Pete Hamill - North River

He walked south and east, shivering on the corners when he stopped to let traffic pass. If it was thirteen degrees this morning, it must be twenty by now. The glaze of ice was melting in the noon sun, and as he walked more quickly, the movement warmed him. He was walking the long way, refusing train, trolley, or taxi, and he knew the true reason was fear. He was delaying his arrival at Club 65, like a patient facing surgery. Alone, he could feel his own trembling uncertainty. At Club 65 they might, after all, kill him. And he would be cursed as a goddamned fool.

On his walk the Depression was everywhere. Even on Broadway. Huge TO LET signs were taped inside the windows of abandoned stores. At every corner men in army greatcoats sold apples. When they first started to appear, three years earlier, all with VETERAN signs displayed in their racks, there were many photographs of them in the Daily News. Not anymore. Now they were almost as common as lampposts. He gave one hollow-eyed man a quarter and left the apples. “This,” he explained, “is from Sergeant Corso.” The man grunted something and stood there against the wall, out of the wind. Down the street, Delaney saw a woman, sagging with abandonment, trudging with two children, her gloveless hand outstretched. Her hair was wild and dirty. Her shoes flopped and she wore no socks. He gave her a dollar, and she looked astonished and burst into tears.

He turned east at West Third Street and saw more than a dozen grizzled men in a lot huddled around a fire in a battered garbage can, one of them roasting a potato on a stick. Maybe a baked or roasted potato would sop up the acids in his churning stomach. The lot was piled with anonymous rubble, strewn garbage, splintered timber, a dead dog picked apart by rats. The far wall was scorched by an old fire. One man took a swig from a wine bottle and passed it on. A half-block away he saw a line of men waiting for entrance to a government building. Most wore dirty overcoats, shirts with curling collars, neckties, old fedoras, as if trying to retain a lost respectability. Scattered among them were men with caps, union buttons, heavy boots. None talked, silenced by humiliation. A few read the meager listing of want ads in the Times or the Herald-Tribune or the World. Come home and paint this, Grace. Come home. And then he realized something large: He didn’t really want her to come home. He wanted to be with the boy. He wanted to do what he was about to do, and live. And then he would make certain that the boy would live too.

The wind blew harder when he reached Bleecker Street. Up ahead he saw his destination. He shuddered in the wind.

Club 65 was a corner saloon, older than the century, with a triangular cement step at the main entrance. A side door opened into the back room, where long ago men could bring women. Once before the war, he’d even taken Molly here. Then it was called the Fenian Cove, and on Friday and Saturday nights they played the old music from Ireland. Not the Tin Pan Alley stuff of the Rialto on Fourteenth Street, with its sentimental delusions, its cheap stage-Irish jokes, but music made before anyone on the island spoke English. It was all flutes and drums and fiddles and pipes, and Molly loved it. Listen, she said, it’s Smetana. Her face amazed. And he didn’t know anything about Smetana, and she explained the way he used folk melodies from Czech villages in his music, and she was sure those villages had once been Celtic. “Just listen, James.” A year later she took him to a concert of Smetana and said: Do you remember? The Fenian Cove? He didn’t really remember clearly what was played there, but said of Smetana, Yes, I hear it, I hear Ireland.

Now he hesitated. Thinking: I don’t need to do this. I can leave it for the police. For Danny Shapiro. For Jackie Norris. Leave it. Leave it. And then walked in as abruptly as he used to dive into the North River as a boy.

The bar was bright from the light of the street and was still laid out the way it had been in the years of Fenians and rumrunners. But there were far fewer drinkers now. Propped on stools at the bar, each forming a little triangle with one leg on the floor for balance, three men whispered inaudibly, as if their volume had been reduced by the sudden presence of a stranger. Another man was at the far end of the bar, near the window, hands in his pockets, gazing at the street. They all wore the gangster uniform: pearl-gray hat, dark unbuttoned overcoat, polished black shoes. The clothes said that not one of them was about to go to work, ever. As in memory, a passageway led to the back room. Delaney stepped to the bar. The bartender was a huge suety man with thinning hair and a pug’s mashed nose. Delaney remembered Packy Hanratty’s saying of such a face, If he could fight, he wouldn’t have that nose. The bartender spread his large hands on the bar and leaned forward.

“Need directions?” he said.

“Just a beer,” Delaney said, and laid a dollar on the bar. The man eased over to the tap and pulled a lager. He placed it in front of Delaney and lifted the dollar. He rang up ten cents on the register, brought the change back to him, and stared at Delaney.

“Is Frankie Botts around?” Delaney said.

“Who?”

“Frankie Botts.”

“I don’t know no Frankie Botts.”

“Frankie Botticelli. Tell him Dr. Delaney is here. He should be expecting me.”

The bartender stared harder at Delaney, then gestured with his head to one of the three men. They’d heard everything that was said. One of them slipped off his stool and strolled into the back room. He was back quickly, looking surprised.

“Hands up,” he said.

Delaney raised his hands and was patted down.

“Back there,” the man said.

Delaney left a nickel tip and carried the beer through the passageway. A window opened into a tiny kitchen, but there was no cook and no sign of food. In the corner of the large back room, four men were playing cards. There were booths along one wall, as in the old days, and about six tables, but nobody else except the card players. Delaney walked to them, taking off his hat, holding it in his bad right hand.

“Give me a minute, Doc,” said the man who must have been Frankie Botts. “I wanna finish takin’ these bastards’ money.”

The other players looked up in an amused way, and the game continued. The back room was warmer, radiators knocking with steam heat. The side door was closed. Each player had a pack of cigarettes in front of him: two Lucky Strikes, one Chesterfield, one Old Gold. They used a common ashtray. Three of the men each had a shot glass in hand, but Frankie Botts sipped from a cup of black American coffee, a distinction that made him look more sinister.

Delaney moved away from the table, sipping from his beer. Club 65 was the same kind of place where Eddie Corso had been shot on New Year’s morning. The Good Men Club was Eddie’s joint. Club 65 belonged to Frankie Botts. Neighborhood saloons that functioned as private clubs. All strangers were discouraged. There were framed photographs of prizefighters on one wall. Dempsey, of course, Mickey Walker, Tony Canzoneri, Jimmy McLarnin, others whose names he used to know, now vanished from memory. A framed cover of the Police Gazette showed Gene Tunney in his prime. One larger one was signed by Jimmy Braddock, who must have known the place well. The ballplayers were there too. Ruth and Gehrig and Crosetti. And high in the corner was Matty. From before the war, before Prohibition, before the Depression. Browning now, and dim. Christy Mathewson himself. And there were other photographs: soldiers in uniformed rows, all from the AEF, and he moved closer and peered at them. Looking for familiar faces, but seeing none. Two neighborhoods away from the North River, and the living and the dead were strangers. Every saloon south of Thirty-fourth Street used the same decorations.