Pete Hamill - North River

“Listen to me, pal,” Delaney said. “I want you to take a message to Frankie Botts.”

There was silence, except for the man’s breathing.

“Tell him I’m coming to see him today. Right after lunchtime. The Club 65.”

Delaney hung up. The man, almost certainly Gyp Pavese, didn’t call back. Delaney stretched out in the dark, taut and angry, flexing and unflexing his hands, his head teeming with scenarios.

In the morning, his guts were churning and his head ached. I can’t live like this, he thought, but I can’t die either. Too many people depend upon me. He imagined himself at Club 65, tape pasted over his mouth, punched in the stomach, bundled into a car. Racing away. And then told to get out an hour later, shot once, twice, six times, and dropped into a lime pit in Jersey. What if that happened? He descended to the kitchen, drawn by the sound of Caruso on the radio and bacon frying in a pan. He went in and Carlito came charging, to be lifted, hugged. “Ga’paw, g’mornin’, Ga’paw! Buenos días!” The boy’s warmth infused him with life. They will not harm you, boy. I will hurt them first. He glanced at Rose and remembered her saying the same words — they would have to go through her — and she gave him a troubled look and then a smile.

“Everything okay, Dottore?” Rose said.

“Nothing that can’t be cured.”

He whispered to Carlito. “You okay, big boy?”

The boy smiled in a cheeky way. “Okay.” He pointed at his plate. “Bay-con an’ egg!”

Delaney sat him back in his chair. Rose touched his plate.

“What’s this?” she said, pointing at the plate.

“Play!” he said.

“Play-tuh.”

“Play-t.”

“And this?”

“Fook.”

Rose laughed out loud, and Delaney grinned.

“No fook. That’s a bad word. Faww-rrrrrr-kuh.”

“Fork.”

“And this?”

“Mesa!”

“No, no, in English!”

He paused, then blurted: “Table!”

He was naming the world, one glorious word at a time, but enough was enough. Time to eat. Carlito scooped up the scrambled eggs, dropping some of them off the fork, which he held firmly in his left hand. Rose came from the stove with Delaney’s plate. The Italian station had a female soprano on the air now, but in his own skull he heard Jolson singing, in some lost year at the Winter Garden. When there are gray skies, I don’t mind gray skies, you make them blue, Sonny Boy… And Molly scoffing at the sentimental rubbish, and then laughing when Delaney stood on a Broadway corner and sang the words, and promised her, in Jolie’s voice, You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet…

He ate quickly, sipped the jolting dark coffee, kidded with the boy and with Rose. But the headache nagged. He would need an aspirin. There was one appointment he wished he could avoid. One that put fear in his guts and an ache in his head. Then he heard Monique come in, and she poked her head into the kitchen and smiled.

“Morning all,” she said. “Looks like, uh, a busy day. They’re already waiting outside, and it’s thirteen degrees in the sun.”

“Better bring them in, Monique.” Then he raised an open palm. “Give me a bit of time first.”

He hugged the boy a final time and thanked Rose and then went to his consulting room. He made some notes: Call Zimmerman. Call Knocko. Call Danny Shapiro at the station house. He took an aspirin, telling himself: Leave instructions, in case I’m killed. Then he sat there, guts churning again. What if Frankie Botts was a real animal, as Rose had called him? And then thought: After the war, I promised myself I’d never live again in fear. But now it’s not just about me. It’s the boy too… it’s Rose.

He took a piece of stationery from his desk drawer and unscrewed his fountain pen. At the top he wrote the month, day, and year. Nineteen thirty-four. He addressed a note: To Whom It May Concern. He stated clearly that the bulk of his estate, his money, would go to the boy and his mother, Grace Delaney Santos. Monique and Rose would each receive ten percent. Mr. Carmody of the Longshoreman’s Union would serve as executor. He wrote down the combination to the wall safe. Then he signed the note and sealed it in an envelope, which he marked Just In Case. Monique would know where to put it.

He took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened the door to the waiting area.

“Who’s first?”

He was ready to vanish into their pain and not his own. The headache disappeared.

At ten-thirty, with no patients waiting and the room disinfected, Rose and Carlito came in. She was carrying a tray with a sandwich of prosciutto and mozzarella, and a glass of water. She seemed to know that there would be no more patients for a while. Carlito went to Delaney’s leather bag.

“Ga’paw’s bag,” he said.

Rose placed the tray on Delaney’s desk and said, “Eat something. You look terrible.”

“No, I feel —”

“No back talk. Eat.”

Carlito leaned an elbow on his thigh, and Delaney began to eat. Suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He gave the boy a crackling crust and he munched away.

“Pan bueno.”

Rose said: “In English.”

“Bread good. ”

Was that his first adjective?

“The radio says good weather’s on the way,” Rose said. “Maybe two more days.”

“I hope so. The sidewalk’s like glass.”

“Two more days, you use the bicycle.”

“Pray for it, Rose.”

“I don’t pray, but it’s gotta come. You gotta get sun. You don’t have any color. You’re gonna get sick. You, the dottore!” Then suddenly: “Carlito, don’t eat your gran’father’s sandwich.”

“Samich.”

They both laughed. Then Rose turned to Delaney.

“What are you worry about?” she said.

“The usual.”

“Well, stop,” she said. Then to the boy: “Come on, boy.”

She took the tray and the plate with its crumbs and started for the door. She left the water.

“Rose?”

“Yeah?”

“That was the best damned sandwich I’ve had since I came home from the war.”

She blushed slightly, then waved a dismissing hand at him.

“Baloney.”

“No,” Delaney said, and smiled. “Prosciut’.”

“Puh-shoot,” the boy said.

Around noon, when the last morning patient was gone, Delaney was still for a while and thought about Frankie Botts and how stupid it would be to die. Then he took a breath, exhaled slowly, lifted the envelope, and stepped into Monique’s area. He handed it to her. “Just in case?” she said. He nodded. She told him that Rose had gone shopping with the boy, where various people would be watching.

“I have to go see a guy on Bleecker Street. Tell Rose I’ll skip lunch.”

“How long’ll you be?”

“Two hours, most.”

She looked at the schedule of house calls and the stack of bills. Delaney saw from the clock that it was twelve twenty-five.

“But if I’m not back by three, call Danny Shapiro, the detective, and Knocko Carmody. Tell them I went to Club 65. They’ll know what to do.”

She jotted a note on a pad. Then her eyes narrowed. “What’s this all about?”

“I can’t tell you till I get back.”

He was donning his hat, scarf, and coat. She lifted the envelope again.

“Just in case? I don’t like this even a little bit.”

“Just in case I get hit by a car,” he said, and forced a smile. “Just in case a flowerpot falls off a roof. Just in case a woman aims a gun at her husband and hits me. This is New York, Monique.”

She started to say something, but he was gone, clanging the gate behind him.