Paradise Alley (2 page)

Yet still it shone. Deep down, through the depths of all that junk, still glinted dozens of tiny mirrors. Glued to the back of the cabinet, meant to make it all seem larger, more splendid, to gleam like jewels. In the yellow morning light, she caught a dusty, broken reflection of her own face. Squinting, peering ignorantly back through all the wonders, impossibly old and distorted. Her cheeks beginning to hollow, the lines creasing her chin and brow, her brown hair starting to grey.

She threw the cover down over the box and went back to her sweeping. She wasn't sure why she had never gotten rid of it, sold it off long ago to the street sweepers for whatever pennies it would bring. Was it to remind herself of her sin—of all her sins?

Or was it the last hold Johnny Dolan still had on her? Some lingering hope that if she kept it, the box might appease him even after all they had done to him.

If he returned.
When
he returned—

She thought she would leave it. It might at least slow him down for a few more hours while he brooded, and wondered over it like he always used to. Maybe even make him forget about them altogether.

Or would it simply be another track for him to follow?

She had to stop then—crouching down, nearly doubled over in her own front room. To think of
him
again. The return of that presence she had dared to believe she had shaken out of their life forever—come to repay her now for all she had done. Worse yet, come to visit all his fury upon those she loved, on Billy and all the rest of her family, he would not care who he hurt. If he could catch them—

Of course he would come back. Of course he would, after the trick we played him—

He is coming.

•
2
•

The boy grins up at me from the gutter, his face smeared with blood. He squints into the morning sun, and wipes a hand across his mouth. Spreading more gore from ear to ear, as if to make a threat, like running a finger across his throat.

But no—he is neither grinning nor threatening, only trying to see who I am against the yellow glare of the sun. My shadow spreading over his playground, the pool of blood on which he is sailing his paper boat. As he looks up at me, distracted, more thick fingers of blood creep slowly up his little boat. They collapse its sail, pull it slowly down into the gutter. He shrugs and produces another brown scrap of butcher's paper, folding it expertly into a set of three triangles. He christens it and launches it, on a fresh red stream eddying up through the sewer grate.

My streetcar arrives and I swing on up over the boy, on my way to the
Tribune,
where I am employed writing articles for Mr. Greeley's newspaper. The faded yellow signboards on the side of the car loom inches from my face:

TREMENDOUS EXCITEMENT: THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT! ONLY—
—R. H. MACY—
CAN PROVIDE BOTH THE ENORMOUS REDUCTIONS
AND THE SUPERB QUALITY THAT WILL SATISFY BOTH HIM
AND HER AND LEAVE YOUR HOUSE DIVIDED NO MORE!

I move back out of the inner car, clutching one of the outside poles by another adamant sign:
NO COLORED PEOPLE ALLOWED IN THIS CAR.

Out here at least the air is not as close as it is inside, fouled with sweat and body odor. The car jammed already, mostly with workies and mechanics, sewing girls and maids making their way to their jobs. Not yet six o'clock in the morning but they are in a holiday mood. Singing and joking, even rocking the car on its rails, the sour smell of whiskey seeping through the windows.

From Eighth Street down

The men are making it

From Eighth Street up

The women are spending it

And that's the story of this great town

From Eighth Street up and Eighth Street down—

Today is Getting Out Day. Today is All Fools' Day, today is Carnevale and Christmas and the Fourth of July, all rolled up in one. And all that's needed is a match.

All weekend I went among them as a spy. That is my job, as a reporter. Listening to them in their taverns, on their street corners and in their parlors. Posing as the out-of-town drummer, the friendly, credulous stranger. There were the usual wild oaths and threats, the drunken boasts—but something else as well. Something real, some kind of dangerous undercurrent beneath all the loose talk. Like all the blood and offal the butchers shove down in the gutters until, when it rains, everything comes bubbling up, the streets swimming in entrails and pigs' ears, cloven hooves and horses' teeth, and puddles of blood.

Trouble in this town usually starts like a musket flash, sudden and unpredictable. A fight, a joke, a routine arrest. Some halfhearted protest that turns into a riot before anyone can quite understand what is happening.

But this is different. More deliberate—even, perhaps, intentional. I don't mean that there is some outside conspiracy, a little group of men sitting around a table in a cellar room. Those rumors have been flying for weeks now, at the Union Club, and the bar in the Astor
House, and in the lobby of the St. Nicholas Hotel. Confederate agents have slipped over the border from Canada. Hired assassins have been brought over from Ireland, the Knights of the Golden Circle are stashing muskets in a secret basement in the Five Points, ready on a signal from Richmond to fire the town—

The usual nonsense. The wild talk that precedes any real crisis in the City, like the seabirds swooping in off the North River ahead of a storm. No, what I mean is that
they
have been talking. The Other City, the Dark City, the City with Its Face Turned Away From Us. The City of Night, the City of Fire, murmuring in low, deliberate, angry voices that we can never quite make out. The workingmen in their party halls. The fire companies in their station houses, the gangsters in their subterranean hideouts. So much talk, so much plotting, bubbling slowly to the top.

It started when the new Draft Law was announced. All able-bodied men, ages twenty to forty-five, married or single, are now eligible to be drafted by lot into Mr. Lincoln's army, and shipped south to the war. There to be fed on wormy hardtack, and saltpork, and butchered by incompetent generals while their families try to subsist on begging and government relief.
Unless—
and, ah, there's the rub!—unless they have three hundred dollars to buy themselves a substitute. An easy enough thing, for any man of means—but two years' salary to an Irish hod-carrier from the Five Points—

The relief that swept the City after Gettysburg faded, when the casualty lists began to trickle in. Loyal Republicans who had illuminated their windows and put up bunting to celebrate found their stoops blackened with tar the next morning, ominous crosses chalked on their doors. Then, last week, the Provost Marshal's patrols started working their way through the Fourth Ward, demanding that men give up their names. There were fights, and arrests, brick chimneys toppling mysteriously off rooftops, just missing the Provost's guard.

The draft was scheduled to commence last Friday, up at the Ninth District office, on East Forty-sixth Street by the Third Avenue. Right to the end, no one thought they would really go through with it—not in this city full of Democrats and Copperheads. By the time I arrived, the mob was already filling the street, a boisterous crowd of workies and their wives. Plainly uncowed by the handful of police and the
squad of invalided soldiers standing guard—shouting out their insults and scatological comments.

“Three hundred dollars! Oh, you can take that and shove it up my—”

“Oh, they will, Billy boy! Oh, they will!”

Nervous, rueful laughter floating up from the mob.

“Three hundred dollars! Tell Abe Lincoln to come an' collect it hisself!”

“Oh, he will!”

Nevertheless, they went ahead with it. The soldiers hauled a big, squared wooden drum up into the open window, and mounted it on the scaffolding there in full view of the crowd. A well-known blind man was led up by the arm, and the marshals gave the drum a heavy, lumberous crank, rolling it over and over until it resounded like thunder up and down the street, silencing even the mob.

Then they opened the hatch and plunged the hand of the blind man deep inside. Watery yellowed eyes staring straight ahead. His fingers rooting in the drum like so many thick pink pig snouts until he had dredged up the first handful of names, written down on simple scraps of paper. An impressively groomed and uniformed major plucked them one by one from the blind man's palm, unfolding them and reading out the names and addresses in a fearsome voice:

“O'Donnell! Thomas! Fifteen Great Jones Street!”

The crowd began to hiss and groan, and I saw the two pickets standing at either end of the drum exchange nervous looks. They held muskets with fixed bayonets, but it was clear to me that if anything had started, they would have bolted like rabbits.

“Condon! Jack! One-eight-four Avenue A!”

There were more groans, more hisses and boos—but nothing else. No well-placed brick or two that might have set off a whole barrage, provoked a volley. The spark wasn't there yet. The crowd was in too good a mood, the weather too moderate still. As the next few names were called out there were more catcalls, more rude noises, but even most of this was good-natured.

“Brady! Patrick!”

“Good for you, Brady!” someone in the crowd yelled out, and then everyone was laughing. Soon every name was greeted with a joke—

“O'Connell—”

“How are you, O'Connell?”

“O'Connor! Sean!”

“Good-bye, Sean!”

“A rest from the missus for you, Sean!”

“Old Abe's done for you now, Sean me boy!”

—the whole scene devolving into another extended street-corner entertainment. The kind
they
love—like a good dog fight or a family argument. At one point a particularly ignorant young
b'hoy
walked out of the crowd when his name was called and, with a resigned shrug, pulled himself up through the window. The major looked as if he were going to have a fit of apoplexy, his face reddening and his hand reaching for his holster, wondering what kind of prank this was.

“Who the hell're you?”

“I'm McMullen, sir. I'm here to give meself up,” the lad said.

The crowd roared, the whole exchange like a scene out of some Paddy stage farce. The major cursing at his would-be recruit—“
Get the hell down from there, goddamn you, man!
”—the youth just grinning sheepishly back at him.

After that it was clear nothing was going to happen. The crowd was almost festive, so close to the end of the working week. Soon they began to drift away, to their homes or the local taverns, looking for new entertainment. The blind man still rooted for names, handing the little white pellets over to the bellowing major until the office finally closed its doors in the late afternoon. The marshals hauled the drum down from its platform then, and shuttered the big open front window, the guard of invalided soldiers hurrying away, grateful to be going back toward their barracks on Governor's Island.

Yet the whole time there was another draft going on as well. I could see it on the fringes of the crowd—the boys, runners for the volunteer fire companies, scurrying back and forth to tell their wards and their blocks who had been drafted. After a while another fringe of young men began to gather—butcher boys and apprentices, gang
b'hoys
and fire laddies. Their hands in their pockets, looking angry and sullen. Walking back and forth, smarting with the insult, repeating the same things over and over to each other.

“Three hundred dollars! Sold for three hundred dollars, when a nigger goes for a thousand!”

They lingered still, muttering on the edge of the crowd, as if waiting for something to happen. But it never did. The spark never came,
and soon they drifted away with the rest of the crowd, looking back over their shoulders at the shuttered draft office.

The streetcar struggles futilely down the First Avenue, the horses slipping and falling on the slick granite paving stones. Our driver curses and whips at the other teamsters with their wagon loads of dry goods and potatoes, beef and beer. They curse back, cutting across our rails until we are slowed almost to a standstill. My stomach lurches and my poor heavy head feels as if it will topple like a twelve-pound shot from my shoulders and roll up and down the aisle of the car, at peace at last. I jump down at the next corner, deciding it will be quicker to make my way to the newspaper by foot.

The cars should operate on steam, of course, but after several spectacular crashes, the Common Council banned all locomotives south of Forty-second Street. Instead, they are unhitched from their engines at the Grand Central Station, hooked up to teams of horses, and pulled the rest of the way downtown. They make no better progress than the ambling stagecoaches or the omnibuses, or, for that matter, the dauntless pedestrians, picking their way past endless piles of steaming manure and teams of rearing horses.

This is the way we live
now,
in the City of Smash and Burn, Sulphur and Blood. Nearly one million souls, packed down into the tail end of Manhattan island. Some few thousand more scattered among the villages of Haarlem and Bloomingdale, the rambling shantytowns of niggers and Irish niggers around the central park they have finally laid out above Fifty-ninth Street. A city where herds of pigs still run loose in the streets. Where stagecoach drivers race and whip each other along the avenues, and steam ferries race and collide and explode in the harbor. The population double what it was twenty years ago, and double again what it was twenty years before that. And every year, the City getting denser, louder, filthier; more noisome, more impossible to traverse.