Paradise Alley (36 page)

“I can take it,” she insisted grimly, though she was not sure at all she was speaking the truth. “He won't ever go too far, he knows he needs a woman.”

And why shouldn't he have one? Why shouldn't he have me, do what he wants to me? After all, I would've starved without him—

Still it tormented her, every day, to have to go back to the shanty. To face Dolan again. Trying to humor him, trying to just avoid him. Nothing worked. Standing up to him was the worst of all, he only seemed to welcome the challenge. Sometimes—sometimes she almost sought to bring it to a boil, to get it over early and relieve the tension. Hoping for one good smack, and then it would be over. At least for a little while.

She let it drift while she tried to think it out. Afraid she could no longer think very well, afraid she would not be able to think at all soon, the way he knocked her head into walls. And afraid, too, that her Billy Dove would fly away again, on to one of the other, far places he liked to talk about. To Portugal or the Windward Coast, down to Brazil or the Tortugas, or around the Horn to Peru.

When they were together now, neither of them said very much, as if everything were frozen in place by the changing weather, the slow turn into winter. They saw each other less and less, the colder it got. To be sure, it felt all the better to sleep warmed by him, in the bed by his stove. It was darker, too—easier to hide in the early evenings. Easier to sneak home, with even the dogs of Pigtown tied up inside their homes, lest they freeze and deprive the shantytown of their incessant baying, come the spring.

Yet with the winter the building stopped, too. The City lay dormant, under the ice and snow, its writhing, ceaseless making and remaking of itself stilled for the season. The construction sites shut down, and there were few prizefights, the sporting men asleep over their cups by the fire, pursuing their other entertainment in the brothels.

Dolan was home nearly all the time now. Spending most of his days brooding by the stove in their shanty. Puffing on his pipe, looking into the tremulous little flames that licked at shreds of newspaper and scrub pine. Away only on night jobs with the river gangs, that he did not talk much about.

She was never sure exactly what these were. At night, sometimes, there would be a sudden thump against the wall of the shanty, rattling her so that she would drop her sewing. He would gather up the mysterious tools he had collected, then—wedges of iron, and long knives, and one, a copper curlicue, no bigger than his thumb and shaped like a pig's tail—and walk off into the night, another shadow accompanying him across the snow.

The rest of the time she was stuck there with him, in the abandoned shack of salvaged planks and railroad ties he had moved them into. Glued like one of the few ornaments, the few trinkets still left along the shelves of the cabinet of wonders. He had never tried to repair it, after that night at The Sailor's Rest, had not so much as dared to but kept it as a damaged relic, still covered, in the corner. He did not even peek under the black cloth anymore, she knew; it gave him no more pleasure, although he remained convinced of its immeasurable worth. Grumbling, sometimes, through the winter months, about how he was tempted to trade it in for his fortune, and a grand house somewhere.

“It's a treasure,” he would insist, when he was far enough along into his whiskey. “They was just too small to know it, down there. They just wanted to trick me into givin' it up to them.”

He spoke of taking it down to Barnum's, or of displaying it on his own, but he never did. She had even thought of repairing it herself, with what she had learned from working at the German ladies', but she knew that he would be outraged by her presumption, might even murder her over such a thing. Though some nights she could barely prevent herself. Some evenings, too, stuck in the shanty with him—the box sitting black and remonstrative in the corner, silent reminder of their original sin together—it was all that she could do to keep from grabbing it up and smashing it to pieces.

After Christmas was over the orders from Stewart's and the other grand stores dwindled off, and the German ladies had let them all go for the season. Some days she would pretend she still had work, and sneak back over to Seneca Village, but she was too afraid to do that very often. She feared that Dolan could sense her desperation, her need to be with Billy, when they were cooped up so long together. Even when she could find good reasons to leave, to buy food or sell the things she sewed, she thought that he did not trust her. She would return to find him standing in their yard, watching her as she came back down into the hollow. Supposedly out cutting firewood, but watching her and saying nothing, the ax gripped in both hands, held level at his thighs.

It was worst at night. She could barely stand it, now, when he forced himself upon her. Punching and fumbling at her, pushing into her in the darkness. Having his way with her until he lay there panting, then snoring, over her. His weight shoving her down, burying her now in this new place, this next bare, uncovered grave he had staked out.

She told herself it did not matter, that Billy did not truly want her anyway. That she was as good as dead, as good as buried here herself. But still she grieved for him the longer they had to be apart. Still she wanted to be with him, even if they could not spend the night together in his bed, even if they had no time to make love. She longed for just the sight of his small home again, for the gentleness of his voice—willing to put up with anything so long as she could have those things just now and again.

Before the winter was out, though, she noticed that her monthlies had stopped. This did not surprise her at first, for she had barely ever had them. There had been no blood at all during the long, starved
months along the road. Even after she had come to this place, they had always been spotty, inconsequential—what blood there was, it seemed to her, weak and thin, confirming her belief that she was not really a full woman at all.

But then it had stopped, and one day sneaking off to see Billy, she had found herself vomiting by the side of the Bloomingdale Road. To her disbelief she had watched her belly start to grow—barely perceptible yet, but a definite swelling, until she knew she could put it off no longer.

If it were Billy's, she knew, Dolan would as likely kill her as not, right there, the moment the brown baby came out of her. Most likely kill the child as well. Yet she was even more sickened by the thought that it might be
his.
That Billy would have to see her walking the fields with Johnny Dolan's child clutched to her breast—a constant reminder of what she was, and where she came from.

For a few days she even thought of killing herself, and the baby—of weighing herself down with stones, and breaking a hole in the ice on the North River. She remembered hearing from a priest that expectant mothers who took their own lives were doomed to wander hell for all eternity with their unborn and equally damned child, and she liked that idea. To drift about forever, with his babe constantly by her side—forever mother and child, having nothing to do but to look out for it, and provide for it.

But she thought then that it would be Billy's as well, and the thought of keeping that from him, of depriving him of his child, was more than she could contemplate.

There was nothing for it, then—she would have to tell Billy. She picked up his track in the snow one evening, on his way back from the orphans. She was sure of it—from the size of his foot, the lightness of his step. It was just the barest impression on the crisp, new layer of snow, weaving a little crookedly, back and forth.

She began to follow it, walking beside his footprints at first. Then walking in between them, until their feet were intertwined. As if they were two lovers making their way across the icy field—arms around each other, each steadying the other against the uncertain footing. Until, suddenly realizing, she had turned and looked back at the trail she had made across the open land, and had run back and tried to smudge it out with her shoe, smearing their footprints together. Panting
in the cold as she worked, the icy snow numbing her feet through the shoddy patent leather, shivering in her thin coat.

She went on, smudging out even his solitary footprints as she walked—though it was almost completely dark by now, the winter night having fallen as abruptly as a curtain. The only light a stern, white half-moon. Moving almost silently through the woods, even in her condition, the dead leaves buried under the snow now.
No longer some big, clumsy forest animal but a sylvan fox, carefully skirting the trees and bushes.

It was by the moon that she tracked him to the little rise above Seneca Village—a small, rugged promontory, scattered with bare white birches. He stood with his back turned to her, facing toward the village, and the North River well beyond. And as she watched he drew a small, brass flask from his pocket, unscrewed it, and took a short draught. Still looking all the time toward the water, where the furled white skeletons of ships lay, awaiting the spring or the icebreaker's passage.

She waited patiently until he had finished, and walked down to his village below. Then, still without saying a word, she had climbed up the little hill to where he had stood.

She looked not at the water, but at the half-moon above, and the swath of cold, clear stars. Then down, toward the dozens of tiny, amber gaslights and red fires from the town below. Picking out his figure as he made his trail down to Seneca Village, following him until he reached his home and lit a lamp inside.

She kept watching, ecstatically, until all the myriad little lights seemed to revolve around her. Just as the stars had out at sea, that night on the ship's deck when she had first had the fever. It was the same wide world she had seen on the ship, yet not the same. Not quite the beast, immense and dazzling and pitiless, but a place where
he
existed, and where she might come in and lie by the fire. And she knew then that she would have to figure some way through this.

•
39
•

After that she had considered whether to kill Johnny Dolan herself. It would not be so hard, she thought. Find something to put in his food, or his poteen. No one would look into it too closely. They were on their own in Pigtown, not even the leatherheads came up there unless something especially ambitious had gone missing.

Of course, that would mean store clerks who might talk, lingerers on the street corners who had seen her buy the package. She had heard of such things before, of witnesses in famous murder trials. She thought of doing it more
directly,
a blade or a shovel to his head, or even the ax he used to cut their firewood. If she didn't succeed the first time, there would be hell to pay—but she didn't figure she would have that problem.

It would be simple enough, to wait one night until he had fallen deep enough in his cups. One good, hard swing, and then she could bury him out in the fields, where the men had already started excavating for the new park. Let them pull his skull from the ground, speculate on what ancient murder it must have been—a casualty from the Revolution, or a slavecatcher crept too close to the dogs of Seneca Village. She would already be well away with her lover, ensconced in the next Negro shantytown, where nobody came looking too closely.

She tried to tell herself that it was impossible, that Johnny would be missed. But she knew it wasn't true. He was a solitary man, even at
his jobs—even with the other fire laddies. They never visited, and he never took her out to see them, or down to the firehouse chowders that she knew the wives went to. Chances were, knowing how little he liked to share his business, they were not even aware that she existed—did not even know where he lived. They would just think, when he did not answer the call to the next blaze or the next dance, that he had moved on. Gone out West, or over to Newark, or fallen in the river coming back drunk one night from The Yellow Man.

No, there were only two people, she knew, two people in the whole of the City who would ever miss Johnny Dolan. That was the sister, Deirdre, and her husband. And in the end they would be just the ones to help her.

It was Ruth who had found them, when he could not.
A good Irish girl, named Deirdre, working as a maid or a cook.
She knew how laughably common it must have sounded in this City, with only a hundred thousand or so women to fit that description.

It was impossible, but she had her job at the rookeries by then. Wandering out after one of his beatings, as far as she could to the east. Wanting to see the river she had heard was there—unsure, just yet, if she would throw herself in.

She had found instead the hills of bones. The mountains of scrap, of garbage, of every possible remnant of cloth, of leather, of broken furniture and busted plates. Of everything the great City chewed up every day in its endless appetite, all its most wretched refuse, washed up here, to be painstakingly remade, restitched, transformed in the shops of the German ladies. Mrs. Krane and Mrs. Mueschen, as they told her they were, though she could not imagine either one had ever experienced anything beyond a Boston marriage. Lean and tall and bespectacled, peering over their vast piles of junk. How they had acquired them, she never knew. An inheritance, sheer luck? Through their own endless accumulation?

When she asked for work—wanting something, some excuse to get away from him even for a few hours a day—they had sat her down, shown her their own crude dolls and trinkets. The inelegant but serviceable little figures they sold downtown at Macy's, at Chesler's—at Stewart's, with all its handsome young blond men behind the counters, its exquisite marble floors.

“Do this,” they had told her, twisting cloth around bone, ribbon
around cloth. “
Do this,
” and she did it, and they looked pleased, even through their dour, enigmatic German faces.

She did it even better than they did after a few turns, a few days, and she had been so happy to know there was
something
she could do—something at least, even if she would then have to do it over and over again, the same thing for the rest of her life.

It was there at the rookeries that she had asked every woman she met about Deirdre. Asking the other women she sewed and twisted the dolls with by the fire, or any women who came into the tiny shop, selling still more junk. That was how Ruth had found her, asking everyone she could for weeks and months, though much good it had done her with Johnny Dolan.

Deirdre was already living in the house by Paradise Alley then, with her husband, Tom O'Kane, and their children and all their nice things. When Ruth and Johnny had finally gone down to visit with them, she had been so intimidated by it all—by Deirdre, by the house. By all the grand pieces of furniture they had crammed into the front room, the fall-front secretary, and the reclining couch, and the square piano squeezed into one corner. Even the light had been different—wonderfully clean and clear, white light from an Argand lamp, with its expensive oil.

And Deirdre herself hovering over the tea table, in a real day dress made of green-striped taffeta, with puffed sleeves, and embroidered muslin cuffs and collar. Ruth had shrunk from her scrutinizing gaze. Struggling with the tea, trying to shove her fingers through the tiny cup handles, having all she could do to keep from spilling it on herself. Trying to sit on the sofa, without her cheap shift creeping up her legs—

She had seemed so formidable that Ruth had actually been surprised when Johnny Dolan told her the rest of the family was dead and Deirdre had cried. Dropping her head straight down in her hands and bawling like a child. Sobbing inconsolably, turning away even from her husband, Tom, when he had half-stood from his chair, and tried to put an awkward, comforting arm around her. But when she brought her head back up, Ruth saw that her eyes were dry again.

She had seen, too, how Deirdre disapproved of her brother. How furiously she would frown whenever Ruth came into her home with a
fresh bruise, or another shanty on the glimmer. She suspected him for exactly what he was, and lectured him on his responsibilities.

“You ought to live like a proper Irishman, and give up shaming yourself before your people and your God,” she would scold him.

Deirdre had disapproved of her even more, she knew—looking upon her from the beginning as the agent of Johnny's degradation. Her scorn turning to abhorrence when she discovered that they had never been properly married—

But then there was the husband, Tom.
There was always a man.
He had a soft word, and a little joke for her, whenever he saw her. A quiet man, gentle in manner and voice—but a former butcher and a fireman, with arms as wiry and strong as cables.

There was always a man, to get one in or out of trouble.

She saw how he would wince when he noticed the bruises on her. The marks of her martyrdom, making their claim upon him as
a good man.
A plan starting to form in her head even before she had any real plan—even before Old Man Noe was murdered, and Johnny Dolan had come home with his face covered not with lumps and bruises, but with deep, bloody scratches.

She might have put it down to some dockside whore. But when Dolan took off his coat, she could see that his whole vest and his white linen shirt were streaked with blood. Still no more disheveled than he might have been after some regular dockside fracas—but more agitated than she had ever seen him, pacing back and forth around the shanty. Peeking out through the door, and the badly caulked planks, as if he expected someone to be coming after him, across the snowy fields.

He had the walking stick half-concealed under his coat. A black oak shaft, crowned by the golden head of a dog that looked more like a jackal, with a long snout and erect, pointed ears. Trying to stand it quietly in the corner behind the cabinet of wonders—his corner, where he also stashed his tools and any money he might have, everything else that was most valuable to him.

“But what's that about?” she had asked without thinking, surprised.

He had come at her, shaking his fist.

“Ya want to say anything about this? Huh? I guarantee ya, if you do—if you say a word to a
soul—
I'll see to it ya hang with me!”

Bringing the fist right up to her face—but not, she had noticed, actually hitting her.

“Sure now.”

“Good thing, then.” He had paced across the room, still flinging hollow threats back over his shoulder. “Good thing for
you.
”

She had dropped her eyes and her hands back down to the sewing in her lap, pretending not to watch as he removed more items from the inner pockets of his vest and coat. Secreting them back there, behind the box that was the greatest of his treasures.

Once he was through he went outside and got more firewood. Cursing as it sputtered in the stove, still cold and wet from the snow in the yard. When at last he had the fire going, he stripped off the shirt and vest, feeding them frantically into its mouth.

“There! The proof's all gone now. So it wouldn't do ya any good to talk about it anyhow.”

He stood over her, bare-chested, hands perched belligerently on his hips.

“No.”

“So nobody'd believe ya anyway.”

She kept her head down over the sewing, until he put on his nightshirt and climbed into bed, still yelling at her. His voice sounding shrill, and futile—

“Shut that light! How's a workingman to get any sleep?”

“All right, then.”

She blew out the putrid oil lamp by which she was working, and sat there in the dark. After a few minutes she could hear him snoring, as she knew she would. He always fell asleep fastest when he was most agitated, most rattled by something, and she rose soundlessly as soon as he did, and went over to his cache behind the cabinet of wonders.

The only light in the room was from the dull embers in the stove mouth, but she didn't need much. She faced the bed where he lay, and squatted over the chamber pot, so that she could have an excuse in case he awoke suddenly, sitting bolt upright, as he sometimes did.

Reaching behind her back, she felt out the tin strongbox he used, clasped with the expensive new lock he had bought down on Broadway. She picked it at once with her hairpin, then worked over its insides with her fingers. Feeling out the newest treasures he had brought home. A fine, silk handkerchief, glorious to the touch. A watch wrapped
inside it. She moved a thumb over the cracked face, and down the smooth, metallic casing—the instrument still running, throbbing like a small bird's heart in her hand. Her fingers working so precisely over the inscription on the back that she might have read it by hand, if she had had any letters.

She moved on—to the watch fob, and a pair of cufflinks. A tie pin, perhaps. Thick paper that might have been a wad of banknotes, or even bond coupons. Nothing out of the ordinary. No more than any other robbery of a drunken fop, some rabbit sport, in one of the warren alleys along the waterfront.

Then she felt it—the cold, copper twists of that curlicue he carried around. Like a corkscrew, but no bigger than a pig's tail. She had always assumed it was a burglary tool, but now there was something different about it—something loose, even slimy coating the top of it.
Blood, perhaps?

She ran her thumb over it again—but it was slippery, and evasive as an oyster. She finally picked the whole corkscrew up very delicately, in two fingers. Realizing only later that she had figured it out before she held it up to her face. Had known it from seeing the same thing, so many times in the cabinet of wonders, so that she did not jump or yell or do anything to awaken him when she finally saw it for herself, unmistakable even in the dim light—

A human eye.