Paradise Alley (59 page)

Ruth had even accepted a little Bible from the Protestant missionary man at the Old Brewery, who had naturally assumed she was still
an idolatrous Catholic. She didn't disabuse him of the notion, but took the small book with its red, false-leather cover for Milton, enfolding it in her dress lest any of their neighbors see.

He had been so pleased with it. Going through the whole thing—then reading the religious stories, and moving on to the patriotic histories of Washington and the Revolution. Then after that, the nickel and dime novels that he consumed more avidly than anything else
—The Black Revancher of the City,
or the
The Green Redeemer of the Hills—
so that she worried they were not of the highest morality. But she could not bring herself to forbid him, he seemed to love them so.

He would read night after night by the light from the fire, while his father grumbled from his chair about how he wanted him up and ready in the morning. Even though it was Billy who had insisted that he go to the common school, and would bring him anything he could find to read from his long walk home, all the scraps of newspaper, and journals. The discarded books he discovered lying in alleyways, and chucked in ashboxes, and selling two for a penny in the back of some liquor grocery—abundant as everything else in this country.

And Milton, in turn, even taught her to read some of them—even taught her to read
The Black Revancher,
which she found was an exciting story despite herself. Their moments together were the only times of real joy she had anymore—when she would lie down on the floor next to him, by the fire, after all the labors of the day were finished. She had to be up before it was light, getting Billy his breakfast and then getting the other children up and off to the common school. And afterward there was the long walk uptown to her own work, then home to clean and get the supper, packing the rest of the children off to bed in their one crowded room.

Billy was worse, then, too. She knew that he still brooded over Lillian, the girl they had lost on this street. Not showing it much, for that wasn't his way, but lingering over it as one final, unpardonable insult from life. She thought, with time, that they should consider themselves lucky to have lost just one, with how many children died on the block every year, from the typhus and the measles, the
tamh
and the cholera.

But he would not accept this. Hating the long walk up to the orphans', she knew, through all the white neighborhoods. Bored and insulted by the work once he got there. He would come in later and
later, despite the looks Ruth gave him—knowing that even a whiskey or two on the way home would be more than they could afford. Weaving over to the table in the way that she hated now—hated the children to see, to smell the queer, sour scent upon his breath.

He would vow to reform. He would wait until they were both in bed, and she could not see his face in the darkness, and then he would speak to her in anguished self-accusations, and swear that he would do better. Astonished to find he had failed again, he swore that he would curb his weakness, that somehow he would find them a better place to live, even outside the City.

And Ruth would lie next to him, and rub a hand silently over his back and shoulders, listening to everything he had to say. Knowing as well as he did that there was nothing to be done. That there was no place to go, no work in the City or out, no work anywhere in this country where he might find a better position.

For a few months, then, he might stay away from it. Forcing himself to come home in better spirits, cavorting around the house with the children. Rooting up what carpentry work he could, from other colored families on Dover and Oak Streets, to make a little money on the side.

But it would always come down. He would wander over to the boatyards, or simply walk by a construction site, and he would be through the doors of the next saloon. Coming home that night with the sickly-sweet smell of the brandy, or the whiskey on him again, and the weaving
—how she hated that weave now, what she had once thought of as his nimbleness and grace.
And how the drink slurred his speech, and made him seem stupid and groggy, until she wanted to choke off all her own pity for him, her husband.

Her only remaining delight, then, was when she stretched herself out on the floor by the fire, and studied the dancing, teeming symbols in Milton's book or leaf of newspaper. There were so many signs, and so many combinations that could be made of them, that she marveled to think that her own son could keep them straight in his head. She loved to simply lie there, and let him explain it to her. Enjoying his sweet, earnest voice, taking such pleasure in it that she did not learn nearly as much as she should have. Listening to him until the tiny, insect-like symbols began to spin before her, falling asleep before the fire.

Billy would have to rouse her—angry with her, though he could not admit to it. As angry with her as if she had actually done something wrong. As angry as she got when he drifted off in his chair from too much drink after dinner, snoring so loudly it seemed to make the whole house shake, and the children laughed and smirked at the noise.

“You never care what I want for the boy!” he would admonish her. “Keepin' him up late, keepin' him tired, learnin' things that ain't no use for a colored man in this City!”

“Where is he? Where's the boy?”

“I already sent him to bed. He needs to learn to mind
me.
You need to learn, too—”

She would get up and go silently to bed, hurt not so much by the unfairness of what he said, but that he could talk to her at all in such a way. Later, in the darkness, he would be repentant again, and sad, and even ashamed. But Ruth thought that so many apologies were only like water after a time, pleasant enough running through her hands but leaving nothing behind.

Maddy, at least, had brought some excitement to the block. Breaking up, for the moment, life's weary circles of penance and decline. The other women, Ruth knew, regarded her almost as royalty at first, and she had felt much the same way herself. Looking to catch a glimpse of her, of the man who kept her, walking down the alley in his elegant silk waistcoat and gloves.

But after a few years that had changed, too. There were others now, ringing freely at the bell in front of Maddy's house, day and night. And after her mother had died, and been taken away in the splendid, glass-walled hearse her man had bought for her, Maddy had begun to appear among them more often. Trudging out along the alley to haul water from the pump or to go to the market—as often as not wearing no more than one of her elegant dressing gowns and nothing else.

They still talked about Maddy in breathless voices, as if it were all they could do to keep from peeping in her windows. Exchanging threats of what they would do to their husbands if they ever caught them going over there.

They had little to worry about, considering Maddy's price and the proximity. Men, Ruth had noticed, felt free to do their foulest things
far from where they lived—at their jobs, or across town, on someone else's block. Even so, she had worried that Billy himself might be tempted. Fretting over how old and haggard she looked whenever she saw herself in a glass, a shop window—the cracked and darkened reflection from
his
cabinet of wonders, when she dusted it.

But Billy never seemed to have an eye for Maddy so much as he did for the colored sailors who came to visit her. They were bold, confident black tars, strolling down Paradise Alley with their rolling gait, and she saw how intently he watched them. Laughing and joking among themselves in some foreign sailor's tongue, before they disappeared into her house. She was always aware of how much he wished he could be away with them.

It was worse, once the war had started. Billy had taken to buying the freedmen's paper, the
North Star,
whenever he could, scouring it to see if they had started a colored brigade yet—complaining bitterly when they hadn't.

“They got a Irish brigade, and a German brigade, and a regiment for Poles, an' one for the Bohemians!” he would exclaim, stamping around the house. “Why not a colored brigade? What's wrong with us, we ain't even good enough to die for them!”

She had refused to say anything—though he must have known how much the whole idea of his leaving hurt her.
To go off to war, and let the rest of them live from hand to mouth.
Perhaps not to come home at all, or with an arm, or a leg off, like the men who had begun appearing on street corners all over the City, replacing the hot-corn girls. Leaning their crutches against a wall, or hopping about with a begging cup. Men with a folded-up sleeve, performing small miracles of agility to roll and light their own smokes, or make change for the newsie.

What were they to do then—if, God forbid, such a thing should happen to him? Live on what she made from the German ladies? Have Milton fill in his position up at the orphanage, and forget about any better life?

But instead of the wreckage and the limbless, he saw only the brash young sailors and soldiers who came to Maddy's in greater and greater numbers, full of their own confidence and insouciance.

When Tom had up and joined the Fighting 69th it had only gotten worse, she knew—without even him to come over for his occasional smokes, Billy's only real friend on the block. He had brooded more
than ever after that. No longer stopping at the shipyards on his way to or from home—but pausing instead to watch the levies of soldiers marching down to the wharves.

Until one day just a month before, when the summer had first started to close its sudden, heavy grip upon the City, Billy had gotten up especially early, earlier even than he usually did for the orphans. Going out without telling her, but returning earlier than usual, so that he had already been home for some time when she got back. Cold sober still, but without the reticent, awkward dignity he usually had about him—the small gleam of pride he had whenever he managed to refrain from the drink.

Instead he seemed exhausted, more tired than she had ever seen him, holding his head in his hands as he sat at the table. She had wanted to ask him what it was but he made it clear she should not approach him. Barely touching any of his food before he retired to his chair, the rocker he had made himself. Smoking and rocking silently there, while she started to lie down by the cold hearth, and read with the boy. But as she did, he had suddenly pushed himself forward in the rocker and forbidden it.

“No, no more books!” he had exclaimed, standing up—his face sweating profusely, a fiery, red-black color in the light from the candles they had lit. “No, you need to shut your eyes, like any workingman! No more of this foolishness.”

Ruth had started to protest, but he had turned such a ferocious look upon her that she had stopped at once. His expression like something she had seen before only on the face of Johnny Dolan, in its most pure and agonized desperation. Though Milton, being less experienced with the ways of men, had only looked his father carefully up and down, then resumed reading the installment of the
Black Revancher
he had before him.

“You want to stay up?” his father had shouted at the uncomprehending boy. “All right, then, c'mon!”

Billy had swung him up with one rough hand, as big as Milton was—his carpenter's arms still powerful, even after all the years at the orphans'. Pulling his son up, scattering all the flapping pages below him like some rousted bird. Catching up the book, too, and flinging it against the wall, toting Milton along with him over her outraged and bewildered cries.

“C'mon, now—I said, c'mon!”

The other children wakened out of their beds by the commotion, coming into the front room and bursting into tears. The lights, Ruth could see, flaring up in windows across the narrow street.
This time they were causing the racket—

“Only one reason a workingman's still awake at night. You come with me!”

Billy shook his son like a rag doll when he tried to pull away, gripping his shirt in his fist. Ruth prying at his hands, repeating his name over and over again, as if that might bring him back to his senses, but he ignored her.

“C'mon, I'm gonna make you a man. We'll go pay a visit down the street, you an' me. A hollow leg—father an' son—how about it?”

He had yanked open the door, hauling Milton down the street with him in the darkness. Dragging him toward Maddy's—and no doubt he would have gotten there, his progress slowed only by Ruth still clutching at him. Milton trying to dig his own heels in, but nearly frozen in fear and astonishment by his father's fury.

“No, not there! No!”

She had feared that Billy might actually do it. She had already seen how Milton had begun to notice Maddy's house, watching the men there himself. Too shy and smart to ask either her or his daddy about it—but watching. Watching Maddy, too, with new eyes, she thought, whenever she emerged into the street. So far just
wondering
about it. And though she knew his first encounter with a woman would likely be someplace similar, maybe worse, still she did not want him to go there.
Especially not now, with his father.

“Here! Here!” Billy was still shouting. “What's the matter? You think I can't pay for it? I can pay for it. Here, here!”

He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled it back out, a small array of gold coins in his palm. Ruth wondering, despite herself, where he could have gotten so much.

“There, now, whattaya think? That's my wages, the wage of a workingman!”

But he was crying by then and he let them stop him, still short of Maddy's house. Milton running off, back down the street, into the house and the children's room. Ruth could hear the doors slamming behind him. But she had stayed where she was, with her husband,
trying to hold him there in the street as he continued to hold out his hand, weeping uncontrollably.

“Here's my wages! Wage of a work-ing-man!”