Pete Hamill - North River

Then she was there, coming into the kitchen.

“That boy’s gonna sleep for two days,” she said. “You want fresh coffee?”

“Sure,” he said. “I bet he gets up tomorrow while it’s dark.”

She started pouring water in a pot, her hands busy in an effort-less way.

“Let me ask you something,” Delaney said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

She looked at him warily. “Sure.”

“Where do you go on Sundays?”

She didn’t turn to face him.

“Here and there,” she said.

“I see.”

“Why d’you want to know?”

“There’s a show — I mentioned it to you — up at the Metropolitan. Botticelli. I thought maybe tomorrow we could go to see it. You and me and Carlito.” He paused. “And tomorrow is Sunday.”

She looked at him in a tentative way.

“The guy from Firenze? He’s pretty good… ” She smiled. “The problem is he got the same name as that shadrool Frankie Botts.”

“What’s a shadrool?” he said, and smiled.

“Like a — never mind. It’s a bad word, that’s all you need to know.”

He laughed. “I think I know a lot of shadrools.”

“It really means a kind of a, in English, you call it a squish.”

“A squash.”

“Yeah. That’s it, a squash. A vegetable. But, ah, never mind.”

The aroma of fresh coffee started filling the room. She took his cup.

“What time you want to go see this show?”

“Around one o’clock.”

She chewed the inside of her mouth as she placed the cup before him.

“Maybe I could do that,” she said. “I got to do something first, in the morning. But hey, Carlito can’t bring the fire engine to a museum.”

He didn’t ask her where she went on Sunday mornings.

She came back that Sunday at twelve-thirty. Carlito hugged her and said, “Hurry, hurry, hurry, Rosa.” She excused herself and went upstairs. When she returned she was wearing the boots that had caused her so much grief. Stretched and widened by Mr. Nobiletti. Carlito pointed at them. “Shoes, Rosa, your shoes.” His English getting better every day. She smiled at Delaney in a confident way and said: “Let’s go.”

When they came up from the Lexington Avenue subway at Eighty-sixth Street, the neighborhood was still filthy from the parade, with garbage rising in pyramids from corner cans. The sanitation men did not work on Sunday. And the street was still carpeted with discarded paper flags, all of them Irish, sandwich wrappings, beer bottles, scattered newspapers, at least two crushed hats, and things without names. One older man in a frayed coat was examining the trash, pocketing some objects, moving on. Delaney took them left on Park Avenue, then right on Eighty-fourth Street, and here it was cleaner, with the old haughty mansions peering down at them in limestone disdain. And up ahead was the museum, a palace fit for Versailles.

“That’s it,” Delaney said. “Right there across Fifth Avenue.”

“It looks like kings live there,” Rose said.

“They do,” he said.

They went up the wide stairs, and Delaney turned to look at the far side of the avenue, remembering the years before the Great War, when some of the mansions, built to last forever, were being torn down after thirty years of life to make room for apartment houses, and how one St. Patrick’s Day there were rumors of impending violence and plywood boards covered many of the windows. Not even a stone was thrown, but the rumors themselves made the morning papers. Most of the Irish just laughed. After all, they had the votes, and the votes were not rumors.

They entered the museum’s great hall, and the boy took a breath and stared around him at the stone columns and arches and the sense of invincible power. To Delaney it was always like something out of the drawings of Piranesi. To the boy, it was something else.

“A church!” he said.

“In a way,” Delaney said. “But not for any god. It’s a church of art, boy.”

Rose looked around uneasily, seeing women in pairs, with clothes that fit exactly and fancy hats and small feet. The sort of women who had sniffed at her from the pews of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There were men too, of course, men who seemed to be surviving the Depression without pain, wearing the long well-cut coats you saw on Wall Street, making remarks to each other and laughing, or looking at lone women with special interest. A few paused to examine Rose, but she stared at them until they looked away. Delaney thought: Say nothing rude, fellas, or she’ll bite your fucking noses off.

“You come here a lot?” she said to Delaney.

“Not often enough,” he said. “When I was young, I used to come every week.”

He remembered coming here for the first time when he was twelve, in a year when he dreamed about becoming an artist. He was alone. He made it to the door but not through it. A guard stopped him and said, This is no place for you, sonny. Looking at his downtown clothes, his soiled knickers, his rough street-scuffed shoes. The Delaneys weren’t poor, but there was no dress code downtown on the West Side. Young Delaney just wanted to see Rubens and Caravaggio and Vermeer, the painters he’d seen in black-and-white in the only art book at school. He wanted the real thing. But he just wasn’t dressed for them. He left in tears, and that night he told Big Jim. The next day his father went to see the Tammany bosses, and they started a campaign to open the Metropolitan to all New Yorkers. A few months later, all the Irish and all the Italians, all the poor Jews and all the black kids, all the Chinese, all the poorest of the poor, all started coming to the great museum. They were coming still. God bless Tammany.

Then Carlito made an excited sound and pulled Rose along and into a room full of medieval armor. All visors and polished metal and swords, rising above him. Mysterious. Malignant. Scary.

“You see, Carlito,” Rose said, “in olden times, these dopes always had wars. They would fight about God. Fight about land. But most of all, they would fight to get swag.”

“You better explain swag,” Delaney said.

“Swag is stuff you steal,” she said. “You go into some castle, the guy has paintings, silver, nice chairs, beds, fancy stuff. You kill all the people in the castle, then you take the swag home.”

The boy pointed at two glassed-in shields encrusted with jewels.

“Swag!” he said.

“You see,” Rose said. “This kid understands everything! ”

The boy wanted to stay all day, but Rose told him they had to go upstairs and see something else. They would come back later. He took her hand with a grudging look on his face. He clearly wanted to stay with the swag.

They climbed the wide central stairs to the second floor and followed signs to the Botticelli show. Then it was Delaney’s turn to suck in his breath. The gallery was more crowded than he expected, murmurous with talk, and he understood why. There on one wall was the Primavera and on another The Birth of Venus. On loan from the Uffizi, as a gesture of international goodwill by Benito Mussolini. Delaney lost his awareness of Rose and of Carlito. There were Botticelli drawings too, and smaller Botticelli paintings, but he stood in front of the Primavera like a predator. The painting was food. He wanted to caress it, hold it in his hands, lick its glazed surface, plunge into it, dive into the Florentine light. Years vanished, decades were erased, and he was again the boy who had come here to the feast of art.

Thinking: Great paintings made me want to be an artist. They made me want to be Mantegna or Verrocchio, Rembrandt or Vermeer. Made me want to put brush on canvas or boards, to make marks that would last forever. Thinking: I was so young that I thought it was possible, that I could actually do it. And the great paintings sent me into art classes on Saturdays and on two evenings a week. Aged sixteen. They made me want to see. To see everything in the world around me, really see it, the buildings and the streets and the many colors of the sky.