Paradise Alley (53 page)

He had thought that even Deirdre had been proud of him that night. Watching the parade of the fire companies wind its way through the cheering crowds—more thrilled by them than by the prince, or even the looming prospect of war, so excited that they had pushed past the lines of police and militia trying to keep them on the sidewalk. The Black Joke was the one thing that Deirdre had let him keep at, the one thing of his old life he had still been allowed to continue. He had convinced her that it was a public service and thus worthwhile—although
she suspected that it was no more than another excuse for drinking and carousing, and Democratic politics.

Most of all, he knew, she distrusted the position of Finn McCool as assistant foreman of the company. That was something he could hardly blame her for, since he did not quite trust Finn himself.

Yet Tom also saw how much she enjoyed the Saturday night chowders at the firehouse. The evenings of music, with the chowder pot thick with eels and clams and lobster, chicken and duck. Or the annual Amity Hop, given by the Amity Hose in the Apollo Rooms, with Jerry Go Nimble, and Jack Diamond playing the hornpipe and dancing his breakdown, and Jack Ballagher, a huge black man with an earring and a red kerchief like a pirate, playing on the fiddle like Old Scratch himself.

And on such occasions Tom was sure, even beyond a husband's natural pride, that her beauty and her grace outshone all the other laddies' wives and sweethearts. He thought that Deirdre had known it, too. He had seen her smile and blush with pleasure behind her fan, and she would dance half the night away with him, much as she disapproved of it herself.

There was nothing he had ever wanted more in this life than to run with the machine. They had all been mad for the fire companies, Tom and every other boy on the street. When the tocsin sounded they poured out of the tenements like bedbugs, just waiting to see them go by.

First had come the runners—no more than boys themselves, most of them, dashing down the street trying to sniff out the fire, and find the nearest pumps. Then there would be another, older boy, blowing a long silver horn as he ran. Then the company, thirty or forty men, maybe more, in their black tarpaulin hats and their red shirts and galluses. Running the engines along by their tongues and handles, moving the great machines so fast that their wheels barely touched the pavement. The crowd along the sidewalk breaking into spontaneous cheers and whistles and yelps of pure pleasure, just to watch them come.

As boys they had dressed up in the red flannel shirts and the colored suspenders of their favorite companies. Lingering around the firehouses, drawing water and building up the stove fires for the men. Polishing the machines and even their boots until they shone. Those who could afford it, whose fathers had a few extra quarters, even
pitched in to buy the companies new signal lanterns, or a brass band to strap around the engine.

But it was not enough. You still needed to have pull, just to become a runner. A brother or a cousin in the company, at least, and Tom had neither.

What he did have, as it turned out, was Finn McCool. It was Finn who had sponsored him for the Black Joke, just as it was Finn who made him a citizen, and a loyal member of the Democracy.

It was Finn, too, who had taught Tom the old molasses trick, the very first day they had met in the Five Points. Pulling him over to a brand-new grocery—this one not just a front for a saloon, the usual mound of rotting vegetable mass out on the sidewalk, but a
real
grocery, with fresh-caulked barrels of flour and sugar, and kegs of molasses along the walls. The proprietor—some poor Yonkers rube—standing behind his counter in a spotless white apron, a sharp new pencil behind his ear.

“Oh, lookit him, lookit him, lookit this ben! Dumb as an oyster!”

Finn whispering behind his ear, his prematurely wizened face almost up against Tom's as he pushed him forward. Announcing grandly as they came through the door of the shop:

“Me friend here an' I got a bet. Him an' five dollars says you can't fit a gallon a molasses into my hat. I says you can.”

Throwing the high, plug hat he wore onto the counter with a flourish.

“Be a good man, will ya, an' fill it up.”

Even the grocer, balking at such a suggestion. He was a solid, square-shouldered man, and Tom would have started edging toward the door but that Finn's hand below his shoulder blades held him steady.

“You want me to fill up yer hat? With molasses?”

His voice incredulous.

“Sure, it's just an old topper. I can buy ten of 'em with what I make off of this rabbit!”

Flipping a dollar piece casually onto the counter, after the hat. The grocer scooping it up, gnawing contemplatively on the coin's edge.

“Just go on with yas an' fill it up, I'll make it good outta that.”

The counterman shaking his head but grinning a little now. Thinking he was safe so long as he gripped the solid dollar in his hand. He
drew the gallon measure from the nearest molasses barrel, Finn making a great show of watching as he poured the oozing, green-black molasses, cement-thick, into his hat. Carefully trickling out every drop until Finn's hat was filled almost to the brim.

“There! You see!” Finn picked up the filled hat, pushed it triumphantly under Tom's nose. “That's five dollars, fair and square!”

Tom inadvertently helping him, looking completely lost. The grocer leaning over the counter, grinning at what he thought was the joke.

“He's got ya there, I can attest—”

Before he could complete the sentence, Finn had flipped the hat over with one deft move. Pulling it down, hard, over the grocer's head, all the way to his ear lobes.

“Here's a
test
for ya!”

The grocer staggered back, making strangled noises as he tried to push the thick, glutinous molasses off his face. Finn was already over the counter, pulling open his change drawer and scooping up as many coins and banknotes as he could gather in both hands. He was back across the counter again before the grocer had the hat off his eyes—the green-black gobs oozing down his shoulders and shirt and the once-spotless apron, still blinding him.

“Now, boy!
Out!
”

Finn had pushed him on out the door, thrusting as much of the money as he could down into his pockets, shoving more at Tom—making sure to grab up even the original dollar piece that the grocer had dropped back on the counter. They bolted around the corner, had vanished down Orange Street and into Bottle Alley before the first police whistles sounded. Finn McCool slowing to a walk then, taking Tom's arm in his own, heading back out onto the streets and the anonymous crowds.

“Now there y'are, boy-o. More than you make in a month, I'll wager—if you want to wager. An' if ya do, I know a good stuss game, what ain't even halfway crooked—”

He was right—it was more than he made in a month, or sometimes two. Tom ran his fingers over the money in his pockets, not daring to bring it out in broad daylight. Suspicious immediately, though, of what Finn might want of him.

“No, no, it's nothin'!” McCool had waved him off. “Just your vote, that's all. An' what's a vote off a man, anyhow? Less than a flake of skin, less than a bit of his fingernail!”

He had taken Tom over that same afternoon, to meet Captain Rynders at the American Club, and get his citizenship. The Captain setting up on a small platform, looking down his large nose at them like a hawk. When Tom went up to him, his piercing, gambler's eyes had raked across him once, then he had taken Tom's hand in his own—greeting him as if they had known each other for many years and slipping a small, convenient square of paper into his palm:

To Whom It May Concern:

Please naturalize the bearer.

        
Cap'n Isaiah Rynders

Finn had snatched up the piece of paper and towed Tom on over to Judge Pietr Brinckerhoff, a decrepit old Dutch magistrate in the Sixth Ward who sat up at his bench receiving an endless line of Irishmen. They approached him like a marriage procession, two by two, some wardheeler or another shoulder to shoulder with each supplicant, handing up little notes like the one Captain Rynders had given him, now wrapped around a coin.

No part of Judge Brinckerhoff moved in response, save for his hands, and these worked like a particularly well-balanced machine. Scooping up the paper, pocketing the coin. Scribbling a few words on another, official-looking piece of paper, then bringing down his gavel.

“Done!” was all that he ever said, and, “Next!”

That was it—and then he was a citizen. Finn had walked him back out of the court, holding the new, larger paper with its official seal, its mysterious flourishes of eagles and Indians and Dutchmen, windmills and sailing tackle.

“Oh, my boy, that's the thing to have!” he had congratulated him, pounding Tom on the back. “That's the ticket, all right. Oh, you'll make some money off a
that!
”

That was how it had been. That was the part of it, the story of how
men
got by in the world, which Deirdre had never quite learned. It was Finn he had gone to, as well, to get a job with the City, once Deirdre had decided that he was too good to work as a butcher anymore. It was Finn who had made it possible for him to work his way steadily up the organization, rising—rising just as she had wanted him to—from lighting lamps to running his own digging crew, in the grand, new central park they were building.

And in return, Tom had only had to go to the Tammany nominating meetings when Finn said to, voting for whoever it was he wanted him to vote for. Never telling Deirdre any of this. Knowing how important it was that she think it was she, and she alone—save for the advice and counsel of the priest—who had made him rise.

It was Finn, too, who had told him not to go to the war. When it had finally come, many of the laddies had been ecstatic. Transforming themselves instantly from fire companies into companies of ninety-day volunteers—the Fire Zouaves, and Billy Wilson's Boys, and Kerrigan's regiment. Replete with colorful new uniforms, and regimental banners full of harps and shamrocks, and the Irish sun bursting through the clouds.

They remembered how it was, those lads who were old enough. All the grand parades, and the honors and the banquets the men had gotten when they'd come back from the Mexican War.

“Only it ain't Mexico, and it ain't goin' off to fight Santy Anny an' that bunch, is it?” Finn had groused. “It's fightin' other Americans, in America, an' good Demmycrats, at that!”

Finn the real force in the company, anybody could see that. His brother, Peter, the captain—a strong, vain, handsome man, with a head of marvelous blond curls, and not enough sense to pound sand in a rathole. Finn was hoping to run Peter for the Forty Thieves, and he wanted to discourage the idea of any potential voters departing for the South. But it was more than that, Tom could see, he truly disliked the whole idea of the war.

“It's
their
war, the Republicans. They'll use it to crush us if they can, you wait an' see.”

“But Jesus, Finn, don't ya believe in keepin' the Union together, then?”

“The Union!” McCool had scoffed. “Oh, the Union, is it! Sure, I believe in keepin' the Union. I believe in keepin' the union between me neck an' me shoulders. You watch: If the war comes we'll fight it, an' they'll profit by it.”

But then had come all the new parades down to the docks as the volunteers marched off. The whole town strung with American flags, and green crinoline for the Irish regiments. The crowds like none that Tom had ever seen before, even for the Prince, with boys hanging off
every tree and lamppost just to get a look, and the girls running out to throw flowers under the men's feet, and kiss their faces and place garlands on their heads. Dodsworth's famous band serenading the new soldiers as they marched down to the Battery—

So we gave them hearty cheers, me boys,

Which was greeted with a smile.

Singin' we're the boys

Who fear no noise

We're the Fightin' Sixty-ninth!

And Deirdre was caught right up with the rest of them in it. For the life of him, that was what he had never been able to get over. Reading her Republican newspaper, always worrying about being respectable and doing the right thing. She had shown him all the abolitionist tracts, about the horrors of slavery, and they were horrible all right, but he did not know what he was supposed to do about it.

Hadn't he been doing, already, everything that she required?
Going off to work each day to the diggings in the new park. Putting his back to the shovel for ten hours a day, and keeping watch so his team of men didn't go off and lie down under a tree somewhere, which they would do in a heartbeat if they didn't fall in a hole first. Stuffing his ears with wax, as they blasted out the huge stones, hauling whole, new great boulders up from the docks—something else that he never understood, why some rocks had to be blown up for the new park, while others had to be shipped in.

Nonetheless, he had done it. Even enjoying it, he had to admit, seeing the whole thing, the perfect, landscaped park, take shape before him. On Sundays he would take the children up to play among the plaster fossils of dinosaur bones Prof. Hawkins had set up there, watching them climb all over the great, white monsters. And back at home, after they were asleep, he would sit by the fire with Deirdre and tell her of all the work they were doing, building the new City, and watch her eyes flare up with pride.

But somehow, it wasn't enough. Deirdre had kept on about it, especially after the Archbishop had called on every good Catholic to
ask
to be drafted into the war. Confirmed in her faith—and in her
great, Protestant respectability. Telling him it was his
duty
to sign up, to go down there with the rest.