Pete Hamill - North River

Thinking: She’d better come back. Fast. I can’t do this. He felt a wash of dread. Something out of rainy dawns with fixed bayonets. Thinking: I must read the letter. Afraid of it too. Thinking: I want to hit someone. Anyone. But not this boy.

“Everything’s okay,” Delaney said softly. “Todo bien, Carlos.”

The boy’s eyes moved around the room. His left hand went to his crotch.

“Oh, okay, I understand, come on.”

He lifted the boy and took him to the bathroom between the bedroom and the living room. He lifted the seat and helped the boy stand on the ceramic rim of the toilet. Delaney thought: I need to get a box in here. A cheese box, low and flat and strong. I can paint it red. Or maybe yellow. What else do I need? What does the boy need that I cannot give him? When the boy was finished, Delaney showed him the chain for flushing and how to do it, and then turned on the hot water in the sink. He washed with a facecloth, and then the boy took the warm, wet cloth and washed his own face. Delaney dried him, lifted him, and took him back to the bed. He covered the boy with sheet and blanket, and the boy pushed his face into the pillow. He was still for a long moment. Then he sobbed.

“Mamá, Mamá, dónde está?” he murmured.

Delaney went to the boy and sat beside him. The boy’s need and uncertainty — perhaps even fear — were almost tangible. He patted the boy on the back, swift, steady pats like an extra pulse, and spoke in a low voice. It’s all right, boy. You’re safe here. You will eat. You will sleep. Your mama will be back. But as the child’s sobs ended, Delaney could sense unspoken questions rising in the warming air: Where am I, and who is this man, and where is my mother? He placed his hand firmly on the boy’s back, steadying him the way he had steadied so many people who were injured, hurting, confused, and full of fear. On beds all over the neighborhood. At last the child fell into sleep.

The clock told Delaney it was two thirty-seven in the afternoon. The end of a very long morning. He stood up as silently as possible and put some fresh coals on the fire. And now? What now? The letter. I must read the letter from Grace. He fought off a shimmer of dread by thinking only of the immediate needs of the boy. I can lay out a bed for him on the floor, made of blankets and pillows, just for tonight. Or take him to one of the two bedrooms upstairs. But what if he wakes up in the dead of night? I can’t have him roaming the stairs in the dark. Christ…

His own exhaustion was eating at him now. As he undressed and donned pajamas, he wondered about Eddie Corso. About who shot him and why. About whether he would live. As always, questions but no answers. He’d have to wait. The nuns had taken Eddie into their consoling hands. Now he had other things to do. Or one big thing. He had to read the fucking letter.

New Year’s Eve.

Dear Daddy,

I am so sorry to do this to you. I hate doing this to me too, because I love this boy. But I’ve come to realize that I can’t be his mother right now. My mind is a mess, as it has been for a long time, something you must know better than anyone. Something is sure to snap. I feel that I might do harm to myself, and to the boy. You don’t need that to happen.

I remember the time you first took me to the Frick, when I was eleven, and I saw for the first time the Vermeer. It was an image of domestic perfection on the earth and it made me long for a life of such perfection. It also made me want to be a painter. To live in the safety of a studio, to create my own world. I seem to have failed at all that. When you wrote me last year about Momma’s death, if that is what it is, I didn’t answer because I was convinced that the world was basically shit. Only my son made me believe that it was worth going on.

His name is Carlos Zapata Santos. He answers to Carlito. He talks some good Spanish and a few words of English. His father’s name is Rafael Santos, as you know. I don’t know where Rafael is. He could be in Spain, which is where he said he was going, or in Moscow. I don’t know. We’ve been apart for four months. I’m going to try to find him.

Carlito will be three on St. Patrick’s Day. Día de San Patricio, as they say in Mexico. Viva Irlanda! He does not wet the bed. He takes a nap, una siesta, every afternoon, and he sleeps well at night. He’s had a shot for smallpox and shots in Albuquerque for diphtheria and tetanus. He seems very healthy. You will know better than anyone what else he might need. He is very intelligent. He was never baptized. Ni modo, as the Mexicans say. No matter.

I don’t know how much Carlos remembers his father. Even in Mexico, he saw very little of him, while Rafael was working at the Secretaría de Educación Popular, creating education programs for other people’s children. Rafael left last July, saying he was going away to continue his revolutionary education and would send for me and Carlito later. He said he was going to Spain and then possibly to Moscow, and would bring his lessons back to Mexico. He never came back. He never sent for me. And so I must find him or go mad. I am, after all, my mother’s daughter.

I stayed on with his family, a kind of prisoner, for three months, hoping to hear from him, and then took Carlito and slipped away in the night. I went to Taos in New Mexico, where some New York painters have settled, and I supported myself selling insipid landscapes to tourists. God help me, but I was so lonely I even had an affair with a watercolor painter! I should have come home to your house, but my vanity was too powerful. I couldn’t even ask you for help. Until now.

Even now, I cannot knock on your door, cannot face you. Forgive me. Before everything else, I must find Rafael. Wherever he is. Carlito needs his father. I need my husband. After that, I can live a human life, in what I hope becomes a better world. Please, Daddy, try to understand. Please… If you call me selfish, or spoiled (as Mother so often did), fair enough. But understand that I must do this in order to live. And to give Carlito the life he deserves.

None of this is your fault. You were never anything but a wonderful, loving father. You gave me the gifts of art, of music, of literature, and above all, the example of simple human kindness. The way you have given so many gifts to the people of our neighborhood, comforting them, saving their lives. You taught by example. By doing. The problem was never you. The problem was me. I have some flaw in me, some kind of emptiness that can’t be filled. At least not so far. I am almost twenty years old and nothing at all seems certain. There’s something in me that causes me to hurt everyone who loves me.

I don’t want to pass that flaw, whatever it is, to Carlito.

I ask only one thing. That you don’t put him up for adoption. I realize that you have so many things to do, and so little money, but if he is adopted by someone, he’ll vanish as surely as his father has. America is too big. So is New York. Please don’t let him vanish. My first stop is Barcelona. I will check American Express every day. I will send you an address, and if you say that you are giving up on my son, I’ll be on the next boat home.

I’ve saved almost eight hundred dollars and will use it to find Rafael, to come back with him, to try one final time to make something that can last, or to end it. Please forgive me for everything. I will love you for as long as I have life.

Delaney sat in the old worn chair beside the fireplace, the pages of the letter on his lap. He pictured his daughter out in the raging snow, pushing her son in a two-dollar stroller with the river wind at her back, and he thought of her life, and his own, and he began to weep.