Pete Hamill - North River

“Right.”

She was quiet again, then spoke in a soft, controlled voice.

“I knew she would come,” she said. “It’s her mother. It’s you. And she has to get back what is hers. Her room. Her son.”

Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, a chord of desolation.

“One thing I learned in this world? Things don’t last. People say they do. They don’t. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don’t.”

There was nothing bitter in her voice. Only acceptance. Or a kind of rough wisdom. He pulled her close to him. He wanted to tell her that everything would turn out all right. He couldn’t. He simply didn’t know, and he could not harm her with a cheap lie. Too many lies were told in bed. He did not want to add to them.

He dozed for a time, and then she reached for him with her hand, and they made love again, erasing dread for a little while.

The boy remained unaware of what was coming. The arrival of his mother was never mentioned. At night, Delaney read to him about Oz. Across the days, he played with Osito, and pushed his fire engine around, and went to the garden and batted the small ball with his paddle under the branches of the olive tree. Rose introduced him to a new passion: watermelon.

“Don’t spit the seeds on the floor, boy,” she told him. “Put them on this little plate. Later we’ll plant them in the garden.”

He looked at her uncertainly, and then at Delaney, as if not sure what seeds did, or why they would be taken to the garden. But he loved the chilled watermelon, taking big bites from his slice, the juice wetting his cheeks and running down to his chin. He removed each glistening black seed and placed it carefully on the plate and then took another bite.

“Good, Rosa,” he said. “This is good!”

“You bet,” she said. “And good for you.”

“Wahtuh-melon,” he said. “I like it!”

Delaney was busy all Monday morning with people scorched, scalded, and blistered by the weekend’s sun. One man showed up shirtless, the touch of any fabric causing agony. Another was white with Noxzema, and still hurting. It was so predictable that Delaney laughed when one casualty of the sun god left, and was grinning when the next arrived. In between there were the normal cases: a man with a fractured jaw, a woman with a TB cough, a child with a fever. All the hurt and harm that made up the dailiness of his life.

That night in the dark, he told Rose that they would go dancing on Friday night. He did not have to remind her that Grace would arrive on Saturday.

“You’re kidding, right?” she said.

“No. Monique found me someone to watch Carlito.”

“Not some crazy person?”

“Her sister.”

“Monique’s got a sister?”

“She works at Metropolitan Life.”

“For me, it’s hard to think Monique even has a mother.”

“Hey, she’s not that bad.”

“Not to you. To me, it’s another story.”

They were quiet for a long while.

“Friday night,” she said. She did not mention that it might be their last night together, and neither did he. “Dancing.”

She kissed him on the forehead.

Monique’s sister Yvette arrived just before seven. She was a plumper, more cheerful version of Monique, and a few years older. She wore a business suit that was wrinkled by the heat. Monique was waiting for her, and they talked in a sketchy way with Delaney about their childhood and Yvette’s three sons and their father and mother. Rose was upstairs getting ready. Carlito looked apprehensive.

“He sure is a handsome boy, all right,” Yvette said. “You’re right about that, Sis.”

“With a great tan too,” Monique said. “And it’s only June. Wait till August.”

“By August he’s gonna look like a movie star.”

Monique said good-bye and left. She had made her point: she was not a babysitter. Then the hall door opened and Rose was there. She was wearing a white summer dress and flat white shoes, and the whiteness set off the rich gold of her skin. A small white purse dangled from her wrist. A plump rose from the front garden was pinned to the dress. She wore no jewelry. Her lipstick was pale and pink, and she needed no rouge. Delaney thought: God damn, she is beautiful.

“Oh, Rosa,” the boy blurted out, as if thinking the same thing, without words. He rushed to her. She smiled and hugged him.

“Don’t get watermelon juice on the dress, boy,” she said. He smiled and touched his face.

“Gran’pa make me wash,” he said, holding out his hands with the palms up.

“You see? Gran’pa thinks of everything.”

Rose and Yvette shook hands and then talked in a corner of the room about the yellow box in the upstairs bathroom, the boy’s toothbrush, and his books. There was a piece of cake in the icebox and some milk. Rose smiled and turned to Carlito.

“Okay, Carlito, we’re going out. So you be a good boy and do what Yvette says, and we’ll see you later.”

The boy looked uneasy, as if he wanted to go with them. But Rose kissed him on the cheek and went out first, as if to avoid inspection by neighbors while holding the arm of Delaney. Yvette took Carlito’s hand and said, “Let’s look at the kitchen.” Delaney left three minutes after Rose. They would meet on Ninth Avenue and take the subway into the night. He imagined the arrival of the Andalusia in the morning and then drove the image away. What will be, will be. Tonight we dance.

Times Square was bright, noisy, packed. It was not New Year’s Eve, but the crowds moved and eddied in the same way. Rose took his arm, holding her purse close to her breasts, gazing around at the gaud and the glitter, or watching the sidewalk in front of her so that she would not stumble. They paused to listen to a street band that featured a black boy tap-dancing for coins, then slowly continued uptown. Delaney remembered when it was all called Longacre Square, and was here in 1904 when the Times opened its new headquarters, extorting the name change from the Tammany boys downtown. It was at first a place for swells, for men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns, for midnight places like Rector’s and Shanley’s and Churchill’s, Healy’s and Bustanoby’s. They came with chorus girls and mistresses and even, occasionally, with their wives, for steaks and chops and champagne and dancing to stringed orchestras. Delaney had often been among them, inhaling perfumed shoulders on dance floors. He had even believed that the great lesson of Times Square was a simple one: sin could be elegant. A long time ago. When he was young.

But the swells were all gone now, along with their watering holes, driven out by Prohibition and now the goddamned Depression. Hypocrisy and bad times had served as the great social levelers. He looked up at the hotels and wondered if Larry Dorsey was working again in one of them, after his terrible New Year’s Eve. He hoped so. And vowed to call him. On every street he saw patrols of hard boys from Hell’s Kitchen, lean and furtive and angry, moving through the crowds after walking east from the tenements on the North River. A few were shining shoes. Most searched for careless marks, with their wallets plump in back pockets. Some women were offering swift joy in side street hotels, and never mentioned gonorrhea. Where was the building that he visited that time with Big Jim, where they sat for an hour with George M. Cohan? And what was the name of that dancer from Earl Carroll’s Vanities, the one with the creamy skin and the long legs? For weeks he had danced with her every night. Now it had been seven years since he had danced with anyone.

He and Rose moved slowly through packed streets, bumping into other people, laughing at the sights. A fat old woman in a shawl sang “Mother Machree” and offered apples for two cents. A tenor proclaimed his passion for Madame Butterfly in a cloud of frying hot dogs. Another man put a dancing cocker spaniel through his routine, in which the dog always did the opposite of what he was ordered and made people laugh. Rose and Delaney didn’t laugh at the veterans they saw on almost every corner. One held a scrawled sign on cardboard. LOST LEG IN FRANCE NEED HELP. Delaney slipped him a quarter and moved on with Rose. They paused to look at the tall beefy cops planted on their big Morgan horses, easy and laughing, but ready for trouble. “Carlito would love these guys!” Rose said. Delaney squeezed her arm in agreement. Above them, the lights of huge signs blinked in crazy syncopation, sending out fragments of nouns, and no verbs. RUPPERT WRIGLEY BABY RUTH BARS. Others were pieces of movies. CRIME DOCTOR. STINGAREE. WITCHING HOUR. Behind them, the electric ribbon on the Times Tower said something about Albania and kept moving. Another message said: GIANTS LOSE TO CUBS 5–4. They passed more hot dog places and skee-ball parlors and a place called the Pokerino. Every movie house lobby was guarded by sour uniformed young men, who served as bouncers and barkers. Newsstands waited for the bulldog editions of the News and Mirror. Inside every restaurant, above the counter, there were framed photographs of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Delaney and Rose could hear music everywhere. Moving through the great crowd, Delaney felt his own kind of relief. Here nobody could ever care about his problems. Your daughter arrives tomorrow? Fine, let her sleep on the couch. But don’t bother me right now, sport.