Pete Hamill - North River

He wasn’t conscious of turning, of moving through knots of other people, but he was being pulled, pushed, lifted toward Venus. His heart was beating fast. There were the delicate hands, the thick dark blond hair, the sinuous outlines, the frank, intimate eyes. More powerful than any reproduction in an art book. Thinking: Rose said she used to look like this, except she was never a blonde. Here there were no bleeding Christs, no kings or dukes, no transported martyrs. Botticelli loved pagan flesh. Pagan eyes. A pagan landscape, washed by the sea.

“You okay?” Rose whispered.

“Oh, yes, sure, I’m okay,” Delaney said.

“You got tears in your eyes.”

He smiled, and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief.

“Aaah, it’s okay. It’s just — they’re beautiful.”

“I better take Carlito back to the guys with the iron masks.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, he’s like, you know, look at him —”

Carlito was standing alone, staring at Venus rising from her shell. Some of the adults were amused at his presence before her, and his intensity.

“Your daughter — his mother — she is a blonde?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Well…”

An older man turned to Delaney, a smile on his face, his eyes twinkling.

“That boy is either going to be an artist or a critic,” he said. “Look at that concentration!” He peered at Rose through rimless glasses. “He is certainly a beautiful boy, and you, I take it, are his mother.”

“Well, I —”

“He certainly has his father’s hair,” the man said, glancing at Delaney. “Congratulations, sir and madam.”

The man walked away, and Delaney thought: With his mannered style, he has to be an actor. And remembered the old line: I’ll never forget what’s-his-name. Rose was lost in thought. He took Carlito’s hand and said to Rose: “Let’s see the other things.”

They looked at many elegant drawings, and a sketchbook in a glass box, and then paused before Botticelli’s portrait of Dante Ali-ghieri: hawk-faced, oddly dangerous for a poet.

“I don’t want to look at this,” she said.

“Why?”

“Don’t you see it? The face, I mean. Don’t you see who it looks like?”

Then he saw it: Frankie Botts.

“Let’s go back to the swag.”

“No,” Delaney said. “Let’s go home.”

On the way out, Carlito turned a final time to look at the blond Venus rising from the sea.

On the subway downtown, his mind was full of questions. How does Rose know what Frankie Botts looks like? Then answered himself: Because she knew Gyp Pavese and must have seen him with his boss, with Frankie Botts. She definitely knew that he ran things out of Club 65. But that didn’t explain her deep silence, sitting now on one side of Carlito, with the boy dozing against her as the packed train squealed through tunnels. It had to be the actor. The older man thought they were married, and that the boy was theirs. That must be it. And she must be thinking about how impossible that would be. How impossible all of it would be. That Grace would surely come home. Rising from the sea. She would take away what was hers. This boy. And then Rose would go too.

Delaney retreated into his own silence.

A frail rain was falling when they came up from the subway, and the skies were as gray and leaky as their mood. He lifted Carlito, and they began walking quickly to the west. When they reached Ninth Avenue, the wind was blowing hard from the North River. Then Rose took Carlito from him, and he realized that his right arm was aching again. They turned into the areaway on Horatio Street, and while Delaney fumbled with his keys, the door opened at the top of the stoop next door. A stout woman in an overcoat came out on the wide top step. He hadn’t seen her for a long time but knew it was Mrs. Cottrell.

“Dr. Delaney,” she said, brushing a hand against the rain. “Wait, Doctor, wait!” She stepped into the vestibule and emerged with an umbrella. A gust of wind flopped it into uselessness. She dropped the umbrella and came clumsily down the steps.

“Come on,” Rose said, opening Delaney’s gate with her own keys. “You’ll get pneumonia out there.”

“Yes, but —”

Mrs. Cottrell had reached their areaway. Her ruined umbrella was careening on her stoop, rising, falling. Delaney tensed for a blow.

“I just want to thank you, Doctor,” she said. “You saved my husband’s life. The doctor at Bellevue told me about it, all about it. Another ten minutes, he’d have been gone. I know we’ve been mean to you, no, nasty. That was my fault. But I was so — Anyway, thank you, thank you.”

She took his good hand in both of hers.

“Get inside, Mrs. Cottrell. Take care of your husband.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Delaney said, and hurried into his own house.

Rose was inside the second door and helped him off with his coat and hung it on the coat tree. She opened the door again and shook the rain off his hat. Carlito came racing from the kitchen on the fire engine. Delaney shuddered.

“That hypocrite,” she said, her use of the word rhyming with “light.”

“Ah, it’s only human,” Delaney said.

“She doesn’t talk to you, for what? Four years? And then she’s sorry.”

“Well —”

“Go upstairs and get dry clothes,” she said. “I’ll make something to eat.”

The boy made the sound of a siren.

Delaney was in bed that night, reading Byron’s very funny poem about George III while the rain drummed steadily on Horatio Street. Rose and the boy were sleeping, and he craved sleep himself, but it would not come. The words blurred on the page. He tried to imagine Mrs. Cottrell on the day her son was killed and Delaney could not save him. She was thinner then, even pretty, but rage is always ugly. She must have raged at the driver of the car and at her husband and at God. She certainly raged at Delaney. Standing by the ambulance, pointing a long finger. “It was you! You could have saved him! You could have saved him! You! You!”

And he knew he hadn’t saved her husband. Anybody in Washington Square would have found the cop, and the cop would have called Bellevue, and there the interns and nurses would have done everything possible. As they had done. But maybe now it would at least be better. Nothing could be done about 97 Horatio, with its colony of ghosts. But maybe Mrs. Cottrell would come to the back garden of 93 and talk across the fence with Rose, about the weather and the birds and the olive tree. But no: she would have to look at Carlito and think of her son, and —

The telephone rang. At ten forty-seven. Again. Then again. He lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” Delaney said.

“It’s me. The guy from Bleecker Street.”

“Hello, Mr. Botts.”

“I been trying to fine you.”

“You didn’t leave a message.”

“I don’t leave messages.” He could picture Botts smiling in the movie gangster style. “I deliver them.”

Ah, Christ, Delaney thought, then said: “What’s the problem?”

“My mother’s sick.”

“Is she in pain?”

“Some. But you know these people from the old country: they never admit nothin’.”

“If she’s hurting, Mr. Botts, go to a hospital.”

“Somethin’s the matter, but she won’t tell me.”

“Can it wait until tomorrow afternoon?”

“I guess.”

“Give me the address,” Delaney said, lifting the pencil from the bedside table, moving the pad. He wrote down the address on Grand Street, and Botts told him it was upstairs from Di Palo’s cheese store.

“There’s one other thing,” Frankie Botts said. “She don’t speak much English.”