Paradise Alley (7 page)

Their wives now swamp the jewelers, and string themselves up in pearls. Styling their new-grown tresses into wavy wreaths, wrapped around their plump, cheerful faces like a hangman's noose. They hold grand balls, and powder their hair with gold and silver dust. On Sundays they carriage about the central park with liveried footmen, and camel-hair shawls. They summer in Saratoga, spend the winter
wrapped in sable and ermine, racing down the Fifth Avenue in their sleds, hurling snowballs at each other and giggling like schoolgirls.

All this golden lust. For all our complaints, the war has barely touched us—some of us. Across Broadway I watch the white-jacketed Negro waiters at the Astor House pull open the shades and, with immense dignity, begin to lay out the usual free food around the bar. There, inside its stoic Greek facade, the ancient Dutch-English aristocracy of the City still gather around its quiet courtyard gardens and fountain, supping on its twelve varieties of poultry, its forty brands of Madeira.

Whitman used to come in for lunch at the bar, before he went down to Washington to find his brother. Let someone stand him to a short beer, then spend the rest of the afternoon contentedly tucking into the steaming platters of roast beef and ham, and smoked turkey; the thick bread and pickles, sardines, and rounds of cheese; and the inevitable hard-boiled eggs (no ears, here).
A poet must provision himself like a camel or a wood tick,
he used to say,
get his meal when he may, and live off the remnants as long as he can.

It was not so long ago that I was with him here, stuck in an omnibus when Lincoln passed through the City on the way to his inauguration. We watched the train of carriages that brought him and his wife to the Astor House, the mob crowding around for a glimpse of the great man. There was a sense of crisis in the air then, too—that light-headed, breathless feeling just before a thunderstorm breaks. The Confederacy was already forming, and a great throng had sprung up around the hotel, surrounding the new president-elect in his barouche.

Whitman didn't like the crowds. He leaned out the window, wrinkling his nose—sniffing the air as if he could detect the rot in men's souls.

“There's many an assassin's pistol or knife in a hip or a breast pocket, right here,” he muttered dramatically, casting an eye over the mob. “Ready to strike, as soon as break and riot come—”

At least we will be here, then, at a safe distance,
I thought, but I didn't say it. Just then Old Abe stepped out of the barouche with his usual lanky grace. I had seen him the year before, when he had come to electioneer at the Cooper Union, and he had been impressive enough then. Now, though, he seemed like some primal force—astonishingly tall
and lean and muscular. His clothes black and simple, tanned Western face furrowed like the soil of a new-plowed field.

He ushered his short, dumpling wife into the hotel lobby—a gesture both gallant and prudent—before he turned back down the steps to face us again. Standing with his hands clasped behind his back, looking us all over with an expression of polite but detached curiosity.

There were calls for a speech, but he begged off, nodding and bowing slightly on the Astor House steps, bending his high frame like a bow pulled taut to the arrow.
The people, his master.
Telling them with his disarming honesty that everything was shifting too rapidly, that “before I should take ground, I might be disposed by the shifting of the scene afterwards again to shift.”

That brought a laugh, and a hand from the crowd, and I thought then that I had been wrong, that with his long neck and stovepipe hat, his tousled hair and his apelike arms, Lincoln seemed like a very
modern
force. Some rude device, the engine of a Western riverboat, perhaps. A tinkerer's dream, with all his ungainly, misshapen, improvised parts, yet hammered nevertheless into a machine of formidable power.

Of course, after that we put him through all the usual inanities we inflict upon our politicians. Nothing would do but that he had to be presented with a wreath from the Astor House manager. Next a tall man insisted upon measuring himself against his height and, again with that casual tolerance, Lincoln agreed. Obligingly turning back to back with him—the crowd cheering again when the president measured two inches taller than the tall man.

At that he was finally allowed to continue inside, to his room and bed. As he went up the rest of the stairs, a spontaneous cheer rang out from the crowd—nothing else so rare, or so moving in this town full of professional agitators and pitchmen. He stayed his steps again for a moment, looking back, surprised for the first time, and more cries—real sentiments—poured from the crowd:

“God bless you, sir!”

“Stand firm! Stand firm for the Union!”

“It's a hard day's work you have!”

And finally, in a child's voice:

“I hope you will take care of us! We have prayed for you!”

He smiled, pausing once more at the top of the steps to address the
crowd, that sly, gently ironic smile of his just touching his lips, though his eyes watered with emotion.

“But, you must take care of me,” he said softly—and then was gone, into the shadows of the Astor House.

I saw him only once more before he left the City, before the war came. That was the following night, when he went to see Verdi's
Un Ballo in Maschera,
at the Academy of Music. Mrs. Lincoln had gone to a reception at Barnum's American Museum, with all its marvels—its white whale, and its Fiji mermaid, and a dwarf who could recite any passage of Blackstone's law by memory—and he was alone again.

I watched him up in the presidential box, his face its own mask. Sitting there high above the rest of us, listening to the divine music. Giving away nothing himself, nodding gravely to all who nodded to him. During the performance he sat slumped back in his chair, with only a single white-gloved hand visible from below. It seemed to glow in the darkness there, that white glove, swaying slightly with the music, hovering above us all.

I touch the pistol Raymond gave me, in my coat pocket. It breaks me from my reverie, returns me to the task at hand. There is nothing more to be learned from the crowd for now, so I sidle away—climbing quietly up the steps of City Hall, peering through the gracious glass Georgian doors. Looking for someone official.

Yet the building appears to be deserted. Its shutters and doors are locked up tight as a drum, its restful green awnings drawn in against the incendiaries.
Where could our government have gotten to?

This is a fool's errand. There is no sound at all coming from inside—save for the ticking of a large clock in the portico, renowned for its accuracy. I pause to set my own watch by it, staring at the hands while they slowly, scrupulously tick away the minutes.

Maddy. I must get back to Maddy.

•
8
•

When her turn finally came, Ruth drew her water and reluctantly left the other women where they stood. She hated to leave them—even Maddy, even as spooked as they all were, nervous as cats. At least they were something familiar, part of her regular morning chores on this unsettled day.

She was, as well, dreading what she needed to do next. She made herself walk the few yards down the block to the O'Kanes's house. Pulling on the bell there, balancing both the water buckets carefully in one hand while she waited for Deirdre to get to the door.

Of course Deirdre already had her water collected, Ruth knew before she was even inside. It sat distributed in buckets and pails in the front parlor, and the other rooms throughout the house—much more than her family could possibly drink, but handy for dousing any sparks.

She was always thinking, that one. Always thinking, the way Ruth herself could not, and looking ahead.

The children were already up and dressed, sitting around the front room as quiet and stern as little judges. The room itself was neat as a pin. Jammed with the oversized used furniture she and her husband, Tom, had salvaged from the old houses over in St. John's Park. This was Deirdre's greatest pride. It was furniture unlike anyone else had on Paradise Alley—an immense cherry and oak, fall-front secretary,
a rosewood reclining couch, even a square piano they had crammed into a corner.

The O'Kanes's house was only a little wider than Ruth's own, but they owned theirs—the upstairs as well—and Ruth was sure that every inch of it was as immaculate as ever. The floor scrubbed nearly through. Handmade lace curtains hung over the windows, as neat as only the nuns could embroider. Pretty blue-white Canova porcelain plates sat on her shelves—and over the mantelpiece, in the place of honor, a proud brass crucifix and a colored illustration of Christ, holding open His Heart of Infinite Mercy.

Deirdre stood in the doorway, her face expressionless. Irked, Ruth knew, just to see her there. Her perfect light-brown eyes the same color as her hair, and cold and unblinking.

“Do ya think we ought ta go?” Ruth asked her haltingly, unsure as she always was around Deirdre.

She finally moved aside, letting Ruth into her house—but only after she had ushered her children out of the room, as if she were afraid they might catch something from her. They filed out at once, without a word of protest, and only then did Deirdre gesture for her to sit, in a French chair made out of chestnut and mahogany, with an upholstered seat. Ruth perched on one end, as uneasy as a sparrow on a weather vane.

“Do I think we should go?” Deirdre repeated her question back to her.

“Aye. Go, or do somethin', then—”

“Well, maybe it's you who should go, then,” Deirdre said drily. “It's you who has a way of bringing him here, isn't it?”

“You know that's not true,” Ruth said softly.

“Well, I don't know who it was, then. I don't know who it was who brought my brother all the way here from across the sea, if it wasn't you. I only wish to God you'd left him there.”

Ruth said nothing, just watched Deirdre's face twist as she spat out her words, unleashing the whole tide of her frustration over Johnny, and the war, and where her husband had gone.

“It was Johnny Dolan what brung me,” she said at last, quiet but insistent. Deirdre made a face but said nothing.

“It was him what brung me, you know that as well as I do, Deirdre Dolan,” Ruth repeated, using her maiden name. “Like it or not, it was Johnny Dolan who brung me over. I'd've been dead without him.

•
9
•

I was born in the Burren, where it's said there's not enough water to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor the dirt to bury him. We had a cabin on the land, not far from Ballyvaughan, and there the maidenhair and the roses and the orchids grew wild in the summer, and the white bones of the earth lay out in the sun.

In the winter, when no one went outside and there was no work to be had, they sat by the peat fire. Listening to their father tell his goblin stories, or about the time he saw Daniel O'Connell at the monster rally.

“The whole country turned out to hear Swaggerin' Dan. There was people everywhere. They filled the fields, an' the roads an' the fields beyond that. Made torches from barrels of tar, an' hogsheads of sugar. And Dan himself standin' there on the hillside with his chest puffed out like a strutting cock—”

Their eyes half-hooded, dreaming around the fire. Listening to the flow of their father's voice, while the banshee wailed around the cabin. Ruth, the oldest, sitting by herself in her emerging womanhood. Then the boys, Brian, who was her mother's favorite, and Sean and Liam, and the younger girls, Kate and Agnes, and Colleen, the baby. All of them half asleep, as groggy as bears in the smoky, dirt-floored cabin through the long winter months. No windows, or even a
chimney, just the door left open enough to let the smoke out and the pig in.

How ignorant we was, and how helpless. It's a sin to be so helpless—

Their father telling his stories of the wider world slowly, solemnly, as if he were still working on each one. Mother quicker, but telling each one the same way, every time. The dance at the crossroads, or how they moved the cabin the day they were married.

They loved to hear them, nevertheless. The story of how the wedding party picked up the whole house: the thatch roof, and the sod blocks, and the foundation stones and everything inside. Carrying it half a mile, to where it still sat, out on the bony plains of the Burren, while the fiddler played, and the women cooked outside in the field, everyone breaking off from the work to drink or eat, and dance.

“Those days we still would dance at the crossroads of a summer night. The priest didn't like it, he thought it a pagan thing—”

Ruth could picture it. The whole village stepping softly, slowly through the fields so as not to wake the priggish priest. Whispers and muffled laughter in the grass. The young men in their gaudy waistcoats, carrying peat and sticks for the fire, jugs of poteen and fiddles under their arms. The swish of women's dresses moving through the high grass, the bright ribbons tied around their caps—

When the west wind eased, an' the winter ended, me Da would haul the seaweed up the cliffs, where the wide Atlantic throws itself up against the land an' the seabirds make their nests in the rock wall. An' me Ma would mix it up thick with the sandy dirt, an' the pig droppings, an' the lumpers would grow even in that. Until they did not.

They pulled them up in August—great, white horse potatoes. Stowed over the fire, on a plank just below the roof thatch. Cooked up with a little salt or, sometimes, for a special occasion, in a soup with a bit of herring and a piggin of warm buttermilk on the side. Not so fine as the red potatoes they grew down in Munster, but big enough to feed them all, and the pig as well until the following June. After that they would live on the American corn they got in the town, and most of the chickens, until it was August and time to pull the lumpers again.

The August Ruth turned sixteen they pulled the potatoes up and found the half of them black, and rotten to the core. The blight had
come before—never so bad, but there were still enough saved to get them through the winter without eating the pig. And the next spring, Mother tore up the old beds with her spade, and had the priest bless them, and by August the horse potatoes grew big and white and coarse again, and they said a prayer of thanks to the Virgin, and to St. Brigid.

But just two weeks after, Mother knocked a dozen lumpers down for the supper, and cried out when she cut into the very first one. They didn't have to ask what it was. The potato she had cut into was black to the heart, though they had pulled it up from the ground whole and white. She cut the rest open, one by one, her face set grim as a stone, each one as rotten as the next.

Da boosted us up on the plank o'er the fire, an' we threw down the potatoes as fast as we could, tryin' to find any that was still good, and separate them from the rest. But it was too late. They turned to black slime before our eyes, even as he laid 'em out around the cabin.

We run out to the lazy beds then, to dig up the new crop an' see if we could not find one or two that was still untouched. But even before we could dig them out our nostrils was filled with the sweet stink of the blight. The lumpers turned to shite where they lay. We skidded through them on our backsides, laughin' and scramblin' in the potatoes, for what else was we to do?

Have you ever had a nightmare come true? Have you ever had the worst thing you can imagine happen to you? We always feared the potatoes would fail, and we would starve. And then they did.

After that there was nothing to do but eat the rest of the chickens. And when they were gone, they ate the pig, since they did not have a thing to feed it with anyway. Their mother spent all day over it, basting and roasting it until the meat was ready to fall off the spit, and their father carved it up deliberately, rationing out the great, greasy slices one at a time.

They were ravenous just for the smell of it. None of them had ever tasted real meat before, and they gobbled it down as soon as they held it in their hands, letting it burn across their tongues and their cheeks. While Da and Ma looked on, not eating, letting them have it all, every bite, the tears streaming down their faces. For they knew what it meant to eat the pig.

And that winter the wind blew all day and all night from the east, which was an unnatural thing, and it brought the snow an' the cold with it. Me Da walked his miles each day to the works, where he labored with t'other men building roads from no-place to no-place, for four and sixpence a week. He worked there in the road, with no coat and the shoes crumbling on his feet, until he died in the road, and was buried in the road, there under the rubbled stone.

In the third year of the blight, they came to tumble the cabin. Half a company of regulars, just turned out of bed and still half drunk. The nervous landlord's agent with his notice of ejectment hiding inside their bayonets. But that was enough. They called them from the cabin and out they came, the woman and her seven children. White as slugs, without a pair of shoes among them, pants flapping raggedly at their shins.

It was half an hour's work. The soldiers lifting the thatch off the roof with their bayonets, then pulling the foundation stones and the peat walls apart with crowbars. The agent reading his bill of ejectment in a loud, shaky voice—slowly tailing off to silence as the family made no objection. Standing out there along the white bands of limestone, blinking like moles at the sun glinting fiercely off the bayonets.

“All right,” the mother said when they were through, and they trooped back into the wreckage of their home and began to set up their
scalpeen.

They pulled out anything they could, the stools and straw bosses, the bedding and the blackened cooking pot. The soldiers ignoring them, their work done for the day, forming up to march back to town for their day's dram, the agent safe in their midst again. They heaped a few stone blocks and the tumbled roof up around their possessions as best they could. Then they crawled back under, out of the sun and with their bellies to the ground.

We ate the pig, an' when that was gone we ate all the turnips an' the blackberries an' the nettles we could find. We even tried to eat the flowers, for it was all that grew out there, the maidenhair an' the pretty roses, an' the blue an' yellow orchids. But we couldn't keep 'em down.

After that their mother went to the church, but two of the priests had died from the spotted fever, and the last one had no word from the
bishop, so he closed up the church, and went out to the works with the rest of the men who could still walk there. Next she went to Ballyvaughan, to see if she might beg some flint corn there.

An' that evenin', just before dark, I looked out from a hole in the thatch an' I saw her there. A lone black figure on the road, holdin' her skirt out before her, so that she looked like a sower upon the land. And not like a sower of new corn but a sower of Death, so I knew from that moment on, sooner or later I would have to leave.

And after the flint corn ran out in the town, they gave them turnips, which was actually an improvement. When they boiled them down, at least the turnips weren't as hard and dense as the corn, which was like trying to eat pebbles. But soon the turnips were gone, and they got by on soup from the Quakers, until that ran out, too, and there wasn't anything—there wasn't anything to eat at all in the town, or anywhere else they knew of, out in the desolate silence of the Burren.

Have you ever had a nightmare come true? Have you ever had the worst thing you can possibly imagine happen to you?

Her mother lay on the hearth, her head against the four crude flagstones where they used to make their fire. Her voice no more than a rasping whisper. Telling the old stories again, about how they used to dance at the crossroads on a summer's night.

“That was na twenty years ago—”

Ruth tried to picture it, the way they always did. But in the end she could only see the telling of the tales. All of them, her sisters and brothers and her father still. Dreaming around the fire in the long winter months, when the banshee howled around the walls and there was nothing to do but tell stories.

But most of all she remembered the food. She tried to help it, but that was all she could think about by then. The fat white lumpers, boiled in the pot with a piece of salt herring, a piggin of buttermilk on the side—

The whole village, walking out to dance in the crossroads. Moving through the fields at night, carrying their goatskin drums and flutes. The women,
each one wearing a bright ribbon in her hair, skirts brushing through the tall grass—

She had never thought of her mother as old, but she reminded her now of a knackered horse she had seen in the town. Her cheeks caved in. Whole patches of her scalp bare, the brown, almost black hair she was so proud of almost gone now. The flesh hung like a loose blanket off her limbs, eyes spinning wildly in her head.

“
Bliadhain an air!
” she cried out. “
Bliadhain an air!
The year of slaughter!”

Ruth stared down at her, dizzy in her hunger, her mother's face spinning before her. There was no fire, and none of them had enough strength left to fetch more peat, to go out and find some, and cut it from the ground. The stones were still warm, though, and she laid her own head next to her mother's, staring into her decayed face, dropping into death.

I left them in the spring, when the red rock roses and the mountain aven grew, and the orchids turned the rock pink and yellow and blue in their abundance. I walked out an' left 'em there, in all that useless beauty.

There was a terrible stink, and Ruth could see something glistening, dark and wet along her mother's blanket. She raised her head, watching, wondering if she was seeing the very life drain out of her. But her mother's face seemed different, too, almost calm now, all but radiant with the fever. She gestured to Ruth, crooking one bony finger at her.

It was then that she saw the nail was broken, the finger bloodied and dirty. It was then that she saw the gaping hole beneath the hearthstone, that lay in the ground like an abscess.

“You must. Get him out,” her mother commanded, pointing at something across the room, her voice barely audible, but triumphant.