Pete Hamill - North River

Delaney slipped under the covers, seeking warmth, and was awake a long time. He thought about Grace, off in Barcelona, and realized that his anger at her had ebbed. In his mind now, when he faced his daughter, he had stopped shouting. And he was thinking in a cooler way about Molly. Soon he must open her locked room and put her things in cartons and store them in the basement, on new shelves, high and dry. He would wrap her framed photographs too, the silvery faces of her heroes, separating them with the musical scores, and seal them with tape. The piano would stay. Perhaps when the boy gives up his fire engine he will play piano. Here, or somewhere else. But Delaney now felt that Grace was almost surely right about her mother. That top-floor room contained Molly’s ghost. It reeked with death. He must open the door, and leave it open, and give it over to life.

Delaney dozed then, hearing nothing, free of all images.

He was woken by the telephone.

“Doc?” a growly voice said.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Brick O’Loughlin.”

“Hello, Brick, what’s the problem?”

“I think I hoit my wife. Bad.”

Ah, Christ.

“I oney hit her once. She gave me lip, and I bopped her, and now she’s on the floor, and she ain’t movin’.”

Delaney sighed. “You better call the coppers, Brick.”

“I can’t, Doc. I gotta be sure. I wanna help her, I don’t want her dead.”

Delaney switched on the lamp and glanced at the clock: seven thirty-five. What day? Or what night? St. Patrick’s Day. Then thought: O’Loughlin’s two blocks away.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t move her.”

He removed the robe, pulled on clothes and shoes, went upstairs. The boy was asleep, snuggled against Rose’s breasts.

“I have an emergency,” he whispered. She nodded sleepily. And he was gone.

Brick answered his knock, reeking of whiskey but looking sober.

“Where is she?”

Brick led him to the kitchen. Poor thin middle-aged Maisie O’Loughlin was flat on the worn linoleum floor. Her eyes were open and sightless. The left side of her face was swollen. Delaney squatted and took her pulse.

“I oney hit her one shot, Doc, I swear.”

“That’s all you needed, Brick. She’s dead.”

Brick sobbed. “Aw, fuck. Aw, shit.” He began weeping. “Oh, Maisie, I’m so fuckin’ sorry. Why’d you make me do it? Why’d you hafta fuckin’ die on me?”

He started to lift her by the shoulders, and Delaney told him to stop, that the cops wouldn’t want her moved, and the man laid her down gently and kept whispering her name, Maisie, Maisie, and Delaney said he would go to the corner and call the cops.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t do anything, Brick. Don’t do anything at all.”

Brick was still weeping twenty minutes later when two sour, chubby detectives arrived, dressed in plain clothes. They also smelled vaguely of whiskey. Delaney thought: It’s a great day for the Irish.

The dark streets were full of drunks as he walked home. Some were singing. Some were alone and staggering, holding the fences of the areaways to stay erect. None of them were with women. A hard wind was now blowing off the North River, and he heard a foghorn blowing and some muted Irish music from an unseen place. The song was called “Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door.” Harrigan and Hart. Every door in the neighborhood needs a horseshoe, he thought, starting with mine. Delaney’s mind wandered. He wished he could go somewhere else. He needed sun and laughter and the colors of the earth. He needed a sky streaked with orange. He needed always, day after day, the aroma of basil and tomatoes, of garlic and oil. He needed Titian and Tintoretto and Botticelli. And a horseshoe on the door. He needed laughter. He needed flesh.

In the kitchen, the boy was awake again, wearing blue pajamas and knitted blue slippers and pushing himself hard on the fire truck, making the sound of sirens, while Rose sat in a kitchen chair and watched.

“This guy makes me tired just watchin’,” she said, and smiled.

“We going to a fire, Gran’pa!”

Death and pain and longing went away, like smoke rising from a ruin.

Later, after eating the last bits of the braciole, and some pieces of birthday cake, they all went upstairs. Rose sat on the foot of the boy’s bed, and Delaney started reading the new Babar book to Carlito. The elephant was now the king, floating in a balloon through the sky with his bride, Queen Celeste. They find their way to the shores of the Mediterranean, above a tiny ship on blue water, and a curving harbor town, a golden vision far from the North River. But then they are blown far out to sea and crash on a desert island. They ride on a whale. They explore the island. Then a massive black ship appears…

“Wow, look at that! A ship, Gran’pa!”

A lifeboat arrives and an animal trainer takes over, and then they are in a circus. A king and queen turned into performers! They escape and find the Old Lady from the first book, and then they are among snowcapped mountains, and they are skiing. But they are homesick for their own country, and the Old Lady arranges an airplane to take them home and goes with them.

But when they arrive home, the country of the elephants is destroyed. There has been a war with the rhinoceroses…

Delaney thought: Only a Frenchman could have written this book. Someone from a country wrecked by war, soaked with blood, for nothing. Someone who knew about Verdun. Rose came around and stared at the pages about the war, but said nothing, perhaps locked into memory of what happens when wars end. Delaney and the boy got to the scene where Babar and the others painted giant eyes on each other’s asses and frightened the rhinos away, and where everything started to be the way it used to be. Carlito laughed at the scene with the elephants’ butts, and this time he did not say that he wanted his mama. Rose hugged him as Delaney closed the book.

“Okay,” she said. “Time for to sleep.”

“I want Babar again, Rosa!”

“Tomorrow,” she said, and then, as if remembering the next day was Sunday, added, “or Monday.”

The boy slammed the pillow with a fist, and his brows furrowed and his face reddened. A tantrum. At last.

“I want Babar !” he screamed, and held the book to his chest and turned on his stomach. He screamed into the pillow. Rose looked alarmed.

“Stop that! Stop it now, Carlito!”

He screamed and twisted.

“Stop!” Rose shouted. Delaney reached for her arm and squeezed it gently.

“Let him get it out,” he said softly. “It’s his birthday, Rose. And he’s crying for a book. ”

She looked ashamed and stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and turned away.

“For God’s sake, don’t be sorry, Rose. I know what you’re doing.”

“I never seen him like this.”

“Nor have I.”

“Maybe he wants his… you know.”

“No, he just wants Babar.”

The screaming had stopped. They sat on different sides of the boy’s bed. He was very still, but not asleep. Rose put a hand on his shoulders.

“Okay, boy. You got Babar.”

He turned, his eyes red, his face distraught. Both arms were wrapped around his book. He said nothing.

“But no more screaming, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Let me read it to you,” she said.

“Okay.”

Delaney hugged the boy. “Happy birthday, big fella,” he said.

He went down to the kitchen and filled a cup with the last of the coffee. He felt oddly better. Have we spoiled him by giving in? Okay, we spoiled him. It was for a book. For a book.

He sat there for a while, thinking about the end of poor Maisie O’Loughlin, and the fate of her poor stupid husband Brick, and wondered how many similar events he had been a part of in that neighborhood, as a bit player at other people’s tragedies. Faces and bodies flashed before him in fragments: beaten faces, bloodied and swollen, not all of them female. What was the man’s name who had his head split open with a ballpeen hammer? Houlihan? Or was it Harrigan? They didn’t always save the mayhem for St. Patrick’s Day. And none of them meant to kill anyone. Just hurt them very badly. He remembered someone at Big Jim’s club giving him advice when he was sixteen or seventeen: “Never marry a girl you can’t knock out with one punch.” And the guy laughed, and the other men laughed, and Delaney laughed too. But it wasn’t funny, and the people were not always Irish. They had no monopoly on kitchen or bedroom violence. Some of the Italians were pretty good at it too. And a few of the Jews. And he tried to imagine Rose when she lifted the three-legged chair and broke her husband’s skull. An act of pure clarity, one that sent her into exile. Sending her here. He wondered if she had regrets.