Paradise Alley (21 page)

That is all it takes. The uniformed policeman next to Kennedy pulls his nightstick, trying to protect him—but another huge Irisher runs up behind him, and belts him over the head with a wooden fence stave. He knocks the officer to the ground, next to his chief, and begins to strip him of his uniform, raging wildly at the unconscious man while he tears it away:

“You son of a bitch! Now I've got you and I'll finish you!”

The crowd takes up the shout, closing around them, beating Kennedy's clerk as well. Somehow, Kennedy himself manages to get back on his feet again. He begins to run, staggering, down the street—the mob right after him. Chasing the City's superintendent of police through the streets, striking and punching at him when they catch him.

Kennedy breaks free again, running blindly for his life. Eagan and I run helplessly after them all, trying to think of something we can do. The mob on Kennedy's heels baying and barking like so many hounds.

“C'mon, boys! Stick together and we can lick all the damn police in the City!”

“Finish the son of a bitch!”

A man swings at Kennedy with a club of some sort, knocking him down into a construction pit. He goes sliding down, headlong through the yellow mud, and I fear he is finished. But he gets back up at once, scrambling desperately up the far side of the pit as the mob races around after him.

We race with them, Eagan and I, trying to beat the mob to him. And then do—what? I thrust my hand down into my coat pocket—remember again that I gave the big Colt revolver Raymond handed me to Maddy.

It would do little good anyway, against such a mob. The only hope is flight, and Kennedy is already out the other side of the pit now, still running but slowing noticeably. I see his face as he runs toward us—reddened and groggy, mouth slumping open in exhaustion. His face and his neat new suit covered in his own blood, in the yellowed mud from the pit—the chalk of the grave already upon him.

I yell at him to hurry—as if he does not fully understand the peril
he is in. Beside me Eagan is yelling, too, even as he looks around desperately for Kennedy's beaten guards, his carriage. God only knows what will become of us all if the mob notices us. But they are too fixed on their quarry—and now they have him. Even as he stretches out his arms to us, imploring, the man with the club catches up again, and fetches Kennedy one last, resounding blow to the back of the head.

It sends him sprawling, a dead weight, right into the arms of Eagan. He holds him there while the mob rushes up, their eyes wide with excitement. Wondering if they have really done it, killed the superintendent of police in the street—

Eagan swings Kennedy's body around to face them. He gropes for the superintendent's pulse—then looks up with an expression of shock and horror, letting Kennedy slip slowly down his legs to the ground.

“He's dead, boys,” Eagan tells them, almost in a whisper, standing his ground as the Irish behemoth and his friends rush up.

“You done it. It's all over—”

The mob pauses at the news. Even they, realizing in their maddened state that
this
would have consequences.

“Jesus, but they'll have the army on us now!”

“No use waitin' to see—”

They fall away, their bloodlust sated for the moment. I go up to Eagan, who is crouched protectively over the body.

“I never saw a man more alive than he was last night—”

“Shut up. He ain't dead,” Eagan whispers.

“What?”

“He's still alive—the goddamned fool! Get his carriage!”

Somehow, the mob hasn't spooked his horse, and I am able to guide the carriage around to Lexington Avenue. By the time I do, Kennedy's clerk and his guard have made their way over to us, beaten bloody themselves, and stripped to their underwear. Between us we are able to haul Kennedy into his carriage, cover him with gunney sacks from the construction site, and pack him off down to headquarters.

“You should come, too,” Eagan tells me before he kicks up the horses.

He is right, of course. I should go back to downtown, to shelter at the
Tribune.
Above all, I should go to Maddy, make her come with me.

But I don't. I have my duty, my vocation. It is what I tried to explain to Father Knapp, but could not.
My job is to see, and to tell.

All my life I have been too afraid—of my own failings, of the City around me—to really get down to the street and see life as it is. To see what it is that holds me back, that keeps my writings from being anything more than scribblings on a page.

And now I have my chance, presented to me suddenly, serendipitously. That cave-in at the old De Peyster house this morning has given me the perfect disguise. Now I can move among them, these wild Irish, these mobs, even at the height of their frenzy—yet undetected,
unseen
myself.

It is too good a chance to pass up. Maddy will wait, the mob is still far uptown. There will be time, plenty of time, for me to see and tell. I hurry back toward the draft office, and the mob. The whole block is burning now, the thick smoke billowing out at me as I go toward it.

•
26
•

When she got back Milton had the other children up and dressed and sitting at the table. He went from one to the other, getting them their food, seeing to their needs—as quick and assured in his movements as his father must have been in his trade, she thought.

I would've liked to see him build a ship. I never did see him build one—

Stopping herself then, making herself stop thinking about it as if she would never see Billy again. Instead she smiled at Milton
—her good boy—
and went about getting breakfast. Porridge and milk again, and the babies whining about it, but there was nothing else left in the house.

“I don't
wan'
it!”

“I don'
wan'
it neither!”

Vie and Mana taking turns, their eyes large and teary.

“You'll eat it. We're lucky to have that now—”

Most mornings she might try to baby them into eating. Play a little game, tell some goblin story she remembered from around the hearth.

How strange, how strange not to eat anything laid before you.

She still had trouble herself not eating things that fell on the ground. They rolled right out of the wagons and onto the street, potatoes and turnips and onions, and apples and even sides of meat. She knew that she had reached Heaven when she first saw that, despite her many sins—

But now there was no chance of getting the children anything more, even if she could leave the house. It was impossible to find coffee in the markets for less than fifty cents a pound, sugar for less than twenty. Even then, what she could get wasn't very good. There was sawdust mixed in with the coffee, sand in the sugar; red lead in the pepper and Prussian blue dye in the tea.

“Ain't there nothin' else, then? Nothin' else
at all?
”

They made faces when they tasted the milk, and she picked up the can she had managed to buy the day before, picking out the words PURE ORANGE COUNTY MILK machine-stamped on the side.

She poured a drop of it out into her palm and licked at it. The milk was a queasy, blue-white color and tasted like chalk and magnesia. She doubted the cow had ever come within fifty miles of Orange County. No doubt it was some poor, spavined, consumptive animal. Fed on mulch in the dark stalls of some Williamsburg brewery—

“No, there's nothing else. You can eat that now or go hungry.”

Milton answered for her when she remained distracted. Looking down at his little sisters so sternly that they burst into giggles.

Ruth smiled, too.
Her two little girls.
She had so looked forward to having them, so she would not be alone in a household of men. They were lighter-skinned than Milton, though they looked less like her than they did her mother.
Worse luck.
At least they had some of their father in them, too: his broad, strong features. Solemn, intelligent brown eyes.

Sometimes she thought she could feel Billy pondering her through them. That serious gaze leveled upon her, assessing her as carefully as he did everything—a piece of wood, a man, the dinner on the plate before him. The face of a man who had once jumped without looking, and was now more wary. He did not trust, perhaps, but there was forbearance, too. A sadness and a kindness she had always clung to, hoping it would be enough.

Where was he now?

Where was her husband? It was getting too late, she knew, too late even to leave for the ferries, with all these men out in the street. She wondered if they should go anyway—but she was more worried by the thought of him laid out somewhere, bleeding in an alley. Or worse.

No, not Billy. Billy would know better, he would know to lay low, he would not get caught out like that.

But even if he came through the door with his wages the next minute, she didn't know what they would live on, out on the road, with five children, away from all their friends and neighbors. Just to leave, to head up into New England or out into Pennsylvania would eat up everything they had—

But we can't stay here.
She tried to set herself to it, telling herself again it wasn't Ireland, this wasn't a starving country. There were miles and miles of farms, and fields full of wheat and corn, and cities like this one.

But what mercy could they expect? A nigger family—black nigger, green nigger—going door to door during this war?

Nine o'clock.

The children ate what they would of the porridge and the brewery milk, and clamored to go outside. Usually by this time the streets and the back lots would be full of their friends, screaming and chasing each other.

Today, though, she would keep them inside—would tie them to her apron strings if she could. Milton took them in hand. Moving them back to the bedroom, inventing games out of nothing to entertain them, and she was grateful for it, but for all that she missed their noise. Rising and falling outside like the sound of the ocean, off Moher. The lulling hush of the waves—

Standing in the grass at the top of the cliff with her brothers and sisters, the other children and their mothers. Waiting silently for the men, despite this chance to talk and gossip. Stupefied by the wash of the waves. The seaweed, when it came, surprisingly heavy, and slippery as eels. The men emptying it out of the baskets they carried on their backs. The children stripping it down—slick and briny, the sea salt and the sand stinging their eyes. Their mothers curling and bundling it with flax, ready to be taken back and spaded into the thin and ungiving earth. The long, fishy curls, to be grown into potatoes. To be grown into
them,
the potato people—

“No, no, no!”

“Yes, that's the rule!”

She heard the cries of the children in the bedroom now, chanting in unison against some decision by their older brother. Milton firmly turning down their appeal. She had to smile, to hear it.
He knew the rules—

The street outside was still nearly silent. The women in, too, with their men, or waiting for them. Even their laundry pulled in from the empty lines, where before they limply crisscrossed the back lots like so many fallen flags.

Where was her Billy?

By now, most days, she would have started over to the Germans, up at the ragpickers' rookeries. A cluster of slanting wooden shacks, built on the barren blocks between the central park and Jones's Wood. Everything between them—the yards, and the doorways, and the stovepipe chimneys—strung with lines of drying rags, and baskets full of bones. Inside the shacks was stuffed every scrap of garbage the bent old German women could scavenge—broken dishes and legless chairs, bits of colored ribbon and cloth. Pieces of stamped tin and fractured lamps, buckets of cinders and burned-out coals.

Anything and everything they could find that might conceivably be twisted and glued together into a toy, a doll. Leaving only enough room on the floor for the ancient German women, Mrs. Krane and Mrs. Mueschen, to shove their skinny beds together. Ruth worked there each day until her fingers ached. Wrapping and pinning cloth around old mutton bones, polishing and shining, cutting and trimming. Creating bright, society dolls out of whole cloth. It paid four dollars a week, but she had had worse jobs. At least the German women didn't bother if she brought her children to sit and play amid the hills of garbage, and they let her talk with the other women as they worked by the hearth, heads down over the bright and putrid scraps in their aprons.

It gave her a chance, too, to slip a finished doll into her pocket from time to time. She took home only her best work—the pretty little maids that she created from the best patches of felt, the shiniest bones she could find, squirreled away discreetly into her pile. Polished a dark black from the coal pieces, so they shone like their father's lovely face.

She had to take some care about it. She had seen the German women strike other girls who had stolen from them, resenting the theft of even the least bit of garbage they had picked up from the ash bins. Their eyes were always hooded and watchful behind large, round spectacles, constantly appraising their kingdoms of garbage. They kept their sharp sticks near the door, in a salvaged umbrella stand—ready to beat back the stray packs of Irishwomen who came
agitating during the bad times, demanding they throw all the coloreds out of their shop.

Mostly so they can pay us all less,
Ruth knew. During these brawls they hid in the back of the shed with the others. The colored women not wanting their faces to be seen at all, knowing the fury the mere sight of them would raise. Ruth and the other whites keeping hidden as well, for they knew there would be retribution should they be seen to work in the same shop with coloreds—

It was the best job she could get, though, and she feared losing it, if only because of the chance to make the dolls for her honeys, her girls. They were her daughters' greatest pride. The black-faced figures—or coffee-colored, exactly the shade of their own, a color gleaned from rubbing old tobacco across a knot of wood.
Unlike any doll the other children on the alley might have—

It was Ruth's greatest pride, as well. Just knowing she could make them—could sell them, even, in the great stores, and earn the money when Mrs. Mueschen counted it out, into her palm every Friday, in two-bit pieces. Knowing she could do it, could do something to provide. That she wasn't useless—

She heard the church bells ringing, and she jerked her head around sharply, distracted from the sound of her children.

Ten o'clock—and where was Billy?