The Banished Children of Eve (35 page)

     
De Camptown ladies sing dis song,

     
Doo-dah! doo-dah!

On
Doo-dah!
the rider brought the strap down on the lieutenant's rear. It made a loud
thwap.
The lieutenant bucked like a horse.

     
De Camptown racetrack five miles long

     
Oh! Doo-dah day!

Thwap.

The Gallagher
brothers didn't join in the singing. They stared across the room. Their large, protruding eyes gave them a hangdog look.

“They're deef,” Cassidy said, “deef as stone. Could shoot a cannon off right in their ears and wouldn't bother them a bit, and they've no speech either, not a word, deef and dumb as the dead. The Protestant missionaries was always trying to take them from their mother when they was pups, said she couldn't care proper for them and the other twelve children with no father about, came once with a court paper empowering them to remove the twins, but Mrs. Gallagher was a Galway woman, with the gift of guile the people of those parts so naturally possess, and she hid them beneath a pier, kept them there for near two months, out of sight, before the Protestants gave up. The boys didn't disappoint her. Went to work as stokers on a steamboat, the infernal noise of the engines that drives some men mad never bothered them, their ears sealed by God, and once the traveling urge got in their blood, they never stopped moving, becoming cabin boys and porters and finally going into a trade of their own as a pair of wandering gips, working all routes west, rail as well as steam, relieving the unsuspecting passenger of whatever valuables they can and doing it with such noiseless grace he's none the wiser till the twins is long gone.”

The
twins watched closely the proceedings on stage, where the lieutenant, red-faced and sweating, was struggling to get out from beneath the riders and the rain of blows. He grabbed the front rider by the boot and twisted. She screamed. The rear rider reached back and put her hand between his legs and squeezed. He cried out and heaved himself to his feet, spilling both girls to the floor. He stormed off the stage, and the crowd cheered.

Dunne studied the faces of the brothers. The only deaf and dumb boy he ever knew was Grover O'Higgins, a runner for the Dead Rabbits. Moved quick as a fly. They all knew he was deaf but shouted for him as if he could hear. Someone turned it into a ditty:

Grover, come here,

Grover, come here,

Stand there, stand here,

Or I'll stick me foot up your rear!

It was true: He got kicked when he didn't come. A face filled with eagerness and fear, eyes that studied every face with searching intensity.

“'Tis a terrible fate befallen us,” said Cassidy. “Days past, the Paddies of this town all knew one another or knew someone who knew someone who knew them, a great iron circle of unbroken bonds that the rat-noses could never dent, but now there are so many of us we live in ignorance of one another, traveling about like the followers of Ulysses clinging to the underside of thick-fleeced sheep. To think there are those your age, Dunne, that is unacquainted with the Gallagher brothers, it's a thing to lament most grievously.”

Cassidy went on with his lament, his voice competing with the barroom noise. “His gift for talk,” Dandy Dan once told Dunne, “is from his father, one of those scholars of the Irish tongue who taught in fields and barns, a ‘hedge schoolmaster,' as they was called, skilled in Latin and Greek and the ancient stories. A man of learning, though in the things of the world as lacking as those he taught. Unlike most of the scholarly kind, Cassidy the Elder was married. Barely able to keep his family from starvation, he brought them to New York same time as my old man came over with us, during the famine of '32, and they met each other working on the laying of Croton pipe. Was a hard thing to watch, my old man said, poor Cassidy with a shovel, so unskilled was the scholar in the ways of the spade, but he did his best and amused the other men with his stories and his learning till one day, in the middle of a tale, Cassidy the Elder sits down and holds his head. Someone asks what's wrong but he never answers, just keels over facedown dead in the bottom of a watery ditch, dying
has gan sagart,
as the old people say, without a priest, and was carted off to potter's field leaving nothing to his family but his learning and his talent for talk, the latter a legacy all the Cassidys share in.”

Cassidy
ordered another round of whiskeys. He handed the Gallagher brothers their glasses and stepped aside so Dunne could pay.

“We aren't the people we once were, no doubt of that,” Cassidy said, “a nation of poets, warriors, and priests, our royalty showing through our rags, the most ancient race of Europe, our country conquered by the treachery of an English-speaking rabble but our souls and spirits free. What have we become? Just look around. A broken, dispirited, anonymous mob of pleasure seekers cowed by the likes of Robert Noonan, that lickspittle calls himself a provost marshal, the greatest traitor of the day!”

“We still have men like Morrissey,” Dunne said.

“Thank God for it,” Cassidy said, rapping his knuckles on the bar.

“None can cow him.”

“The man hasn't been born yet.”

“Nor show him disrespect.”

“None.”

“Nor dare to cheat him.”

Cassidy took his drink in one gulp and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Well, some have tried, no doubt, but paid the price.”

Dunne ordered
another round. “Always a price to pay for crossing John Morrissey,” he said.

“Always.”

“Seems to me only a fool would take the risk.” Dunne passed around the drinks.

“'Tis true, but such are always in abundance, especially in New York, the mecca of fools everywhere.”

The Gallagher brothers took their drinks without removing their eyes from the stage. Three waiter girls were singing a soft melody. The words were inaudible; every few minutes, as they bent at the waist and the low cut of their blouses practically exposed their breasts, a cheer went up.

Cassidy leaned close to Dunne, and seeming to forget that it was only the Gallaghers who might overhear (and couldn't anyway), whispered to him, “They aren't hard to find, the kind of fools you spoke about; indeed, you need go no farther than these premises: One of the cabal of the rat-noses that owns this place is as big a fool as God makes and has traded away his future at the faro table. Morrissey is breathing down his neck for payment, a hot and discomforting breath it must be.”

“Is he a gentleman?”

Cassidy laughed. “A crude hayseed of a Yankee is what he is, an original apple-knocker from some upstate backwater, one of those crossroads calls itself a town. Made a bundle on Wall Street and, from what I hear, lost it too, and is now in danger of losing more precious things, like life and limb.”

“And he owns the Trump?”

“A part. He was the one brought in the spectacle of the lovely Anatid, a sight even Barnum can't match. The Trump was just another concert saloon until Halsey came up with the notion of offering private viewings of the Swan, found her, too, a girl worth ogling. A pimp's work, but the house rewarded him with a proprietary interest in the place since it was him who raised it to prominence.”

“Halsey know the danger he's in?” Dunne asked.

“Does the mouse fear the cat? The man may be a
speculator and pimp, but he's got ears and eyes. He knows what Morrissey will do to a welsher and knows too that when his luck was running high and the cards running his way, he boasted about putting Morrissey out of business and taking the faro palace away from him. Morrissey will never forget the slight. He'll do to Halsey what Achilles did to Hector, not just destroy him but subject his fallen form to shameful outrage.”

Cassidy called for more drinks. Dunne turned and watched the stage. A line of waiter girls were kicking their legs. He wouldn't press Cassidy any further. He had what he was after. A lead.
Halsey.
Didn't sound like Capshaw's gentleman visitor, but it was a place to start.

The waiter girls moved back and forth across the stage, their arms locked together, an identical half-moon smile on each face.

A waiter girl came up beside the Gallagher brothers. “Would you like to see the Swan?” she said. Neither of the brothers looked at her.

“How about One-Eyed Jack?” she said.

“Little need have I of such foolishness,” Cassidy said.

“You'd come sure enough if you could get someone else to pay. How about your friend here? Maybe he'd like a view and will take you along.”

Dunne shook his head, turned, and paid for the last round of drinks. He felt beyond such boy's stuff, peeking through holes at a naked woman. Look but don't touch. He wasn't averse to the pleasures the likes of Anna O'Brien could offer, but in his heart was a desire he never spoke about, a desire few denizens of the Bowery or the Five Points ever seemed to think about, a desire for what seemed out of reach, not merely a woman, but a wife, children, a home. Lying abed at night in the cold, damp darkness of the New-York Orphan Asylum, he had thought of that warm and distant world, closed his eyes, and tried to keep it there until the occasional coughing from the other beds, the sleepers' cries for mothers who would never come, the sound of the whistles on the river, night noises, distinct and lonely, drew him back to where he was.

He had his first woman when he was fourteen. Been
out of the orphanage almost two years. Left one day on a scow, hidden beneath a canvas tarp, landed in Manhattan, gone back to the old neighborhood he had been taken from six years before, when his mother died of cholera. Ran with a pack of Paddy urchins like himself till he landed in the arms of a Municipal and was hauled before a rat-nosed judge.

“Mr. Dunleavy,” said the judge staring down at him, “you have committed a theft while riding a public conveyance. You deserve to go to jail.” The judge glanced at a tall somber man who stood at the side of the bench. “What do you think, Mr. Scott?”

“I think what I have always thought, Your Honor,” Mr. Scott said. “It is a waste to send a boy such as this—and despite his crime, that is what he is, a boy—to a penal institution in which he will be further schooled in criminal depravity. What boys like this one need are Christian homes free of superstition, ignorance, and drunkenness. In the proper setting, surrounded by habits of thrift, piety, and honesty, divorced from the influences that have misshapen them, it is possible they may one day grow into mechanics, farmers, taxpayers.”

“I doubt it, Mr. Scott. In my experience, few things short of hanging can change the direction of a youth set out on a life of crime. His is invariably a felon's doom. But if the Children's Aid Society promises that this criminal will be removed to a distance not less than a thousand miles from this city, I will consent to put him in your custody.”

“Your Honor, I cannot promise the distance to which he will be removed, but I can aver that as we have done with a myriad of his ilk, the Society will provide this boy with the chance for a new and productive life.”

Jimmy Dunne left in autumn, part of a company of forty-three boys and girls. He was among the oldest, the majority being between the ages of six and ten. Jimmy was brought by Mr. Scott from jail to the Hudson River pier on the morning of the departure. The agent in charge was the Reverend Edgar Potts, a visitor of the Society, who was assisted by two matrons. He had the children line up in rows. He searched the clothes and sacks of the boys, the matrons those of the girls. They confiscated scapulars, rosary beads, religious medals, several knives, and a small vial of gin. Each child was then given a Bible. “This is the greatest protection and comfort you will have on our journey,” Mr. Potts said. “Cling to it.” He told them to kneel, and said a prayer over them. The boy kneeling next to Jimmy was small and frail. He was clothed in a silver-buttoned tunic several sizes too big for him. “O Holy Mother of God,” he said over and over again in a thin voice, “we're going to Kansas, and the Indians
will eat us.”

They traveled up the Hudson overnight. Mr. Potts locked the older boys and girls in a cabin. Most of the children were Paddies, but there was a contingent of Germans who spoke to one another in their own language until Mr. Potts forbade any conversations except in English. In Albany they were given breakfast and put aboard a train for Buffalo. For many of the children it was their first trip on the rails, and there was an air of excitement as they got aboard. But Jimmy and the older children were locked in a windowless baggage car, and their excitement soon turned to tedium. In Buffalo they boarded another boat. By now the novelty of the trip had disappeared for everyone. The little children were crying constantly, and the older ones were sullen and withdrawn. Mr. Potts and the matrons were rarely to be seen. They arrived in Detroit before dawn, walked through dark, empty streets to another rail station, and climbed onto a train for what seemed an endless journey through great forests that gradually gave way to a flat, treeless land. At several stops, Mr. Potts and the matrons removed small groups of children to a nearby church or hall. Mr. Potts invariably carried one of the little ones in his arms, tousling his hair, hugging him, making it seem as if such playfulness were a usual part of their relationship.

A crowd gathered at each place, farmers and their wives waiting in their wagons until the children
appeared. They looked the children over the way they would a horse, examining teeth, feeling limbs, turning heads this way and that. “Good children all,” Mr. Potts said each time. “I've come to know every one of them in special ways. I envy your chance to suffer these little children to come unto you.”