Pete Hamill - North River

“Bah fongool,” Carlito said.

They had gone half a block when the boy stopped and looked bleary. He couldn’t move his feet. Delaney lifted him, carrying him home, feeling his puppy warmth through thick coats and falling snow. He remembered Eddie Corso’s tutoring him in Italian that time in France. Palle were balls. A cazzo was a prick. Fottere meant fucking. But Eddie didn’t know where bah fongool came from, although he did know what it meant. In search of precision, they went to see Lieutenant Rossetti, whose father was a writer for Il Progresso in New York. The lieutenant smiled. Yeah, he said, it comes from va f’an culo, which roughly means, Up your ass! Don’t say it to anyone, unless you want to get shot. The next afternoon, Lieutenant Rossetti had the front of his brow blown off by a German sniper.

“I’m sorry I used a bad word back there,” Rose said. “The boy, he remembers everything you say.”

“Don’t worry, Rose,” Delaney said. “The guy deserved it. Just be careful. This is about me, not you.”

“You didn’t seem scared about the gun.”

“Every gun is scary,” he said. “But I’ve seen them before.”

“In the war?”

“The war,” he said. “And yes, around here too.”

From long habit, he didn’t elaborate. Rifles, mortars, grenades… and he’d seen gunshot wounds too. A lot of them. Too many of them. Way too many dead people too. But he hated talking like a tough guy.

“I know that guy,” Rose said quietly. “The cafone with the gun.”

“Who is he?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she said, glancing behind her at the empty sidewalk and the snowy stillness of the street. Her face was harder now.

When they reached the house, Rose opened the doors beneath the stoop, then gazed once again at the street. She locked the doors behind them, and Delaney carried the boy upstairs to the top-floor bedroom. Rose followed, removing her coat and hat, then draping them over the top-floor banister. In the light from the hallway, Delaney laid the boy on his bed, where the teddy bear was tucked under the covers. The ache was back in his right arm.

“Here, let me do this,” Rose said, as if sensing that both arms were not the same now. She began to undress the boy. Delaney removed his coat and placed it on the banister beside hers. The boy’s eyes opened. He blinked, gazed at Rose, then at Delaney. He did not look frightened.

“Okay, come on now,” Rose said, lifting the boy. “Brush your teeth, make pee pee.”

She carried him into the bathroom. Delaney stood there, hearing flushing water, and Rose’s murmuring voice. He glanced into her room. There was a notebook on top of the Italian-English dictionary. On the wall a calendar from Il Progresso showed Roman ruins. Delaney thought: I’m a sort of ruin too. And chuckled.

“Okay,” Rose said, after flushing the toilet. “Now you go night-night, boy.”

She pulled the covers aside and laid him down, and he hugged the teddy bear as she covered him. His eyes moved from Delaney to Rose. He turned his head to face the wall and whispered: “Mamá.” He hugged the bear. Then he closed his eyes and fell into sleep. Rose glanced at Delaney, who saw unspoken emotion in her eyes. Pity. Or sorrow.

“Come on,” she said. “I make you some tea.”

He drank his tea in the Irish way, with milk and two sugars. Rose used a wedge of lemon and resisted the sugar. She folded her thin, sweatered arms and leaned on the table and talked about the man with the gun.

“They call him Gyp,” she said. “Like one out of three gangsters. Once a week in the Daily News, they find some dead cafone in Brooklyn and his name is Gyp. Gyp Santucci… Gyp Ferraro… This guy, his name is Gyp Pavese. He lives with his mother up Spring Street. Thirty-fi’ years old, he lives wit’ his mother.”

“How do you know all this?” Delaney said, wanting to know about Gyp, wanting to know more about Rose.

“When I first come to America,” she said, “ I live in the same block as Gyp, across the street with a family from Genoa. I see him every day, dressed in clothes he can’t afford, so I know he’s a gangster. The people in my house say he’s a knife guy. Couldn’t fight Carlito and win, so he uses a knife on people.” She turned her head as if embarrassed at what she was about to say. “One time, he comes to me, he says, ‘Hey, baby, you gotta go out with me.’ I say, ‘No thanks.’ Well, that makes him crazy, ’cause he thinks he’s Rudolph Valentino. He asks me again, then again, until I say, ‘Don’t ask me again, Gyp.’ ” She smiled. “Or else, goddamn it.”

About six strands of her hair had fallen loose, like brushstrokes. She sipped her tea, then went silent, as if she did not want to go on. She was like so many patients who had sat across from him and told only part of their story.

“But that wasn’t the end of the story, was it?” he said.

“No.”

“Tell me the rest.”

She took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Well, the people from Genoa, my landlords, they worry all the time, they don’t want trouble with gangsters. And so I move away, and live in Angela’s house awhile.” A muscle twitched in her cheek. “All this is, what? Five, six years ago…”

She drummed her nails on the tabletop. They were square and blocky and carefully trimmed. She seemed hesitant, as if afraid she was telling Delaney too much about herself.

“But Gyp didn’t give up?” Delaney said.

She looked at him, then at the wall above the stove. “No. For a long time, I don’t see him. Then I hear he’s in jail. Good, I think, that’s where he belongs, with his crazy mother too. I relax. Then I hear he’s out of jail. Still, I’m okay. You know, it’s New York: you move five blocks away, it’s a different world. And I had lots of work. Cook-ing. Making hats. Sewing dresses. Stuff like that. Piecework, too, blouses…”

“And then Gyp came back.”

“You got it, Dottore,” she said. Nodding her head. “One morning I come out of the house, there’s Gyp. Dressed all sharp, with a gray hat like tonight. He says he wants to see me, he’s been in love with me for years, and then he says, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody else can have you.’ ”

She poked at the tea with a spoon. “What’s the word? A threat?” Delaney nodded, encouraging her to go on. “Anyway, I think about going a long ways away, like California. Maybe China! I explain everything to Angela, and she says, ‘Don’t worry, I take care of this.’ And she does. She talks to someone, and Mr. Someone talks to someone else, and Gyp stays away.” She moved her head from side to side. “Until tonight.”

Delaney sipped his tea, which was turning cold.

“He was there because of me, not you.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Delaney said, “Who were the guys in the car?”

“From the Frankie Botts mob. Up by Bleecker Street. The Naples boys.”

“Frankie Botts?”

“Frankie Botticelli.”

“Like the painter?”

“You know Sandro Botticelli?” she said, and smiled. “From Firenze? There’s a painting he painted, you know, very famous. A naked lady with long hair, coming out of a clamshell. You know that painting? Venus! I used to look like that, except I’m never a blonde.” Then she blushed, as if afraid the doctor might think she was flirting. She waved a hand in an airy way. “You know…”

For the first time, Delaney tried to imagine Rose naked. And stopped. And remembered buying a large framed print of Birth of Venus for Grace, on her fourteenth birthday. Her young eyes widened, and she stood before it, breathing deeply, flexing and unflexing her hands. Her hands then moved toward the tabouret, for paint and a brush. Poor Venus hung on the wall upstairs for a long time, and when Grace left with her man, the Botticelli went with her. Wherever that might be.