Paradise Alley (51 page)

She had had some presentiment of it when Ruth's little girl had died. Her anger fading a little even then, as she saw every day what it had taken out of Ruth—having to watch while that child wasted away from the cholera. Fearing for her own children. Remembering how she had felt when she had lost the two in childbirth.
The little babe coming out blue, and not breathing, strangled by the cord, its very lifeline to her.
Or dead already, in the other case—carried about dead inside her, as she had already suspected for over a month, for one of God's awful, impenetrable reasons.

She had felt her hatred, her fury begin to recede even then. But she
had pushed it back into place, holding it there for all those years more. Keeping up her hatred like her street face, though there was no reason for it.

“So—nothin' there?” Ruth asked her now in a whisper, wiping her hands on her apron. Her face already sure of the answer, composed and unaccusing.

“No.”

Ruth had turned and looked at Milton, shaking her head. Including him, sharing him in their adult council, above the heads of the other children. Smiling at him as he frowned, softly calling over something to allay his fears as best she was able:

“To be sure, he's all right. Like any sailor, he knows to put in at a storm—”

Making it a virtue that his father was still missing, maybe strung up from a lamppost somewhere in the City. And doing it so convincingly that Deirdre wanted to weep at the effort, at her own hardness of heart.

How could she have held herself aloof from this woman for so long?
It was one thing that had always bothered her about the inspirational books, all the wondrous conversions. Weren't the writers of such stories the more embarrassed by their past sins, when they saw the light at last? Didn't it make them feel all the more remorse—all the more
foolish—
for the years lost in darkness?

At least they had the glorious revelation of their conversion, the sheer joy of the scales falling from their eyes, to carry them through. Deirdre had yet to come to her own full reckoning.
It was one thing for her to forgive Ruth, and to take in her children.
But then there was Tom—still out there, wounded again, undergoing God knew what agonies. And she had sent him there. She had sent him out there, she knew with a knowledge that all but crushed her, because he had brought the niggers on the block.

“It is our Christian duty,” she had told him, and he had gone and done it.
What was her duty?

After she had read the casualty lists from Fredericksburg, last December, she had wandered around in a trance. Keeping it in her glove, the scrap of paper that was part of him, against her. The
announcement that time. The tiny lines of type from the
Tribune,
under the usual, plain grim heading of
The Casualties:

T
HE
K
ILLED AND
W
OUNDED IN THE
I
RISH
B
RIGADE
.

C
OLONEL
N
UGENT, OF THE
S
IXTY-NINTH
N
EW
Y
ORK
F
URNISHES THE
F
OLLOWING
L
IST OF
C
ASUALTIES FROM
P
ERSONAL
R
ECOLLECTION
.

I
N THE
S
IXTY-NINTH
N
EW
Y
ORK WERE
W
OUNDED
. . . .

. . . . O'Kane, Tom, Co. A, chest, severe.

It was she who had started taking Horace Greeley's
Tribune
in the first place, trying to emulate the Protestants. Not their heathen worship, God knew, but how they thought and lived—and how they made money. For the longer they lived in Paradise Alley, the more Deirdre had wished to live somewhere else.

The urge had only grown and festered as she had watched the City moving lumberously uptown—the new blocks and homes springing up everywhere in the open fields, the airy new blocks to the north. They had not been able to go with it. Tom had made a slow but steady rise through the clubhouse, from lamplighter to a City watchman's job, to foreman of his own construction crew, digging out the central park uptown. Yet they were barely able to keep up with the babies she turned out, one after another, like clockwork. Never getting enough ahead to move, particularly with the war now raising the price of everything.

While Paradise Alley and the blocks around it in the Fourth Ward grew more crowded every year. Still dirtier, still busier. Still more full of race families and now even whores like Maddy Boyle, with their fancy men and black tars—

“It's a sin to wish too much for the things of this world,” Father Knapp had gently chided her in one of the talks they had in the rectory study at St. Patrick's.

But she knew that he was wrong. It wasn't a material wish she had, but a wish for all that was respectable and good. Wanting to live like decent people in this pit of a City, just as the Archbishop himself admonished them every Sunday. Wanting to live like
Americans.

It was in the
Tribune
that she had read the accounts of what slavery was like, and life in the South. About all the miscegenation, and the
race mixing, with the white planters and overseers imposing themselves upon the Negro women. Spawning still more halftones, who were then impressed into slavery. White women having to live every day with slaves who were in reality their half sisters, and stepdaughters, and cousins.
But of course men would do such a thing. Of course they would do whatever they pleased, given that sort of power—

She had been so appalled she had even asked Father Knapp about it.

“Is it right, then, Father?”

“The Church teaches us that slavery is not an
unmitigated
sin,” he had answered her slowly. “It is the next life that matters, and if slavery should bring any poor heathens to Jesus, no matter how inadvertently—”

“Is it a Christian thing, then, Father?”

It was the first time she had ever seen him look embarrassed. Staring at the floor as he drew one foot across the worn rectory rug.

“No,” he said softly, meeting her gaze then. “No, no, it isn't a Christian thing a'tall.”

“It is your duty,” she had told Tom.

He had argued about it, though he never argued with her on anything in their marriage. Standing his ground on this, though he spoke to her quietly and reasonably enough, seated at their kitchen table in his shirtsleeves.

“It ain't that I'm afraid. You see that, don't you? It ain't that I'm so afraid as to shirk me duty.”

Just to remember that, alone, made her blush with shame.
That she had forced such a man to defend his honor—

“But what will the rest of you do, then? To go down to Virginny an' fight for the poor colored peoples, when me own wife an' babes go hungry—”

“We'll manage,” she told him. “If it's your duty, God will see to it that we get by all right.”

“Ah, Dee, but it can't last much longer. Just wait awhile—”

But soon after that recruiting posters had gone up all over town for Corcoran's Legion, announcing that
A Few Good Men Are Wanted,
and the Archbishop had proclaimed that if there were not enough volunteers it was the people's duty to rise up, and demand that the government draft them.

“It is our patriotic duty. The Archbishop said so himself—” she had told him to his face, and he had given in then, and gone down to sign his name.

Yet she knew it was a mistake as soon as he had joined. It had been a dismal scene, down at the striped enlistment tents the Provost Marshal had erected by Castle Gardens. The gang
b'hoys
standing around, sneering at the recruiters and trying to talk men out of enlisting. Rival tents set up by towns and cities from upstate, or as far away as Ohio, trying to draw recruits in with better offers, so their own sons and husbands would not have to go and die.

She had realized what she had done as soon as he stepped out of the tent, and put $129 in greenbacks and a fat clutch of relief tickets in her hand.

“There it is,” he had told her. “That's the whole of the enlistment bonus. Best you should keep hold of it as long as ye can.”

Hating her already, it was clear in his face. She had wanted to stop it then. She had wanted him to go back into the tent, and hand over all the tickets and the ridiculous green gobs of shinplaster money, and take his name back.

“It's too late for that,” he had said, as if he could read her thoughts, or her face.
Just hating her.
“It's too late for that, so why don't you go on home now.”

His coldness astonishing and dismaying her. Thinking as she turned and left him without another word,
What have I done?

She had been further appalled when she'd gone to see him up at the mustering ground in the central park. Stunned that the government would let its soliders live in such a way—seeing for herself all the long lines of dirty white tents, pitched in a sea of mud. An open ditch for a latrine.

“You look starved. I'll bring you some more food,” she had told him, fingering his blue tunic, pitifully light and shoddy for the weather, already. “I don't know how they expect you to get through the winter in this—”

“Yes. That would be good.”

His hatred already banked somewhat by then, he was that good a man.
Much better than she was.
He had only seemed very sad, which
made her feel all the worse—already looking so much thinner and older, with his beard growing in. His eyes staring past her, as if he could only get through by keeping himself very contained and distant. He put a hand on her shoulder, and she had thought of him then as he had been, coming to see her in Gramercy Park. His young face so open and innocent, so obviously hopeful.
What have I done to him?

She went back to visit him as often as she could, though she hated seeing him there. Unlike the first year of the war, there were no grand parades or reviews now. Sometimes on Sunday the regimental band would play forlorn camp songs that already sounded like dirges. Otherwise she would meet him on the same desolate, muddy lane by the camp—waiting there with the wives and the sweethearts, the prostitutes in red velvet sauntering back and forth, looking for their customers. Trudging back alone afterward in the gathering darkness, walking for a mile before she could even catch the horse cars for the two-hour trip downtown.

It felt as if she were visiting him in the Tombs prison, and she feared that she could not stand it much longer. Yet it was even worse once he was shipped down South, to the war.

The City had become a strange and dismal place by then. Everywhere there were picket lines. The strikers standing along the sidewalk outside the gasworks, the shipyards, the iron foundries. Their hands shoved deep in their pockets, shivering and coatless in the winter. The construction sites standing idle, the boards around them plastered with handbills calling for rallies for or against the war, denouncing the Copperheads or the Niggerheads.

She saw men being arrested on the street every day, usually deserters picked up by the Provost's guards. There was a whole stockade set up for them in the park by Broome Street, the men led out to use the latrine behind it in shackles.

Even the pigs had thinned out. Small wonder, with any meat, even mutton, impossible to have for less than fifteen cents to the pound. She spent all her time now tramping the streets, trying to find decent food for her family to eat. She did not even try for coffee anymore, saving the money for what sugar she could buy for the children. The prices rising still higher—the shopkeepers eagerly sticking their new, marked-over signs up in the window each morning.

She took in any sewing and washing she could find, but there was
only so much time, with all the hours she had to put in shopping, and the measles and the mumps running through the younger children. She had gotten Eliza a job at the counter at Macy's, and she had found their oldest boy, Henry, a position as an apprentice clerk, though he was barely thirteen. Even so, she had had to empty out the account at the Bank for Savings they had built up so carefully over the years.

If it is your duty, we can manage.

She had even given up the
Tribune.
Instead she got hold of whatever sheets she could scrounge, blushing as she bent down to pick up a copy from the gutter or the ash box, but still needing to
know.

It hadn't been so bad at first, checking the daily casualty lists. Tom had just missed the bloody fight at Antietam, and when it got to be December, the other women on the block, the ones who already had husbands and sons in the war, told her there would be no more campaigning until it was spring again.

Then had come news of the fight at Fredericksburg. She had barely been able to pick up the paper for the next three days. Thinking,
It isn't fair, it isn't fair, there isn't supposed to be another fight!
Her stomach sinking each time she saw the heading for his regiment
—New York 69th—
and the long columns of names underneath it. Knowing they had taken the brunt of the fighting. Reading through them all with her heart in her mouth, and falling to her knees to thank God and the Blessed Virgin as soon as she was through.

Until, on the third day, she had seen his name.
Her name. O'Kane, Tom, Co. A, chest, severe.

She had heard her children's feet in the hall—and not knowing what else to do, she had ripped out the line of type, sticking the rest of the paper hastily in the kindling pile. Unwilling to simply throw his name into the fire, but slipping the scrap into her hand, hiding it in her glove, as if she were holding him there.

She had picked up her basket then, and walked out into the streets. Intending to get something, to do something, but mostly just wanting to get away from the children until she had composed herself.