Pete Hamill: North River

He woke in the blue light of evening, to the boy’s angry wailing for his mother. Delaney placed a hand on his shoulder, tapping rapidly and gently with his fingers, saying over and over that it was okay, boy, don’t cry, boy, everything’s gonna be okay. The boy then wept in a clogged way, punctuating his lament with a single word: Mamá.

Delaney switched on the lamp, took a tissue from beside the bed, and touched the boy, then placed the tissue at his nose. “Blow,” he said. The boy froze for a moment, his eyes full of tears, rivulets of tears marking his cheeks. Delaney gestured with his own fingers at his nose. “Blow.”

The boy blew. Once, then again. Then looked around at the strange world.

“Everything’s okay,” Delaney said, as the boy stared at him. “Todo bien.”

The boy’s lower lip jutted out, as if he would cry, then he seemed to gather himself. Delaney pointed at his own chest.

“I’m your Grandpa,” he said. He jabbed his chest again. “Grandpa.”

The boy whispered, “Ga’paw.”

“That’s right!” Delaney said, smiling. “Grandpa.”

The boy smiled too.

“Ga’paw.”

Delaney lifted him. “Let’s get dressed.” The boy’s head was beside Delaney’s ear.

“Co’flakes, Ga’paw…”

“No, something better than that.” Delaney glanced at the front windows. The snow had nearly stopped. He tickled the boy and Carlito giggled. “How about spaghetti!”

Carlito couldn’t figure out the word, but they washed and dressed and then went out to the evening streets together. The snow was lighter now. The boy’s eyes widened. Hundreds of kids were pushing each other on sleds, throwing snowballs like warriors, climbing great piles of snow that had buried all the parked cars. Long dark blue shadows were cast by the tenement on the corner, that grim factory for making children, and criminals, and illness. But all was luminous in the general whiteness. The sidewalks were gone under the snow, and the only path was in the middle of the street. Adults hurried along with modest bags of groceries, fighting for traction, shouting at the snowballers for a cease-fire while they passed. Carlito stopped walking, the snow near his knees, and watched. Then he reached down and tried to pack a snowball, but the dry cold powder blew out of his small hands. His brow furrowed. “Take a little time,” Delaney said, squatting and holding fresh snow tightly in his own hands until it annealed. “See, like this…” Then he packed a ball and handed it to Carlito. “Now you can throw it, boy,” Delaney said, making a gesture. “Throw the snowball.” Carlito heaved it awkwardly with his mittened left hand toward a snow mountain and laughed in delight. He grabbed more snow in both hands. “Wait,” Delaney said. “Easy now. Pack it, and count. One, two, three, four, five — how’s that?” The boy had his snowball now and then he threw it three feet into a snowbank and clapped both mittened hands. “Hoe -ball! Hoe -ball!”

Then Delaney got hit between the shoulder blades. He turned to the gang of young snipers and sappers and shouted, “Hold it, hold it! Cease fire! ” His words were muffled by the snow and the ferocity of combat. The ambush artists shouted their taunts, and Carlito seemed alarmed. But Delaney laughed and lifted him with his left hand to his own shoulders. They hurried together out of no-man’s-land, where nothing at all could remind the boy of his mother.

They made a right at Hudson Street, moving south on the wide avenue. No trains were in sight on the elevated railroad. The streetlights were out, telling Delaney that the storm had knocked out the electricity, which was why the El was not working and the phones were dead. The bars and food shops were open, with candles lighting their interiors, and the street itself was a kind of party, Horatio Street multiplied by a factor of ten. Not like Times Square the night before, if Times Square was as it always was on New Year’s Eve. But close. More a downtown version of Brueghel. In a few Italian stores, including Nobiletti’s shoemaking shop, the front pages of the News and Mirror had been taped to the inside of the front windows, showing La Guardia being sworn in at midnight. The headlines shouted: IT’S MAYOR FIORELLO and HERE’S THE MAYOR! And Delaney realized he had not yet read the newspapers. He wondered if any Republican had ever been honored this way in the history of Hudson Street, so deep in the heart of what his father always called Tammanyland. Certainly this was unique, because Fiorello was the city’s first Italian mayor, fifty years after the first Italians came down the gangways onto Ellis Island. They called them Wops then, which stood for “without papers.” Now one of them was the mayor of the greatest city in America. Tribal pride. But there were no other signs of politics on Hudson Street. There was only the snow and the kids and the sense of shared natural disaster, which always gave New York a special exuberance. And placed images into the very young, which would return in trembling dreams, as the Blizzard of ’88 had returned to Delaney just this morning. Carlito would probably dream of this day for the rest of his life.

They finally reached Angela’s restaurant at the moment when electricity returned to the western side of the street. Cheers erupted along with more barrages of snowballs, and Delaney lowered the boy and hurried with him into the restaurant. Thinking: Goddamn you, Grace, you should be here with us. You should be whispering to your son. This sweet baffled boy that you’ve abandoned to my incompetent arms. Goddamn it all to hell.

There were about a dozen customers at the tables, couples, parties of four, a few of them blowing out the emergency candles as the surging electricity reached Angela’s. The aroma of garlic and oil filled the room, and from somewhere in the rear, beside the kitchen, an Italian radio station suddenly played music. At one corner table, four Tammany politicians poked glumly at their pasta, one of them smoking a cigarette while he ate. Delaney tried to remember the name of the presiding pol. A judge now. A friend of his father’s. Since midnight, the Republicans, and that goddamned La Guardia, owned City Hall, and the pols’ world was turned upside down. They all nodded at Delaney and looked curiously at Carlito.

In another corner was Knocko Carmody, his black derby hat firmly in place over his Irish face of pink cement. He had three union lieutenants with him. Delaney tipped his union cap to Knocko and the man’s eyes brightened. He smiled, his fork wrapped with pasta, threw Delaney a thumbs-up with his free hand, and made a sign that they would talk later. They knew each other from grammar school, and during the past summer, Delaney had saved his wife from peritonitis when her appendix burst. He realized that half the crowd had been in his office at one time or another.

Then from the rear, an enormous smiling woman came forward to greet them, her makeup heavy, gold bangles bouncing from gold posts in her earlobes. She had immense breasts, and a button was open at the top of her blouse, showing her cleavage. Her olive skin was glazed with fine perspiration from the heat of the kitchen. A wide white apron was tied behind her back.

“Angela, Happy New Year!” Delaney said.

“Same to you, Doc,” the woman said, her voice burred by tobacco. “And who’s this little movie star?”

“My grandson. He’s staying with me for a while.”

“Whatta you mean, a while?” she said softly.

She gave Delaney a look that said: This must mean trouble.

Delaney shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

Angela nodded, sighed, took them to a small corner table, where Delaney hung the boy’s mackinaw on a wall peg and placed his own jacket and cap above it.