Paradise Alley (69 page)

“Hullo! Over there!” a voice called softly through the darkness.

They all stood up abruptly.

“How can we be of service to you, Mrs. Mendelssohn?” Deirdre called back—both their voices seeming terribly loud, now, in the quieting night.

“What're you gonna do? If they come tomorrow?”

“Praise Jesus in His mercy, they won't come at all.”

“With no disrespect, it's not Jesus that I'm worried about.”

Peering into the darkness, Ruth could make out the figure of Mrs. Mendelssohn, hunching forward over her lantern, a shawl around her shoulders. Standing beside her she could see her daughter—Sarah,
she thought her name was.
She had a lovely face, but there was something wrong with her legs—

“What if the mob comes?”

“If they do, I don't think they're interested in the likes of us, Mrs. Mendelssohn.”

“But what about the others? The coloreds, an' the like. Or what if they just want to loot?”

“I don't believe it will come to that—”

“But just if it does. You can come over here, you know. If you can get out the back, just come right across. We'll take you in—an' anybody else you know.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Mendelssohn, that's very kind of you. And the same goes for you. If they come to your block first, our house is always open to you.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Mendelssohn said, sounding relieved and very pleased. “Thank you, I'm sure. Remember, come over!”

She and her daughter turned away, and the little red glow of their lantern disappeared, going back down into their house.

“D'ya think they'll go after the Jews, then?” Ruth asked. “If it comes to that?”

“I don't know,” Deirdre said frankly. “I don't know what they'll do, or what they want. I don't know what they think they're doing now.”

“They're doin' what men always do. They're takin' it out on someone else,” Maddy said sleepily, from her place back in Deirdre's lap—and Ruth felt a pang of envy, wishing that she could be there herself, feeling Deirdre's reassuring hand on her brow and her hair.

“But how long?”

“Until they get tired of it. Until they get sober enough, or scared enough to quit.”

“And when will that be?”

“Who can say? There's a building still standing, ain't there?”

“Enough of that talk, now!” Deirdre chastised her, but Maddy only yawned loudly, and stretched her body like a cat's. Her form, still clad in the red dressing gown, lank and unconsciously sensuous.

“I just hope he's all right,” Ruth said fiercely. “I just hope he knew enough to go to ground. He's smart like that. He's a sensible man, when he ain't got the creature in him, when he ain't too fed up.”

“Oh, aye.”

“And I know Tom will be all right.”

“God willing.”

Down in the streets, the luminous bugs blinked out, or rushed away.

“God willing, preserve all the sons of women tonight.”

In Deirdre's lap, Maddy snored.

•
63
•

Up on the roof, she stroked Maddy's hair where it lay in her lap. Almost amused to find herself cradling the head of the block's whore.

The poor, daft child. And where would she go after this? After the harpies below had finished turning out her house?

Beside her, Ruth was nodding as well, leaning against her shoulder.
Who would have thought it?
But here she was, herself giving sanctuary to the whores and the blacks, and just as glad to do it.

She had been right after all—it was not a fit block to live on. Thinking of the women who had come by the house all day, with their hateful rantings. Their savage faces, creased with joy as they hurled their stones and bricks.

Stoning a girl! On her own block! What has happened to us, then?

Yet her thoughts always went back to Tom. Trying to think of where he might be, and how he was. Mulling over the line in the paper again—the most recent line:
O'Kane, leg.
And before that there had been the
chest, severe,
and how many more would there be after that, even if Jesus granted her prayers and he did live through this one?

At least now we are reconciled. At least now we would have some chance to meet in Heaven, having both confessed.

All through that winter, after his last one—the
severe
one—she had agonized over him. Wanting desperately to see him, to take the
train down to Washington and go searching through the hospitals until she found him.

But it was too much of a risk. The smallpox and the measles were raging through the City by then. She could not leave the children, and besides, there was no money for it, anyway. Instead she had sent him all the food she could manage, and spent her evenings writing—writing to anyone and everyone she thought could help. Writing to the Sanitary Commission and to the hospital nurses; to the Congress and the War Department and the colonel of his regiment. Hoping and praying for some word—for some chance somebody might take notice of her husband.

And first of all she wrote to him every night—a letter every single day, though they could barely afford the postage. Going without supper sometimes so she could buy the pens and ink, and candles. Getting the children to write as well, those that could already, doing whatever she could to make sure that he had a letter at least once a day, wherever he was.

It had nearly driven her to distraction, trying to get word, in the first place, as to whether he was alive or not. Suffering all through Christmas while she tried to nurse the children and make some sort of holiday for them.

How good it would have been to have some friend then,
she thought, feeling the weight of Ruth's head against her shoulder.
How good it would have been simply not to be alone.

She had finally gotten an official letter from the War Department, late in January, informing her briskly that her husband was still invaliding at the Bethesda hospital. The note sending her into paroxysms of both new fear and exultation—overjoyed that he was still alive, but fretting over why he was still in the hospital.

Only after another month had gone by, deep into February, had she received the first scarce lines from him.
Im alright now,
written in his schoolboy's hand, but even more wavery and uncertain than usual, as if he barely had the strength to work the pencil.
Im reecovered now and back with me company.
She has sensed the trace of resentment still running through those words, reminding her that he was still in service.

Slowly, they had made it up. Over the course of those first tentative letters, the daguerreotype he had finally sent to her. She had been
shy herself, wanting desperately to confess, to debase herself before him, but she was afraid of how he might respond.

To know himself, in so many words, to be married to such a woman—how would he take it?

“I know what I have done,” she had written him at last. “And I repent it with all my heart, and all my faith, and would repent it with my life as well, should I think that would be of use.”

And getting his reply then—still cautious and unsure, still with a touch of the old resentment running through it. But slowly making his confession as well, with a man's own grudging, prideful slowness. Writing to her in that uneven hand,
But I wanted to go. Thats the truth out I wanted to go.

The words there, the frankness, sitting between them like some newfound thing. The question still unresolved, the bond still fragile, still tenuous, but restored, at least for the time being. While the war went on.

Then had come the newspaper again, after Gettysburg, with his name there. The whole thing starting up again too soon.

If she could only have seen him.
He was supposed to have leave to recuperate but there was some mistake, he had had to report back to the regiment first. Then with Lee moving north, all liberties had been canceled. He had written her, she was glad of that at least. Not wanting her to think he had spent his furlough gambling and whoring in Washington City—letting her know he wanted to come back, to be at home with her and his family.

I kiss you and embrase you. Id be back with you if I could all of you.

Knowing at least from that there was hope, at least from that there was something to pin her faith on. Then had come Gettysburg, and the new line in the newspaper.

O'Kane, leg.

It had stunned her, to see it. Thinking that she had made her peace now, that by confessing she would be forgiven by God as well as by Tom. But there it was—just another battle, another desolation. She nearly lost all the faith she had gathered over it. Knowing it would only go on and on, the battles, the killing, with no reason to it. Until her Tom, too, was killed.

“God does not bend to our wishes, but we to His,” Father Knapp
had told her—though she could barely look him in the eye anymore, for all of the wickedness he must know was in her now.

“But what good is the sacrifice, then, Father? What does it do for Tom?”

“Jesus teaches us, ‘I require mercy, not a sacrifice.' All we can do is wait upon His mercy, and extend our own.”

It was not good enough—it was still not good enough. But then she had learned that her brother had come back, and the riot had started, and she had had no time to think about anything else. Making sure to lay in enough water and food, and keep the children in off the street. Forcing herself to think what else, what else had to be done.

It was then that she had remembered Ruth. Wanting to hate her still—but she could not anymore. Her last, residual well of hatred spilling out when she saw how frightened she was, how helpless but how determined. It was then that she had seen God's purpose clearly. That she must ease the hardness of her heart, still unconfessed, for this woman who had wiped away the last of her family. This grudge held so carefully, all these years—but she had given it up willingly. Pleased at last to submit to His judgment, washed of her cares like some thick-headed Protestant lawyer.

Below she could see the last lights going out—around the Five Points, just to the south, and much of the East Side. The City slowly going black, and finally quieting. Wondering what they would do, what
she
would do, if they came back in the morning—if the riot reached the block.

Escape over the back lots to the Jews? Try to face down men, as she had faced down those foolish women today?
And what would she do with her brother, if he found them?

She didn't know, it was all in God's hands, and even her most careful preparations could not help with what might descend upon them. She was just glad to be able to do something—to be able to fight, if need be, as he had. Glad to have a duty.

•
64
•

It was cooler on the roof.

The air was still hot enough, and there was a constant smell of smoke in the air, but it was better up there, and besides, there was company.

She lay in Deirdre's lap, passing in and out of dreams. Cosseted and cushioned, her eyes opening from time to time to stare out at the lights flickering below. Deirdre's hand smoothing through her hair. Embarrassed by how knotted and dirty it must be, but pleased to feel her hand anyway. Pleased to feel any human touch that wasn't methodically probing and grabbing at her.

Her father had smoothed her hair, as she lay in bed at night. Or maybe it had been her mother. It was hard to remember, they had both been gone for so long. She barely had any recollection of her father at all—just the sense of a large, confident presence. The memory of him standing in the doorway with his hands on his hips, laughing at something she had done.

She could never understand what had gone wrong with the scaffolding, casting him down from a height no higher than they were this night. Not too long a drop for a man to survive with a broken leg, a bad back—a shoulder that didn't work quite right for the rest of his life.
He must have lost his footing, got tangled up in the ropes and fallen at a bad angle.

She had wondered since if her mother had been called to the sight—to see her husband's body lying there, his neck bent like a hanged man's. She didn't know, the old woman had never spoken of it. Maddy could barely remember the day herself. Only that she had come home from the common school and her mother was sitting in a chair, dressed in black, and all the neighbors were over. The wake held that very night—her father in a box, a candle at his feet. His face looking ashen, scrubbed and dressed in his best clothes by her mother and her friends. Maddy had seen him last that very morning, her eyes still bleary with sleep, finishing his tea in the kitchen before he went off to his painting job.

And now, in Robinson's silly creation, he was a drunkard, a brute, a pimp. Selling his children on the street for alcohol, beating his wife. When in life he had been guilty of only one thing—he had died.

Ah, well, that was enough, wasn't it?

Her anger from the day settling into a deep, muddy sediment—though she still flinched and swore to herself when she thought how, even now, the bitches could be looting through her things. Stealing what they liked, and who was to stop them? Half a dozen times during the day she had stood up in Deirdre's parlor, looking for her gun. Determined to run out in the street and settle things, scatter them all like a roost of chickens.

They had gotten hold of her each time, Ruth or Deirdre. Walked her back to the couch, sat her down there, gently but firmly. In truth, she had been just as glad to be stopped, even though she had cursed and shrieked at them, struggled weakly against their hard grips. She was still unsettled by the stoning, the piece of brick glancing off her head. It was a small enough wound, Deirdre already having dressed it up with iodine, but it had rattled her.

She had come out with her gun and they hadn't run. She had gone out there, and they had only laughed at her, and stoned her like a whore—

Which was what she was. That had hurt as much as anything. They saw her as no better, even now, with the war come right up to the block. They really meant all the cuts, all the curses. Stone her in the street and take her things, just as they would the race women's, or Ruth's family's—

She could not fathom why Deirdre had stood against them, though
she was grateful for it. At supper she had been sat down with all the rest of them. The children from both families crowded into the table like it was Christmas Eve. Deirdre and Ruth and Ruth's son, that beautiful dark boy, serving up the food and taking care of everything.

And she, Maddy, had been tucked into the table, too. Sitting right between Deirdre's two oldest girls. She had been put right there, like one more member of the family, sat down and served with all the rest. All the trimmings of a family, even if it wasn't really hers.

The meal had cleared her head, for the first time in days.

“Are ya missin' him then, Maddy?”

Ruth, very close, just above her. She opened her eyes and saw her leaning into Deirdre's shoulder. Her face looking softer in the refracted orange light from the sky than she had ever seen it before.

“Who?” she asked—though she knew exactly who Ruth had meant, had made a show of it, and pretended that he was right downstairs, running after her.

“You shouldn't be encouraging her to miss such a man as that,” Deirdre admonished her, but Ruth paid no mind.

“D'ya know where he is? D'ya miss him not bein' around tonight?”

“No, not him,” Maddy told her truthfully.

She was thinking instead of a scaffolding giving way, a man falling to his death just like that. It had changed everything, but she had done her best, she and her mother. She had never made any apologies for it.

“That's right, then,” Deirdre said, misunderstanding. “No need to miss the likes of
that
one.”

No—not when there were so many other bastards still to come.

All day long, she knew, she had been waiting, hoping for her lover to come back somehow, and keep his promise. Willing to forgive him even then, for all that he had done to her family in his book—for all of his nothingness. Just on the faith and hope that he would see her for what she was—someone to come back for—rather than what he wanted to see her as, his White Captive, his artist's model.

But she didn't need even him, in the end. If he hadn't wanted to come back, it was just as well that she knew it, at last. She had always gotten by, since the scaffolding had given way. She always would.
It was cooler on the roof.
Deirdre's lap so comfortable beneath her. Almost like a family.

She told herself that none of it mattered—the women on the street, or the fire captain with his threats to clear her out. Robinson and his games. Letting it all drift away from her with the night. All her things, and her love for him, and all the scores and the insults and the outrages still left unsettled. All the hands of men upon her.

She tried to think only of the tree, just outside their kitchen window on St. John's Park, the three of them eating there on a summer's night. Insisting that nothing else mattered—and none of it would ever be avenged, and he would never see her for herself, and her mother and father would be left in peace, God rest their souls.

Only the small voice, restless inside her. Knowing that it did matter, to her, as much as she wished that it did not. Insisting, as she spiraled down to sleep,
It's a lie, It's a lie, It's a lie—