Paradise Alley (77 page)

“I got him out, then, I got him. Without even the potato.”

“Yes, yes.”

“I got 'em all out, an' didn't sacrifice the one. I saved him—”

“Yes. Try to sleep now.”

She fell into a deeper sleep, and Deirdre left Eliza, who had come
back from the Jews' house, by her bedside and walked through the ruined front of her home. Moving obliviously past the remnants of her parlor set and out the broken front door. Grabbing the first woman she could find by the elbow.

“Go find a priest. Tell him it's urgent, a woman is dying, and maybe a child as well. Go,
now!
”

The woman, who had been another member of the mob minutes before, nodded and ran off without another word. Deirdre stood out on the street, surveying all the damage there for a moment longer—the mattresses and bedclothes. The bureaus and dressers, portmanteaus and chests—all her best pieces—smashed or burned, or emptied out where they lay.

Then she saw it—just up the street, in front of Ruth's house. That
thing
of his—the cabinet of wonders. Lying out on the paving stones, its front panels smashed and the glass knocked out. She walked over to take a closer look—staring down into the cabinet, expecting to see it emptied. But it didn't seem to her as if any of the countless gewgaws inside had actually been taken, only jumbled altogether.
A meaningless scramble of junk, lying out on the street.

She crossed herself, beginning to murmur a prayer.

“Hail Mary, full of grace—”

She was interrupted by a wild clanging noise, like some loose bell rolling down a hill. Turning her head, wondering what new calamity this was—she saw a fire company running its engines onto the block. She watched, incredulous, as the men rushed to fix the hose to the Croton hydrant, pumping immediately at the great piano handles with clockwork drill and discipline. Some of them the same men, their faces still blackened, that she was sure she had just seen on the block, trying to burn it down—

She walked toward them, reading the name and number off their wagons:
No. 6. The Big Six.
The ferocious tiger's head painted on the front of the engine box. The big red machine all but unscathed, somehow, in all the turmoil of the City. Deirdre walked up to one of the firemen as if in a dream.

“What are you doing?”

“Why, we're puttin' the fire out, ma'am!” the man told her, tipping his leather-backed hat but looking at her as if she had lost her mind.

“Why? What for? You started it.”

“Ah, now, ma'am, that couldn't a been us,” the fireman said, admonishing her with a smile as he hurried, with the rest of his company, to guide the hose around to the smoldering back privvy lots. “Besides, it's orders of the boss hisself—”

She wandered away, back toward her house, and Ruth in her bed. The firemen hustling up and down the block around her. The women slowly fading back into their homes, unshuttering their doors and windows—and the sound of the drums growing steadily louder.

Another company of men came around the corner now—dressed in blue tunics, running in a crouch. The bayonets on their muskets flashing in the late afternoon sun.
The soldiers—
here at last. They jogged down the street, looking carefully all around them, scanning the upper-story windows and the roofs. An officer followed on a large black horse—more teams of horses hauling a pair of field guns along.

Deirdre stared at them numbly, at the men and their weapons, moving together as one dangerous being.
Like a machine.
Wishing numbly, devoid of all charity, for them to simply sweep the street clean of any life, to sweep all the streets in the whole wretched City.

And then she saw him. Scarcely able to credit it at first, or to understand. Seeing him there, and whole—moving well enough, with only a slight limp in one leg. His face nearly covered in a beard. Older and more worn than she could have imagined, just in the past few months, but him, unmistakably him. Tom himself, running along with the rest, his eyes looking much more worried than the rest. Until he saw her there—

•
76
•

He stared down at the wreckage of the box, where the looters had laid it out.
A cabinet of wonders—
lying along the pavement before him. All of it still there. The painted glass eye, and the broken hilt of a sword, and the tiny engine. The miniature of the most beautiful woman in the world, and the lovers walking in the moonlight, and a ship in a bottle.

All junk. All of it so much junk, worthless even to a rampaging mob. Exactly what McCool and his bartender had said it was, on his first night in the City.

He ran a hand through it, dredging up the jumbled scraps. Letting them roll out into the street.

A delusion. Just like his brother.

He stared back down the street at the wreckage of his wife, still lying on the ground—at the boy, her son, hidden beneath her. The mob, and the frenzy of violence around them.

All smashed, by his own hand. He had not meant to hit them so hard, Ruth, or her boy. No—he had meant to hit them as hard as he possibly could, to smash the life out of them. But it had done so little good.

He looked back down at the junk by his feet, and wanted to bellow out his rage again.
All that.
Traveling halfway around the world and
back, just for this junk, the illusion of a brother.
All that trouble, just to live.

But here he was, at the end of it—still alive. Still breathing, despite everything he had tried. He stood up and walked away unnoticed, off Paradise Alley, over to the waterfront. Looking for a bar, if he could not die.

•
77
•

She lies out on the street, barely alive. Her face horribly swollen, covered in blood. Moaning over and over again the name of someone, whom I am told is her son. Barely able to get the words out of her broken, bloody mouth, but she keeps asking.

“My boy, my boy . . . . How is my boy? Did he kill my boy?”

I think I know her face, even as battered as it is. No doubt from passing her in the street, over so many years, on my way to visit Maddy. And she must then know me, at least, as Maddy's gentleman.

How many such faces do we pass every day in the City? Gaining no more than, at best, a nodding familiarity. Never suspecting that they might know us as something else, something better or worse than how we choose to present ourselves to the world. Never looking at them twice until something happens—the horse bolts, the streetcar shudders, there is shouting—and they lie before you, as this woman does before me, moaning for her child.

The son lies over in the gutter, a few feet away. Beaten bloody himself, his dark, brown body stripped naked. He is unconscious, but still breathing. A sweet, boyish face, bearing the marks now of the same hard fists that pounded his mother. A beautiful youth—or so he was, before the mob. The nose and probably at least one cheek broken, cuts and gashes covering his fine, youthful brow. He is young, perhaps he will live.

They tell me all about it, the people on Maddy's block. This collection
of half-castes, and half paupers. White women married to colored men, ragpickers and bonepickers and streetsweepers and whores. From what I can gather, it was the woman's former lover who did this. She having forsaken him to marry a colored man who is absent now, missing since the riot started.

“Do ya know him? Do ya know anything of him?” they implore me about the colored husband. Pulling at my sleeve once I begin writing down notes and they ascertain that I am a journalist. Thinking I know all things; fearing the worst for him, a black man missing in the City—

“They call him Billy Dove. Works up at the Colored Orphans' Asylum. Or did, before t'other day—”

“Ah, would be a shame to lose 'em both!”

“Oh, but the boy'll live, you'll see—”

“That's enough talk out of all of you.”

A strikingly handsome Irishwoman takes charge, shooing them away from the woman where she lies in the street. Barely able to contain her rage, she is still as efficient and coolheaded as a great general.

I am given to understand that she is the sister-in-law—trim as an oak sapling, her hair tied back in a neat, tight chignon. Her face is truly beautiful, her eyes the same color as her light brown hair. Yet for all her beauty she has a hard, unflinching look about her.

“What should we do with all this, then?” one of the neighbors lingering in the street asks her.

He gestures toward a broken cabinet, lying out on the sidewalk, and a vast array of junk around it. I can make nothing of it. It seems both archaic and incomprehensible—the junk of the ages scattered randomly along an alley, as it is in so many of the streets of our City.

The woman, the sister-in-law, looks it over with the contempt it deserves. Then she flicks a hand at it, dismissively. The haughty Irish maid, right to the heart, showing the chimney sweeps 'round to the servants' door.

“Get rid of it. Get rid of it all! Or just leave it, it'll get rid of itself out there!”

But then I see tears well up in her eyes—as unexpected as they might be on the cheeks of a marble statue. She turns, and ducks quickly back inside to her sister-in-law's home.

Some of her neighbors linger in the street, wondering what they
should do—wondering if the mob will return. Soon, though, a company of soldiers makes its way down the street, posting pickets on the corners. They sweep on through the ward, driving the mob before them. Going door to door to search for stolen merchandise, arresting anyone they find with dress coats or ladies' frocks.

And Maddy is gone. No one knows where she might be. The door to her house yawns open, and there is no one inside. Soon enough I am able to piece together that it was she who the mob came for.

“Shootin' away at 'em the whole time,” a woman tells me, with a note of awe in her voice. “Cursin' those men for what they were, an' firin' away like the devil with that revolver.”

So, she finally got to fire it after all. And then fled—where? All anyone could say was that she had escaped up to the rooftop, then down the privvy lots. Running back into the City with an empty gun.
Free of me at last—and with no more idea of how to survive than a child would have. The child I first picked up, in Printing House Square—

Inside her looted bedroom I pick up the dirty, spotted dressing gown she had been wearing. The thing feels threadbare, and almost insubstantial in my hand. The rest of her closet, her wardrobe, is bare, completely turned out and sacked, as is the whole of the little Dutch house I rent for her. I wonder if she will ever come back to it now.

Outside, on the street, I kick through the garbage from that odd, broken cabinet. A few of the soldiers are bending over it, fingering the various curios, then flipping them back in the street. I spot one private—his collarbone in a sort of cast—tuck a lewd etching away in his tunic.

So at least it is good for something.
I am about to let it go, and head down to the
Tribune,
when I see something else lying amid all this rubbish. It is that same infernal sign. The block of wood the creature from the park wore all day, a chunk of it, anyway. Their crude demand still chalked upon it:
no draft!

I tell myself the mob must have made hundreds of such signs—but there is no mistaking it. There is even the same length of chain around it. The very same piece of wood, discarded right here.

Then I know where I have seen that look before—in the face of the sister-in-law.
That brusque, beautiful woman.
A face as different
from that man's as night from day, but not really. Still the same expression in it, the curled disdain I saw when he faced the troops, invited them to shoot him down.

It must be he who has come this way, unleashed all this havoc, all his rage and fury upon that poor woman, that boy. I am up and running at once, asking everyone I can where he went, in what direction, but they are only confused and suspicious. They can give me only garbled, useless answers, even as I keep confronting them. Demanding to know—

“Where is he?
Where is he?
”