Read Online North River by Pete Hamill - Free Book Online Page A

the ghost of poor Jimmy Logan. He had grown rich in the good times after the war, import-export, the trade of the river; bought this house; added a second in the Poconos; had two cars and three daughters. Insisted that people call him James, not Jimmy. Suits from Brooks Brothers. Shoes from England. After the Crash, his stocks and bank accounts vanished. He got rid of the cars. Then one Friday, his business ended too, the movers carted away the furniture, and he came home and shot his wife, and two of the daughters, and himself. Jackie Norris helped clean up that mess too. So did Delaney, when Monique heard the shots. The story was all over the tabloids, and a judge ordered the house sealed until the youngest daughter, four years old, grew up. She was staying with relatives in New Jersey and would be a long time growing up. The house stood there now, part of the parenthesis within which Delaney lived. Ghosts to the left. Bitterness to the right. He looked away.
    After a while, the boy began to shiver. They went back inside. Rose was coming in the front door with a battered suitcase and a shopping bag. She laid the bag on a chair beside the kitchen table. She was definitely moving in.
    “Give me ten minutes, I unpack,” she said. “Come on, Carlos.”
    The boy went up the stairs behind her, taking one step at a time. The house was getting fuller, and somehow richer.
    Delaney went to his consulting room and worked on a cable. YOUR SON IS SAFE. HE WANTS TO KNOW WHEN YOU’RE COMING BACK. DAD. No, that was wrong, making her feel guilty. ALL IS FINE WITH CARLOS. I HIRED A WOMAN TO HELP CARE FOR HIM. WHEN WILL YOU RETURN? Too many words, too expensive. This is a cable. CARLOS FINE WOMAN HELPING WHEN YOU RETURN QUERY DAD. One, two, nine words. Better . . .
    Monique came in.
    “Three house calls waiting. Also the mail. Some bills for the electric, the telephone, the usual first-of-the-month stuff. I also gave Rose ten dollars for food. Hey, you look wiped out. Maybe you should grab a nap.”
    “Maybe.”
    “I mean, if you get sick, the whole thing stops.”
    He laughed. “I can’t afford to stop now.”
    “You ain’t kidding. You got ninety-seven dollars in the account, and now you gotta feed three people, plus coal and kerosene.”
    “Maybe I could tend bar after house calls.”
    “Maybe you could do a novena.”
    She turned and he held the text of the cable, the two early versions crossed out.
    “If Jackie Norris calls with an address, send this, okay?”
    She looked dubiously at the text and hurried away to answer the ringing telephone. He went up to see the boy. Carlito was sitting on the floor in Rose’s room, watching her lay clothes neatly in the dresser drawers. The suitcase was open on the bed. On the small lamp table, an Italian-English dictionary was laid upon a copy of the
Daily News.
Just as Monique told him. Rose was smiling as she moved, and in the hard snow-bright light he noticed that she had a fine white scar from her left cheekbone to the lobe of her ear. The slice of a knife. It did not affect her smile, so he knew the blade had missed the crucial tendons.
    “Looking good now,” Rose said, her smile showing a slight overbite. She unfolded a framed photograph on a small easel and placed it on the dresser top. The frame was brass. “That’s my mother, my father. My brothers, my sisters. There’s me too.”
    The father was dressed in a badly-fitting black suit, starched collar, wide knotted tie, squinting sternly at the camera. The mother looked blank and uncomfortable in a dark skirt that reached her shoe tops. Rose was probably fourteen and resembled her mother. The oval shape of her head. The young men were all smiling, perhaps preening, their suits pressed, their shoes glistening with polish. The girls were glum, except for Rose, who was flashing her wonderful smile and her intelligent eyes. Delaney thought: She was thirty pounds lighter then and two inches shorter.
    “It’s a Sunday,” Rose