Paradise Alley (81 page)

“The City's always burnin' somewhere, little by little, or haven't ye noticed? It's never the same City one day to the next, any more than we're exactly the same person, now. Are we?”

While I was still sputtering with rage, he tapped me with his walking stick—a fine black cane he likely filched during the riots, one with the head of a golden dog, its ears long and pointed as a jackal's.

“You're smart enough, an' you're no fool,” he told me confidentially. “Let me make it up to ya, I can tell you certain things about West Side lots. You mark my words—that's the comin' place.”

He gives me a huge, insolent wink, and strolls away.

“Remember!” he calls back to me, still grinning. Referring, I think, to his real estate tip. “It's only a matter of time!”

Indeed.
If anything, New York only seems to burn faster since the riot. The whole pace of the City is more frantic, more flashy, more vulgar than before. There are still more dance halls and more beautiful waiter girls. More naked tableaux vivants, and nightwalkers, and street girls selling whatever they can. More hoarders and stock jobbers and shoddy men, filling the hotel lobbies. More faro games, and shooting galleries, and block-and-fall joints; more piles of garbage and dead animals and excrement piling up in the street.

In Wall Street they are gambling now with petroleum stocks, as well as gold. There are more epidemics sweeping through the poor wards, smallpox in the Five Points, typhus in Mulberry Street, cholera on the waterfront—many of them maladies that might have been prevented by a simple vaccine. Instead, our health wardens are mostly liquor dealers with political connections, inclined to do nothing but burn camphor in the streets—as if we are all giant moths, drawn to the flame.

The ways in which men make money during a war! Such a society we shall have in the years ahead—the streets jammed even now with the sybarites of shoddy. They jostle each other in the funeral procession. Using the death of the Great Emancipator to show off their newest carriages, the latest in silken black veils and ribbons, black gloves and sashed top hats.

Even so this is not society's day. The hearse rides high on its great wheels so they can all get a glimpse—all the hod carriers and the fishmongers, the tinsmiths and the bricklayers and the sewing girls. The women from the brothels, waving sad little perfumed handerkchiefs at the coffin. Men still in uniform, their faces expressionless, hands thrust deep in their empty pockets. Others teetering on crutches and wood stumps, faces drawn and ragged, saluting the body of their chief. Come out to mourn him along the same streets where just two years earlier they clamored for his blood.

It is all different now. The crowds along Broadway are docile, even reverent. Paddies and Yankees and Negroes alike, simply straining for a glimpse. He is theirs, too, now.
Lincoln,
they already call him.
Lincoln
with that same reverence with which they utter
Washington
or
Jefferson
or
Jackson,
all the secular saints of the Republic. All of us caught up now in the greater story, the epic of the nation, which leaves us breathless, swept along in spite of ourselves.

And as we pass, I search their faces. Wondering if Maddy is among them.

I look for her everywhere now. Thinking that I see her half a dozen times a day, in the crowds along the street. Searching for her along Park Row, where I first picked her up—and in the narrow alleys and the tenements of Paradise Alley.

I had thought she might return to me, but she never did. I tell myself that she was only a model, a diversion, but I look for her anyway. I tell myself I only want to make it right, what I have done to her, yet I know that my need is a more selfish one.

I even keep the rented house she lived in, still empty on Paradise Alley. Hoping that somehow it will lure her back—unable to fathom the hold she has on me, but needing her more than ever now.
Maddy.
Always trying, even when I am not thinking about it, to pick out her face from the crowd. Thinking that still, somehow, there must be a reconciliation, a way that we can live together.

In the meantime I keep observing, keep writing down all that I see—hack that I am. The line of people stretches nearly down to the Battery, all waiting patiently, just to see his coffin. I watch them making their way slowly past, the regular citizens of the City, and I scribble observations in my notebooks. Recording their reverence. Recording their awe, what they say and do—but all the time, looking for her face again. Thinking that surely she will come to see Lincoln.

The funeral procession pulls up by the city hall steps at last. The honor guard steps forward, carefully carrying his casket up to the Governor's Room.

He has come among us once again. The simple rustic, who hid everything behind a smile, a joke, a story. His secrets carried to the grave. I can still see him at the opera in Brooklyn, at his own masked ball. Giving away nothing. Sitting up there alone, high above the stage, as he listened to the divine music—that homely Western face still perfectly opaque and attentive.

Tomorrow, after he has lain in state, they will put him on the train up to Albany, and then back out to the West, where the fields and prairies run on and on, all the way out to the far mountains.

But that is for tomorrow. For now he must rest. We must have him on display, like everything else in this City, mounted for all of us to see, and to wonder over.

•
83
•

He trudged downtown in the slow parade, hoping to get a glimpse of them, somewhere, in the gawking crowds.
Nothing.
It didn't exactly surprise him. The mobs were enormous and he could see why she wouldn't want to risk it—a white woman taking a bunch of black children out into the streets.
Not after all they had been through.

None of the men in the honor guard were allowed to leave the city hall while the body lay in state, and there was no way to send a message. He was hoping word would get through anyway, the way it always spread around the City somehow, faster than any telegraph.

Some word to reach her, to let her know he was here—

He stood his watch in the close, dark room, his eyes nearly closing in the heat. Nothing to see beyond the pregnant black window bunting that covered the windows—just a snatch of new green branches and grass. The rifle heavy on his shoulder—even the Springfield—after so long a tramp around the City. The smell of melting candle wax and the mounds of fresh-cut flowers filling his nostrils.

The endless, shuffling lines of people moved past, whispering and pointing. The gentlemen and merchants, the boilermakers and brass polishers, the parlor maids and cooks, and longshoremen, and the firemen in full uniform, with their canvas hats and bright, wide galluses. Winding their way slowly forward to see the closed, blind casket. To
stand there and touch the flag draped over it, and wonder what they should think about it.

He saw men and women he knew, but he could not say anything—and they did not recognize him now anyway, his face thick with beard, the infantry cap pulled down over his brow. He almost felt as if he were dead himself, watching them walk up to him, unseeing, touch the coffin and walk away. Wanting to call out to them, wanted to say to them,
Tell her.
But of course it was forbidden.

He thought again of when he had seen her, on the last day of the riots. Her chestnut hair already beginning to turn grey at the edges—no longer quite the color of her eyes—but still so lovely. Standing out in the street, wondering what next—her face set in that way she had. Then she had caught sight of him. Clutching the ends of her skirts, her eyes welling up with surprise and relief—relief to be rescued, he knew, but more just to see him there, so unexpected and safe. He knew then, if he had ever doubted it, that she was the making of him.

He stood drenched in sweat by the coffin, itching in the wool uniform. Watching the line moving past, the faces blurring.

Wishing her to come. Willing her to come.

He tried to spy them from as far down the line as he could, hoping to spot her as she emerged from the gloom of the city hall corridors. Looking for some spot of recognition—the color of a dress, her hair, the way of her walk.

She will come.

He had lowered his own eyes for a moment, and then she was there. He thought it was an illusion at first. She wore a dark ribbon tied around her hair. The one black mourning dress she had, carefully sewn and resewn, the one she had worn at the burial of their first child, and the twins. Twisting a handkerchief in her hands. And her face, her face—a little older, still, a few more lines, more grey hairs, yet just as lovely as he remembered. The perfect brown eyes, looking about anxiously, but full of hope. Looking for something besides the great, obvious catafalque, he realized. Having heard somehow after all that he was here—

Then she saw him. The tears coming to her eyes when she did, but a small, secretive smile playing along her lips. So proud of him in his position, he knew. Not bothering to approach the coffin, just looking
at
him—
and all he could do was to stare back helplessly from under his cap. Knowing she would like it that way, that she would want him to do his duty, but preferring it that way, too, for the time being. Wanting only to look at her just then, to see
her.

His Deirdre.
His wife.

A DROP OF THE CREATURE:
A drink, usually of whiskey.

BAWN:
From the Gaelic, a fortification.

BEN:
A fool, a rube; a gullible man.

B
'
HOY:
From the Gaelic, usually meaning a young rowdy gang member.

BLACKBIRDERS:
Slavecatchers, and illegal slave smugglers.

BLACK FEVER:
A virulent form of typhus, common in Ireland during the famine. Also known as spotted fever, its symptoms included delirium, fever, twitching limbs, fits, and rashes and, in its final stages, vomiting, painful sores, gangrene, and the loss of toes, fingers, and feet. Its sufferers emitted an awful stench, often bad enough to make others vomit on approaching them. Its name stemmed from the impediment of the blood flow, which gave the faces of victims a dark hue.

BLACK LEG:
The last stages of scurvy, characterized by a loss of teeth from spongy gums, the painful swelling of limbs, and the bursting of blood vessels to the point where they left dark marks beneath the skin.

BLIND PIG:
An illegal, often hidden bar; a dive.

BLOCK-AND-FALL JOINTS:
Low taverns, serving the sort of whiskey that leaves one to walk a block and fall down.

BLOOD-AND-THUNDER:
A common type of play in Bowery theatres, usually featuring much dramatic and violent action.

BLOODSUCKER:
A man who sucked the fighters' fists dry of blood during the bare-knuckle boxing matches of the day.

BLOODY FLUX:
Dysentery.

BODHUN:
Gaelic, for fortress.

BROKEN LEG:
A woman who has an illegitimate child.

BUCKETSHOP:
A low dive, often serving dregs of beer, gleaned from the old barrels of other bars. Also, a crooked stock brokerage.

CASA:
In New York slang, as in Spanish, a house.

CAT:
A prostitute, or a bad-tempered older woman.

CHAINS AND WIFE:
New York slang, for ball and chain, manacles.

CODFISH ARISTOCRACY:
A derisive term for the older, elite Yankee society of New York and other American cities.

COPPERHEADS:
Northern opponents of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, and often Southern sympathizers.

COW:
An aged, worn-down prostitute.

CROTON:
A common New York term for water, following the completion of the first Croton Aqueduct in 1842. Its iron pipes stretched forty-one miles from the Croton Dam, and provided the city with the first steady supply of good water in its history. The early Croton hydrants were wooden, and painted green.

DEAD RABBIT RIOT:
What came to be a generic name for large-scale, gang brawls—which New York was rife with—after the Irish Dead Rabbits, or “best sports” gang. Recently, historical research has suggested that the gang itself might have been an invention of the newspapers; however, the brawls were very real.

DOLLAR SIDE OF BROADWAY:
The west side of lower Broadway, then filled with more fashionable and expensive shops than on the east, “shilling,” side of the street.

ELEPHANT HUNTING:
Slumming. “The elephant” was a general piece of slang, usually ironic, for any sensation—as in “going to see the elephant” or “the elephant has left town.”

FAMINE DROPSY:
The last stages of starvation, more correctly known as hunger edema. It was often characterized by the swelling of bodies and limbs until they actually burst.

FAWNEY:
A ring.

FIRE TENORS:
Popular singers who performed on the street while firemen battled large blazes.

FLINT CORN:
Also known as Indian corn, or Peel's brimstone, after Robert Peel, the British prime minister during the famine. Dried corn and similar meal issued during the Irish famine, it was known for its indigestibility. When eaten unground, it even tended to pierce the intestines.

FORK:
A pickpocket.

FORTY THIEVES:
A nickname for the New York City Common Council.

FOURIERISM:
A French socialist movement that enjoyed a brief vogue in the United States, particularly within the pages of Horace Greeley's New York
Tribune.

FROG AND TOE:
Slang for the city of New York, predating the Big Apple by many decades. I have yet to uncover its origin.

GOMBEEN MAN:
Gaelic, for a loan shark, or pawnshop owner.

GOOHS:
Prostitutes.

HACKUM:
A gang tough, particularly one who is good with a knife.

HARDTACK:
The main staple of the Union army diet throughout the Civil War. These were usually biscuits made from flour and water, and preferred by quartermasters for their durability. This same quality made them well loathed among soldiers; they were also known as teeth dullers and sheet-iron crackers, and were frequently served teeming with worms, maggots, or weevils. Soldiers would often try to deliver themselves from these uninvited messmates by soaking the crackers in coffee.

HEAD MONEY:
The fee of two dollars per passenger that the states of Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania required all shipping companies to produce, so as to assure that immigrants did not become indigent wards of the state.

HIGH PAD:
A highway robber.

KIRK BUZZER:
A thief who specializes in picking pockets and robbing the collection plate in church.

KITCHEN RACKET:
A loud house party, usually held in the main room of an Irish cottage.

KNOW-NOTHINGS:
A nickname for adherents of the anti-immigrant, racist Nativist Party, which flourished for a time in the 1840s and '50s. The party specialized in street brawling and secret meetings and ritual; when confronted about their organization, loyal members were supposed to reply, “I know nothing.”

LACED MUTTON:
A common woman.

LEATHERHEADS:
Slang for police, owing to the leather helmets that they once wore, years before the start of this novel.

MABS:
Prostitutes.

MOLL BUZZER:
A thief who specializes in picking women's pockets or purses.

MOLLY:
Street slang for a low woman.

MONSTER MEETINGS:
Mass meetings, often of tens of thousands of people, common during Daniel O'Connell's campaign to repeal the many discriminatory acts against Catholics, then prevalent in the United Kingdom.

MORT:
New York slang for a woman—usually derogatory.

MOSE, THE BOWERY B'HOY:
New York's own version of Paul Bunyan, a legendary figure of gargantuan appetites. Modeled (loosely) after a real fireman named Moses Humphreys, he was a staple of the New York stage for many years, beginning in 1848. Accompanied by his loyal sidekick, Sykesy, and his best gal, Lize, Mose frequently engaged in such hijincks as standing in New York Harbor and blowing ships back to sea, or picking up entire streetcars, horses and all. It was Mose who was held responsible for the disappearance of all the cherry trees on Cherry Street and the mulberry trees on Mulberry Street; he had used them for toothpicks. For all of Mose's Rabelaisian aspects,
he was also a new venture in realism on the New York stage. He appeared in the rather flamboyant outfit of the real Bowery gang
b'hoys,
and affected their speech and mannerisms. As such, he soon became a great crowd favorite.

NAB:
Street slang for a policeman.

NEDDY:
A type of blackjack; see “slung shot.”

NIGHTWALKERS:
Prostitutes who walked the streets at night. Later, as they became more brazen and all but ubiquitous in New York, the common term became “streetwalkers.”

NORTH RIVER:
The Hudson River; the two names were then used interchangeably.

NOTICE OF EJECTMENT:
During the famine many Irish tenant farmers were ejected from their land by their largely English absentee landlords when they could no longer pay their meager rents.

PAINTING THE OLD GAL GREEN:
Pumping very well at a fire, usually to the point where one's company flooded the engine of a rival company.

PLACE OF BLOOD:
A large collection of slaughterhouses along East Houston Street.

POP:
A pistol; also, “to pawn.”

POPSHOP:
A pawnbroker's shop.

POTATO MURRAIN:
Another term for the virus that rotted the potatoes and caused the terrible Irish famine of 1845–48.

RABBIT:
New York slang for a young sport.

RELAPSING FEVER:
Another illness common in Ireland during the famine. Similar to yellow fever, it would often include symptoms of jaundice, as well as high fevers and compulsive vomiting. After extreme sweating the crisis of the fever would seem to break, leaving the victim exhausted. It would generally recur another three to four times, though, every six to seven days.

RIBBONMEN:
Irish bandits, who tended to prey on landlords' cattle at night, sometimes in connection with patriotic causes.

ROUNDSMAN:
A patrolman.

SABBATARIANISM:
A movement that protested strongly against the pursuit of almost any activity on the Sabbath, and particularly the consumption of alcohol.

SCALPEEN:
A makeshift shelter, usually crafted from the remnants of a tumbled-down house. A
scalp
was a lesser
scalpeen,
often just a roofed ditch by the side of the road.

SHANTY ON THE GLIMMER:
A black eye.

SHEELAHS NIGHT OUT:
A girls' night out.

SHINPLASTER MONEY:
A common term used for the mistrusted new paper money issued by the federal government for the first time during the Civil War, in order to keep the economy afloat.

SHIP'S FEVER:
Any of the debilitating, often fatal illnesses common in Ireland during the famine, but contracted or experienced onboard a ship to America.

SHODDY:
A term used to describe second-rate, badly made goods, still used as a noun at the time of the Civil War. The many New York merchants who made money selling shoddy uniforms and even weapons to the Union army came to be known disparagingly as shoddyites, or the shoddy aristocracy.

SHOULDER-HITTERS:
Strong-arm men or thugs, commonly used to intimidate opponents at political meetings. Every prominent machine politician would have his own entourage of such men.

SINGING THE MURPHY HYMN:
Becoming a teetotaler. The abstemious were generally referred to as Murphys.

SKILLYGALEE:
One of the many ingenious ways Civil War soldiers found to make hardtack more or less palatable, in this instance by soaking the crackers in cold water, then browning them in pork fat. Another recipe was to eat them as a sandwich, spread with sugar and a slice of fat pork.

SLUNG SHOT:
A popular type of blackjack, a neddy.

SOW BELLY:
Slag for another army staple, salt pork, which was described as “usually black, rusty, and strong and decidedly unpopular.” Like army salt beef, it was usually encased in salt and often had gone bad anyway. Troops frequently had to soak it in water overnight before they could eat it.

SPARKS OR SPARKLERS:
Diamonds.

STAR POLICE:
A nickname for the New York City police, in one of their earlier incarnations, for the large, star-shaped badges they wore.

STIRABOUT:
A sort of weak porridge.

STUSS DENS:
Places to play stuss, or faro, then the most popular card game of the time.

TAMMANY HALL:
A political clubhouse and the preeminent machine within the Democratic Party, as it would be for over a hundred years. It had not yet, however, achieved complete dominance over the party, as it frequently would in the city over the decades to come.

TAMH:
A Gaelic word for “plague.”

TEASCHA:
A Gaelic word for “fevers.” Like
tamh,
its roots go back to medieval times.

TOPER:
A clever highwayman; also known as a Captain Toper.

VELVET:
Tongue. “A free one with the velvet” would be a talkative person.

WALKING THE CAPSTAN:
The main employment within the workhouses to which many of the poor were confined. The purpose was to grind corn, when any was actually available.

WALKING THE HALL:
Being unemployed.

YEAR OF SLAUGHTER:
Bliadhain an air,
in Gaelic. This was the year of an earlier, shorter potato famine, in 1741. It was still much in the minds of the Irish people by the time of the great famine of 1845–48, and often referred to by them as they saw their own suffering increase.