Pete Hamill - North River

That night was twelve months after she had vanished, and tonight she still wasn’t there. She might never be in this room again. This room that was her secret garden of books and music and dreams. Right up to the moment when she went down the stairs and started walking to the river, the breeze ruffling her blue dress. Other people saw her go, but I was out on house calls. Goddamn it all to hell.

He took a breath, exhaled, and went in.

The room was as it always was: wide, the ceiling higher than in the small maids’ rooms in the rear. The hardwood floors looked gray under a coat of fine dust. The fireplace awaited a fire. The piano stood near the windows, properly grand in spite of the dust, filling the space between the windows. Delaney sat down on the wide sturdy bench and could see Molly’s heroes, framed upon the wall. Mr. Bach. Mr. Mozart. Mr. Brahms. Mr. Scott Joplin. Mr. Arnold Schoenberg. In the years after the war, he was away so much on calls, or at the hospital doing grand rounds, or tending to patients, that she often played only for her masters

The wall on the right was stacked from floor to ceiling with his books and hers. Many of his were on the top shelves, near the ceiling, some going back to high school, dozens from Johns Hopkins before the war. The textbooks were filled with the medical ignorance of the day, now worthless rubbish that could not even be sold to the dealers on Fourth Avenue. And yet he could not throw them out. Once he loved them and learned from them. They were now like aging teachers whose time had passed. Then his eyes fell to the lower shelves, full of treasures. Dickens and Stevenson and Mark Twain. Conrad and Galsworthy, Henry James and Edith Wharton. On one shelf, Theodore Dreiser leaned against Dostoyevsky, and he remembered how sure he once was that they were snarling at each other, each filled with certainty. To their left, unable to soothe them, was the good Dr. Chekhov. With any luck, these books will be the patrimony of the boy. And who will teach him how to read?

There too was his chair, with its thick rounded arms and its ratty green brocaded covering. The place into which he would sink at the end of a fatiguing day. There he would read novels to know more about human beings, who were, after all, his basic subject, and still were. The medical books didn’t tell such stories. Only novels did. Sometimes Molly would play a concert for him alone. When she wanted to annoy him, or irritate him for some infraction of decent manners, she would play Schoenberg, knowing that Schoenberg would always break his trance. When she wanted to move him into sleep, she played Brahms. She knew that men broken by war need lullabies. O my Molly-O.

He opened a closet filled with dusty luggage and Molly’s old summer dresses, and lifted a small valise down from a high shelf. He turned a small key in the lock and clicked it open and then placed his daughter’s letter into a folder with her other notes from distant places. The folder was on top of those from Molly. Letters Molly wrote to him in France. Earlier letters full of plans and hope. The 1918 letter sent to his hospital bed in Paris, as his ruined arm slowly healed. The letter telling him about his mother and father and how they had died in the influenza epidemic. Along with thirty thousand others in New York alone and millions all over the planet. Some of the older letters were full of longing for him, pulsing with love and desire. From the time before the slow darkness fell. Letters that made him bubble with happiness. Letters that made him weep. Only later, as time dragged and healing slowed and his stay in the French hospital was prolonged, only then did Molly’s tone alter into icy anger. Have you forgotten you have a daughter? she wrote. Have you forgotten you have a wife? And why did you go to that stupid war anyway? You didn’t have to go. You were never going to be drafted. You volunteered! Why? Over and over. Why? Those letters were there too. He clicked the valise shut, locked it, and placed it back on the shelf.

Then he lighted the candle again and shut down the oil lamp, locked the door behind him, and went down one flight to bed. His pajamas felt cold. He placed more coal on the fire and looked at the sleeping boy in his corner of the huge bed. There were no sounds from the street, as the silent neighborhood huddled under the smothering blankets of snow.

He slipped into bed in the dark.

O Molly. Come home, Molly. I need you now. Come and play for me. Come and play for this boy. Come home, my Molly-O.

THE WOMAN ARRIVED JUST BEFORE SEVEN O’CLOCK THE NEXT morning. At the first ring of the bell, Delaney was in the cellar, shoveling coal into the small boiler that heated the water. A flashlight was perched on a milk box. The sound of the bell first made him think it was Bootsie again. Some demand in the ringing. A feeling of alarm. And Monique was not yet at her desk. He closed the furnace door, laid down the shovel, grabbed the flashlight, and went up the darkened stairs, afraid the sound would wake the boy. But Carlito was already awake, sitting on the stairs near the bottom, his pajamas blotchy with urine. He must have tried, Delaney thought. He must have stood on the bowl and tried. The boy hugged Delaney’s leg as if consumed with shame, and the doctor hefted him and carried him to the door under the stoop. This should take only a minute, boy, he whispered. Hug me to stay warm.

The woman stood beyond the gate, snow on her wool hat and shoulders. She was in her middle thirties, with olive skin, a longish nose, a strong jaw, a faint mustache. Her body looked heavy under her dark blue coat, and she was wearing men’s boots. Her black eyes glistened. She was carrying a woolen bag and a cheese box.

“I’m Rose,” she said in a gruff voice. “Angela sent me.”

“Come in, Rose. Come in.”

She stepped in as Delaney backed up, her feet crunching on the hard snow that had blown in through the night. She pulled the gate shut. Steam was easing from her heavy lips. She stomped her boots on the mat and, as Delaney held the vestibule door open, passed into the hallway. Delaney closed the second door behind her.

“This is him, huh?” she said, and smiled.

“This is Carlito.”

She grinned more widely, showing hard white teeth, and turned to Delaney.

“Okay. Where’s the bathtub?”

Still in bathrobe and work shirt, Delaney brushed his teeth and washed at the sink while water ran into the small bathtub. An old showerhead rose above the tub. Steam drifted from the running water, and he used his fingers to wipe a space in the fogged-out mirror. The bathroom door was still open, and he saw Rose drape her coat over a chair. She looked thinner in a long dark dress that went below her knees, over the men’s boots. Then she pushed into the bathroom and placed the cheese box at the foot of the bowl. She removed the boy’s clothes, dropped them on the floor, and wrapped him in a large beige towel to keep him warm. The boy’s eyes were wide. What was this? Who was this? How many people were there in this world?

“Okay, get out,” she said to Delaney. “Get dressed. I gotta wash this boy.”

Delaney wiped his face, dried it, smiling as he shut the bathroom door behind him. He pulled on trousers, a clean shirt, socks, and boots. He could hear her low affectionate voice through the door: “What a handsome boy. All nice and clean now, you’re gonna be nice and clean. Hey, what’s this thing? What you got there? Nice and clean now. And your hair? Gotta wash that too. Pretty blond hair. Can’t wear it dirty.”

Thank you, Rose. Thank you, Angela.

There was a slight New York curl in her voice, “doity” instead of “dirty.” She dropped the d off every “and.” The h was banished from “thing.” She must be here a while. She’s definitely not just off the boat. Then the telephone rang for the first time in many hours. He lifted it.