Pete Hamill - North River

“It’s like a block party around here,” Rose said, and laughed. “How many of these guys — I mean your guys — you think have guns?” Delaney said he didn’t want to know. In the places where he made house calls, neighbors nodded, and waited in the vestibules like guards. The word was out. This wasn’t just a neighborhood. Delaney knew that it was a point of view, a way of looking at the world and living in it. They all believed in the unions, the longshoremen, the teamsters, the carpenters, the steamfitters, and so did their wives. Even out of work, the men were out of work as union men. In the twenties, more than a few of them had had their heads cracked in fights on picket lines, men like little Patty Rafferty, who sat now with vacant eyes in the dock wallopers’ union hall. Some had cracked a few heads themselves. But they got the union, forever. They had voted for Roosevelt and said so, and some had voted for La Guardia and didn’t say so, because they had never voted for a Republican in their lives. Now some of them were communists, vehement and certain, but Delaney was sure that wouldn’t last. The communists did not easily forgive sin. On the West Side, sin and its forgiveness were part of the deal.

That’s why he’d come back here. That’s why he’d returned to make a second life with Molly and Grace after the war had destroyed so many things, including the certainties of that first life. These were his people. They needed him. They still did. And he needed them. They would fight if threatened, and he would fight for them, and with them. He would try to prolong their lives. Or save them. He would help them move their children through the ceaseless dangers of the streets. He would try as hard as he could to ease their pain. To bring them sleep. To give them another day, another week, another year. The reason was simple. Here all sins were forgiven. Even the sins of James Finbar Delaney.

On Sunday, the blessed day without patients, Rose was off work, wandering alone into the city. Delaney tried to convince her to stay home, but she only laughed. “Those bums can’t fight when the sun is out. Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.” And was gone.

Delaney took Carlito by the hand and walked down to Washington Street. The sun was bright and hard. They stood for a long time watching a lone freight train move on the High Line, testing the track, groaning, pulling loads of unseen cargo, bells ringing, steel wheels squealing, entering buildings from the north side and emerging on the south. He tried to see this wonder through the boy’s eyes. Were these huge right-angled animals? Were they controlled monsters? Whatever he thought, the boy didn’t want to leave.

“Tray,” he said, pointing a mittened hand at a train. And adding, when it was gone, “More tray.”

I will get him a picture book about trains, Delaney thought. And about animals. And the alphabet. He will learn to name the world. All of its plants and living creatures, its seas and ships, its cabbages and kings. In the spring, I will get him a book about baseball. And show him the photographs in the Daily News, of a man sliding into second base with the shortstop above him, firing to first for a double play.

Then they walked to the North River, empty on this cold day of rest. Only the train was moving behind them. He saw one of Knocko’s boys watching from a discreet distance, hat pulled low, hands jammed in pockets. The boy stared in wonder at three huge ships tied to the few waterfront piers that were not emptied by the Depression. He saw a seagull descending in a diminishing circle and landing on a grimy piling. Then Delaney led him onto the abandoned pier where he and Molly had walked on summer evenings. He held the boy’s small hand all the way, feeling the warmth. He wondered where Rose had gone on this empty Sunday. The North River was filled with broken boulders of ice, and Delaney explained the chunks to the boy, and how the river carried them away to the harbor to the left and then to the ocean, and the boy watched with great intensity. I will find a book about ships and rivers and the ocean sea.

Standing on the timbers of the pier, holding the boy’s hand, Delaney realized that after a long frozen time, there was a fresh current in his own life too.

When he was in bed in the dark, longing for sleep, Delaney’s patients vanished. The commandos of the neighborhood’s self-defense corps had retired to quarters. Monique was off in her night place. Rose was upstairs with her dictionary and her Daily News beside her and a baseball bat in the corner. There were no sounds in the dark house. And yet he trembled. Afraid of sleep. For the boy now filled too many of his dreams.

One night he saw Carlito falling from the Brooklyn Bridge, calling, calling, his voice pathetic and pleading, vanishing into the black waters. On another night, the boy was running on Horatio Street toward the High Line and fell into an open sewer, into the place where cholera lived, and typhoid and polio. On a third night, the boy was at the rail of a freighter glazed with ice, carrying him away from a North River pier into the unseen Atlantic. And on another night, on the same icy ship, the boy started to climb the rail, as if to dive in and swim to shore, and his mother was suddenly there, Grace herself, pulling him back, the faces of both distorted with fear. That night he called to Grace to hold the boy, and then woke up at the sound of his own voice.

On this Sunday night, he huddled there in the dark, his heart thumping. Longing for sleep to come, in spite of dreams.

He woke abruptly from a dream of Carlito one night, the boy wedged in the gluey mud of a trench, wearing pajamas among helmeted men while explosions shook the earth. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. Delaney lay there, heart pounding, his eyes blinking, and then saw a glow.

Against the far side of the room the glow was pale white, tinged with blue, as shimmery and pale as a watercolor. He stared. And then, like atoms coalescing, a figure formed, sitting in the wing chair.

It was Molly.

“Hello, James,” she whispered.

He started to get up, to go to her.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Stay there.”

He rose to his elbows, his heart now racing.

“Is it really you?” he said.

She didn’t answer for a while.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. She was wearing an overcoat and laced boots, but he could see her high cheekbones, the wide-spaced eyes, the lustrous hair, the long-fingered hands.

“I had to go away,” she said. “It was the only way I could live.”

“Where did you go?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “To green fields. To soft rain. To music in mountains. Everywhere, James.”

“But why?”

“To be free. And so you could be free too. Free of me.”

“I didn’t want to be free of you.”

“But look at you. You have the boy. And you look happier than you ever were with me.”

“Please, Molly, stay. Don’t go away. Stay with me. And the boy, and we’ll wait for Grace to return, and —”

He slipped out of bed now to go to her, to hold her, to embrace her, to weep into her hair.

“I must go,” she said.

He took a few steps. And then she was gone. The glow faded into blackness.

Delaney turned to his pillow but did not weep.

THE MIDNIGHT VISION OF MOLLY WAS WITH HIM AT BREAKFAST, and stayed while he tended to the morning patients, and as he ate a sandwich with Rose on the lunch break in the kitchen, and while Carlito showed off his growing skill with the paddleball. Molly was with him later, as Delaney moved through the neighborhood on house calls, leaning into the wind, and while he examined a cancer case and a raving late stage of syphilis in a woman he knew as a child. An old longshoreman moaned with diabetes, all feeling gone from fingers and hands, and tried to hide his terror about amputation. A thirtyish daughter explained that her sixtyish mother had fallen into some valley of depression and would not come out. An infant wheezed with croup. He looked at each of them, focused on them tightly, touched them gently, recommended remedies in a voice he hoped was soothing and kind and knowing, and moved on, and Molly was still with him.