“My wife would prefer a private room. She’s a very modest woman. Very shy.”
“I know, Captain,” the doctor murmured, “I know. Shall you tell her or shall I?”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Yes,” Dr. Bernardi said. “I believe that would be best.” The Captain went back to the reception room to wait for her, and practiced smiling.
It was a doxy of a day, merry and flirting. There was a hug of sun, a kiss of breeze. Walking north on Fifth Avenue, they heard the snap of flags, saw the glister of an early September sky. Captain Delaney, who knew his city in all its moods and tempers, was conscious of a hastened rhythm. Summer over, vacation done, Manhattan rushed to Christmas and the New Year.
His wife’s hand was in his arm. When he glanced sideways at her, she had never seemed to him so beautiful. The blonde hair, now silvered and fined, was drawn up from her brow and pinned in a loose chignon. The features, once precise, had been softened by time. The lips were limpid, the line of chin and throat something. Oh she was something! And the glow (that damned fever!) gave her skin a grapy youthfulness.
She was almost as tall as he, walked erect and alert, her hand lightly on his arm. Men looked at her with longing, and Delaney Was proud. How she strode, laughing at things! Her head turned this way and that, as if she was seeing everything for the first time. The last time? A cold finger touched.
She caught his stare and winked solemnly. He could not smile, but pressed her arm close to his body. The important thing, he thought-the most important thing-was that…was that she should out-live him. Because if not…if not…he thought of other things.
She was almost five years older than he, but she was the warmth, humor, and heart of their marriage. He was born old, with hope, a secret love of beauty, and a taste for melancholy. But she had brought to their home a recipe for lentil soup, thin nightgowns with pink ribbons, and laughter. He was bad enough; without her he would have been a grotesque.
They strolled north on Fifth Avenue, on the west side. As they approached the curb at 56th Street, the traffic light was about to change. They could have made it across safely, but he halted her.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I want to catch this.”
His quick eye had seen a car-a station wagon with Illinois license plates-coming southward on Fifth Avenue. It attempted to turn westward onto 56th Street, going the wrong way on a one-way street. Immediately there was a great blaring of horns. A dozen pedestrians shouted, “One-way!” The car came to a shuddering halt, nosing into approaching traffic. The driver bent over the wheel, shaken. The woman beside him, apparently his wife, grabbed his arm. In the seat behind them two little boys jumped about excitedly, going from window to window.
A young uniformed patrolman had been standing on the northwest corner of the intersection, his back against a plate glass window. Now, smiling, he sauntered slowly toward the stalled car.
“Midtown Squad,” Captain Delaney muttered to his wife. “They pick the big, handsome ones.”
The officer wandered around to the driver’s side, leaned down, and there was a brief conversation. The couple in the out-of-state car laughed with relief. The policeman cocked thumb and forefinger at the two kids in the back and clicked his tongue. They giggled delightedly.
“He’s not going to ticket them?” Delaney said indignantly. “He’s going to let them go?”
The patrolman moved back onto Fifth Avenue and halted traffic. He waved the Illinois car to back up. He got it straightened out and heading safely downtown again.
“I’m going to-” Captain Delaney started.
“Edward,” his wife said. “Please.”
He hesitated. The car moved away, the boys in the back waving frantically at the policeman who waved back.
Delaney looked sternly at his wife. “I’m going to get his name and tin number,” he said. “Those one-way signs are plain. He should have-”
“Edward,” she repeated patiently, “they’re obviously on vacation. Did you see the luggage in the back? They don’t know our system of one-way streets. Why spoil their holiday? With two little boys? I- think the patrolman handled it beautifully. Perhaps that will be the nicest thing that happens to them in New York, and they’ll want to come back again. Edward?” He looked at her. (“Your wife is obviously ill…the fever…hair in her comb…you have three options…infection that…”) He took her arm, led her carefully across the street. They walked the next block in silence.
“Well, anyway,” he grumbled, “his sideburns were too long. You won’t find sideburns like that in my precinct.”
“I wonder why?” she said innocently, then laughed and leaned sideways to touch her head against his shoulder.
He had plans for lunch at the Plaza, window-shopping, visiting the antique shops on Third Avenue-things she enjoyed doing together on his day off. It was important that she should be happy for a time before he told her. But when she suggested a walk through the Park and lunch on the terrace at the zoo, he agreed instantly. It would be better; he would find a bench where they could be alone.
As they crossed 59th Street into the Park, he looked about with wonder. Now what had been there before the General Motors Building?
“The Savoy-Plaza,” she said.
“Mind-reader,” he said.
So she was-where he was concerned.
The city changed overnight. Tenements became parking lots became excavations became stabbing office buildings while your head was turned. Neighborhoods disappeared, new restaurants opened, brick changed to glass, three stories sprouted to thirty, streets bloomed with thin trees, a little park grew where you remembered an old Irish bar had been forever.
It was his city, where he was born and grew up. It was home. Who could know its cankers better than he? But he refused to despair. His city would endure and grow more beautiful.
Part of his faith was based on knowledge of its past sins: all history now. He knew the time when the Five Points Gang bit off enemies’ ears and noses in tavern brawls, when farm lads were drugged and shanghaied from the Swamp, when children’s bordellos flourished in the Tenderloin, when Chinese hatchetmen blasted away with heavy pistols (and closed eyes) in the Bloody Triangle.
All this was gone now and romanticized, for old crime, war, and evil enter books and are leached of blood and pain. Now his city was undergoing new agonies. These too, he was convinced would pass if men of good will would not deny the future.
His city was an affirmation of life: its beauty, harshness, sorrow, humor, horror, and ecstasy. In the pushing and shoving, in the brutality and violence, he saw striving, the never-ending flux of life, and would not trade it for any place on earth. It could grind a man to litter, or raise him to the highest coppered roof, glinting in benignant sunlight.
They entered the Park at 60th Street, walking between the facing rows of benches toward the zoo. They stopped before the yak’s cage and looked at the great, brooding beast, his head lowered, eyes staring at a foreign world with dull wonder.
“You,” Barbara Delaney said to her husband.
He laughed, turned her around by the elbow, pointed to the cage across the way where a graceful Sika deer stood poised and alert, head proud on slim neck, eyes gleaming.
“You,” Edward Delaney said to his wife.
They lunched lightly. He fretted with his emptied coffee cup: peering into it, turning it over, revolving it in his blunt fingers.
“All right,” she sighed in mock weariness, “go make your phone call.”
He glanced at her gratefully. “It’ll just take a minute.”
“I know. Just to make sure the precinct is still there.”
The thick voice said, “Two hundred and fifty-first Precinct. Officer Curdy. May I help you?”
“This is Captain Edward X. Delaney,” he said in his leaden voice. “Connect me with Lieutenant Dorfman, please.”
“Oh. Yes, Captain. I think he’s upstairs. Just a minute; I’ll find him.”