Paradise Alley (46 page)

Instead, she smiled up at me—her exquisite little feet balancing along an upper ledge no wider than my hand. There she strolled along, as easy as a mountain goat. Oblivious to the effect the blackened walls must have on her new red frock, walking through the bowels of the City.

“Come down!” she called to me, still smiling up at my horrified face. “Come on down—I'll show you where to walk!”

But I could only cling to the rim of the culvert, watching Maddy. She walked on her toes, executed a pivot on the slender ledge, as graceful as any tightrope walker, dancing on the edge of a cesspool.

After that I did everything I could for her. The house was only a start. I hired tutors to teach her how to read and write. I retained dancing masters, and music teachers to school her in the harp and the piano, in drawing and decorum. I opened up an account for her at Stewart's, along with the services of a knowing widow who could instruct her on what to buy, and how to wear it. In short, I gave her everything she needed to become an accomplished, finished young woman.

When her mother passed away, I even paid for the funeral—
complete with a marble headstone and a black-caparisoned team, a glass coach and paid mourners to follow it out to the Green-Wood Cemetery. A fine funeral—something that always seems to mean so much to
them,
after the mean lives they lead on this earth.

It had surprised me, I admit, how much she had cried at the cemetery. Keening like those Irishwomen in their shawls, in the pit of De Peyster's old house. I tried to be especially attentive to her after that. My companions among the literati down at Pfaff's Cave noticed my absences, how I slipped away in the early evenings now. I tried to lie, and tell them it was a case of gout, but they saw through me.

“Don't you see?” George Arnold had cried out. “It must be his secret passion!”

“She must be very beautiful, for him to keep her from us so,” Clapp, the Oldest Man, said, smiling at me through the smoke that always wreathed our back table. Then he surprised me, turning almost serious.

“But you should be married! When are you going to marry, Herbert?”

Why should I? We had, as it were, a perfectly workable facsimile of a marriage. Better, even, than the real thing. Any evening I wished, I could simply stroll by. Listening to Maddy play, or sing for me after our supper. Enjoying whatever else I desired afterward (she never denied me anything). There were no scenes over my smoking or drinking. No objections when I took myself off for a fortnight of hunting down in Jersey, or fishing in the Adirondacks. There were no demands of any sort made upon me.
How dreary it all was!

Then I discovered our little game.

It started when I took her to see a show at William Schaus's gallery. I hadn't expected much, just some more of the “
Ruth-mania
” we were still enduring then. Endless paintings of Ruth, sketches of Ruth, sculptures of Ruth, gleaning in the fields of Boaz. Cooper's frontier Ruth, dragged off to live with the Indians in
The Wept of Wishton-Wish.
Ives's bust in every home, with its demure, chaste, womanly features—the one symbolic grain of wheat tastefully arranged in her hair. Ruth the dutiful wife, the dutiful daughter-in-law, clinging to her new people.

But what I found was something else again. Schaus had only a single
exhibit on display, executed by some self-taught sculptor Hamilton Fish had found upstate. The work was called
The White Captive,
and according to the literature at the gallery, it was supposed to have an uplifting moral purpose—“
to show the influence of the Savage upon Christianity.
”

The influence of the savage indeed! After I put down our four bits, Maddy and I were swept up in the mob as if by a riptide at Coney Island. We were carted almost bodily down a narrow hall, until I thought Maddy would be crushed, and my nose would be broken from being jammed so repeatedly into the back of the gentleman before me. Then, finally, we were shot through into the gallery, and there she was.

It was the sculpture of a young woman. A young, pioneer girl, pulled from her cabin in the middle of the night by marauding savages. Stripped of her nightdress, she stood naked now, and tied to a tree stump. The whole work was a blatant steal from
The Greek Captive,
Powers's old sensation—but this was much less classical, almost lifelike in its feminine, sensuous roundness.

Schaus even had a halo of tinted gaslight over the piece, so that her skin looked almost as real as flesh. A mechanic stood by, laboriously turning a crank that rotated her pedestal slowly around and around, so that the crowd could see all of her. Her legs, her buttocks—the leather strap where it bound her hands together behind her back, and tied her to the tree. Her nightdress strewn over the stump, as if to remind us again of her soon-to-be-lost innocence. So helpless. So terrified that she could only stare blindly ahead, ready to do whatever she was bid—

Greeley—with his usual boundless capacity for self-deception—wrote the next day that “in her nakedness she is unapproachable to any mean thought. The very atmosphere she breathes is to her drapery and protection. In her pure, unconscious naturalness, her inward chastity of soul and sweet, womanly dignity, she is more truly clad than a figure of lower character could be though ten times robed—”

In a pig's eye.
The women in the room knew better. They huddled fearfully together in the corners, holding up their fans and arms in front of them, as if to ward off an assault. Meanwhile, the men in the crowd stalked relentlessly around the piece, the mechanic with his crank still not fast enough for them. Schaus was wise not to put anything else on exhibit; they would have smashed it to pieces in their frenzy. Banging heedlessly into each other, swarming around the statue
like so many sharks. There was no talking—no buzz of words, excited or bored, that rise up inevitably from the crowd at every exhibition. Only the constant scuff and creak of men's shoes, moving back and forth over the carpet and the floorboards.

Gazing upon her I maintained my equanimity for as long as I could. Then I took Maddy home and ravished her. Making her take off every stitch of her fine, new clothing before me, tying her hands behind her with my own belt. She took it all with as much passivity as the white captive. Seemingly frightened and overwhelmed by me now. Reduced again to her most primitive nature—to the wild savage I had first encountered upon the streets of New York.

Yet it was more than lust—it was literature. I had, I now discovered, the key to my
Street Scenes.
Why shouldn't a good story, a tale of moral reform, have episodes of wild and lascivious adventure in it?
The influence of the Savage upon Christianity.
Well, why not? What better way to discern which was which?

I set to work again at once. My long months of stagnation broken. Retitling my tale as
Paradise Alley, a Tale from the Streets of New York,
to give it more of an air of social reform (and, of course, depravity). Taking as my subject—Maddy herself.

Of course, it had to be changed, improved upon. Her father—and her mother—now were both drunks. The father falling into the bottle first, through a series of misfortunes, and bad company, then dragging the mother down after him. Maddy was still a hot-corn girl, but a pure, virtuous thing—every night fending off corruption, and still selling her wares. Beaten not by her pimp, but by her very own parents when she returns to the Shambles. No longer a lone child now, but blessed with a younger brother.
No,
a younger brother
and
a sister, whom she shields from one travail after another of the streets, and from her dypsomaniac parents—

It all fit so perfectly. An adventure full of one peril and pitfall after another. Lending itself naturally to so many conversions and reversals, rescues and deathbed scenes. Of course there had to be a little tragedy, a few depictions of truly depraved places. Perhaps even a few social statistics at the back of the book to give it weight, make sure it was regarded as important literature. And for the main character—the much-put-upon hot-corn girl—I had the life model right there before me.

My editors down at Harper and Brothers were ecstatic. It went so
well that I started to map out my little book's successors as soon as I sent it off to the printers. There might be something with Five Points in the title, or the Cow Bay. I need never run out of depraved neighborhoods, not in this City—

It was soon afterward that she came to my home on Gramercy Park. I remember it was an evening in autumn, just at that turn in the season when the days become noticeably shorter. The street lamps lit earlier, glowing against the orange leaves, and the blue slate sidewalks that ring the park.

She simply appeared before me. I had walked back from the
Tribune,
was about to turn into the gate of my home, when there she was. Wrapped in a cloak and hood, moving across the street so swiftly that I stiffened—thinking she must be a beggar woman, or some particularly brazen nightwalker.

Then her face was in front of me, lovelier than ever. More defined now, the first, delicate lines of full womanhood beginning to sculpt her cheeks. Framed there against her hood, her hair pinned into careful, artificial curls. Her eyes no longer so frankly ingenuous but knowing, seeing me now.

She had come to tell me that she loved me. I moved her nervously in through my dooryard gate, shielding her under the elm tree there. Wanting to get her out from under the eyes of my neighbors but not willing to bring her into my house. Holding her hands, trying to smile—I could feel the trap closing on me, the long-delayed extortion coming at last.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, disbelieving. Wondering what had finally made her restless.
The death of her mother? A new opportunity? Or simple boredom?

“You are welcome to keep the clothes. The piano, too, if you like. Even the harp. As to cash money—”

Her eyes flickered down, away from mine, for the first time since I had known her.

“I love you.”

“I don't understand,” I said, astonished. Half-smiling, thinking that this must be some ploy.

“I love you,” she said again.

I had to admit then what I already knew—that it was no game. I knew that she meant it.

“You are still grieving for your poor mother. You are distraught—”

She turned her head, looked with some little wonder now at the gracious redbrick house where I lived, the long porch with its trellises and vines out front. The wages of hackdom.

“This is your home.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

I said this tersely, and she looked down again.

“Look, if it is the condition of not being married that bothers you—” I tried. “I could situate you in a shop, perhaps. Or another home, where you are unknown. You could even say that I was your guardian. It would not be hard to arrange a match, now that you have become so accomplished—”

That only made her angry, and she looked at me with an expression of sudden hatred that I had never expected to see in her.

“Now who is talking about money.”

Such a woman. She had learned to speak.

“It is impossible,” I said, shaking my head.

I looked toward the house this time, afraid one of the servant girls might be looking out.

“No. It is just not possible.”

Her eyes bored into mine, full of hurt and frustration.

“I love you.”

I was reduced to muttering, under my own elm tree.

“Not possible. Not possible.”

•
48
•

There is a shout from outside, then the sound of a bottle breaking, and Maddy stirs against me. Untangling her legs from mine, unsticking the soft, wet flesh of her inner thighs. I put out an arm, and pull her back into me. Breathing in the sweet, musky night sweat of her underarms. She burrows her head into my neck, murmuring, her eyes still closed—

There is another shout, some incoherent cry, and we both sit up. A faint smell of smoke seeps into the room, and peering out through Maddy's bedroom shutters I can see that the sky is powdered with a dull, red grit.

They are back out again already. The riot is not over.

We rouse ourselves, both of us silent, still surprised and a little embarrassed by our anxious, clinging passion from the night before. Even tender with each other as we climb back into our clothes, and hurry through our morning ablutions.

I wash myself a little in one of the stale buckets of water she hauled in yesterday. Not
too
much. Not even brushing my disgusting clothes before I dress again—not wanting to look anything like a three-hundred-dollar man. After all, the riot is on again, and I shall have to go back out there.

And again—why?

I should have gone home last night, I suppose, to stand guard over
my property in Gramercy Park, along with George Strong and his troop of vigilantes. Instead I seem to have come completely adrift in the City. Staying where I will, doing what I want—

So why here?

Down in her sodden kitchen, we chew away at some old bread. Trying to find something to fill the void in our stomachs, to fill the awkward silences between us.
Maddy.
She looks so pretty, so
familiar
at the table across from me, has even put on a new red dressing gown.
For me?

I go to the door, though, having said almost nothing to her.
What is there to say now?
When she came to my house, to tell me she loved me, I only told her that it was impossible. Preferring to have her under me. To tie her up in little chains, so I could look at her—

There must still be a way to put this right—for me to redeem her.
I turn back from the door to entreat her. Wishing to have her by me or simply fulfilling my responsibility, I am not sure any longer. Only knowing that, as ever, she will do as she likes.

“Maddy, I have to leave now. I want you to go to my home in Gramercy Park.”

“To your maid's room?”

“To wherever you wish!” I snap at her, instantly angered again, trying to fight down my temper. “Sit out on the porch, if you so desire. You cannot stay here. It is hot, and they will come.”

“Why should I fear a thing from them?
You
should be afraid!”

She tries to look defiant again—but I can detect some indecisiveness, some uncharacteristic hint of fear in her face. Something has spooked her, at least a little. Is it the growing cries of the mob we can hear now? How silent and deserted the street was yesterday?

“
Please—
go there. For your own sake. And for mine, too.”

There, I have said it. She hesitates for another long moment, looking me over, as if trying to see if she can trust me.

“All right—perhaps!” she says at last. “If you take me there!”

“What? Why?”

There is too much to do. I must get back down to the
Tribune,
then out to the streets again—

“You must take me there. Make sure the servants let me in, make sure they treat me right.”

She holds her chin up, intransigent again. But it will take up half
the morning, for me to escort her all the way up to Gramercy Park, then get back down to Printing House Square. I must get back out there, to see the struggle for the City at its most critical hour—to see it, and write about it. It is crucial for my career, my need to write something of lasting worth—

“I can take you someplace else,” I tell her. “Just for a while, a few hours. Then we could go—”

“No. To your house.”

“It is
impossible—
”

That word again. She puts her head down, crosses her arms over her chest and looks away.

After she came to my house the first time—from that moment on—she looked for any opportunity she could find to defy me. She sent away the tutors—the geography instructors and the music masters, and the dancing professor. When I asked her why, she only gave me a long, deliberate look.

“I will do as I like,” was all she would say.

That became her standard refrain. Whenever I tried to get her to accompany me somewhere, to take some excursion up the Hudson, or over to the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, she would level that same, baleful stare upon me—“
I do as I like.
”

Soon she began to turn away my gifts. The only thing she would take from me was clothing, on the account at Stewart's. Even there, though, she defied me. Dismissing the knowing widow, choosing whatever colors and fabrics she might, however vulgar. Having the seamstress cut them in the most lewd and garish patterns conceivable. I began to buy her finished dresses myself, which she accepted—only to cut these, too, as she liked.

“Are they mine or ain't they?”

“Yes, they're yours, all right—”

“Then I will wear them as I please.”

I thought then that she might leave me. In my more honest moods, I hoped for it, looked forward to the relief. But nevertheless I continued to ply her with more gifts, more entreaties.

To my surprise she did not go. She continued to sleep with me whenever I wished. We continued to play my little games.

Then one sunny Saturday morning, I arrived in time to see a Negro
tar from Trinidad walk out her door. He gave me a gap-toothed grin, tipped his hat to me, and said something obscene in Spanish while I stared at him, stupefied.

For all that I treated her like one, until that time I had never really understood that she was a whore. Or should I say, more accurately,
a public whore.
I flung the term at her one night, but she took it coolly enough.

“It was you what made me one, when you decided you did not love me.”

“You have so many other loves now. Perhaps you should see if they will foot the bill.”

A mistake. (How is it I could be so constantly outwitted by this unlettered girl?) She took down the plain silver necklace she wore around her lovely neck, the one piece of jewelry she had not refused from me.

“If you like. You can have this, too.”

She laid it in my palm like a limp thing, a handful of worms.

“You can sign the lease over to me, if you want. Otherwise, I can just go. If you got someone else in mind—”

“That won't be necessary!”

I continued to pay the rent. I continued to visit her, too. Rutting at her with some resurgent, wanton desire, even after her other lovers—her other
customers.
Writing down
their
stories, too, as she told them to me.

I kept going back even after her little visitation. She had never been pregnant before—not by
me,
at least that I knew. And truth to say, I never much concerned myself with it. When I thought on it at all, I simply assumed that she was utilizing some womanly art passed down by her mother, or some older girl at Gramma Em's.

Now, suddenly, she was as fecund as the rest of her race, breeding in each tenement rain gutter. She acted unabashed about it—implying she would get rid of it herself, or even have the child if I chose not to help her. Even speculating to me as to whom the father might be—a Nassau tar, a German or a Sicilian, or maybe even a Jew. As if the whole world had suddenly come to drop on my doorstep—

I took her up to Madam Restell's lonely marble palace on the Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street. Trying to make the visit as quick and discreet as possible, sweeping up in a covered hansom, the curtains
drawn. Pulling Maddy, as fast as I could move her, through the side visitors' door.

Everything was handled with impeccable discretion. Maddy issued into her waiting rooms by a bowing male servant. Scarcely a word spoken or any acknowledgment of our names, beyond the aliases I had chosen:
Mr. and Mrs. White.

Still, it was grotesque. Even Maddy was jolted by it. The siege of boys chanting, “
Madam Killer! Madam Killer!
” and “
Your house is built on babies' skulls!
” every time a carriage pulled in or out of her gates.

And inside, the endless halls of tessellated marble one had to walk through to Madam Restell's examining room, footsteps echoing flatly along the walls. Everything furnished in vulgar shades of red; the windows hung with scarlet satin curtains. Worst of all, the hall lined with huge gilded French mirrors, so that with every step we took, we looked back at ourselves. A frightened young pregnant woman, on the arm of a furtive-looking man slipping into middle age, his face half-obscured by his high collar.

I only saw Madam Restell herself by chance, at the end of their interview, when she held the door open for Maddy. She had a disconcerting way of looking right through me, a frank, chalky English face for all of her French airs. The face of the Gloucestershire shopkeep she was, measuring me exactly.

I bundled Maddy up in her cloak, whisking her back out the side door and to the rented carriage as quickly as I could. Laughing softly to herself, head down, as we drove back out through the horrible boys. Then turning to look at me, still laughing. Saying,
Well, that's it. I can't have any more—

What had I done? Should I have let her have her child
—my child,
perhaps? And if it wasn't?

But strangely, after that afternoon at Madam Restell's, there was no question of us parting. Maddy still saw her other callers, still did as she liked. More bitter with me than ever after that, more sharp-tongued, but there could be no good-byes now. I had seen her through the whole span of her youth, and we were bound now as closely as husband and wife, with all the appropriate grudges and resentments, and the binding hatred.

Of late we have done almost nothing between us, not even the silly game, the chains. We have become as quarrelous and chaste, as dependent
on each other as some elderly couple. Looking at her standing before me—sleeping beside me upstairs—I know that I might even love her. That at least I have loved nobody else.

So why didn't I marry her?
She was below me, certainly, but that hardly mattered. There is no City on earth, probably, where it matters less. New York is full of men and women who crawled up from God knows where, telling the world anything they wished. Madam Restell, with her French name and her English fishwife's face. Building her marble abortionist's mansion just two blocks from where Dagger John's beloved new cathedral still molders.

I could have changed Maddy's name, her past, her grammar. Brought her to my house in Gramercy Park. It wouldn't have made that much difference, save at the tables of those most ancient families of the City—who wouldn't have me anyway, on account of my profession.

So why?

Because I am a hack, after all. Only wanting to see my name in print, to revel in the praise and adulation of those I do not know. Wanting to watch the crowd, and write of it, but not to be part—not to be part of anything, in this great, dangerous, devouring City.

It is not too late to change, for both of us.
Is it?

“All right,” I tell her. “All right, then. Wait for me here. I will not be long. Wait for me here, open the door to no one save for myself. And I will come back and take you to my home.”

She looks at me, her arms crossed. Still suspicious, but hopeful.
Still afraid, of something.

She says nothing, just gives me a quick, short nod, and I turn again and go out the door. Back out into the blistering street, looking for a story. Telling myself it will not take long.