North River (27 page)

“You guys got a big day today,” she said. “The Polo Grounds!”

“Bay-ball,” Carlito said with a grin.

“
Base
-ball.”

“Bayz-ball.”

“Good, Carlito,” Delaney said. “Baseball!”

“Have a great time,” Rose said, and went off to feed the men who would not be making it to the Polo Grounds anytime soon.

It was dark when Rose came home, and Carlito ran to her and started talking about what he had seen in the Polo Grounds. The words came in an excited rush. The boy was describing the world now, not simply naming it.

“Rosa, they have bats like you! Big bats, all bats in their hands, and they hit a ball, and they run. They run very fast, and they jump into the base. There’s grass all over, and lots of people. They all, they —” He paused, groping for the word, raising his hands in the air.

“Cheer,” Delaney said.

“Sí, they cheer, Rosa. All of them. Many, many people. Then they come with the bat again and they throw the ball and they hit the ball in the air, Rosa! Up high in the air!”

“You got to take me there someday, Carlito,” Rose said. “And explain to me how they play.”

“Yeah! And Osito too! But we can play in, in, the bagyard too.”

“Not when it’s dark, boy!”

“No, in the sun, Rosa.”

Later, they all went up to bed. Later, Rose opened Delaney’s door and entered the intimate darkness.

The next day, there were three letters from Grace, all with different postmarks, Nothing told him that they had been opened, but he was sure that Tillman had sent them on. Delaney couldn’t read them, because the Monday-morning rush was on outside his door.

Later, he thought. Always later. Now the quinine men were there, yellow with malaria. A few strangers. A woman with what was surely leukemia. One lunger. A hernia. A broken nose. And Sally Wilson, hoping again to have her breasts gripped in a man’s hands.

“I’m sure it’s a lump,” she said.

Delaney sighed and said: “Let’s see.”

When they were all gone, he sat heavily at the desk and opened the letters from Grace. Each was brief. Her husband was back in Spain but she hadn’t made contact yet. Somebody would try to bring her to him, or him to her. She was making drawings of Barcelona and its people. She missed Carlito and hoped to see him soon. But the husband, Santos, was essential. “I just have to resolve this,” she wrote, “and then try to get on with my life.” She thanked him for everything and apologized again for leaving the boy on his doorstep. Delaney put the letters back in their envelopes and slipped them under the desk blotter.

Then he filled out records. Sally Wilson: That was wrong. I can’t have her here anymore. The coldness of examination is in me, but not in her, and I’m servicing her. And I can’t go to the Chinese women anymore. I know I’m just providing medical services. But to Rose it would be like an act of infidelity. He thought about Grace. About her possible return. And what it might do to all of them. To him. To the boy. To Rose.

At lunch Rose talked about the Bing Crosby movie she’d seen the day before on Fourteenth Street, and how Crosby was a wonderful singer, and so relaxed, and how she always heard him now on the radio. Mentioning him, she smiled widely. The boy wandered in and out of the back door, which was open to the garden and the olive tree. Rose did not bring him a baseball bat.

Delaney looked at Rose and saw that her face was smoother now, her skin rosier, her smile oddly wider. Some of it must have been from the sun. But maybe it was also from what they did in the night. He wanted now to hold her and kiss her and feel her pressing against him. Then he thought of Grace’s letters, and felt each minute ticking away. He wished for clarity, but it did not come.

That afternoon, at Billy McNiff’s, he bought a baseball and a small child’s glove. At the art supply store near Cooper Union, he picked up three brushes, watercolors, crayons, two pads of paper, some charcoal, and pencils. In Molly’s room, he and Rose set up two facing chairs for Carlito, and a table for Delaney.

“This is great,” Rose said, as she gazed around the room that had always been closed and was now wide-open. She was beaming as Delaney showed the boy how to use the crayons. Now they were both southpaws, and Delaney drew a crude head of a man wearing a baseball cap, with big eyes and a wide grin, then handed the crayons to Carlito.

“You try it now, big fella,” he said.

The boy chose a red crayon and began with his left hand to make a head. Rose went downstairs, but Delaney and Carlito stayed in the room for more than an hour. The boy did little more than scribble, while Delaney tried putting watercolor on paper with his own left hand. He painted a crude house, and a cruder bicycle in a front yard, and the sun shining in the sky. Carlito watched and then tried doing the same with his crayons. When they went downstairs to eat, they left the door open.

That night she held him tightly, as if trying to calm him. Or herself.

“You okay?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Something happened,” she said.

“There were some letters from Grace.”

A pause. Then: “She’s coming home?”

“Maybe.”

He could feel her deflate. Now he held her tight. He touched her damp face. He could feel the faint ridge of the scar.

“Who did this to you?”

“I told you. Some guy.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

She was quiet for a long time.

“I was here almost a year,” she said. “Living in a rooming house. My own room. With a lock.” A pause. “I didn’t know much English. I was lonesome. And I met this guy.”

Her breathing was shallow now.

“An old story . . . I start going out with him. Here and there, mostly speakeasies, you know. . . . He’s very handsome, thin, a good dancer. His Italian is very bad, all mixed up with American, but so is my English, and anyway . . . that wasn’t what it was all about.” Another pause. “He had a wife too. I saw her a few times. Everything on her was big, top and bottom. Some kind of an American. I know this could be bad trouble, and I want to break up with this guy, but he won’t let me. Another jealous guinea.” A final pause. “Then one night I’m packin’ to leave and he catches me in the hall and starts yelling and I curse him and his whole family and
whoosh:
the knife comes out and he cuts my face. Then he says, Okay,
go.
”

Silence.

“You went.”

“To Jersey City. When I come back, I know he’s around someplace, but it was over. Around this time, I start having my trouble with Gyp, another guinea gangster that used a knife. That’s why I hate these gangster movies.”

He touched the scar again, up now on one elbow.

“What was his name — the guy that cut you?”

“It doesn’t matter. He put a mark on me.” A pause. “Now it’s the past. Nothing can be done.”

He felt her emptying beside him, at once ashamed of her confession and relieved to get it said. He held her closer and kissed the scar.

FOURTEEN

F
OR DAYS
R
OSE WAS HER OLD SELF.
H
E DID NOT MENTION THE
scar. She was cheerful, busy, focused, intimate, while routine established its discipline. She did not mention Grace again, nor the possibility of her return. Without words, she made Delaney believe that the present was everything, a kind of joy, even if the future might contain dread. Perhaps, he thought, this is an illusion. I think it’s true because I want it to be true. But as he and the boy tossed a ball around in the backyard, both using left hands, or when they made pictures in the room they now called the studio, or when they sat down for dinner in the golden aroma of oil and basil, and when Rose slipped into his dark room at night, Delaney allowed himself to feel happy. No matter what might happen, he would have these moments as long as he lived.

One afternoon he passed a music store on Broome Street, where old hand-wound Victrolas were for sale, and many 78 rpm records. He tried several machines, testing them with an old Brunswick record of Crosby singing “I Surrender Dear.” The records were ten cents each, and he bought ten: Crosby, Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallee. The records and the bulky Victrola were piled into the basket on his bicycle and lashed safely with cord by the man from the music store. Then Delaney slipped the handle of his leather bag inside his belt and pedaled home.

Delaney arrived with his secondhand treasures, to whoops from Rose and scrutiny from the boy, and they went to the top floor and through the open doors of the studio. He placed the Victrola on top of the piano and tried to wind it with his good left hand. His movements were clumsy, and Rose edged him aside.

“Let me do that,” she said. And wound it taut, while Delaney lifted Russ Columbo’s version of “I Surrender Dear,” holding it on the edges, and placed it on the turntable. Rose gazed at the needle, which was new, then cocked the arm and laid it on the record. The voice of Russ Columbo filled the room.

“Moo-zick!” the boy exclaimed, as if seeing a magic act. “Moo-zick!”

He sat at the piano and plunked various keys, and Rose clapped her hands in delight. When the song ended, she put the needle back at the beginning of the record and they did it again, Delaney keeping time with his feet, Rose singing along. Here. Now.

In the night, she did not talk about the boy. It was as if she had already accepted the possibility of his departure. She merged with Delaney, flesh to flesh, her body excited in the now, while forging images that would last for another day, or a month, or always. But above all, now and now and now and now. One night he reached for baby oil on the night table and began to knead the pliant flesh of her back, and her buttocks, and the back of her legs. Her breathing was deep, hoarse, rhythmic. Then he turned her and rubbed the oil into her feet, into the wide hard soles, softening them, into and between toes, into arches and ankles. Her breathing grew more rapid, second after second, deep in the now, until she reached for the pillow and screamed into its dense softness.

During breakfast on a Saturday, the telephone began ringing. Delaney wanted to ignore it, to hold off still another demand for relief. Then he sighed and went into his office.

“Hello?”

And heard a familiar voice.

“I need morphine, fast.”

Eddie Corso.

“Where are you?”

“In New York. I need to see you.”

“Where and when?”

“You’re off tomorrow?”

“Yeah, but so is the woman. I have the boy.”

“Bring him.”

“Bring him? Eddie, last time I looked there were four platoons of wiseguys looking for you. All with guns.”

“I’m a long way from Bleecker Street. It’s safe here or I wouldn’t be talking to you.” A pause. “Besides, I got my own guys.”

“That’s what I need: a crossfire. Jesus Christ, Eddie, the boy is three years old.”

A sigh. “I need to see you, Doc.”

Delaney answered with a heavier sigh, fluttering his lips. “Where are you?”

After he hung up, Delaney stared at the telephone. At the scribbled directions. Then at the safe. The treasure of Eddie Corso was dwindling, eroded by the costs of the steam heat system. The house next winter would be warm. But here came the past.

On Sunday morning, he told Rose that he was taking the boy to Coney Island and would be back in the afternoon.

“Hey, I want to go to Coney Island too,” she said, smiling a wide grin. Her skin was already darker from early summer. And Carlito was browner too.

“We’ll all go together on the Fourth of July,” he said. “Lots of fireworks.”

“That’s a month from now.”

He gambled that she could not change her schedule.

“So come with us,” he said.

She sighed. “Too late. They expect me at St. Brendan’s.”

“Next week,” Delaney said, relieved. “Make sure you get a bathing suit.”

“No! I can’t go around in a bathing suit, and all those young guys watching, all those dirty old guys.”

She laughed harder.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll go in my long underwear!”

She shoved him hard, the good shoulder. “You do that and I get back on the train.”

Rose dressed and hurried off to perform her corporal works of mercy. Carlito played on his fire engine, shouting,
Fire in Coney Isling, fire in Coney Isling.
Delaney went into his office. He stared at the telephone, then dialed the number for Frankie Botts.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Dr. Delaney, Mr. Botticelli.”

“Hey, howaya?” he said, the tone friendly.

“I’ve been going over records this morning, and I don’t think I have to see your mother anymore.”

“What?”

“She’s got no pain. She’s walking. All the blisters have healed. She’s got spots on her skin that might take a while to fade. But she’s okay, Frankie.”

Silence. Then: “You sure?”

“I’m sure. She can still use the salve, once a day. But she’s okay. Any problems, call me.”

“Let me ass you somethin’. Can she go to a ballgame?”

“Sure. As long as you’re with her.”

Botts exhaled. “That is great fuckin’ news. Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

“What about our understanding, Frankie?”

“What understanding?”

“I take care of your mother and everything is over down here,” Delaney said. “We don’t have to walk around looking over our shoulders.”

Botts grunted. “I’ll call you back.”

He hung up. Delaney sat there for a while, thinking: You son of a bitch.

They caught the Sea Beach Express at Union Square. The train was packed with men and women and kids, many wearing straw hats, or carrying blankets and lunch baskets, all full of a glad anticipation. He held Carlito’s hand tightly as the laughing crowds parted to allow still more people to board the train. The air was dense. The overhead fans had been shut off long ago, to save money. Many people were sweating heavily. Delaney was sure he could smell tenements.

The train plunged under the river, racing to Brooklyn, racing to the sea. It was as if they all had the same slogan: To hell with the Depression, the sea is free. At the end of the car, the door was open to catch a breeze from the cool tunnel, and four young men started to sing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” Almost all the others joined them. When they came to the line
If you don’t get a letter, then you’ll know I’m in jail,
they were shouting the words. How many of them had been in jail? More than a few. How many had friends in jail, or relatives, or children? Even more.
Toot, Toot, Tootsie, don’t cry, Toot, Toot, Tootsie, good-bye . . .

Then they were up out of tunnels, and the Brooklyn sky was above them, with the Brooklyn light glancing off the unseen harbor, just like in a Vermeer. Nobody got off, and nobody new could get on. The singing continued. “That Old Gang of Mine.” Then “My Buddy.” Carlito was planted strongly on the floor, holding a pole, and his visible world was all elbows and hips and knees, the bottoms of baskets, hands dangling or clenched together, and, when he looked up, all chins and nostrils.

Then there was a brightening and then they started coming into the terminal, and the whole car roared. Last stop. Everybody off. Carlito’s eyes were wide with excitement. The train stopped. The doors opened. And some of the passengers began to run toward the ocean and the sand.

Delaney and Carlito walked more slowly. He looked behind him, but it was impossible to know if they had been followed. Certainly nobody on the Sea Beach Express was wearing a pearl-gray fedora. There was a carousel ahead of them, going around and around, up and down, with slum kids mounted on brightly painted plaster horses while music from Tin Pan Alley or the circus played loudly. The crowds milled and men blinked and mothers called to children, and they all went out to Surf Avenue.

This was his too, and he knew the geography of Coney the way he knew the West Village. He and Carlito stood on the sidewalk, and he pointed out the swirling towers of Luna Park to the left, as if conjured by Scheherazade, and then at Feltman’s across the street. He had brought Molly here once to listen to the Bavarian music in the beer garden, while Grace ran around, a year younger than Carlito, and when he asked Molly what she thought of Coney, she said, I don’t have the skin for this place. On this day, the boy was blinking again, closing his personal shutters as if taking photographs, while the crowds swirled around them. A clock told Delaney he was fifteen minutes early.

He and the boy crossed the street where lines were forming to enter Steeplechase the Funny Place, with its huge grinning face. The boy watched a train inching slowly to the apex of the roller coaster, poising, then dropping while people screamed.

“What is?” the boy said.

“A roller coaster,” Delaney said. “It’s scary.”

“Can we go too?”

“Not today, Carlito. Someday.”

He remembered being here with Grace when she was seven, and how she insisted that he take her on the roller coaster, and how he sat beside her as it climbed, and how terrified she was when it dropped so hard and fast. She screamed and screamed as he held her with his good left hand. Later she continued sobbing and said she never wanted to see Coney Island again, and for three years she didn’t. On this day, as on that day long ago, the vendors were selling hot corn and ice cream and lemon ices and watermelon. Off on the side, a burly man raised a huge hammer and brought it down, and a hard rubber disk rose high on a cable and hit a bell and everybody cheered. Another man was aiming a rifle at a moving tin rabbit, fired, missed, fired again, missed again. In the next booth, a young man wound up like a pitcher and threw a baseball at a target with a hole in the center. The ball bounced away.

“He need a bat, Gran’pa,” the boy said. “And a glove.”

“He sure does.”

It was time to go see Eddie Corso. Delaney took Carlito’s hand and started walking back across Surf Avenue. The boy stopped and looked back at the baseball range.

“I want to see more! I want to f’wow a ball, Gran’pa. Please!”

“We have to meet someone, boy. Come on.”

The boy stood still, refusing to budge. Delaney spoke the boy’s name. The boy did not move. Delaney went over to him and tried to take his hand. The boy half turned and folded his arms across his chest. His lower lip protruded now, his brow furrowed.

A heavy woman in her fifties paused and looked from Carlito to Delaney.

“You better give him a good whack, mister,” she said. “ ’Cause that kid ain’t goin’ nowheres.”

“I ain’t goin’ no ways,” Carlito said.

The heavy woman said, “Whad I tell ya?”

Delaney thought: Fuck off, lady.

But squatted down beside Carlito.

“Listen to me, Carlito.” The boy looked at him. “I know you want to stay. But first we have to go somewhere else. All of this, the bats and balls and guns, they’ll still be here. But I have to meet a friend, and then we can come back.”

The boy looked at Delaney with doubt in his eyes. Then he sighed, a form of surrender. Delaney stood and took his hand, and they walked across the wide avenue.

Then a man in a straw boater and sunglasses and a thick mustache emerged from the eddying crowds.

“Hey, Doc, glad you could make it. Come on.”

It was Bootsie.

His plain black Ford was parked on a side street and they got into it. The boy was still resisting. He wanted loud music, guns, baseball, watermelon. He clearly didn’t want to get into a car. Delaney placed him on his lap. Bootsie turned into the two-way traffic on Surf Avenue and inched along, with Steeplechase across the street on the beach side. Delaney could see Scoville’s, the saloon where for years his father and the other Tammany guys celebrated the birthday of John McKane, the nineteenth-century Tammany prince of Coney Island. The ritual started when McKane came home from Sing Sing in 1898. The old Coney boss died a year later, but the ritual went on, ending only with the double calamity of the influenza epidemic and Prohibition. And here was Scoville’s open again, and he wondered how many people were left alive who remembered McKane in his heyday.

Then Bootsie turned right into a side street and pulled into a driveway beside an old-fashioned bungalow on a street of identical bungalows. Kids played in the sandy front yards. Men walked home with the Sunday papers.