Pete Hamill: North River

“Wait,” Angela said. “I got a thing he can sit on.”

She went into the back, past the kitchen, and returned with a high chair. She put the boy on the floor and tied a bib under his chin. She lifted the tray of the high chair, put the boy snugly into the seat, lowered the tray, then pushed the chair to the table. All in a few expert seconds. The boy was to Delaney’s right, the perfect spot for a left-hander.

“You want some clams?” Angela said. “I got some in from Georgia. Just two days ago. Before the trains stopped wit’ the snow.”

“Let me think a minute,” Delaney said. “I promised him spaghetti, so…”

“So I give him a kid portion, and you —”

“Why not? Spaghetti. With the clams…”

As they waited, the boy’s brown eyes moved around the crowded room, with its haze of burnt nicotine, and the pictures on the ochre walls. The Bay of Naples. A view of Palermo. Both gauzy with nostalgia. Both painted by Fierro, the sign painter, who had a shop on Ninth Avenue, a Sicilian married to a Neapolitan in what some people called a mixed marriage. There were other pictures in Angela’s gallery. A heroic painting of Garibaldi, brought over from the old country by a customer. A painting of flowers on green fields. Photographs of Angela when she was younger and thinner. Her family in the old country, a year before they took the ship to La Merica, where Angela was born a few doors away from Transfiguration Church on Mott Street. Mother and father were still alive, both patients of Delaney’s. And there on the wall, standing alone, was Frankie Fischetti, the first kid from Hudson Street to be killed in the war. Carlito blinked, his eyes like a camera shutter, as if freezing each new thing he saw into memory. He had been taken by his mother to a world of many rooms.

A young waiter arrived with a basket of Italian bread, a fat slab of butter, a dish of olive oil. He rubbed the boy’s blond hair and hurried away. The waiter was quickly replaced by Angela, carrying a bottle of Chianti.

“For the New Year,” she whispered, so the Tammany boys would not hear. “And for Fiorello. Don’t get use’ to it.”

She laughed and went away. Delaney poured an inch of the wine into his glass, tore off a crust of bread, and handed it to the boy.

“This is a restaurant, Carlito,” Delaney said, waving a hand around the long room. “Where people come to eat.”

The boy listened but said nothing, trying to decode this new, secret script. He must have learned some English in New Mexico, Delaney thought, while his mother peddled paintings of mountain ranges. He must have been in restaurants there, even with his mother saving every dollar for the search for her husband. He must know more than he lets on. The way his mother was when she was three. He must remember the watercolor painter too. The door opened and a pair of St. Vincent’s interns came in, overcoats buttoned tight over green uniforms, their eyes frazzled and hungry. Neither man was Jake Zimmerman, savior of Eddie Corso. They stood by the door, eyeing a tiny empty table to their left, the last one in the place. Delaney recognized them from the hospital but couldn’t remember their names. They smiled when they saw him, mouthed greetings for the New Year. Delaney beckoned to one of them, and the young man leaned over.

“How’s that special patient of Dr. Zimmerman?”

The intern paused, then said: “Okay. He’ll live. He doesn’t exist, but he’ll live.”

“Good,” Delaney said. “Had a rough twenty-four hours?”

“Everything. People falling in the snow and breaking arms, elbows, wrists, and heads. Old ladies tripping down stairs. Babies close to death ’cause there’s no goddamned heat. Everything. Hell, you know how it is.”

Delaney nodded. “Well, stay safe.”

“Thanks, Dr. Delaney.”

Yes, he knew how it was. He had interned at Bellevue, bigger and crazier than St. Vincent’s. Before the war. They owned one of the first ambulances, after cars came to the city, but it didn’t work in snow or ice, and not very well in rain. Thirty-six hours on, eighteen hours off. Just Delaney and a driver. The calls came from the police, and then they raced to the scene, to the man trapped in an elevator pit, to the woman who slashed her wrists after discovering she had a dose of the clap passed to her by her husband, the four-year-old boy whipped into unconsciousness by his father, the girl who gave birth in the vacant lot, her child strangled on the umbilical cord. He knew how it was. Caging emotion. Accepting numbness. Good training for a war. Or a marriage.

The door opened and two more Tammany guys arrived in search of consolation.

He’ll live. Eddie Corso will live.

“Here ya go,” said Angela, breaking his reverie with two bowls of spaghetti on a tray. She placed the larger one, dotted with clams, in front of Delaney. The boy stared at his bowl. It had no clams, but he did not ask why.

“I know it’s a real New Year now,” Delaney said. “Service by the boss.”

He lifted his small glass of wine in a wordless toast and smiled.

“Like I said, Doc. Don’t get use’ to it.”

The interns were seated now, and the room was noisier, a full house, with a steady murmur of talk, Puccini now playing on the hidden radio. It was like being at an opera where the audience talked though the performance. The murmur was punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter, except from the politicians.

“Spaghetti,” Delaney said, pointing at the bowls.

“Bagetti,” the boy said.

With his left hand, he tried to twirl the slippery strands of spaghetti on his fork, but they kept falling, and Delaney leaned over and cut them into smaller pieces. The boy stabbed at them with his fork and then grabbed a few strands and started chewing. He made a face — what is this taste? — and then decided he liked it, and tried again with the fork, and this time succeeded. Delaney smiled.

“Bagetti,” the boy said. “No co’flake.”

“Right. Spaghetti.”

Chairs scraped on the floor, and Delaney turned. Knocko Carmody was approaching him, smiling. The others from his table were standing now too.

“Does this kid have a union card?” he said, his voice a growl but his eyes twinkling. The other three stayed back, as respectful as lieutenants to a general.

“He’s coming to the hiring hall this summer, Knocko.”

“Just bring him around. He gets a card, just showing up.”

At the hard sound of Knocko’s voice, Carlito stopped eating but then quickly resumed.

“Who’s this?” Knocko whispered.

“My grandson.”

“Grace’s kid?”

“Yeah.”

“And where’s the beautiful Grace?”

“Away.”

He said the word as if naming something permanent.

“Shit,” Knocko said.

“Yeah.”

They’d known each other too long to invent a story.

“You need some help, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks, Knocko.”

Out he went, into the snowy street. He was flanked by two of the men, and the third walked directly behind him. There was a clatter of dishes as the waiter cleared their table. Delaney glanced at Carlito. All the spaghetti was gone from his bowl. Some was on the checkered tablecloth, some on the bib or the floor. Delaney lifted a portion of his own pasta and placed it in the boy’s bowl. He sipped his wine and finished eating. Angela returned with a wet cloth and began cleaning the boy’s face and hands.

“This kid don’t fool around,” she said.

“He’s an eater.”

“He’s gonna be pretty big,” she said. “Look at them feet.”

“With any luck.”

Carlito must have sensed that they were talking about him, but he said nothing.

“I got something else for you,” she said to the boy.