Paradise Alley (43 page)

“‘Lads and lasses to your places, up the middle and down again.'

Ah! The merry-hearted laughter ringing through the happy glen!

O, to think of it, O, to dream of it, fills my heart with tears—”

He had backed quietly down the hall, not wanting to frighten her. Worried about what she might think of him, a man who walked right into people's houses, and spied on them in their bedrooms.

But from then on, he was determined he would have her. The next Sunday he had been bold enough to introduce himself, and ask if he might walk out with her. Tom would never forget how she had looked at him. Her face as grave and beautiful as ever, but also unsurprised, as if she had expected just this thing.

“I am sincere,” he had blurted out, thinking that she was about to reject him, that she must get such offers every week. “I am sincere. I want to be led into a life of mercy.”

And she had looked him up and down then, as if making some final decision. Her face still grave and unsmiling. Though he would never forget, either, what she had said to him:

“All right.”

And that was it, just that.
All right.
From those two words, she had changed everything in his life. She had made him give up his bad company, and running with the river gangs, and cutting throats at The Place of Blood. She had taught him to read good books, and even to write a little, and how to dress and conduct himself like a respectable, God-fearing Irishman. She had brought him to the Church, and married him and given him children and a fine home, all with the assent of those two words.

All right.
He echoed them now in the letter he wrote, by the waning, yellow light of the candle, and the Pennsylvania moon. Wondering
if she had seen the account of his wound and hoping, in the hard way of lovers, that it had hurt her just as much as it had after the first time—after Fredericksburg. But glad, too, to relieve her mind. His hatred having dissipated in all that had passed since he had last looked upon her face. Scribbling down the words,
Im all right,
before he went to bed in his field.

•
45
•

She had seen from the start that she could make something of him. The awkward, big-eared boy staring at her like a calf in St. Patrick's yard. Even then he had been in arms, dutifully clutching a huge, rusted musket someone had given him.
A soldier for Christ,
as they had called them, she and the other volunteers for the Sisters of Mercy. Giving out food and good, clear water to the men there—scandalized that they could want them to give out something more, even when they were assembled for such a cause.

She did not think that she was naive—a young woman living alone, earning her own living for years in the City. She had some idea of what men were, she had just expected them to be transformed by the cause, at least for the moment.
To be soldiers for Jesus—when else would they ever have such a calling?

Instead they had used the call to arms, the call to defend the Church and the Bishop as one more excuse to wink and paw at the girls.
Not with her.
She had stared them down—giving out the bread and dried fish from her basket and looking right through them. Daring them to so much as say a word to her—until she had seen him, staring at her there like such a calf. His face hopelessly open to the world but serious, too, she could see. Great big, overgrown boy, holding carefully to his musket, his charge. She thought it right away, here was someone she could do something with.

• • •

She was already working at the house on Gramercy Park. Cooking for a rich Yankee in the big, brick home he kept there, complete with trellises and porches, and a garden in the dooryard. He lived alone, amid all that, with just a small household to run the place. Another member of the codfish aristocracy, with bundles of money he seemed to have scooped up from the ground, the way they all did. Patronizing and supercilious, joking smugly with the help.

At least he kept his hands off them. She had been in too many positions where there were such goings-on. From the time she had first started, not yet fourteen, she had had to fight off men. Not just the young men, back from school or a day's riding and drinking with their friends, but the masters of the house as well. Carefully setting their traps. Waiting until she was upstairs alone, changing the sheets or dusting a mantel, when they would just happen to wander into the room. Trying to corner her behind a bed, or a chair. Rarely even bothering to say anything, simply grabbing at her, or throwing her skirts up over her head.

She had learned that pulling at the roots of their hair was a powerful dissuader. There was hardly a man alive, she had found, who would persist in having his way when she was halfway to pulling his scalp off. Of course, she had to be careful—often enough the hair came right off in her hand, leaving her holding some shabby horsetail wig. Others liked to unbutton themselves first, and come at her with their thing front and center. She had found this was actually helpful, once she got over her incredulity, seeing what looked like a chicken's neck emerge from a man's pants. At least it gave her a good target. All that was usually required was to take a good, healthy swing at it with the most harmless of items—a mere dust cloth, or a pillow case—and most men's would immediately shrivel right up. Once that happened they were usually too morose to try for anything more.

“But you Irish are supposed to be so free with it,” one householder had told her, in astonishment, even as they wrestled on a couch.

Sometimes, for her chastity, she received a shanty on the glimmer or a bloodied lip, a mouse along her high, exquisite cheekbones. She tried to keep these hidden. To a perceptive mistress they were a sign as clear as a shingle, and she would be unlikely to remain in such a household.
Yet even when caught out, she would insist, if questioned, that she had walked into a door, or banged her head while mucking out the fire. Knowing that her future employment depended on this unspoken pact with the lady of the house—her ability to get a reference, and go on to be the sport in some other home.

But himself left them all alone, in the house on Gramercy Park. Always speaking respectfully to
her,
seeming to sense her disapproval. He had a mistress somewhere, she was all but certain. He spent too many nights away to believe his mumbled excuses, stumbling home in the morning, that he had passed the night at his club. His collar smeared with rouge, his clothes reeking of port or brandy. Or maybe he spent the night at a brothel—though it seemed to her, when she was still the upstairs maid and hauling down his shirts every day, that they always smelled of the same flowery scent.

She found herself thinking of him at odd times in the years to come, though she was angry to have such idle thoughts. Wondering what had become of himself, while she was cleaning her own home. A grey, trudging man, gone to fat. Breathing hard to climb the stairs. Combing his hair over, adjusting his silk stockings and the edge of his trousers in the hall foot mirror.

He must be dead by now,
she assumed.
And his fine house? What had become of that?

She had liked it there, as much as she'd liked any home not her own. She got to run most of the staff the way she liked, all save for his valet, and the place ran like a newly wound clock.

She had a room of her own there, too, up on the third floor, her reward for having finally worked her way up to cook. She spent her nights reading the old common school grammars that she had found, bought for one bit down in the Chambers Street shops. Or her copies of
How to Read Character,
or
Whom to Trust?
Stories of miraculous conversions, with titles like
The Path That Led a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church,
or
How a Universalist Lady Came to Christ.
Or even, once in a rare while when she wanted to treat herself, some collection of sentimental stories,
A Basket of Chips,
or
Bits of Blarney.

On her night off she would join the grand parade of servants around the iron-gated park. Walking proud and alone most of the time, she couldn't help it. Sometimes, particularly near the end of the month, she might walk with the O'Looney sisters, Ellen and Sharon, the young serving girl and scullery maid who worked under her. A
Sheelahs' night out, the three of them walking arm-in-arm, Deirdre trying to talk some sense into their silly, girlish heads. But if they had anything left at all from their wages, both O'Looneys preferred to go see a shillelagh drama, or a blood-and-thunder down on the Bowery. Running with God knew what sort of company—

Deirdre went back to thumbing through her pamphlets.
Whom to Trust?
Whom indeed?

She had always been able to do for herself. From the time she was still eleven years old, back in Cork. She had gone to see a cousin get married, and after the wedding feast the whole party had walked the couple back to their quarter acre. There she had seen her cousin's new home—literally, a ditch by the side of the road. A hole as deep as a grave, with a little thatch thrown over it, and surrounded by potatoes.

They had all stood there—the fiddlers playing and everyone waving and wishing them luck—as the cousin descended slowly down, into her new hole, until only her head was still aboveground, smiling bravely back at them. Within the year they had a babe as well, all living and rutting in the ground like so many animals.

Deirdre had decided even then that she wanted no part of such a life. She was still young to leave home, but her father had been just as glad to lose the cost of a dowry. She had gone first to the Sisters of Mercy, in Cork city, to learn a little sewing and some needlepoint, and ever since then she had been able to do for herself—had always been able to stick her ear in anywhere and get a job. It had been hard leaving her family—the younger brothers and sisters she was in charge of, even her parents, as shiftless and conniving as she perceived them to be. It would have been even harder to stay.

In New York she had been guided to a rooming house when she'd first arrived, still only fourteen years old. There she had been locked up in a room for two days with no food, until a man came in to tell her what a great bill she had run up, and suggested there were other ways to settle it.

Yet even then she had been able to make her way. She had talked and bluffed her way out, fulminating that her uncle was a sergeant in the star police. The proprietor had believed her just enough to have his doubts, and once she was finally free she had gone at once to buy a piece of bread and a cup of milk. Walking around the Five Points, eating and giving thanks to the Virgin Mother for her deliverance. Feeling
almost giddy with triumph, and excitement, even though she had almost no money left.

She had learned the skills as she went, faking them when she had to. Working her way up through the households, taking an almost ferocious pride in what she could learn to do. Keeping up her appearance and working steadily on her letters, on learning how to speak and deport herself properly. Putting aside nearly all of the seven dollars a month she made in wages.

Putting them aside for what?
Deirdre had listened to the older, married women in their gossip over the washing. “
If I had it to do over, I'd never marry
”—spoken with a bitterness that always startled her. Most of them even sounded wistful for the days they had been in service. Making their living now as best they could, running groceries and grog shops, selling baked pears and matchboxes on the street. Their husbands useless idlers and drunks, pontificating in the saloons. Or they were hard, silent, equally bitter men—coming home from their twelve-hour shifts shoveling coal at the gas works, or loading raw meat onto a boat, and just waiting for somebody to try and say something.

Yet as much as she reveled in her independence, she was not sure how much longer she could stay alone in the world, and feared lest she fall into error. Getting up every morning before dawn, shaking the O'Looneys awake, the lazy, torpid beasts that they were. Making her own bed, straight and tight as a sail, while they got the fires started—then going downstairs in her starched, spotless apron to get the master's breakfast. Taking her inventory of the larder and the pantry. Going out to the fishmarkets and the meat stalls and the vegetable groceries in the wide, bustling City. Keeping herself in hand, walking with her head up along the dollar side of Broadway, just as proud as the ladies.

But always alone. Sometimes a whole day passed without her uttering a word besides an order, or a reprimand. Turning out her meals, keeping a stranger's house. She prided herself on being a decent cook, on working on meals again and again until she got them right, but she had no real flare for it—no love of foods or flavor. She made what she needed to make, then ate in silence in her kitchen. Chasing Ellen and Sharon around until she was satisfied they had scrubbed it clean.

Then—it was back up to her room. To wash her hair with soap and cold water in her basin, and go back to her reading. That was all. Trying to get through her true stories of miraculous Protestant conversions, her grammars and her pamphlets on how a proper Catholic girl should comport herself.

She tried writing home, but she had learned it was futile. Her father had some letters, but he would not write back, claiming that he could not afford the postage, or the paper, even when she sent him the money. Sooner or later the priest would write back for him, letting her know in bland, general words what had happened since to her family, who had been born or who was ill, passing on supposed greetings from her mother and father. It had only made her feel worse, thinking of her father standing before the priest, hat in hand, telling himself, no doubt,
Let the Pope take the expense.

The Church was her one consolation. She went to Mass every morning she could, stopping in at St. Patrick's or one of the smaller parish churches on her way to the markets. She loved the cool, darkened interiors, awash in the smell of candles and incense—kneeling there, sanctified already with the holy water from the door.