osito this, Osito that . . . even bed at night.” A pause. “Someone to hold on to, I guess.”

Delaney thought there was a faint wistful note in her voice, but he did not respond as they walked through the cold evening to Angela’s restaurant. Rose held the boy’s free hand, while the boy hugged Osito.

The restaurant was half-empty, as it was on every Monday night, and a smiling Angela came to greet them. She led them to a table against a wall, out of the cold drafts of the opening door. Italian ballads played on the radio in the kitchen, with many mandolins. Angela waved and a waiter brought the high chair for Carlito. She pinched Rose’s cheek and whispered in Italian, then pushed her breasts against Delaney. She leaned down to Carlito.

“Okay. Wha’s this guy’s name?” she said, pointing at the bear.

“Osito!” the boy blurted.

“An’ what’s he gonna eat?”

“Hot dog!”

“We don’t have no hot dogs in here, boy. This is a
good
restaurant. So no hot dog!”

“Okay, I want bagetti!”

“That
we got!”

Carlito climbed into the high chair and squashed the bear beside him, with its paws on the tray. Delaney and Rose told Angela what they wanted, and she went off to the kitchen. Delaney gazed casually around at the other diners. One stranger, sitting alone, was facing the door and reading the
World.
He was wearing a badly cut suit but seemed too old to be working for the FBI and too out of style to be a gangster. Others nodded hello to Delaney, and he smiled back. Rose played nervously with a fork, tapping the tines on the tablecloth.

“The guy readin’ the paper,” she said quietly. “I don’t like his look.”

“He’s too old to be a bad guy, Rose,” Delaney said.

“Don’t be so sure.”

“I’m not,” Delaney said. And he wasn’t. There were many kinds of bad guys, and their badness could be as real as blood.

He got up to walk toward the men’s room, casually looking again at the stranger, and near the kitchen he stopped to talk with Angela. They were out of the view of the man reading the newspaper.

“I need something,” he said.

“Like what?”

“A safe address,” he said. “For mail. Nothing else. Where my daughter can write me without getting her letters opened.”

“I’ll give it to you with the check.”

“Also: The guy with the newspaper, alone. You ever see him before?”

“A couple’a days ago.”

“Keep an eye on him for me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Later, drowsy with food and exhausted by the long day, Delaney read Byron for a while in bed, and then turned off the light. Sleep did not come. Images of the day moved through his mind, glimpses of ivory skin, a flash of the absolute certainty in Callahan’s eyes, the metallic look of a man who judged others. But Delaney could never judge the women in Tommy Chin’s house on Mott Street. They did what they must. In some ways, their lives were now better than what they’d left behind. It was true of them. As it was true of some Irish women not long ago, and some Jews and Italians, and all the others who had found their various ways to the indifferent city between two rivers. Some, but not all.

He heard water running in the bath upstairs. Rose. Her heavy peasant tread. To the room. Back to the bath. The boy surely asleep, hugging Osito. Then silence. The water taps closed. Rose in the bath. His mind filled with images. How many nights did I spend in that tub with Molly? She murmurous with pleasure. Leading me wet to the music room, to stretch upon a yellow beach towel, to scream. Laughing once and saying: That was a C over G. But more often silent. More often humming some vagrant tune.

Delaney dozed then, hugging a pillow. After a while, he was snapped into clarity. The door had cracked open. A dim figure in the dark. He could smell the soap before he saw her. Rose. She said nothing. The door closed behind her. He heard her remove her robe. By the time she slipped in beside him, he was already hard.

He reached for her, to touch her flesh.

Rose was not there. The only flesh was his own.

For days, as the winter gave way to the first rumors of spring, he maintained a formal distance from her, afraid of making a mistake. Rose went shopping with Carlito and his teddy bear. She bathed the boy, and cleaned his clothes, and prepared lunch and supper for the three of them. In small awkward ways, Rose showed Delaney that she knew something had shifted in him, but she gave him no obvious signs of her unspoken knowledge. She never used the language of affection, except to the boy. She did not touch Delaney, even in the most casual way, nor did he touch her. He was always Dottore. Not Jim. Everything was as before, and at the same time, it was not.

But across the days of other people’s illness and damage and painful unhappiness, the days of endless casualties, he carried Rose with him now. She and the boy had formed a current in his life, like a secret stream flowing south through the North River, all the way from the distant mountains. It was a stream that was always in the present, not in the past, nor the future.

Then as February drew to an end, the past came rushing back. Delaney came down into the kitchen for breakfast on Monday morning and Rose and Carlito smiled at him. The boy’s mouth was full of bread. The teddy bear dozed. The radio played at low volume.

“Some baseball guy died,” Rose said. “It was on the radio.”

“What was his name?”

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

He turned up the volume, while Rose busied herself at the stove. He moved around the dial. Finally he heard the name McGraw.

“John McGraw,” he said. “It was John McGraw.”

He tried to explain to Rose that John McGraw was the manager of the New York Giants, the manager for as long as anyone could remember, from before the Great War right up until two years ago, when Bill Terry took over.

“
You knew this McGraw?” Rose said.

“Not really,” Delaney said. “He was a friend of my father’s. But I met him many times.”

“I’m sorry he died,” she said in a soft voice.

“So am I,” Delaney said.

The morning patients were all sorry too, even the women. Delaney listened to the patients, and examined them, and spoke banalities, and wrote prescriptions for them. He wished he could go to the Polo Grounds and say a proper farewell. When the last morning patient left, Monique handed him a letter.

“For you,” she said.

He took the letter, addressed in Grace’s handwriting to a Harry Miller on West Nineteenth Street, and slipped it under his desk blotter. Then he called in one of the malarial vets for his quinine. The letter would wait. It had spent days crossing the Atlantic. A few hours would make no difference now.

On every house call, the talk was of McGraw. Do I have that thing that killed John McGraw? said one flabby man, gray from the long winter. Sure, he was a grand tough fellow, wasn’t he? said another.

“You’ve got a ruptured appendix, Eddie,” he said to a heavy longshoreman named Doyle on Jane Street. “You’ll have to go to the hospital.”

“Not me.”

“There’s no choice. You stay here, Eddie, you die.”

“Shit,” Eddie Doyle said, as if he’d been sentenced to the electric chair. After a while, he reached for his trousers, hanging on the bedpost. Delaney would have to make still another call to St. Vincent’s for still another ambulance to pick up still another man who lived alone with the sour odor of age and isolation. His wife was dead of “the con,” tuberculosis, which Eddie still called consumption. A man whose three daughters were gone off to the distant Bronx with their husbands and kids. A man left alone with Jimmy Walker on the wall.

“I hear McGraw is dead,” Doyle said softly.

“True. They’ll have a mass for him at St. Patrick’s.”

“Uptown St. Patrick’s or downtown?”

“The one with the most seats.”

“Your father woulda been there for sure,” Eddie Doyle said.

“For sure.”

“They were real good friends, wunt they?”

“They were.”

“Help me on with this, Doc, will ya? I’m hurtin’ too bad to move.”

Delaney called for the ambulance from the corner candy store, where everybody was talking about McGraw. Almost all working men, with nowhere to go, least of all home.

Before dinner that night, he sat by the bedroom fire and read the letter from Grace.

Dear Daddy,

I got your note. It’s hard to believe that you have been visited by the FBI. There is great hope here for Roosevelt, that he will change things in America, that he will recognize how many people have been hurt by the Depression. Not just in America, but in Spain too, and in all of Europe. But how can there be true hope if people with badges come to your office? You, who have never done anything except try to help people?

That’s why there are many Spaniards who believe there is no hope unless the people take up arms. The communists sneer at Roosevelt as a tool of Wall Street, and maybe they’re right. I don’t know. I’m not a true part of it. But do not be surprised if there is a rising. Or a civil war. The fascists have their supporters here too. They love Mussolini. They are happy about Hitler. Who knows what might happen?

I met a man yesterday who saw my husband a few months ago. He said he will try to get a message to him. I will let you know.

I miss Carlito with all my heart. Send me news. Send me photos. I am at the same place. But American Express is best. Use the name Leonora Córdoba. I miss you too, Daddy.

Saludos, y mucho cariño, G.

He wrote a brief note and enclosed snapshots of Carlito on the streets of New York, and one with Rose and Monique. He hoped they would fill her with longing, not only for her son, but for Grand Central and the Chrysler Building and the Third Avenue El. Her city. Home. Where she lived with Molly while he was away at the war, where she did not know him when he returned. The place where she made ten thousand drawings on the way to the future. Where she was determined to find her own way in the world even if it meant leaving. Even, indeed, if it meant leaving her son in a vestibule. To pursue a man who blew up buildings in the name of utopia. And maybe blew up people. For a moment, he felt a treasonous flutter around the heart. One part of the truth was that he didn’t want Grace to return. He wanted the boy for himself. And so did Rose. For Rose, it was even worse. She needed him.

He told Rose that he had to go to the Wednesday funeral of John McGraw at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“Why?” Rose said.

“He was a friend of my father’s,” he said in a cool way. “I never made it to my father’s funeral. Or my mother’s.” She looked at him and waited for the reason. “They died in the flu epidemic. I was in a hospital in France.” A pause. “So that’s why I have to go to St. Patrick’s, Rose.”

She touched his shoulder, then quickly removed her hand.

“Do you want to go to the funeral, Rose?” Delaney said.

“Alone?”

“Of course not. With me. With Carlito.”

She furrowed her brow in a thoughtful way.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe all this church stuff.”

“Neither do I.”

“So why you want to go?”

“It’s about a man. McGraw. It’s not about God.”

She looked at the boy, then into the yard. The snow was now all gone, and she leaned forward at the window and squinted at the sight of a yellow bird in one of the skeletal trees. Abruptly the hardy scout flew off into the sunny cold.

“The truth?” Rose said. “I want to go, jus’ to see for myself. But I
won’t
go. First, I don’t have clothes. All the fancy people, the big shots, politicians, and actors and all that? With them, I can’t wear what I got. Not and walk in the door with you.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said.

“Silly to you. Not to me. I don’t want to shame you, Dottore.”

“You couldn’t shame me if you showed up in overalls.”

But he knew what she meant. Even now, even in the Depression, the codes of class prevailed in certain parts of New York. The schools you went to and the accents of speech and the clothes you wore. Delaney was a doctor, with degrees on the wall from fine schools. He was the son of a politician who was a friend of John McGraw’s. He owned a house. He was surviving the worst times. And Rose? She was a housekeeper, a kind of governess, who went to the fourth grade in Sicily. There were women like her still, in Gramercy Park, on Lower Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side. Her clothes were what she could afford. She carried a bloody secret about her husband. She must be certain, Delaney thought, that the observers in the pews of St. Patrick’s would know her. They would sneer, more at Delaney than at her.

He saw that her eyes were moist, and she was gnawing at the inside of her cheek. The same cheek that carried the fine scar.

“Well,” she said, and breathed out. “Maybe.” A pause. “Okay.”