Paradise Alley (28 page)

There was the sound of glass breaking, somewhere very close, and despite himself he flinched, and looked out the window into the front yard. There was the mob. White men and women, and children, too, filling up the front yard like a puddle of grease. Some already hurling bricks and dug-up paving stones at the front of the Asylum, others pulling and pushing down the iron fence out front. More of them hurrying down the Fifth Avenue, even as he watched. Whooping and laughing, and chanting something—something incomprehensible at first, that slowly became clearer to him:

“Burn the niggers' nest! Burn the niggers' nest! Burn the niggers' nest!”

Some men came striding up to the front door, crowbars and mechanics' wrenches in hand. Then he was flying—back down the stairs, to the first floor, just praying that no one had slipped around to the back door already.
They hadn't—thank God for that at least.
He went through the back gate in an instant—pausing to latch it, even so. Trying to keep from doing anything that might give them ideas, point them in a direction.

He ran on up the back lot, up the alley where the others had gone. Orphans quickly coming into view before him—Billy relieved, and fearful at the same time that they had gone only so far. Tad gazing happily on his talisman, the tiny horse, in his hands. Seemingly oblivious to the growing chant behind them.

“Burn the niggers' nest! Burn the niggers' nest!”

•
32
•

Noon.
She was sure now, he wasn't coming. All she could hope was that he wasn't stuck in a barroom somewhere.

They would get him there. Surely he would know, even with the creature in him, that they would get him in such a place.

But where else could he be? Would the Orphans' Asylum be any better? Would anyplace in the City?

She felt a new lump of fear in her throat, but fought it down. Billy had been through worse. He was smart and resourceful, except when he had had one too many, and there were alleys and back alleys, culverts and back privvies; roofs and cellars, the rear doors of saloons and stores and stables. A thousand hidey holes, for a man run to ground like some kind of game. Billy would find one of them, she was sure of it, she had to be.

She tried to get her mind off it, to fight down the impulse that seized her sometimes like a pair of choking hands, to just grab the children and bolt. Instead, she joined Milton for a few minutes, playing with the younger children. He had improvised some sort of card game, made up from bills of handling, and labels that he liked to soak off empty crates he found in the streets. She found herself staring at their pretty lettering and pictures. The scenes of half-naked women and tropical lands, that tomatoes and bananas and rice came from. The
faces of somber, bearded merchants, advertising the integrity of their goods by the seriousness of their own cloaked faces.

The game itself was too complicated for her, though the other children seemed to understand it easily enough. She smiled, watching them at their play. Pleased at the thought:
Five children, and each one smarter than she was.

They would know better than she had how to get out of a trap. How to get off an island when everything went to hell—

Milton passed out the bills and labels again. She tried to follow his system: blue beat green, green beat red, red beat plain black and white. But it was the distance of the destinations listed on the bills that were trump: Troy over Yonkers, Hartford over Elizabeth. One bill he had found from San Francisco, over everything—

“How far away is it?” she asked Milton.

“That's thousands of miles,” he told her. “Thousands of miles, maybe three, four thousand—”

She already knew—wanting to reassure herself.
But what does it matter? He came thousands of miles once, he could do it just as easily again—

She got up and moved away from the table. The other children happily playing still—Milton following her with his eyes, she knew. It was impossible to hide anything from him completely. She walked over to the window again, looking out, over the wooden shutters. The street wholly deserted now, not so much as a pig abroad. They were smart creatures, would get off the street when they sensed a storm coming, or some other trouble.
Smarter than her.

She moved back from the window, back toward her children. Glad, then, for one thing. Watching them all, so intent over their game, Milton presiding so sternly over them.
Glad that he didn't know about then—that none of them knew who she had been before, and what she had done.

•
33
•

I went with him. I didn't want him to leave me behind. I didn't know how I would live if he did and that was my sin, I wanted to live still—

Along the road Johnny Dolan kept the box wrapped up tight. But at night now they made their camp as far from the highway as they could, and he would open it up, and stare at it until the light faded.

There was everything inside, behind the glass. There were tiny mirrors and gemstones, glued to the back, so the whole size and shape of the thing seemed to shift, every time they looked inside. And they could always find something new. There were the embryos of small animals, and insects floating in jars, and feathers of strange birds, and the bones of the saints. There were miniature charts of the seas, and the constellations, and the compass of the navigator, and the tools of the apothecary, and of the barber and the surgeon—

At first Dolan hadn't wanted to look at it at all. He had kept it wrapped up, as if his looking at it too much would diminish it. Warning her not to let it come uncovered, not to say a thing about it.

“That's our passage off this island,” he liked to tell her as they moved up to Dublin. “That's
not starving,
right there.”

But then one night he began to look, and after that he would look until the sun went down, and even longer, keeping the fire going even when it meant scavenging for wood for an extra hour. Dolan didn't
seem to care—and she was just as glad herself. He stayed off her now, at least most nights. Looking at that thing, and wondering over it afterward.

“An' what d'ya think
that
is, back there? What d'ya think that does?” he would ask as they peered in together by the glow of the fire. Begrudging her even having a look at first, still fearful she would use it up—but preferring to have an audience, for all his speculations.

“D'ya think we can see everything in there? D'ya think we can see everything there is?”

The people moving along the roads were a river now, flowing faster and faster toward Dublin. The families hauling all they owned in carts and barrows. The grim-faced men with their spades and their hoes, carrying the tools of their trades, though there was no work anywhere.

There were bodies everywhere. Lying out in the fields, and fallen in the doorways of their cabins. Bodies lying by the road, their mouths rictured open and green inside, from trying to eat the grass and the nettles.

They only glanced down, and moved on. Stopping for nothing, now, not even to look in the cabinet. The fear growing more palpable, more frantic the closer they got to the city. Ruth watched a woman as she dragged the naked corpse of her daughter out of her
scalpeen.
She was nearly as big as the woman herself, but she dragged her out by her heel—covering the body with rocks, out in front of her
scalp,
then crawling back in under its tumbled walls again.

I turned to Dolan, wantin' to see if he had seen, to see what he thought. But his face was only set ahead, toward the road before us.

Once they reached Dublin they kept to themselves, Dolan making more certain than ever that the black dropcloth stayed tightly wrapped around their treasure. Even he was unnerved by the size of the place, the crowds along the streets and the quickness and verve of the people. It was the first town they had seen where food was still displayed in the shop windows—chickens and pigs and chains of sausages hung from the butchers' hooks, fine cakes and tarts in the bakers' trays. The houses still gracious and bright along their avenues, painted in brilliant light blues and yellows.

Down the alleyways, though, they spied heaps of mud and garbage, and the bodies of men and women—dead or alive still, they
could not tell. Children stood on every street corner, holding out the skin that sagged from their arms in order to demonstrate their hunger. The hair had fallen out of their heads, but a downy fuzz had grown in along their cheeks and foreheads, so that they looked like monkeys. Muttering their pleas like a benediction and response:

“
Ta sinn ocrach
”—“We are hungry.”

“
Tha shein ukrosh
”—“Indeed, the hunger—”

Dolan rented a room, in a sailor's boardinghouse along the Liffey docks, and at his insistence they took turns, standing guard over the box. Rarely leaving the room at all, the city unlit and even more threatening at night.

Yet everywhere they looked in the day, there were signs, directions, advertisements. Shop placards banged and fluttered above their heads—giant boots and hats, kettles and pigs. Abandoned storefronts were pasted with rail tables and patent-medicine advertisements; auction bills, and legal notices from the Poor Law Commissions, and whole sheets from the penny journals, their columns blazing with descending headlines. Clusters of men perusing them, chewing over what they might mean, if anything:

THE LIBERATOR IN ROME!

DANIEL O'CONNELL TO MEET WITH HIS EMINENCE; GRAND SCHEME TO FEED THE NATION!

His Grace Promises to Aid His Flock in Holy Ireland, Savior of the Church!

O'Connell Said to Be Restored by His Audience with the Holy Father

Dolan read them all, the patent-medicine stories and the bills of attainder, and the penny dreadfuls, as if they could provide some idea of what they should do next, or where they should go. But most of all he preferred to look in the box again—sitting up in their room and staring at all the wonders behind the glass.

Finally, one afternoon, he had her take it with them, down to the
gombeen
man. They had hauled it in, and set it down on his counter, and Dolan had asked the man for ten pounds, right off.

The
gombeen
man just laughed at them at first. A fat little pawnbroker named Murphy, with a shop in Thomas Street that was filled to
the ceiling with things snatched for nothing. There were tea sets and kettles and plates, watches and watch fobs, mandolins and zithers and banjos hanging on strings from the ceiling. All raked in from those desperate enough for the head money. The good wedding linen, and the thick quilts, and the lovely brooches and cameos and hair combs, and all the other possessions saved and hoarded over a lifetime—over three lifetimes—now come to hang up in a Dublin pawnshop for anyone who cared to pick them over.

“Look at this here!” Murphy laughed, pointing at all he had. “And not one of 'em will get you ten pounds. Nothing in this world is worth ten pounds!”

Dolan, to her surprise, did not lose his temper. Instead, all he said was,
We'll see,
and threw back the curtain on the cabinet of wonders. And when he did even the
gombeen
man had to gasp.

“It's all here!” he muttered, his eyes flicking back and forth over it. “It's all here!”

Dolan pointed out everything to him—as if it needed any explication. All of the little mirrors, and the fine paintings. All the hidden corners, and labyrinthine tricks they had discovered on the road—the hidden compass, or the surgeon's knife; the phrenologist's chart, and the graphic illustrations of the one hundred and forty-four ways of Hindoo love, and the hidden compartments that sprang open to reveal a music-box dancer, or a desiccated orange, or the skeleton of a toad. The
gombeen
man's breath coming in short rasps as he looked it over, repeating his same, awed cry.

“It's
all
here!”

After that he caught himself enough to turn them down—but even Ruth could see, with her simple country eyes, that Dolan had the hook in him.

He only thanked the man, and left. Acting as if he didn't mind at all, though they were in fact close to starving again by then—the last of the pennies Dolan had pulled from the studiolo man's pockets gone to pay for the room.

But sure enough, when they brought it back the next day, Murphy had leaped down from the stool by his ledgers, as if he had been waiting for nothing else—nothing from the whole world that came to his door.

“Five pounds!” he cried. “Not a shilling more. I hate to offer that
much, I swear, I'll have t'carry every junk dealer in Ireland on my back!”

“Ten,” Dolan told him.

He lifted up the cloth again, just enough so that the man could see—the jeweled, broken sword handle; the tiny dynamo. The picture of the most beautiful woman in the world in all her nakedness, with her brown eyes like the sea and the ring of fire around her head.

And again he did not buy that day—but Dolan brought it back again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after. Until at last the
gombeen
man put the ten pounds in his hands without another word, and ushered them out of his shop.

“He couldn't stand to lose it again,” Dolan said, outside on the street. “He couldn't stand to see it and lose it all those times. No man could.”

Dolan made himself wait the rest of the day, and that night, and the day after that—before he broke into the shop through the rear window, and stole it back. That was as long as he could stand it, she knew. And when she asked him if they could not be hung for the theft alone, Dolan shrugged and told her that, after all, the
gombeen
man did have the thing to himself for a day and a night.

Once they had the money, Dolan went out every morning to look over the ships, to kick at their timbers and count the number of water barrels they had onboard. For he had heard all the stories of the boats that had broken down or wrecked or vanished altogether before they reached the St. Lawrence, or New York City—about the
Katie Calhoun,
out of Waterford, which had sunk just outside the harbor with the loss of all hands, in full view of their friends and family still waving from the dock.

Ruth couldn't picture that any of the ships before them would do better, worm-eaten and shabby as they were, their sails patched and repatched. The long, grey wharf rats running freely up and down their lines. But Dolan kept looking until he found a schooner he liked—the
Birmingham,
out of Liverpool—and took her over to book passage.

The broker's office was a narrow triangle, with only a shellacked loaf of bread in the window. Outside, on the wooden sidewalk, two more begging children stood—heads bald, the downy, simian fur
creeping across their brows. Unable even to beg, their jaws hanging open so that whenever they tried to say something, their tongues sank into the soft roofs of their mouths.

Inside was a solitary desk, the broker perched behind it on a high stool. He wore a crumpled stovepipe hat on his head, scratching fervently at his well-cropped beard as he worked. They handed over their money and the man began to energetically stamp and scribble away at whole sheafs of paper.

“What's the ship like?” Dolan demanded.

“Don't ya know yourselves? You're the ones who're booking passage on her! Why would ya get on a ship that wasn't no good,” the broker drawled—breaking off when he looked at Dolan's face.

“Oh, she's a fine ship, a swift ship! All up to inspection, just like it says in the regulations. There's a gallon of water a day, an' you get a stirabout in the morning. Herring and a whole loaf of bread for supper—just like the one you see in the window.”

He pointed at the bread with his pen, and they stared at it covetously—the permanent, varnished loaf, sitting there so temptingly. The broker finished his stamping and pushed the thick packets of paper over the desk to them.

“There's papers. Now all you got to do is go see the medical officer.”

There was a line of men and women a block long, winding their way into another narrow storefront next door. But it went quickly—as quickly as the half-starved people could move. The inspection consisting as it did of sticking out their tongues, one after the other, while they filed past the doctor. He looked openly terrified, sitting behind a window cut in the wall, his head held as far back as possible while he stared at their tongues. In the end he stopped no one, signing all their papers though there were people in the line obviously in the last stages of the famine dropsy, or spotted fever.