Paradise Alley (15 page)

But inside! There were worlds in there, behind the glass.

She could see: the ear of a blackamoor, and the eye of a giant, and a ship in a bottle. A tiny harp the size of a finger, and a daguerreotype of the great O'Connell, and the bone of a monstrous beast. A musket ball, and a giant oyster shell, and a hangman's noose, and a lucifer
match, and a broken sword with a jeweled handle. There were pressed flowers, and colored gems, and perfect, tiny paintings, no bigger than a thumbnail, of a raft sinking at sea and an ancient battle. Of lovers walking under the moon, and the most beautiful woman in the world, in all her nakedness, with eyes as grey as a storm and hair like a ring of fire around her head.

All of it, right there. Contained all in that single cabinet, and even he was impressed, I could see it in his eyes. And why not? There was everything you could want in the whole world under that glass, so close you could smash a fist through and wrap your hand around it.

Instead, he turned to me.

He came up suddenly in the firelight, surprising the little studiolo man where he sat at his dinner. Making him drop the pan of rabbit pieces he had been waving over the fire, shoving a hand back into his pack and squawking at the stranger in his hoarse parrot's voice.

“Who are ye? Whattaya doin' out there in the dark?”

Dolan stepped forward, the boils glistening blood red along his cropped head.

“Where did ya get all that, then?” he asked quietly.

The old man wheezed with laughter, fat red cheeks bulging though he kept his hand in his pack.

“I got it off the tinkers, that's all ye need to know. The rest is between me an' them.”

Dolan stood where he was, saying nothing, and the smile left the studiolo man's face. He reached for his pan again, snatching up his rabbit parts. In the same motion, he brought his other hand out of his pack, holding a great pistol in it now, trained on Johnny Dolan.

“I just got enough supper for meself. Show's over, come back tomoree if ye want to see—”

“I ain't here for your supper.”

Dolan still standing just over the other side of the fire, still saying nothing until the studiolo man finally screamed at him:

“Well? What is it then?
What do ya want from me?
”

“Something else,” Dolan said, grinning suddenly. The studiolo man kept his distance.

“What's that?”

“Somethin' you can afford, I think. Somethin' ye'll want to pay for.”

Dolan pointed to the man's own tent. On his gesture she stood forward, silhouetted behind the tent flap by the light from his fire.

“What? What is it? How the devil did they get in there?” the studiolo man demanded, squinting at his tent.

“Look—”

At his signal she stood up against the tent flap, began to fold back her dress off her body. Moving into profile to be sure he could see she was a woman, she was so miserably wasted away.

“Well,” the old man breathed. Getting up from his fire, the pan of rabbit still in his hand. “Well, now, maybe I can pay somethin' for this.”

“Sure now,” Dolan told him, still grinning. He raised his voice: “Come on out, now.”

She did as she was told, still, coming out of the tent before him. Ashamed in her half nakedness, trying to cover herself with her hands. Dolan grabbed hold of her arms, and twisted the dress up and away from her. Ripping it, drawing her hands up behind her back with what was left of it, leaving her naked before the little man.

“Hmmph!” he snorted. “That ain't so much! I can get better than that in Cork for just a look in the box—”

“Are we in Cork, then?”

“No, no, ye got a point there,” the studiolo man considered, looking back and forth between her and Dolan. “What d'ya want for the bint, then?”

Dolan shrugged, as casually as he could, she knew. Ruth watching him, standing there still trembling in the warm night, before the fire.

“You know. The usual. I'll take some a your supper.”

“All right. But just half, now. That's all she's worth,” the studiolo man said finally, laying the frying pan carefully down between them. “Any more, mind you, an' I shoot an' take the girl anyway!”

“Fair enough,” said Dolan. He let go of Ruth and reached down for the pan, still smiling up at the studiolo man the whole time. Reaching carefully around until he had the handle, then flipping the pan up suddenly at his face. The man crying out as the hot grease and rabbit bits hit him, firing his pistol as he jumped backward.

But Dolan was already going for him, the gun discharging harmlessly over his head. He went to tackle him around his knees, but the studiolo man managed to dodge him, running back into the tent. Grabbing
up the cabinet though it was nearly as big as he was and bolting off like a hare, into the briary ruins of the church. Dolan chasing after him, his eyes as wide and yellow as a wolf's in the firelight.

Ruth squatted down by the fire in her fear, throwing the torn dress around her. She watched as Dolan jumped through the briars in the ruined church, looking frantically all about him, swinging his club wildly back and forth. Then she spotted him—just a glimmer, creeping over the crypt stones. A glint of firelight on the glass of the cabinet, and she called out despite herself.

“There! There he goes!”

The little man bolted up then, running for his life. But Dolan was on him like a hawk, reaching out and grabbing him around the knees this time. The man cried out, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the smooth, slippery, grey granite. Then he went down, cracking his head against the rock, and Dolan was on him. Clubbing at him in the darkness—once, twice, quick and efficient, as if he were a rat he was disposing of. Then he stopped, and came toward her, the end of the stick dark and wet in the faint moonlight.

“Is he dead?” she whispered.

He only shrugged, and jerked his head.

“How should I know? Hell, he'd better be—”

Retrieving the cabinet of wonders where it had fallen, miraculously unscathed, into the bushes growing out of the church floor. Tenderly folding the black curtain around it. From across the road they could hear a dog barking, they could see a light in the window of the little wooden church there.

“Quick now!” Dolan said, all business again. “You don't know but what the priests are about.”

“Jesus, but it ain't right, takin' it off him like this,” she protested, looking down at the dark outline of the studiolo man where he lay against the crypt, still trying to see if he was breathing.

He only cursed her.

“There's nothing
right
here anymore. This ain't the country of
right.
”

He had started off down the road already, the cabinet of wonders strapped to his back somehow.

“You wanted the money, too, didn't ya?” he said, turning to face her.

“Ah, but Jesus—”

“You wanted to get off this land, too. Y'know that ye did now, that's why ye helped me, an' brought him down like that.”

Already retreating down the road with him, step by step, as if slowly pulled along by a rope. Picking her way through the briars—the barking of the dog across the road getting louder now, the sound of someone moving about, of men's voices clear now in the utter country stillness.

“Ah, but Jesus, Johnny, we'll have to see God someday!” she cried as she hurried after him now, shrugging back into her torn dress.

“I hope we do,” he snorted. “All the better to curse Him to His face.”

•
18
•

Eight o'clock.

The pretty little brass clock on Deirdre's mantel chimed the hour. Even this sounded loud in the crowded front room, making both of them start.

“I should be back, then.”

She peered out the window again, as she had done a dozen times already. She should have been back already, even though she was sure it was fine, sure she could trust Milton to follow her instructions and look after the rest of them. So foolish—she had only lingered because she wanted to be reassured by Deirdre's immaculate house, by her silent, obedient children and her iron control. And now all she knew was that Deirdre herself was scared.

Eight o'clock—and where was Billy? She wondered if it might be his weakness, then was immediately ashamed of herself for the thought.

No, he would know better today.
Weakness though it was, he would never do that to her—to them—not today. He would come right home, just as soon as he had his money.

Unless he couldn't. Then she really would be all alone, to meet Dolan. She was friends with most of her neighbors in Paradise Alley, many of them mixed-race families themselves, friends with the Jews who lived on the next block, past the back-lot privvies.

But what could she expect from them if
he
came? She doubted if they could stand against him even if they wanted to. If there was a riot coming on, they would be locked deep in their cellars and back rooms, keeping their heads down. The most she could count on would be Deirdre, and maybe Milton—sweet boy, she could not leave him to go up against the likes of Johnny Dolan—

No. She would have to do it. She would have to think it out herself.

“All right, then.”

She went up to Deirdre and kissed her impulsively on the cheek before leaving. Her face so beautiful, held so coldly. Her long brown hair—the very same color of her eyes—tied rigidly back on her head. She looked surprised by the kiss, then embarrassed, turning away from her.

“I got to get back,” Ruth said, then couldn't help adding: “I wish your Tommy was here, at least.”

It was the wrong thing to say, and she knew it, but there it was. Deirdre looked stunned, then immediately angry and disgusted again.

“Haven't you had enough to do with him, then? Drawing him into your schemes?”

Deirdre's mouth twisting angrily, trying to keep her voice low enough so the children wouldn't hear.

“He did help me,” Ruth said evenly, facing her. “He helped me, when no one else would.”

•
19
•

Ruth was gone. Deirdre waited until she had left the house, watching her out the window. Then she went to the bottom drawer of the falling-front secretary, her hands fumbling through it. The secretary was her prize, it had taken them two years to save for it. An enormous thing, carved out of cherry and oak and finished a deep black, with curtained glass doors on top where she watched her own face, terse and drawn, as she pulled out a sheet of the
Tribune
from the previous Friday.

She read the name again, on the long page of names. Crossing herself as she did, every time she read it. The print smeared and worn away by her fingers though she tried to prevent that, loath to rub away any of the names there, as if it were a sacrilege.

The name she didn't want to find was there in the fine type, tucked away in a column in the back pages, under the heading
The Casualties.
It sat there now, like a toad on the page: “In the Sixty-ninth New York . . . . O'Kane, Tom. Co. A, leg.”

Nothing else—just the bare listing of the man, his regiment and company, and where he had been hit. At least there were none of the dreaded amplifications she had seen before, tacked on to the end of some others:
amp.,
for amputation, or the one she had seen the last time, beside his own name:
chest, severe.
It had almost broken her, last Christmas, seeing that.
Severe—
and nothing else as to where he might
be, or what had happened to him since. She had nearly driven herself to distraction, trying to keep it from the children, and get some word of what hospital he was at.

Severe—

She tried to comfort herself, this time, through this absent elaboration. No
severe.
Telling herself it was just a simple little wound, a scratch, a bruise, nothing more. Though in her heart she knew it was meaningless, that men could die from everything, down at the war. She had known more than one woman at the pump who had seen the same simple listing—only to hear by telegraph the next week that he was gone, swept away by an unexpected fever, or a hemorrhage, down in the sodden hospitals where they lay—

She folded the newspaper up, shoved it back into the drawer before it attracted the attention of the children. Her fingers smearing the close-packed print again, wearing off more names despite her care.

She could not bear to think of that—Tom bleeding to death, down in a Washington ward somewhere. His head on fire with fever, and no one to hold his hand or talk to, no one to bring him water. Their second boy, Charlie, had been taken by a fever. Not yet three years old, it was an awful thing to endure—for her, for Tom—but the one consolation had been doing for him. Getting him everything, making him as comfortable as she could right up to the moment the priest had closed his eyes. Knowing that his soul resided with God in Heaven—

Tom had hidden it from her, the hardship, when he had been able to write again. Even then, his letters, when they got through, were so much gentler than she had expected. The first one from the hospital had been in a woman's fine hand, dictated to some volunteer lady when he was barely able to sit up. No mention of her save for the name modestly filled in at the bottom, below his signature:
as to Mrs. Jeremiah Slade.

She was jealous of the very name, of her presence there beside him, writing down his words. She had asked Tom to send her a picture of himself, once she began to get his letters again in his own crude hand. When he replied she could read his wary surprise between the lines. She was not sentimental, and it was such an expense, what she had requested—with her barely able to keep the children in their clothes, or buy sugar.

Maybee, when Im stronger,
he had written back, but she could not wait. Practically begging him in the next letter to have the daguerreotype
made.
Let me see you,
she had written him.
I want to see you—
and two months later it had arrived: the picture of him in its brass oval frame. So gaunt, the uniform jacket and winter-issue cape hanging off his frame like old clothes off a scarecrow now. But there, his dear face, under the infantry cap. Almost seeming to smile back at her, at certain angles, the way the daguerreotype shifted—in certain light in the evening, or in the morning when she looked at it on the dresser in their room. The look on his face almost sly, and reassuring.

But now he was hurt again. The thought of it pierced her. She wanted to strike at Ruth, coming into her house to say she wanted him back.

Didn't she just say it herself? Don't I want him back as much as her?

Yet what wrong turn had Ruth ever done to her, save to live on the same block, and try to keep her family and her house together? Even when she had hated her most—for conniving to send her brother away, and getting Tom mixed up in it—Deirdre couldn't really blame her. She had spared Johnny's life, after all, when it would have been a simple thing to have had him hanged, when she herself had first wanted to turn him over to the police.

Ruth had even tried to remain a friend, despite how Deirdre had cut her and despised her, all these years. Always saying hello to her in the street, or at the pump. Even last winter, when Tom had been wounded and she had been so bereft, Ruth had come to her doorstep to tell her how sorry she was—to see if there was something she could do. Even though Deirdre had all but shut the door in her face, disdaining her pity, her help.

But surely that was why Tom had been hurt. For her pride. For her hardness of heart.

Blaming Ruth for getting him mixed up in shipping her brother off. Blaming her, even, for shipping Tom south.

When in fact that was the worst thing. When that was the most damning thing, for it was she, Deirdre, who had really seen to it that Tom was shipped south.
And all because he had let the niggers on the block.