Pete Hamill - North River

Then he saw Grace. She was at the top of the gangway, wearing dark slacks, a patterned blouse, a black beret. She squinted into the darkness of the giant shed. Delaney waved and she leaned forward, then smiled and moved faster, and hit the pier running. She went straight to Delaney and made a little leap and they embraced and hugged.

“Oh, Daddy, oh, Daddy, oh,” she said. Then dropped her voice. “Oh, Daddy. I’m so sorry. For everything.”

“Welcome home, Grace.”

Then she saw Knocko.

“Oh, Mr. Carmody! How are you! Thank you for coming!”

“You play any softball over there?” he said, and grinned.

“Not an inning,” she said. “How about tomorrow?”

They walked together toward the street side of the shed, and the longshoremen came up behind them with one large bag and two smaller ones, and they passed into the sunlight and the sparsely crowded avenue that ran along the piers. Before the Depression, Delaney thought, the crowds were so thick here you couldn’t cross without a rifle. Grace took off her beret and stuffed it in her belt. Her blond hair was darker and coarser, from too many years of hard water. Her smile was still lovely, her eyes remained a lustrous brown. But Delaney thought: She is twenty and looks thirty. Lines were scratched into her brow. Her mouth was more severe.

“I can’t wait to see Carlito,” she said.

“He doesn’t know you’re coming,” Delaney said. “I didn’t want him getting nervous.” He looked directly at her. “But first we have to talk, Grace.”

“Oh, there’ll be plenty of time to talk, Dad.”

“Now, Grace.”

The longshoremen were loading her bags into the trunk of Knocko’s Packard. He could see several canvases tied with cord. He went over to the car, but Knocko wasn’t there. The driver was standing at the door, smoking.

“Listen, could you go over to my house and wait for me?” Delaney said. “You know where it is. My daughter and I will walk home.”

“Sure thing, Doc,” he said. He got into the loaded car. Delaney turned to the longshoremen and tried to pass them a tip. “It’s okay, Doc,” the heavier one said. “It’s taken care of.”

Delaney turned to Grace. She was staring out at the river.

“The waterfront looks bad from the ship,” she said. “It looks worse up close, doesn’t it?”

“The Depression did it,” he said. “Not just to the waterfront.”

“Even Barcelona looks better,” she said.

She glanced at him as they started walking downtown beside the piers and the gaps.

“You’re angry, aren’t you, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

She jammed her hands in her pockets. “I don’t blame you.”

“You were selfish and careless, goddamn it,” he said, trying to wring the anger out of his voice. “That boy’s whole world was ripped up. He was crying for you, Mamá, Mamá, for days. Goddamn it.”

She looked as if she’d been slapped. A longshoreman passed, hook in his belt, lost in thought. She touched Delaney’s arm, and he could smell the sea rising from her clothes.

“We have to talk about now, ” Delaney said. “What you’re going to do now. ”

“Okay. First, we have to take care of what I came for,” she said, bristling slightly. “We have to get my mother buried. My mother. Your wife. Now. ”

“It’s all arranged,” he said. “There’ll be no mass, but we’ll go with her to the cemetery. The Green-Wood in Brooklyn. That’s where we can say good-bye…”

She asked for details, and he provided them in a low, clinical voice, blocking the current of anger. They saw a small crowd of men around the entrance to a pier and a black freighter docking, like the ship in the Babar book. A hot dog cart with an umbrella was feeding the men. He thought of Carlos. And then Rose.

“I wonder what happened to her,” Grace said. “Did she just give up? Did she slip and fall?”

“There was no note,” he said. “We’ll never know.”

And told himself: Get to it. Get to now.

“Can I see her?” Grace said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Grace. Remember her in life. The good and the bad.”

“Do you remember her?”

“Of course.”

Get to it.

“What else are you going to do, Grace? What are you going to do today? ”

She seemed startled by the question, and stopped walking. Her eyes reminded him of Carlito’s when he was scolded.

“I’m going home,” she said.

“To stay?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” he said in a flat voice.

“You said today. You said now. ” Her eyes flashed, her mouth seemed harder. “Can’t we talk about this later?”

“No.”

They were at Christopher Street now, with its pedestrian path under the highway, and a stoplight. He took her hand as he so often did when she was a child, and they hurried across. They waited for one lone truck as it groaned and turned, carrying heavy crates into the city. When they reached the opposite side, he released her hand. She stood there and faced him.

“Daddy, listen to me, Daddy,” she said with some heat. “Please listen. I did what I did because I had to. It wasn’t forever. It was for what I thought would be a month, at most. I had to find my husband. I had to know if he was alive or dead. If I didn’t know, I couldn’t get on with my life.” She paused for breath. “I thought I couldn’t be a decent mother to Carlito if I didn’t resolve the thing with Rafael.”

Delaney wondered: From what movie did she take this scenario? From what novel? Oh, how young she is.

“And so I went. I —”

Across the street, a few vagrants stood together, passing a pint of wine from one mouth to another. Some kids with a basket and a blanket were walking east to the subway. Delaney saw none of them. He stared into his daughter’s face.

“Goddamn it, Grace. You could have called me and said you were coming and why. You could have brought the boy into the house and introduced him to me and explained who I was. You could have slept in your own bed. You could have stayed a few days, taken another ship —”

“It was the last ship to Spain until the spring!”

“Then you could have figured it out better, goddamn it. You could have come a week early. Not the night before! Instead —”

She turned her back on him and began to sob.

“Stop!” he said, hating his own prosecutorial vehemence but unable to cage it. “You’ve got to face what you’ve done!” His voice lowered. “Now there are other people involved. Not just you.”

She turned to him. Her eyes were wet and she was sniffling, but she had stopped crying.

“And you have to face what you did when I was small.”

“I have faced it. I did what this whole neighborhood did, when the young men went off to the war. But yes, I didn’t have to go. And yes, I was sorry. But I tried and I tried and I tried to make it up to you. I spoiled you. I forgave everything, even if I could not forgive myself. But Carlos is also three years old. How could you do to him what I did to you?”

She seemed to be shrinking. He took her elbow and walked east, then took a left, heading for Horatio Street. His heart was drumming.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to make this worse.” She didn’t reply. “And it turned out —” He groped for the right words. “It turned out that Carlos was a gift. His innocence was a gift. His way of looking at the world, and naming it, and showing it to me fresh: that was a gift, Grace.” Say it, he thought. Now. “And because of him, I received another gift. A woman.”

She slowed down as they walked on Washington Street. Away off they heard the elevated train squealing against its tracks.