The Banished Children of Eve (58 page)

They rode north again, along the eastern section of the seven-mile wall that enclosed Central Park. There was planking strewn about, and mounds of raw earth that made it look as if a great explosion had just taken place.

“The
rich had it all set to build mansions on both sides of the avenue, with the park as their backyard,” said Cunningham, but Mayor Wood stopped 'em, a man of the people, Mayor Wood.”

“I'm not interested in politics,” Margaret said.

“Here ya gotta be, at least a man does, it's his bread and butter. He can't afford not to be interested, especially the Irishman. We all got an interest in keepin' the likes of men like Fernando Wood in power.”

“Mayor Wood is Irish?”

“No, but being a true Democrat he's careful to listen to the will of the people, and since a good number of the people in this city are Irish, he heeds our wishes.”

Cunningham began to discuss the city's politics. Margaret admired the hills and meadows in the park, new stands of trees emerging from the chaos, ponds and lakes in the process of construction. Cunningham turned from the park, and after a drive through some half-constructed streets, they reached a real wood, wild and overgrown, with none of the landscaped symmetry of Central Park.

“This is Jones's Woods,” he said. “A little ways up and we'll get a view of the river.”

They came into
a meadow that ran in a slight incline toward the river. Cunningham tied up the cart. Ahead was a wooden pavilion. A band was playing, and people were dancing. Cunningham went up the stairs without a word to Margaret. She stood outside, uncertain if she should follow. He came back in a few minutes with two mugs of beer. He drained his in one long gulp. They walked together to the end of the meadow, and it wasn't until they stepped up onto an immense outcropping of rock that the river came into view. It surged beneath them, a torrent of fast-moving water pushing toward the harbor.

“Over there is Blackwells Island.” Cunningham gestured with his empty mug at the wooded shore opposite. The roofs of several buildings poked through the trees. “The workhouse, the city prison, and the lunatic asylum, they're all over there. New York's got two insane asylums now. You know a city is on its way to being something when it's got to have two madhouses.”

They strolled back to the pavilion, and Cunningham kept going inside for more mugs of beer, and Margaret kept hoping that he would ask her to dance, but he didn't. They sat on the steps and listened to the musicians, Germans in purple uniforms with silver braid, and Cunningham talked politics. It was dusk when they finally left. The woods were already dark.

She half wished that he would kiss her, pull off into the woods, stroke her hair, embrace her, bury his head in her shoulder, confess some passion for her. She would kiss him back. She wasn't in love with him, but she felt so lonely she wanted to stay awhile longer with him, share some intimacy, words, gestures, even silence, open herself to the possibility of discovering in him a gentleness others didn't see and finding in herself the first stirrings of real attachment.

Cunningham moved the cart slowly through the woods. From behind came the faint sounds of the German band. “The Protestants love the niggers,” he said. His words were badly slurred. “Take a nigger over an Irishman any day, even got a home for nigger kids on Fifth Avenue. That's because they know they can run the nigger's life, cuz he ain't got enough sense to run his own, and they're afraid of the Irishman cuz of the opposite. They know in their heart of hearts, even if they don't ever admit it, we're every bit as good as them.”

At the word
heart
he thumped his chest the way the priest did when he said the Confiteor.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

The room was hot and close when she slipped into bed. Mrs. O'Sullivan was facing the wall. As soon as Margaret lay down, the older woman said, “Well, did he try to get back his fare?”

“He was a gentleman.”

“Never was a cartman who was a gentleman. Either he had too much to drink or he was in a hurry to get over to Greene Street to get what you wouldn't give.”

“He
said he was going home.” He hadn't told her where he was going. They had raced down the avenue and he had sung in a loud, drunken voice:

De Camptown ladies sing dis song,

Doo-dah! doo-dah!

Camptown racetrack five miles long,

Oh! Doo-dah-day!

“For some of them, Greene Street is home,” said Mrs. O'Sullivan. “The whores are the only family they've got. Well, at least he didn't leave you with anything you have to carry into confession.”

Margaret saw Cunningham twice after that. Both times they rode up to Jones's Woods, with the same result. He had too much beer, talked politics, and drove her home. Once winter came, she never saw him again.

The following fall, in 1860, a girl from the factory said she was applying for a job as a servant. The demand had picked up greatly, and the call for domestics was getting well ahead of supply. Mrs. O'Sullivan
advised Margaret against following the other girl's example. “It's a kind of slavery,” she said, “living your life under the eye of your master.” But Margaret thought Mrs. O'Sullivan's view was influenced by the loss of the rent she would suffer.

Margaret bought a dress from A. T. Stewart's for her interview at the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants. Though she got it at a steep discount, it had still cost her a month's salary.

Mrs. Bedford examined her application form as they stood in the vestibule of the house.

“I see you have experience as a resident domestic.”

“Yes, ma'am.” A small lie. She had cleaned houses in Cork City, but never lived in.

“I don't want an inexperienced girl. This is a well-ordered household, and it's important that any new help be able to master the routines.”

“You can count on it, ma'am.”

She cleaned the bathroom last, then relieved herself in Mr. Bedford's bowl.

Mea culpa.
Another offense against Mrs. Oswald's Commandment No. III.

It was almost time to serve Mr. Ward his lunch. Glancing at the mirror, Margaret adjusted her cap. After lunch she would sweep downstairs and polish the hallway floors—a nearly impossible task to keep them shined and spotless, free of the grime and dirt continually tracked in on boots and shoes. As she came down the stairs, somebody gave the front-door knocker a loud rap.

She opened the door. It was a workman in overalls, standing with cap in hand.

“I'm here to check the gas connections.”

“The connections?”

“The pipes. Make sure they're tight.”

“All right. Go below and I'll let you in.”

He put his cap back on and went down the stoop. Margaret stood at the door a minute. Odd, a tradesman coming to the front door instead of going below, but nobody knew his place anymore. Miss Kerrigan's complaint, and there was truth in it, the way some of the merchants dunned Mr. Bedford about bills, coming right to the front door, like invited guests, and demanding to see him.

Miss Kerrigan
was getting Mr. Ward's lunch ready when Margaret came into the kitchen.

“The gas man is here to look at the pipes.”

Miss Kerrigan went about her work. “Sure, we have no problem with the pipes. Tell him not to waste his time.”

Margaret walked to the front of the house and opened the basement door. The man was standing in the well beneath the stoop.

“The pipes is fine,” she said.

He stepped inside and removed his cap. “This is an inspection, ma'am. Once every three years. You was notified by post.”

He was on the short side, but taller than she. His dark hair was unparted and combed straight back from his forehead. He smiled at her, rows of white, even teeth, and blue eyes, a lovely soft color.

“It's getting warm out,” he said.

An American from the sound of him. But it was an Irish face. What was the harm in having the pipes checked? She would stay beside him the entire time, never giving him the chance to take anything, which some workmen weren't above doing, although this one didn't look the criminal type.

“It is indeed,” she said.

C
OLONEL
R
OBERT NOONAN LAY DOWN
to smoke a cigarillo, stretched out carefully, his head propped on two pillows, his boots extended over the bedside. He sucked in the smoke and released it just as the guns on the far side of Governors Island began to fire.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Big guns, they had been shipped to
New York a year
before, in the wake of the appearance of the ironclad
Merrimac
at Hampton Roads, and placed behind embankments dug by the Rebel prisoners held in Castle Williams. The North had been thrown into a panic, and although the
Monitor
had steamed out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, south to the mouth of the James, and arrived in time to save the Union fleet, the city's defense had nonetheless been reconstructed. From Fort Schuyler to the north, on Long Island Sound, to Sandy Hook, at the eastern tip of New Jersey, new batteries had been put in place, with more and bigger guns and thicker and stronger fortifications. The batteries on Governors Island were part of this effort. They were silent for the first months. But in June, to reassure the city in the wake of Lee's invasion, General John Ellis Wool, Commander of the Department of the East, ordered them fired every morning.

The city was given no notice. The morning the batteries were first fired, some people thought the Rebels had entered the harbor, and took refuge with their families in cellars and basements. One man stopped a streetcar and forced the driver at gunpoint to race uptown, away from the Rebel assault. Mayor Opdyke appealed to General Wool to halt the firings. “Such cannonading,” the Mayor wrote, “is an unwarranted irritant to the peace and tranquillity of the population.”

General Wool gave no
reply other than to keep the guns firing each morning. On July 4th, 1863, the day the news of General Meade's victory at Gettysburg arrived, General Wool ordered the guns fired continually for two hours until they were so hot the battery commander silenced them out of fear of an accidental explosion. The following day they resumed their regular firing. People ceased to notice. By now, the booming had become as much a part of the city's life as ferry whistles, church bells, and the roar of traffic.

Noonan had come out to Governors Island the evening before and spent the night. Here, he was too close to the guns not to notice them. The windows of his room rattled. Except for his tunic, he was already dressed. There was nothing more to do. In a few hours the first names would be pulled from the drum, and the draft would be under way. He drew more smoke from his cigarillo. The original plan had called for a massive troop presence throughout the city the day the draft began, but the Confederate invasion had resulted in the city being stripped of troops. If the previous week had brought news of a Union defeat, the draft would have been postponed. Victory had made everyone confident that the machinery of the draft would proceed unimpeded. The guns boomed again, then ceased.

In his office in the city, in the St. Nicholas Hotel, Noonan had mounted a large wall map of the wards that contained the great bulk of the city's population. He outlined in red those that contained the largest potential for violence, a vast contiguous area that ran from the Second Ward to the Seventeenth and covered most of the neighborhoods east of Broadway and south of Fourteenth Street. People lived there crammed in among factories and slaughterhouses, in cellars, in tenements, in the decaying ruins of the city's ancient housing stock. To the north was the other potential trouble zone, the shantytowns. Noonan told each provost that the enrolling officers couldn't rely on voting records or the census to give them a list of eligible draftees. Half those enrolled to vote were, as Tammany called them, “the brothers of Martha and Mary,” men as dead as Lazarus was before Jesus called him from the tomb. These new Lazaruses were summoned only on Election Day, when the likes of John Morrissey and company resurrected and reenfranchised them. In many areas the census was more a sampling than a summation. It avoided most of the hundreds of back-lot tenements reached through dark alleyways, and the cellars where four or five families shared a single room, and the wild terrain of the shantytowns, and the lodging houses where thousands upon thousands took their shelter one night at a time.

Noonan instructed the
enrolling officers to visit every building, shanty, tenement, lodge, hotel, house, and cellar. The draft was to be fair. No one would be able to claim that only Catholics or Democrats were being enrolled. Just as Congress had directed, the enrollment would include every male citizen and immigrant aged twenty to forty-five. No exceptions.