North River (3 page)

“Why not? Spaghetti. With the clams . . .”

As they waited, the boy’s brown eyes moved around the crowded room, with its haze of burnt nicotine, and the pictures on the ochre walls. The Bay of Naples. A view of Palermo. Both gauzy with nostalgia. Both painted by Fierro, the sign painter, who had a shop on Ninth Avenue, a Sicilian married to a Neapolitan in what some people called a mixed marriage. There were other pictures in Angela’s gallery. A heroic painting of Garibaldi, brought over from the old country by a customer. A painting of flowers on green fields. Photographs of Angela when she was younger and thinner. Her family in the old country, a year before they took the ship to La Merica, where Angela was born a few doors away from Transfiguration Church on Mott Street. Mother and father were still alive, both patients of Delaney’s. And there on the wall, standing alone, was Frankie Fischetti, the first kid from Hudson Street to be killed in the war. Carlito blinked, his eyes like a camera shutter, as if freezing each new thing he saw into memory. He had been taken by his mother to a world of many rooms.

A young waiter arrived with a basket of Italian bread, a fat slab of butter, a dish of olive oil. He rubbed the boy’s blond hair and hurried away. The waiter was quickly replaced by Angela, carrying a bottle of Chianti.

“For the New Year,” she whispered, so the Tammany boys would not hear. “And for Fiorello. Don’t get use’ to it.”

She laughed and went away. Delaney poured an inch of the wine into his glass, tore off a crust of bread, and handed it to the boy.

“This is a restaurant, Carlito,” Delaney said, waving a hand around the long room. “Where people come to eat.”

The boy listened but said nothing, trying to decode this new, secret script. He must have learned some English in New Mexico, Delaney thought, while his mother peddled paintings of mountain ranges. He must have been in restaurants there, even with his mother saving every dollar for the search for her husband. He must know more than he lets on. The way his mother was when she was three. He must remember the watercolor painter too. The door opened and a pair of St. Vincent’s interns came in, overcoats buttoned tight over green uniforms, their eyes frazzled and hungry. Neither man was Jake Zimmerman, savior of Eddie Corso. They stood by the door, eyeing a tiny empty table to their left, the last one in the place. Delaney recognized them from the hospital but couldn’t remember their names. They smiled when they saw him, mouthed greetings for the New Year. Delaney beckoned to one of them, and the young man leaned over.

“How’s that special patient of Dr. Zimmerman?”

The intern paused, then said: “Okay. He’ll live. He doesn’t exist, but he’ll live.”

“Good,” Delaney said. “Had a rough twenty-four hours?”

“Everything. People falling in the snow and breaking arms, elbows, wrists, and heads. Old ladies tripping down stairs. Babies close to death ’cause there’s no goddamned heat. Everything. Hell, you know how it is.”

Delaney nodded. “Well, stay safe.”

“Thanks, Dr. Delaney.”

Yes, he knew how it was. He had interned at Bellevue, bigger and crazier than St. Vincent’s. Before the war. They owned one of the first ambulances, after cars came to the city, but it didn’t work in snow or ice, and not very well in rain. Thirty-six hours on, eighteen hours off. Just Delaney and a driver. The calls came from the police, and then they raced to the scene, to the man trapped in an elevator pit, to the woman who slashed her wrists after discovering she had a dose of the clap passed to her by her husband, the four-year-old boy whipped into unconsciousness by his father, the girl who gave birth in the vacant lot, her child strangled on the umbilical cord. He knew how it was. Caging emotion. Accepting numbness. Good training for a war. Or a marriage.

The door opened and two more Tammany guys arrived in search of consolation.

He’ll live. Eddie Corso will live.

“Here ya go,” said Angela, breaking his reverie with two bowls of spaghetti on a tray. She placed the larger one, dotted with clams, in front of Delaney. The boy stared at his bowl. It had no clams, but he did not ask why.

“I know it’s a
real
New Year now,” Delaney said. “Service by the boss.”

He lifted his small glass of wine in a wordless toast and smiled.

“Like I said, Doc. Don’t get use’ to it.”

The interns were seated now, and the room was noisier, a full house, with a steady murmur of talk, Puccini now playing on the hidden radio. It was like being at an opera where the audience talked though the performance. The murmur was punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter, except from the politicians.

“Spaghetti,” Delaney said, pointing at the bowls.

“Bagetti,” the boy said.

With his left hand, he tried to twirl the slippery strands of spaghetti on his fork, but they kept falling, and Delaney leaned over and cut them into smaller pieces. The boy stabbed at them with his fork and then grabbed a few strands and started chewing. He made a face — what is this taste? — and then decided he liked it, and tried again with the fork, and this time succeeded. Delaney smiled.

“Bagetti,” the boy said. “No co’flake.”

“Right.
Spaghetti.”

Chairs scraped on the floor, and Delaney turned. Knocko Carmody was approaching him, smiling. The others from his table were standing now too.

“Does this kid have a union card?” he said, his voice a growl but his eyes twinkling. The other three stayed back, as respectful as lieutenants to a general.

“He’s coming to the hiring hall this summer, Knocko.”

“Just bring him around. He gets a card, just showing up.”

At the hard sound of Knocko’s voice, Carlito stopped eating but then quickly resumed.

“Who’s this?” Knocko whispered.

“My grandson.”

“Grace’s kid?”

“Yeah.”

“And where’s the beautiful Grace?”

“Away.”

He said the word as if naming something permanent.

“Shit,” Knocko said.

“Yeah.”

They’d known each other too long to invent a story.

“You need some help, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks, Knocko.”

Out he went, into the snowy street. He was flanked by two of the men, and the third walked directly behind him. There was a clatter of dishes as the waiter cleared their table. Delaney glanced at Carlito. All the spaghetti was gone from his bowl. Some was on the checkered tablecloth, some on the bib or the floor. Delaney lifted a portion of his own pasta and placed it in the boy’s bowl. He sipped his wine and finished eating. Angela returned with a wet cloth and began cleaning the boy’s face and hands.

“This kid don’t fool around,” she said.

“He’s an eater.”

“He’s gonna be pretty big,” she said. “Look at them feet.”

“With any luck.”

Carlito must have sensed that they were talking about him, but he said nothing.

“I got something else for you,” she said to the boy.

She waved at a waiter, made a spooning gesture. The waiter shouted something into the kitchen, then hurried over to take away the pasta dishes.

“You’re gonna need help,” Angela said, her face grave. “A lot of help.”

“I know.”

“You can’t go running out on house calls carrying a three-year-old with you.”

“I know.” He laughed. “But you know what I really need first? I need a cheese box. The boy can’t reach the bowl when he stands in front of it.”

Angela laughed.

“I don’t have one here, and the cheese store is closed. Wait’ll tomorrow.”

The waiter arrived with two dishes of vanilla ice cream and two spoons. The boy smiled. This was food he had seen before his journey to New York.

“You’re gonna need a woman,” Angela said.

He carried the boy part of the way on his shoulders, leaning into the wind, fighting to keep his balance, but bumping the boy up and down in a kind of dance. Carlito laughed in delight. Then he stopped laughing, and Delaney slipped him off his shoulders, saw that his eyes were closed, and held him close for the rest of the journey west on Horatio Street. A taxi pulled up in the center of the snow-packed street. A well-dressed man and woman stepped out. The Cottrells from next door. Both were Delaney’s age. From 93 Horatio. His neighbors. They didn’t look at him. They never did. Not since that summer afternoon four years earlier, when their son was knocked down by a speeding car driven by a drunk. At the sound of screeching brakes, Delaney rushed outside. He did what he could for the boy while an ambulance slogged through traffic from St. Vincent’s. But it was too late. The boy was dead. Nine years old. The only boy among three sisters. The Cottrells chose to blame Delaney and never spoke to him again.

As the gate of the Cottrells’ house clanged shut, he could feel the boy’s warmth, and his vulnerability on this street in the perilous city. Don’t worry, boy, he thought. I’ll make everything work. Or die trying.

Later, by the light of candles, he sat in his big chair with a notebook in his lap. Through the open oak doors that separated the bedroom from the rear, he could hear the shallow breathing of the sleeping Carlito. He began to write down the things he would need. Maybe fit out one of the maids’ rooms upstairs. A good bed. Clothes, guards for the stairs. Food. Including spaghetti.
Monique will help, after she returns tomorrow.
Money too. Money most of all. Not easy, at two dollars for a consultation, three for a house call.

This goddamned Depression. When will it ever end? He couldn’t charge a patient who had sixty cents to last a week. He couldn’t turn away anybody because of money, or the lack of it. He couldn’t ever charge a veteran. Not ever. In the week before Christmas, he had earned forty-two goddamned dollars. And he paid Monique twenty.

He thought about applying for a loan. From St. Vincent’s. Or some bank. Maybe one of the vested old Tammany pols knew a banker. That judge, whatever the hell his name was. But in all the years since his father had died, Delaney had asked them for nothing. Ah, Big Jim, would I even ask
you?
If you were here, would you come to my rescue? Could I even ask? He dozed, and saw himself filling in a form under the lipless stare of a bank manager.

Delaney could feel the banker’s chilly rejection. He listened for the boy, who was breathing in a steady way.

Any persistent ailments? 
Heartbreak.

He lifted the candle and his daughter’s letter. Time to go upstairs. To Molly’s floor. The shrine of the past, soon to be filled with the future.

Delaney opened the small rooms first, two of them, with single windows facing the backyard. The rooms of the Irish maids, who served a haughty family long ago. The shades were drawn. In the light of the candle, he saw an old-fashioned lamp on a small table beside a bed. He lifted it and felt the weight of oil, turned up the wick, placed the candle against the wick. Orange light filled the room, along with the burnt, sour odor of stale oil. Thank you, Lord, for small miracles
.
He blew out the candle. There were paintings by Grace on the walls of each room, done while she was a teenaged girl at the Art Students League. A gypsy. A man with a turban. An old woman. The brushstrokes were bold. God, she was so confident then.

There was a bed for Grace in one of the low-ceilinged rooms, but the other was empty. When she was thirteen, that became her studio, with her ceramic tabletop and her easel and her tabouret. She loved that room, especially when morning light came streaming in. He noticed splatters of old paint on the floors, and opened the closet door to see her brushes and various jars and cups and tubes of paint. He lifted one tube of burnt sienna. It felt like iron.

He looked into the bathroom, saw the old tub with its lion’s feet upon the tiles and the ceramic sink with its chipped edge. He turned the tap. The water flowed, rusty and coughing and then clear. When Grace made watercolors, she washed her brushes here. Never oils, she said. Because they would clog the drains. She soaked those brushes in turpentine, then used the faucet in the garden. Now on the top floor, the cold was total, like an apartment in Siberia. Delaney wished he had risked everything before the Crash to install steam heat. Each small room had a kerosene heater, and in the winter when they were all together here, Mr. Lanzano would lug the kerosene cans up the stairs without complaint, while his son helped deliver the blocks of ice through summer heat. The kerosene odor was awful, but Grace as a teenager said she loved it.
Oh, Daddy, it’s so
real! How long did she live here? Eight years? No, seven. And is it the odor of kerosene that urges me even now, in blizzards, to sleep with the window open?