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
“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.”
Dorfman came on almost immediately. “’Lo, Captain, Enjoying your day off? Beautiful day.”
“Yes. What’s happening?”
“Nothing unusual, sir. The usual. A small demonstration at the Embassy again, but we moved them along. No charges. No injuries.”
“Damage?”
“One broken window, sir.”
“All right. Have Donaldson type up the usual letter of apology, and I’ll sign it tomorrow.”
“It’s done, Captain. It’s on your desk.”
“Oh. Well…fine. Nothing else?”
“No, sir. Everything under control.”
“All right. Switch me back to the man on the board, will you?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll buzz him:”
The uniformed operator came back on.
“Captain?”
“Is this Officer Curdy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Curdy, you answered my original call with: ‘Two hundred and fifty-first Precinct.’ In my memo number six three one, dated fourteen July of this year, I gave very explicit orders governing the procedure of uniformed telephone operators on duty. I stated in that memorandum that incoming calls were to be answered: ‘Precinct two five one.’ It is shorter and much more understandable than ‘Two hundred and fifty-first Precinct.’ Did you read that memo?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, Captain, I did read it. It just slipped my mind, sir. I’m so used to doing it the old way…”
“Curdy, there is no ‘old way.’ There is a right way and a wrong way of doing things. And ‘Two five one’ is the right way in my precinct. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
He hung up and went back to his wife. In the New York Police Department he was known as “Iron Balls” Delaney. He knew it and didn’t mind. There were worse names. “Everything all right?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Who has the duty?”
“Dorfman.”
“Oh? How is his father?”
He stared at her, eyes widening. Then he lowered his head and groaned. “Oh God. Barbara, I forgot to tell you. Dorfman’s father died last week. On Friday.”
“Oh Edward.” She looked at him reproachfully. “Why on earth didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, I meant to but-but it slipped my mind.”
“Slipped your mind? How could a thing like that slip your mind? Well, I’ll write a letter of condolence as soon as we get home.”
“Yes, do that. They took up a collection for flowers. I gave twenty dollars.”
“Poor Dorfman.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“Of course I like him. As a man, a person. But he’s really not a good cop.”
“He’s not? I thought you told me he does his job very well.”
“He does. He’s a good administrator, keeps up on his paperwork. He’s one of the best lawyers in the Department. But he’s not a good cop. He’s a reasonable facsimile. He goes through all the motions, but he lacks the instinct.”
“And tell me, oh wise one,” she said, “what is this great cop’s instinct?”
He was glad to have someone to talk to about such things. “Well,” he said, “laugh if you like, but it does exist. What drove me to become a cop? My father wasn’t. No one in my family was. I could have gone on to law
