The Banished Children of Eve Page 3

  Manning stopped rubbing. “Tell me who you’re waiting for, and there’s a chance I can tell you whether you’re wasting your time. Ain’t trying to pry, wouldn’t have lasted in this trade all these years if I got into such a habit, but I know most everyone around here. Rare the man frequents these paving stones ain’t one time or other been a visitor to Mike Manning’s.”

  On the wall above Manning, Robert Emmet continued to point to the street, arm outstretched, a martyr framed and frozen in his moment in the dock, his defiant legend in block letters across the bottom of the picture: LET No MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH.

  Dandy Dan made out of the patriot martyr’s life a rule: Trust no one, least of all your own. Christ Himself learned that lesson on the Cross. Wasn’t a Roman or a Greek sold Him for thirty sovereigns but a brother Jew. Emmet followed that same road to the scaffold. Trusted one of his own, forgetting that while the sons of Israel produced the true and original Judas, it was the Irish perfected the type, spewing forth rank after rank of Judases in every generation.

  Dunne fingered his glass. Was that what drove Dandy Dan to drink? Fear of betrayal? In truth, he was never betrayed. Was himself he betrayed in the end.

  “Rare the man passed this way ain’t made my acquaintance,” Manning said again. He twisted the bar rag around his fist. Most times, all he had to do was stand there as the whiskey flowed across the bar and wait until the backwash brought its predictable flood’ of stories, facts, confessions, the disappointments, hopes, hurts men nursed in their hearts, secrets they told no one else, not even a priest. He wasn’t used to having to wring out bits of intelligence drop by drop.

  “You probably know him,” Dunne said. “Seems everyone either does or says he does.”

  “Ach, then, sure I know him, can’t be a doubt of it.” Manning came and stood beside Dunne’s stool, his hands roped behind his back in the tight grip of the rag. He stared intently at the street. “Who is it we’re watching for?”

  “John Morrissey.” A name like the Holy Name of God, source of terror and awe, to be invoked rather than discussed.

  The rag went limp in Manning’s hands. His mouth hung open. “The John Morrissey?”

  “The one and only.”

  “John. Morrissey is to meet you here?”

  “The corner of Catherine and Cherry was what he said.”

  “And he made no mention of me?”

  “It’s him who recommended this place to me.”

  Manning’s face radiated only delight. He stepped outside and surveyed the street. Seeing no sign of Morrissey, he reentered. “Your man will have a drink with me, I’ll insist on that. He’s no stranger to me. Sure, it’s years since we last met, him traveling a higher road, defender of our race, knocking the stuffing out of every rat-nosed Anglo-Saxon Protestant bastard ever stepped into the ring with him, bringing honor on us all, but there was a time the distance ’tween John Morrissey and Mike Manning wasn’t so great. We both started as runners back in the forties, fetching our bread by seeing to the immigrants right off the boat, making sure they had a place to stay or a ticket to Albany. Never was a fiercer competition on the face of the earth, with Awful Gardner and his like biting the ears off them who threatened to take a piece of the business. Thought that as True Americans the Constitution give them alone the right to cheat and abuse the immigrant. Morrissey showed ’em. He opened the trade to Irishmen. I’m not claiming we was any band of saints, but we was gentler with our own than the True Americans had been. Sure, most times what we took was less, and whatever gouging and stealing went on, many the Irish heart was lifted to hear the voices of their own race upon setting foot in New York. Besides, if there was cheating, and there’s no denying there was, the worst of it was directed against the Germans.”

  A customer entered and went to the rear of the bar, by the stove. Manning went off to serve him. “Soon as you see Morrissey, give me a holler,” Manning said. “I’m goin’ t’insist he set a foot in here, raise a glass to the times we shared.”

  More customers entered, louder than the earlier ones, faster to finish their drinks. They kept Manning busy. He stood on his toes and shouted over their heads to Dunne, “Remember, the minute he appears, you let me know!”

  Dunne had no date with Morrissey. He had invoked his name in the hope that it would silence Manning and stop his questioning. That was the usual effect. The agents of the House of Morrissey were everywhere. Most times they were congenial, just doing their jobs, collecting rents on the properties Morrissey owned, lending money at a rate north of usurious, seeing to it that at election times the ballot boxes were squeezed full with a near unanimous return for Tammany. But sometimes their duties were less civil. Sometimes they made examples of those who welshed on their obligations or failed to settle their gambling debts at Morrissey’s uptown faro palace. Bodies were fished out of the East and North rivers, faces bruised but still recognizable, and for this reason Morrissey’s men were cordially greeted but usually left alone. Any conversation was theirs to start or finish. They were never questioned on the activities of the boss or on his whereabouts. But here was Manning, back at the window, still jawing. “I knew Jack Morrissey when he was fresh from Troy, arrived as a deckhand on a Hudson River steamer, an Irishman ready to fight every rat-nose in the city. From the first day he set foot here, he was an inspiration to us all.”

  The men at the bar were talking so loudly that Dunne had to lean close to Manning to hear what he was saying. They yelled for another round and banged their glasses on the bar.

  “O Christ,” Manning said, “there’s no telling what this day will bring, but that’s why Morrissey is on his way, ain’t it? He’ll try to play the peacemaker. Maybe the men will listen to him. It’s the nigger got the men so riled, bad cess to him. ’Tis a fearsome enough affair when any man be brought in to break a strike, but to bring in the nigger to do it is to spit in the face of every laboring man in this city. And what can John Morrissey do about that? Can he promise the men they won’t be drafted and sent to free the niggers who’ll take their jobs? Can he give each of ’em the three hundred dollars needed to buy his way out of the draft?” The shouting and banging grew louder. Manning scurried back to his bartending.

  Dunne glanced at the clock that hung beneath the picture of Robert Emmet. It was almost nine. Still no sign of the clerk and his posse of Metropolitans, perplexity on their faces because the special gratuities they received from the management of Brooks Brothers were now in danger. They hadn’t been alert enough to prevent a break-in, which is what they get paid for, and why reward a shepherd who fails to guard the sheep? Unfortunately, the two piles of greenbacks in the safe hadn’t been what they seemed at first. The bulk wasn’t notes but receipts, the one bundled on top of the other, a paper version of fool’s gold. Enough to make your heart leap when the door swung open, before a quick thumbing revealed the truth: a grand total of twenty-eight dollars. At that point the decision made to stick around, seek some satisfaction from the embarrassment of the booly dogs.

  Another crew of longshoremen made a loud arrival in the saloon. Manning worked feverishly to serve them. The stove contained only a skinball’s portion of coal, a small pile in which each lump had been counted out until the minimum to sustain a fire was reached, but the room had become so crowded it felt warm and close.

  A curtain of steam began to form across the window. Dunne put his sleeve to the glass and wiped a half circle clean. At first he almost looked for Morrissey, as though the story he had told Manning were true. The Metropolitans were nowhere in sight, but Catherine Street was becoming thick with laborers.

  “Christ,” Manning said. “I wish your man would come.”

  “Patience,” Dunne said.

  Dandy Dan O’Neill’s advice.

  The first question he put: Can you cultivate in yourself a talent for waiting? Hardly knew what he was talking about. The whole town in motion, nothing and nobody about to wait, everybody going about like they was in a walk-around in a m
instrel show, packs of kids running up Roosevelt Street and Chatham Square, a drunken Negro sailor whose pockets had just been ripped open screaming at the top of his lungs, Come back here, you Paddy sons of bitches, and us taunting him, Catch us if you can, nigger, nigger, nigger. Us milling around McGirl’s Ale House on Canal, where Anna O’Brien rented the second floor, the sounds of Anna’s girls and their marks floating out into the street, picked up by our voices, echoed, a choir of moans and laughter. Us waiting at the corner of Houston to catch a glimpse of Big John Morrissey and his entourage as they’d start their nightly stroll down Broadway, swaggering along, copper-headed canes at their sides, looking for some band of True Americans to try to push them into the gutter, us trailing behind like gulls behind a scow, screeching encouragement, Give it to the rat-noses!

  Dandy Dan knew everyone, the whores, politicians, barmen, drovers, actors, the bare-knucklers and the sports, whether you was mighty or lowly didn’t matter, he’d make conversation and listen to what you had to say. Always listening, watching, sizing it up. Never seemed in a hurry. Was outside the Atlantic Garden he picked me out, put his hand on my shoulder, a kind of ordination, like when the bishop puts his hand on the head of a man about to be a priest.

  Just stood there dumb, not knowing what to answer, and stared up at him in his wide-brimmed straw hat, white coat, and flowing silk cravat, the wax in his mustache glistening in the light from the gas lamps at the Garden’s entrance. In the background a band played that spittoon music the Germans love, all brass and blow, and the kids was running up and down the street, shouting and screaming, Runnin’ a race wid a shootin’ star, Oh! Doo-dah day!

  Come on, Jimmy!

  Didn’t move. Stayed there with Dandy Dan. Says he, You’ll have to work hard. Be prompt, alert, obedient. But you’ll make a life for yourself. What do you say?

  Yeah.

  Manning was out from behind the bar. He wiped his forehead with the bar rag. “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” he said, “there’s gonna be trouble, no doubt it, there’ll be no avoiding it now, not unless Morrissey can do something.” Manning’s breath smelled of cheese and onions, a skinball’s breakfast, the same stale remnants he put out for his customers. “Are you listening to me, man?” Manning took grip of Dunne’s arm. “It’s a terrible mood the men are in, no telling the harm they’ll do to themselves or others. Morrissey has got to try to stop them!”

  The whiskey had settled on Dunne’s brain like snow, muffling sounds, obscuring the world in a soft, fuzzy blanket, the hard edges made round and unthreatening. He had broken almost all of Dandy Dan’s rules in a single morning. Lingering. Being conspicuous. Pulling a job in the same place you lived. Why? Maybe for the same reason Dandy Dan did, whatever that was. Seen him that time right before Christmas, about a month before he died. Rode the ferry over to Blackwells Island. The cold was fierce, the trip only a couple of hundred yards, but it must have taken an hour, the ice was so thick. Got to the penitentiary half-frozen and it was colder in that hole than out. Dan was doing ninety days for stealing a bag of oranges. More a ghost than a man at that point, standing there in what looked like a gray sack, shivering. Held a stick with a clump of straw at the end of it, his hands fumbling as he tried to tie them together. Must have been ten men at that table making brooms. They all looked as bad as Dan. Don’t know how they stayed alive in that cold. Dan’s face was already as white and sunken as a dead man’s, his eyes as flat and lifeless as a fish’s. His hands shook something terrible. Slipped the booly dog a piece of silver so he’d look the other direction when Dan took the flask. Dan wrapped his hands in the big burlap sleeves of the garment he was wearing. He cradled the flask, lifted it slowly to his lips, but the shaking was so strong half the liquor poured over his chin.

  Your friends are asking for you, Dan.

  My friends have written me off as dead.

  The truth. Nobody wanted any part of him. Only one showed him any kindness was Mosie Pick, the gutter-rag fencer of old cups and dented silver. Her place was near the railroad station, on Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue, in the middle of the basement rooms where the whores worked so quick the travelers never missed their trains. As a favor, Mosie would occasionally fence watches or rings the whores lifted from their marks, but mostly she dealt in junk. A big lumbering Jewess, she let Dandy Dan sleep in the back room, with the score of stray cats she gave shelter to, but told him, Don’t bring none of your loot back here. It’ll only get me arrested.

  At that point, Dan was lifting whatever he could get his hands on, nails, shirts, purses, pens, he’d stuff his pockets and go hurtling into a crowd, stumbling across streets and sidewalks, almost getting himself killed as he made his escape. That’s how he landed on Blackwells Island. Mosie took him back when he was released. She’s the one paid for the funeral. After Dan died, someone slit her throat, ransacked her place, took whatever money she’d stored up. Metropolitans didn’t waste much time trying to find out who done it. More interested in protecting places like Brooks Brothers and collecting their tribute. Poor Mosie. But that’s the way in this town: The good go to the grave, the greedy open their own bank, which is what Waldo Capshaw could do if he wanted. The worst of the lot. A nose longer and sharper than a rat’s, him perched behind that uptown facade, the purple drapes framing the windows and the shades all drawn, the trappings of a respectability Waldo wanted the world to think he was born to. Liked to act like he was a gentleman, only everybody knew he was nothing but a fence, the tightest and meanest ever lived. Left a note at the hotel last evening: Must see you the day after tomorrow. Can you be at my place at four?

  Maybe, Waldo. If there ain’t anything better to do.

  Manning was back in his position behind the bar. He fired round after round of whiskey at the hordes in front of him. From outside a shout went up. A group of urchins ran down the street. “The boolys is coming!” they cried. “The booly dogs is here!”

  The bar began to empty. The sidewalk was crammed with people. They were quiet and sullen until a column of police turned off the Bowery and headed down Catherine Street, then they erupted into hoots and catcalls.

  Manning went to the rear of the bar and lugged out a large, flat piece of wood. “Give me a hand,” he said to Dunne as he dragged it through the front door. He tried to fit it across the window but couldn’t get it to stay in place. Dunne hadn’t moved. Manning rapped on the window and yelled at him, “Please, man, give me a hand! They’ll wreck everythin’ once they get started, won’t matter who it belongs to!” His voice was muffled by the glass. It had a faraway tone. “For God’s sake, man, please!”

  Dunne stepped outside. He grabbed the end of the panel and helped lift it into place. Manning twisted two snap bolts to secure it. The column of police had halted outside Brooks Brothers. The head clerk rushed out and talked animatedly to the policeman in charge.

  “Ach,” Manning said. “We’re in for it now. Not even John Morrissey can stop it.”

  Many of the men were armed with sticks, bottles, paving stones, or baling hooks, which they held at their sides out of view of the police. The children continued to frolic in the street, running up to the Metropolitans, taunting them, and then running away. The chief policeman went on talking with the Brooks Brothers clerk, seemingly unperturbed by the size and mood of the mob.

  Manning pointed to the corner of Cherry Street, where another column of police had appeared. “It’s gonna be another Bull Run!” he cried. “It’ll be ruin for us all!” He went back to the entrance of the saloon. “You better warn Morrissey!” He slammed the door shut behind him and pulled down a tattered green shade.

  The two columns of police merged into one solid body of four ranks, ten men to a rank. Each Metropolitan held his locust stick in front of him. After a few minutes, the chief policeman gave the order for them to move forward. Men lifted their weapons and waved them at the police. There was a collective roar, and the crowd surged into the street. Dunne felt himself being dragged along. “Bloody pe
elers!” the man beside him yelled. The police halted a distance away. Dunne turned and pushed his way toward the rear of the crowd. He was almost free when an arm came around his neck, a bulky band of hardened muscle that pulled so tight he felt as if he might black out. He tried to reach into his inner pocket to grab the iron claw, but before he could, the arm released him and he was shoved so hard he lost his balance and slammed into the side of a building. When he got up, he was surrounded by dockworkers. The one who had held him around the neck, a hulking, clean-shaven man in a cloth cap, stuck his finger to the tip of Dunne’s nose. In his other hand he held a baling hook.