North River (26 page)

The vast sea was empty and scarlet. The immense wave rose and rose and rose, carrying Delaney with its surging power, and then crested, held, seemed frozen, and then fell, dropping straight down into a darker crimson trough, and the trough was not empty. Tinpot helmets bobbed everywhere, going under then rising, faces contorted under the helmets, all mouths open, dozens of them, hundreds, drowning in the blood-red tide. He could see Eddie Corso without a helmet, his eyes glittery with fear, close enough to see and hear but too far to reach. There were dozens of soldiers whose faces he knew, but the only name he could remember was Eddie Corso’s. He began to see others: Knocko and Zimmerman and Mr. Lanzano. Packy Hanratty. Angela. All wearing helmets. All except Eddie and the boy. He was in the crimson water too, his eyes wide, full of terror, and Delaney tried to swim to him, calling
Carlito! Carlito! Carlito!
Delaney’s legs seemed to weigh three hundred pounds, and his right arm was useless, and he could not reach the boy.
Carlito! Carlito! Carlito!

And then he was awake, and Rose was sitting beside him on the bed, caressing his sweaty face. Rose. This time not an illusion, not a scribble of dream or desire. Real. With her odor of flowers. In a bathrobe in the dark.

“You okay?” she whispered hoarsely.

“Yes,” he said, feeling a tremble in his voice. “Yes. Sure. Just a bad dream.”

“You were calling the boy.”

“Did I wake you up?”

“No, I wasn’t asleep.”

“I’m okay,” Delaney said.

“No, you’re not.”

She stretched out on top of the covers and pulled him close, her right arm across his chest. He could hear her breathing, cool and steady. A vague aroma of basil was now mixed with the smell of flowers.

“It wasn’t just Carlito,” she said. “I know. I couldn’t sleep with worrying. About going away. About living somewhere without the boy.” A beat; then, in a reluctant voice: “Without you.”

“Don’t go away,” he said.

He wanted to hold her face, to kiss her cheeks and brow and lips and neck. But he was afraid. If I cross this street, he thought, if I open this door, where will it lead? Will I ruin something? Everything? Will I
force
her to choose flight?

Thinking: Don’t play with her.

Thinking: Don’t take advantage of her goodness, her sense of unworthiness, her confusion.

Thinking: She came to me. Full of her own needs. Perhaps even acting out a farewell.

“It’s cold here tonight,” she said, and lifted her arm from his chest, and touched his face, and sat up.

Thinking: Don’t go. Please don’t go.

She folded back the blanket and sheet on her side of the bed and slipped in beside him. She bent her leg and slid it over his thigh, infusing him with warmth, while her hands moved to his face and neck. Her breathing was thicker. He realized in the dark that her bathrobe was open, and he could feel her breasts, pliant and full, and her hard nipples. And then it was hair and flesh and tongue, then it was sounds without words, then it was belly and bottom, and hands moving, and legs, and softness and hardness, and muscles taut, then it was wetness and then entry into deep endless warmth.

“Dottore,” she whispered.

“Rosa.”

THIRTEEN

J
UST BEFORE EIGHT-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, THEY BOARDED THE
local train going downtown to Chambers Street. Rose was dressed in the same black clothes and stretched boots she wore to St. Patrick’s, but her face was bare of powder. She was hatless, her hair held tight with oyster-colored clasps. Walking beside her to the station, Delaney absorbed her tense silence. Monique had arrived early, after Delaney’s call. The patients would have to wait. But the tension was surely not about the boy. It was about everything else.

On the crowded train, the knuckles of her hand were white as she gripped the long bar above the packed seats. Delaney saw a film of sweat on her upper lip. She nodded when he said, “Just two stops and we’re there.” He stared at the reflection of her distracted face in the window glass as they moved through the black tunnel. She was looking at nothing. Or at things stirring vividly within her head. The blood seeping from Callahan’s scalp. Tillman’s badge. And perhaps most important: the visit later to Delaney’s bed. Delaney himself was still full of what had happened between them in the dark. They had crossed a line together. In the morning, everything had been the same, and utterly changed.

He glanced at the reflections in the windows: shopgirls anxious to be on time, Wall Street clerks in linty double-breasted suits, a uniformed cop with a drained face, heading to Brooklyn. Many read newspapers. All seemed gripped by the seediness of the Depression. None could have imagined what was filling Rose’s mind, or Delaney’s.

They came up onto Chambers Street, in the bright morning river light, slanting to the west from Brooklyn. They started walking to Broadway, and at the corner a small ice truck made a sudden turn, angrily blaring its horn. Rose jumped in alarm, shouted in Sicilian, and took Delaney’s arm. He squeezed it closer.

“Easy, Rose,” he said, and smiled. “Usually guys like that just run you over.”

She threw him a dark glance but said nothing. They walked uptown two blocks to Duane Street, and he could feel her gathering her strength for what awaited them. Her face was harder, her brow furrowed, her eyes focused on the sidewalk directly in front of them. Her grip on his arm grew tighter. They turned east on Duane Street, and saw up ahead the vast brightness of Foley Square. It was named for Tom Foley, who ran a saloon and was a chieftain in Tammany Hall and a good friend of Big Jim’s. Long ago, Foley gave a job to a kid named Al Smith, who had never finished the eighth grade, and Smith went on to become governor of New York and the Democratic candidate for president in 1928. Smith didn’t forget that Foley had given him his life, and pushed hard to name the square after him, as it was constructed on the site of the old Collect Pond and the Five Points slum. On the far side of the square, Delaney could see the new federal courthouse, its steel frame rising more than thirty stories into the sky, to be finished in another year. The FBI office was a block to the north. He mentioned none of this to Rose. She was rehearsing her secret script. Questions. Answers.

They turned into an office building on Duane Street and took an elevator to the sixth floor. She released her grip on his arm. They stepped out of the elevator into a small reception area, with a woman behind a sliding glass window.

“Dr. Delaney to see Judge Flanagan, please,” he said.

“One moment, sir.”

She hit a button, whispered into the phone, then turned to Delaney and motioned to an oaken door.

“Go right in, sir.”

Across the carpeted room, Harry Flanagan rose from a swivel chair behind a cluttered desk, a wide smile on his face. He was not wearing a jacket, and the many curves of his body were emphasized by his wilting white shirt.

“Good morning, Dr. Delaney,” he said, extending a hand for Delaney to shake. “And this must be, Miss, uh —”

“Verga,” Rose said. “Rose Verga.”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Verga,” he said.

“Likewise,” she said.

“Have a seat,” he said, and Rose sat in one of the two chairs facing the judge’s desk. Then Flanagan gestured with his head to Delaney and walked to a wall covered with framed photographs. Delaney followed. There were pictures of ballplayers and prizefighters, soldiers and politicians. Al Smith was there and Jimmy Walker, who was away now in European exile. And there were many group photographs from political dinners and chowder outings and trips to Saratoga and the Polo Grounds. Flanagan pointed a finger at one group shot.

“I noticed this when I came in this morning,” he said. “It’s gotta be, what? Nineteen thirteen? Anyway, before the war. Right there in the middle is Tom Foley, that they named the square after. Look who’s next to him. That’s your father, Doctor. That’s Big Jim.” Delaney squinted. It was Big Jim all right. “And next to him? That’s
me.
I musta been seventy-five pounds lighter!” He laughed. “But look at this runt, over here on the left? That kid. Know who that is?”

Delaney shrugged. He didn’t know.

“That’s your man Tillman,” he said. “He came out of St. Brigid’s, his father dead, and Tom Foley, bless his heart, helped put him through law school. He ended up at the Justice Department during the war, and Hoover made him part of the Palmer Raids. When they started the FBI, he was right there.”

“I’ll be damned,” Delaney said.

Flanagan wheezed and returned to the swivel chair. Rose was trying hard to decode this conversation and sat very still, her face empty of emotion. Delaney took the other chair.

“Anyway, I called Mr. Tillman this morning,” Flanagan said, in a dry tone. “I reminded him who your father was, I reminded him that this fella Callahan didn’t have a search warrant. I reminded him what the papers would do with all this. He was very nice.”

Then he paused for a beat. He focused on Rose.

“Go home,” he said. “It’s all over.”

Rose went loose, with sounds coming from her, but no words.
Uh.
Just
uh
and
uh
and
uh.
Her hands moved without purpose. Delaney stood up. He felt as if his own tension was leaking out on the carpet.

“Thanks, Judge,” he said, shaking Flanagan’s hand with both of his own. “Thanks very much.”

“Yes,” Rose said. “Many, many thanks.”

Flanagan glanced at his wristwatch and stood up too.

“What is it the great Boss Tweed once said?” he said, and grinned. “It’s better to know the judge than to know the law.”

Back on Duane Street, she put a hand on a scrawny tree and started to laugh. Bent over. Released. Men and women hurrying past looked at her, and the women smiled and the men seemed baffled. All kept moving. Then Delaney saw that she was sobbing through the laughter. He handed her a handkerchief, and she wiped at her face and giggled like a youngster.

“Oh, Dottore. Oh, thank you. Oh, you crazy Irish. Oh.”

He put an arm around her waist and guided her to Broadway. Across the street was a large cafeteria called the Broadway Café, and they went in. She had not eaten breakfast, and he had only sipped from a cup of coffee. The place was loud with talk and the clatter of dishes and silverware. Many tables were filled: lawyers and defendants, reporters from the
Sun,
which was a block away, groups of three or four middle-aged uptown women preparing for a day of shopping for downtown bargains. Delaney and Rose paused inside the door, then saw two men get up from a table. One was clearly a lawyer, the other clearly a mug. The mug was dressed in a chalk-striped suit and looked nervous. Delaney nodded as they went to meet their fate, and Delaney and Rose sat down. There were empty coffee cups and some plates on the table, and a cigarette burning in an ashtray. A young man cleared the table, stubbing out the cigarette, and then a waitress in a green uniform came to them and faced Delaney, a pencil poised above her pad.

“What’s yours, sweetheart?” she said.

He explained to Rose: “No menus here.”

“Uh, let me see,” Rose said. “How about a roll with butter, a fried egg, and a jelly doughnut.”

“You want the fried egg on the jelly doughnut?” the waitress said. Then giggled. “Just kiddin’,” she said. She was about forty, with a tough Irish face. Rose said separate plates would be fine. Delaney said, “Just the buttered roll, and coffee, please. Black coffee.”

The waitress hurried away. He looked at Rose across the table.

“I want to dance,” she said.

“Like Dolores Del Rio?”

“Yeah,” she said, and squeezed his wrist. “On the wings of an airplane.”

Across the day, she did not speak about what had happened in the night. In early afternoon, they went to see Mrs. Botticelli, who made jokes in Sicilian and said she was feeling much better. Rose bought cheese in Di Palo’s and some oranges from a pushcart. She showed deference to Monique, and played in the garden with the boy, and Delaney went on house calls. That night she returned to Delaney’s bed. And the night after that. And the night after that.

Delaney did not say anything either. He was happy that she did not affect a girlish shyness, or a giggling modesty. She wasn’t a girl. She was in her middle thirties, not her teens. Through the days, she was as she was before, with only subtle changes. She flashed him intimate smiles, she touched a casual hand to his face, but she did not talk about what they now shared. On their walks with Carlito in the evenings, she showed nothing in the street, did not take his arm, did not hold his hand. She never used the word “love.”

In the luminous dark of Delaney’s bedroom, she was not shy either. They did many things with each other, like humans finding water after drought. One night she straddled him on the armchair. On another, she joined him in the shower, the lights out, and she soaped him and he soaped her until neither could wait another second and they moved barefoot, hair wild and wet, to the bed. Sometimes, in full passion, she covered her face with the pillow, fearful of waking the boy with her screams.

Carlito never woke. He was exhausted from pedaling his fire truck, often now on the sidewalk outside the house. Or he was full of the sly silent contentment of pasta. Or both. Each night, after the boy fell into sleep, Rose slipped beside Delaney, bringing warmth, changing the air and making it more humid, the two of them erasing loneliness. He never heard her leave, but she was always gone in the morning. Her presence now was larger in the house. She walked with greater confidence, exuding a sense that it was her house too. She was more comfortable than ever, and so was Delaney.

They began to talk in the dark before sleep would come to Delaney.

She said: “Is your wife alive?”

“I don’t know. She disappeared and was never seen again. Dead or alive.”

“You miss her?”

“Sometimes.”

“You dream about her sometimes?”

“Sometimes.”

Silence.

“I dream about my husband sometimes too. Calvino, with the plate in his head. Sometimes he’s even that handsome guy I saw after the war. Most times he’s a goddamn monster.”

She was silent then.

“I dream about the boy too. I dream about Carlito.”

“Me too.”

“They scare me, those Carlito dreams.”

He remembered the scarlet sea.

“Me too,” he said.

And laughed.

There was no fresh letter from Grace, and very little news in the papers about Spain. He thought of calling Tillman, asking if the mail from Leonora Córdoba was being stopped by some new young FBI zealot who had discovered the secret address. Then thought Tillman would be embarrassed or angry or both if he asked. Let it alone, he told himself. As he made his house calls, Delaney heard much talk about the Giants, with opening day coming on fast, and how this would be another immense year for the Giants after the great World Series win over the Senators of Washington. McGraw would not see it, of course, but Bill Terry was a great manager, along with being a splendid hitter, and Mel Ott was sure to have a big year at bat, and the pitching was strong, even if Adolfo Luque, the ancient Cuban, was another year older. One afternoon Delaney spent twenty minutes with an old man in Hudson Street, his wife dead, his children gone off to their own lives, his lungs choked by a million cigarettes, and they talked baseball, and how Gus Mancuso was still not able to play, on account of getting typhoid during the off-season. Delaney went to see the mother of Frankie Botts, with Rose beside him, and the old woman said she wanted to know about the Giants. “I just want to go one more time to the Polo Grounds,” she said in Sicilian. Delaney said, “You’ll see a lot more Giant games. Later in the summer.” Tears appeared in her eyes, and later, out on Grand Street, where the two hoodlums remained on guard duty in their car, Rose said: “I don’t understand this. How come one old lady from Sicily cares about this baseball?”

“Because she’s an American now,” Delaney said.

Then it was the Sunday after opening day, and over breakfast he and the boy talked about baseball. The boy still didn’t know what Delaney meant, but he listened intently, looking at the photographs on the back page of the
Daily News.
Then Rose came into the kitchen, dressed for Sunday, smiling broadly.