Pete Hamill - North River

Delaney smiled fondly in the darkness. Izzy the Atheist had lived in the trenches too, in the mud and shit and fear, and sometimes raved in Delaney’s office, waiting for his quinine. He wasn’t the only man, sound of body, who had a hole chopped out of his brain by what he saw. Nobody who had gone to France ever said a word to him. Those who tried to stop Izzy’s ravings were all men who had stayed home. The vets knew that God was just another form of bullshit.

But if God was gone, or simply deaf to all cries for help, Delaney did wish that he could speak to his daughter, Grace. Urging her to return. Come and take your son, Grace. Do not hand me this cup. Come and retrieve him, and I’ll give you Eddie Corso’s five thousand dollars. Not as a bribe, but to give you a means to begin again here in New York with your son. With or without your man, the son of a bitch. You can pick up the pieces of your life, you can stretch canvas and mix paint and create. You can become again the woman you started to become when you were sixteen and seventeen, when the whole world awaited you. Goddamn you, Grace. And then he fought against his bitterness, trying to place it in a cage, and then to shrink it. He addressed himself out loud: “Stop it, stop this self-righteous horseshit.” And thought of Grace at three years old, the age of the boy. And addressed himself. You put your marks on her too. You broke the balance. You went off to the goddamned war when you didn’t have to go. You could have fought the call-up in 1917, claiming truthfully that you had two dependents. You didn’t fight the draft. You went to the war and you were gone more than two years. When you returned, you were at once so numb and so busy trying to get back lost time and lost money that you had no time for that little girl. You were there, and you were not there. She learned to live without you. She needed you, because… because her mother was drifting into the cold numb isolation that came from rage. Or because all little girls need their father. Or because… But then you don’t truly know why, do you? You weren’t there. Grace needed you and you went to the war. You were sworn to do no harm, and then you went ahead and did it.

“Stop it.”

He let the boy rise in his mind, with those bright intelligent brown eyes and his wonder at the snowy world. He could be here for three weeks or twenty years. There was no way of knowing. Grace was out wandering the dangerous world. Across oceans lurked dragons. The boy was here. The boy was alive. He was a fact, not an abstraction. He is asleep upstairs, while the cleansing rain falls on the city . I can do for him what I did not do for Grace. I can take his hand. I can love him…

After a while, Delaney fell asleep. And dreamed a dream almost as familiar as the older dream of snow. He was in a long gray concrete corridor, trying to find an exit. The dying, the injured, the wounded, were all around him, writhing, moaning, seething with pain. There were soldiers with tin pots on top of their heads and blood streaming from their eye sockets. Slum kids from Brooklyn and the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen stood at an angle to the wall, erupting with strands of yellow mucus. Old women pulled robes against shriveled bodies. There were bashed women and stabbed women and women crazy with disease. The floor was slippery with blood and shit and urine. Someone screamed for morphine. Many held out hands, demanding to be touched, to be healed, and he would not touch them.

Then he was awake, his heart pounding.

The clock said three-fifteen. He could hear a few cars making a tearing sound through the rain. The snow was surely gone.

Then he heard the music.

The piano.

Brahms.

He threw off the covers and reached for his robe in the chilly room. The music stopped. It was the melody she played that summer evening before going on her walk to the North River, never to return.

He dozed again in the silent bedroom and conjured images of Molly, with her lustrous black hair and her crooked grin. Molly at the Battery gazing at the October harbor and the lights glittering off the waves. Molly in Tony Pastor’s on the Fourteenth Street Rialto, laughing at the comics and the jugglers, and later humming the melancholy ballads as they walked toward home. They’re all sentimental rubbish, she said, but they get into your head… Molly announcing she was pregnant that first time, her face transformed, radiant, luminous, and then the bitter tears when the child came too soon and was dead. He saw that it would have been a boy, but he did not tell her for more than a year. He saw her beside him on the streets of Vienna, joyous as they skipped together through the evening crowds to the opera house; or walking beside him across Central Park to the Metropolitan, where she stared at the Vermeer and said she could hear the Dutchman’s music. She was seated with him in the Polo Grounds, enjoying his happiness even though the game baffled her and she knew nothing of the legend of John McGraw. They went together to Coney Island on a few summer Sundays. They took the ferry to and from New Jersey, with the cool salt spray dampening them both and the towers rising in the downtown city. They took the subway to the end of the line. They rode the Third Avenue El and the Ninth Avenue El to the same destinations, her eyes taking in everything, from the dark subway tunnels to the tenement living rooms where the human beings lived with the constant roar of trains, and then she tried to put all that she had seen into music. I want to make this all into music, she said. American music. No: New York music. Full of car horns, not cattle; gangsters, not cowboys; poor women working street corners; thieves locked away in cells. All of that… He heard her arguing for socialism. He heard her saying that this was no democracy if women could not vote, more than 120 years after the Revolution. He heard her talking about Berlioz and Schoenberg and how her instructor in Vienna thought that all the past was now dead. He heard her tell him as they sat together near a cleared space on the North River that she was again pregnant, and how he hugged her in delight, and kissed her tearful face, and started to sing the song.

He heard her laughing at the silly words.

And thought: I do not believe in ghosts. But I know they exist, because I live with one.

He woke before seven and shadowboxed in the chilly room for five minutes with his hands open. Jab, left hook, right hand. Jab-jab, right hand. Hook, hook, double ’em up, step back, right hand. Jab, then bend, then the hook. The way he had been trained long ago in Packy Hanratty’s gym upstairs from the saloon on Ninth Avenue. Except that now the right hand had no snap, would never again be a punch, was shoved into the air instead of tearing at space. The hand that once had painted, the hand that once punched. Long ago. Still, he could hear the roar from the packed smokers in Brooklyn and East Harlem, in those years when every other Irish kid wanted to be a fighter, even those kids who wanted to be doctors. Packy’s motto was Above All, Do Some Harm. And he did.

Then he went into the bathroom, where he shaved at the sink and stepped under the shower, an ache in his right shoulder, some migrating sliver of shrapnel loosened by the shadowboxing, working its way to freedom. Or the shrapnel of worry. The shower was an ancient device, reminding him of the insane inventions of Rube Goldberg in the Journal. Knobs, pipes, the water sometimes scalding, sometimes tepid, always sputtering. He dried himself with a towel that was too small, thinking: I could get all this goddamned plumbing fixed, I could buy big towels, and fresh underwear. I could do all those things put off after the bank on Canal Street failed in ’31 and took everything with it. I could…