North River

by Pete Hamill

They looked at many elegant drawings, and a sketchbook in a glass box, and then paused before Botticelli’s portrait of Dante Ali-ghieri: hawk-faced, oddly dangerous for a poet.

  “I don’t want to look at this,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you see it? The face, I mean. Don’t you see who it looks like?”

  Then he saw it: Frankie Botts.

  “Let’s go back to the swag.”

  “No,” Delaney said. “Let’s go home.”

  On the way out, Carlito turned a final time to look at the blond Venus rising from the sea.

  On the subway downtown, his mind was full of questions. How does Rose know what Frankie Botts looks like? Then answered himself: Because she knew Gyp Pavese and must have seen him with his boss, with Frankie Botts. She definitely knew that he ran things out of Club 65. But that didn’t explain her deep silence, sitting now on one side of Carlito, with the boy dozing against her as the packed train squealed through tunnels. It had to be the actor. The older man thought they were married, and that the boy was theirs. That must be it. And she must be thinking about how impossible that would be. How impossible all of it would be. That Grace would surely come home. Rising from the sea. She would take away what was hers. This boy. And then Rose would go too.

  Delaney retreated into his own silence.

  A frail rain was falling when they came up from the subway, and the skies were as gray and leaky as their mood. He lifted Carlito, and they began walking quickly to the west. When they reached Ninth Avenue, the wind was blowing hard from the North River. Then Rose took Carlito from him, and he realized that his right arm was aching again. They turned into the areaway on Horatio Street, and while Delaney fumbled with his keys, the door opened at the top of the stoop next door. A stout woman in an overcoat came out on the wide top step. He hadn’t seen her for a long time but knew it was Mrs. Cottrell.

  “Dr. Delaney,” she said, brushing a hand against the rain. “Wait, Doctor, wait!” She stepped into the vestibule and emerged with an umbrella. A gust of wind flopped it into uselessness. She dropped the umbrella and came clumsily down the steps.

  “Come on,” Rose said, opening Delaney’s gate with her own keys. “You’ll get pneumonia out there.”

  “Yes, but —”

  Mrs. Cottrell had reached their areaway. Her ruined umbrella was careening on her stoop, rising, falling. Delaney tensed for a blow.

  “I just want to thank you, Doctor,” she said. “You saved my husband’s life. The doctor at Bellevue told me about it, all about it. Another ten minutes, he’d have been gone. I know we’ve been mean to you, no, nasty. That was my fault. But I was so — Anyway, thank you, thank you.”

  She took his good hand in both of hers.

  “Get inside, Mrs. Cottrell. Take care of your husband.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Delaney said, and hurried into his own house.

  Rose was inside the second door and helped him off with his coat and hung it on the coat tree. She opened the door again and shook the rain off his hat. Carlito came racing from the kitchen on the fire engine. Delaney shuddered.

  “That hypocrite,” she said, her use of the word rhyming with “light.”

  “Ah, it’s only human,” Delaney said.

  “She doesn’t talk to you, for what? Four years? And then she’s sorry.”

  “Well —”

  “Go upstairs and get dry clothes,” she said. “I’ll make something to eat.”

  The boy made the sound of a siren.

  Delaney was in bed that night, reading Byron’s very funny poem about George III while the rain drummed steadily on Horatio Street. Rose and the boy were sleeping, and he craved sleep himself, but it would not come. The words blurred on the page. He tried to imagine Mrs. Cottrell on the day her son was killed and Delaney could not save him. She was thinner then, even pretty, but rage is always ugly. She must have raged at the driver of the car and at her husband and at God. She certainly raged at Delaney. Standing by the ambulance, pointing a long finger. “It was you! You could have saved him! You could have saved him! You! You!”

  And he knew he hadn’t saved her husband. Anybody in Washington Square would have found the cop, and the cop would have called Bellevue, and there the interns and nurses would have done everything possible. As they had done. But maybe now it would at least be better. Nothing could be done about 97 Horatio, with its colony of ghosts. But maybe Mrs. Cottrell would come to the back garden of 93 and talk across the fence with Rose, about the weather and the birds and the olive tree. But no: she would have to look at Carlito and think of her son, and —

  The telephone rang. At ten forty-seven. Again. Then again. He lifted the receiver.

  “Hello?” Delaney said.

  “It’s me. The guy from Bleecker Street.”

  “Hello, Mr. Botts.”

  “I been trying to fine you.”

  “You didn’t leave a message.”

  “I don’t leave messages.” He could picture Botts smiling in the movie gangster style. “I deliver them.”

  Ah, Christ, Delaney thought, then said: “What’s the problem?”

  “My mother’s sick.”

  “Is she in pain?”

  “Some. But you know these people from the old country: they never admit nothin’.”

  “If she’s hurting, Mr. Botts, go to a hospital.”

  “Somethin’s the matter, but she won’t tell me.”

  “Can it wait until tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I guess.”

  “Give me the address,” Delaney said, lifting the pencil from the bedside table, moving the pad. He wrote down the address on Grand Street, and Botts told him it was upstairs from Di Palo’s cheese store.

  “There’s one other thing,” Frankie Botts said. “She don’t speak much English.”

  “And I don’t speak Italian.”

  “I thought maybe you could bring that hoodlum that takes care of the kid. So she could translate, know what I mean?”

  “I’ll ask,” Delaney said.

  “Don’t worry,” Botts said. “You’ll be safe.” A pause. Then: “I hear you got the G-men on your ass.”

  “They came by,” Delaney said.

  “Looking for Eddie Corso too?”

  “His name never came up. If it did, I couldn’t tell them anything anyway, because I don’t know where he is.”

  Botts sighed. Then: “Tomorrow at two-thirty? Before you start your house calls.”

  “You know my hours pretty good, Mr. Botts.”

  “I know a lot of things.”

  Botts hung up, and Delaney sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the carpet. It could be a setup, he thought, a way to get me out of this neighborhood, and the men who guard me, and then do what he wants to do. But that made little sense. Botts was no fool. He knows the Feds are watching me. He knows I’ll probably tell everyone where I’m going. Monique. My friends. The cops.

  No, Botts might be telling me the truth. His mother is sick. And every gangster Delaney had ever known was sick in the head about his mother. Irish gangsters most of all. But the Jews too, and the Italians. They all insisted they had accepted a bitter cup in order to make life better for Mama. Maybe that’s all it is. Again.

  TWELVE

  IN THE MORNING, IN HIS BEDROOM, FRESH FROM A SHOWER, A bathrobe loose across his shoulders, Delaney glanced at the newspapers. There was a huge taxi strike, with twenty-five thousand hackies out on the street. La Guardia, speaking as a New Yorker and an American and not as a Republican, said in a speech that everybody must support President Roosevelt. The Giants were working their way east and north, playing exhibition games. John Dillinger was spotted in Santa Fe and in Oregon on the same weekend, but did not rob any banks. There was no news from Spain. And no sound from the top floor.

  He removed the robe and sat on the edge of the bed. He felt stronger, younger, after only a week on the bicycle. I’ll have to work
even harder now, pedal more furiously, or the Italian food will smother my Celtic bones. His eyes fell on the books beside the bed, and the third volume from the top was a selection of the work of Dante Alighieri. He slipped it out. The frontispiece was a small black-and-white version of the portrait at the Met that looked like Frankie Botts. He started dressing for the day, and wondered what would happen in the afternoon on Grand Street.

  That afternoon they walked to Grand and Mott from the subway, and Rose was sullen most of the way. Carlito was now in the care of Monique, and Rose wasn’t pleased to be drafted into Delaney’s service. She wore her old shoes and walked quickly, as if wanting to rush back to Horatio Street. The streets here were crowded, the last of the pushcarts parked beside the curbs. In the newspapers, La Guardia was saying that he would get all the pushcarts off the streets because they were unsanitary, but suggesting that they were part of the stereotype of Italians and thus had to go. Most were still on the streets, but because of the strike, the taxis were not. Rose moved through the neighborhood as if it was at once familiar and alien.

  “I don’t like doing this,” Rose said when they were a block away.

  “It’s not for him,” Delaney said. “It’s for his mother.”

  “You know she’s Sicilian, right?”

  “I thought Frankie was a Neapolitan.”

  “No, it was a — how do you say it? Mix marriage?”

  Delaney wanted to laugh but didn’t. “That’s why Frankie must have asked for you.”

  She shrugged and looked ahead in a dark wary way. “Maybe.”

  She paused to examine the window of Di Palo’s cheese store. Little signs were pinned into the cheeses: ragusana, romano, mozzarella. Her lips moved, as if saying the names, but no words emerged.

  “I could make some great stuff out of that window,” she said, repressing a smile.

  “We’ll stop on the way home.”

  Delaney looked at the bells on the doorframe in front of the vestibule. One was marked B, nothing more, and he pressed it. A buzzer rang, and as he pushed on the door something clicked and the door opened. Ah, the rewards of crime. Only gangsters could afford electrically controlled locks in the tenements of New York. Delaney led the way up the narrow stairs, with low-wattage lights above them. Each step and landing was covered with brownish linoleum. The banister smelled of lemon juice. Cooking odors filled the air, along with the aromas of cheese from the store, all mixed with music from the Italian radio stations. Frankie Botts was alone on the third-floor landing.

  “Up here,” he said, leaning over the banister. “Right here.”

  On the landing, Botts had assumed a pose of command, hands jammed in the pockets of a dark suit, a lightbulb above him emphasizing his shadowed eyes and high cheekbones. Delaney thought: Christ, he looks like a painting by Caravaggio. A single light and the deepest darkness. The sense of menace was palpable. He shook hands with Botts, but Rose stood with her arms folded across her breasts. She was wearing a dark blue sweater, and her eyes were examining the place, never looking directly at Frankie Botts. Down the steps was the safety of the streets. Up one final flight was the roof. In some houses in New York, the roof was for hurling people into the yards.

  They passed into the kitchen, and Frankie closed the door behind them and turned two locks. There were no bodyguards in sight. The kitchen was like a thousand others: stove, refrigerator, table, chairs, a sink. The bare table had the texture of bone from many scrubbings. A framed lithograph of the Bay of Naples was on one wall, a young man in an army uniform on another. That was Carmine, killed in Château-Thierry, the same photograph that was hanging in Club 65. The one whose death had so hurt Frankie’s mother. She was obviously a woman who would not surrender her hurt.

  “Where’s the patient?”

  “In here,” Botts said.

  He led the way through the flat, passing more photographs of Carmine, and several of a young woman and a young Italian man, made in a studio in some city in the old country. Delaney was sure the woman was Frankie’s mother, with her vehement Sicilian eyes, and the man with her was surely Frankie’s father. His face was amused. The apartment was immaculately clean.

  “Right here,” Frankie said.

  He opened a door to a back bedroom. The shade was drawn. An old woman in blue pajamas was lying under the covers of a bed with a dark carved wooden headboard. She still resembled the young woman in the framed photograph. Her hair now was almost white, pulled back in a bun, but it was the same woman. She had handsome lined features, and was breathing in a shallow way. Her eyes were closed. A votive candle flickered on a bureau, but there was no other light. The top of the bureau was cluttered with more framed photographs, one showing the entire family with a New York river in the background, and separate ones of Frankie in a baseball uniform and Carmine in a summer shirt and long pants. In one, Frankie stood with his kid brother, both smiling, Frankie taller and more muscular. Delaney had seen many bureaus like this one. He laid his bag on the floor.

  “Momma?” Frankie said.

  Her eyes came open, the irises a washy blue, and she blinked at the strange faces of Delaney and Rose. She seemed as wary as Rose was. Frankie went around to the side of the bed and turned on a lamp.

  “Momma, this is the doctor,” Botts said in Italian. “He’s here to see you.”

  She answered, “I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

  Frankie said: “He knows that, Momma. But he gotta examine you, see what’s the problem.”

  “I don’t want nobody looking at me,” she said in English. “It’s too ugly.”

  Then she saw Rose.

  “Who’s she?”

  “I’m like a nurse, signora,” Rose said in Sicilian. “I’m here to help the doctor.”

  “That’s right, Momma,” Frankie said in English.

  The woman sighed in an accepting way and said, “You get outta here, Frankie. Okay?”

  Frankie shrugged, backed out of the room, and left Rose and Delaney with his mother.

  “You have to show me the problem, Mrs. Botticelli,” Delaney said, and to be sure, Rose translated. The old woman seemed reassured and began to unbutton the top of her pajamas. Her scrawny chest and belly were covered with sores, some erupting into blisters. Delaney leaned forward to see them better, and touched them gently.

  “You see?” the old woman said. “Disgusting!”

  “The doctor’s going to fix it,” Rose said in Sicilian. “Don’t worry. He’s the best.”

  “It’s so awful,” the old woman said. “I want to die.”

  When Delaney came out ten minutes later, Frankie was leaning against a window, staring at the street.

  “Jesus, that was fast,” he said.

  “The problem is called herpes zoster,” Delaney said. “It comes from nerves, worry, any kind of stress. The common name is shingles.”

  “Shingles? Like on a fuckin’ roof?”

  “That’s the word. Don’t ask me why. They can be very painful for a while, and they itch. They come late in life to people who had chicken pox when they were kids. Somehow the chicken pox virus stays alive, buried in the body, waiting to make a move. She gets full of worry and then, pow: shingles. But they’re nothing to worry about. I mean, you don’t die from shingles.”

  “So whatta we do?”

  Delaney was already writing a prescription.

  “First get this cream. She has to apply it four times a day. If she can’t do it, have someone come in and do it for her. I had a small jar in my bag, and Rose is applying it now.” Delaney filled out another prescription. “This is for some pills. To ease the pain. One after every meal.”

  “She ain’t eatin’.”

  “Make sure she eats something, Frankie. Three times a day. For strength. Otherwise, she’s okay. No fever, strong heartbeat. How old is she?”

  “How should I know? She’d never tell us. You know these people from the old country. They think they’re always in front of the grand jury. . . . I figure
sixty-five, seventy, something like that.”

  Rose came out of the bedroom, then stepped into a hall bathroom. They could hear water running as she washed her hands.

  “I’ll come back same time next Monday,” Delaney said. “And see how she’s doing.”

  Botts took an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Delaney. “For you,” he said. Delaney brushed it away.

  “You know what I want,” Delaney said.

  “I do?”

  “Call off your boys, Frankie. Let us all live in peace down on Horatio Street.”

  The sleet returned to the gangster’s eyes. His body tensed and coiled, and he turned away. “There’s a lot of things involved,” Botts said. “I gotta talk to my people.” Rose emerged from the bathroom, and Botts returned the envelope to his pocket. Rose nodded a cool good-bye to Frankie Botts, opened the two locks of the door, and stepped into the hall.

  “Let me think about it,” Botts said. “Like I said, there’s lots of things involved.”

  “Starting with my grandson.”

  “No, starting wit’ that fucking Eddie Corso.”

  Delaney lifted his bag and followed Rose into the hall. He did not shake hands or say good-bye. Going down the stairs, she looked at him, as if saying: What was that all about?

  “We’ll talk later,” he said.

  On the crowded street in front of the building, Rose looked straight at Delaney.

  “That was nice with the mother,” she said. “What you did, the way you talked to her. She’s scared to death, and you made her feel safe. Very nice.”

  “You helped too, Rose. You helped a lot.”

  “I know,” she said. “She wouldn’t let a man put the cream on her. And it made me feel better. But I can’t stand that comorrista Frankie.”

  “I wasn’t there just for her,” Delaney said. “I want Frankie to leave us all alone.”

  “Then you better not cure the old lady,” she said. “As soon as she gets better, they come looking for you.” She laughed. “Faster if she dies.”

  He grinned and said, “I thought about both possibilities.”