Paradise Alley (17 page)

But there was nothing—not so much as the corner of a foundation wall. All he could do was get to his feet again and turn slowly around in place, genuinely and completely lost now.

He had thought they might have moved, in fourteen years' time. He expected that they might be gone, if they had any brains at all, but he had always figured that he could find some trace. Some neighbor who remembered them and could pass on their whereabouts, or at least the next place to go, the next track to follow. He hadn't expected
this,
this
nothing,
and as he stood there on the well-rolled lawn, he felt as if his mind were dissolving. It was a numbing, pacifying feeling. One that left him as dumb and helpless as a small child—

Perhaps nothing he knew anymore was real. Perhaps he should give it up, forget about ever finding them. Just stop and lie down, right here on the grass—

There was a flash of movement, and he looked up. A man in a sparkling, blue and gold-buttoned uniform was coming down one of the winding, raked paths toward him, eyeing Dolan suspiciously. The very look of himself, he knew, was always able to attract the scrutiny of a cop.

He rose from the grass and began to stagger back the way he had come, trying to move quickly but not too quickly. He soon realized, though, that he had failed to retrace his steps. Taking a wrong turn at a fork in the winding, serpentine roads.
What did it matter, now?
He walked past a grove of lilac bushes, another pair of towering grey boulders—glad for some cover at least, glancing back over his shoulder for the cop.

When he looked around again, he saw, looming suddenly up before him, a field full of gigantic, hideous creatures. Or rather their bones, whitewashed, and set in terrifying poses. All tooth and claw and jutting bone, like no animals he had ever seen before, but very real. Dolan could not stop walking around them, staring up at their gigantic, bony heads, tapping at the thick leg bones, even though they gave off only a hollow, plaster echo.

So they were statues. But who would ever put up statues of such things—of their skeletons?

Before he could puzzle it out, he saw men pouring into the park. These were some more of the mob, he recognized—rough-looking workingmen like the ones he had come uptown with. Walking slowly but purposefully, right across the well-tended lawns with their little
keep off
signs. At their approach the lawn cop fled at once, Dolan saw, to his surprise. But the men kept coming, hundreds of them, and he hurried to join them, treading carefully past the giant plaster monsters.

•
22
•

They are not a mob—not yet. Still more of a holiday crowd, out on a lark. At least five hundred of them now, maybe as many as a thousand, straggling slowly up the East Side, toward the Provost's Office at the Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. A captain's guard could stop them now, a single squad of Metropolitans. But there are no police in sight and the crowd grows, in size and confidence, with every passing block.

When we reach the docks of the East River, they call out to their friends. Playing such rough music. Banging pots and pans, any two pieces of metal they can find to clang together. Singing their obscene songs to the longshoremen, wrestling with their crates and bales. The brass finishers and the iron molders, the blacksmiths firing their trip-hammers, the boilermakers flanging the plates in their fiery furnaces.

They drop their work and come out, as quickly as the Disciples must have answered the call of the Nazarene. Still smarting from all the recent strikes—the scabs who had been called in to take their jobs, the thousand other injustices the poor clutch constantly to their bosom.

“We're free men, ain't we?”

“Not some nigger labor they can trade as they like—”

Justifying themselves to each other:

“A nigger, hell!
Three hundred dollars, when you can get a thousand for a nigger!
”

I want to ask them,
What is it that offends you most? The fact that a price is put on your head? Or that it is so low?
But I know better than to press my luck. They are still in their holiday mood, after all. Bawling away at the top of their lungs:

“For we'll hang Abe Lincoln from a sour-apple tree,

Yes, we'll hang ol' Abe from a sour-apple tree—”

They rough up any prosperous-looking gent who happens to cross their path, anyone who looks as if he could buy his way out of the draft. Pushing him back and forth, bellowing in his face, “
Are you a three-hundred-dollar man?!
” They make him swill some of their whiskey or parade along with them, or pledge his allegiance to the Confederacy.

In the end, though, they send their man off with nothing worse than a round of kicks and hoots, even a slap on the back if he's been a good enough sport. It's still all in fun—though that can change in a heartbeat, a cross word, a shot of whiskey.

I am spared any such rough play myself, thanks again to the fatal cave-in and my suit, covered in the dust of men and bricks. Instead, like the crowd in City Hall Park, they take me for one of their own—that is, one of that vast tribe of men without money. I am delighted to play along, secure in my disguise. They offer me free swigs from their bottles and I pretend to accept. Pretending to be as drunk as they are. Swaying along with them, laughing at their jokes and even singing along lustily when they get to my employer:

“For we'll hang Horace Greeley from a sour-apple tree,

Yes, we'll hang Horace Greeley from a sour-apple tree—”

The first trouble comes outside the great Novelty Iron Works, near Tenth Street. Here is where they make the sixty-ton bed plates for the gunboats and the blockaders that are choking the South to death. One of the Novelty's ironmasters tries to stop his men from leaving, running out after them and grabbing at their arms, saying something about meeting their contract.

“Here, we signed up for the job, we have to fill it—”

He is beaten to the ground at once. A big man, a proud man, obviously used to being a leader of men. Stripped to the waist, the furnace-bronzed muscles bulging along his arms. But they knock him to the ground nevertheless, kick and stomp on him until he crawls back into the ironworks he had once ruled, no doubt happy to escape with his life.

It feels to me as if the very air around us has been shattered. A man who had done nothing, beaten to the ground in broad daylight. The ones who did it not running for their lives but standing about, barking their triumph. The others doing nothing to stop them, but joining in, laughing and shouting their own invective.

I have sat through a thousand prizefights, watched men beaten to bloody pulps while the crowd yelled,
Shutters up, there's a death in the family!
I have seen plenty of brawls in the streets of our turbulent City, I have even seen men shot down in battle.

But this is worse, somehow. This feels as if there is nothing to turn to under the sun—not justice, nor mercy, nor simple decency. It feels as if we have all been left to look out for ourselves, as naked and unprotected as the ironmaster was.

I want to do something about it, I feel I must do something—my hand reaching for the pocket where Raymond's revolver was. But of course the pocket is empty now, the gun back at Maddy's. I close my mouth, marching along with the rest, telling myself I cannot do a thing.

Near Dutch Hill we turn away from the East River, and plunge back into the town—past its swarms of half-wild goats and ragpicker shanties, its ash boxes unemptied for weeks and stinking like the plague. The crowd at least five thousand strong now, still singing and banging out their charivari. When we reach Forty-sixth Street, they break into a run, headed straight for the Provost's Office—but its door and shutters are still bolted tight, thank God. A rumor goes 'round that they are not going to open all day. I pray that this is true, though I have never before known our elected officials to display so much common sense.

We mill around in the street, unsure of what to do now. Deprived of our target, we start tramping on uptown—the mob gaining still in
numbers, but losing momentum and purpose. Past where the sidewalk itself gives out, at Forty-eighth Street. Not far beyond is what looks to be some European ruin: immense white blocks, piled around a long foundation. Already greying with the City's soot and dirty rain, half-covered in weeds and strangler vines.

The mob slows as it passes these blocks, but it doesn't stop. A few of the women cross themselves, and the men remove their hats. This is to be the heart of their faith, the new seat of their archdiocese—for all that they care now. Yet I know it as well to be the last obsession of a dying man.

On Sunday morning, my head notwithstanding, I had gone down to St. Patrick's.
Their
citadel. The sturdy little church at the corner of Prince and Mott, built like a fortress behind its stout, stone wall.

A parish priest I knew from the Sixth Ward, a Father Knapp, had told me he could arrange an interview with Archbishop Hughes. He led me into the archbishop's rectory rooms, right into his bedroom, from where I could hear the chants of the Mass still being celebrated across the yard.

There he sat. Dagger John Hughes, from County Tyrone, propped up in his bed like a wounded hawk. Too weak to man his pulpit but his flashing, blue-grey eyes still as fierce as ever. Working away at something on a little writing table—though when he caught sight of me, he dropped his pen and uttered a single, exasperated word:

“Greeley!”

I nodded, smiling despite myself, and he gestured toward the writing table by his bed.

“I was just trying to finish a missive to your employer. But it's a delicate business, don't you agree, putting words in the hands of a newspaperman.”

“Yet that is what I am here for, Your Holiness,” I told him, trying to cut short his usual tirades against Horace before I was tempted to join in. “I would like to solicit your views about what will happen tomorrow, when the draft resumes—”

He let his head droop down to one side. Staring out a little window into the churchyard, with its shade trees and high grass, and the narrow red headstones of his predecessors. Twenty years ago, during the Know-Nothing riots, armed men had filled that yard at his beck and call. Dagger John calling in the mayor to tell him that if a single
Catholic church were touched, he would turn the City into another Moscow.

No churches were molested. The City remained unburned—for the time being.

“What do I
think
will happen?” he told me now, slowly turning his most withering gaze upon me.

“I think that the good, Catholic workingmen of this city will go and do their duty by their country. While at the same time I think that
your
young men of society will spend their days wagering on the outcome of the war on Wall Street, and their nights in a brothel.

“That, sir, is not only what I
think
will happen. It is what
has
been happening for the last two years, and I suspect it will
go on
happening for as long as this wretched war lasts.”

He broke down into a wracking cough. His eyes clouding over uncertainly, the talons retracting.

So it was true what they were saying.
At first glance, he looked enough like the old Dagger John—the same impatient curl around the sides of his mouth, the long, sharp nose poking confidently forward. The face of a great commander, a Wellington or a Marlborough. Enough vanity left that he still wore a half wig, propped carefully up under his skullcap.

Yet, peering closer, I could see how his simple black cassock hung on him, the large gold cross pulling down his head. Gone were the powerful arms and neck, the hickory-lean figure of the ambitious young acolyte who had worked his way through a Maryland seminary as a day laborer, an overseer of slaves, any work he could get. The poor immigrant boy, thirsting for enlightenment—and power.

“You have turned us into cannon fodder!”

His gaze drifting out into the churchyard again. It was not this modest, walled yard he was seeing, I knew, but that lot uptown, along the Fifth Avenue. Where the crowning achievement of his stewardship lay covered in vines and weeds.

“I took the scattered debris of the Irish nation,” Dagger John murmured, half to himself. Father Knapp took a step or two toward him in alarm, he suddenly looked so desolate—his face slack and yellowed in the sunlight. Hughes waved him away.

“I was just beginning to make them into a people again,” he said bitterly. “A God-fearing, self-respecting people.”

It was true, for two decades the commander had bent his church and his people to his will. Took a mob of peasants and molded them
into the faith militant. He had marched their sons into parochial schools, and brought the Sisters of Mercy over from Dublin, to teach their daughters how to be dutiful maids and cooks and seamstresses. Building over a hundred churches throughout the City—

Dagger John Hughes
—more a Roman gladiator than a meek Christian,
Bennett had called him in the
Herald.
Tirelessly writing his letters to the editor, signing his name with a cross slashed defiantly across the page. Going in street clothes to Know-Nothing rallies, so he could hear the enemy's arguments. Speaking for two days and nights—pausing only for food and sleep—against the City's leading Protestant clerics and lawyers during the great debate over religious education. Expunging every trace of a brogue from his own voice, so no one could assume anything by where he came from, but would have to
listen.

His crowning glory was to be the great cathedral in the Fifth Avenue. It was to be more than a church—more than the little cathedral just next door to us now, with its humble spire between two slanting towers. This was to be a masterpiece, a monument to
him,
and to
them.
Built with the sweat and skill of his own people, financed with their own pennies in the collection plate.

“And then you had to have your war.”

Stalling all his plans, eating up his pennies and his laborers. The great piles of granite lying tumbled about their empty lot, like God's very building blocks, abandoned.

“Am I to understand, then, that you no longer support the war?”

“You may assume nothing of the kind”—staring down his long nose at me.

He was a shrewd man—but Old Abe was shrewder still. With the help of Seward he got 'round him, offering Hughes the only thing that might make up for the loss of his monument. He made him an emissary of the nation, sent him off for a year to defend the Union in the jaded courts of Europe. It had been too much to resist, a chance to see Rome again, and Paris—and Tyrone.