Paradise Alley (38 page)

Each side sings when the war goes their way. When the tide shifts in favor of the North, those who have bet on Secretary Chase's shinplaster money bellow out “The Union Forever.” The goldbugs sing “Dixie” whenever Lee wins another victory, or now, as the City burns around their heads:

“I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times there are not forgotten,

Look away,

Look away,

Look away—

Dixie-land!”

They are in full voice, singing ecstatically, even as the gold they worship flees town in a coffin. When they reach hell, I have no doubt, they will sell the devil short.

•
42
•

By the time I make my way back to the
Tribune,
there is a feeling of utter desperation inside. Over in City Hall Park, the mob has grown larger and louder than ever. The revolutionary barber from Christadoro's is still egging them on from his soapbox.
Can he really have been there all day? Or did he go back to work, shave a few faces in the afternoon, then come out again for the evening show?

Across Park Row the
Times
is lit up like a Christmas tree. Clerks and reporters showing themselves in every window, with pistols and carbines in hands. Henry Raymond and Leonard Jerome themselves are standing behind enormous Gatling guns, just waiting for the mob to try something.

Greeley, meanwhile, will allow no one to bring so much as a dueling pistol on the premises. All he has allowed is for the windows to be barricaded with bales of water-soaked paper and cotton—a precaution that has left everyone nearly prostrate from the heat, and has only added to the general despair.

Everyone, that is, save for Horace himself. Our leader stands behind his desk, fielding telegraph messages and dispatches with aplomb, Sidney Gay and James Gilmore working grimly by his side. Teddy Tilton, who edits the
Independent,
is here as well and looking even more grim. Come to keep a supper appointment, he has found himself trapped in the middle of the maelstrom.

“Ah, Robinson! What do you have for me?” Horace greets me with a paternal smile, as if I have just come from a meeting for Sabbatarianism.

I know what he is about, playing dauntless captain of the storm-tossed ship. Adding to The Legend That Is Greeley. Besides, as a newspaper man he is in his element.

“Such days we are living through!” he exults, looking over my shoulder as I rough out for him the first lines of my report. He thumbs again through the thick pile of wires on his desk, gleefully reading me stories of this depredation, or that valiant defense.

“It seems that Mother has put a keg of powder in the cellar,” he marvels, shaking a message from his wife at me. “With a trail leading up the stairs to the living room, so that in case these curs come to Chappaqua she can blow the whole house down on them!”

He leans back against his desk to consider this, his eyes wide with excitement. Not least, I suspect, over the possibility that The Irrepressible Conflict will blow
herself
to kingdom come—

There is a rattle of something against the front of the building, like hail falling on a tin roof. From below comes the sound of breaking glass, the heavier
thump
of bricks and stones glancing off walls, and we rush to the windows. The mob has begun to move. Even as we watch, they stream out of the City Hall Park, hurling everything they can find at us—still exhorted by their radical barber.

“Come on, my laddies, come on! And we'll have the life of that damned Greeley!”

Blocking their path are no more than four or five roundsmen, posted at the front door of the
Trib.
They will be swept away within seconds; it is a wonder they do not run already. Yet, unaccountably, the mob stops before them, only hurling more insults at us.

“
Down with the
Tribune!”

“Down with the old white coat, what thinks a nigger's as good as an Irishman!”

“This is not a riot, it's a revolution,” Mr. Gay says, peering down at them.

“It looks like it. It is just what I have expected, and I have no doubt they will hang me,” Greeley agrees, sounding rather satisfied.

“We must
do
something—”

“Well, I for one intend to have my dinner.” Greeley makes a great
show of consulting his watch, then clicks it shut again and nods back toward the mob below. “Let them burst their throats bawling at me. If I cannot eat my dinner on time, my life is not worth anything, anyway. Theodore?”

Tilton nods and swallows like the condemned man, called from his cell, allowing Greeley to hook an arm in his and guide him on downstairs.

“
At least go out the back way!
” Mr. Gay cries after him—but Greeley only waves him off, still clutching poor Tilton's arm.

From up in his office, we watch wordlessly as Greeley walks him right out the front door and pushes their way through the mob.

“They will hang him before our eyes!”

I can't say there is a man among us who would not be at least intrigued by such a spectacle. But the mob seems frozen by his appearance. Even the ranting barber is stunned into inaction by the sheer gall of it. Before they can think to so much as raise a hand against them, Greeley is able to steer Tilton right through their ranks, down the street and into Windust's restaurant.

“It's true,” gulps Gilmore, into the awed silence in the room. “God
does
look after children, and the simpleminded.”

“Which is Horace?”

“Both!”

But the mob still seethes outside—their rage redoubled, now that they have inexplicably let Greeley himself pass through their fingers. They surge toward the door again, the desperate policemen trying to link arms against them.

“Here they come!” cries Gilmore.

They sweep the police out of the way, pulling the nightsticks out of their hands, beating and pummeling them as they go. They kick down the front door—and all at once they are inside, grappling with the reporters and clerks on the first floor. Breaking up the furniture and the composing boards, heaping up everything they can find in the middle of the room.

“Burn it! Burn it all!” the barber is shouting maniacally in their midst, emptying bottles of camphene along the floor, starting small fires everywhere.

We run downstairs and someone takes a wild, drunken swing at me. I jump back, and it only glances off my chest—still, hard enough
to send me sprawling. In the whole day of fighting, this is the first time someone has actually laid hands on me and I lie where I fall, temporarily stunned.

“Up! Up, boys, and at 'em!”

Carpenter and his flying squad come charging up Nassau Street on the run, and fall on the crowd from behind. Just like this afternoon, nothing can stand before them. They beat down everything in their path like the human thresher machine they have become, and the mob is broken at once. They flee back out into the darkness, while the rest of us stamp out the fires—the barber last seen running off up Broadway, still swearing his vengeance upon Greeley.

It is over within minutes. The composing room is a wreck, full of broken chairs and half-charred desks, as if a tornado or a hurricane has swept through it, everything covered in camphene or water. Nothing is damaged beyond repair, though, and before Carpenter and his men leave, Raymond and Jerome send over sixteen
Times
men with rifles, and yet another Gatling gun.

“But Horace said no weapons,” Mr. Gay protests half-heartedly.

“He can go hang!” snorts Gilmore—though no one is sure the mob hasn't done that very job already, in all the confusion.

“Where is he? Where is Horace?”

The staff searches frantically through the offices, sends runners out to Windust's, which the mob has also sacked. We peer out the windows—half-afraid that we will see his famous white duster swinging slowly from a lamppost. There are rumors that he has indeed been hanged, that he fled the City—that the waiters at Windust's hid him from the mob under a table.

There is no word, though—until suddenly he appears in the door some two hours later, like an apparition. Patting his perfectly rounded child's belly. He strolls through the composing room barely seeming to notice the smashed furniture and charred woodwork, his mind no doubt on some great Greeley scheme or another. The rest of us watching openmouthed as he makes his way to his desk.

Upstairs he only pauses for a moment before getting back to the next day's editorial. Running his hand mournfully over the Gatling gun that James Gilmore has pointedly set up just outside his office.

“I don't know how I can work with so many guns about,” he says wistfully.

• • •

I sit upstairs, at a desk in the hall outside Greeley's office, and write down my stories. My new street scenes—all the terrible things I have seen and heard today. From time to time Greeley emerges, and looks at my leaves, and hums with something I take for approval.

Yet my mind wanders, and I have to strain, and force myself to finish the article.
How can Maddy be faring through all this?
She should be all right. She is one of their own, an Irisher, it is true. Yet she is so pigheaded, and liable to provoke them—

My Maddy.

I should have made her come with me, deposited her in my house in Gramercy Park. Instead I hurried out to see what was going on, as I always have. Trying to find some story, some glimmer of truth, out in the City. Instead there is simply depravity.

I finish my copy and go up to the roof of the
Tribune,
to see if there isn't some way I can scout a path, back to the house I rent for her. Much of the staff is already up there, trapped the same as I am from reaching families and loved ones. The reporters and editors silently smoking their pipes and cigars.

Down below, we are still under siege from the mob. They have set bonfires all around Printing House Square—and throughout the great, blackened City before us. Only an hour or so after the first attack, Inspector Carpenter and his men had to intercept another horde at Frankfort Street, as dead set as everyone else, it seems, on marching down to the
Trib
and hanging Greeley from a lamppost.

God only knows why they hate us so—and why they are so intent on turning the whole City to rubble. There are shouts and cries in the darkness, little hedgehogs of torches moving through the streets. Here and there, a new building bursts into flames, shooting up into the night like a firework—

There is a boom, and a sound like many rushing feet, and for a moment we all brace ourselves, up on the roof, thinking that the gunboats have finally opened up, or that the mob is making another rush. But no. The boom sounds again, then crackles and rolls. It is only the benign intercession of nature, a spectacular, rolling thunderstorm—the kind that once used to terrify us so badly in the City.

The rain has come at last. Even as we watch, the storm forces its
way over the Hudson, smudging out the fires below like a giant thumb. Forcing the mobs from the streets where nothing else could.

I seize the moment to set out for Maddy's at last. Walking quickly through the cover the rain provides, not caring if it drenches me, it is so blessedly cool. Yet soon it subsides to a trickle, the water gurgling down through hundreds of drainpipes and gutters.

The City is almost numinous at such moments. Even the pigs have been driven from the streets. The paving stones glistening, the sound of draining water receding until the town is nearly hushed.

I reach Paradise Alley and move cautiously down the middle of the street. I am more visible here, I know—but less likely to be taken with a slung shot, or a garrot, out of some house shadow. When I reach Maddy's house, I tap quietly at the door, trying not to make too much of a commotion. But the only sign of human existence that I can see is a hooded figure at the far end of the block, one so distant and surreptitious that I cannot even tell if it is a white or a Negro, a man or a woman. He or she seems to be locking a door, ready to flee with a wheelbarrow full of possessions. When it turns in my direction, the wraith freezes in place, and seems to give me a long, scrutinizing stare. Then it finishes locking up and hurries off toward the west—grabbing up a pig as it goes, the animal squealing pitifully.

“Maddy!
Maddy!
”

My voice tinny and unconvincing in the empty night—the rain beginning to pick up again. I bang harder now, and even clang the outside bell. Almost frantic, afraid for her, afraid for myself—

Then I spot her face at the second-story window, peering through the curtains. No longer mocking me, but troubled and pale as the moon. We hold there for a long moment before she moves away, starts downstairs to let me into the rented house I have kept her in for all these years.