Paradise Alley (48 page)

“Ah, now, ya see, boss? She just wants a little taste.”

The slaver slipped suddenly behind her, sliding an arm across her waist. She could feel his hardness, pushing into her buttocks, and she began to tremble despite herself.

“Whatta you gonna do now, boss? Don't wanna hurt your little honey, here.”

The man ran a hand up over her right breast, his thumb and forefinger squeezing at her nipple until she cried out in pain.

“I'll shoot your friend here first,” Robinson said, calmly training his pistol on the other blackbirder, who took a quick step backward but was still several paces from the trees.

“Then I'll come over there and see about you.”

“I reckon you'll see, all right!”

“I reckon you'll have to let her go to get to that pistol in your belt. And before you do, I will put a ball in your brain.”

“Cass, enough a this nonsense. Let her go now!” The other blackbirder spoke for the first time, the nervousness plain in his voice. But the man who had his hands on her still hesitated, his grip tightening around her waist.

“Ah, what's he gonna do, Chance? Swing for some little tart like this?”

“It will be a year at least before they find you up here,” Robinson said. “If they do, they will just blame it on the local Negroes—a couple of dead slavecatchers. Chances are the coloreds will make sure nobody
ever
finds you, just to save themselves any trouble.”

Maddy could feel the one behind her shift. Those feral eyes looking over the forlorn plot of earth around them, the tangle of scrub woods. He took his hands off her, complaining as he did.

“Jesus, mister, what kind of place is this?” His voice actually sounding hurt, even as he backed slowly into the woods with his partner.

“Shoot a white man over some little whore!”

Robinson kept the gun on them, his lips just barely peeled back from his teeth.

“This is New York, sir. We will shoot a man over almost anything.”

When their footsteps had receded into the brush, she ran over to Robinson, and he threw his duster over her. Grabbing up her clothes, running her on back to their carriage without pausing to so much as dress her, or take the chains from her body. He whipped the horses back down the Bloomingdale Road, driving them at a breakneck pace until he was sure he had outpaced any man.

Only when he was certain they were well away did he turn the carriage down a deserted lane. Pulling up there, and turning to her where she sat, back on the leather carriage seat—still wearing the duster over her helpless shoulders. Running a hand down her cheek.

“Are you all right, then?” he asked her. She only nodded—still chained. Feeling his hand tremble against her face now.

He threw his legs on over, sliding down into the seat beside her. There he held her face in his hands, kissing her all over her face and neck, moving his hands inside the coat. Caressing her breast where the blackbirder had bruised her, as if to soothe it. His hand moved lower then, and she had let him, pushing herself against him, letting him take her right there in the carriage, even still in the chains. Thinking that this was what he wanted and willing to be that, too, willing to be whatever it was he wanted.

But it wasn't. Nothing was, it seemed. She had put up with all that. She had even gone to his house to tell him she loved him, only to have him keep her out there under his elm tree, mumbling that it was impossible.

Until now.
Was he really going to come back for her?

She doubted it—but she went over to her closet anyway, to get ready, just in case. Pulling hurriedly through all the fine clothes she had there—

It was another strategy she had used to repulse him, dressing in slovenly, stained gowns. But the fact was that she could not bear to use her best things. Hoarding all of her fine dresses, her best robes and bonnets, endless pairs of gloves and stockings and ribbons. Yet still buying more, with his money or what she earned herself. Packing most of them away in balls of camphor as soon as she got them home from the milliner's. Saving them for some occasion, someday when he broke with her, once and for all.

She had let him pick her up, right off the street. And he had taken her to a brothel. But to shelter, nonetheless—

There was a noise from the street, and she broke off her search through the wardrobe, stumbling over to the second-story window. Below she could see the women of Paradise Alley, beginning to emerge from their houses and tenements again. Mrs. McGillicuddy, Mrs. O'Connell, Mrs. Buckley—all the ones who put on such airs, just because they were white and married to white men.
Broken legs and laced mutton, the lot of them.

She was surprised that she couldn't see Deirdre O'Kane, out there among them. Deirdre was the only woman on the block Maddy was a little afraid of, always immaculately dressed and clean, head held as high as the archbishop's. Crossing herself whenever she passed Maddy's house.

“
I'm as good as you are yourself!
” she had yelled at her one morning, not wanting her to think that she didn't see her.

Any of the other old morts and mollies on the alley would have scuttled away, or pretended they didn't hear. But not Deirdre O'Kane. She had stood her ground, stopping right where she was, and turned her head slowly in Maddy's direction until she had fixed her in the window there. Eyeing her so coldly and deliberately that it was only her own pure stubbornness and the whiskey she had already imbibed that morning that kept Maddy from throwing the shutters closed.

“Our Maker and our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, will be the judge of that, Miss Boyle,” Deirdre had replied, in a voice that made the pigeons fly away. “In the meantime, I suggest you stop advertising just how good you are to the general population.”

It had almost made her laugh out loud, once she'd gotten over the shock. Deirdre had had fewer airs, she'd noticed, ever since her man had gone off to the war. The others, the coloreds or the race women, weren't such bad sorts, either. Like Mrs. Derrickson, or that one, Ruth, who had been fascinated with her gun at the pump the morning before. She seemed like a simple thing, worked to the bone, but always nice to her. Married to that big, good-looking Negro who walked like a sailor. She would have done
him
for free—him, or that son of theirs, just as dark and nearly as handsome. So sweet in his youth, his cheeks still barely bearded.

Someday, perhaps, he would come to her.

The only ones on the block who could ever afford her were the young men. Butchers' boys and mechanics' helpers, and apprentice sailmakers, just starting on their first jobs, with no household to support yet. Or their fathers would bring them over, if they could find a way to hide their first week's wages from their mothers. Anxious and impatient to learn—yet too embarrassed and ashamed to look her in the face.

Ashamed for her, in the end.
The father patting the son on the back in her parlor afterward, both men going out the back door without another word to her. A few moments later she would hear them laughing as they had a piss together, out in the back lots.

Would it be like that with him? With that beautiful boy?

Or would she last that long? What would she do when the war finally ended, as all wars did? When her price came down, with no more hordes of farm boys passing through, eager to stick it in once before they went to the killing. Would they all be able to have her then—all the men in Paradise Alley?

She pulled one of the new red silk dressing gowns defiantly out of the closet, and wrapped it around herself.
What was she saving it for, anyway? He wasn't coming.

On the sill by the upstairs window she found the gun, where she had put it down the night before.
At least he had left her this much.
Sticking the gun in her pocket, she ran downstairs—checking the front door, then the back and the windows, making sure they were all locked.

Of course he wouldn't come back for her, she was just a whore.

She pulled out the pistol and shoved its barrel repeatedly through
different slats of the shutters, trying one angle, then another. Outside, just across the street, she could see the white women gathering like so many geese. Talking avidly to each other, and gesturing, she was sure, toward her—toward her house. Her finger caressed the trigger, pretending to knock them off, one by one, like so many tin targets at a shooting gallery—

Then she heard it again. The dull roar of the mob, like the sound of a locomotive in the distance, slowly rising as it came closer. She stumbled back into the kitchen, cursing him as she did. Looking for the jug.

Offering to let me be his maid. Just another whore. Just another Paddy.

•
50
•

She awoke slowly, unsure of where she was at first. The heat pressing down upon her chest like a steam iron, and the first, conscious thought skittering across her mind like an insect:
My God, it's even worse than yesterday—

There was the sounds of footsteps outside, moving quickly, and she got up from the chair in Deirdre's parlor and went over to look through the shutters. But it was the same man—Maddy's man—who had come so late the night before. Hustling away again already, looking nearly as frightened and disheveled as he had when he arrived. A little man, in his dirty yellow trousers, with a gaudy red handkerchief sticking out of his vest pocket now. Whistling tunelessly through his teeth—glancing back over his shoulder from time to time as if he were fleeing something. He walked rapidly to the corner, then was gone.

What creatures men are! Always hurrying back and forth. Spending and replenishing, until the mere facility of motion seemed to be enough for them—

She turned back to the room. Deirdre and Milton sat slumped where they had fallen asleep the night before. Milton, with his usual instinct for her, waking just moments later and sitting bolt upright. He looked bewildered for a moment, then stared wildly around the room.

“Did you fall asleep, too? Were we all asleep?” he asked.

“Yes—I guess,” she answered, without thinking.

“Then we could've missed him!”

He started to go for the door.

“You're not to go out there!” she cried, all but throwing herself at him.

“But if we were all asleep, how do you know we didn't miss him?” he insisted, his voice rising. “Maybe he came home, and we weren't there. We have to go out now, we have to
look
for him!”

“
No,
” she said, trying to reason with him. “Your Daddy's no fool. It was a good thing we stayed up so long as we did, just in case, but he'll know enough to call here when he finds we're not home—”

“He would have to, just to ask where you had gone,” Deirdre said, rising from her chair now. Her voice as clipped and practical as ever, even as she pressed futilely at all the new folds in her dress. “That would be his first concern. You can see that, can't you? He would look first to see where you'd gone, and he would have to come over here.”

Ruth watched, silently grateful for Deirdre's quick thinking, as Milton nodded slowly.

“But still he might've come home last night,” he insisted after mulling it over for a moment. “He might've come back, and decided to wait out the night. We've got to look for him back home, at least.”

“That's fair enough,” Deirdre told him quickly, before Ruth could raise any further objection. “But let me do it. That way I can just go in and out, down the back lots, and nobody will be the wiser.”

“Because you're white,” Milton said. His voice suddenly resentful.

“Yes,” Deirdre agreed. “Because I'm white.”

“All right,” he agreed cautiously. “All right, then.”

Ruth could tell from her son's face that he was still not completely assuaged, but she hurried him on into the kitchen.

“You can come help me with the others,” she told him. Hating to have Deirdre go out there for what was her husband, her family—but willing to do almost anything to keep Milton safe.

Was that how it was, then? You sacrificed what you had to?

“Is it all right, then?” she whispered to Deirdre, ducking back out of the kitchen. “If ya don't want to—”

“I understand,” Deirdre said, waving her off, already heading out the back door.

Didn't she have babies, too, a husband—

Ruth tried not to think about it anymore, setting out breakfast.
Trying to maneuver around Deirdre's fine, spotless kitchen. Glad, even with everything, that she had given her own abandoned place a last sweep—

She could remember how it had felt, to have a proper home around her for the first time, even if it was only rented. How it had been when she'd first come on the block. It had been Tom who had set that up as well, so many years ago—though Ruth was certain that he had not told Deirdre beforehand. Tom who had seen to it, after he had come up to Seneca Village with the rest of his work crew, to tear down the roof over their heads.

Ruth had been living in the village ever since the night they had made Johnny Dolan disappear. She had loosed the dog that Dolan kept, kicking at his haunches and hurling rocks at him until at last he'd moved off into the fields, growling and snapping. Then she had slaughtered the pig; cut it up and salted it herself, taking it off to Billy's in a burlap bag as a gift.
Her dowry, as it were.
Slamming the door behind her when she went, leaving the shanties of Pigtown behind her forever.

Billy had insisted they get married, and she had been very pleased, though she had never asked him for it. Before the wedding the Reverend Betancourt, the same little Protestant priest she had seen the first day she had ever laid eyes on the village, had come to indoctrinate her in the practices of her new faith. She had looked forward to his visit, as willing to trade her faith for any other, but when he did come to see her in Billy's house, she had burst into tears.

“Look at me, Father, I am not a fit person,” she had told him. “You can see, I have been with men. And I have done worse things, sinful things, Father, just to keep alive.”

“Arrogance!” he had thundered at her. “You think that you are the only one here who has not done terrible things just to live?”

He was a small man, but he looked much larger now. His eyes swelling and burning—staring past her to a random point somewhere along the wall above her head. Gesturing toward where the City lay.

“And out there, too! They think their lives have been so blessed by God they do not have to sin. But they are wrong!” he declared—speaking more calmly now, but still in the great, orotund tones he used from the pulpit. A trace of the same Island lilt that Billy had in his own voice.

“They are wrong, for there is no sin too low for man. You know that truth, at least, and you are so much closer to God because you know it.”

He stood up abruptly, proclaiming from the Bible, though she scarcely knew what he was talking about:

“As it is written in Joshua, ‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.' “

Then he sat back down, just as suddenly. His voice all but indifferent now, his eyes looking smaller in his head. The wild light gone out for the time being.

“You know your sin, now you are ready for your redemption,” he said matter-of-factly, waving an empty cross over her, and sprinkling oil across her brow. “All you have to do is learn your lessons, renounce the wicked church of the pope in Rome, and you will be anointed.”

A few weeks later she was baptized in the Hudson. The little minister grasped her firmly around the back and clamped his hand over her nose, then he dipped her abruptly backward, into the freezing spring water that swirled and tugged at her ankles.

And afterward, that same day, she was married in the little clapboard church—wearing her own white robe now, flowing out over her swollen belly. A wreath of wild flowers and strands of wheat in her hair, woven for her by the other women in the congregation, although she barely knew them.

She had been unsettled by the strangeness of the service. The whole church standing and booming out their sonorous Protestant hymns. Shouting back their call and responses to the minister. She had been filled with a sudden terror that she might be losing her soul once and for all—as battered as it was—by abandoning the True Church for this strange and heathen ceremony. But she had stood up nonetheless and married her Billy Dove, as she knew she should have if it had been required that she become a Jew or a Muhammedan, or if she should have gone to hell directly.

And when they were married she had done everything she could for him, in her condition. Whitewashing the little house, or tilling the square of vegetables he kept out in the dooryard. Trying always to surprise him with some treat, some little improvement. She rose early in the morning to cook for him, and before he came home in the evening she walked out into the fields to cut a wildflower, or a sprig of
lilac to put by his plate. Though it occurred to her, sitting there watching him eat, that she would have liked to have decorated him in flowers, he looked so beautiful.

He was very pleased with her in those days. His hands were on her constantly, caressing and holding her. Grabbing her up and tickling her when he came home—the hour when he was formerly at his most moody and discontented, and had already had a few drinks on his way back from the orphans. Now he was usually sober, or at least had only had one. Rubbing his hands over her stomach, insisting on lifting up her dress even if they were outside.

“A big boy for me. A child with a mother and a father,” he would say, running his hands over her taut, bulging flesh. “A boy who can truly learn to sail, to go where he might.”

She had waited patiently for her time, for she knew that she was not likely to live through it. She saw it in the looks the other women gave her, wrapping their hands around her skinny arms, frowning and shaking their heads. Murmuring,
Too thin, too thin,
to each other, trying to fatten her up with pieces of fatback, and cornbread soaked in the grease.

It did not bother her much. She was only grateful for their company. She had been afraid that she might be lonely
—as if she could be more lonely—
living in the village. But she made friends easily enough—walking down to the Hudson in the morning with the other women, black and white, to wash and beat the clothes against the rocks. Standing up to her knees in the deceptive, swift-running water. Culling through the played-out beds of Stryker's Bay for a last stray mussel or clam. Letting them teach her how to fish, casting the crude hemp nets they used out into the current, and hauling in striped bass and weakfish.

It was such a country of abundance. Like some miracle in the Bible. Put your hand over the water and you shall have all that you want.

And afterward, waiting for the clothes to dry, they would take their ease for a little while in the long, summer afternoons. Lying or squatting under the trees by the river, gazing across at the Jersey shore and the Palisades. Some of the women smoking cob pipes, or tobacco they had rolled in sheaths of newspaper. Laughing and waving at the trains on the Harlem line when they came chugging and clanging down the track behind them—the engineer and the firemen blowing the whistle and waving, grinning lasciviously back at them.

Just before it was time to go, at the very heat of the day, they would wade back in and bathe once more in the Hudson. Then they would return to the shade for a few more minutes, letting themselves dry there, away from the sun, cooling themselves for the evening. The life growing inside her keeping Ruth pleasantly, drowsily warm anyway. All worries about her time to come dissipating as she thought how nice it would be to die like this, breaking up and drifting helplessly, painlessly off over the broad, grey river.

When her confinement did come, the women had made her take to the bed in the tiny house. Coming in to sit with her in teams of two or three or four. Bringing their own chairs, knitting and talking quietly by the foot of her bed, one or another of them constantly running a wet cloth across her head, and arms.

She lay there, hearing them whisper still
—Too thin, she's too thin.
Glad only to be facing a clean and certain death, after all the times she had encountered it in confusion—fleeing along the roads, or lying in the hold of the ship.
Feeling the first, cold pull of it, like the currents of the Hudson tugging at her ankles.

Even so, the pain of the first contractions took her by surprise. She had known pain before—the ache down in her bones when she had had the relapsing fever on ship, or Johnny Dolan's hands on her, or the pain of her stomach, seven days without food. But this was different. It was a harsh, ragged feeling at first, as if she was being split open by gigantic hands, and it only got worse. Going on for hours, the pain endlessly elongating the time. Leaving her too helpless to do anything but watch the agonizingly slow progression of life all around her. The flies crawling along the walls, the summer sun retreating second by second across her windowsill—