Metropolis (47 page)

No Whyo saw her go. Maggie the Dove spread the word, and soon everyone understood what had to be done. No one gave an order, but the gang functioned with one mind, as if it was possessed of a collective consciousness. They desisted their un-Whyolike behavior. They fell quiet. They dispersed. They fanned out across the plaza and into neighboring streets. No one had a plan, but they might as well have rehearsed it, they were so efficient.

Just two men were tailing Undertoe as he turned north onto Chatham Street, but they made sure the others knew their location. Undertoe didn’t even realize he was being followed yet, but the net of Whyos was so tight around him that there was no corner around which he might have turned to escape. When he made to walk up Bowery, a populous street, they herded him east instead. He began to feel nervous as they pushed him even further toward the river, to Oliver. His ears were ringing. He heard again the whispering that he’d come to understand was something much more than trees or birds or carriage wheels on Belgian block. He’d known something about what he had been hearing in the courtroom; now he knew it in a different way. He realized it was directed at him, and he tried to resist but was unable. He looked behind him and saw no one, nothing, but nevertheless he was afraid. Even when Luther Undertoe broke into a trot, even when he ran, he was not free—his very feet moved under direction from the Whyos. Finally, he found himself almost at the river. There were livery stables on either side and a narrow passage between them that opened onto the docks, which at that latitude were taken up entirely by the East Side Manure Depot, a complex of piers where stables and street-cleaning carts dumped the solid waste of every horse in that quadrant of the city. Undertoe darted through the gap between buildings and found himself up against a mountain of fly-swarmed dung as tall as he was.
What am I running from?
he wondered as a chill coursed his spine. He turned three hundred and sixty degrees in place.
Strange,
he thought,
there’s no one around.
But of course it was not strange at all if one happened to know that the Whyos had purposely cleared the area. And then there were people all around, people with faces he recognized—the men and women from Mother Dolan’s funeral, from Billy’s, from the Morgue—and there was no doubt that they were working in concert. He saw men he’d known vaguely, years ago at the Newsboys Lodging House. He saw the Jimster—the Jimster had been his boy once. Then someone kicked a rooster tail of dung in his direction, and they fell upon him.

In all his years, Undertoe had never thought twice about any of the people he’d killed, and, no, he didn’t start to do so now. He felt no redeeming pang of remorse. What filled his mind as the Whyos surged toward him was the very same thing that had always filled it when he was on the other side of a crime, dealing blows: the image of his mother, Lola Unterzeh, the Pomeranian Soprano-Contortionist, P. T. Barnum’s early great hope and even greater flop, the fizzled precursor to the star act that followed, the woman the world called the Swedish Nightingale. Undertoe’s mother had had a voice even sweeter than Jenny Lind’s, but her act, while squarely up Barnum’s alley, was too much of a hybrid to catch on. She sang arias while standing on her hands, with her legs over her shoulders and her derriere exposed; she crooned lieder while performing a flashy one-hand backbend in a sequined chemise. It was sheer genius, really, how she managed to project her voice in those postures, but he hadn’t promoted her right, and when ticket sales faltered Barnum had shunted her off to the sideshow, while Jenny Lind’s American tour had made her famous and him a world-class impresario. Loopy Lola, as some people called her, began to feel ill one evening when Luther was a boy, just after a flawless execution of her pièce de résistance, a Mozart aria that ended with a high C she belted out in the standing double-lotus position. An audience of four saw the act: two woozy sailors, an Indian on break from another exhibit and her son. Lola had had to excuse herself afterward to go throw up. For three days, Lola Unterzeh had writhed in pain and watched her stomach bloat. She couldn’t eat a thing. It wouldn’t have helped her much to know what it was: an impacted bowel, triggered by an unlucky constellation of small disorders, including constipation from her little laudanum habit, an exacerbation of the chronic inflammation that she suffered as a low-grade carrier of typhoid, and then, of course, the unfortunate angulation of the knot she’d tied herself in that afternoon. Luther had never forgotten the fecal stench of her vomit toward the end, his helplessness, her final words: “Luther, my pea, my sweetest pea, if I don’t get well, go to your father. He’ll take care of you.”

Undertoe had always known who his father was but had never really known him. Mr. Barnum, as he called him, kept his distance from all but the gold-medal acts, and Lola Unterzeh hadn’t panned out. He’d given Undertoe a lousy job selling trinkets and a bunk to sleep in, in the stable, just to shut him up, but the day the boy came up to him in front of half a dozen others and dared to say
father,
he’d slapped him in the face without compunction.

“Excuse me, boy, is that something your opium addict of a mother told you, or is it just your own little dream?”

Undertoe had landed his boy’s flyweight left hook in Barnum’s grandiose gut—to no particular effect—before being dragged away by a couple of the freaks. He’d started to dream of fire that very night. Fire was a fine kind of revenge for a boy, one with a potential impact far surpassing the incendiary’s personal strength. That was what had hooked him, really: the exponential growth of it from the first small flickering match to something that seemed like the end of the world. It had made him, who was no one, just as powerful—or more so—than Barnum, for a while.

Someone landed a slung-shot squarely on the whorled cup of Undertoe’s right ear, and he heard an angelic sound: the trill of a perfect high C. His ears hadn’t rung so purely since before he caught the mumps. Many of the Whyos had clubs and bowie knives. The first two who got to him with gougers prized out his eyes. Maggie the Dove got the left, slightly astigmatic one. Before five minutes had expired, it was over, and there was no body anywhere in sight—just a freshly turned spot on the festering pile and half a hundred average-looking Irishmen and -women fading back into the streets, tucking in their shirts, straightening their skirts, discreetly wiping their hands on the insides of their pockets. From the top layer of the pile of shit beneath which Undertoe lay, maggots went on bursting into horseflies, almost like popcorn, just as they’d been doing all day long and the day before and the day before that, ad infinitum. And then, one by one, they flew off—green-eyed, buzzing and hungry for the cycle of their procreation to begin again.

40.

WORLD WITHOUT END

H
angings at the Tombs were not public; they were held in the building’s fully enclosed courtyard. But because of the relative height and proximity of the surrounding buildings, whenever the gallows went up the adjacent rooftops transformed the area into an amphitheater, with elbow-to-elbow balcony seating for the spectacle below. All the residents of Five Points converged upon the area. Bowery theaters stayed dark, knowing no one would come. And then there was always the smattering of upper-class rakes who donned shabby jackets and risked joining the fray just to feel the thrill of watching a healthy man jerk and die, just to be able to say they’d seen what their acquaintances only read about in the
Sun
or the
Trib.
It was almost as adventurous, to them, as going to sea or to war, but the war was long over and sea voyages were notorious hells. Going down to the Fourth Ward to take in a hanging demanded only a single night; they’d be home for lunch the next day.

The revelry began around dusk the night before and went on till hours after the rope was finally cut down. Vendors who otherwise sold their wares on the streets by day made their way up to the rooftops at sundown and did a brisk trade walking from building to building through the wee hours. Eventually, just before dawn, every square foot of roof space was so thick with people that the vendors returned to the streets below, which at least were still navigable, though even then they were thronged with latecomers who’d failed to find perches with views onto the action. The crowds being as thick as they were, a hanging was also a great opportunity for petty thieves and pickpockets. Beatrice and Fiona and the rest of the Why Nots had gone out with baskets of corn and profited handsomely from many a hanging in the past.

This time, as the soon-to-be widow of one of the condemned men, it was going to be different for her. Beatrice received an invitation from the warden himself to witness the event from a balcony within the courtyard; the letter came some two weeks in advance of the date. It arrived at the old Dolan penthouse, where Fiona and the Jimster lived now, and was delivered to Dr. Smith’s house in Weeksville by a girl she didn’t know—a new Why Not, she presumed. So business was going on without her. After she’d read it, she tore the heavy sheet to shreds. Newly law-abiding or not, author of his death or not, she damn well wasn’t going to stand beside the cops while a couple of innocent Whyos were strung up to die. But it did raise the question: Would she go at all? Join the rollicking crowd? Accompany the other Whyos, some of whom had dreams of an eleventh-hour rescue? She didn’t think she belonged there anymore.

“I don’t know what I want to do, Harris. Maybe I shouldn’t go at all. And yet I feel I have to.”

She didn’t expect him to have an answer. It was a bit of an awkward subject for him, but after a minute he said, “Well, it wouldn’t be a great view, kind of far away, but unobstructed, away from the crowds.”

“What, the bridge?”

He nodded.

“It’s not allowed, is it?” She was almost smiling. She’d wanted to go to the top of the bridge for some time, but he hadn’t offered. The company had banned all ladies from the footbridges, thanks to a couple of scandalized newspaper articles the month before, after an assistant engineer brought his young daughters on a tour and they had both been so paralyzed with fright that they’d had to be carried down.

“I seem to remember you playing the part of a boy rather convincingly, the morning I first met you. You and your brass knuckles.”

“Harris.”

“Well, you did.”

“I’m well aware.”

It was something of a problem for her, actually, how he managed to be both sensitive and funny, and then, just when she was sick of what a goody-goody he was, he would want to break some rule, do something wrong, go far enough afield to keep her interest. He was too perfect.

That week, she’d found yet another matter to preoccupy her. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized it before, but she had finally gone to the Smith-Blacksall clinic one day, after school—as a patient.

“Lord, girl,” said Dr. Smith, who was on duty. “What about school, your plans, haven’t you learned a thing at this clinic?”

Beatrice was silent.

“Well, are you planning to marry that Harris boy? You’re going to need to think a few things out.”

Beatrice coughed. “To start with, I’m still married to the other.”

“Oh—so you are. But you don’t mean to tell me . . . it’s
his
?”

Beatrice could see her counting backward in her head.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe you could help me figure that out. If it’s Harris’s, see, I think I’d feel different.”

It turned out the window of opportunity spanned the time when Dandy Johnny had last raped her and she’d first taken up with Harris. There was no way to know. Maybe it was the hormones, circulating wildly irrespective of paternity—because no matter how big a mistake she’d made, Beatrice was normally anything but a blubberer—but now she burst into tears.

Dr. Smith said, “I’m sorry, Beatrice. I’m awfully sorry for you. You have to figure this one out. But I’ll tell you, if you stick to school, if you work hard, you really could be a doctor. It only takes determination, studying, time . . . or all that plus a strong stomach, which I know you have. There’s a lot of girls out there who need caring for. You could go back to the Five Points and help those girls, show them what’s possible. There are even fewer women than Negroes in medicine, you know. They’re needed. You could make it if you didn’t quit.”

“But what if I love him, Harris, and it’s his? What do I do then?”

“I don’t know. You have to choose.”

She couldn’t bring herself to go back to Dr. Zhang’s, nor did she ask Dr. Smith for more help, nor did she even tell Harris. She told herself she would wait until Johnny was dead, although why she felt that gory milestone would make things any clearer even she couldn’t have said.

For the next week, she bounced from morose ill humor to clinging adoration of Harris, from impatience with him to insatiable lust. He was pretty patient, considering, but he was anxious, too. Great, unpredictable changes were bound to occur in their lives. And then the eve of the day arrived. When it grew late, they climbed into bed. He reached around and embraced her from behind. He seemed to weigh the flesh of the stomach in one hot hand, a breast in the other. He seemed to know what she hadn’t told him, and she imagined he was waiting for her to confess. It was reasonable, perhaps, but she resented it.

“You know, don’t you?”

“Know what?”

“You know, Harris—” she said, and then he got it.

“What, really?” He sat up and looked at his hands and then at her in amazement, happy amazement, as if he had built something wonderful. Then he leaned over her and covered her with himself, kissing her face while she lay flat and unresponsive. She wasn’t kissing back. It was so warm and humid out that his skin made a damp, sticky sound on releasing from hers. She looked at him. He was still smiling, a little thickly. He hadn’t even begun to imagine the problems. Sometimes he seemed like such a fool to her.

“But it’s good, it’s all right, Beatrice,” he said and reached out to her again, but this time she rolled away.

“You don’t understand, Harris. It’s not as easy as that.”

“You don’t want a baby? Or it’s me?” His face crumpled a little, and he looked away from her.

“I don’t know, Harris. The first problem is, it could be
his.
What if it’s a gangster’s baby, would you like it then?”

This next bit was one of Harris’s better moments so far: Instead of backing up and saying,
Oh. Oh no,
he looked at her in a way that said he didn’t care. He’d already understood the risk. He reached out and put his fingers against her waist in the gentlest way and said, “We could handle that. It’ll just be a
baby.
And maybe it’s mine, right? I don’t mind if it isn’t, but I feel lucky now.” Which made her bury her face in the pillow. He was as good as he could have been, and it still didn’t answer her questions.

“I’m not even married to you.”

It sort of made him fill with joy to hear her say that. She was obviously miserable, angry, too, but he heard the glimmer of promise, of possibility.

“Well, Bea, as soon as you aren’t married to someone else, maybe . . .”

She gave him a look, a setback. “Is that how you’re asking me, like that? Harris, I don’t even like the idea of marriage.”

“Oh.” He was starting to feel bad again.

“I’ve got plans. You might not believe it, but I’m really going to go to the medical college.”

“I believe it.”

“And I’ve got some money of my own. A lot. I could do it alone. I don’t need you.”

“Oh.”

“You’ve got no idea how much I can do.”

“Maybe I do. Maybe you could do even more than you think. You could do both.”

She growled with frustration and turned away. There was something about his kind, supportive rebuttals that oppressed her and made her want to be free, never have to think about him or some child, whoever its father was.

“Ich liebe dich.”
He said it in German because there was a sense in which it still meant more to him in his own language, even after all this time. It somehow seemed realer to him, but it didn’t touch her.

“What?” she said. “Why are you suddenly speaking German now?”

“I love you, just so you know.”

“I’ll take it into consideration.” And they talked no more that night.

The next morning, Beatrice and Harris got up very early. She dressed in a suit of Bobby Noe’s clothes: trousers, a vest, a boy’s cap, a short coat. She was still a remarkable chameleon: He hardly would have recognized her, except that he remembered this boy she’d become. “Shut up and get moving,” she had demanded of him once. There was much that was different about it now, walking through the streets with her in a boy’s garb, but now as then he was afraid. On the ferry, the fact that he couldn’t reach out to guide her elbow nor she take his arm (it would have been most inappropriate, given her costume) was at once painful to him and titillating.

Harris being a foreman now and because of his connection to the Dolan murder case, it was generally expected at the bridge site that he’d be going up there that morning to take in the spectacle from the safety and remove of the tower. He introduced Beatrice as Ben O’Gamhna, a relative, to a couple of men in the yard, and she shook their hands like a boy who hoped to be respected as a man. She was very good at characters. Then they made their way to the footbridge. He sent her up in front of him so he could rush to her aid if she grew dizzy or slipped, but her step was firm. She held one wire rail in each hand and walked steadily in the direction of Brooklyn. Up and out, away from Manhattan, toward the open river, looking past downtown Brooklyn to the unspoiled farms and villages further out. He turned back to look at Manhattan briefly. It gave him a crowded feeling. Brooklyn was where he belonged, he thought—not Germany, not Manhattan. Out on the Heights and beyond, past Fulton Ferry, there was room to breathe, room to build, room enough to cope with trouble and to make a new life. If only she would join him, he could be happy there. But after last night, he was less sure than ever that she would. It wasn’t exactly a surprise to him to realize he was about to miss another near chance at being happy. That’s the way it had always gone with him. He looked at her slim legs in Bobby Noe’s knickers and sighed. He would just keep on working. It would be enough.

The Manhattan tower was about three quarters finished. When she reached the top, she turned around and held out her hand to him. It was funny, her helping him, when he was the one who came here every day, but he realized he needed it. Harris was reeling, not from dizziness or height but love. She hadn’t said much all morning, but it was her way of silently breaking the distance between them. He tried to give her a smile that was warm but not happy, something that showed loyalty but did not stake a claim. It wasn’t a very large terrain he was trying to chart with that smile. Between the event they were there to witness and their conversation last night, he was on delicate ground. But the sight of her with her legs in those trousers, standing wide for balance in that high place, was very nearly more than he could bear. He bit his lip. It was a grim moment for her, a complicated one. For the love of God, they were up there together to watch her husband be hanged by the neck till he died. Yes, and though he told himself it was loathsome, insensitive, crass, Harris couldn’t stop thinking that as soon as Johnny Dolan was dead, she would be his. It wasn’t true, of course. She had never been a chattel to be transferred from one man to the next, not Beatrice O’Gamhna, not even when Johnny had claimed her. He knew now, from the past months, from the bumps in her nose, from her role in bringing about what they were there to see, that she had never succumbed to that. But Harris could not deny that he was looking forward to seeing Dandy Johnny kick, gasp, dangle and finally go slack, leaving Beatrice free at least to choose.

He was, of course, far more jealous even than he admitted to himself. It would be harder than he could imagine if he ended up the father of a
gangster’s baby.
He and Johnny did not resemble each other, meaning it would very likely be possible to tell. It would be hard, but he had an especially compelling reason to make the effort. That reason leaned toward him, one hand still grasping the terminal bolt of the railing stanchion, the other mingling her fingers with his, and pulled him up off the wavery catwalk onto solid rock. They walked around the central pit to the northwest edge and sat down on a couple of barrels to watch what was taking place at the Tombs.

“That’s where you fell, down that hole in the center?” It was deep and dark.

“Yeah, but not that one. On the other side.”

“God, Harris.” She put her hand on his thigh. He told himself not to overreact.

The people below seemed tiny and unreal, but as with watching ants, once Harris and Beatrice had been looking at them for a while they adjusted to the scale and were able to make out the movements of individuals as well as the larger patterns of flow and stasis. From the streets all around, people were converging upon a space that was already so crowded it seemed unable to accommodate more. In the ring of packed rooftops there was one anomaly: a building with a roof that was not crowded at all but held just a few dozen onlookers, as if it were some kind of private box at the opera. It was also some two stories higher than those on either side of it, which kept the traffic from adjacent buildings from flowing across it. Beatrice knew the building; it was a burned-out warehouse that was sometimes used by the Whyos for meetings and stashing loot.