North River

by Pete Hamill

  They walked inside, and Norris led the way to a long corridor, flashing his badge.

  “Some black guy pulls outta Red Hook in a little putt-putt,” Norris said. “He’s headin’ for Sheepshead Bay to do a little crabbin’. You know, grab free lunch for the family. It’s a little windy, a little chop in the water, so he stays near shore.” Norris nodded at a beefy nurse with an Irish face. “Then he looks down in the rocks near the Narrows, this side of the Narrows, the New York side, and he sees, maybe eight, ten feet down — he sees a skull.”

  They followed signs to the morgue.

  “When he gets to Sheepshead Bay, he calls the cops,” Norris said. “They call the Harbor Police, and next thing you know, I’m here.”

  They passed the corridor leading to the emergency room, and Delaney could hear a woman moaning in pain. A sound he had been hearing all of his life. They went through the door of the morgue. A fat balding clerk looked up from his desk just inside the door. He was reading the sports section of the Daily News.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  Norris showed his badge. “We’re here to make a possible ID. Unidentified woman fished out of the Narrows yesterday.”

  The man opened a ledger book in an annoyed way and ran a plump finger down a list of entries.

  “Try F-11,” he said. “And sign in here.”

  They walked down aisles of cabinets containing the dead. Six closed trays above each other, like floors in a tenement. For Delaney, all morgues were the same: the same bleak lighting, the same damp concrete floors, the same odors of pine and formaldehyde. They stopped at F-11.

  “This ain’t gonna be easy,” Norris said.

  “I know,” Delaney said. “But I’ve got no choice, Jackie.”

  Norris slid out the tray. The skull was closest to them, the other bones arranged into the deepest part of the tray. One femur was missing, and other bones as well. Delaney stepped to the side to look down upon the skull. It was grinning, like every other skull he had ever seen. Grinning in mockery of the living. Grinning with secret knowledge. He reached down and used his right hand to move the lower mandible. There on the right was the molar filled with gold by that dentist just off the Ringstrasse. It’s my damned Irish teeth, Molly said. They make contact with Viennese chocolate and they rot. To the right of her head were the folded remnants of her blue dress, faded and shredded by tides and time. Oh, Molly.

  “It’s her,” he said. “I recognize the filling. That’s part of the dress she was wearing, the last time anyone saw her alive. . . . Thank you, Jackie.”

  “When I heard there were a few pieces of blue dress, I thought, Maybe this is her. It’s what you told me.”

  “The filling, that’s the right tooth.”

  “You can see we don’t have all the bones,” Norris said. “The guys will look again Monday morning, weather permittin’.” A pause. “There’s no sign of damage. No bones broke by bullets, no cracks in her head from a blackjack or anything.”

  Delaney took a last look, then slid the tray back into its cabinet.

  “I’ll ask the coroner to make the cause of death ‘accident,’ ” Norris said. “That way you can bury her in a Catholic cemetery if you want.”

  “Thanks, Jackie,” Delaney said, ignoring the suggestion of suicide, and started walking through the clammy dampness toward the exit, with Norris behind him. He knew the routine. The bureaucracy of death. He would sign a few papers. A clerk would stamp them. Norris would add them to his files and go off to his office the next day and talk to the coroner and later stamp the entire folder Case Closed. Then life would go on. There were dozens of people every year who ended up as corpses in the harbor. Delaney did what must be done, shook hands with Norris, and then walked toward the sun of Sunday morning.

  All the way back to Manhattan, images of Molly in life kept rising from memory. On that North River pier the first time he saw her, incoherent with pain and loss. Laughing at Tony Pastor’s. Walking through downtown Baltimore. Sneering at Al Jolson and baseball and the Irish songs from Tin Pan Alley. Then laughing as Delaney began to sing the songs. Walking across Union Square at dusk. Molly hugging the infant Grace in a hospital bed, her face fierce and protective. Her face and body lost in music, enraged music, and Brahms too. They had danced. He could always say that. They had danced at Tammany rackets and neighborhood weddings. They had danced in Vienna. And to an oompah band at Feltman’s on Coney Island. Always a waltz. Never anything else. A waltz always brought them to their feet, to grasp each other’s hands, and she could be carried out of her angers. Sitting on the train, he realized something else: It was the past. As distant now as all those browning photographs scattered around bars and offices and homes all over New York.

  Still, he began to hum Strauss on the subway, the tune rising from him without thought, and a woman looked at him from her seat across the car and smiled. Gray-haired, missing a bicuspid. Here, in the real world. He stopped humming. She reminded him that the world was for the living. The train pulled into Fourteenth Street.

  “That was nice,” she said as Delaney got up. “A waltz on a Sunday morning. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, and smiled as he got off. He did not try to explain that he was thinking of a woman he once loved with all of himself, and loved no more.

  At the house on Horatio Street, Rose and Carlito were waiting. She had skipped the movie to pick up the boy, and when Delaney came in she folded her arms and set her face, as if expecting a blow.

  “Well?” she said.

  “It was her,” he said.

  She breathed out hard, then unfolded her arms and let them hang loosely.

  “Well, that’s that,” she said.

  Delaney looked toward the door.

  “I’m going to take a little walk, Rose. Just collect my thoughts.”

  “Sure,” she said, and touched his face.

  “A half hour,” he said. “No more.”

  “We’ll be here.”

  They walked to the gate together.

  “Okay, Carlos, come on,” she said. “We’ll change your clothes.”

  “I want to go with Gran’pa.”

  “No, he has to do something. He’ll be right back.”

  “Please, Rosa.”

  “You heard me. No.”

  Delaney walked toward the river. He saw familiar faces and nodded hello. About a dozen kids were playing stickball beyond the High Line. The other kids were not yet back from the beach. A young woman pushed a child in a stroller. A drunken older man held on to a lamppost like a figure in a temperance poster, speaking steadily to himself. At water’s edge, Delaney walked to the pier where he’d gone so many times with Molly, long ago.

  I hope you knew how much I loved you, Molly, when you chose the river over life.

  He stood alone, watching the current move south to the Narrows and the sea beyond. On the next pier to the north, some kids took turns leaping into the river, riding the current to the pier beyond his own. A tugboat grunted north, a seagoing club fighter, fearless, tough.

  I want to tell you something, Molly. I’m very sorry for all the things that I did and didn’t do. But you chose the river, and the rocks at its gate. I am alive. I will live. I have found the aroma of life, and it’s full of garlic and basil and oil.

  SIXTEEN

  DELANEY WOKE UP ALONE AT FIVE IN THE MORNING AND KNEW HE could not return to sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed, his mind full of Molly’s bones. In some way, they were beautiful. A watercolor made of earth colors. Something Thomas Eakins could have painted. He wondered how they had been streaked, what chemicals had flowed around them, making such subtle marks. They had been scoured and bleached and stained. Now they would be returned to the earth.

  He stood up and went into the bathroom to shower. The bones stayed with him. He had lived for many months with an image of Molly moving through the current, her hair streaming out behind her, and he wondered which part of her flesh went first and which went last. He imag
ined her scalp and hair were last, but he could never be sure. Perhaps she had hit her head on a piling when she fell, and gashed that part of her flesh, and the current started to lift it, to peel it away. That scalp he had grasped in ecstasy. That hair that he had curled in his fingers. Ah, Molly.

  He dressed in the dark and went out at the top of the stoop, his ring of keys twined in his fingers. He stood there, in the place where Carlito had come into his life, and looked toward the North River. Then he turned back into the house.

  On Monday morning, he took the bicycle and rode with Carlito to get the bread and the newspapers. The Daily News headline said, in a disappointed way: MOB TRUCE? The News did have the best police reporters in the city, and they said that leaders of the Corso and Botticelli clans had a “sitdown” on Saturday night. Not in Little Italy. In the Bronx. Delaney smiled. If Eddie had been asked, he would have insisted on New Jersey. Never the Bronx. The News reporters added that one test of the cease-fire would take place Monday at the funeral of Frankie Botts, expected to be one of the biggest in Mob history. The cops were mobilizing more than eight hundred men to help keep the peace. Mayor La Guardia urged all decent citizens to stay home or go to work. But the News underlined a simple fact: as of early Monday morning, when they went to press, there had been no reported deaths for twenty-four hours.

  There was nothing in any of the newspapers about Molly. Jackie Norris had made certain of that. So Delaney sat down at his desk and wrote a telegram to Grace. SAD NEWS STOP MOTHER’S REMAINS FOUND STOP CAN YOU COME FOR BURIAL QUERY ADVISE SOONEST DAD. He clipped a note to the text for Monique, telling her to send it to the address on the Plaza Real and to American Express in Barcelona and Madrid.

  Then Carlito ran in with his teddy bear. Smiling and happy. Rose brought Delaney a fried egg sandwich and lifted Carlito. The smudges under her eyes were darker. She seemed desperately in need of sleep, and he was sure he knew what was keeping her awake.

  Monique arrived, and he handed her the telegram message. She glanced at it, then turned to him.

  “Oh, Jim,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “At least we know,” he said.

  She glanced toward the kitchen.

  “What’s gonna happen?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Then he went to work, nodding toward the door at the unseen patients. More than ever he understood that he needed their pain to keep from thinking about his own.

  That afternoon Monique asked Delaney about arrangements. “How are you gonna do this?” she said. He told her there would be no wake and no funeral mass, and that Molly’s bones might be buried in the same plot occupied by Big Jim and his wife out at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. “I have to call the cemetery,” he said. “Or maybe you could.” Monique looked at him in a dubious way. “You sure?” she said. “No mass?” He reminded her that Molly had left no will and no instructions, not even about the music, and had never mentioned any relatives in Ireland.

  “I do know that she hated the church,” he said. Then shrugged. “Well, maybe just a ceremony at the funeral home. Or at the grave. Family and friends. I have to ask Grace. If she comes home.”

  “That could be a long time. Maybe never.”

  “True.”

  “You’ve got to have something.”

  He was deliberately vague. “Well, we have a little time . . .”

  Monique shook her head. And Delaney wondered why Monique was reacting this way. She had never much liked Molly, and Molly had never much liked Monique. They tolerated each other, with crisp efficiency. Perhaps it was about Rose. Perhaps Monique wanted to be in charge, with no role for the bossy new interloper. No: that was probably not it. Monique was suggesting that he wasn’t reacting with sufficient ceremonial grief. That he was not gilding himself in platitude. It was like so much of life now: she wanted him to perform grief, and she would perform sympathy, even if she did not feel it.

  “Let’s talk later,” he said, and retreated to his office. He called Casey the undertaker and asked him to take custody of Molly’s remains from the hospital and hold them until a date was chosen for the burial. “The date’s not set yet, Mr. Casey.” And Casey said he understood. He did not explain that the date depended upon Grace. Burial would take place soon if Grace did not want to return. Molly would be buried without the presence of her daughter. The date would be later if Grace found a ship for New York. He began to imagine a small ceremony in Green-Wood. When it was over, they could walk up the slope to the peak of the hill and look down upon the Narrows.

  He didn’t eat much that evening and began to doze at the table. Rose touched him gently.

  “You go up to bed,” she said. “You need sleep. You need to clear your head.”

  “I do,” he said. “We have to talk about all this.”

  “Not tonight,” she said, turning to the drowsy Carlito. “You look worse than he does.”

  “But —”

  “I won’t come down tonight,” she said, a slight chill in her voice. “I can’t. It’s not right.”

  “I got over Molly a long time ago, Rose.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but this, it’s all still alive.”

  That night Delaney did not sleep a real sleep. It was not Molly who kept him awake. It was Grace. She would determine the future. How would she react to Rose? With snooty contempt? With the cold eyes of the women in St. Patrick’s that morning? In spite of all her glib talk about socialism and class equality, Grace could be haughty too. She was, after all, Molly’s daughter. He wondered what Grace would do. She might plan to move back into 95 Horatio, to reclaim her room as she reclaimed her son. Or she might go somewhere else, up to the Village, back to the West, or even Mexico, taking her son with her. I could not stop her, but if she tries to take him to Spain, I would try.

  He tossed in the darkness, but could not find a position that eased the ache in his bad arm. His mind teemed with questions that had no answers. How would Rose react to Grace? She had done what Rose could not imagine doing: she had left her child to the tender mercies of others. He imagined Rose staring at Grace, arms folded, full of Sicilian vehemence. And, of course, all of this might never happen. Rose might simply pack and go.

  He changed positions again, and pulled a pillow over his face, and smelled Rose on it, and moved to his left, pushing the pillow to the right. That hot night, he finally slept and dreamed once more about the snow.

  In the morning, Delaney did not want to read the newspapers, but Rose pointed out the photograph on the front page of the Daily News. The gleaming coffin of Frankie Botts was being carried into Our Lady of Pompeii by six burly pallbearers. Behind them were the other mourners, all properly dressed in black, most of them male, except for Frankie’s mother. She was directly behind the coffin. Three rows behind her was Bootsie.

  “You see this?” Rose said.

  “I see it now.”

  “It’s like a, uh, un simbolo?”

  “A symbol of what?” Delaney said.

  “That it’s over, at least for now. Bootsie, they all know he’s from the Corso gang, and here he is, dressed in black, showing some kind of respect. Right behind the mother. Even the cops know. And those guys beside him? They are Corso guys too.”

  “What do you think?”

  She placed the newspaper on a chair. “I think, wait and see.”

  Delaney laughed and told her what Danny Shapiro had told him, that if the Sicilians and the Neapolitans ever got together, we’d all be in trouble. Rose smiled, but her eyes remained wary. She looked around the kitchen with focused eyes, as if forcing every detail into memory. He touched her arm.

  “A day at a time,” he said, ashamed of his own banality. “A day at a time.”

  Later, when the hour of house calls arrived, he wheeled the Arrow through the areaway under the hot sun and saw Izzy the Atheist sitting on the stoop. He was wearing a sweat-stained denim shirt, dungarees, and sneakers. He stood up, came to Delaney, and put a hand on his shoulder.


  “I’m so sorry, Doc,” he said. “I heard about Molly.”

  “Thanks, Iz. At least the mystery is over. Or most of it.”

  “There anything I can do?”

  “Just stay healthy, Izzy.”

  Izzy lit a Camel with a wooden match he scraped into flame on the back of the dungarees.

  “You having any kind of ceremony?” Izzy said.

  “Something small. Private. No mass.”

  “Good. And Grace? She comin’ to it?”

  “I’m waiting to hear.”

  Izzy exhaled a small cloud of smoke.

  “Ah, well,” he said. “You and me, Doc, we come from a long line of dead people.”

  “That we do, Iz. That we do.”

  Then he was off to the emergency wards of the neighborhood.

  There was no word that day from Grace, and that night Rose returned to his bed. In the hot dark, they made love almost desperately. It was as if both knew that time was running out. In bed, after all, they could erupt into the certainties of flesh. Afterward they lay together, holding hands. The room was thick with her various aromas, including sex.

  “You know what I feel bad about?” she said quietly. “There were some things I wanted to do.” Her voice had fatalism in it, but no self-pity. “For Carlo. With you.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. “What are you driving at, Rose?”

  “If your daughter comes back,” she said in a cool way, “it means I have to leave.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Come on, Dottore. How do you say? Face the facts.”

  He held her tightly, inhaling her aromas.

  “We can work it out,” he said. “I’m sure of that, Rose.”

  She turned her head, but he could feel her breathing on his hand. They were quiet a long time.

  “These things you wanted to do,” Delaney said. “What are they?”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said, in a tone that implied: It’s too late.

  “Like what, Rose?”

  “Like going to Coney Island.” A pause. “The three of us.” Another pause. “Just like the people I see in the Daily News on Mondays. With a blanket, and food, and Carlito with a pail and a shovel.” She exhaled. “The merry-go-round. Steeplechase the Funny Place. I been there before, you know, been to Coney Island. But never on the sand. Never with you and the boy.”