Pete Hamill - North River

The restaurant was half-empty, as it was on every Monday night, and a smiling Angela came to greet them. She led them to a table against a wall, out of the cold drafts of the opening door. Italian ballads played on the radio in the kitchen, with many mandolins. Angela waved and a waiter brought the high chair for Carlito. She pinched Rose’s cheek and whispered in Italian, then pushed her breasts against Delaney. She leaned down to Carlito.

“Okay. Wha’s this guy’s name?” she said, pointing at the bear.

“Osito!” the boy blurted.

“An’ what’s he gonna eat?”

“Hot dog!”

“We don’t have no hot dogs in here, boy. This is a good restaurant. So no hot dog!”

“Okay, I want bagetti!”

“That we got!”

Carlito climbed into the high chair and squashed the bear beside him, with its paws on the tray. Delaney and Rose told Angela what they wanted, and she went off to the kitchen. Delaney gazed casually around at the other diners. One stranger, sitting alone, was facing the door and reading the World. He was wearing a badly cut suit but seemed too old to be working for the FBI and too out of style to be a gangster. Others nodded hello to Delaney, and he smiled back. Rose played nervously with a fork, tapping the tines on the tablecloth.

“The guy readin’ the paper,” she said quietly. “I don’t like his look.”

“He’s too old to be a bad guy, Rose,” Delaney said.

“Don’t be so sure.”

“I’m not,” Delaney said. And he wasn’t. There were many kinds of bad guys, and their badness could be as real as blood.

He got up to walk toward the men’s room, casually looking again at the stranger, and near the kitchen he stopped to talk with Angela. They were out of the view of the man reading the newspaper.

“I need something,” he said.

“Like what?”

“A safe address,” he said. “For mail. Nothing else. Where my daughter can write me without getting her letters opened.”

“I’ll give it to you with the check.”

“Also: The guy with the newspaper, alone. You ever see him before?”

“A couple’a days ago.”

“Keep an eye on him for me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Later, drowsy with food and exhausted by the long day, Delaney read Byron for a while in bed, and then turned off the light. Sleep did not come. Images of the day moved through his mind, glimpses of ivory skin, a flash of the absolute certainty in Callahan’s eyes, the metallic look of a man who judged others. But Delaney could never judge the women in Tommy Chin’s house on Mott Street. They did what they must. In some ways, their lives were now better than what they’d left behind. It was true of them. As it was true of some Irish women not long ago, and some Jews and Italians, and all the others who had found their various ways to the indifferent city between two rivers. Some, but not all.

He heard water running in the bath upstairs. Rose. Her heavy peasant tread. To the room. Back to the bath. The boy surely asleep, hugging Osito. Then silence. The water taps closed. Rose in the bath. His mind filled with images. How many nights did I spend in that tub with Molly? She murmurous with pleasure. Leading me wet to the music room, to stretch upon a yellow beach towel, to scream. Laughing once and saying: That was a C over G. But more often silent. More often humming some vagrant tune.

Delaney dozed then, hugging a pillow. After a while, he was snapped into clarity. The door had cracked open. A dim figure in the dark. He could smell the soap before he saw her. Rose. She said nothing. The door closed behind her. He heard her remove her robe. By the time she slipped in beside him, he was already hard.

He reached for her, to touch her flesh.

Rose was not there. The only flesh was his own.

For days, as the winter gave way to the first rumors of spring, he maintained a formal distance from her, afraid of making a mistake. Rose went shopping with Carlito and his teddy bear. She bathed the boy, and cleaned his clothes, and prepared lunch and supper for the three of them. In small awkward ways, Rose showed Delaney that she knew something had shifted in him, but she gave him no obvious signs of her unspoken knowledge. She never used the language of affection, except to the boy. She did not touch Delaney, even in the most casual way, nor did he touch her. He was always Dottore. Not Jim. Everything was as before, and at the same time, it was not.

But across the days of other people’s illness and damage and painful unhappiness, the days of endless casualties, he carried Rose with him now. She and the boy had formed a current in his life, like a secret stream flowing south through the North River, all the way from the distant mountains. It was a stream that was always in the present, not in the past, nor the future.

Then as February drew to an end, the past came rushing back. Delaney came down into the kitchen for breakfast on Monday morning and Rose and Carlito smiled at him. The boy’s mouth was full of bread. The teddy bear dozed. The radio played at low volume.

“Some baseball guy died,” Rose said. “It was on the radio.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know from baseball.”

He turned up the volume, while Rose busied herself at the stove. He moved around the dial. Finally he heard the name McGraw.

“John McGraw,” he said. “It was John McGraw.”

He tried to explain to Rose that John McGraw was the manager of the New York Giants, the manager for as long as anyone could remember, from before the Great War right up until two years ago, when Bill Terry took over.

“ You knew this McGraw?” Rose said.

“Not really,” Delaney said. “He was a friend of my father’s. But I met him many times.”

“I’m sorry he died,” she said in a soft voice.

“So am I,” Delaney said.

The morning patients were all sorry too, even the women. Delaney listened to the patients, and examined them, and spoke banalities, and wrote prescriptions for them. He wished he could go to the Polo Grounds and say a proper farewell. When the last morning patient left, Monique handed him a letter.

“For you,” she said.

He took the letter, addressed in Grace’s handwriting to a Harry Miller on West Nineteenth Street, and slipped it under his desk blotter. Then he called in one of the malarial vets for his quinine. The letter would wait. It had spent days crossing the Atlantic. A few hours would make no difference now.

On every house call, the talk was of McGraw. Do I have that thing that killed John McGraw? said one flabby man, gray from the long winter. Sure, he was a grand tough fellow, wasn’t he? said another.

“You’ve got a ruptured appendix, Eddie,” he said to a heavy longshoreman named Doyle on Jane Street. “You’ll have to go to the hospital.”

“Not me.”

“There’s no choice. You stay here, Eddie, you die.”

“Shit,” Eddie Doyle said, as if he’d been sentenced to the electric chair. After a while, he reached for his trousers, hanging on the bedpost. Delaney would have to make still another call to St. Vincent’s for still another ambulance to pick up still another man who lived alone with the sour odor of age and isolation. His wife was dead of “the con,” tuberculosis, which Eddie still called consumption. A man whose three daughters were gone off to the distant Bronx with their husbands and kids. A man left alone with Jimmy Walker on the wall.

“I hear McGraw is dead,” Doyle said softly.

“True. They’ll have a mass for him at St. Patrick’s.”

“Uptown St. Patrick’s or downtown?”

“The one with the most seats.”

“Your father woulda been there for sure,” Eddie Doyle said.