Paradise Alley (12 page)

They are our ideal of womanhood here in the City. When times are bad enough, you can find one on every corner: match girls or button girls, pear girls, and especially hot-corn girls. A small cedar barrel
tucked up in the hollow of their arms, full of hot roasting ears of corn like some not-so-secret token of their real profession. These child-women, always half-naked, always barefoot. Always offering and pleading, alluring and bleeding.

“Hot corn! Hot corn!”

She was just below me—circled, I knew, by black-coated flocks of men. Men of business and young gang toughs, clerks and foreign skippers, aldermen and judges. Some of them buying, some of them leering. Holding up the coins in their hands, just out of reach. The young rabbits and shoulder-hitters, with their string ties and top hats, pushing their way through the crowds, picking their fingernails with their knives—

“Hot corn! Hot corn!”

There was a sudden, high-pitched scream, breaking the girl's litany. I was on my way at once, bounding out of my chair and office, down the stairs, toward the entrance, thrusting on my coat as I went. The
Tribune
has a watchman, and there were newsies, printers' demons, politicians, and editors everywhere, but who knows? One of our City's most charming attributes is that, while it is not nearly so dangerous as it might appear
—what place could ever be?—
the most evil things imaginable can happen anywhere, at any time.

I ran out the front door prepared, if not to rescue, at least to get the story. There was the hot-corn girl on the corner, still screaming bloody murder. Struggling to hold on to her cedar barrel, battling like the furies to protect her wares against—a herd of pigs.

They had already snatched most of her ears and scampered across to City Hall Park, snuffling and snorting, eating as they ran. Our politicians talk constantly of devising some way to rid our streets of the pigs, Greeley himself must have dedicated a dozen editorials to the subject. Yet somehow, nothing is ever done. They bust out of the pens where they are kept by the North River, run in packs on the streets. Smarter than dogs and twice as big, knocking over children and snatching food out of ladies' hands.

Even as I watched, three of them bullied the hot-corn girl about with an uncanny coordination and intelligence. Two of the porkers butting at the cedar bucket, trying to tip it over just enough so the third pig could stick its snout in and get at the remaining ears.

“Get away! Get away! Awful things!” the girl was screaming, flailing at them with her free hand.

The pigs slunk reluctantly off at my approach, sizing up my height and weight with their usual swinish sagacity. Back to scrounging in the gutter for their usual meal—old apple cores and sausage bits, turned oysters and butcher's offal and horse's remains, drowned rats and moldy pigeons. (Plenty to keep them fat and round until it is time for them to grace the best tables in Manhattan.)

On the street corner, the hot-corn girl was still screaming and crying, the young men grinning at her as they passed.

“There now, I've sent them off,” I said bluffly, trying to comfort her, but she just kept screeching like a harpie:

“What'll I do? What'll I
do?
”—and without thinking I reached out, shaking her sharply just to get her to stop making such a horrid noise. She kept screaming—and before I knew quite what I had done, I had picked her right up off the ground.

There we stood, mutely looking each other over. Our faces inches away from each other. Her shoulders slender, even scrawny under her plaid shawl. I know I should have been captivated from the first, but in truth I thought she looked much like they all did: wearing the same shawl, the same spotted calico dress torn strategically along the shoulders and calves, showing off her legs up past her knees.

I could hardly guess her age—though whatever it was, she had not been a child for a long time. No one could be, out on the streets like that, in all weather, with all company. Her hair was lank and unkempt, her face dirty, her feet bare. Her hands, I remember, clinging to my arms. They were small, but rough and horned from shucking the corn each morning, roasting it dutifully in the street or in the corner of some tenement room.

How she clutched at me!
How savage she is,
I thought then, but at the same time,
How helpless. How unprotected.
Her wild green eyes alarmed but also calculating. Her face serious and wide and innocent while she tried to figure out who I was, and what the hell it was I wanted.

•
13
•

Oh, my girl—

I picked her up, right there on the street. I picked her up, after the pigs had ravaged her wares.

It would have been easy enough to leave her, once she had stopped screaming about the pigs. It would have been easy enough just to go back to my warm room, and my useless book.

But I did not. Instead I pulled out some coins, dollars and half-dollars, thrusting them blindly into her hands, meaning to pay for the lost corn. Or at least so I told myself. I must have handed over to her at least ten times what her whole bucket of roasted ears cost. And when I did she looped her arm through mine, as passively as a child, and I realized I had bought more than just the damned corn.

What was I doing?

Yes, I am a bad man. I had been to brothels before. But she was still so young. Barely a woman at all. I had never been one for the child brides, for all the little Annabelle Lees who haunt our street corners and our bordellos in the City. Yet there was something that drew me to her . . . .

I took a few, halting steps down Park Row, into City Hall Park, as if I were trying her out. Her hand so small, so light on my arm. She looked up at me with her eyes still questioning but docile, with that
strange, childlike trust even the most jaded nightwalker must have to hand herself over to a strange man on a dark street.

“I know a place,” I told her, and I began to walk more quickly now, my head down and my collar pulled up around my face, hoping no one would recognize me as I towed her through the blurred and crowded streets.

I could scarcely take her to my own respectable home in Gramercy Park. No doubt she lived in the Five Points, or in some Sixth Ward tenement—the Gates of Hell, or Brick-Bat Mansion, perhaps. That wouldn't do either. Who knew what ponce waited for her there, or if I wasn't being set up even then for some badger game—to be robbed of my purse, my watch, my life, once I had my pants off?

No, there was only one place for us. It would have to be one of the Seven Sisters, the row of seven whorehouses strung cheek by jowl along East Twenty-third Street. Each of them supposedly run by one of seven sisters from a distinguished New England family, who came each in their turn to the City, were debauched. As the story went, they then wholeheartedly embraced their sin and made a killing on it.

All rubbish, of course. The story was much too good on the face of it, the truth colder, as it usually is. The houses, like everything else in this town, owned by mysterious combinations of businessmen, managed by seven unrelated old crones who had never been anything
but
the merchandisers of young flesh.

I went to them more than I liked. They were the best brothels in the City, with velvet curtains and well-tuned pianos, good brandies and cigars in their parlors. The sheets were changed between customers, and the chamber pots were emptied. Every Christmas Eve there was a rollicking party, with games of blindman's buff, and leapfrog, all played in the buff, by the girls, at least. And every New Year's Day there was a formal open house, where gentlemen called to drink a cup of punch, and chat politely with the same young ladies, done up in their finest dresses and ribbons.

I took Maddy to my favorite house, the most respectable one of the seven, more discriminating than all but the best hotels, and a good deal cleaner. It was run by a particularly hideous old panderer, with the
homespun nickname of Gramma Em. She bowed us in obsequiously, acting not in the least surprised to see me in the company of a bedraggled hot-corn girl, just picked up from the street.

Instead she took us immediately in hand from the doorman, leading us quickly and discreetly up the stairs. From behind the scrim that blocks the front parlor, I could make out the genteel silhouettes of well-dressed men and women in conversation, the sound of one of her girls playing a stately hymn on the piano—

Gramma Em tottered before us on the stairs, bent nearly double with age but surprisingly agile, holding a taper out ahead of her. She led us to one of the most private, removed back rooms on the second floor, around a corner at the far end of the hall.

“As you like it, sir,” she murmured, pushing open the door and slipping me the key.

The room was anonymous but well-furnished. It was equipped with a functional, sturdy bureau, a vanity with its hair- and clothes brushes. Writing paper and pen, an unopened bottle of brandy, a fistful of good cigars—in short, everything a gentleman could want in his club. Yet my taste in her house was all Gramma Em had ever presumed to know of me. She had never given the least indication that she was aware of my writings, or of where I lived, or who I might know, or even what my name was.

“Ring for the girl if there is anything more you require, sir.”

Pulling the shawl closer over her shoulders, spectacles at the end of her nose, bestowing a benevolent, elderly smile on us both as she bowed herself out of the room. Yet I had seen her ruin a girl who had cheated her, a beautiful mulatto from the Islands she cornered in the downstairs kitchen, branding her on the face with a heated fork before anyone dared to stop her.

She closed the door—and I locked it immediately behind her and turned finally to my prize, the hot-corn girl. She stood on tiptoe on the edge of the rug, turning slowly as she took it in: the immense, canopied bed with its feather mattress, the lady's mirror across the room with its own brushes and pins, clasps and combs. Then, all at once, she skipped about the room. Moving so lightly and naturally she might have been flying. Her feet barely touching the floor, staring closely at everything. Running her hands over the smooth quilt, the polished furniture, running the brush through her hair.

I was sure she must be performing, playing the innocent for me just as she did for the men out on Broadway. I reclined indifferently on the bed and tried to ignore her, kicking off my shoes and lighting up a house cigar.

But she ignored
me.
She went right on flitting around the room, excited as the child she still was at heart. Only acknowledging me when she turned to share her excitement, dirty, innocent face flushed with pleasure over it all.

“Is this where you live?” she breathed.

I leaned forward on the bed—still not quite believing, watching her for a long moment before I stubbed out my cigar.

“Come here,” I said, and patted my knee.

Like an obedient child, she skipped on over to me, up on my lap. She was so light, so small. Her boney, underfed hips and bottom cutting into the flesh of my thighs.

“So you like this place. How would you like to remain here for a time?”

I had a tried and true method of seduction—though, granted, I had only tried it out on whores. To steady her nerves and mine, I asked her questions about herself. About where she came from, about her family and what she liked and what she did with herself. All the time sliding my arms gently around her waist, holding her in some innocent, even familial way. Slowly, slowly beginning to stroke her breast, her neck. Rubbing her brow and cheek, getting her to relax back into my arms so that I could stop trembling myself.

Yet this girl was different. The moment my hand lit upon her thigh she lifted up her calico dress—pulled it all the way up over her head and let it fall on the floor, just like that. She was suddenly wearing only a rough, yellowed half petticoat. Still seated on my knee, her modest, smooth, rounded breasts fully exposed, the ribs showing underneath.

It was the body of a girl, but one already exposed to the hardness of the world, and suddenly I didn't know what to do with it. I wanted to weep, I wanted to worship her. I wanted to make it so she would never have to face anything hard or terrible again, and at the same time I wanted to fuck her.

“What do you like?” she asked me, innocently, parroting back my questions.

“What's
your
name? Where do
you
come from?”

She ran a hand up through my pomaded hair, sniffed curiously at the toilet water on my neck—again as sweet and uninhibited as a child. I smelled her sour girl's breath along my face, and I was almost undone. I leaned back, docile under her hands, and she swung herself up over my stomach. Pulling the petticoat over her head now, letting it follow the calico dress to the floor. Sitting on me completely, thoughtlessly naked. Bracing herself against my chest with her hands.

“What do
you
like?”

I reached out for her, not sure what to touch first. Wanting to feel her breasts, her cunny, the smoothness of her skin, her face, all at once. Wanting to give her pleasure. Wanting most of all to touch her for my pleasure, that first sublime contact of flesh against new flesh. But wanting, too, to make her feel
something—
to sigh, to cringe, to love or fear me.

Yet she did not. She steadied herself along me as somberly and unconsciously as she did everything else. I took her left breast in my hand—slightly smaller, slightly more rounded than the right one, even the slight difference appealing to me—and then I moved my lips to it, licking gingerly, sucking at the little bud of a nipple. And in that moment I was filled with the desire to treat her as tenderly as I could treat any other human being, to do nothing that would ever hurt her. I believed it was the first genuinely unselfish moment of my life—lying on my back in a brothel, slowly penetrating a street prostitute I had just met.

Afterward she huddled under my arm for a little while, still naked. I tried to cover her with the quilt but she got up, moving around the room again. She stopped and stared at herself in the mirror—turning slowly around, trying to catch a glimpse of her slender back, her bottom, the one place where she had an ounce of extra flesh. I thought again that this was too much, that it must be a performance. Then she turned to me, her face completely in earnest:

“Is there some place I can—”

I allowed her to leave the thought unfinished, threw on a nightshirt, and rang for service. A pair of pretty young women, regular denizens of the house, came in response, Gramma Em apparently having boundless regard for my stamina and appetites. Maddy ran instinctively up to them when they entered, standing on one leg and whispering with her hand over her mouth.

They laughed, and walked down to the hallway of another, darkened room, gesturing for her to follow. She hesitated, and I took her by the hand and walked her halfway down the hall—still naked and oddly trusting. She let go and ran the last few feet to the door, where the older, slightly taller girls greeted her, still smiling, and ran their hands impulsively through her hair, all of them standing there like a trio of naiads or wood goddesses before my rapturous gaze.

I remember her sleeping so soundly in my bed that night. More innocent than ever, her face and her body scrubbed clean, a flowered nightgown tied up around her neck. After her bath I sent down for a ham and some potatoes, and she ate ravenously, then passed straight out, snoring contentedly in my lap.

I lay beside her, finishing a snifter of brandy, tempted to give her an affectionate chuck. Tempted to ravish her again. Every time I looked at her, my desire to protect her from everything in the world grew—as did my cock.

Her name was Maddy Boyle, I discovered, and she lived in the Shambles, that same awful place down Paradise Alley, and just above the City sewer. This was hardly her first time out on the streets, or her first time with a patron. She even had a pimp: one Eddie Coleman, a street thug I happened to be slightly acquainted with, who spent his days drinking and dicing at Rosanna Peers's grocery in the Five Points. She assured me matter-of-factly that he would beat her for not coming home to him, and while she seemed to think little enough of this, I insisted that she stay at Gramma's, at least for another few days.

What I would do with her then I had no idea. Yet somehow the whole prospect filled me with a keen sense of anticipation, almost one of light-headedness. She was mine for the time being—for as long as I wanted, it seemed.