Pete Hamill - North River

“Silver plate?”

“Sì, a plate inside. Made of silver. To hold his head together. Right that minute I should have left Agrigento. A man with metal in his head, he ain’t ever gonna be normal… But he’s a hero of the war. How can I run away from a hero of the war?”

Most patients had a narrative that explained many things, and he had learned to be gentle in discovering it. But he wanted to stop now. To stop the process of knowing her. She was not a patient. She was not asking to be healed. He should leave her to tend the boy and cook and provide warmth to the house. But he wanted to know her too.

“And so?” he said.

“You want to know the whole story?”

“If you want to tell it.”

“I didn’t tell it to Monique. I didn’t lie. But there’s another story.” A pause. “Maybe I better tell you, maybe you should know about me, if I’m gonna be here for the boy.”

He waited, looking at her, and she began to talk.

Rose and her wounded husband got married and moved into a tiny house out where Agrigento ended and the olive groves began. A kitchen, a bedroom, that was all. Enrico Calvino was an old thirty-two and she was a very young nineteen. She discovered he was a fanatical Catholic and something of a mama’s boy, but she tried. She offered no clinical details but implied that he was not a hero in bed.

She worked. He didn’t. A year or two went by, and he started talking more and more about Benito Mussolini. “That was his job, talking about Mussolini,” she said, and paused. “By then, I’m working in a fish house down by the water, because he can’t work. I buy a used bicycle and go down in the morning, with big boots on my big feet, and back up the hills at night…”

Her face hardened and a sliver of bitterness came into her voice.

“But because I don’t give him a baby boy, a nice little fascisti boy, he starts to hit me.” Another pause. “A slap, then another, and after a while, punches.”

Her chin jutted out, and she said, “Eh…” The sound of contempt. She stood up and poured more hot water in her cup and did the same for Delaney.

“Finally, I know I can’t live with this Enrico no more. I can’t live with him punching me no more. I can’t take his sitting there, smoking cigarettes, not workin’, not talking about anything except that goddamned Mussolini, and I start planning to get away.”

She saved money, a few lire at a time. She checked boat schedules to Naples and trains to Torino and Genoa and Milano. She thought about La Merica. In the telling, the old buried rage blossomed. Her words came more quickly, her voice shifted to a higher pitch.

“One night, I come home late, and Enrico’s there, drunk and pissed off. The big hero starts to yell. Where’s my dinner? Where’s my dinner and where’s my baby boy? He calls me bad names, and I call him bad names, and then he comes for me with a knife, and I turn around and grab a stool, one of those small stools? With three legs?” She took a quick breath. “And I hit him in the head. The head with the, the, with the plate. ” Her voice fell. “And he goes down on the floor.” A pause. “There’s no blood, but I know he’s dead.”

She sipped the tea. She lowered her head, not looking at Delaney.

“I’m very scared,” she said. “I mean, worse than scared. What’s the word? Panico ?”

“Panicked,” Delaney said.

“Yeah, panicked. I think about burning the house down with Enrico inside. I think about going on the bike to the cliffs and jumping into the sea. I think: My life is over. I think: My parents, they’ll be disgrace. I think a lot of things. Then I think: I want to live.”

She looked up at Delaney as if trying to decode his face. Then turned away again.

“I wait a long time, till some clouds cover the moon. Then I drag Enrico out to the olive groves and leave him there. I go back to the house and make sure there’s no blood, and I pack some clothes and get out the bike. I put Enrico down a dry well and drop big rocks on him, the rocks they use to mark the fields. Then I go. There’s a midnight boat to Naples. I get on the boat with the bicycle and my bag of clothes, and I’m on my way. To America. To here. This house. This kitchen.”

She looked exhausted and distraught now, shifting her body, clenching her hands. Delaney wanted to place his good hand on her and comfort her. He didn’t move.

“I’m glad you told me all this, Rose,” Delaney said quietly, and felt stupid for the clumsiness of his words.

“You not gonna fire me?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m a murderer.”

“In this country, self-defense is not murder.”

She waved a hand as if dismissing the distinctions. She now seemed older, her thin face more drawn, as if debating the wisdom of saying anything at all. Delaney ended the silence, saying: “You’d better get some sleep, Rose.”

Her eyes were full. She stood up and placed the cup in the sink. Then she turned on the faucet and watched running water quickly spill over the brim of the cup. She didn’t say another word about her husband. She didn’t mention Gyp Pavese. She said nothing at all about the boy she needed so much.

Instead, she said, “Buona notte, Dottore,” and hurried to the hall. He heard her footsteps rising heavily on the stairs. Her aroma lingered in the kitchen, roses melding with garlic. He had learned again that sometimes a kitchen was more intimate than a bedroom. Or even a doctor’s office, where he had listened to so many confessions without any hope of granting absolution.

In the gray morning, wrapped in his bathrobe, he pushed aside the life within the house and glanced through the newspapers: 400,000 on relief in New York, Hitler ranting in Germany, fighting in China, a volcano erupting in Mexico. There was a photograph of the erupting mountain with a peasant in the foreground, dressed in white pajamas and sandals and holding a machete. You missed this, Grace. You missed the volcano. What paintings it might have inspired. I always thought that you had married Mexico even more than Santos. You were not a communist. You were an artist. Or so I thought. And never said.

Delaney sighed and skipped through the Daily News , where a story told about the glories of a new theater in Harlem called the Apollo, and he thought: I should go up there and see it. To listen. To see. Another story told about a woman in Brooklyn who had shot her husband dead. Delaney tried to imagine Rose on her final night in Agrigento. The husband with his knife. His eyes mad in the light of candles. Coming at her. Then Rose reaching for the three-legged stool. What have I done? She is here now. She is caring for the boy. And yet within her is a woman who killed. He imagined himself under oath in a court of law, explaining that yes, he had known about the death of her husband. But he could not imagine her ever killing again. Except to protect Carlito.

He dropped the newspapers on the carpet and got up to brush his teeth.

The boy played with his paddle and his teddy bear. Rose moved through the day without saying a word about her confession. Patients demanded help. The watchers kept watch on the street. That night, in a light trembling sleep, Delaney was on a melancholy strand of beach and something was behind him. An immense creature. He could not see it but heard the great weight of its body, feet smashing into sand, the foul gnashing of its breath, and he was running and running and running…

The ringing phone snapped him awake. He was still breathing in the darkness, still fleeing the unseen beast. He fumbled for the telephone. Something fell. From the sound, surely a book. Surely Lord Byron.

“Hello,” he said softly.

He heard someone laughing. And then a man singing. Gyp Pavese.