North River by Pete Hamill Read Free Book Online

consulting room to answer it. Annie Haggerty. About her mother, around the corner on Lispenard Street. She was hurt. Bleeding and moaning.
    “Where’s your father, Annie?” he said, knowing he was talking to a girl who was about fourteen.
    “Out.”
    “Is your mother awake?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Is she bleeding?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Where?”
    “Face.”
    “Nose? Mouth? Ears?”
    “Yeah.”
    “All of them?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’ll be over as soon as I can. Keep talking to your mother, Annie. Keep her awake.”
    “Okay.”
    He wrote a note to himself: the name Haggerty, the word “blood.” He knew the building too well. The telephone rang again.
Hurry, Monique.
This was Larry Dorsey’s wife. He was a saxophone player in some Times Square hotel.
    “Doc, it’s Larry. He got hurt New Year’s Eve, some fight, drunks throwin’ chairs. You know. He got hit on the head, but he won’t go to St. Vincent’s. Goddamned Irish, don’t want to go to hospitals.”
    He took her address on Bank Street and then went to the kitchen.
    “You get more calls than a bookmaker,” Rose said. Her English is good, Delaney thought, but who is she? Carlito was delighted with his cornflakes.
    “Many more.”
    She was going through the pantry.
    “Not many pots and pans. The icebox is great, electric and all. But we gotta get some food in here for this boy.”
    “Yes, we do, Rose. Plenty of food. Maybe when my nurse, Monique, gets here, you can —”
    “And we gotta get rid of that stroller,” she said, pronouncing it “strolla.” “That thing will give you a disease or something.”
    The telephone rang again.
    The snow was piled high on Lispenard Street as Delaney trudged toward number 12, shifting his heavy leather bag from gloved hand to gloved hand. Today a change in routine. House calls in the morning or Mary Haggerty might die. Trucks were pushing for passage to the meat market, where Harry Haggerty was a butcher. Delaney knew the street well. Herman Melville had worked here, right in that building, waiting for ships to arrive so he could clerk the cargo. A job that he needed because nobody was buying his books. Even today nobody anywhere around here had heard of the white whale. Or Ahab. Or Queequeg. Or Melville himself . . . He climbed to the second floor and knocked.
    "Yeah?” came the girl’s voice.
    “Dr. Delaney.”
    She unlocked the door and Delaney went in. The girl was trembling and pale, her hair frazzled, her eyes wet. There was an odor of excrement in the air.
    “Where’s your mother, Annie?”
    She led him to the back bedroom, where the odor was stronger. The woman’s face was swollen blue. Her husband had literally beaten the shit out of her. One eye was closed. The other was skittery with fear. Her nose had been pounded to the side.
    “Annie,” he said to the girl, “boil a pot of water, will you, dear?”
    All the way to Bank Street on his second call, he struggled with his rage. The story was too familiar. Big tough Harry Haggerty had come home loaded, demanded his supper, and when his wife served it cold, he started pounding her. He had to punch real hard. After all, he only had seventy-five pounds on her. Then he passed out on the couch, and went off to work at dawn. Big tough guy. Knowing that the cops would do nothing. Just another domestic dispute. If she died, maybe they’d make an arrest. . . . Delaney had done what he could: cleaned the wounds, applied bandages, checked for broken bones, gave her some aspirin and a painkiller, and told Annie to hold ice to her face. She should come see him when the swelling went down, and they would discuss what to do about her broken nose. The wounds in her mind would need much more time, and he could do little to heal them. Physician, heal thyself . . .
    Larry Dorsey was in bed in the first-floor flat on Bank Street. The place was spotless, the wood polished, no dust. Wallpaper from an earlier time still looked fresh. It was an apartment without children,