Paradise Alley (45 page)

Tuesday
July 14, 1863

Our holy and beautiful house,
where our fathers praised thee,
is burned up with fire;
and all our pleasant things
are laid waste.

ISAIAH, 4:11

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47
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It is hot again. It is still early morning, but already it is even hotter than yesterday, as if the cooling rains had never come. The sun a merciless, red eye above the top of the shutters—

But inside, Maddy snores gently on the pillow beside me. How angelic she looks now, sleeping by my shoulder. How like our first nights together!

She has aged, but not badly—not nearly as much as I have. She is no longer girlish, but if anything her face is now fuller, and more sensuous. Even with her hair unwashed, and disheveled, as it always is these days, she looks more beautiful than ever to me.

Last night, after I spied her face in the window, she rushed to let me in. Running down the stairs, flinging herself into my arms with gratifying haste.

“I heard them. I heard them out there, all day,” she admitted, still clinging to my neck. “There's been nobody around. None of the women out on the street. Nobody come up to see me!”

I sat her down at the kitchen table, held her gently in my lap.
She is still so small—as light as a girl.
There was no game now, on either of our parts. Instead it felt like our earliest time together, all needing and unguarded. I held her tightly to me, stroking her hair while she spoke.

“I was alone all day,” she told me, pushing her face down, nuzzling into my neck. Still unbathed, dressed in the same, decrepit yellow
gown I saw her in that morning. Both of us must have been quite a sight—me in my filthy suit, ruined by the construction dust.

It did not matter. I kissed and touched her everywhere, my caresses moving down over her arms, her breasts, her belly. I stood her up and undressed her lovingly, right there in the kitchen. Shucking the unspeakable dressing gown off her, pinning her hair back up as she stood naked and docile before me.

“My good girl.”

I led her upstairs by the hand, to the fine oak bed I bought for her years ago. And when we made love she clutched at me, as if she could not make me out, between the total darkness of the room and the hard rattle of the rain again on the windows, shutting out all other sound. When it died down, we could hear distant shouts and laughter, and breaking glass, and she had clung to me all the tighter.

So why? Why is it that I should ever leave her?

I am a hack.

That is the heart of the matter. Oh, I do not say it to insult myself. I even take a certain pride in it.

I am a hack, a writer. It is a trade much like any other trade, no more or less honorable. I write about everything that I know, and much that I do not know. I write about dogs and guns, and horses and birds. I write reviews of books I have not read, and plays I have not seen, and firsthand descriptions of places I have never been. I have even written poetry.

I have written for the Republicans, and for the Democracy, and for the old Whigs, and the Anti-Masons, and the Temperance party. I have written miraculous conversion stories for the One True Church
—How a Protestant Lawyer Saw the Light,
and
How a Universalist Lady Came to Christ.
And I have written Know-Nothing pamphlets about the dreadful carryings-on in papist convents and monasteries
—Awful Revelations or, The Confessions of a Lascivious Nun.

I have written shilling shockers for a nickel, and thrilling stories for a dime. I have written
The Blue Avenger of the Waves,
and
The Red Revenger of the Plains,
and
The Black Revancher of the City.
I have written for
Harper's Weekly
and for
Harper's Monthly;
for the
American Museum,
and
American Monthly,
and
National Era;
for
Brother Jonathan,
and
True Flag,
and
Flag of Our Union,
and
The Starry Flag.
I have written for
Godey's Lady's Book,
and
Petersons' Ladies' National
Magazine,
and
Ladies' Companion;
for
Burton's Gentleman's Magazine,
and
Mrs. Stephens' Illustrated New Monthly,
and
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
and
Ned Buntline's Own.
And I have written for
Country Living and Country Thinking,
and
Musical World and Times;
and for
The Scorpion
and
The Congregationalist.
I have written.

It was never something that I planned to do. I was—like Greeley—the sudden spark in my family. The prodigy, in my little New England village. Reading and writing and doing my sums so adroitly as to attract the notice of a distant uncle. He became my patron, at least to the expense of sending me off to boarding school, then to his old college out in the gentle, rolling hills of western Massachusetts.

After that, I was on my own—and as poor as ever. My immediate, old Yankee family was so unambitious that they did not even move on once the meager soil of their farm ran out, content to slowly decay into impoverished gentility.

I came to the City instead, turning my back on them. Looking to do something, anything, that did not require capital, or the sort of insane risk my countrymen are so fond of taking—fighting Indians, growing corn on a prairie, crossing mountain ranges to hunt for gold. Tinkering with boilers, and steam pressure all the day.

Then I saw it. People reading, everywhere—poring over books in social libraries, and reading rooms, and on the streets. Only then did it strike me, once I was in the City, though I had perused the written word since I first could walk. Only here, where it was altogether, did I see it. Printers and their presses on every other block. Turning out mountains of paper and words; of books and newspapers, and yearbooks and handbills, and any old leaves stuck between two cheap pieces of cardboard.

I knew then I had found my calling—my commodity. Do not think me too cynical. Like any craftsman, I took pride in what I could do so easily, just through the weight of my experience, and expertise. In how I could put my hand to anything—any public event, any passing fancy, any work of another writer (preferably one in Europe)—into something that people would
read,
would spend their hard-earned money and—even more!—their time on.

And I made a living. Enough to make my way, even in this most damnably expensive of all cities. Relentlessly pushing my name (and my many pseudonyms) out before the public, until I could afford finer
clothes, finer restaurants than I had ever dreamed of bothering with before. Until I had acquired the fine house in Gramercy Park, bought off the doddering scion of an old Dutch merchant family as decayed as my own.

Still, it was not enough. It was almost like a disease, a mania. I went on, writing and writing, until I was drawn down into the newspapers. There was something to write about every day—something right out on the street before me.

Surely, there was something here I could gather to me.
Something greater.
That was my secret dream, the longing that lies in every hack's heart. The desire to do something, write something of lasting worth. Some song I could cobble together, as bearish old Whitman did with his intemperate, pulsing odes to everything. I looked for it everywhere, out in the great City.

Yet my
Street Scenes
proved hopelessly stuck. I tried everything. Once I even set myself in the upper window of the
Tribune
for a whole day. From there, I vowed, I would take in the whole scene along Broadway, and write down everything I saw, every jot and line of humanity.

How I loved them all—
watching them from such a distance, unobserved as I was myself. The flower sellers dickering and laughing, hanging their goods along the fence posts by St. Paul's Chapel. A proud and beautiful cook, striding along, her head held high as a bishop's. The businessmen and the gang
b'hoys,
both idling along, eyeing her and any other woman they saw. The society women shopping with their maids, the politicians slapping shoulders and talking, talking. The teamsters pulling up and prodding their thick horses on—

I believed there was some greatness here, but it was in the City and not in me. I could make nothing of it, even of my day in the aerie, not even a story for the
Tribune
's readers. I battered and flailed at it, like a sculptor smashing at some unyielding block of stone, trying to cut out some truth, some greater story from it all.

It would not emerge—and I fled, out into the City. Plunging up one street and down another, shouldering my way through the mobs along the sidewalks. Taking reckless chances, cutting across the avenues just in front of the cabs and the wagons and the yellow omnibuses. Willing to risk being cut in half, just to get across the street a moment sooner.

I discovered that I was not alone in this. That there were hundreds,
perhaps thousands of my fellow New Yorkers racing along with me. Their feverish, anxious faces, always at my shoulder. Restless as sharks, we darted this way and that. Moving, always moving—always hoping to bury or unearth something in the great bulk of the City.

I would walk until I found myself bound, as always, by one river or another. And there I would stop, panting for breath, and then I could hear it—the steady, dissonant drone, rising up all around me.

I thought I was going mad at times, but I could hear it. I cannot say just what it was—the whine of the new machinery, or the babble of a million voices; the unceasing tramp of feet and hooves along the pavement. Perhaps it was all of these, and more, joined into that awesome, senseless hum. The City as a living, breathing, conscienceless thing, all around me. Yet I could make nothing of it.

I am, as I mentioned, a hack.

Then I found Maddy. I kept her at Gramma Em's, in the Seven Sisters, for a few more weeks, then I paid off her pimp and rented this house. I went with her, to fetch her things and her mother from their home up in the Shambles. It was a terrifying climb, through almost total darkness, along a staircase almost as steep and narrow as a ladder. On every step, beneath my boot I could feel the soft squish of filth, animal or human I could not tell. Other dark figures, reeking of whiskey or cabbage, smashed blindly into us and were gone, cursing and grunting as they fought their way down the stairs.

Maddy led the way, surefooted as an Indian. It seemed to me that the new red frock I had bought her was the only glimmer of color in that place—leading me up and up the stairs as if it were a lantern, to the decrepit cubbyhole where her mother lived, on the top floor. There the old woman sat rocking back and forth in a chair, before a cold fireplace, sucking on a corncob pipe. Maddy shouted greetings a few inches from her head—her mother's face clearly oblivious to what she was saying but a smile forming along her toothless mouth, gnarled hands reaching out to stroke her daughter's cheeks.

Maddy gathered their few belongings, then patiently led her back down the steps, though the old woman seemed nearly as surefooted as her daughter. I, on the other hand, stumbled across some protrusion by the threshhold to the Shambles—and to my horror my foot plunged right through the cobblestoned paving of Paradise Alley. The loose
stones plunging into a dark and pungent torrent, suddenly revealed below.

“It's the City sewer,” Maddy explained blithely. “The Swamp Angels and the Break o' Day Boys like to cut holes in the culvert. They hide their treasure down there.”

“You go down there?” I gaped at her.

“All the time. We never found any treasure. You had to be careful, though, even if they found ye lookin' around, they'd just as soon cut your throat.”

“Down there,” I repeat, staring down into the raging tempest, pouring all of our accumulated filth, day and night, out into the East River.

“Of course!”

And just like that, she swung down through the hole I had inadvertently pushed through her pavement, and into the reeking sewer below.

“Maddy!”

For an instant I feared that she was gone. I peered frantically down into the darkness, expecting to see her small body being swept off into the river.