North River (20 page)

Callahan sighed, took the other man by the elbow, and walked away.

He talked awhile in his office with Monique, telling her that he thought Rose should get a raise. She made a face and said, “It’s a little early for that, isn’t it?” Delaney said that Rose put in a lot of hours and the boy loved her and he didn’t want her to walk away for another job that paid more. Monique sighed. “I’d like you to tell her, Monique. Not me.”

“You just gotta add some rules to the deal,” Monique said. “She’s too goddamn bossy, Jim. She thinks she knows you better than I do, and what’s good for you, and all that. Sometimes it pisses me off.”

Delaney looked at her in an annoyed way, then pulled a chair beside her desk and sat down. She wouldn’t look at him, her fingers busy with papers.

“Monique?”

“Yeah?”

“Listen to me, Monique.” She looked up at him. “You are very, very important to this house. And to me. I truthfully could not do what I do if you weren’t here. I want you here for as long as I do this work.” He paused. “But goddamn it, the boy has changed things. And Rose has to be here too. For as long as the boy needs her.”

Monique looked unhappy. “I guess,” she said.

“I promise I’ll talk to her about the bossy stuff. For now, don’t get in a fight with her.”

She sulked for a long moment. And then exhaled hard, as if saying it was time to move on.

“Speaking of the boy, what about his birthday?” she said. “It’s St. Patrick’s Day, right? It’ll be here before you know it.”

“I know, Monique,” Delaney said, pushing the chair back and then standing.

“My advice?” Monique said. “Don’t take him to the parade. He’ll think it’s for him, and that could ruin his life.”

“You’re right, of course. Even if you do sound bossy.”

She smiled in a thin way. “And don’t get him a dog. Rose’ll have to walk him — or it’ll be left to me.”

“Okay, no dog. Any mail?”

“Nothing important,” she said. “An’ by the way, some guy called three times but wouldn’t leave a name. I told him you couldn’t call back if he didn’t leave a name. But he hung up each time.”

“Maybe it was Hoover,” he said. “Always on the job.”

“He sounded more hoodlum than Hoover, you ask me.”

He peeled the wrappers off two medical journals and signed some checks, and then he could hear Rose and Carlito coming down the stairs.

After they ate together, and after they walked together down to the North River and Carlito stared a long time at a passing liner, and after they returned in the chilly night air, they went back to the kitchen for tea. Rose had bought some biscotti from the bakery, and music played quietly from the Italian station, and they talked about why there was no such thing as Irish food while there were hundreds of kinds of Italian foods, all delicious. Delaney said that the bad luck of the Irish was the problem.

“Sicily was conquered by the Arabs, and they knew how to cook,” he said. “But the poor luckless Irish were conquered by the English, and they didn’t even know how to eat. For them, food was fuel, like coal. Pleasure of any kind was a sin.”

“So how’d they get so many babies?”

“They could do something about the food,” Delaney said, “but they couldn’t do anything about human beings in bed.”

Rose laughed. Carlito looked preoccupied. He waited for a break in the talk, and then he went to Delaney and pointed upstairs.

“I want my book, Ga’paw,” he said.

“Damn, I forgot,” Delaney said. “Where’d I leave his books, Rose?”

“Upstairs. I know where.”

Delaney rinsed the cups and saucers, and Rose put away the cream and the rest of the biscotti, and they went upstairs together.

Rose found the books on top of the armoire, still in their bag.

“You read to him,” Rose said. “I’m goin’ to run a bath.”

Delaney and the boy went into his room and took off their shoes, and he stretched out on the small bed with the boy curled beside him. They could hear the water running in the tub. Rose leaned on the doorframe, arms folded across her breasts. Delaney held up the two books. “Which one?” The boy pointed to
The Story of Babar.
Delaney opened the book, and the first page showed a gray baby elephant being swung in a hammock by an older elephant. They were surrounded by green jungle. Rose came in and sat at the foot of the bed, while the water ran slowly.

Delaney read the text, running a finger over the words, and pointing at the things they named:
“In the great forest a little elephant was born. His name was Babar. His mother loved him very much. She rocked him to sleep with her trunk while singing softly to him.”

“Babar,” Carlito said. “He’s an evvafent.” Rose smiled as Delaney turned the page.

“Babar grew bigger. Soon he played with the other little elephants. He was a very good little elephant. See him digging in the sand with his shell?”

Delaney pointed at elephants swimming in a pond and elephants playing football and elephants parading, holding other elephants’ tails in their trunks, and elephants snacking on oranges and bananas, with the jungle in the background and pink mountains in the distance. The little elephant named Babar had a seashell in his snout and was carving away at a small pile of sand.

“Let me see that,” Rose said, grinning, and Delaney turned the book. “Wow! That’s a great spot!”

Then Delaney went to the next spread. On the left page the little elephant was riding on his mother’s back, while a monkey and a red bird watched from a bush. To the side, behind another bush, a man with a helmet was firing a gun.

“One day, Babar was riding happily on his mother’s back when a wicked hunter, hidden behind some bushes, shot at them.”

Delaney glanced at the boy, whose eyes were suddenly wide. He thought he should stop. But he went on.

“The hunter’s shot killed Babar’s mother! The monkey hid, the birds flew away. And Babar cried.”

Tears began seeping from Carlito’s eyes.

“I want Mamá,” he whispered.

He wasn’t speaking to Delaney. Or to Rose.

“I want Mamá!”

Rose stood up abruptly and hurried into the bathroom. She closed the door. The running water stopped. Delaney hugged the boy and laid down the book.

“Carlito, boy, Carlito, big fella, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a story, that’s all.”

“Mamá,” the boy whispered, his voice charged with anguish.

“Your mama’s not dead, boy. Your mama’s coming back.”

The boy sobbed in a small way, and Delaney consoled him, using soothing tones, and then decided he should continue the story. If it was, as he had told the boy, a story, then he should finish the story. He opened the book and showed the boy the drawing of Babar running away to safety, and finding his way to a town.
“He hardly knew what to make of it because this was the first time he had seen so many houses. So many things were new to him! The broad streets! The automobiles and buses!”
To Delaney, the town was Paris. It could have been New York.

He was near the middle of the story when Rose came out of the bathroom in her robe, to the sound of draining water. She didn’t look at them. She walked heavily to her own room, and Delaney could hear the door click shut.

He resumed the story, with Babar walking on two legs like a human and wearing a bright green suit, which made Carlito smile. And after a while, Carlito fell asleep. Delaney was still for a long time and then slowly detached himself from the sleeping boy, closed the book, and turned off the light. He slipped the Babar book under the mattress and left the door open a crack as Rose always did. Then he looked at Rose’s door. He knocked, turned the knob, and went in.

Rose was awake in the dark. He went to her and sat beside her, inhaling the aroma of soap laced with hurt.

“He didn’t mean anything,” he said quietly.

“Oh, I know. Come on . . .”

Her voice was choked. He slid an open hand under her head, and felt the pillow damp across his knuckles.

“Please don’t cry, Rose,” he said.

She was silent then for almost a minute. Then she cleared her throat.

“I gotta leave here,” she said. “This ain’t right. I’m not his mother, and he knows it and you know it. My heart is killing me. I gotta go.”

He held her tight now, pulling her to him.

“I won’t let you,” he said.

ELEVEN

R
OSE DID NOT LEAVE.
N
OR DID SHE SPEAK TO HIM THE NEXT
morning about what had happened. Perhaps nothing had happened, except that he had held her until she fell asleep. A moment of intimacy, one lonesome human consoling another. Nothing big, nothing major. But Delaney knew it was a lot more than nothing.

At seven-thirty, Mr. Nobiletti arrived carrying shears, and smiling when Rose greeted him in Italian. Both were from Sicily, although the towns were far apart. Both must have dreamed on certain nights about olive groves. They went into the yard together, with Delaney and Carlito after them, and Mr. Nobiletti stared at the wrapped tree.

“It should be okay,” he said to Delaney.

“A tough New York tree,” Delaney said.

The older man began cutting through the cords and tar paper, dropping strips on the earth, which was softening into grassy mud. He said nothing. Carlito lifted each strip as it fell, carried it to the back door, and made a neat pile. Then the last strips fell away and the tree stood before them. To Delaney it was as scrawny as a girl of twelve, each branch curving and seeming to reach for the distant sun.

Rose clapped her hands and then whispered: “Che bello! Che bello!”

Tears were brimming in her eyes as she caressed the branches. Here was Sicily in a yard near the North River. She hugged Mr. Nobiletti. She squeezed Carlos. She smiled in an embarrassed, teary way at Delaney. Sicily was here.

Later in the morning, after Nobiletti had gone off with her punishing boots, Delaney gave her the Babar book to read, so that she would see that it was not about the mother, really, but about having a life, no matter what. It was a story. That’s all. A story for kids. It was also a story about the consolations of cities. She carried the book to her room, but she did not speak about it. Across the morning, in abrupt moments between patients, Delaney remembered the beating of her heart.

Around the house, Rose moved with purpose, in and out of the yard as if expecting instant life from the olive tree, showering the boy with affection. She thanked Delaney for the raise and said, with deadpan irony, that she was thinking of investing in the stock market. She showed the boy how the sun was falling on the tree and the other growing things in the yard, and how soon they would be full of life. “You’ll see,” she told him. “Life is green.”

Three days later, she tried on her widened shoes and wore them in the house for a few hours at a time, always with white cotton socks. “Black socks are for cops,” she said. She listened to the Italian radio station, and hummed arias to herself. If Rose had been frightened that things would fall apart, the moment seemed to have passed.

In the warming evenings, they began to take walks after an early dinner. They went down to the North River piers, and Delaney sometimes thought about the many evenings when he had grieved here for Molly. One night in the second week after his return from the war, he told her: “I’ll never go away again, Molly. I promise you that.” She looked at him with such angry suspicion in her eyes that it struck him as permanent hostility. But as months slipped into years, Delaney kept his word. He did not go away again, not even for a night. But their lives were not the same. To be sure, there was surface civility. They would talk in a cool way about Grace, and her schooling, and her affection for painters and for the game of baseball, and Molly kept reminding Delaney that he was spoiling the girl. He would mumble something about lost time and shrug, and Molly would seethe. They sometimes discussed politics. They talked about what might be coming to the world after the stock market collapsed in October 1929. But Delaney often felt as if he could be talking to a neighbor. Her anger was always there beneath the civility. It wasn’t simply about the war. It was about him, about his being a doctor, about his obligation to help others, about many things. He taught himself to live with it, telling himself that Molly, after all, was Irish. Everything could be forgotten, except the grudge. Their bed became a place almost exclusively devoted to sleeping. Molly would turn her back to him, sending a familiar signal that another day was over. He would sometimes long for flesh and intimacy. For hair and teeth and wetness. Or a simple night of dancing. Until she finally turned her back on him for the final time and walked to the river.

But he did not, of course, mention any of this to Rose. On their walks, the boy was between them, a link, a bond, a kind of gift. And Delaney made no moves that could be seen by Rose, or by strangers, as expressions of intimacy. The boy was all. He loved to see a liner moving at dusk on the river, with the sun vanishing into New Jersey. He loved seeing a train grind slowly south on the High Line.

Then one evening as the sun began to fade, they went to Jane Street to show the boy the firehouse. The doors had been closed through the hard winter days, but now they were open, and the engine was gleaming and redder than the vanishing sun. Two mustached firemen were smoking cigarettes and nodded to Delaney, right out of the days when the fire companies supplied the infantry to Tammany Hall. Then suddenly bells began to ring loudly, metallically, and the cigarettes were flipped into the street and other men were thumping down stairs and sliding down the fire pole, pulling on rubbery raincoats and boots and reaching for axes stacked against the wall. The boy backed away from the fierceness of the sight, and then the lights of the engine came on, and a siren screamed, and the engine pulled out, making a slow turn toward the city, with men hanging off the sides, and then, all power and controlled passion, it roared away.

The boy was frozen in astonishment. Rose lifted him and hurried him to the middle of the street so he could watch the engine on its way to work.

“Fire engine,” she said. “That’s a fire engine, ragazzo.”

The boy’s jaw was slack with awe. And Delaney knew what he must do in the next few days.

St. Patrick’s Day fell on Saturday, and in the morning they stood three feet apart in the areaway watching the neighborhood empty. The boy peered through the grillwork of the fence while Irish music came from everywhere, out of open tenement windows, from the old streets of the Five Points, from Tin Pan Alley, from distant Kerry and Antrim and Mayo. They watched the entire student body of Sacred Heart, garbed in maroon uniforms, march east to the subway. They saw men in green ties, long coats, and a few vaudeville green derbies, coming from the saloons beyond the High Line, and clusters of women following the men. Some wore green buttons that said ENGLAND, OUT OF IRELAND. Most of the men nodded to Delaney as they passed. They were all going uptown to the parade.

“They must wonder why you’re not going to the parade, Dottore.”

“They know I’ve got patients,” he said.

Rose sat on the second step of the stoop, and Carlito climbed up behind her, to see better.

“Some of these guys,” Rose said, “they’re gonna need you tonight. After they beat the hell out of each other.”

Delaney laughed. “Let’s hope whatever they do, they do it uptown.”

He had taken part in many of these parades before the war, starting in the ranks of Sacred Heart, and later marching with his father, and he hated them and loved them too. Above all, he loved the defiant pride of the marchers. When he was twelve he asked Big Jim why the parade was on Fifth Avenue, where all the rich lived and the only Irish were doormen and maids. And his father said, Big fella, it’s simple: to show those bastards that they got the money but we got the votes. Delaney loved that part, the Tammany tale, and the sense among all of them that they too owned a piece of New York, they had purchased it with sweat and will, they were New Yorkers forever. He hated other things, starting with the clergy, plump and sleek, and how they insisted that the parade was a Catholic event, not just an Irish event. That meant they had no room for Jonathan Swift or Wolfe Tone, for Oscar Wilde or William Butler Yeats. He hated the drunkenness too, men embracing the stereotype and careening around the Irish joints on Third Avenue after they had marched. Hated above all what would happen to them in the night, or to their wives. He had treated too many of them. He knew all the reasons: the way the British refused to give them power of any kind, except to get drunk and assault their women. Drunks were no threat to power. Knew the reasons, but hated seeing their leftovers on the streets of New York. Still, in other ways, the Irish tale was a noble one, all about people who kept getting knocked down and kept getting up. He would tell that tale to Carlito too. Eventually.

“I went to the parade, five, six years ago,” Rose said. “Lots of guys throwing up on their shoes.”

Delaney said: “Were they at least nice to you?”

“Falling all over me,” she said, and grinned, and turned her attention to the last stragglers heading east, three old women of the type who used to be called shawlies, widows who stayed in church for hours each day. They wore shawls now too, and long dresses and warm coats.

Rose said: “I should walk wit’ these women. Look at them feet.”

They indeed had huge feet. Larger, by far, than Rose’s, but from similar histories. They had worked the stony fields of Connemara or Donegal, before embarking forever for New York. He knew one of them. The one in the center, with blue eyes like ice water. Dunn. Bridey Dunn. He remembered her fury when he told her that her son had polio and there was nothing to be done. There was no cure. The boy would live all of his life with a maimed leg. Bridey stopped and gazed from Delaney to Rose.

“So here you are with your whore,” Bridey said. The word was pronounced “who-uh.” The New York style. Rose tensed, as if preparing for combat.

“Good morning, Mrs. Dunn. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Bad cess to you and your good wishes, Dr. Delaney.”

The two other shawlies were at her elbows, trying to move her along, but Mrs. Dunn shook them off.

“You’re a bloody disgrace,” she said. “Living in sin with this trollop.”

“Hey, you,” Rose said, with heat in her voice. “Shut up and go to the parade.”

Delaney stepped in front of Rose, his back to Mrs. Dunn. “Ignore this fool,” he said. “I’ll explain later.” But Rose stepped to the side and hissed at Mrs. Dunn. “Go on, get the hell outta here!”

“I’ll sic the coppers on the pair of yiz. I’ll get the priest over here! Yiz are a disgrace to all of us!”

“Bah fongool!” Rose shouted. And then her friends led Mrs. Dunn away to the east, snarling and sputtering all the way. Carlito ran to Rose and embraced her hips.

Delaney explained to Rose about Mrs. Dunn’s son, who probably picked up polio swimming in the North River and was now almost twenty, with a permanently maimed leg. He explained how Mrs. Dunn was like many other people: she had to blame someone for misfortune, and the doctor was the easiest target. In cases of incurable disease, a doctor was only a messenger, but they chose to blame the messenger.

“But she was after me too,” Rose said. “Not just you. But me! And she doesn’t even know me!”

“She knows you a little better now.”

Rose looked away, with some shame in her face.

“I’m sorry I used bad words,” she said.

“I don’t blame you,” Delaney said. “But it wasn’t you she wanted to hurt, it was me.”

“You feel hurt?”

“A little,” he said. “I should have defended you better.”

“Hey, I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can,” he said, remembering the affectionate way that Knocko Carmody called her a hoodlum. To him the word was a compliment.

“I just don’t like it when there’s some secret going on and I don’t know what it is.” She was silent for a beat. “Know what I mean?”

Then he told her about the single phone call with the breathing sound but no voice. He told her about seeing the bartender from Club 65 on the Sunday walk, and about Callahan and his friend in the tweed coat.

“Thanks for telling me,” she said. “I gotta watch even better now.”

And then went upstairs to work.

At one-thirty that afternoon, after dealing with a scattered lot of Saturday-morning patients, Delaney sat down at the kitchen table. There would be no house calls on this day of celebration. It was as if the entire neighborhood had gone up to Fifth Avenue to sing and march. In the warmth of the kitchen, he felt almost dizzy from the aroma of olive oil, basil, garlic, and simmering beef. Osito was on the chair to Delaney’s left, Carlito to his right. As always, Italian music was playing very low. Then Rose turned from the stove, grinning, to present the meal.

“Okay, something special, somethin’ new!”

“What is, Rosa?” the boy said.

“Braciol’,” she answered. “With pasta in oil!”

She laid plates in front of Delaney and Carlito and then one for herself. Carlito stared in a suspicious way at the mysterious new food. A rolled tube of beef, covered with dark red sauce.

“Watch,” she said to the boy, and reached over to cut his rolled beef in pieces.

“You see? Beef, with cheese inside, and
sauce!
”

He stared at the braciole, not moving. Delaney took a piece and started chewing.