Paradise Alley (11 page)

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I abandon our abandoned City Hall, cutting around the crowd filling the park, and cross over a footbridge to the dollar side of Broadway. Here the sidewalks are nearly as full as they are on any Monday morning. Crammed with merchants and Wall Street traders, peddlers and messenger boys and visitors from out of town, all of them oblivious to the impending crisis. The flower girls are setting up their wares as usual, wherever they can find a corner or a fence.

I stop at the stand of an old Negro woman to buy a pear in syrup, served up in a clay dish, a good remedy for a bad head. The street throngs push past me, as impatient as ever. Yet standing there, slurping down my pear, I notice, crowds or no crowds, that more and more dry-goods stores are not opening up. Or they are closing down already, their tin-sheet shutters clanging on the pavement. Some of our merchants have gone so far as to hire toughs and paid them to swagger about outside their doors, pistols prominently displayed in their belts. I wonder how much use such men will be to them if the mob actually does come.

On Paradise Alley they know better. The only sound in the street is the buzzing of flies, hovering over the heaps of garbage and the horse carcasses. Every door is shut. You can almost
feel
them sitting inside, in the stifling heat. Watching every movement along the street—

I pull the bell outside Maddy's—outside the home I rent for her. It is a sturdy, old freestone house, dating back to the Dutch. One of a few remaining houses along the nub end of Cherry Street. Just down Paradise Alley, looming over them all, is the terrible double tenement they call the Shambles—an enormous, monolithic structure, its walls and even its windows perennially blanketed with coal soot.

I give a small shiver, as I do whenever I see that place, and turn away, ringing Maddy's bell again. There is still no answer, so I pound on the door with both my fists, instantly enraged by her insolence, then worried. Could she really be out on such a day? Foolish enough to be straggling back from some god-awful haunt of hers—

“All right, all right, if you're that desperate for it!”

The voice of a slattern, but I am relieved. At least she has had the sense to stay in today—

She opens the door, smirking up at me through her hair, and I realize it is all a joke. She knew who it was, must have seen me hurrying down along Catherine Street through her upstairs window.

“Oh, it's you,” she says, coquettishly, sidling up against the doorjamb. “I'm sorry, I was expectin' a regular—”

Infuriated all over again, I seize her by the elbow and push her inside. She yanks her arm away angrily, reaches under her frock and pulls out the absurd horse pistol she's been carting about.

“Ya can't do that to me! Mind yourself, or I'll give ya a taste of this!” she screams, waving the enormous gun around in front of my nose.

I slap it out of her hand, the ball rolling harmlessly away as it hits the floor. I slap
her
then—once, twice across the face, as hard as I can make myself, assuming she is still drunk from the night before. I am immediately filled with regret, with anguish and self-loathing for my temper. Maddy bawls like a cat for a moment, then steadies herself, waiting to see what else I might have to say.

She is not someone who rattles easily.

“Amuse yourself with me some other time. Things are up today.”

“Are they?” she asks, stabbing a hand at my crotch, expertly discovering the tumescence that has come over me since I pushed my way inside her home.

“Are they indeed?”

I shove her hand away, holding her arms by her sides. She stands
there, a smirk on her face. Looking, God help me, nearly as young as she did when I first knew her. I feel a great tenderness toward her still. Looking at the way her thin, silken hair hangs down over her face. Wearing the fine yellow gown I bought her at Stewart's—though even in this light I can see she has already managed to stain it with food and ashes, maybe worse.

I don't know why she should hate me so, save for the fact that I have stolen her life.

“You have to leave this place,” I tell her. “That pistol won't help with a mob any more than it did with me. You have to come with me.”

“Why would anyone want to come
here?
” she brays at me. “It's your fine houses uptown they'll burn! Best you get back an' look after yourself!”

“I wouldn't rely on it,” I say, as calmly as possible. “There will be police and soldiers to guard Gramercy Square. The mob will go where there is the least resistance.”

“You think your soldiers will do any good? Those shot-up old men? I seen what
they're
good fer. Besides, they say there ain't a whole regiment in the City—”

She is trying to provoke me again, though I fear she is right.

“Look around you,” I tell her, gripping her by both arms and making her listen. “Look at all the coloreds you have down here, many of them living freely with white people. Who do you think the mob
really
wants to burn? And when they come, they'll find you as well.”

“And what'll you do with me?”

“I'll take you to the house—”

“You'll take me to the house. To
your
house, now.”

“Yes, you can stay in the servants' rooms. If the mob does come, you can say you work for me—”

It is the wrong thing to say—and I know it only too late. She stiffens, that stubbornness falling over her again like a veil.

“I worked for you before. I do as I like now.”

“When have you not?” I ask her, looking around me.

She has turned the home I rented for her into a bawdyhouse. There is an empty bottle of whiskey on the table, empty glasses lying on their sides, an open tin of sardines. The whole house smells rancid, almost as foul as it does outside. It doesn't look as if it's been washed or swept for weeks, though I give her money for a charwoman, as well.

I move back toward the door almost reflexively. Maddy only leers at me knowingly.

“Why'd ya really come? To offer me the chance to be your maid? Or were ya hopin' we could play your game again?”

She lifts the hem of her yellow gown up over her sex—up all the way to her small, round breasts—as wanton as a Water Street whore, and I am spellbound.
Even after all this time.

“I can get outta
this
fast enough. All you have to do is fetch the chains—”

“All right, you've had your fun.”

I want to walk out of the house, leave her to the mob. I want to throw her down on the day couch, have her right there. I want to save her from everything. And as always she senses my predicament, grins knowingly around her mat of hair.
These people—

“If you insist on staying, at least take some real precautions.”

I leave her the Colt revolver that Raymond pressed on me, showing her how to work the mechanism and turn the chamber. It won't be easy for her to fire, with her soft little hands, or to aim a weapon with such a kick. She can get off six shots with it, though, and the noise it makes will sound like a cannon. That might be enough to give her some running room, at least—

She stands there looking at it, caressing the smooth, white, ivory handle as if it's the best gift I've ever given her, better than all the dresses, and the toilet water, and the ribbons for her hair, over so many years. Better than this house, or all the tutors, or the piano.
A gun.
Admiring it, so childlike.

That cryptic note of triumph as she defies me:

“I do as I like.”

My Maddy. My mistress, my love. A spewing whore—and I have done this.

Have I done this?

She used to be different, once—I think.
So was I.
We met so many years ago, when she was little more than a child, already a woman many times over, in this town.

I can remember the very moment. It was one of the few true spring nights the City ever experiences. I had stayed on at the
Tribune
offices well past dark, putting to bed the national weekly edition. Getting out
the Word of Greeley for the nation. Knowing that it would be read by sheepherders out on the Ohio, homesteaders in Illinois, gold panners in the California foothills. The advance guard of empire, fending off flood and famine, bandits and savages. Hunched around their campfires upon the dark and illimitable prairie, reading whatever scraps of the
Tribune
they can lay their hands on. Asking each other in awe-filled voices:
Have you seen Horace?

After my duties were discharged, I had stayed on, trying to work on my own book, a collection of sketches from life in the City, which I planned to call
Street Scenes.
This was my secret ambition, the book I had yet to tell even the other literati down at Pfaff's Cave about. Deep in my heart of hearts, I harbored dreams of becoming the American Dickens, of turning out a book of great social importance—and one that would also sell like hot mutton pies in the dollar stalls.

Yet somehow, the images I had gathered failed to coalesce. They stuck and shriveled on the page before me. I put it down to my fatigue, to my mistake in trying to plug away at what was my art only after I had done my necessary work. Frustrated beyond endurance, I fell asleep, drowsing in the warm room.

It was her voice that awakened me:

“Hot corn! Hot corn!

Here's your nice hot corn!

Smoking hot, smoking hot,

Just from the pot!”

The sound of a hot-corn girl, so close beneath my window that I could nearly hear the rustle of her shawl. How many times had I heard that same call! Usually at night, while I was trying to sleep—smothered in my bedroom, shifting about under a single sheet. The cry of the girl, somewhere out in the vast City, coming through my window—

“Hot corn! Hot corn!

Here's your lily-white corn!

All you that's got money—

Poor me that's got none—

Come buy my lily-hot corn

And let me go home!”

Now, welling up around her cry, I could hear the omnibuses creaking their way up Broadway. The trill of the newsboys, hawking the late extras. A fire bell clanging, the eager young men in their red shirts rushing to the station house. The laughter of the rabbit sports on their way to a theatre, or a supper, or a whorehouse.

All the sounds of a great city turning into night . . . .

It was that hour of the evening when the City is just picking up steam. That hour when the Wall Street merchants leave the exchange to wager in hotel bars and gambling dens. The workingmen speak earnestly in their lodges and political meetings. The gangs plot in their cellar redoubts, the smiling women walk brazenly through saloon doors. The theatres and the beer gardens fill.

The room around me was soaked in the agreeably pungent smells of my profession: ink and pencil shavings, blotter paper and Indian rubber and machine oil. Beneath my feet I could feel the throb of the first-floor presses, rolling out tomorrow's edition, to be sent out all over this City, the state, out to all the new lit outposts of our republic—and I could still believe then, with a glow of pride and satisfaction, that I was a part of it all.

“Hot corn! Hot corn!

Here's your nice hot corn,

This corn is good,

And that I know

For on Long Island,

This corn did grow!”

The girl's voice drifted up to me again. It was clearly the voice of a young woman, perhaps still a teenager. Brave and insistent, guileless and revealing despite itself, the way only a young girl's voice can be. I heard it tremble slightly. No doubt anxious she wouldn't sell all her corn before it grew cold and she had to take it back to the Little Water, or the Arch Block, to face another beating from her mother or her pimp (or both). Still, I could perceive, she tried to use her fear, to hit just the right note of girlish helplessness that draws men like flies.