Paradise Alley (13 page)

Such a life she had led, already!
Such a life they all lead, these children and near-children, begging and starving on our streets. Here, I saw, was a chance to do something for one of them. I had always been fascinated by the great rivers of humanity, the endless, passing scene along our streets. I had passed among them many times, in one disguise or another, for that is what my profession called for.

I just had never, quite, been able to do anything
further,
not even to the point of gaining for myself a wife, a family. Not anything, save in the confines of houses such as the one I was in. Not anything even in
the way of close friends, save for the fellow hacks I drank with down at Pfaff's—

But this—this might be something different, I thought. Something I could do for someone else, and for myself. Just outside the window I could see the red-papered Japanese lanterns in the little back garden Gramma Em maintained. Somehow, even in this sordid setting, they seemed to glow with possibility.

That was so long ago—an age, in more than years. Could it be that she was once that sweet, that trusting? Or that I was?

My Maddy.
Despite her mockery of me—despite all that has passed between us, her degradation, our awful little games—I still wish to shelter her, to protect her. I wonder if I should go back even now, try to convince her again to come with me, to remove herself from harm's way.

But ahead of me now, from the direction of the East River, I can hear another noise. The tramp of feet, of thousands of boots and low, distant men's voices. An unforgettable sound, one I have not heard since my sojourn down to Virginia for Burnside's campaign.

It is an army of men on the march. Without the discipline of a real army, to be sure, but an army nevertheless. A great tide of men, sweeping north, uptown.
The mob is out, but where is it going?
In any case, they are not coming here, Maddy will be safe enough, plenty of time to rescue her later. I hurry on down the street, running toward the story.

•
14
•

She watched him go, through the shutters, running her palm over the smooth, ivory-covered handle of the gun. Gauging its heft. Sighting down its barrel, through the slats, at the women still in line by the Croton pump.

“Let 'em come. Let any of 'em try an' come.”

Picturing the men in their stead. All the ones that had come before, and all those who would not come again. Leveling the revolver on them as they came through her door. Her hand feeling blindly along its chamber, then the barrel.

“Let 'em try it.”

A new gun, a long gun. A cavalry officer's gun. A sure shot. Made of steel, at least, this one, you would never have to worry about it—

We'll see to your niggers. To you, an' all your niggers.

That voice from the other night, freezing her blood. The one she had locked out on the street. His threats had been spoken calmly, but they felt all the more real for it. Made as an oath, in a voice just loud enough to tell the whole block.

He had been in before. A short, shriveled-up sort of man. Steward or captain of a fire company, she knew the type. Fastening his suspenders with a pair of gold eagles, as proud as though they had been a colonel's epaulets. Unable to raise his hose half the time, that was why she hadn't let him in. Men like that took up too much time. They
became only too aware it was a business, pumping away in desperation, an ever-grimmer look on their faces. Then they took it out on you.

All the men and their guns.
She had seen every variety since the war, business was booming. Tars in white jackets, up from the blockade with their ships. Zouave officers, wearing their baggy red pants and the funny little fez hats with the tassels. Enlisted men, fuzzy-cheeked boys from Massachusetts and Maine and Vermont, passing through on their way down to the war, recommended by a friend or a cousin who had been this way before. A satisfied customer—perhaps already tucked under the earth, somewhere down in the wilderness of Virginia, or Stone River—

They went on, in their turn. Two or three at least, every night. Scared or excited or drunk or quarrelsome, or dangerously angry. She dealt with them all, sent them on their way, letting them button their trousers in the street if they tried to give her grief.

Yet
he
had come back—this fire captain, this voice—blaming it on the coloreds.

Men were always disappointed with something. That was the first thing to know about them. They were rarely satisfied, and when they weren't, they liked to blame it on something else—a rich man, or a woman. The government, God in His infinite mercy. The niggers. In truth, it was all one and the same, the thing that stopped them.
Best not to be mistaken for it.

She moved back into the streaked, brown gloom of the house's interior. Rummaging around behind the littered kitchen table, the scraps of last night's meal, bread and cheese, sardines and soured wine, still on the board.
God, it was hot.
She was already sopping beneath the yellow silk dressing gown, the perspiration collecting in little beads along the fine, soft hairs at the small of her back and on her lip. Looking around for where she had put the ladle, and the bucket of water.

She decided she wanted something more than water, and went over to the jug she kept in the coolest corner of the kitchen. There she drew out the plug with her teeth, and took a slow, leisurely slug. Feeling the acid whiskey taste drip slowly down her throat. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand when she was through, and thinking as she did how much Robinson hated that—both the jug and the hand
wiped across her mouth. The look of repulsion on his face when he would smell it on her, especially in the morning.

I do as I like.

Not that it kept him from wanting her. Nothing did. She enjoyed it sometimes, seeing how hideous she could make herself to him, and still have him want her. Leaving herself unwashed and unmade, the house uncleaned until the roaches ran up the walls. Her long, red-brown hair left flat and matted. Baiting him with her tongue.

Nothing worked. Not even the black men who so disturbed the fire foreman. She knew of others, lady birds and nightwalkers, who refused to take any coloreds onboard. She had never cared. It was all the same to her, that pushing and throbbing down there, who cared what color it was. Mostly it bothered the other men, she knew. Jealous as they were of their supposed size, and prowess. Outraged by the thought of it, by the very idea that they might be
spoiled
for white men.

As if there was anything left to spoil.

She hugged herself, scratching her arms vigorously against the memory of Robinson's touch. Her efforts no more availing than all the other touches she had used to obliterate his. The feeling remained. Something deeper, more unnerving than even laying his hand on her sex.
How he would grasp her wrist, pull it behind her back, pull the manacle closed around it—

The loose play chains that Robinson would put on her. Laughing as he did it—this forced, grim laugh, as if it were a joke they shared, just between themselves. She did not know which was worse, when he laughed or when he did not. For when he did not he would look at her—look right through her—with glazed eyes, his mouth slightly open, breathing hard and unable to say anything.

Robinson had insisted that she like it. He had insisted that she play his game from the day they had first gone to Schaus's gallery, and seen the statue. Starting with the simple band of leather that the sculptor had depicted, but moving, inexorably, to the chains.

She was not sure why. He seemed to like the heft of the fetters, ornamental though they were. Or maybe the way they caught the light through the shutters, gold and silver, or most of all, she suspected, his sense of them against her naked skin. The way their metallic
coldness raised the bumps all along her flesh, made her nipples rise when he draped them over her.

It made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck, too, although he did not notice that.

She took another draught directly from the jug. This one went down easier—they usually did, after the first—but her head felt heavy now. She thought to take a short nap, the ivory gun handle still clutched in her right fist.

She opened her eyes without lifting her head from where it lay on the table.
Another rotting dish. Leave it to the roaches and the flies.
There was a dull, roaring sound in her ears, but she could no longer tell if it came from within her head or without.

When was the last time she had eaten?
She sat up, considered fetching herself another drink from the jug, but knew it would only make the heat worse. Wondering if it would be worthwhile to get a rise out of him anyway, whenever he came back.
She would be whatever he wanted her to be.
But now she just wanted to get a reaction out of him, any kind of response she could manage. Which was why she still let him put on the chains—

The roaring kept up in her head, and she stood up from the table, moving unsteadily toward the jug, thinking,
At least it will stop that.

Yet she kept going, past the whiskey. Moving on out into the front room, the roaring growing perceptibly louder as she did. Until at last she stood in front of the shuttered window and realized that it was not coming from inside her at all but from outside, somewhere in the City. The heat pressing down on her chest like an anvil.

“Let 'em come,” she breathed.

Wanting them to come, even—but the first sharp stalks of fear already poking into her stomach. Wondering when he would come back for her, then doggedly shaking off such a thought.

“Let 'em come an' try.
I do as I like.
”

•
15
•

“Is he gone, then?”

“I think so.”

Ruth peered out the neat lace curtains of Deirdre's house. The well-dressed man was receding from view, moving off toward the East River and the ominous sounds of the mob.

What were men, to go toward such a thing as that?

She had assumed the worst when she'd spotted the man, moving so rapidly down the street. But she saw soon enough that it couldn't be him, that he moved nothing like Johnny Dolan, in the half-crouch she could remember even after all these years.

“Who
was
it?” Deirdre asked sharply, looking over her shoulder.

“Just
him—
just that gentleman of Maddy's.”

In all the years she had been on Paradise Alley, they had never learned his name.

“Ah.
Him.
”

Deirdre wrinkled up her face in disgust.

“The thought of it. On our own street—”

“Well, better him than the one who was here the other night,” Ruth said.

“Oh, yes. Much better, I suppose,” Deirdre said tartly.

It had been another one of Maddy's late-night explosions. Ruth had sat up in bed, listening with that same illicit thrill with which she
always liked to overhear things in the street, in this City, late at night. Wild, drunken fights and quarrels, the passionate voices and sounds coming out of the darkness. Listening as she did to the gossip of the other women, and the tales Billy brought back to her—all the joys she had never known before, of living close to other people.

But this wasn't the same. This voice not blustery or winded at all, the way they usually were. Not the usual drunken men shouting to the heavens, but spoken with a purpose, rising just loud enough for the whole block to hear.

“We'll see to your niggers.”

The voice sharp and direct as a knife.

“This is a white man's country, an' we'll be damned if we're gonna share our whores with the niggers, too—”

“Niggers? Niggers?
Two
a you couldn't measure up to a nigger! At least a nigger fireman might know how to pump his own!”

Maddy screaming obscenities back at him, as usual. Mocking and taunting him over his manhood and his capabilities, until windows began to open all up and down the block.

“Keep that shite down! We got children in this house!”

“Keep
your
shite down, I got work tomorrow. Your goddamned children can sleep the day away!”

The exchanges of shouts and curses dwindling down to more jokes, sardonic laughter rumbling through the night. Billy shifted in the bed beside her—alert as ever to her slightest movement, mumbling that she ought to lie back down and let him sleep.

But the voice outside Maddy's, still sure and mean and purposeful, repeating its one threat over and over:

“We'll see to your niggers. And to you as well—”

It was something just in the way he said the word.
Niggers.
Of course, Ruth had heard that from the first day she'd set foot in the City. The Know-Nothing gangs, calling her Irish nigger in the streets. Niggers, nigras, black niggers, green niggers—as far as she could tell, it was a City of Niggers.

But this one said it as a careful threat, one that the unseen speaker, the voice out in the darkness, enjoyed making. She could not see who it was—just a short, dark shape outside Maddy's door, repeating it a few more times. Then he had gone away, retreating down Paradise Alley before he disappeared into the fastness of the Shambles.

That had been before she knew that Johnny Dolan was back. But listening to it she remembered nevertheless the way he used to talk, and it sent a chill into her, just coming through her window. The voice even familiar, so that she was sure it must have come from one of Johnny's old companions in the fire station, or the clubhouse. Now risen in the world, to the place where he could threaten whores on the street. The whole incident, sticking in her head, disconcerting her ever since—

She stood by the window, watching the back of Maddy's gentleman recede down the street. Listening to the distant sounds of men marching, still moving steadily uptown.

“Do ya think they will come, then?” she asked, though she regretted it before the words were out of her mouth. It was a foolish question, she knew. The sort of question children asked, just to be reassured. Which was why she had asked it—

“How should I know if those
b'hoys
will come here, or what they'll do?” Deirdre told her.

Still, there was a note of uncertainty beneath her usual fierceness. Her voice lacked its typical tone of command. Something Ruth had never heard from her before.

“They won't come,” Deirdre said now, as if to regain herself.

“How do ya know that?” Ruth asked, hoping again.

“They won't come. The government won't permit it,” she said, crossing herself. “The mayor won't permit it, the Church won't permit it, now. All that going on in the streets—”

“Ah. Ah, then,” Ruth repeated respectfully.

She wanted to ask her:
Just what will they do to stop it?
but not daring—for Deirdre's sake, and her own. For she had seen for herself back in Ireland, just what the government, or the Church, or any of them would do once things went all to hell.

What were any of those things, as unreal as the Virgin or the Holy Ghost, compared to him? Johnny Dolan as she had first known him, looming out of the evening with a knife in one hand, a haunch of meat in the other—