Paradise Alley (37 page)

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40
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She started awake, still not fully aware that she had dozed. The stark, winter stars and the half-moon were gone. It was summer again—and now the night sky had an apocalyptic, orange hue. There was a heavy smell of smoke in the air, even where she was inside, through the clasped shutters.

“Hullo! Hullo!”

There was a banging on the front door, so loud and heedless that it frightened her at first.
The troops in front of their cabin, bayonets glinting in the sunlight, while the land agent read his bill of ejectment—

“Hullo! Are ye
there,
then? Are ye still in there? Hullo!”

It was Deirdre, the impatient, peremptory voice unmistakable. Ruth began to unbolt the door—casting a look around the room as she did at the children, still sleeping where she had left them, slumped on the floor or about the chairs.
Worrying even now what Deirdre might think, to see them still up—

“Hullo! Ruth, can ye hear me?”

“Yes, yes!”

She pulled the door open hastily. Surprised to see the look of concern across Deirdre's face—even as it changed at once back to annoyance, to the usual impatience with anything having to do with
her.

“You're here, then. Did you fall asleep? And these children—awake still!”

Milton was already gathering them up, ushering them into their common bedroom. They went passively, walking in a trance, not even crying to be so disturbed. She watched Deirdre watch them go with her usual expression, something between exasperation and astonishment that any children could be such a color, and still talk and cry and smile like real babies.

“What is it, then? Did they take the town back?” Ruth asked.

Knowing it couldn't be true, or Billy would be back. Wishing again—

“No. It's worse than that,” Deirdre told her in a low voice, waiting until all the children were out of the room. “The word is, they took the Armory. Maybe the Steam Works, as well. They got all the guns they want, now—”

“I see.” Ruth said. Her mind going blank as she waited for what she thought Deirdre was about to tell her.

“They burnt the Colored Orphans' home,” she blurted out, then grabbing Ruth's arm, adding quickly, “
Mind you,
there's no word of anyone dead. Leastways, there was nobody there when they got in—they know that for sure. The great bravos are walking all up and down the street, regretting that the place was empty, and bragging about what they would have done if it hadn't been.”

“All right. All right, then,” Ruth said, taking a breath, determined not to let Deirdre see her cry—not to let go of herself now, with the children to be taken care of still, and worse to come.

So he was out there, somewhere, with all those poor children. If he really was still alive. Maybe it was even proof he was alive. After all, someone had to take the orphans out, get them away from the mob—

She forced herself to think, to talk.

“All right. So what's there to do, then?”

She could scarcely credit it, in the gloomy light through the shutters, but she could have sworn that she saw a look of admiration flicker across Deirdre's face.

“Not much—not much to be done, at that. They say they're burning the whole town. There are fires everywhere—”

“Can we still run for it, then?”

“It would be folly, now. The mob's all over, attacking people in the street. But I was thinking . . . .”

She let the sentence trail off, looking down for a moment at the
floor Ruth had swept so fervently that morning, thinking that she would walk away and never see the place again.

“You could come with the children to our home. For the night. It'd be safer that way. From the mob and from
him—
”

“No, I couldn't do that,” Ruth told her—though to her continuing surprise, Deirdre actually seemed anxious for her to accept. “Your own family would be in danger. It wouldn't be right—”

“Since when has
my
family had a thing to fear from such street rabble?” Deirdre scoffed, contemptuous again.

“This is different—”

“Nonsense! Respectable white people in a white house—they wouldn't dare to disturb us.”

“But Billy—when he comes back, how'll he find us? How'll he know where to go?”

“We'll keep a watch for him,” Deirdre told her briskly.

Milton had just come back in the room, and to Ruth's surprise she even acknowledged his existence.

“Sure, it will be you and me, and your oldest boy. And maybe my Liza—her eyes are good enough, when she's not watching a stew. As soon as Billy takes a step down the street, we'll pull him in.”

Ruth hesitated—
But surely it would be better for them at Deirdre's. It was the thing he would be most pleased with her for, to keep his children safe.

“All right,” she agreed—and Deirdre was all efficiency again, hustling them about the house.

“Let's get your things. You're packed? Good, then. Let's wheel it over through the back lots. There's no reason for everybody on the block to see our business.”

They peered out the back door, into the impenetrable night.

“All right, now. It's just three houses. Liza will be at the door—at least she's supposed to be, or I'll tan her backside for her,” Deirdre told them. “Knock twice, and she'll answer—”

Ruth could just make out the slumping roofs of the privvies, the air reeking with their odor. Beyond them were the backs of the houses on the next lot, their shutters closed and their lights all out—save for a single, solitary prick of light from one window.
The Jews' place,
she
recognized.
God only knew how they were faring over there, on such an evening—

“All right, now. Go on with you!”

The children looked at her for confirmation, and Ruth nodded.

“Go! Now!”

They scuttled their way like rats down the back lots. She and Deirdre taking the youngest ones by the hand, while Milton pushed the barrow holding all their possessions. Every turn of its wheel seemed to squeal and echo, up and down the alleyway. It was not thirty yards down the lots to Deirdre's house, nothing but the back of their own houses on the one side, the stinking wood privvies on the other. But with every step, she was sure that she could see a pair of feet, the edge of his coat, waiting in the shadows—

How real he still was, even after all this time. She could see the white-knuckled grip of his fists, the rage in his face, right in front of her—

A head jutted out from the privvies, wild and unshaven—red eyes staring through them. Ruth almost screamed to see it—but it was only a local bummer, a deserter from the army who hung around the back lots. The tattered remnants of his blue Union coat still hanging from his back. He took a step toward them, perhaps threatening, perhaps imploring.

“Get out of here! John Kaehny, you miserable old layabout!” Deirdre shouted at him, and he bolted off at once, back down between the privvy shacks.

They raced the last few yards to Deirdre's house, reaching her back door breathless and terrified. They rapped twice—and Eliza opened it up at once. The rest of Deirdre's children standing just behind her, looking worried but silent—a wince of envy going through Ruth, even then, to see how neatly dressed, how clean and obedient they were.

Deirdre shut the door at once, and bolted it behind them. Smiling as best she could at them all. Trembling a little, Ruth could see, as she was herself, but still in command.

“Come on, now, I'll get someplace to sleep made up. And Ruth will get cocoa for you children, you'll like that.”

Ruth went gladly to do as she was told, not even minding the order. Marveling as always at the tidiness of Deirdre's kitchen. Sure enough, looking in the pantry, she found a tin of cocoa, though she
knew it must have cost nearly as much as gold these days. There was a bucket of real milk, too, from the O'Kanes's cow. They were the only ones on the block to keep one, renting a stall from a livery stable on Oliver Street.

She moved about the kitchen, getting the mugs of chocolate ready, and trying to keep from smiling too much. Trying to hide how exultant she felt
—now that Deirdre would take care of everything.
She still could not quite understand her sudden kindness, or, for that matter, how unnerved she had been this morning. But she was unable to submerge her delight in the moment, even with Billy still out, and Johnny Dolan himself, somewhere in the City.

It was all right, Deirdre would set it right.
Feeling now as she never had before, save for lying in Billy's arms in the old house, up in the central park, or listening to her father's stories, half-drowsing through the smoky, winter afternoons in their cabin out on the Burren. Her belly full, and her head against her mother's knee—the small, rustling noises of her brothers and sisters all around her as they burrowed in with her around the hearth, safe in the company of her family.

•
41
•

Night—
and through the ruptured City all sorts of creatures slip.

This is the creeping season. Thieves pick through the shattered storefronts. Cabs stalk slowly up the side streets, and back alleys. They are drawn by horses with muffled hooves, their drivers charging fifty, a hundred dollars to sneak the families of bankers and merchants out of the City.

Up from the wharves and the Five Points come others, with no intention of fleeing. These are the professional gangsters and the river thieves, the housebreakers and crimps and killers. They have no quarrel with the draft. They never planned to go anyway, their names unrecorded in any barrel, any census. Now they swagger through the streets, brazenly hold up the cabs at gunpoint. Robbing men in the City at gunpoint, committing all sorts of other outrages—

The boy in the street, playing in a puddle of blood. Smiling up into the sun as he smears a hand across his face—

I creep through it all myself, still searching. At last I have fulfilled the original assignment that Greeley gave me, what seems like so many years ago this morning. I have tracked down the seat(s) of our government, located now at the St. Nicholas Hotel, corner of Spring Street and Broadway.

The St. Nick is one of those perfect middle grounds that spring up in any good war. Not quite so elegant as the Metropolitan with its ladies'
sky parlors, or the Fifth Avenue with its perpendicular railway, but perfect in its own, enormous garishness, its gigantic chandeliers and candelabra, its silver service and Sheffield plate, its six hundred rooms.

All sorts of men gather here—drummers and spies and the aristocrats of shoddy; journalists and generals and politicians. They jam the lobby, alert, feral eyes squinting to see how they might best exploit our national calamity for their own gain. Arguing and cajoling, entreating and seducing. Gulping their iced smashes, their daisies and juleps, excitedly dipping in their fresh, green blades of spearmint. (They would not gulp their drinks so rapidly, perhaps, if they knew that the spearmint comes from the roof boxes of Baxter Street tenements—plucked by the hands of tubercular children, fertilized with pig excrement gathered from the street.)

The place is more jammed than ever tonight, even as wild rumors sweep the lobby.
The whole City is burning. The mob is on its way here.
Mayor Opdyke has his headquarters upstairs, as does General Wool, and there is a martial feel to the whole establishment. Uniformed messengers storm through the lobby, officers in gold braid strutting urgently about.

Meanwhile, the Union League holds the bar like a fortress. Here is the real backbone of the City. My Gramercy neighbors, George Strong and Dudley Field. The Reverend Morgan Dix from Trinity Church, and Bellows, up from Washington. Professor Gibbs and Charlie Brace, and President King, down from Columbia College.

Men of steel, in the Street and in the pulpit. They sit around a side table, imbibing nothing stronger than sarsaparilla. Casting suspicious glances at the dead-horse contractors all around them, while they browbeat our poor mayor.

“Where are the Metropolitans? What is Acton doing?”

“He has the situation well in hand. I have every confidence in him,” the mayor replies.

“
Oh?
” George Strong asks, cocking an eyebrow. “May I inquire then,
why have you abandoned City Hall?
”

George Opdyke mops his brow, drenched in sweat, his suit crumpling in the heat.
(It will never rain.)
He is a dry-goods merchant turned reform politician, a man who likes to write scholarly papers on colonial economics—and who thought it would be a good idea to be mayor at the outset of the Civil War.

“One should take precautions—” he tries.

“You should march back to City Hall at once, and read the Riot Act to the rabble!” the Reverend Dix informs him. At the start of the war, Dix raised the American flag over Trinity Church and it has flown there ever since, above any cross, joining God and the Union for eternity.

“Where is General Wool? What is he doing?”

“Upstairs, hiding in his suite!” snorts Charlie Brace.

Wool is the commander of all federal troops in the City. He is a stern-looking man but ancient; an old Indian fighter who made a name for himself running helpless Cherokees out of Georgia.

“General Wool has no more than five hundred men he can put under arms—”

“Impossible!” Strong exclaims. “If that is really so, we must telegraph Secretary Stanton at once!”

“I'm told it is a crucial moment, if Meade is to catch Lee north of the Potomac,” Opdyke tries to demur. “If he can, the whole game may be up—”

“Nonsense!”
Strong bolts up out of his chair. “It doesn't matter what happens out in some Pennsylvania wheat field! The war is
here!
”

As always, these men understand the heart of the matter. Just two years ago, at the start of the war, our then-mayor Wood proposed that the City should actually secede as well, and start our own nation—thereby promoting himself to president (emperor? grand vizier?). Other men of the Street were all in favor, looking nervously to their Southern debtors—terrified that they would simply refuse to pay, and bring a ruinous crash down upon us.

Not the Union League. They have money at stake, too, but their ties to the country are almost mystical. Their whole ideal of themselves—their dour, unwavering Yankee superiority—is bound up with the Union. If they are not the merchant princes of a divinely blessed people, of the world's coming colossus, then what are they? Just more stock jobbers, grubbing for money like everyone else in this town?

It was they who made sure that Secretary Chase found the money to finance the war. Made sure that we remained the Empress City of the West, advancing toward our certain, glorious destiny. They don't
mean to turn back now, no matter how much blood darkens the fields of the Southland—or the streets of our City.

“We must do something. This afternoon it took a
priest
to talk them out of burning down the college!” President King of Columbia protests, unclear as to what was the greater humiliation.

“What we need are
gunboats,
gunboats
ringing
this island,” Dudley Field insists. “
That
will put the fear of God in them.”

The island of Manhattan surrounded by floating machines, girded with iron. Ready to belch fire until the whole of the City is destroyed, if need be—

“We must
at least
declare martial law.”

“I don't know about
that—
” Mayor Opdyke equivocates—but George Strong has had enough. He stands up with a dismissive wave of his hand, headed for the St. Nick's convenient new telegraph room.

“I shall wire President Lincoln for more men. We will save this City yet!”

He strides off, ignoring Opdyke's protests. But soon he is back, his face contorted with indignation.

“It seems that the lines are down, all over the West Side. I am going down to wire from my office on the Street—if
anything
is still working in this City!”

I decide to go with him, curious to see how Wall Street is holding up—and what will happen next. As angry as Strong is, I can see that he, too, is disconcerted by this latest turn of events. The previously unthinkable idea is growing—that now, with our communications cut off, we might actually lose the island.

Out on Broadway, the night is more stifling than ever. A corrosive, burning smell is everywhere, filling one's nose and throat. Dozens of fires can be seen, turning the night sky orange. It is our only illumination, now that the street-lights have been extinguished, the gas cut off by the mob or the authorities.

“Your house is still standing,” Strong tells me abruptly, and I almost laugh to hear him say it, knowing how hard it is for him to make conversation. He is an odd man, my neighbor. Haughty and aloof but strangely idealistic for a businessman, engrossed in his ideas about what the Union, or religion, or what our civilization should be.

“They have not touched the Gramercy Park—not yet, anyway,”
he goes on, trying something like humor. “We got up a squad of vigilantes. Marching around the square with bird guns and dueling pistols, trying to grimace sufficiently at every young Celt we could find. But they never attempted it.”

In truth, I had forgotten all about my home on the Gramercy Park for hours. So Maddy would have been safe there, after all—

Maddy.
The day's fighting has carried me back and forth past her little house, but no closer. Paradise Alley, the whole Fourth Ward, lies behind the lines of the mob now. It will be dangerous for me to venture there now, after dark, even in the disguise of my wrecked suit. But I must try it, as soon as I file my story—must talk her into leaving.
Stubborn, foolish girl—

It is a harrowing enough walk down to Strong's firm. Near Canal Street we pass roving gangs of gang
b'hoys—
skulking about, looking out for their chance. A solitary roundsman comes up the street, tapping his locust club in his hand. He does nothing, though
—can
do nothing, one man alone—and he and the gangsters simply eye each other warily and move on.

Those who can, defend themselves. On Maiden Lane the jewelers patrol in front of their stores, rifles in hand. Ironworkers hold their forges, conductors their rail cars. Lord & Taylor's has armed a hundred of its clerks, and the nice young men at Stewart's Iron Palace now offer to shoot you on sight.

Somehow, we are able to make our way down to Wall Street without being shot by either robbers or vigilantes. Strong goes off to his office, but I wait for him below, preferring to see what I can see, here in the heart of our nation's money capital.

The Street and the blocks around it are bustling despite the hour. Here are most of Wool's regulars, along with sailors from the ships in the harbor, setting up Gatling guns at strategic positions. In the SubTreasury Building—the very spot where Washington first took the oath of office as president—clerks stand guard at every window. They are armed with hand grenades, and bottles full of vitriol, and a hose has been run down to the basement boiler—ready to blow scalding steam into any mob that should breach its massive, bronzed doors.

Even so, sailors are lugging chests shaped like coffins down the steep steps of the Sub-Treasury. They toil under the blackened statue
of Washington, gesturing disdainfully toward the West, grunting and struggling with the huge, heavy chests. For a moment I wonder what they could possibly be moving—then it comes to me.

Even the gold is fleeing the City.
They are hauling the caskets on down to the Battery, and out to the ships in the harbor. The nation's gold reserves, taking flight—can the rest of us be far behind? The capital trembles in its citadel—

Just then I hear a burst of noise, and wonder if the mob could have sneaked 'round our defenses. But no—it is coming from the offices of an ancient and venerable firm, just across Liberty Street.

What mischief is this? Have thieves broken in?
The door and shutters of the building are locked—but I spy a penumbra of light around a basement window, and crouch down to peer inside.

There I see a remarkable sight. Some of the most renowned traders on Wall Street, some of the richest men in the nation and therefore the world, are acting like lunatics. Even as I watch they jump in the air, and gesture frantically, standing on chairs and tables, cursing and laughing—and
singing.

I realize that I have stumbled upon the Gold Room. It is the biggest open secret in the City, save for Madam Restell's abortion parlors. Trading in gold has been banned by federal decree, since Old Abe became exasperated by the wealthiest men in the Union wagering every day on whether it would survive.

But he only succeeded in pushing it underground. Now the greatest financiers in the country gather every night in a different office, to bet America up and down. They huddle around the wires, and it is said that they have spies in every major telegraph office, and both armies, to send them the most critical information before Lincoln himself gets to see it.