Paradise Alley (4 page)

Thousands of men died on such ships, chained in the holds for years, allowed up for exercise only at night. Never seeing the sun before they perished from starvation, or the fevers. A typical, diabolical British punishment. Taking men who claimed to fight for freedom—some great, glorious, abstract notion of freedom—and putting
them to the test. Making sure they would never again have the simple freedom of standing outside on a brilliant day.

I had seen the
Jersey
many times before, though. My real attention was focused on the door of The Sailor's Rest. As I watched from the corner of my eye, a huge, hulking shape ambled slowly outside and pretended to light up a pipe.
Someone meant for me?

Yet even as I watched him, I glimpsed another figure—one rising noiselessly from where he had hidden himself in a pile of old rope and crates. He came straight for me, making the blood freeze in my veins. Some desperate rummy or thief who had spotted my suit, or my watch fob, and my unsteady gait.

The hulking figure by the door was on him as quick as a dog upon a snake, slung shot in hand, moving with extraordinary speed and silence for such a big man. He seized my would-be assailant by the neck, giving him a single sharp blow. The man fell at his feet with a low moan—my protector lifting him up immediately, dumping him into the black river where he sank with a small splash, barely audible in the night. Then he moved back against the wall, watching me again, no longer bothering to fiddle with his pipe.

I knew then that Finn McCool wasn't trying to find out anything at all. Rather, that he was trying to deliver a message, had even provided protection to make sure I got safely off the docks with it.

“Like all cowardly criminals, they're trying to set up an alibi for themselves in advance.”

Later that same Saturday night I stopped in at 300 Mulberry Street, the police headquarters, to see Superintendent John Kennedy, chief of the Metropolitan police. He only nodded, head down, making another notation at his desk when I told him all that I had seen and heard. Still working away vigorously although it was the early hours of Sunday morning by then. He dismissed the whole idea that the mob was beyond the control of Tammany, or Mozart Hall, or all of the endless layers of demagogues and scoundrels in this City.

“The big fish have swum away, so no one can blame them. McCool would have us believe the mob is beyond his control—but I'd wager good money he's only taking orders from afar. Maybe even Richmond!”

John Kennedy is one of those brisk, efficient Irishmen, a testament
to what the race might do if they could only stay away from the drink. His uniform as neat and pressed as McClellan's itself, his white beard trimmed close to the chin.

“I understand the Black Joke lost thirty men to the draft. Including their captain,” I told him.

“Yes, I've heard that.” Kennedy nodded again, barely bothering to look up.

“They're all up in arms,” I went on, ticking off all the murmurs of revolt I had heard among the fire companies. “Also the Shad Belly, and the Dry Bones. Even the Big Six is supposed to be ready to go on the warpath, though I can't imagine Tweed would allow them to get mixed up in anything.”

“Yes, I know. The fire laddies all want to be exempted from having to serve in the militia again,” Kennedy acknowledged drily, unsurprised. “They all want it back the way it
used
to be, before the war. But where would we be then, if we gave them the old exemption? Nearly every young man worth his salt is a volunteer fireman in this town. Who would do the fighting for us?”

There was another brisk shuffle of papers. The sheer masculinity and vigor of such men as Kennedy is overpowering. Skin as pink as a pig's, chin cut sharper than a clipper's bow. He seemed to me Father Christmas and an Old Testament prophet all rolled into one—ready, alert, faintly amused. The sort of captain one might have trusted with the defense of a city, in medieval times.

“Nothing to worry about!” he assured me. “They should have made their move on Friday, when the mob was already out.”

In the amber glow of the gas lamps, men bustled impressively in and out of his office, bringing endless dispatches and telegrams. Kennedy perused them all, jotting his notes on each one before passing it over to another subordinate. His lieutenants were as neat and well-groomed as their chief, collars buttoned up to their throats despite the wilting heat.

“Now it's too late,” he went on. “We're ready for them. I've canceled all leaves, called in every man I have. They know better than to try anything, now that we're prepared.”

Together with Commissioner Acton, Kennedy has made the City's police as honest, as reliable and efficient a force as we have ever had in the City. His Metropolitans were created by the state legislature just
six years ago, a last desperate effort to do something about Mayor Wood's corrupt old Municipals, who had reached a new nadir of depravity. Fernandy Wood refused to yield, of course, standing on high, constitutional principles—not to mention the bribes that were the lifeblood of his administration.

A judge then sent the Metropolitans to arrest
him—
the mayor of the City—and before the whole thing was resolved, our rival police departments, Metropolitans and Municipals, actually got into a fight on the steps of City Hall. Burly, uniformed policemen, wrestling and punching and gouging at each other's eyes, right out in broad daylight. If the Seventh Regiment hadn't happened by and broken it up, they might all have killed each other. Has any city, down to ancient Rome with its gladiators, ever offered its citizens the spectacles that New York does on a daily basis?

Since then, though, Kennedy has cleaned out the deadwood, whipped his police into shape. His headquarters is more efficient than that of any division staff I saw down in Virginia. Laid out on a table in his office is a map of the entire City, with pins stuck in it indicating the locations of the police precinct houses and the draft offices; City Hall, the Sub-Treasury building down on Wall Street; the major banks and stores, the homes of leading citizens, and all the other potential targets.

“Any trouble will probably start at the provost's office. But we also have to cover the shipyards, and the ironworks along the rivers. Then there's the Union Steam Works
here,
and the State Armory
there—
”

He pressed a pink, clean-nailed thumb down upon the old steam works, at Twenty-second Street and the Second Avenue—important only because it was made into a munitions factory after Bull Run. Just below it on the map, at Twenty-first Street, is pinned the State Armory, where the army has ten thousand rifles stored.

“—but we've already got the Broadway Squad there. It will take some mob to get past
them.
Even if they do, we have telegraph operators at every precinct house. We can rush men to any trouble spot, anywhere in the City, within minutes!”

There was no reason to doubt his system. Yet I couldn't help noticing how many pins there were in his map. A whole City, the greatest in the Americas, to be held by his twenty-three hundred Metropolitan officers.

“How many men can General Wool let you have?” I asked him about the City's army commander.

Kennedy frowned a little at this, but stood up straighter than ever.

“Not many. Mead stripped the City of every man he could for Gettysburg. Maybe fifteen hundred, at most, and a lot of them Invalids.”

He tried to reassure me again as he showed me out, squeezing my arm and balling his other hand into a confident fist.

“There is no cause for alarm. The important thing is to stay on top of them! Give it to them good and hard before they get started!”

We passed on out through the headquarters, back to the streets and the usual chaos of a Saturday night in our City. As we went through the station house, though, I noticed what any sentient New Yorker does every day—that all of the men policing his City are Irish. Great big bruisers, to be sure, even their long mustaches bristling aggressively. Polite and well-groomed, a trim-looking fighting force if there ever was one. They even have to pass a literacy test now.

Yet they are all Irish, all the same, right up through their captains and commanders, and Kennedy himself.

We cannot do without them.
But if there is real trouble, what will they do?
Can we rely on them—if it means putting down their friends and neighbors?

Or is the enemy already inside the gates?

•
4
•

Seven o'clock.

The block was nearly silent. Usually by this time of the morning there would be a small riot outside her door. The street teeming with men and women joking and jostling each other on their way to work. The shopkeepers and vendors making their long, singsong pitches.

But today none of the little shops across the street was opening up. Their doors and windows were still shut, though Ruth could make out shadowy movements behind some of them. Their owners were still inside, she knew, watching and waiting. When anyone did move down the street, they walked with quick, jerky movements, heads pivoting as if to see what might be coming after them.

The back lot was just as quiet. She peeked out there—
Just to be sure, just to make certain he wasn't coming that way.
Usually, by this time, there would be a commotion there, too, as whole families made their way down and out to the stinking back privvies. But there was nothing now.

She peered past the privvy shacks, at the back of the tenements on the next block, where the Jews lived. They were a family named Mendelssohn, a glazier and his wife, and their three daughters. She knew them a little, mostly from fetching water at the pump or exchanging nods with the woman when they were both hanging their laundry on their roofs, above the reeking gulf of the back-lot outhouses.
All of them murphys, they wouldn't take a drink between them. The eldest daughter dark and beautiful of face but lame, walking with a cautious, lurching tread. Sometimes Ruth would stand by the back door on Friday nights and listen to the strange songs and chants coming from their kitchen, spy the candlelight dancing through their windows.

“The Jews are a mark upon us,” Deirdre liked to fret, but around the pump in the morning, the women were divided. Some said they were indeed a mark, and a bad element, but others felt they might be good luck, at least if one knew how to use it.

“Have ye touched the oldest one's leg?”

“No, it's the
hair
you got to touch, to get the luck. Otherwise it's no good.”

“No, it's the leg, of course, that's where she was smote—”

They would argue on and on—and find ways to sidle up to her, to run a hand along the Mendelssohn daughter's head or her hip when she was in the pump line, thinking she wouldn't notice. Ruth thought that she did, that she could see her eyes go wide and her body stiffen whenever she felt their hands grasping at her. Yet she had never noticed that anyone along Paradise Alley had much luck, no matter where they contrived to touch the Jew girl.

She saw no one—but now she could hear the noise again, rising up from all around her. The same marching sound she had heard before. The low, ominous murmur of men's voices and the tramp of their feet, as if all the City were on the move.

The mob was out.

At least they weren't stopping yet. Still moving uptown, past them, God's mercy for that.

Billy was still uptown, at the Colored Orphans' Asylum at Forty-third Street and the Fifth Avenue. He would be trapped up there, she realized with a jolt, unless he was already swinging back down the Bowery. She tried to picture him—moving warily but fast, his pay in his pocket. They could be out of the City before anything even got started—

No.
She forced herself to face the truth of the situation. It was no good to do otherwise, she had learned that if she had learned nothing else in this life. Better Billy go to ground, and be safe, if the mob was
really out. Even if he got back in the next few minutes, it still wouldn't be a smart idea to head out on the streets now.

Ruth ran her eyes over their possessions, waiting by the door. All her thoughts of how free she would feel, how relieved once they got on the ferry, dissipating instantly. Instead, she forced herself to think about what they had, here and now, and what they would need.

There was enough food to last a few days, she had seen to that for their travels.
What else, what else?
Water. They were nearly out; she hadn't sent Milton to the pump last night, figuring they would be gone. There was no help for it now, she would have to go out. She took a deep breath, picked up the two buckets by the door.

She looked in on the children again in their room, thinking she would simply lock them in while she walked to the pump in the square. But Milton, her oldest, was already up. He smiled sheepishly at her from the bed where he lay, reading his book. Looking serious at once when he saw her face, listening with her to the growing noise outside.

“What is it?” he asked, and she had to smile despite her worry, just to look at him.

Her boy. Her firstborn. Always so quick to understand, to sympathize.

“Nothin' to fret yourself about,” she told him, as easily as she could. “Just some men about—”

“Are we goin' still?”

“Well, I don't know now. Not right away, at least.”

It had been impossible to keep their preparations from him, the boy was too alert for that.
They had not told him why, at least.
She had never told him much of anything about her life before his father. It was not so much to spare his feelings as she was ashamed to have him think of her like that, the way she had been, when she had lived with Johnny Dolan.

“Where's Da?” he asked.

“Up with his orphans—”

He looked a little relieved, she was sorry to see. Billy was always too hard on the boy. He never liked him reading so much, even though it was he who had insisted on sending Milton to the free schools for as long as he could go. He wanted him up fresh and well rested when he went out to help him on a job.

“You're no good to me like that,” he would harry the boy, especially
when he was in his more sour, hungover moods. “You get up from that bed, you come in to wash, get your breakfast, first thing you do.”

But there was no stopping him. Milton reached for a book when he woke up in the morning, he read after supper until he fell asleep before the coal fire in the grate. He would rather read than sleep, or eat, and she tried to puzzle out what he was at now. Once it had been patriotic histories of the nation, books such as
The Life of Washington,
with the picture of the fine man on the white horse.

These days, though, it was a different kind—adventure stories of some sort. She read the title slowly out loud, sounding out the letters—“
The-Green-Aven-ger-of-the-Fields.
” Knowing he would like that, and indeed he beamed at her, a great, delighted child's smile.

Sweet, sweet boy, as sweet as the berry—

She forgot sometimes how young he still was. Dark-eyed child, with his big book, sneaking a look back at its pages even now. It was he who had taught her what reading she knew. Nearly fourteen, still without so much as fuzz on his smooth, almond-shaped cheeks but so serious at times that he seemed much older. His body already as taut and muscled as a man's, from the full day's work he put in whenever his father could find it for him. Taller than she was now, and as black as his father—darker by far than her other four children, who were more the color of coffee cut with milk.

She feared for his color. She always feared for him when Billy took him out on jobs. Knowing how the dockworkers and the street cleaners would spit and curse at him for his darkness. Knowing that he could not walk for more than a block without some hard word. She couldn't stand that for her boy, her favorite, she knew, though she tried to deny to herself that she had any such thing.

“It's not so bad for him,” Billy would tell her. “Better that he's black like that. It's the mixin' they don' like. It's the thought of how that happens, makes 'em crazy.”

The boy would only smile again, proud to do a man's work. But she knew how it hurt him. She could see the fear and the bewilderment in his eyes, the way he shied when he saw any group of Irish toughs coming down the street. How he flinched from their curses.
Hey, nigger. Hey, contraband—

His father cursed him when he saw that, telling him to walk like a man, but she considered that useless and foolhardy advice. Ruth only
wished there was some way she could protect him. Instead, she ended up depending on
him
to keep the other children in line, help her with the chores and errands when he wasn't working. He was such a trustworthy child, had always been so, reliable beyond his years.

“I have to go out now. To get the water—”

“I'll go do that—”

He was already putting down his book, ready to go in a moment.

“No!” she told him, more quickly than she wanted to, trying to keep her fear off him. “No, I don't want you to bother yourself.”

She smiled at him, tried to make light of her own anxiety. “It's just to the pump, anyhow, and I got to have a talk with Deirdre—”

“All right,” he said evenly, from behind his book, its wild, melodramatic cover. Two men fighting with sabres over a prostrate woman—one of them, no doubt the avenger himself, swathed from head to toe in green.

“All right,” he repeated, seemingly accepting everything she said on the face of it. “I'll get breakfast.”

But he was too smart, Ruth knew. She could see from his eyes that he knew something more was going on.

“Go ahead an' read for a bit yet,” she said, trying to distract him. “You can let these sleep, no sense gettin' 'em up yet.”

She looked over at the others, the younger ones—Mana and Elijiah, Vie and Frederick. Still asleep in their beds and cots piled around the small room, drooling and whimpering fitfully in the heavy heat. She couldn't help leaving him with a final warning, even though he didn't need it, even though she knew it would only alert him the more.

“Whatever you do, though, don't let 'em go out. Y'hear me now?”

“All right.”

The eyes solemn as a bishop's, watching and waiting. She made a decision. There was no hiding anything from the boy, she might as well make sure.

“Just be sure ta bolt the door behind me, an' don't open it.
Don't open it for no one but me,
d'ya hear? Not even if it's just one person, sayin' he needs to come in for some'tin'.
D'ya hear me?
I don't care how sweet he is to ya—not one person!”

“What person?”

“Never you mind.”

She hadn't meant to sound as harsh as she did. It was impossible to explain it now, even if she could.

Oh, but that she could rip out her past, just for the sake of this boy—

“It don't matter who,” she said, softening her voice. “All sorts of shanty trash are out there today, stirred up about the draft, or some such. Someone tries to come in anyway, you get t'others, go out the back door down to the O'Kanes. The
back
door now, d'ya hear?”

“Yes'm.”

He nodded gravely and she smiled.

Best to make it a duty, another task for him to carry out, he was good at that.

“Good then. I won't be gone a quarter hour, don' worry.”

She backed out of the room, to give him some privacy. He had already become painfully modest, sleeping in longjohns or his pants even in this heat, lest she see him naked in the morning. She let him put on his pants and shirt before he escorted her to the door. There she swung up the solid ash bolt, breathing a sigh of relief when she heard it swing back down after her, once she had stepped outside.

He was a good boy, he could be relied upon. As much as anyone could, if
he
came by—

The women of the block stood at the pump like a row of brightly colored flowers. All of them at least slightly different shades, even sisters and sisters, the mothers from their daughters. There were women and girls from the Islands, blue- and purple-black as plums. Runaway women from somewhere in the South, faces the color of fine chocolate or well-used leather, or brushed with just the faintest trace of red, or olive. Women from Hamburg and Bavaria, or from Leinster or Connaught, like herself. Faces originally whiter than white, freckled and pale as the hide of a pale horse—but browning now, weathering as they all were, under the hard summer sun of the City.