Pete Hamill - North River

I want to tell you something, Molly. I’m very sorry for all the things that I did and didn’t do. But you chose the river, and the rocks at its gate. I am alive. I will live. I have found the aroma of life, and it’s full of garlic and basil and oil.

DELANEY WOKE UP ALONE AT FIVE IN THE MORNING AND KNEW HE could not return to sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed, his mind full of Molly’s bones. In some way, they were beautiful. A watercolor made of earth colors. Something Thomas Eakins could have painted. He wondered how they had been streaked, what chemicals had flowed around them, making such subtle marks. They had been scoured and bleached and stained. Now they would be returned to the earth.

He stood up and went into the bathroom to shower. The bones stayed with him. He had lived for many months with an image of Molly moving through the current, her hair streaming out behind her, and he wondered which part of her flesh went first and which went last. He imagined her scalp and hair were last, but he could never be sure. Perhaps she had hit her head on a piling when she fell, and gashed that part of her flesh, and the current started to lift it, to peel it away. That scalp he had grasped in ecstasy. That hair that he had curled in his fingers. Ah, Molly.

He dressed in the dark and went out at the top of the stoop, his ring of keys twined in his fingers. He stood there, in the place where Carlito had come into his life, and looked toward the North River. Then he turned back into the house.

On Monday morning, he took the bicycle and rode with Carlito to get the bread and the newspapers. The Daily News headline said, in a disappointed way: MOB TRUCE? The News did have the best police reporters in the city, and they said that leaders of the Corso and Botticelli clans had a “sitdown” on Saturday night. Not in Little Italy. In the Bronx. Delaney smiled. If Eddie had been asked, he would have insisted on New Jersey. Never the Bronx. The News reporters added that one test of the cease-fire would take place Monday at the funeral of Frankie Botts, expected to be one of the biggest in Mob history. The cops were mobilizing more than eight hundred men to help keep the peace. Mayor La Guardia urged all decent citizens to stay home or go to work. But the News underlined a simple fact: as of early Monday morning, when they went to press, there had been no reported deaths for twenty-four hours.

There was nothing in any of the newspapers about Molly. Jackie Norris had made certain of that. So Delaney sat down at his desk and wrote a telegram to Grace. SAD NEWS STOP MOTHER’S REMAINS FOUND STOP CAN YOU COME FOR BURIAL QUERY ADVISE SOONEST DAD. He clipped a note to the text for Monique, telling her to send it to the address on the Plaza Real and to American Express in Barcelona and Madrid.

Then Carlito ran in with his teddy bear. Smiling and happy. Rose brought Delaney a fried egg sandwich and lifted Carlito. The smudges under her eyes were darker. She seemed desperately in need of sleep, and he was sure he knew what was keeping her awake.

Monique arrived, and he handed her the telegram message. She glanced at it, then turned to him.

“Oh, Jim,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“At least we know,” he said.

She glanced toward the kitchen.

“What’s gonna happen?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

Then he went to work, nodding toward the door at the unseen patients. More than ever he understood that he needed their pain to keep from thinking about his own.

That afternoon Monique asked Delaney about arrangements. “How are you gonna do this?” she said. He told her there would be no wake and no funeral mass, and that Molly’s bones might be buried in the same plot occupied by Big Jim and his wife out at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. “I have to call the cemetery,” he said. “Or maybe you could.” Monique looked at him in a dubious way. “You sure?” she said. “No mass?” He reminded her that Molly had left no will and no instructions, not even about the music, and had never mentioned any relatives in Ireland.

“I do know that she hated the church,” he said. Then shrugged. “Well, maybe just a ceremony at the funeral home. Or at the grave. Family and friends. I have to ask Grace. If she comes home.”

“That could be a long time. Maybe never.”

“True.”

“You’ve got to have something. ”

He was deliberately vague. “Well, we have a little time…”

Monique shook her head. And Delaney wondered why Monique was reacting this way. She had never much liked Molly, and Molly had never much liked Monique. They tolerated each other, with crisp efficiency. Perhaps it was about Rose. Perhaps Monique wanted to be in charge, with no role for the bossy new interloper. No: that was probably not it. Monique was suggesting that he wasn’t reacting with sufficient ceremonial grief. That he was not gilding himself in platitude. It was like so much of life now: she wanted him to perform grief, and she would perform sympathy, even if she did not feel it.

“Let’s talk later,” he said, and retreated to his office. He called Casey the undertaker and asked him to take custody of Molly’s remains from the hospital and hold them until a date was chosen for the burial. “The date’s not set yet, Mr. Casey.” And Casey said he understood. He did not explain that the date depended upon Grace. Burial would take place soon if Grace did not want to return. Molly would be buried without the presence of her daughter. The date would be later if Grace found a ship for New York. He began to imagine a small ceremony in Green-Wood. When it was over, they could walk up the slope to the peak of the hill and look down upon the Narrows.

He didn’t eat much that evening and began to doze at the table. Rose touched him gently.

“You go up to bed,” she said. “You need sleep. You need to clear your head.”

“I do,” he said. “We have to talk about all this.”

“Not tonight,” she said, turning to the drowsy Carlito. “You look worse than he does.”

“But —”

“I won’t come down tonight,” she said, a slight chill in her voice. “I can’t. It’s not right.”

“I got over Molly a long time ago, Rose.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but this, it’s all still alive.”

That night Delaney did not sleep a real sleep. It was not Molly who kept him awake. It was Grace. She would determine the future. How would she react to Rose? With snooty contempt? With the cold eyes of the women in St. Patrick’s that morning? In spite of all her glib talk about socialism and class equality, Grace could be haughty too. She was, after all, Molly’s daughter. He wondered what Grace would do. She might plan to move back into 95 Horatio, to reclaim her room as she reclaimed her son. Or she might go somewhere else, up to the Village, back to the West, or even Mexico, taking her son with her. I could not stop her, but if she tries to take him to Spain, I would try.

He tossed in the darkness, but could not find a position that eased the ache in his bad arm. His mind teemed with questions that had no answers. How would Rose react to Grace? She had done what Rose could not imagine doing: she had left her child to the tender mercies of others. He imagined Rose staring at Grace, arms folded, full of Sicilian vehemence. And, of course, all of this might never happen. Rose might simply pack and go.

He changed positions again, and pulled a pillow over his face, and smelled Rose on it, and moved to his left, pushing the pillow to the right. That hot night, he finally slept and dreamed once more about the snow.