Pete Hamill - North River

After a melancholy moment, she turned her back on the photograph and took blouses from the suitcase and started hanging them in the shallow closet.

“You gotta get this boy some more clothes,” she said. “I know the bargain places. Or up at Klein’s, on Fourteen’ Street. And that window in his room, it don’t close right. I put the towel to close it up, see? So the boy don’t catch a cold. And you, Dottore, go down and sleep a little, okay? You look terrible.”

Wearing a bathrobe, Delaney slipped under the covers and fell into an hour of deep dreamless sleep. He came suddenly awake, rose quickly, brushed his teeth and washed, and then, feeling refreshed, went off into the blue twilight to make three house calls. When he returned, Bootsie was waiting in the hall. The fat man rose from the bench, wheezing slightly.

“You keep too many hours,” Bootsie said. “Even your nurse went home.”

Delaney opened the door to his office.

“How’s the boss?”

“Much better. He wants to go home. He wants you to put in a word with that Zimmerman.”

“He’ll go home when he’s ready. That’s not up to me. What can I do for you, Bootsie?”

Bootsie took a long tan envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Delaney.

“Mister Corso sent you this.”

He turned to go.

“Hold it a minute, Bootsie.”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say? What’s his message?”

Bootsie smiled without humor.

“He said, you don’t take it, he kills you.”

He smiled again, then went out through the hall. Delaney heard the gate clang shut behind him. From the high floor he could hear the murmur of Rose’s voice, talking with the boy. He closed the office door and laid the envelope on the green blotter of his desk. He sat looking at it for a long moment. Then he used a letter opener to slice through the seal.

There was no note. He spread the contents on the blotter. There they were: fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. Five thousand dollars in cash.

“God damn you, Eddie,” Delaney whispered.

AT HIS DESK, DELANEY HELD THE PHONE FOR A LONG TIME, WHILE off in St. Vincent’s one of the nuns went to find Zimmerman. The news on Larry Dorsey was good: no fracture, no brain damage. He’d be playing saxophone in another week. But it was Eddie Corso he wanted to know about. He heard granular rain lashing at the back window. It would either wash away the scabbed snow or glaze it with ice. He wanted the goddamned snow to be gone. He wanted to walk around the neighborhood with the boy, to give him some basic geography, to show him the North River. He wanted to tell him about springtime in New York, and how the bony trees would burst with leaves, and how the Giants would soon play ball in the Polo Grounds again. They would go together. The boy would be three on St. Patrick’s Day, a good age to begin looking at the most beautiful of sports. He would explain to Carlito what a hot dog was too, and how it wasn’t a dog at all. They would eat hot dogs while sitting together in the sun.

“Hello?”

“Zim, it’s Delaney. How’s our patient?”

“He’s some tough old bastard,” Zimmerman said. “He wants to leave tomorrow.”

“What do you think?”

“Two more days, at least. He’s healed well, the pain is almost gone, no signs of infection, but…”

“Want me to take a look?”

“If you like, but he seems… I don’t know, a guy gets shot like he was, you think he’d stay in bed for a month.”

“He’s been shot before.”

“I know. You told me, and I saw the scars. I don’t know why you didn’t become a surgeon.”

“Someday I’ll tell you all about it. Did he talk about anything else?”

“Well…”

“What do you mean? Well, what?”

A pause. A smothering hand on the phone at the other end, a lowering of the voice.

“He gave me some money,” Zimmerman said. “He gave the nuns money too.”

“And what did you do, Jake?”

“I told him to forget it. Then he told me if I didn’t take it, he’d have me killed.”

Delaney chuckled. “The nuns too?”

“That wouldn’t scare them. Aren’t they in, what do you goyim call it? A state of grace?”

“Yeah, they die, they go straight to Heaven. If you see a nun driving a car, get off the street.”

“Anyway, I don’t know what they did about the money. And I don’t want to know.”

“Neither do I.”

“Try to come in and talk him down. He says he wants to drive to Florida.”

“I’ll call tomorrow. Thanks, Zim. For everything.”

“Thank you. ”

Delaney hung up the telephone and sat for a few minutes, staring at a framed browning photograph of his father standing with John McGraw, before the war. In the days when his father was Big Jim and Delaney was Little Jim, even though he was two inches taller than Big Jim. At that time a lot of people received cash in envelopes, almost certainly including Big Jim. He placed the bills back in the envelope and opened the wall safe where he kept his passport, the deed to the house, his marriage license, along with morphine and other dangerous items. He laid the envelope on top of the small pile, then twirled the dial to lock the safe. He put out the lights and closed the doors and went quietly up the stairs. The only sound from the top floor was Rose’s light snoring. He went into his bedroom.

In the darkness, wrapped in a cotton nightshirt, the covers pulled tight, Delaney listened to the hard rain and could not sleep. He wished he had someone to talk to. Someone who could listen while he discussed the money. He wished he could explain how torn he was, how he was trying to balance the sudden presence of the boy in his life with the ancient sense of corruption that he was feeling about those five thousand dollars. Big Jim wouldn’t think about it for a minute. He was Big Jim Delaney, district leader, ward heeler, and he knew how the world worked. He had never read Niccolò Machiavelli, but he had graduated from the University of Tammany Hall. He always said his favorite color was green, and not because he was Irish. Delaney’s mother would have placed the child and his future before the legal concerns, knowing in her chilly way that what was legal was often not the same as what was moral. New York had taught her that, and so had Ireland. You must be daft, he could hear her saying. You’ve helped thousands of people for free, not taking a bloody dime, and here is a gift that will make a boy’s life more possible. Take it. It’s yours. God sent it to you. With Eddie Corso’s money, he could have the house steam-heated, putting heat into the arctic top floor without the stench of burnt kerosene. He could pay for clothes for the boy, warm winter clothes, lighter things for the summer. He could buy a small used car and do even more house calls and perhaps help even more people. There’d be no need for the bicycle, except for exercise. He could deliver the endless New York casualties to the doors of the hospital. Then he remembered dimly a phrase from a high school religion class, something about an “elastic conscience,” and how its possession was the worst example of the sin of vanity. That’s me, Delaney thought, here in this monk’s bed. The man with the elastic conscience… He wished he could pray, but all of that faith and belief and certainty had ended forever in the Argonne. After seeing true horror, no sane person could believe again in a benevolent God.

He could see and hear Izzy the Atheist at the bar in Finnegan’s last summer, railing at all the big gods. Izzy, who was half Jewish, half Italian, full of sarcasm, his teeth yellow and framed by a biblical beard. “What kind of god tells a man to kill his son? Like Abraham and Isaac? I’ll tell you what kind of a god! An egotistical, cruel, son of a bitch of a god!” Someone shouted at him to shut up. Izzy went on without fear. “God comes to me and tells me I gotta kill my son? To prove I love God? You know what I tell him? I tell him: Hey, pal, go fuck yourself, you fat-headed prick!”