Paradise Alley (50 page)

The steely thicket of bayonets. The land agent reading out his paper while they blinked like moles in the sunlight.

Though when they did come, there was no need for a guard of soldiers, or even a policeman. The whole village gathering up its few belongings, and walking away in still-unbelieving silence. Only a handful of them were armed with any valid deed, and entitled to compensation—the rest of the inhabitants of Seneca Village simply wandering slowly off down the Bloomingdale Road toward the City, without a complaint or a look back. All of their friends and neighbors, a whole village, simply drifting away, so that there would scarcely be a trace of them left by nightfall.

All it took were a few of the sheriff's men to oversee the whole business, waiting patiently enough to turn them out of their homes. A
contingent of surveyors, led by a nearsighted, diffident man in spectacles and a little student's cap, who ignored them altogether.

And a work crew—much like those she saw all over the City, tearing some new hole in the street. Leaning and squatting against the side of the now-abandoned and desanctified All Angels Church. The workmen quietly working their chaws of tobacco and spitting from time to time into the churchyard lawn. Not intending any disrespect by it but merely killing time, as they always did, while they waited on their betters.

Tom among them.
In charge, even, as far as she could make out, wearing an official blue City tunic with another bright red sash across it. He walked over to her looking abashed, taking off his hat as he approached.

“I'd forgot you were here,” he said—his voice apologetic, even ashamed.

“Sure, but it's not your doin',” she had told him.

But he had continued to stare at her there, holding Milton by his hand and dangling Lillian on her hip. Eyes widening a little at the sight of them. Looking at her with that mixture of pity and protectiveness that made him a little bit in love with her—and she knew it.

“All the same, I'm sorry to see you in such a way,” he had said, fingering the band of his official hat and looking down. The last, straggling line of the villagers moving out of sight, heading down to the City.
A life of forty years' duration, vanished in a day.

Tom scuffed his feet again, rubbed the rim of his official hat.

“I'd forgot you were here—”

It was Tom who had found them the little house on Paradise Alley—out of his infinite generosity and, she hoped, his quiet, brotherly love for her. Even loaning them the rent for the first month, on the ground-floor apartment. Though he had suggested, squirming and blushing as he did, that perhaps it would be better if she did not tell Deirdre about it.

That was nothing Ruth had not surmised already—certain though she was, too, that Deirdre must have already known. Nevertheless, she had determined to try to stay out of her way for as long as possible, even timing her trips outside to hang the wash and fetch water from the green Croton pump so as to avoid her.

Yet Deirdre had surprised her, showing up unexpectedly on her doorstep one morning. She had brought a fresh, iced flour cake on a plate, and Ruth was so startled she did not know what to say—though the sight of it sent Milton, following behind her skirts, into paroxysms of joy.

“Oh—oh, look at it, Mother! Look at that!”

“This is to welcome you to the block,” Deirdre had told her, her diction and manners, as always, so rigidly, Yankee perfect. Ruth had mumbled something back—still mesmerized by how beautiful she looked.
How such a face could be so hard—

But Deirdre was looking down at her son where he stood in the doorway, still gazing up in wonder at the cake.

“This is your oldest,” she said, as a statement, not a question.

“Yes.”

Ruth had smiled automatically, assuming that Milton would brighten any heart, the way he brightened hers.

“How old is he, then?”

“I—” Ruth started—then stopped abruptly, realizing the trap she had fallen into.

“I thought as much. You were taking up with him when you were still with my brother.”

“Billy's my husband,” Ruth had said defensively, pushing Milton back inside so he would not hear more. “We're married now, which me an' Johnny never was—”

“Oh, aye!” Deirdre spat out. “Married in a proper, nigger church, I'm sure.”

She leaned in now, her face filled with still-unabated rage.

“You're on a respectable block now. You'll have to learn to live among respectable white people. Not like you did up in the woods, running around with whatever you chose.”

With that she had thrust the cake into her hands and walked off, and after that Deirdre had had nothing to do with her, though Tom would still sneak over sometimes, to share a cigar or a pint with Billy. When he did he always brought a gift for her, some little thing, a new pot or a ribbon, or a toy for the children. And when he was gone, they were always sure to find money hidden somewhere around the house, a nickel or a York shilling or two bits, stuck under a frying pan or on the mantel over the fireplace. Ruth had picked them up silently, without
even telling Billy—knowing that Tom did not want to offend their dignity by offering it to them openly.

She was grateful for the money, and the gifts—grateful for the house, as well. The block was not so bad, though the ash boxes overflowed on the corner, and the blood swelled up from the gutters whenever it rained. It was much longer for them to get to work, making the walk uptown. But Ruth was able to make friends with most of the women, and there were more and more race families moving onto the street.
They would not simply be living with white people after all, Deirdre's admonition notwithstanding—

Yet Billy was tetchy all the time, she noticed, stopping for a drink more and more often on his trip home from the orphans'. She knew that he did not like living in houses that were so close together—that they prevented him from seeing what might be coming. He was mistrustful of the white neighbors, and when she tried to tell him that the slavecatchers were less likely to come down to the Fourth Ward, he still would have none of it.

“At least up there you could see who's with you an' who's not,” he liked to say, moodily tapping his fingers on the kitchen table. “At least in the nigger village, nobody called you a nigger.”

But their old friends and neighbors were all scattered now—living at best in a few houses together on the Arch Block, and down on Roosevelt Street, and Baxter, and along York and Lispenard Streets in Greenwich Village. Paradise Alley was as safe as anyplace for them, and she had thought,
Well, it's not so bad. At least we got a roof over our heads, an' enough to eat, how bad could it be?

But before their first summer on the block was out, Lillian had come down with the wasting sickness. Ruth had seen right away that it was serious. She had stayed home from her job with the German ladies to nurse her. Giving over most of her own dinner to the child, plying her with whatever sweets and fats she could lay hands on. But it was hard to get good, clean food or water anywhere in the ward, and the only milk came from the brewery cows.

Despite everything she could do, Lillian would not stop vomiting, would not stop shitting out whatever they fed her. Ruth watched her growing thinner, every day, starving in front of her eyes.
Just as they had all been, back in the cabin. Down in the dark of the cabin, huddling under the thatch.
Her daughter screaming with pain as her little limbs
convulsed with the cramps, unable after a few days even to keep any water down.

Billy could not get too close, having to go to his job at the orphans', but he did whatever he could. Giving over every penny they had, borrowing more just to get good milk from a real stable he knew of up on the West Side, above Fifty-ninth Street. Walking the whole five miles back home with a bucket in each hand, every night. He had even hired a real physician, one Dr. Sloper, a self-confident, elegant young man from Great Jones Street, only to have him inform them that their child had the cholera morbus and advise that she be quarantined before he fled, back uptown.

Ruth had stayed by her bedside night and day, doing whatever she could for her. She had patted her brow with a wet cloth, and tried to force what food and water she could into her. She knew, though, that she was only wearing her child down all the more, as she threw it all up, and the realization of that had made her frantic—sending her running out into the street blinded and crazed with helplessness. Only the thought that her baby might die alone forced her back in, back to her bed to watch the final, merciful death throes.

That night she had stayed up and washed her child, and dressed her in the best clothes she could find. Getting her body ready for the picture she wanted from the daguerreotypist in the Second Avenue. She had seen such pictures before, displayed in his window. The deceased child always looked so peaceable, so lifelike and tranquil, as if she were only sleeping. Dressed in her best clothes, a solemn brother or sister at her side, done up as well in their meeting clothes.

She had seen that and wanted it, so she dressed Milton up the next day, too, while she sent his father out to hire the daguerreotypist. Milton, who had eaten and drunk everything she'd given him during his sister's illness, and only grown bigger and stronger. So that for a while she had hated even him, although she had forced herself not to show it to the child. Realizing now, as she saw him so somber and obedient, standing a little perplexed by the body of his sister, that she loved him more than ever, loved him just for surviving, as well as for everything he was. Waiting calmly, as peaceful as she had been in weeks, for Billy to return.

He had come back shaking his head, though—telling her kindly but firmly that the picture was too much. That it was impossible, they
would be better off spending the money for the funeral, and to make a better life for their son. And she had wailed like a madwoman, and raged against him to hear this. Clawing at him while he held her gently against his chest, and comforted her, until she realized that he was right.

“Leave the dead for the dead,” he had told her, but so gently that she knew he was right, that there was nothing more she could do for her daughter, but that she would have to get back to the dismal business of living.

They had buried her in Brooklyn—with the help of Tom, again, who knew a digger in the fine new Green-Wood cemetery, and had forwarded them another bit of money. This not even Deirdre had begrudged, nodding to Ruth curtly but with as much sympathy as she had been able to offer the next time they had crossed paths on the street, telling her with a quick, sharp intake of breath, “
Sorry for your loss.
”

Ruth had been somehow comforted by that, as much as she supposed that it should have made her hate Deirdre all the more. And also by the fact that her little girl was to lie out in Brooklyn—far enough away that she could not visit her there often. Glad, now, that Billy had stopped her from having the picture done, to be able to remember her how she was—and not to have some permanent record of that chiseled, hunger-wizened face.
To not have any picture of her boy, standing next to death.

A few months later she had been pregnant again, and she would be again after that, and they would go on with things, such as they were. But it was never the same for them, there on the block. There was nowhere else they knew of to move, and nowhere else they could afford, but it was never the same for them, or between them. They still went off to their jobs uptown, Billy going up to the orphans' everyday, and she to her German ladies. But it was the end of that time and they knew now that no better time was going to come, that there was nothing more to expect than that they would go on, living on the block.

•
52
•

She rattled the key noisily in the back door of Ruth's home, opening it as loudly as she could. She had considered trying to slip in, to steal into the house as quietly as possible, but she thought that might only alarm Billy, if he were indeed back—or any bummers inside, trying to loot the place.

And if her brother were there, she knew, it wouldn't make any difference anyway. She would be as good as dead before she got across the threshhold—

But there was no one. It was quickly apparent in the few small rooms that no one had been in at all—not Billy, nor Johnny Dolan, nor any of the looters. The narrow house was all but emptied out—only the stove and the furniture, rough and unfinished and scarred with use, still remained. That damned box of Johnny's standing in the corner like a covered gravestone.
Like some black effigy of Johnny himself, mocking them yet.

Everything else was thoroughly swept out and washed, cleaner than Deirdre could ever remember seeing it. Even now, though she tried to be charitable, she could barely keep from showing her repugnance for how Ruth kept her house, and raised her children. It was not to be helped, she guessed, considering the money they had. At least they were cleaner than most of the children on the alley, and that oldest one, Milton, was smart as a whip. Yet Deirdre could not stop
herself from thinking, deep down, that somehow she could have at least
tried
a little harder.

She had disapproved of Ruth right from the beginning, when her brother had first brought her 'round to their house. Mooning at her like some dumb creature, like she had never been in a proper home before, and Deirdre could not help then but hold her at least partly responsible for what had become of him.

All those years, as the famine had taken hold, she had thought of her family with a growing sense of dread. Reading about the deaths in the Irish papers; the coffin ships, and the starving people walking the roads like living scarecrows. She had tried to get word—but this time there was no reply at all. Even the letters she sent to the priest came back, with a note that the parish church had been closed on account of the typhus, the families all scattered or holed up in their cabins.

She had sent Tom over to the Corcorian Men's Association, though he was a Tipperary man himself, to see if he could find anyone there who had heard anything. But all he could come up with was a friend of a friend of the family, who thought that they had gone to the workhouse.

“At least they'll be fed there,” Tom had said, trying to ease her mind. “At least they'll have a roof above their heads, and two meals a day. Soon as we hear, we'll bring 'em on over.”

But she had read about conditions in the workhouses, and when she wrote next to the one in Cork city, she got no reply from there, either. He was a good man, Tom, but she thought that he tended to be a little too hopeful about such things.

In those days they were still renting an apartment in an old brownstone on St. John's Park, and Eliza was already on her way. She had made him quit running with the Break o' Day Boys, and the other gangs on the East River—had made him quit all his old associations with men, save for the fire company, the Black Joke, because he had convinced her that it served a valuable public function.

She got him as well to go down to the clubhouse, and start attending the political meetings, until he had been hired as a lamplighter for the City. He had been a little ashamed of it at first—a fawning, beholden political job—and his friends had made sport of him. But it paid better than a butcher's apprentice, and he didn't come home anymore
stinking of blood and offal, or have to stand over the sink for half an hour before he could unbend from the pain in his back and shoulders.

And in the evenings they would read together. She had taught him to read her inspirational tracts, or the proper Catholic newspapers and journals, not just Mr. Bennett's
Herald
and the other penny dreadfuls. His arms around her, stroking her hair and laying a hand on her swelling stomach—treating her at all times, in the bedroom and without, with respect and adoration. And at such moments she thought that this was everything she had always wanted, and how wise the priest was.

She made sure, in her turn, to follow the rest of the advice in the
Guide to Catholic Girls Who Earn Their Own Living.
Going to great pains to keep herself up—to comb her hair out, and scrub and clean herself and her home more fervently than she ever had, even when she was well along. Not that she was really earning her own living anymore, having left service and the house in Gramercy Park behind after they were married. Still doing some needlework and spinning at her wheel, to speed along the purchase of their house—

She would have given it all over, though, every last penny of their savings, to know that her family was safe from the hunger and the workhouse. To have had any word from them. Certain as she was on some nights, lying in bed, that the worst had happened and they were all dead. Trying to banish such thoughts even as she had them, to preserve her baby. On other days, scrubbing the floor or doing the dishes, she would tell herself that they had emigrated, to England or Amerikay, or even to Australia. That maybe even now they were in New York, and trying to find her. Once a month or so she sent Tom to the docks and the rooming houses, to inquire if anyone had shown up. But none of them ever did.

Then Ruth had appeared with her brother, like some damned storm crow. Coming around when they already had the new house by Paradise Alley, and Eliza, and she had all but given up hope for them. Telling herself,
Well, they were in Dublin or in Heaven, it was all the same, and she would see them in the next life.
She had all she could do to keep from weeping when she learned that Johnny was not only still alive, but in the City.

Yet she had thought right away that he looked so different, so hardened. Back in Cork, he had been her little man. He had been no more than a child, still, when she had left. A headstrong and reckless boy, capable of being as ruthless and cunning as the devil. But tender, too—she had taken care of him many days when her Ma was out in the fields, and she had loved him like her own son. Playing at being a mother, before the hearth. Feeding him his milk and potatoes, and wiping his face. He was a wild one already then, he would not hold still for her, but she knew he had loved her.

Now, when Deirdre saw him again, he seemed changed beyond the natural hardening of a man. The only likeness was a certain determination in his eyes—something that was so like her, and which she took an improper pride in. But there was a queerness even in this. There was a mulling restlessness in him, more like that of a loose dog than a man. He would look right through her, she noticed—through Tom and the baby, the new house and the furnishings. As if, like a half-starved dog, he was only ferreting out what he might batten on.

When Johnny had told her about the rest of the family, she had burst into tears, surprising even herself with her sobs, her inability to hold on to herself. Crying like some drunken washerwoman out in the street. Yet crying as much for Johnny as for them, she knew even then—this wreck of a man before her, who had had to witness it all.

And the girl he had brought with him—half wild herself, barely able to pull her dress down over her knees. Bewildered and unlettered, some mad child out of the West.
God only knew what temptation she had put before him—

Deirdre had determined, then, to save him—to bring him back into the fold of God's mercy. Getting Tom to work on him, to invite him into the Black Joke company. She had thought that he might be her work, her sacrifice for the blessings that had been bestowed upon her.
Offering it up to Jesus—

All it would need was her hammering at him enough, she was convinced. Yet to her surprise, he resisted her. He had joined the Black Joke readily—willing enough to carouse over lamb pies and ale—but otherwise all he had done was to take up with Tom's old, bad companions. Insisting on living up in Pigtown, among all the heathen niggers and the shanty Irish there. Doing God knew what to make his living.

The trouble must be the girl, Deirdre decided—especially when
she learned that they were not married.
Why else would any woman want to live up in that wilderness, save to hide her own shame?
and she had decided that shedding himself of her might be the first great step toward his salvation.

But she could not ignore the black eyes, the split lips and the bruises that Ruth came to sport. The two of them showing up at her house like a traveling pair of prizefighters, they were so marked up. She saw in Ruth's eyes the sort of crazed wariness that she saw in the faces of other women on the block who felt the back of their husband's hand. And when she saw it she wanted to throw them both out of her house, she was so angry.

She had tried to tell herself that this, too, must be Ruth's fault somehow.
For any woman to let herself be hit like that.
She must have no self-respect at all. Goading him to it, somehow. Driving him to it with her own sluttish, godless ways, tormenting him with his own weakness.

Yet when Ruth had come to their home that night, to tell them it was Johnny who had killed Old Man Noe, she knew it was the truth. For all that she had cried and screamed at her, Deirdre knew that she had suspected it all along—had known that something had gone out of her brother. That of course he had done it, of course he would be capable of even worse things, just like all the rest of the human filth she walked among, head held high, on the streets of this City. Ready to kill or fornicate or sell their souls for a dollar, another drink, a good suit of clothes. Seeing each other as no more than the next grist for the slaughterhouse, the herds of pigs and goats and cows shipped in each day by flatboats. No more than another one of the butchers, her brother.
Her brother.

And even then, too, she had another sense of Ruth's worth. This ignorant, half-wild girl coming to them, already having worked out a plan. Getting her Tom involved in it, for which she could not forgive her. Wanting Ruth to keep her hands off him, imagining God knew what terrible things that she might draw him into—working along with that drunken Negro she had found, no less.

Beneath it all, though, lay her fear that she might draw Tom himself away—a girl this resourceful, this hardened herself, at such an age.
Hardened just as she had been, making her way alone in the City, as no more than a girl.

She had hated it worst of all when Tom, without her knowledge, had brought Ruth down to live by the alley—along with her new colored brood, and the Negro husband. Offended just to see them there, every day, following her down the street. All those halftones—and the oldest boy, jet black as his father, the devil's own color. All of them living on her block, defying all her efforts to mold it into—to
think
of it, even—as a respectable neighborhood.

Living here, in this house, only a few doors down from her own.

Deirdre backed silently out of Ruth's deserted home. Locking the door again—the hairs on the back of her neck pricking at the empty house behind her, though she had looked into every corner. The house where Ruth's family had lived for so long, and what had she ever done for any of them? Only resenting, endlessly resenting her for it all—that she had ever dirtied Tom's hands with her business, and sent her brother away. Not even confessing it, but harboring her resentment through the years.

When Deirdre got back Ruth was busy at work in her kitchen, feeding her children along with her own, glancing shyly up at her, amid all the commotion, for her approval. Her heart went out to her at the sight of it. Seeing the doggedness in her now, the tenacity beneath her seeming confusion, her ignorance.

How easy it was for all of her hatred to fall away.
How hard it had been to keep it in place for all these years! Wondering if this was how it was for all those stories in her inspirational books—the Protestant lawyer, or the Universalist lady—to finally come to Jesus, and the True Church. All those saved souls who had finally let their resistance fall away, like shedding an old garment.