Paradise Alley (35 page)

“Yes.”

“Your husband?”

“No, but a man. A hard man,” she told him, as honestly as she could.

“Where is he now?”

“Away. On a buildin' job, over in Hoboken. But I would never say a thing to him or anyone else about you. You can trust me on that, I think you know that by now,” she told him, nodding back toward the fields and woods, the darkness where the slavecatchers still hid themselves somewhere.

But he still did not move, and she blurted it out in desperation.

“I seen you,” she told him. “I followed you before.”

“I know,” he shrugged.

“I seen you with the orphans.”

He said nothing, but she thought she saw him flinch, as if from an unexpected pain.

“I seen where you go,” she went on. “I seen you take care of the orphans. I know you're a good man, a man who can take care of his own, an' shield them from others—”

“What do you know?” He cut her off, his voice full of bitterness. “What d'you know about anything?”

“I
know!
”

He didn't say anything more to that, and for a long moment she thought that he was going to simply open the door, and go inside. But then he slowly pushed the door all the way open, and held it there for her.

Inside the little cabin, when he struck a locofoco match and lit the lantern, it was everything she had imagined it to be. It was only slightly bigger and better furnished than her own shack, back in Pigtown, but much cleaner.
The home of a man who kept himself in order,
she thought.

It was just the one room, with two windows, the privvy and pump out back. The only furniture was a single bed, and a chair; an old
Franklin stove with a pipe that was obviously patched and pounded together with salvaged bits of metal. But there was a washbasin, and a bright, orange-and-blue rug. Yellowed pictures of sailing ships, cut from the newspapers, were tacked up along the walls, and there was even a small, neat shelf lined with books, even if they were battered, cheap editions, backed with cardboard, and with titles she could not read.

It was the home of a person—of someone who was still living, and trying to make some little mark upon the world.

She was more embarrassed than ever about herself, then. She was usually ashamed—of how she looked, and how ignorant she was. Embarrassed to be so dirty, and thin, and unlovely; so foolish and so poor.

“Put out the lantern,” she told him, when they moved over, and sat on the bed. Embarrassed even to be naked with him in the light, though she still could not help wanting him.

Instead he left the wick burning, and kissed her. She thought she saw something that actually resembled affection—or perhaps pity—on his face, and he kissed her very gently on the mouth, and put his large hand on her cheek, and she could not help but lean into it, and kiss him back. When he took off her dress, the poor, muddled shift she wore, she was embarrassed again. But he only held her to him, and pulled her into the bed, under the scratchy wool blanket with him.

It was nothing like what she had known with Dolan, he was so leisurely and gentle. Afterward, lying in the bed beside him, she had adored every part of him. His face, his eyes. He had beautiful hands, she thought,
a craftsman's hands,
like those she had seen on the best seamstresses in the ragpickers' shops. Knotted and calloused from the work he did, but sensitive and clever, with long, tapered fingers.

“What's your name?” he asked her, looking over at her in the flickering light from the lantern, his face cryptic and remote again.

“Ruth. My name is Ruth,” she told him, and it occurred to her that she had never said it to anyone she loved before. “What's yours, then?”

He swung his legs out of bed without answering. Pushing some kindling in through the grate of the Franklin stove to start up the fire, though it wasn't very chilly, with the two of them in the small room.

“It's Billy,” he told her at last, looking into the stove as the fire
slowly built, then sputtered. He shoved the end of a stick at it, stoking up the sparks. “Billy Dove.”

“That's a lovely name.
Billy Dove,
” she repeated. “Why d'ya hate it, then?”

“I don't hate it.” He looked at her sharply. “I don't hate it.”

“But ya do.”

He gave the fire a final poke, and climbed back into the bed. She stretched an arm over his chest, nestling by his underarm, and he pulled her tightly to him.

“It was given to me,” he told her.

“So? Ain't all names given?”

“It was given to me by a man who assumed he owned me. Besides, it's somethin' I was then, what I am not now.”

She could feel him shrug uncomfortably against her in the dark. His hands behind, under his head, looking up at the ceiling he had built for himself.

“What were you, then?”

“I was a sea-going man. I was a man knew how to
make
ships.”

She could hear the bitterness—and the pride—in his voice again, though she still was not sure that she understood. For herself she could not think of any better job in the world than the one she had seen him at, with the orphans.

“You don't know what it's like, to build a thing like that,” he told her, almost accusingly.

“But you get to take care—”

“A black man, a black woman in this town is always taking care of someone. Black children or white children, his own or someone else's. That's all it is, takin' care.”

“But what's wrong with that?” she asked him, her voice so obviously ingenuous, so sincere, that he had answered her.

“But what do we get to keep, what's any man like me get? What can I store up, an' lay down for myself? What's the use of all this takin' care—for what?”

She wanted to say,
For me, then.
She wanted to say that, but she didn't dare.

“A man works his whole life for something, a skill. He learns it—but then he can't use it. I don't want anyone else's name for me. I'm bound down here now, I don't want their names for what I'm not.”

He pulled her under him again, and she was so glad, despite his anger. Opening herself to him, holding him as tightly as she could. For the rest of the night, they dozed and talked and made love, until she had faded slowly, sublimely off to sleep in the early morning. Recognizing, despite herself, that she would not be here, that he would have nothing to do with her if he were a master shipwright, and she was what she was.

After that she stayed with him whenever Johnny Dolan had a job in New Jersey, or up the North River, anything that would take him out of the City for a night. And even on the other days, when Dolan was home and she could not stay, she would come over for as long as she dared after work, and they would lie together, or hold each other on the bed and talk.

Sometimes, too, when he was late coming home from the orphans, she would let herself in past the simple latch. She liked being in his home, though she was never more ashamed of herself then. Embarrassed by the tattered bits of ribbon that were all she had to put in her hair. The cracked shoes that she wore, just as glad to fling them off and go barefoot most of the year. She would stare at her face in the shard of shaving glass he had tacked up to the wall, wishing that she were pretty. That she had some power to hold a man, instead of being half-starved out, a permanent hole in herself. Not even able to read, to help him with her head, bring him luck, fortune, prospects.

She tried to make things as nice as she could, at least, though the truth was, there wasn't much to do. She might scrub the floor, or bring in flowers from the fields, or bits of bright cloth she had scavenged from the German ladies. Once she had even sewn him curtains for the windows—the same yellow color she had sewn for their curtains at home, right under Johnny Dolan's nose, pretending she was making just enough for them. Reveling in that small deception—

Yet he kept all of his things so orderly that there was little she could do even in this line. She would always remember the time she had found his tools, the new tools he had bought with his first money from the orphans. Still oiled and preserved and kept so carefully in their small kit, hidden in a trapdoor just below his bed. There was his treasure, but she knew they had never been used—just as splendid and shiny as they were the day he had bought them.

She had felt his hurt again, then, and felt all the more badly that she could not do anything for him. Thinking of the men she had seen, carpenters and mechanics, workingmen returning from some construction site downtown. Singing,
We won't go home till morning.
Walking proudly in their leather aprons, their tools in a bag thrown over their shoulders, walking in their workingman's strut, like a man who knows he is considered to be of value; bowlegged, as if there were too much to contain it all—

She did not see the same swagger in him. There was instead some resignation, something lost—something that, perhaps, even accounted for the gentleness in him.
Not a complete surrender.
She could also feel the lingering frustration there, the bitterness and confusion that rubbed like a burr beneath the skin. What it was that accounted for the brandy or the whiskey on his breath. What it was that kept him, too, walking carefully, lightly across the woods and fields every morning and evening.
What it is that keeps him coming home to me.

When she was with him she thought of nothing else, but in the daytime she was afraid that Johnny Dolan might find out. Fearful that some of their neighbors might notice the nights she did not come home.

She had no friends among them, and she knew that Dolan preferred it that way. Nearly everyone in Pigtown kept to themselves—wraithlike figures she saw in the murky morning light, going out to relieve themselves, or staggering home at dusk. Still, she did not know who might be watching, and she tried to deceive any unseen eyes. Making a point of coming and going after she got back from the Germans. Leaving the house repeatedly to gather wood, feed the pig, do some other chore—before she slipped off to her Billy.

She didn't know if she was fooling any of them. Soon she came to realize that it didn't matter, for her man was not the sort of man people told stories to. No matter what they suspected, no one was about to regale Johnny Dolan with tales of how his woman was spending her nights with a handsome man from the Nigger Village.

And Dolan did not seem to suspect a thing, himself. She watched him closely, for she knew he was clever enough, and kept things close to his vest, but she could see no sign that he knew. He would make baseless accusations when he got home after a job, ask which of the
neighbors, or the laddies on his fire company, she'd been keeping time with. But she knew this was mostly to give him the excuse he wanted to push and slap her around their shack—shoving and kicking at her, calling her a whore and a nightwalker, until he had calmed down enough to eat the meal she had waiting.

It was always the same when he got back to the City, often the same if he had just been downtown, or had only been sitting around in the yard all day, brooding and nipping from the jug. It was worse, she noticed, when he came back from a fight than from a building job, though she would have thought he'd had enough of fighting on such occasions. He would come in with his face a mass of purple-red bruises, ears swollen like cauliflowers and his nose pushed in, until she could barely stand to look at him herself.

But it only seemed to excite him, to get his blood up for it. Going into his boxer's stance as soon as he came in, knees bent, arms held up rigidly. Bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet like some mad, mechanical doll. Taunting her with repeated, vicious slaps, too quick for her to dodge or return.

“C'mon. Tell me what you been up to,” he would hiss at her, goading her still through clenched teeth. “Tell me about your day. C'mon.”

Until at last, boxed into a corner of the shack, by the stove, she would have no choice but to grab something—the broom, a loose slat of wood, anything at hand—and lash back at him. She would try to get a good shot in—for he would take that moment, that inciting her past the point of all forbearance, to let loose.

One full punch was all it took. She would let it be enough, smashing into her chin or stomach, all but paralyzing her. Her arms and legs suddenly useless—flying back helplessly against the wall of their shanty. And after that, usually, he was satisfied enough to have his supper.

Billy noticed her scars and bruises, even in the dim moonlight that came through the windows of his house. Running his fingers questioningly over the splotches along her jaw, the tight, round, red circles on her stomach. A new one usually forming before the others had faded, so that he got to see her wounds at every stage as they blossomed and turned, and finally subsided—these malignant flowers, water stains upon her body.

“Why do you let him do that?” he asked, his turn to interrogate her. And: “How do you take a punch like that?”

“I got no choice.”

“You think he won't kill you, one day?”

His voice full of a concern—she realized with a deep and abiding regret—that was more kindness than outrage.

“D'you want me to do somethin' about it, then? About him?”

She was a little flattered, at least, by the offer. Thinking that he might do it, too, just out of pride. She could see him walking into Pigtown with the big, rusty pistol she knew he kept on the shelf behind his Protestant Bible—walking right up to the shanty, and shooting down Johnny Dolan like a dog.

But then what would happen to him? What would happen to her, to all of them in the village?

“No, no. I can handle him,” she told him.

She could hear his rich, bitter laugh, even if she couldn't fully see his face in the gathering darkness.

“Oh, you're handlin' him, all right. You handle him any better, darlin', you'll be dead.”