Pete Hamill - North River

“Just sit,” Delaney said. “We know where the oil is, and the butter, and the pot to heat up the soup. Just sit.”

“Sit, Rosa,” said the boy, patting the seat of her chair. She eased into the chair, hugging the boy, looking at Delaney.

While they ate, she explained how St. Brendan’s worked, using leftover food from grocery chains and restaurants (including Angela’s), and how the priests raised money with bingo games and raffles, and how it was never enough. Delaney wished he had taken Frankie’s money and given it to Rose for the Sunday kitchen. She finished her half sandwich and sipped her coffee. The boy slipped off the chair, mounted the fire engine, and banged it into the door to the yard. Rose laughed out loud.

“Hey! Ragazzo! You gonna hurt yourself!”

He laughed. “No, Rosa. No.”

Rose turned to Delaney, arms folded on the tabletop.

“I guess you want to know where I go after we feed the men,” she said.

“I wonder sometimes, sure,” Delaney said, thinking: She reads minds too.

“It’s pretty simple,” she said, looking at him in a new way, as if suspecting he might be jealous. She smiled sweetly. “I don’t have a boyfriend, if that’s what you think.”

“You have the right.”

“I know better.”

“So?”

“I go to the movies,” she said.

“That’s it? ” Delaney said, feeling something like relief. He smiled. “You go to the movies?”

“Every Sunday,” she said. “They are so — what’s the word? — wonderful.”

She said the word with a hair of pride in her voice for saying it exactly.

“What’s your favorite?”

“Last week I saw Flying Down to Rio. It’s got that actress Dolores Del Rio, who’s the most beautiful girl in the world. Dark hair, a long neck, long legs, a face, ooof. And she dances with that skinny guy, he can’t do nothin g wrong. Every step he’s perfect, and relaxed, and like one hundred percent American. That Fred Astaire. I wanted to stay and see it twice, but then I’d have to sit through a gangster movie. I hate gangster movies.” A pause. “You know why.” Another pause. “I hate gangsters.”

“And today? What did you see?”

“The truth?” She chuckled. “I like to go over the East Side, a place called the Palestine, that everybody there calls the Itch, and I see King Kong again. The fifth time since it come out last year.” Now she was smiling broadly. “It’s just so wonderful. The greatest love story ever!” Her face darkened slightly. “That poor monkey, he falls in love with Fay Wray and what happens? He dies! Because he loves her! I cry every time.”

“Imagine if he met Dolores Del Rio.”

She laughed out loud. “And tried to dance like Fred Astaire.”

She leaned against Delaney, and he put his good hand on her shoulder and pulled her closer.

On the following Sunday morning, the city was drowning under a heavy spring rain. In his office, Delaney opened the safe and took a hundred-dollar bill out of Eddie Corso’s envelope. He addressed a new envelope, to St. Brendan’s, slipped in the bill, sealed the envelope, and gave it to Rose.

“A contribution to your Sunday work,” he said. “Don’t tell them where it came from. They might ask if I’m in a state of grace.”

She looked at him in a confused, dubious way.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But I want to.”

Then he handed her a manila envelope.

“There are face masks in here,” he said. “The kind we use at the hospital. They tie at the back of your head. Wear one. You never know what’s floating around in the air of St. Brendan’s beautiful restaurant.” He smiled. “And if you get a cold or something, you won’t pass it to the food.” A beat. “Or Carlito.”

She took the pale blue masks from the envelope and looked at them.

“They might think I’m some kind of a bank robber. Lady Dillinger feeds the poor!”

“Rose, I doubt that very much.”

She shrugged, slipped the envelopes into her pocketbook, donned her own poncho and winter boots, and went out to feed the poor. For a while, Delaney and the boy watched the rain pelting the backyard, where flowers were bending under the assault. The thirsty limbs of the olive tree reached for the sky. Then he turned to the boy.

“Come on, big fella,” Delaney said. “We have work to do.”

They climbed together to the top floor, and Delaney took out his keys and opened the door to Molly’s room. He switched on some lamps and raised the window shades. The boy gazed around.

“That’s a piano! ” he said, as if suddenly retrieving the word in Spanish.

“You can play if you like,” Delaney said, and raised the top. He plunked one key. There was no echo of the past. “You see,” he said, “each key has a different sound.” He plinked another key, and another. Then he lifted the boy onto the stool. “Play, Carlito. Make music.”

He turned to the flattened boxes leaning against the bookcase, and to the roll of tape and pair of scissors. A stack of old newspapers was lying on the floor. Thank you, Monique. He unfolded one box. The boy plinked a key, then another, each one tentative. Delaney taped the bottom of the box, and placed it on the floor, and started to stack Molly’s scores. Schoenberg. Mahler. Bach. He remembered how Molly would come home from the Steinway store on Union Square with her face flushed and happy and a new score in her hand, and how she would go directly to this room. Here, she vanished into the music, forgetting the world, the house, Grace, me. Some passages were repeated over and over again, and he could hear the Ringstrasse in some of them, that year before the war. Now the boy was pounding the keys with two hands, a prodigy of atonality and dissonance, or just a kid making noise, and Delaney thought: Molly would have winced over this, and loved it too.

By the time Delaney was on the second box, Carlito came off the stool, bored with playing at the piano, and stood beside Delaney. He asked the boy to put a finger on the tape while he cut it with the scissors. He flipped the box to its taped bottom, and Carlito began to bring books from a lower shelf. Some belonged to Grace when she was not yet ten years old.

“Let’s keep these,” Delaney said. “Make a pile right there.”

“Okay, Gran’pa,” the boy said, and sat on the rug, looking at the books, turning the pages, seeing visions of Oz and Sherwood Forest. Delaney remembered buying the Oz book on Fourth Avenue, just before leaving for the war. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. By L. Frank Baum. The fourth edition. Molly said in one letter that she was reading it to Grace, who loved the illustrations, but never said that she had finished it. He handed Oz to the boy and told him to hold on to it. Robin Hood could wait. He put a Matisse book aside for himself, with tipped-in illustrations in splashy color. He filled two more boxes, sealed and marked them, and then Carlito looked up. He was looking at an illustration from Oz.

“Gran’pa, what is this?”

“That’s the Tin Man,” he said. “And that’s the Cowardly Lion. They’re going to the Emerald City. Later I’ll read it to you.”

“Read it now! ” the boy said. “Come on, Gran’pa.”

“In about an hour, Carlito. We just have to finish the job.” Understanding that the boy didn’t know an hour from a month. “We’ll work fast, okay?”

And so they did. Certain shelves were emptied, others remained full, and a dozen boxes were taped and marked and sealed. He locked the door behind him. On Monday, Monique was bringing someone to carry the packed cartons to the shelves in the basement, far from the heat or the hazards of weather. As they went downstairs, the boy carried The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Delaney clutched the Matisse book. Thinking: Maybe I can start painting again, with my left hand. When he was sixteen he lasted three months at the Art Students League, where the drawing instructor first showed him Gray’s Anatomy, that fat masterpiece of bones and muscles and the hidden terrain of the body. Later the teacher told him sadly that he didn’t really have what it took for art. But — Gray’s Anatomy led him to the alternative dream of becoming a surgeon. He no longer had what it took for that, he thought, but maybe he could make paintings now that didn’t have to be art. That were just color and form and filled with emotion. Like a spring day. And Carlito could do the same. Up there in the room they were reclaiming from ghosts.