Paradise Alley (47 page)

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She watched him go, out into the street again, wondering if he would be back. Not sure if she wanted him back, hoping to God he would be.

She hadn't expected him the night before. She had finally fallen into a shallow sleep, with the help of the whiskey, when she had heard it—the quiet tapping on her own door. A sound both closer and more sinister than any of the wild cries she had heard from outside all day. There was just that small, insistent knock, in the middle of the night—as if someone were testing the door, testing to see if she were home.

She had sat up in the darkness, unable to move. Expecting next to hear the sound of the knob being twisted, the door frame beginning to splinter. Finally she had grabbed up the revolver and run to the window. Peeking out from behind the curtains at first, her palm tightening around the pistol. Feeling the sweat as it cooled on her naked back and neck.

We'll see to your niggers—

By then, though, Robinson had started to ring the bell. She had let him ring, listening with some pleasure to him calling her name out in the street. Then she had rushed down the stairs, pulled him eagerly inside, in her relief and desperation.

It had been like that when they were first together.
Without the game, without anything.
The two of them clinging to each other, against all the terrors of the City outside. Afterward they had listened to the rain, and
he had held her, and talked about all the terrible things he had seen, and how worried he was for her. And she had held his head against her chest, and let him.

Yet now he was off again. Promising to return, to finally take her to his house. He had even sounded sincere for a change, though she tried not to believe him—to believe that she needed him at all.

I do as I like.

But she didn't, not now. She had let him go, even though she didn't want to. Already, she could hear it starting up again. The same distant, roaring sound. The mob on the move again, somewhere. While she sat and waited for him to return.

In the beginning he had been much more fun. It was a more straightforward transaction; she had no illusions about it. She was used to the hands of men on her. She was even used to the hands of men raised against her—was more than willing to trade that in for a real bed, in a private room, with clean white linens and a mirror to see herself.

In the summer he would take her out to Coney Island for a week, to wade in the sea, and stay in a hotel, and dance around the midnight bonfires with the other guests. Or at night he might take her to see one of the blood-and-thunders, or a Mose play on the Bowery
—Mose and the Gold Rush,
or
Mose in Bleeding Kansas.
They would sit up in the top galleries, with the newsboys and the street sweeps, the ragpickers and the cinder girls. Stamping their feet and whistling, chanting, “
Hoist dat rag!
” along with the rest before the curtain came up. Drinking whiskey from a flask and eating fresh-roasted chicken wrapped in a newspaper, tossing the bones down on the fat German mechanics and their wives, sucking on peppermints and pink lemonade in the stalls.

Afterward Robinson would take her to the Atlantic Gardens and there, amid all the crowds and the pandemonium, they might have still more fun for a while. They would perch on a bench inside the enormous beer hall, ensconced in the continual din of the drums and bass fiddles, the pianos and harps, and the shooting-gallery rifles, and the men slamming down their dominoes and dice.

They would sit there, wedged together, the whole commotion so loud they could barely talk to each other. And she would look over at him, and see his gaze slide away. Taking in the scene around them, as if trying to fix it in his memory. Looking for some interesting character to
shout back and forth with. Robinson's lips smiling at her, but his eyes moving away restlessly, evasively, whenever she tried to look at him.

It was around then that she had tried to become what he wanted, even though she had no good idea of what that might be. It was then that she had let him move her and her mother to the house he had rented for them. When she had begun to take the lessons that he pushed on her—learning to read and to figure; to dance, and to play the square piano that still sat in the corner, its case unopened for years now. Learning how to dress, and to carry herself.

She had not asked him for anything, content to take what he thought she should have. Grateful to him for providing a decent home for her mother, a dry, warm room for her in the winter. An ailanthus tree out the back window, where they could watch the birds lighting in the summer, just as they had back in St. John's Park when they were still a family. Sometimes, when Robinson came over for supper, it felt almost like they
were
a family again—the way it had been when her father had been alive, the three of them laughing and eating together around the kitchen table.

And when her mother died Robinson had hired out an enormous hearse, with a great glass-box wagon to mount the coffin in, and horses with regal black plumes on their heads, and a carriage for them to follow in. She had relished the looks from the other women on the block as he'd helped her up into her seat—dressed in the fine black crepe-trimmed bonnet and dress he had bought her, complete with an actual veil. She knew how much her mother would have appreciated such a funeral for herself, how much it would have meant to her. And when, three blocks from Paradise Alley she had begun to cry compulsively, she could not help but lean in to him, and let him comfort her.

She supposed that she was in love with him by then. Or at least, she had wanted him to see her, to really see her now. Watching herself in the mirror every morning, smoothing out her fine new clothes, her green-striped taffeta day dress, or her mantilla wrap, embroidered with red and brown velvet. Barely knowing herself, how different she looked. Thinking that this must be the start of it, that Robinson must be changing her into what he wanted, what he could love.

She had been through this before. Dressing up for the men down on Broadway, and the Bowery. Putting on the checkered shawl and the ragged dress of the hot-corn girl, and taking off her shoes. Playing at
something they wanted, though she barely knew what that was, either. Yet they had come around, circling her avidly, and she had realized then that men would accept almost any disguise.

Robinson had come, too—and she had sat in the house he rented for her, waiting, patiently shaping herself into what he wanted. But there had been nothing else. Still she had waited, trying to impress him with her newly acquired skills. Engaging him in what conversation she could on the day's events, or a book her tutor had had her read. Playing for him on the square piano.

He had only sat in a chair in the corner, sipping his brandy and blowing smoke rings from his cigar at the ceiling. She had not understood it at first, because she was not allowed at the sort of evenings he attended. She could not accompany him to the society dinners and the musical soirees, the seances and nocturnal tappings, so only gradually did she begin to get the idea. Able to glean it solely from his manner and his tone of voice, his expression and his half smiles and all the other little hints she now paid so much attention to. Not until then did she understand that what she was turning herself into was just what he was used to, and was already thoroughly bored with.

Then had come the show at Schaus's. She had not quite understood that, either—the men circling all around a statue, with a halo over it like the Virgin Mary. Some solid, well-fed girl, with an expression Maddy recognized from the women at Gramma Em's brothel in the Seven Sisters, staring off impassively over the heads of the men perusing her.

Nonetheless, she had let him take her home after that, and stood before him and let him tie her hands as the statue's had been tied. Her new maroon frock laid out over the chair beside her. Standing before him, in the parlor of her little house. His breath coming in short, shallow draughts as he watched her there. Letting his hands move over her—while she stood there helpless, unable to touch him in return.

He never seemed to grow bored with the game, had even moved on to real chains. They were light enough, discovered in God knew what brothel, or maybe even custom-made by some discreet blacksmith.
It was not hard, in this town, to get a chain for anyone.
Fastening them eagerly about her hands, sometimes her ankles as well; draping them about her shoulders, her breasts.

When the weather was good, he might take out a carriage. Driving them out on Broadway, then far up the Bloomingdale Road. Past all
the little squatter villages of Irish, and the Negroes up there, the small plots of corn, and wood stills and crude rendering plants. All the way up to some isolated thicket of woods, past any remaining dribble of civilization.

There he would have her go through the whole game. Taking off her garments one at a time. Laying them over a tree branch or a stump, until she was completely naked. Watching her every move—then walking slowly up to her and snapping the chains on while she stood there waiting, trembling. Intensely aware of every sound of the birds and the smaller animals in the brush around her—the farther-off sounds from the City of whistles and hammers, the tremble of the New York and Harlem rails to the west—

One afternoon there had been an especially loud rustling in the trees, more than a dog or any other creature might make. She had thought something was wrong the moment she heard it, but before she could even get to her clothes, the men were walking out into the clearing.

There were two of them, leering openly as they looked her over—trying to cover her nakedness as best she could, but restrained by the chains. They wore long traveling coats, covered in red dust, and broad-brimmed slouch hats pulled down over their eyes. They had irons themselves, slung from their belts, and coiled bullwhips at their hips. She had seen men like them in the City before, and she realized at once what they had to be, skulking around in the woods so close to the coloreds' village.
Blackbirders—

“I see ya got one already,” the first one out of the woods said—grinning and winking at Robinson where he stood, rooted across the clearing from her, his face perfectly expressionless.

“Looks like ya been poachin' on us.”

They turned their back on him, and moved toward her. Their pink faces nearly identical under the black hat rims, lined with dirt and scraggly, red-brown hair. Round, feral eyes looking her over.

“She's just a little green niggah anyway. Brown ‘er up in the sun a little, we could take ‘er right back with us—”

“She already got the irons an' everything!”

They walked up to her, and she tried to hold herself perfectly still. Meeting their gaze, their eyes like those of dogs she used to see on the streets. Staring right into them, hoping they would back down—

“All right now.”

Robinson had spoken quietly from across the meadow. Pulling back his duster to show the pistol he had in his belt.
Of course he would take precautions,
she thought with a small tug of relief, but resenting him for it as well.
Thinking he might need such a thing, he had brought her anyway.

“All right.”

They ignored him, moving in on her, until Robinson pulled the gun and clicked the hammer back. This did make them pay attention, though they still did not move away from her.

“You've had your joke now. Go on back to whatever Carolina shithole you came from.”

Still they did not back off—and she could see now that they, too, carried pistols on their belts, tucked just behind the bullwhips.

“
Wait—
” she started to say, but she couldn't get the rest of it out. Fearing that they would kill him, and her, too.
While if he just let them do her . . . .
It wouldn't be nice, but that would be the end of it, nobody would get killed. Besides, they would do her anyway—

The first one turned his grinning face back to her.