Pete Hamill - North River

“Hoo-shine, Rose!” the boy said, pointing at her feet. They were encased in high laced black boots, brought to a brilliant polish. The boy hurried over and lightly touched the polished leather. “Gran’pa! Look!”

Delaney said: “You look beautiful.”

“Ah, shoosh,” Rose said.

And blushed even more deeply. She moved around the kitchen in a tentative way, like a girl wearing her mother’s shoes.

Before they reached the subway, Rose had begun to totter awkwardly on her high-heeled boots.

“Ooof,” Rose said. “It was easier walking in these at the shoe store.”

“We can get a cab,” Delaney said. “Or we can go home.”

“No. A cab costs too much. Let’s go.”

They moved on to the subway.

Her hobbling was worse as they walked toward the crowd around the cathedral on Fifth Avenue, with the RCA Building rising across the street, high above its incomplete neighbors in Rockefeller Center. Under her hat, Rose was now wide-eyed, seeing actresses in mink stepping out of limousines, their skin tanned from Florida or California, and the Tammany pols moving somberly up the steps of the cathedral wearing black armbands, and some of the old ballplayers moving among them, big and wide-shouldered in camel’s hair coats. Carlito was between Delaney and Rose, each of his hands held tightly in the thickening human swarm. He seemed awed, perhaps even frightened, by the size of the ballplayers and the sight of more human beings than he’d ever seen in one place, even Grand Central. Suddenly Delaney was nervous too. In this crowd, a knife would be better than a gun. Silently jammed into belly or back. Some random hoodlum, maybe even Gyp Pavese himself. Spotting them in the crowd, striking, then hurrying to Club 65 for a payday. He gripped the boy’s hand and glanced around. Rose squinted at him, as if sensing his thoughts.

“Don’t worry,” she said, using a shoulder to force a way through the gawkers.

Reporters and photographers were everywhere, scribbling notes or aiming Speed Graphics, attending the arrivals of saloon royalty. Delaney recognized old bootleggers and stagedoor Johnnies and Ziegfeld girls and at least one woman who was a famous madam. There were men in shabby clothes among them, brothers of those human ruins that Delaney had seen so often on breadlines or on house calls. Some were wiping at tears with their coat sleeves. Weeping for McGraw. Perhaps for themselves when young.

Rose took Delaney’s ruined arm as they came closer to the steps, her hand holding him tight, and she lifted the boy and whispered to him, calming him with her soothing tone. On the top steps, Delaney saw Danny Shapiro, pressed back into uniformed duty for the day, his lean face alert, his dark eyes scanning the crowd. Shapiro pointed at Delaney and gestured to himself, and they nudged their way to him, and Shapiro got them into the cathedral.

“You’re on your own now, Doc,” Shapiro said, and laughed. “I’m a Dodger fan and a Jew. I can’t help with anything else in this ballpark.”

They stood with others against the back wall, Delaney gazing down the empty center aisle, which awaited the pallbearers and the coffin. As they arrived, each man removed his hat, some holding them to their chests, others letting them dangle from their hands. Delaney placed his fedora over his heart. There were many bald heads in the cathedral now and women with white gloves. To the right Delaney spotted Knocko Carmody flashing a thumbs-up and gesturing toward the aisle on the right. They went that way.

The boy was pointing at the soaring ceiling, the chapels, the paintings of men in robes, and the many other things he could not name. A man nailed to a cross, bleeding from his hands and head. A grieving woman in thick robes. Rose removed the boy’s gloves and shoved them in her pocket, and then she too gazed around her. Everything was luminous with electric lights, a thousand candles, stained-glass windows, an unseen organist playing Handel. They went down the side aisle, slowed by two veterans on crutches, and followed the turning of a thousand heads as John McCormack walked down the center aisle with his wife, guided by an usher. The great tenor was pudgier now than he had been before the war. The McCormacks were led to the front pews where McGraw’s family would sit. Against the far wall, on the left, Delaney saw Izzy the Atheist standing alone, wearing a necktie. Delaney knew that he was not there because the funeral of John McGraw was a religious event. For Izzy the Atheist this must be extra innings.

As he, Rose, and Carlito inched forward, he saw Harry Flanagan, the Tammany judge who got his shoes shined in Grand Central. He gestured to Delaney to take the tight space in his own row. He and Rose started easing into the pew, the boy held by Rose, and others moved to the side. There were hard oaken kneelers on the floor before them and little room for feet. Delaney sat next to Flanagan with Rose beside him and the boy on her lap. She sighed as weight came off her feet. Delaney smiled at Flanagan.

“Hello, Judge,” Delaney said. “Thanks for making room.”

“I liked church better when I was smaller,” Flanagan said. His coat was folded high off his lap, a derby on top. His suit jacket was open to allow for his stomach. Flanagan shook hands with Delaney and nodded amiably at Rose.

“This is Rose Verga,” Delaney said. “And you’ve already met my grandson, Carlos.”

“Can he pitch a few innings of relief?”

“Soon. He’s a southpaw.”

“That’s the only kinda relief pitcher.”

Delaney smiled and turned to Rose, who seemed puzzled at men talking baseball when a corpse was about to enter the center aisle.

She whispered: “The Irish are all crazy.”

Now there was a greater stir, and heads turned to see Will Rogers coming down the aisle alone, tanned, lean, dressed in a dark business suit. His rolling gait said that he was a star, but there was no expression on his face and no vanity. Up front an usher was signaling him to come forward, and Rogers slipped into the same pew that had welcomed McCormack.

“That’s that cowboy guy,” Rose whispered. “The guy with the rope.”

“That’s him.”

The boy didn’t look at Rogers. He was growing drowsy with the odor of burnt wax and the heat rising from many bodies, most of all from Rose. He put his head on her shoulder. Then came George M. Cohan, short and pugnacious, in the McGraw mold. He tried to walk with the solemnity required by the occasion, but still slipped into his old Broadway bounce. Delaney remembered that day in the first months of the war in France when the New Yorkers were marching toward the fighting and someone started singing “Give My Regards to Broadway.” And then they all were singing, slowly, like a dirge. Asking someone, anyone, to remember them to Herald Square, and to tell all the gang at Forty-second Street that they would soon be there. Some of them were still in France, forever.

As he turned to look at Cohan, Delaney saw others looking at him, and at Rose. People who knew his father. Downtown people. Two women whispered, then averted their eyes. He saw another vaguely familiar face three rows behind them. Then the McGraw family entered the main aisle, but Delaney glanced again at the man three rows back. Long ago, before the war, before Johns Hopkins, before Vienna, the man was a regular at Big Jim’s club and had gone often to the Polo Grounds with the Tammany braves. With them, but not one of them. He looked exactly the same now as he did then. What was his name? Where had he been? Cormac. Cormac something. A face unmarked by time. Some kind of newspaper guy. Cormac…

The pallbearers were suddenly at the entrance, the coffin on their shoulders. Incense thickened the air. The organ boomed its announcement of requiem. Everybody stood. Rose glanced at Delaney with sad, distracted eyes. A few more women looked at Delaney and Rose, and she must have seen the disdain in their eyes. She held the awakened Carlito, one hand on his small back. And John McGraw was carried toward the altar.