Pete Hamill - North River

“Rose, this room is locked,” Delaney said in a soft, polite voice. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s just —”

“This was your wife’s room, right?” she said.

“Right,” he said, thinking, Women know everything important. She glanced at Delaney with a dark gaze, tinged with pity.

“You want some food? I got soup in a pot, some good bread.”

“I’ll help myself.”

“I can do it. Then I gotta go someplace and pick up clothes.”

They went down the stairs together, Rose now holding the boy. The odor of kerosene got stronger. There were two more patients waiting on the bench, both women.

“Take care of them,” Rose said. “I get the soup ready.”

She put Carlito down and went through to the kitchen, the boy holding her skirt. Delaney saw the women patients: a heavy cold with a hacking cough, a twisted ankle. When they were gone, he walked back to the kitchen, and Rose ladled out some soup and laid the Italian loaf and a slab of butter on the table. He thanked her and she went out. The soup was tasty, the bread fresh, with a crisp seeded crust. The boy watched him eat.

“She’s a nice woman, Rose is,” he said to the boy. “You make sure you do what she says, because she will be very good to you.”

The boy wore a serious face as Delaney spoke. Soon he would be fluent in English, and Italian too. Or Sicilian. How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one? The telephone rang once, and then Monique poked her head in.

“Jackie Norris on the phone,” she said. “He says you know what it’s about.”

He got up to go to his office. “Talk to this young man, will you?”

All cops had the same voice, clipped and laconic, and Jackie Norris had been a cop since he came back from the war. They exchanged hellos and Jackie then got right to it.

“Doc, your daughter, Grace, left New Year’s Day on a Spanish freighter out of Hoboken. Bound for Barcelona, Spain. It arrives in, oh, ten days. Depending on the ocean. She had a U.S. passport, under her own name, and two pieces of luggage. She didn’t use the married name you gave me.”

“Is there any way I can send her a cable?”

“Of course. I mean there must be. Let me find out the details.”

“No, Jackie. You have things to do.”

“I’ll find out.”

“By the way,” Delaney said, “how’s the knee?”

“This weather, it kills me. Hard to sleep. Fucking Heinies…”

“Come by. I’ll take a look.”

“I can’t for a while. We got a double homicide on Morton Street. They drafted me ’cause I know the neighborhood. A man and a woman, dead in his bed, and her husband on the lam. The usual shit.”

“Anybody we know?”

“Nah. The dead guy’s from Brooklyn, lived two months on Morton Street, a furnished room. The couple’s Irish. Might be just off the boat. Love is wonderful.”

“Well, stay off the ice, Jackie. And thanks.”

In the kitchen, Carlos was gnawing on a crust of bread. He was sitting now on a plush red cushion, taken from the upstairs living room. He pointed to the snow in the yard.

“O,” he said.

“Okay, lad. Let’s finish eating first.”

They played in the garden for a while, but it was hard to make snowballs from the iron crusts of old snow. Delaney could see the boarded-over back windows of the Logan house, right next door to the west, number 97 Horatio. Taller by a floor than his own. Brownstone, not brick, like a vagrant visiting from Gramercy Park. The windows on the street side were sealed too. Even the hard kids and the rummies avoided the place. They all believed that ghosts lurked within. Perhaps they did. Above all, the ghost of poor Jimmy Logan. He had grown rich in the good times after the war, import-export, the trade of the river; bought this house; added a second in the Poconos; had two cars and three daughters. Insisted that people call him James, not Jimmy. Suits from Brooks Brothers. Shoes from England. After the Crash, his stocks and bank accounts vanished. He got rid of the cars. Then one Friday, his business ended too, the movers carted away the furniture, and he came home and shot his wife, and two of the daughters, and himself. Jackie Norris helped clean up that mess too. So did Delaney, when Monique heard the shots. The story was all over the tabloids, and a judge ordered the house sealed until the youngest daughter, four years old, grew up. She was staying with relatives in New Jersey and would be a long time growing up. The house stood there now, part of the parenthesis within which Delaney lived. Ghosts to the left. Bitterness to the right. He looked away.

After a while, the boy began to shiver. They went back inside. Rose was coming in the front door with a battered suitcase and a shopping bag. She laid the bag on a chair beside the kitchen table. She was definitely moving in.

“Give me ten minutes, I unpack,” she said. “Come on, Carlos.”

The boy went up the stairs behind her, taking one step at a time. The house was getting fuller, and somehow richer.

Delaney went to his consulting room and worked on a cable. YOUR SON IS SAFE. HE WANTS TO KNOW WHEN YOU’RE COMING BACK. DAD. No, that was wrong, making her feel guilty. ALL IS FINE WITH CARLOS. I HIRED A WOMAN TO HELP CARE FOR HIM. WHEN WILL YOU RETURN? Too many words, too expensive. This is a cable. CARLOS FINE WOMAN HELPING WHEN YOU RETURN QUERY DAD. One, two, nine words. Better…

Monique came in.

“Three house calls waiting. Also the mail. Some bills for the electric, the telephone, the usual first-of-the-month stuff. I also gave Rose ten dollars for food. Hey, you look wiped out. Maybe you should grab a nap.”

“Maybe.”

“I mean, if you get sick, the whole thing stops.”

He laughed. “I can’t afford to stop now.”

“You ain’t kidding. You got ninety-seven dollars in the account, and now you gotta feed three people, plus coal and kerosene.”

“Maybe I could tend bar after house calls.”

“Maybe you could do a novena.”

She turned and he held the text of the cable, the two early versions crossed out.

“If Jackie Norris calls with an address, send this, okay?”

She looked dubiously at the text and hurried away to answer the ringing telephone. He went up to see the boy. Carlito was sitting on the floor in Rose’s room, watching her lay clothes neatly in the dresser drawers. The suitcase was open on the bed. On the small lamp table, an Italian-English dictionary was laid upon a copy of the Daily News. Just as Monique told him. Rose was smiling as she moved, and in the hard snow-bright light he noticed that she had a fine white scar from her left cheekbone to the lobe of her ear. The slice of a knife. It did not affect her smile, so he knew the blade had missed the crucial tendons.

“Looking good now,” Rose said, her smile showing a slight overbite. She unfolded a framed photograph on a small easel and placed it on the dresser top. The frame was brass. “That’s my mother, my father. My brothers, my sisters. There’s me too.”

The father was dressed in a badly-fitting black suit, starched collar, wide knotted tie, squinting sternly at the camera. The mother looked blank and uncomfortable in a dark skirt that reached her shoe tops. Rose was probably fourteen and resembled her mother. The oval shape of her head. The young men were all smiling, perhaps preening, their suits pressed, their shoes glistening with polish. The girls were glum, except for Rose, who was flashing her wonderful smile and her intelligent eyes. Delaney thought: She was thirty pounds lighter then and two inches shorter.

“It’s a Sunday,” Rose said. “My father’s birthday. We all went to eat together. I’m fourteen. My brothers left after the picture, chasing girls.” Beyond the Verga family there was a bay filled with anchored fishing boats and a distant line of mountains. “Long time ago.”