Pete Hamill - North River

On the train out to Brooklyn, many Sunday-morning riders pored over the Daily News. The headline shouted: 2 MORE SLAIN. But he didn’t buy a paper, even from a kid hawking them in the subway cars. He wasn’t keeping score. On this morning, he didn’t even care who won the Giants game.

Jackie Norris was waiting at the main entrance to Kings County Hospital, smoking a cigarette. His suit was rumpled, and he had the Daily News tucked under one arm. He saw Delaney and flipped his cigarette into the grass.

“Doc,” he said. And nodded.

“How’d you find her?”

“If it’s her.”

They walked inside, and Norris led the way to a long corridor, flashing his badge.

“Some black guy pulls outta Red Hook in a little putt-putt,” Norris said. “He’s headin’ for Sheepshead Bay to do a little crabbin’. You know, grab free lunch for the family. It’s a little windy, a little chop in the water, so he stays near shore.” Norris nodded at a beefy nurse with an Irish face. “Then he looks down in the rocks near the Narrows, this side of the Narrows, the New York side, and he sees, maybe eight, ten feet down — he sees a skull.”

They followed signs to the morgue.

“When he gets to Sheepshead Bay, he calls the cops,” Norris said. “They call the Harbor Police, and next thing you know, I’m here.”

They passed the corridor leading to the emergency room, and Delaney could hear a woman moaning in pain. A sound he had been hearing all of his life. They went through the door of the morgue. A fat balding clerk looked up from his desk just inside the door. He was reading the sports section of the Daily News.

“Yeah?” he said.

Norris showed his badge. “We’re here to make a possible ID. Unidentified woman fished out of the Narrows yesterday.”

The man opened a ledger book in an annoyed way and ran a plump finger down a list of entries.

“Try F-11,” he said. “And sign in here.”

They walked down aisles of cabinets containing the dead. Six closed trays above each other, like floors in a tenement. For Delaney, all morgues were the same: the same bleak lighting, the same damp concrete floors, the same odors of pine and formaldehyde. They stopped at F-11.

“This ain’t gonna be easy,” Norris said.

“I know,” Delaney said. “But I’ve got no choice, Jackie.”

Norris slid out the tray. The skull was closest to them, the other bones arranged into the deepest part of the tray. One femur was missing, and other bones as well. Delaney stepped to the side to look down upon the skull. It was grinning, like every other skull he had ever seen. Grinning in mockery of the living. Grinning with secret knowledge. He reached down and used his right hand to move the lower mandible. There on the right was the molar filled with gold by that dentist just off the Ringstrasse. It’s my damned Irish teeth, Molly said. They make contact with Viennese chocolate and they rot. To the right of her head were the folded remnants of her blue dress, faded and shredded by tides and time. Oh, Molly.

“It’s her,” he said. “I recognize the filling. That’s part of the dress she was wearing, the last time anyone saw her alive… Thank you, Jackie.”

“When I heard there were a few pieces of blue dress, I thought, Maybe this is her. It’s what you told me.”

“The filling, that’s the right tooth.”

“You can see we don’t have all the bones,” Norris said. “The guys will look again Monday morning, weather permittin’.” A pause. “There’s no sign of damage. No bones broke by bullets, no cracks in her head from a blackjack or anything.”

Delaney took a last look, then slid the tray back into its cabinet.

“I’ll ask the coroner to make the cause of death ‘accident,’ ” Norris said. “That way you can bury her in a Catholic cemetery if you want.”

“Thanks, Jackie,” Delaney said, ignoring the suggestion of suicide, and started walking through the clammy dampness toward the exit, with Norris behind him. He knew the routine. The bureaucracy of death. He would sign a few papers. A clerk would stamp them. Norris would add them to his files and go off to his office the next day and talk to the coroner and later stamp the entire folder Case Closed. Then life would go on. There were dozens of people every year who ended up as corpses in the harbor. Delaney did what must be done, shook hands with Norris, and then walked toward the sun of Sunday morning.

All the way back to Manhattan, images of Molly in life kept rising from memory. On that North River pier the first time he saw her, incoherent with pain and loss. Laughing at Tony Pastor’s. Walking through downtown Baltimore. Sneering at Al Jolson and baseball and the Irish songs from Tin Pan Alley. Then laughing as Delaney began to sing the songs. Walking across Union Square at dusk. Molly hugging the infant Grace in a hospital bed, her face fierce and protective. Her face and body lost in music, enraged music, and Brahms too. They had danced. He could always say that. They had danced at Tammany rackets and neighborhood weddings. They had danced in Vienna. And to an oompah band at Feltman’s on Coney Island. Always a waltz. Never anything else. A waltz always brought them to their feet, to grasp each other’s hands, and she could be carried out of her angers. Sitting on the train, he realized something else: It was the past. As distant now as all those browning photographs scattered around bars and offices and homes all over New York.

Still, he began to hum Strauss on the subway, the tune rising from him without thought, and a woman looked at him from her seat across the car and smiled. Gray-haired, missing a bicuspid. Here, in the real world. He stopped humming. She reminded him that the world was for the living. The train pulled into Fourteenth Street.

“That was nice,” she said as Delaney got up. “A waltz on a Sunday morning. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and smiled as he got off. He did not try to explain that he was thinking of a woman he once loved with all of himself, and loved no more.

At the house on Horatio Street, Rose and Carlito were waiting. She had skipped the movie to pick up the boy, and when Delaney came in she folded her arms and set her face, as if expecting a blow.

“Well?” she said.

“It was her,” he said.

She breathed out hard, then unfolded her arms and let them hang loosely.

“Well, that’s that,” she said.

Delaney looked toward the door.

“I’m going to take a little walk, Rose. Just collect my thoughts.”

“Sure,” she said, and touched his face.

“A half hour,” he said. “No more.”

“We’ll be here.”

They walked to the gate together.

“Okay, Carlos, come on,” she said. “We’ll change your clothes.”

“I want to go with Gran’pa.”

“No, he has to do something. He’ll be right back.”

“Please, Rosa.”

“You heard me. No.”

Delaney walked toward the river. He saw familiar faces and nodded hello. About a dozen kids were playing stickball beyond the High Line. The other kids were not yet back from the beach. A young woman pushed a child in a stroller. A drunken older man held on to a lamppost like a figure in a temperance poster, speaking steadily to himself. At water’s edge, Delaney walked to the pier where he’d gone so many times with Molly, long ago.

I hope you knew how much I loved you, Molly, when you chose the river over life.

He stood alone, watching the current move south to the Narrows and the sea beyond. On the next pier to the north, some kids took turns leaping into the river, riding the current to the pier beyond his own. A tugboat grunted north, a seagoing club fighter, fearless, tough.