Pete Hamill - North River

And here he was, walking into a hard wind on Horatio Street, the North River in sight, and the house waiting for him at number 95. On the corner, he saw four young kids riding a familiar object up and down a snowy hill. The stroller. Rose didn’t waste time. A narrow path had been shoveled through the snow along the sidewalk. And into the front yard too, right to the gate under the stoop. And where now is my little girl, who is now a woman? And where is my dear Molly-O?

There were seven patients waiting in the hall, two of them standing for lack of space on the bench. Three were reading the Daily News, and all looked relieved to see him, smiling tentatively or nodding in approval. Five of them were women. A normal day. “Give me a few minutes,” he said, and eased into the consulting room. Monique was busy with files and mail. She smiled and told him to take off his coat and galoshes. “Or you’ll end up a pneumonia case yourself.”

He hung coat, hat, scarf on the oak clothes tree and sat down to peel away the galoshes. Heat flowed from a small kerosene stove out past Monique, near the low barred windows.

“Where’s the boy?” Delaney said.

“Upstairs with Miss Verga. Rose. They’re fixing the rooms. His room and her room.”

“She’s moving in? ”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know anything about her, Monique.”

She lifted a sheet of paper and glanced at her notes.

“Her name is Rose Verga. Angela told me that, at least, is true. She says she’s thirty-two, so figure she’s thirty-eight. She’s from Agrigento in Sicily and went to school there for six years. Figure four. She can read and write. In English too, which she learns from the Daily News and a dictionary. She was married for a while after the war, but the guy died and she came here.”

“Did she ever take care of children?”

“No. She worked in three sweatshops, sewing dresses. She cleaned offices nights down Wall Street, she was a waitress in different places, including a place run by Angela before she got her own joint.”

“She never had children?”

“She says she can’t.”

He folded his arms and looked vacantly through the front windows at the street. Kids went running by, heading for the river.

“What do you think, Monique?”

She sighed.

“I don’t know… She’s a little sure of herself. But what the hell, give her a try. You can always can her if it don’t work out.”

The telephone rang.

“Dr. Delaney’s office, how can I help you? Oh. Yes. He has office hours until four. Just come on over, Mrs. Gribbins.”

Monique hung up.

“And what do we pay her?” Delaney said.

“She wanted ten dollars a week plus room and board. I got her to take eight, for the first few weeks, maybe months. Then we’ll see.”

“You’re a hard woman, Monique,” Delaney said. Then he sighed, and nodded at the door leading to the reception area. “Who’s first?”

“You’d better try Mrs. Monaghan. If she’s not already dead.”

Mrs. Monaghan came into the small office, where Delaney sat behind his cluttered desk. She was about forty, had been in a few years earlier with a broken hand, after falling on ice. She had six children, the oldest only eleven, no husband, and worked in a movie house on Fourteenth Street. Her manner was breathless and tentative. She had kept her wool coat on, but she was still shaking. When the door closed, he asked her what was the matter, although he already knew.

“Oh, Dr. Delaney, it’s been dreadful, dreadful. I woke up with the chills, with a fever, cold and burnin’ at the same time. I had a dreadful pain here, in the right side of my chest, dreadful, dreadful. I went into the jakes and spat up guck with blood in it.”

“Take off your coat.”

She did. He took a sputum sample, then tapped with his finger on the right side of her chest, above her breasts. He listened with the stethoscope and heard the bubbly breathing start and stop. It was surely lobar pneumonia.

“You’ll have to go to St. Vincent’s, Mrs. Monaghan,” he said softly. “You’ve got pneumonia.”

“Sacred heart of God,” she said, and moaned. “Oh, I can’t go there, Dr. Delaney. I’ve got the children at home, I’ve got to work, I can barely walk, and, oh God, I can’t go there. Please, Dr. Delaney, can’t you give me something here?”

He told her there was no choice, that she had to go in, and he’d call for an ambulance if she couldn’t walk, and he’d ask Monique to try to get some help with the children, and also call her job. She began to weep.

“If I go there, I’ll die for sure,” she said. “And all the weans’ll be orphans.”

“If you don’t go, Mrs. Monaghan, you’re sure to die.”

And sobbing, trembling, tottering uncertainly, she went into the hall to wait for an ambulance. Delaney thought: I have to call the hospital and ask about Larry Dorsey too.

Then Frankie Randall came in, his face a pale yellow. He wished Delaney a belated Happy New Year and took his quinine for the malaria he’d contracted at a training camp in Louisiana in 1917. He was in and out, with nothing else to say. Then Mrs. Harris took a seat, big and blowsy, a pasty-faced veteran of the old bordellos behind the warehouses on the North River, and he gave her some mercury to help control the lingering presence of a disease of the trade. She went to pay Monique. Mickey Rearden was another malaria case. Unlike Frankie Randall, he liked to talk. He talked about the Giants’ coming season and how great Bill Terry would be as a successor to John McGraw, playing and managing, and how it would be grand to be down in that Florida for the spring training when it started. Delaney was curt with him, briefly thinking about the boy and the need for money. For food and clothes and the woman named Rose. Mickey, please take the quinine and go, and for fuck’s sake stop talking. I’ve got to earn some money.

He heard a banging, then heavy footsteps above him coming in from the top of the stairs. He opened the door and asked Monique what all the racket was about.

“The bed,” she said. “For the boy. They’re taking it up top.”

“What bed?” he said. “I don’t have any cash to pay for a bed.”

“It’s only a dollar,” she said.

“You found a bed for a dollar?”

“Rose did. She called somebody and here it is, an hour later.”

Delaney thought: Rose Verga doesn’t fool around. He reached into his left pocket for money.

Monique said: “Can I tip the guys a quarter?”

When the last patient left, he hurried up the stairs, while Monique added up the fees and wrote numbers into the ledger book. He could hear Rose talking to the boy before he saw them.

“Okay, Carlo, you grab that end, yeah, right there, then you pull.”

“That end,” the boy said.

Delaney turned on the top landing and saw Rose and the boy on either side of the bed, pulling sheets tightly across the narrow mattress.

“Hey, Doctor,” she said and smiled. “We doing good. He’s workin’ hard, this Carlo. He swept the floor all by himself.”

The boy grinned in a shy way and stared at Delaney.

“What’s his name?” Rose said to the boy and pointed at Delaney.

“Ga’paw.”

“You remember! Gran’paw. You’re smart, Carlos. That’s your gran’paw, all right.”

Delaney reached down and lifted the boy and hugged him. He was warm in his arms. Delaney held him tight and felt a little ice melting in his frozen heart.

“Ga’paw,” the boy said.

Rose explained that the boy had a spiced ham sandwich for lunch and some mushroom soup, and she walked with Delaney outside the bedrooms to the upstairs bathroom. The cheese box was already in place. “I gotta paint that,” she said. “A real good yellow. You know, like the sun.” Towels were draped neatly on the rods of the holders, soap lay in a glass dish. Then they paused outside Molly’s room.