Pete Hamill - North River

The boy sobbed in a small way, and Delaney consoled him, using soothing tones, and then decided he should continue the story. If it was, as he had told the boy, a story, then he should finish the story. He opened the book and showed the boy the drawing of Babar running away to safety, and finding his way to a town. “He hardly knew what to make of it because this was the first time he had seen so many houses. So many things were new to him! The broad streets! The automobiles and buses!” To Delaney, the town was Paris. It could have been New York.

He was near the middle of the story when Rose came out of the bathroom in her robe, to the sound of draining water. She didn’t look at them. She walked heavily to her own room, and Delaney could hear the door click shut.

He resumed the story, with Babar walking on two legs like a human and wearing a bright green suit, which made Carlito smile. And after a while, Carlito fell asleep. Delaney was still for a long time and then slowly detached himself from the sleeping boy, closed the book, and turned off the light. He slipped the Babar book under the mattress and left the door open a crack as Rose always did. Then he looked at Rose’s door. He knocked, turned the knob, and went in.

Rose was awake in the dark. He went to her and sat beside her, inhaling the aroma of soap laced with hurt.

“He didn’t mean anything,” he said quietly.

“Oh, I know. Come on…”

Her voice was choked. He slid an open hand under her head, and felt the pillow damp across his knuckles.

“Please don’t cry, Rose,” he said.

She was silent then for almost a minute. Then she cleared her throat.

“I gotta leave here,” she said. “This ain’t right. I’m not his mother, and he knows it and you know it. My heart is killing me. I gotta go.”

He held her tight now, pulling her to him.

“I won’t let you,” he said.

ROSE DID NOT LEAVE. NOR DID SHE SPEAK TO HIM THE NEXT morning about what had happened. Perhaps nothing had happened, except that he had held her until she fell asleep. A moment of intimacy, one lonesome human consoling another. Nothing big, nothing major. But Delaney knew it was a lot more than nothing.

At seven-thirty, Mr. Nobiletti arrived carrying shears, and smiling when Rose greeted him in Italian. Both were from Sicily, although the towns were far apart. Both must have dreamed on certain nights about olive groves. They went into the yard together, with Delaney and Carlito after them, and Mr. Nobiletti stared at the wrapped tree.

“It should be okay,” he said to Delaney.

“A tough New York tree,” Delaney said.

The older man began cutting through the cords and tar paper, dropping strips on the earth, which was softening into grassy mud. He said nothing. Carlito lifted each strip as it fell, carried it to the back door, and made a neat pile. Then the last strips fell away and the tree stood before them. To Delaney it was as scrawny as a girl of twelve, each branch curving and seeming to reach for the distant sun.

Rose clapped her hands and then whispered: “Che bello! Che bello!”

Tears were brimming in her eyes as she caressed the branches. Here was Sicily in a yard near the North River. She hugged Mr. Nobiletti. She squeezed Carlos. She smiled in an embarrassed, teary way at Delaney. Sicily was here.

Later in the morning, after Nobiletti had gone off with her punishing boots, Delaney gave her the Babar book to read, so that she would see that it was not about the mother, really, but about having a life, no matter what. It was a story. That’s all. A story for kids. It was also a story about the consolations of cities. She carried the book to her room, but she did not speak about it. Across the morning, in abrupt moments between patients, Delaney remembered the beating of her heart.

Around the house, Rose moved with purpose, in and out of the yard as if expecting instant life from the olive tree, showering the boy with affection. She thanked Delaney for the raise and said, with deadpan irony, that she was thinking of investing in the stock market. She showed the boy how the sun was falling on the tree and the other growing things in the yard, and how soon they would be full of life. “You’ll see,” she told him. “Life is green.”

Three days later, she tried on her widened shoes and wore them in the house for a few hours at a time, always with white cotton socks. “Black socks are for cops,” she said. She listened to the Italian radio station, and hummed arias to herself. If Rose had been frightened that things would fall apart, the moment seemed to have passed.

In the warming evenings, they began to take walks after an early dinner. They went down to the North River piers, and Delaney sometimes thought about the many evenings when he had grieved here for Molly. One night in the second week after his return from the war, he told her: “I’ll never go away again, Molly. I promise you that.” She looked at him with such angry suspicion in her eyes that it struck him as permanent hostility. But as months slipped into years, Delaney kept his word. He did not go away again, not even for a night. But their lives were not the same. To be sure, there was surface civility. They would talk in a cool way about Grace, and her schooling, and her affection for painters and for the game of baseball, and Molly kept reminding Delaney that he was spoiling the girl. He would mumble something about lost time and shrug, and Molly would seethe. They sometimes discussed politics. They talked about what might be coming to the world after the stock market collapsed in October 1929. But Delaney often felt as if he could be talking to a neighbor. Her anger was always there beneath the civility. It wasn’t simply about the war. It was about him, about his being a doctor, about his obligation to help others, about many things. He taught himself to live with it, telling himself that Molly, after all, was Irish. Everything could be forgotten, except the grudge. Their bed became a place almost exclusively devoted to sleeping. Molly would turn her back to him, sending a familiar signal that another day was over. He would sometimes long for flesh and intimacy. For hair and teeth and wetness. Or a simple night of dancing. Until she finally turned her back on him for the final time and walked to the river.

But he did not, of course, mention any of this to Rose. On their walks, the boy was between them, a link, a bond, a kind of gift. And Delaney made no moves that could be seen by Rose, or by strangers, as expressions of intimacy. The boy was all. He loved to see a liner moving at dusk on the river, with the sun vanishing into New Jersey. He loved seeing a train grind slowly south on the High Line.

Then one evening as the sun began to fade, they went to Jane Street to show the boy the firehouse. The doors had been closed through the hard winter days, but now they were open, and the engine was gleaming and redder than the vanishing sun. Two mustached firemen were smoking cigarettes and nodded to Delaney, right out of the days when the fire companies supplied the infantry to Tammany Hall. Then suddenly bells began to ring loudly, metallically, and the cigarettes were flipped into the street and other men were thumping down stairs and sliding down the fire pole, pulling on rubbery raincoats and boots and reaching for axes stacked against the wall. The boy backed away from the fierceness of the sight, and then the lights of the engine came on, and a siren screamed, and the engine pulled out, making a slow turn toward the city, with men hanging off the sides, and then, all power and controlled passion, it roared away.

The boy was frozen in astonishment. Rose lifted him and hurried him to the middle of the street so he could watch the engine on its way to work.