North River

by Pete Hamill

  He touched the scar again, up now on one elbow.

  “What was his name — the guy that cut you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. He put a mark on me.” A pause. “Now it’s the past. Nothing can be done.”

  He felt her emptying beside him, at once ashamed of her confession and relieved to get it said. He held her closer and kissed the scar.

  FOURTEEN

  FOR DAYS ROSE WAS HER OLD SELF. HE DID NOT MENTION THE scar. She was cheerful, busy, focused, intimate, while routine established its discipline. She did not mention Grace again, nor the possibility of her return. Without words, she made Delaney believe that the present was everything, a kind of joy, even if the future might contain dread. Perhaps, he thought, this is an illusion. I think it’s true because I want it to be true. But as he and the boy tossed a ball around in the backyard, both using left hands, or when they made pictures in the room they now called the studio, or when they sat down for dinner in the golden aroma of oil and basil, and when Rose slipped into his dark room at night, Delaney allowed himself to feel happy. No matter what might happen, he would have these moments as long as he lived.

  One afternoon he passed a music store on Broome Street, where old hand-wound Victrolas were for sale, and many 78 rpm records. He tried several machines, testing them with an old Brunswick record of Crosby singing “I Surrender Dear.” The records were ten cents each, and he bought ten: Crosby, Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallee. The records and the bulky Victrola were piled into the basket on his bicycle and lashed safely with cord by the man from the music store. Then Delaney slipped the handle of his leather bag inside his belt and pedaled home.

  Delaney arrived with his secondhand treasures, to whoops from Rose and scrutiny from the boy, and they went to the top floor and through the open doors of the studio. He placed the Victrola on top of the piano and tried to wind it with his good left hand. His movements were clumsy, and Rose edged him aside.

  “Let me do that,” she said. And wound it taut, while Delaney lifted Russ Columbo’s version of “I Surrender Dear,” holding it on the edges, and placed it on the turntable. Rose gazed at the needle, which was new, then cocked the arm and laid it on the record. The voice of Russ Columbo filled the room.

  “Moo-zick!” the boy exclaimed, as if seeing a magic act. “Moo-zick!”

  He sat at the piano and plunked various keys, and Rose clapped her hands in delight. When the song ended, she put the needle back at the beginning of the record and they did it again, Delaney keeping time with his feet, Rose singing along. Here. Now.

  In the night, she did not talk about the boy. It was as if she had already accepted the possibility of his departure. She merged with Delaney, flesh to flesh, her body excited in the now, while forging images that would last for another day, or a month, or always. But above all, now and now and now and now. One night he reached for baby oil on the night table and began to knead the pliant flesh of her back, and her buttocks, and the back of her legs. Her breathing was deep, hoarse, rhythmic. Then he turned her and rubbed the oil into her feet, into the wide hard soles, softening them, into and between toes, into arches and ankles. Her breathing grew more rapid, second after second, deep in the now, until she reached for the pillow and screamed into its dense softness.

  During breakfast on a Saturday, the telephone began ringing. Delaney wanted to ignore it, to hold off still another demand for relief. Then he sighed and went into his office.

  “Hello?”

  And heard a familiar voice.

  “I need morphine, fast.”

  Eddie Corso.

  “Where are you?”

  “In New York. I need to see you.”

  “Where and when?”

  “You’re off tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, but so is the woman. I have the boy.”

  “Bring him.”

  “Bring him? Eddie, last time I looked there were four platoons of wiseguys looking for you. All with guns.”

  “I’m a long way from Bleecker Street. It’s safe here or I wouldn’t be talking to you.” A pause. “Besides, I got my own guys.”

  “That’s what I need: a crossfire. Jesus Christ, Eddie, the boy is three years old.”

  A sigh. “I need to see you, Doc.”

  Delaney answered with a heavier sigh, fluttering his lips. “Where are you?”

  After he hung up, Delaney stared at the telephone. At the scribbled directions. Then at the safe. The treasure of Eddie Corso was dwindling, eroded by the costs of the steam heat system. The house next winter would be warm. But here came the past.

  On Sunday morning, he told Rose that he was taking the boy to Coney Island and would be back in the afternoon.

  “Hey, I want to go to Coney Island too,” she said, smiling a wide grin. Her skin was already darker from early summer. And Carlito was browner too.

  “We’ll all go together on the Fourth of July,” he said. “Lots of fireworks.”

  “That’s a month from now.”

  He gambled that she could not change her schedule.

  “So come with us,” he said.

  She sighed. “Too late. They expect me at St. Brendan’s.”

  “Next week,” Delaney said, relieved. “Make sure you get a bathing suit.”

  “No! I can’t go around in a bathing suit, and all those young guys watching, all those dirty old guys.”

  She laughed harder.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll go in my long underwear!”

  She shoved him hard, the good shoulder. “You do that and I get back on the train.”

  Rose dressed and hurried off to perform her corporal works of mercy. Carlito played on his fire engine, shouting, Fire in Coney Isling, fire in Coney Isling. Delaney went into his office. He stared at the telephone, then dialed the number for Frankie Botts.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Dr. Delaney, Mr. Botticelli.”

  “Hey, howaya?” he said, the tone friendly.

  “I’ve been going over records this morning, and I don’t think I have to see your mother anymore.”

  “What?”

  “She’s got no pain. She’s walking. All the blisters have healed. She’s got spots on her skin that might take a while to fade. But she’s okay, Frankie.”

  Silence. Then: “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. She can still use the salve, once a day. But she’s okay. Any problems, call me.”

  “Let me ass you somethin’. Can she go to a ballgame?”

  “Sure. As long as you’re with her.”

  Botts exhaled. “That is great fuckin’ news. Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

  “What about our understanding, Frankie?”

  “What understanding?”

  “I take care of your mother and everything is over down here,” Delaney said. “We don’t have to walk around looking over our shoulders.”

  Botts grunted. “I’ll call you back.”

  He hung up. Delaney sat there for a while, thinking: You son of a bitch.

  They caught the Sea Beach Express at Union Square. The train was packed with men and women and kids, many wearing straw hats, or carrying blankets and lunch baskets, all full of a glad anticipation. He held Carlito’s hand tightly as the laughing crowds parted to allow still more people to board the train. The air was dense. The overhead fans had been shut off long ago, to save money. Many people were sweating heavily. Delaney was sure he could smell tenements.

  The train plunged under the river, racing to Brooklyn, racing to the sea. It was as if they all had the same slogan: To hell with the Depression, the sea is free. At the end of the car, the door was open to catch a breeze from the cool tunnel, and four young men started to sing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” Almost all the others joined them. When they came to the line If you don’t get a letter, then you’ll know I’m in jail, they were shouting the words. How many of them had been in jail? More than a few. How many had friends in jail, or relatives, or children? Even more. Toot, Toot, Tootsie, don’t cry, Toot, Toot,
Tootsie, good-bye . . .

  Then they were up out of tunnels, and the Brooklyn sky was above them, with the Brooklyn light glancing off the unseen harbor, just like in a Vermeer. Nobody got off, and nobody new could get on. The singing continued. “That Old Gang of Mine.” Then “My Buddy.” Carlito was planted strongly on the floor, holding a pole, and his visible world was all elbows and hips and knees, the bottoms of baskets, hands dangling or clenched together, and, when he looked up, all chins and nostrils.

  Then there was a brightening and then they started coming into the terminal, and the whole car roared. Last stop. Everybody off. Carlito’s eyes were wide with excitement. The train stopped. The doors opened. And some of the passengers began to run toward the ocean and the sand.

  Delaney and Carlito walked more slowly. He looked behind him, but it was impossible to know if they had been followed. Certainly nobody on the Sea Beach Express was wearing a pearl-gray fedora. There was a carousel ahead of them, going around and around, up and down, with slum kids mounted on brightly painted plaster horses while music from Tin Pan Alley or the circus played loudly. The crowds milled and men blinked and mothers called to children, and they all went out to Surf Avenue.

  This was his too, and he knew the geography of Coney the way he knew the West Village. He and Carlito stood on the sidewalk, and he pointed out the swirling towers of Luna Park to the left, as if conjured by Scheherazade, and then at Feltman’s across the street. He had brought Molly here once to listen to the Bavarian music in the beer garden, while Grace ran around, a year younger than Carlito, and when he asked Molly what she thought of Coney, she said, I don’t have the skin for this place. On this day, the boy was blinking again, closing his personal shutters as if taking photographs, while the crowds swirled around them. A clock told Delaney he was fifteen minutes early.

  He and the boy crossed the street where lines were forming to enter Steeplechase the Funny Place, with its huge grinning face. The boy watched a train inching slowly to the apex of the roller coaster, poising, then dropping while people screamed.

  “What is?” the boy said.

  “A roller coaster,” Delaney said. “It’s scary.”

  “Can we go too?”

  “Not today, Carlito. Someday.”

  He remembered being here with Grace when she was seven, and how she insisted that he take her on the roller coaster, and how he sat beside her as it climbed, and how terrified she was when it dropped so hard and fast. She screamed and screamed as he held her with his good left hand. Later she continued sobbing and said she never wanted to see Coney Island again, and for three years she didn’t. On this day, as on that day long ago, the vendors were selling hot corn and ice cream and lemon ices and watermelon. Off on the side, a burly man raised a huge hammer and brought it down, and a hard rubber disk rose high on a cable and hit a bell and everybody cheered. Another man was aiming a rifle at a moving tin rabbit, fired, missed, fired again, missed again. In the next booth, a young man wound up like a pitcher and threw a baseball at a target with a hole in the center. The ball bounced away.

  “He need a bat, Gran’pa,” the boy said. “And a glove.”

  “He sure does.”

  It was time to go see Eddie Corso. Delaney took Carlito’s hand and started walking back across Surf Avenue. The boy stopped and looked back at the baseball range.

  “I want to see more! I want to f’wow a ball, Gran’pa. Please!”

  “We have to meet someone, boy. Come on.”

  The boy stood still, refusing to budge. Delaney spoke the boy’s name. The boy did not move. Delaney went over to him and tried to take his hand. The boy half turned and folded his arms across his chest. His lower lip protruded now, his brow furrowed.

  A heavy woman in her fifties paused and looked from Carlito to Delaney.

  “You better give him a good whack, mister,” she said. “ ’Cause that kid ain’t goin’ nowheres.”

  “I ain’t goin’ no ways,” Carlito said.

  The heavy woman said, “Whad I tell ya?”

  Delaney thought: Fuck off, lady.

  But squatted down beside Carlito.

  “Listen to me, Carlito.” The boy looked at him. “I know you want to stay. But first we have to go somewhere else. All of this, the bats and balls and guns, they’ll still be here. But I have to meet a friend, and then we can come back.”

  The boy looked at Delaney with doubt in his eyes. Then he sighed, a form of surrender. Delaney stood and took his hand, and they walked across the wide avenue.

  Then a man in a straw boater and sunglasses and a thick mustache emerged from the eddying crowds.

  “Hey, Doc, glad you could make it. Come on.”

  It was Bootsie.

  His plain black Ford was parked on a side street and they got into it. The boy was still resisting. He wanted loud music, guns, baseball, watermelon. He clearly didn’t want to get into a car. Delaney placed him on his lap. Bootsie turned into the two-way traffic on Surf Avenue and inched along, with Steeplechase across the street on the beach side. Delaney could see Scoville’s, the saloon where for years his father and the other Tammany guys celebrated the birthday of John McKane, the nineteenth-century Tammany prince of Coney Island. The ritual started when McKane came home from Sing Sing in 1898. The old Coney boss died a year later, but the ritual went on, ending only with the double calamity of the influenza epidemic and Prohibition. And here was Scoville’s open again, and he wondered how many people were left alive who remembered McKane in his heyday.

  Then Bootsie turned right into a side street and pulled into a driveway beside an old-fashioned bungalow on a street of identical bungalows. Kids played in the sandy front yards. Men walked home with the Sunday papers.

  “This is it,” Bootsie announced, opening his door. The boy looked surprised. A house? Where is the sea?

  “Thanks, pal.”

  The door opened on the porch and there was Eddie Corso. In white slacks, sandals, and a sport shirt. His skin was dark and oiled and he had grown a white beard, neatly trimmed. He and Delaney embraced. There were no stale morphine jokes. Delaney stepped back and held Eddie’s shoulders.

  “You look good, Sergeant. Where’d you get the tan?”

  “Out west.” He waved a hand around at the neighborhood. “Here too.”

  “And the beard?”

  “Out west too. Do I look like a rabbi?”

  “One full of wisdom and years.”

  “This is the boy, huh?”

  “This is the boy, all right.” Delaney moved the boy a few inches closer. “Carlito, this is my friend.”

  “ ’Lo,” the boy said, offering his hand. Corso shook it. Delaney never said Corso’s name. In the age of the holy G-men, you never knew when they might drag a three-year-old before a grand jury. A breeze off the sea made a porch rocker move slightly.

  Corso said, “Come on in, get a cold drink.”

  When he led the way back inside, bells jangled on the outside door, and then he pushed through an inside screen door. Delaney looked around. There was a wide room inside the doors, with a couch and two chairs and a low table. There was a small kitchen with an icebox and a counter. The back of the house was dark, with two closed doors sealing off the bedrooms. It felt like what it was: a place for transients. There was a pistol on the counter. Another pistol was on the low table. Corso opened the icebox.

  “Le’s see. I got Cokes, some beers. . . . You don’t drink, but what about the kid?”

  “He’s off the beer for now, Sergeant.”

  Delaney noticed the boy staring at the gun on the low table. Corso popped open three Coca-Colas.

  “One small favor. Carlito has his eye on that gun.”

  “Oh, shit, I forgot.” He turned to Bootsie. “Stick that rod somewheres. Then go work on your tan while I talk to the good doctor.”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  Bootsie placed the pistol on a shelf above the sink, then went outside. He left the outside door open and the breeze ca
me through the screen door. Delaney could hear the sound of the rocker moving heavily, as Bootsie watched the street.

  “How do you feel?” he said to Corso.

  “Pretty good.” Corso opened his shirt. His body was tanned but the scar remained a livid white. Delaney ran his fingers over it. It would fade. The way Rose’s scar had faded.

  “He did a good job, that fella at the hospital,” Corso said.

  “He sure did.”

  “So why are you back?” Delaney said quietly.

  “You know why.”

  “No, I don’t. Last I heard, you were getting out of the rackets.”

  “I am,” Corso said, and sipped from the Coke bottle. “But first I got some unfinished business.”

  Carlito stood up from the couch and stared through the screen door at some kids playing in the street.

  “Forget about it,” Delaney said. “Just leave it alone.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  Delaney sighed, and stared at the Coke bottle in his bad hand.

  “I gotta ask you a few things,” Corso said.

  “You mean about Frankie Botts and me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was treating his mother. She had a bad case of shingles.”

  Corso smiled. “A case of what?”

  Delaney explained, and noticed Carlito at the screen door, staring past Bootsie at the street.

  “And you brought that woman, what’s her name? She’s taking care of the kid?”

  “Rose. To translate for the old lady.” A pause. “I told Frankie I would treat his mother if he would call off his boys. Somehow Frankie blamed me for saving your life on New Year’s Day. He wanted me to tell him where you were. I told the truth. I didn’t know. Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell. But some guys came around, a guy named Gyp. There were phone calls. I was afraid. For Rose. For the boy.”

  Corso stared hard at Delaney, then exhaled and leaned back in his chair.

  “Stay away from Frankie Botts,” he said. “It could be dangerous.”