Pete Hamill - North River

“Want me to talk to Stella before you go?”

“We’ll call from the road we need advice.” He smiled. “Maybe she’s a plainclothes nun. She’s definitely big on Hail Marys and Our Fathers.”

“Maybe she’ll save your soul, Eddie.”

“Too late for that, I guess,” he said, and laughed. Then winced. “Jesus, don’t make me fuckin’ laugh.”

A pause. Then Delaney took Eddie Corso’s hand.

“I wanted to thank you for… you know…”

“Shut up, you dumb Mick. Just use it for that kid. And if you need anything else, you know, like getting somebody killed, just call me. I’ll be out by the pool.”

Delaney took the El back downtown, looking around at the sparser crowd of passengers. He sometimes felt in trains the way he felt in emergency rooms. There were too many people to ever know them all. Every one had a story that he’d never hear, and he had heard more stories of human grief than most people. He met them in the present, but each of them had a past. Better to shut down, stop imagining, deal with all other human beings the way he dealt with patients. Cage the past. Deal with them, gently if necessary, and then seal them out of memory. They could vanish like the words of a song, recovered only in isolated fragments. Worry about your friends, he often thought, and the few people you love, and leave the rest to Providence and, as Big Jim used to sing, Paddy McGinty’s goat. A song that always made Molly laugh. A song from the past.

From the moment he first saw her, he knew that Molly had a past. She was losing a child on a North River pier, and someone had helped place that child in her emptying womb. Someone from her very recent past. He knew that from the beginning, but never asked her about it. Not in St. Vincent’s, as he tried to convince her to live, with soft words and gentle touches of her wrist. Not later. The nuns never asked either. They had seen too many humans move through those wards to judge any of them. So had Delaney. He never asked her about the past when she left the hospital, still full of sorrow and some form of muted anger. He didn’t ask her when he saw her on Greenwich Street seven months later, healthy now, working at Wanamaker’s as a salesgirl, living in a woman’s boardinghouse. Nor did he pry in any way when they went together to Tony Pastor’s on the following Saturday night. There he first saw her beautiful smile when the comedians started their routines, a smile full of release from sorrow, and later they walked across Union Square in the dim snowy night, and she took his arm and repeated three of the jokes and then laughed out loud, and they went into the restaurant, and still he did not ask. He knew that he must listen if she ever told her tale, but he could not ask. He did not ask when they were married. He did not ask in Baltimore, when they arrived to find the way to Johns Hopkins. He did not ask when they moved into Horatio Street, or in the years that followed. He did not ask in his letters from the war. He never asked, and she never told the tale. But he came to know something large and heavy about her: the tale lay within her, wordless, a wound unhealed.

Sitting alone at the end of the rattling elevated car, Delaney saw a young man at the other end, seventeen or eighteen, dressed in the sharp clothes of the apprentice hoodlum. He stood with his back to the door, hands before him like a prizefighter waiting to be introduced at the Garden, unwilling to sit and risk the ruin of his razored creases. And Delaney thought of Eddie Corso, and hoped he would be all right. He hoped Eddie would live many more years. He hoped the wound would not suddenly fester. He hoped there would be no stupid accident on the long road to Florida. He hoped no hired gunsel would hunt him down.

He got off at Fourteenth Street, glancing one final time at the apprentice hoodlum, who didn’t move an inch. He walked past the Spanish church and the Spanish Benevolent Society and the Spanish grocery and turned left at the meat market and into Horatio Street. Kids were everywhere, defying the icy wind off the North River. Playing tag. Running after one another. Shuddering in doorways or vestibules, scheming, smoking cigarettes. He had treated most of them and would treat them again. The Rearden kid. The Caputo kid. The Corrigan twins. They moved in packs of six and seven, and he tried to imagine Carlito among them. They carried all the normal dangers: measles and scarlet fever and whooping cough. In summer there was polio, and all the filthy things they could contract while swimming off the North River piers. The normal diseases were just that: normal. Mayor La Guardia said a few days ago that he’d make vaccinations for kids mandatory, and maybe he’d be the rare politician who kept his word. Maybe.

The streets were full of other dangers. Knives and guns and the logic of the pack. He had treated people for such things too. Soon the boy gangsters would no longer swing aboard the Tenth Avenue trains, taking their percentage, not after the New York Central opened the elevated High Line above the street. Closer to the river, they were working on the Miller Highway too, that would carry automobiles above the cobblestones. But the High Line was something else, a commercial overpass that even cut through buildings above street level. But he could imagine the youth packs heaving ladders against walls and hopping the slow trains and hurling booty to the street. Children of the old Hudson Dusters, the vanished Whyos. Some of them learned too young to love trouble, and the more difficult the trouble, the better.

For most of a block, he was scared about Carlito. If the boy stayed here a long time, if he was to be here for years, he’d go to those streets on his own. The boy couldn’t have Delaney with him every hour of the day. He couldn’t have Rose Verga there either, for she could be gone in a month. Even if she stayed, the other kids would mock him if he used any woman as a bodyguard. Or a creaky, respectable grandfather. But he couldn’t just move away. Couldn’t afford another house. Couldn’t just go. This was his place and he had made a vow. Promised himself in the mud and shit of France that if he lived he would serve his own people. For the rest of his fucking life. If he fled with Carlito to some leafy suburb, or to Brooklyn or the Bronx, the broken vow would eat his guts. He must find a way to stay.

But in spite of the vow, Delaney knew he must deal with practical matters. Where would the boy go to school? Sacred Heart was better than the public school. But there was trouble there too, and danger. Demented priests, seething with God’s furies and their own tormenting desires. They planted the fear of Hell in their young charges along with hatred of the flesh. Carlito could be subjected to all those small mutilations that could leave scars for life. God damn you, Grace.

He went in under the stoop, and on the bench in the hall he saw a weeping young woman holding an infant. She rose when he entered, trying to speak. The child was silent and still. Behind her on the bench was Japs Brannigan, his high-cheekboned yellowed Asian face more like a wood sculpture than part of a living creature. He was there for the quinine. And there was old Sally Wilson, staring into the darkness at the far end of the waiting room. Delaney held up a hand, gesturing to them all.

“I need five minutes,” he said. “Just give me that.”

Monique was at her desk, her face flat and void of expression, her eyes tired. He closed the door behind him. He flashed on that morning, the first of May, 1909. Knocko was calling, a dock walloper then, not the president of the union. He said there was a woman on Pier 41 and she was in trouble. “She’s a Mick,” Knocko said. “I don’t want the immigration idiots to send her out to the Island for lyin’ or somethin’.” Delaney pedaled the bike to the pier. In a dark corner Knocko had placed some longshoremen around the woman, holding blankets to shield her from the inspection of strangers. She was young, pale, beautiful, and semiconscious. She had just arrived alone in steerage from Ireland and was having a miscarriage. Molly.