Pete Hamill - North River

“Thanks, Dr. Delaney. We’ll take care of it. Call later and we’ll know what it is.”

“Thanks, Miss McGuinness. Is Dr. Zimmerman on duty?”

“Wait, I’ll get him.”

Zimmerman emerged from an inner room, smiling, shaking hands with Delaney, while Dorsey was led away and a second nurse took notes from Louise. The two doctors stepped to the side. Zimmerman was in his twenties, skinny, freckled, with reddish hair and bulging, inquisitive eyes. He had some Lower East Side in his voice.

“Like Grand Central around here today,” Zimmerman said. “They’re all digging their way out and falling down with heart attacks.”

“How’s our patient?”

“He’s a tough nut, all right. He keeps asking for morphine and then laughing.”

“Can I see him?”

“Third floor, at the end.”

Zimmerman turned to see a man with a white face being carried in by two younger men. Delaney touched the intern’s sleeve.

“Thanks, Doctor.”

“If we get caught,” Zimmerman said, “we’ll do the time together.”

Eddie Corso was in a bed in his private room, covered with a heavy blanket, a transparent oxygen tent over his head. He needed a shave. To the side of the door was Bootsie, looking suspicious, even anxious, trying to appear casual by examining the state of his fingernails. The shade was drawn, a light burning on a side table. Delaney parted the flap of the tent.

“Morphine, morphine…”

“That’s a bad old joke now, Eddie.”

“So am I.”

Palm down, Corso curled his fingers at Bootsie, and the fat man eased out the door to stand guard in the hall. Corso smiled weakly.

“Thanks, Doc. Again.”

“Thank Dr. Zimmerman.”

“I did. But it was you, Doc. Without you…”

“Enough already.”

A longer pause.

“I hear you got someone staying with you at the house.”

“I do. My grandson.”

“Where’d his mother go?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Russia.”

“Russia? Is she nuts? There ain’t enough snow right here for her?”

“The truth is, I’m not really sure where she is. I think Spain. Which means she has a passport, and had a ship to catch. I called Jackie Norris at the Harbor Police and asked for his help.”

“He’s a good cop. You didn’t mention me, did you?”

“Never. Jackie says he’ll do what he can.”

“He always keeps his word.”

Corso closed his eyes and looked as if he were drifting. Delaney came closer.

“You hurting, Eddie?”

He opened his eyes.

“Nah. Well, just a little. You got someone to help with this boy?”

“Angela sent me a woman.”

“Good. She’s a Wop, I hope?”

“I think she’s Italian, but I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Angela sent her, she’s a Wop. Good for you, with a kid on your hands. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know what the fuck you were doing.”

“That’s for sure.”

They were silent for a while.

“Your daughter Gracie don’t come back, Doc, the kid could be there a long time.”

“I’ve thought about that.”

“How old is the boy?”

“Three in March. On St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Jesus Christ. Another goddamned Mick. And fifteen years from now, when you’re an old man, he’ll be graduatin’ from high school.”

Delaney laughed. “I thought about that too.”

Corso seemed to be fading away by the second. Delaney thought he should call Zimmerman, maybe something…

“You got any money?” Corso said, coming back from where he had gone.

“Enough.”

“Come on. Don’t bullshit me, Doc. I know you spent a mint when Molly, you know…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. The missing words were took off.

“I remember you put ads in the newspapers,” Corso went on. “You had them leaflets on every lamppost from Twenty-third Street to the Battery. You hired some private dick. That must have took a lot of dough.”

“I’ve got enough, Eddie. I saved some, I have patients. The boy won’t starve.”

“Las’ time I was in your house, when I had that thing with malaria, I froze my nuts off. You don’t have steam heat, Doc. That kid’ll be runnin’ around bare ass and —”

“The woman will watch him.”

“Freezing her own ass off too.”

Corso turned his head to the wall and sighed.

“How long’s it been now?” he whispered. “Since Molly went —”

“Sixteen months,” Delaney said.

“Christ.”

Corso’s hand moved to the flap of the tent, then fell to his side.

“I’m thinkin’ of gettin’ out of this thing.”

“Good.”

“I don’t like the way the thing is going. Moving booze, runnin’ clubs, that was one thing. That was fun, f’ Chrissakes. But that’s over. It died with Prohibition.” A pause. “I don’t like what some of these guys want to do now. And they don’t like that I don’t like it. Especially the fucking Neapolitani… bunch of cazzi. That Frankie Botts…”

He cleared some phlegm from his throat, and Delaney put a tissue to his mouth so he could spit it out. The sputum was pink.

“Besides, I got three grandchildren myself now, Doc. I sent them and their mother away this morning…”

“They’re good kids. I delivered two of them, remember? And gave all three their shots.”

“Right, right…” He closed his eyes again briefly. “I want to see them graduate from high school.”

“And college too.”

“Hey, wouldn’t that be something? College. They’d be the first kids in the history of the Corso family to…”

They were both quiet for a while. Then Delaney said, “If you get out of… the business, what’ll you do?”

“Maybe become a priest.”

Delaney laughed.

“Nah. Maybe I’ll move to Florida. Or out west someplace.”

“You’d go nuts.”

“I’d rather be nuts than dead.”

Delaney moved slowly west, into a river wind. The snow was now ice, blackening in the streets like an untreated wound, and he could not feel his face. As always, in icy winter or torrid summer, he looked down at the two or three feet ahead of him, because when he gazed into the distance he felt he could never make it. As always, he fought off the things he had seen on his house calls, the need, the pain, the false comfort he had given to these hurt people. He was a doctor, but medicine was not an exact science. There was no cure for everything. As in life. The cause of death was always life. Across many years now, he had comforted people he knew would soon die. He hoped his consoling whispers would do them no harm. He hoped too that he could reduce their immediate pain. But he could not carry them around in his head like luggage. He had to examine them with all the intensity he could muster, do what he could, avoid harm, and then forget them.

He could not forget Eddie Corso. Eddie wasn’t a patient. He was a friend, the friendship created in rain and blood. And now, slipping, tottering, pausing on the black ice, Delaney saw Eddie again in the driving rain of France, knee-deep in the water of the funk hole, canteens slung around his neck, his eyes wide and half-mad. He was going to the water hole at the foot of the cliff. Knowing the Germans were up there somewhere, knowing they had machine guns and potato mashers, knowing they had what the Americans didn’t have: overcoats, boots, ammunition, food, and water. The Americans had tried catching water in stretched ponchos, but the Germans shot holes in them. And shot one of the soldiers too. The remnants of the battalion could not go back, ease away in retreat, because the Germans were there too, and later it would be said that they were a lost battalion. On that night they weren’t a battalion anymore. And they were not lost. They were surrounded. But Eddie said he would go for the water, as dirty as it was, and he would frisk the dead for bread or hardtack hidden beneath their tunics. Delaney told him not to go. Eddie said even the Germans had to sleep, and it was better with the pounding darkness of the rain to go now. And so he went, up over the lip of the funk hole, a New York rat slithering through broken trees and gouged earth and unburied bodies, gripping the canteens so they would make no jangling noise. See ya, Eddie said. And was gone. Delaney heard nothing except the rain hammering around them, and the snoring of soldiers up and down the trench. Then the sky was lit up by a star shell, sending spears of light through the ruined forest like something from the Fourth of July, and then the machine gun opened up. Brrrraaaap. Brrrraaaap. The light burned itself out. And then there was silence. The men beside Delaney did not even stir. Then, away off, he heard moaning. And he grabbed the first aid kit and lifted himself out of the funk hole and went to look for Eddie. He found him on his back in a thicket, a dozen feet from the water hole. His eyes were wide. Fresh slippery blood, thin and watery in the rain, soaked his shoulder and his arms, and there was a hole torn in one of the canteens. At least one round in the back, and blood leaking over his boots from a leg wound. Holy Jesus, Doc, it hurts like a bastard. Delaney undraped the canteens and left them in the drowned mulchy leaves. Then he saw the wound in Eddie’s leg and knew he could not walk. He grabbed him under the armpits, dragging him into the denser foliage and then turned him and heaved him onto his shoulders and carried him, slipping, falling, wet with blood, back to the line. One of the other doctors, Hardin from Oklahoma, hurried from another hole, and together they ripped open Eddie’s clothes and cleaned the wounds as best they could with alcohol, and tied coarse tourniquets on the ripped thigh and the smashed shoulder, using strips of uniforms from the dead because there were no bandages left. The fuckin’ pain, Doc, hurts like a fuckin’ bitch. Delaney gave him a shot of morphine, his own hands trembling, and the rain falling hard, and after a few minutes Eddie looked dreamy. Delaney sat for a long time in silence, thinking that if relief did not come soon, Eddie would surely die. If relief did not come soon, they all would die. He would never see Molly again. He would not see the little girl Grace. He would not ever walk with them again beside the flowing summer waters of the North River.