At Seventy-second, the Riley wagon turned onto Broadway, which followed the path of the old Bloomingdale Road. The city had widened and improved the road just after the Civil War but had only recently gotten around to paving it, so the macadam ended somewhere in the Nineties, where a dust cloud marked the work.
The Rileys had come to tear down a house. They had put in a bid and were hired by the man who had bought the block. Tear down a house, salvage the good parts, and leave the lot ready for construction. Dick Riley had done it dozens of times.
But this house was one the last remnants of old New York. It had been known as Woodward Manor, seat of a famous Tory family. It had later become the Daggett Tavern. And it had ended its life as a flophouse for day laborers.
But there was still something dignified about the old place, thought the boy. Perhaps it was the pillared front porch . . . or the ancient oak that shaded the roof . . . or the carriage drive that still formed a grand semicircle off of Broadway. Or was it the way the house just sat there staring out at a world changing so rapidly around it?
“Washington ate here,” said the father.
“Then how come we’re tearin’ it down?”
“Because New York is growin’. Besides, after the squire fed Washington, he fed the British officers chasin’ Washington.” The father pulled the brake and jumped off the wagon. “That makes the tearin’ down easier.”
“How come you don’t like the British, Pa?”
“I have no argument with your dagoes or your darkies, and Jews is hard businessmen, just like the Irish, so we understand each other. But the Brits”—Six-Pound Dick gave a shudder—“they sent my father scurryin’ for America over forty years ago. So you just might say they killed him.”
“But he died with the Irish Sixty-ninth at Fredericksburg.”
“He left Ireland on account of rotten potatoes and rotten British landlords. It’s just good for us that he come here. And now that we give our blood for this country and our sweat for this city, it’s time we got somethin’ back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So my son’ll work with his head, not his hands.” The father went to the rear of the wagon and pulled out a tool belt and strapped it on. “Just do me one favor. When you read, read about money. Enough with history and novels. George Washington and Will Shakespeare and all them fellers had a fine run when they was alive, but we’re in modern times now. And a boy with a good head can go far, so long as he don’t fill it with silly notions. Besides, Shakespeare was British.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy climbed down.
“Now then”—the father gave him a pinch bar—“good head or not, let it never be said that a son of mine don’t know how to work with his hands. If you can work with your hands, you’ll never go hungry.”
AS SOON AS the father removed the padlock and opened the front door of the old house, the boy smelled must, stale beer, and dead animals.
Inside, it was dark and clammy. A center hallway led to French doors at the back. Beyond was a patch of grass, a few fallen-down outbuildings, and a stretch of new row houses on West End, blocking what must once have been a fine view of the Hudson.
“Before the Revolution,” said the father, “this spread covered a hundred acres.”
“In New York?”
“Ain’t nothin’ compared to the Apthorp spread. We took their house down on Ninety-first last year. They owned two hundred acres. But that was back when New York had twenty-five thousand folks. Now there’s two and a half million.” The father cocked an eye at his son. “That’s an increase times what?”
“A hundred, sir.”
“See that? A fine head for figures you’ve got.”
The boy did not tell his father how easily the math came to him. He liked his father’s praise and did nothing to deflect it.
“Get out your notebook and write it down to take these French doors,” said the father. “I know an old Jew who’s lookin’ for a set, and these are as fine as any I’ve seen.”
In every dusty room, there were things to salvage—doors, moldings, bits of furniture that might bring a price, and things to avoid—rotting food, empty whiskey bottles, clumps of old newspapers that squatters had used for bedding. The boy made notes and followed his father from the hallway through the dining room into a parlor that had become a taproom. They went up the grand staircase, surveyed the second floor, then took a smaller staircase to the attic and heat so strong that the boy could smell the century-old dust baking into the floorboards and rafters.
The father looked around at the four roughed-in rooms. “Servants would have lived up here. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer.”
The boy pointed to the trapdoor and the spring-loaded ladder attached to the ceiling. “What’s up there?”
“What they call a cupola, a little glassed-in turret.” The father pulled down the ladder and dropped the trapdoor. Light flooded the ancient attic. “Let’s have a look.”
As the boy climbed, a startled pigeon exploded from the rafters, flapped around, found a missing pane of glass, and was gone. The boy, as startled as the pigeon, took a breath, then levered himself up into the little space, only to be startled again by the view.
“There it is.” The father popped up behind him. “The city of dreams.”
It lay in a thick haze of July heat, like an army uniformed in redbrick and brownstone, its forces massed below Fifty-ninth Street, but its columns advancing quickly up the avenues of the West Side.
“Men come here from all over world, son, just for a chance. And the city don’t ask where you was born or what you done in the old country. It just says ‘Be smart and work hard and you’ll be rewarded.’”
“We work hard, don’t we, Pa?”
“We do for certain.”
“Is Hell’s Kitchen our reward?”
“It’s a roof over your head and food on your table and a family who loves you in a parish that cares. That’s some reward, if you ask me. So’s a view like this.”
From up here, the streets looked as if they had been drawn with a straight edge, and the land west of Central Park was filling fast with apartments, hotels, row houses. But vegetable patches still grew behind tar paper shanties, and clumps of trees still caught the sunlight, as if to remind New Yorkers of what once had been.
The boy tried to pick out some of the landmarks to the south. The twin steeples of St. Patrick’s rose as clear as the cross of Christ. Other steeples etched the horizon, too. From a distance, New York seemed a much holier place than it was. But the steeples were disappearing behind new buildings like the Savoy Hotel, which towered twelve whole stories above Fifty-ninth Street. And soon, said the father, there would be skyscrapers of forty, fifty, even sixty stories. But the boy found that hard to imagine.
So he turned and looked past the new All Angels Church on West End, out over the stockyards and steaming train yards, out to the river itself, to the hundreds of boats skittering along, their smokestacks belching exhaust that formed what his father called “the great cloud of commerce that rains money like water on the city of New York.”
Then he looked north, past Morningside Heights and the orchards of the old Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, up toward the rising new row houses of Harlem. And somewhere beyond lay the Polo Grounds, home of his beloved Giants.
When he turned east, an owl stared up at him from a hole in the side of the old oak, but the boy barely noticed. His eye went to a train puffing smoke along the Ninth Avenue El, then to an apartment building on Central Park West. At its opening nine years earlier, people had nicknamed it the Dakota, because it stood so far from the city that it might as well have been in Dakota. Now a hotel called the Majestic would soon block its view to the south. And another grand structure was rising to the north.
But its easterly view reached out over the green expanse of the park itself. Somewhere beyond lay Fifth Avenue and the fabled row of rich men’s mansions, one after another, side by side, all filigreed and buttressed and gar
goyled, like the ancient cathedrals and castles that the boy had read about in his novels.
“Son, in the circle you just drew with your two eyes, a man with a dream has a better chance than in all the principalities of Europe.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But there’s never been a dreamer yet who got anything out of life without hard work. So”—his father snapped at his suspenders—“let’s get to it.”
THEY STARTED IN a servant’s bedroom under one of the dormers.
The father took out a pair of cotton work gloves with leather palms and told the boy to put them on. The gloves were new and stiff and a little big, but the boy liked the way that they came up around his wrists. He thought of Ivanhoe pulling on his gauntlets before a joust.
Then the father took a thick chalk from his tool belt, crouched, and drew an X on half a dozen floorboards.
“What’s that mean, Pa?”
“You put an X on what you want to save. You don’t see floorboards like these too often. Twelve-footers, fir, eight-inch wideboard, never waxed. We’ll sell ’em to Squints O’Day. He’s buildin’ water tanks these days.”
“Water tanks? To go on roofs, you mean?”
“It’s the comin’ business. With buildin’s gettin’ taller, they need tanks to keep up the water pressure above six stories. They pump water up to a tank on the roof, then—”
“We don’t have water pressure, do we, Pa?”
“No, son, we don’t. We don’t even have runnin’ water. We get our water from the spigot in the yard.”
The boy knew that his parents talked about moving to a place with a toilet on every floor, especially now that Eddie had to hobble up and down the stairs on a crutch. But those tenements cost more. So did tenements on the lower floors. And money was tight. Money was always tight.
“Now, then”—the father made a few more X marks, as if to change the subject—“we’ll load up on these and take ’em to Squints.”
“Didn’t you used to work for him?”
“Still do, when the demo jobs get slow. I learned cooperin’ at the age of fifteen. Squints used to call me the best barrel-bottom man in the business. And whenever I do a bit of part-timin’ for him, he’s after me to stay. Tells me now I’m the best tank-bottom man in New York, which means I can cut a lot of fitted boards into a neat circle. But I like workin’ for myself. So”—the father took the pinch bar—“let’s work.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, tearin’ up rough floorin’ is easy, ’cause the boards is face-nailed. Just find a line of nails, then . . .” He jammed the pinch bar down between two boards and levered.
Nails and wood gave out with a yelp.
Then he moved to the next line of nails, levered and lifted, then a third and fourth time, and the board came free. Beneath was a latticework of lathe and ceiling plaster.
And from somewhere downstairs came a voice: “Hello! Hello!”
“Your uncle.” The father rolled his eyes. “Pray that he’s finished his beer fartin’ for the mornin’.”
The boy laughed. He liked it when his father let him in on a joke.
The father handed the boy the pinch bar. “Use the straight end.”
The boy slid the bar along the top of the newly exposed floor joist until it ran into a row of nails. He twisted and pivoted, and another board lifted.
“Funny,” said the father, “that board’s only been nailed in at the ends, like somebody didn’t want to bother renailin’ the middle. Give ’er a pull at the other end.”
So the boy did, and with barely any levering at all, the board popped up, revealing more lathe, more plaster, and fitted neatly between two of the joists, a wooden box about ten inches by seven inches by four inches high.
“What’s that, Pa?”
The father crouched down. “That, Timothy Riley, is why I love my line of work.”
“Hello! Hello!” The voice echoed up from the second floor.
The father glanced over his shoulder, then lifted the box. It was dark wood, mahogany, hinged, held shut with a little padlock clasp. The father probed the clasp with his screwdriver. The little nails holding it pulled away, and the box popped open: empty.
“Too bad,” said the boy.
“Not so fast.” The father tapped the bottom of the box. “You hear that? Sounds solid. Too solid.” Then he turned the box over, looked at the sides, ran his fingers along the little molding strip around the bottom. And then he found it, a fitted piece of molding that moved, and he slid it all the way off the side of the box.
“Hello! Hello, Six-Pound! Where the hell are you?”
The father glanced again toward the sound of his brother-in-law’s voice, then gave the boy a grin. “Many’s the box I’ve found with a false bottom. Now . . . watch.” He slid the bottom out through the space left by the molding to reveal—
“What the hell is this? Paper? Paper notes?” The father picked one of them up. It was a small thing covered in small print on paper yellowed from the heat of decades beneath the attic floorboards.
The father read the words at the top: “‘One hundred dollars.’ It says ‘One hundred dollars.’” Then he held it up to the dormer light. “And a watermark.”
“Watermark?”
“A kind of shadow writin’ that tells who made the paper.” The father squinted. “It says, ‘Confed . . . eration.’”
“Confederate money?” The boy looked closer. “But ‘State of New York’ is printed right under the ‘Hundred Dollars.’”
“Well, New York wasn’t in the Confederacy. We know that.”
“Are you up there, Dick? Who’s with ya?” The uncle was climbing to the attic.
The father made a gesture to the boy: Quiet. Don’t say anything. Then he took off his derby, put a few of the notes into the crown, and put the hat back on. He closed the box and slid it far under the floorboards.
“I got some bad fuckin’ news for you, Dick.” Uncle Billy Donovan’s brogue entered the room, followed by his beer belly, then Billy himself, all out of breath.
Dick Riley stood and turned. “The bad news is you’re late, and jobs is gettin’ tougher to come by.”
“Ah”—Billy made a wave of his hand—“you mean that panic thing the papers is talkin’ about? I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”
“I would,” said Six-Pound Dick, “and watch your language.”
Uncle Billy looked past his brother-in-law at Timothy. “Come to work with the men, have you, boy-o?”
“Yes, sir,” answered the boy.
“Now what’s this bad news?” asked Six-Pound.
“I’ll keep it under me hat, so’s I don’t scare Timmy.” Billy smiled. He had one of those pushed-up noses that always seemed to be pulling on his upper lip, so that a smile revealed his front teeth and gave him the look of a rodent . . . a large, beer-drinking rodent.
Six-Pound looked into his eyes. “I’d say you was drunk last night. Are you still?”
Billy farted. “As sober as a judge I am. And it was with these two sober eyes that I seen Strong McGillicuddy in his mother’s saloon.”
“You was drinkin’ in Mother Mag’s? I told you to stay out of there.”
“Ah”—Billy made another wave of his hand—“I go where I want, when I want.”
“And you mean Slick McGillucuddy, don’t you?”
The boy sensed a change in his father’s voice.
“Not Slick. Since you took the hammer to Slick, he’s good for nothin’ ’cept washin’ beer mugs or drainin’ ’em. Strong’s the older brother. He’s bigger and meaner, which is the reason for why he been up the river these last ten years. He—”
Six-Pound put up a hand. “Enough.”
“Just a word to the wise, Dick. You know you can count on me.”
“They won’t touch me, Billy. Been too long.”
“Ah, but some of these boys has long memories, Dick. So keep an eye out, and I’ll watch your back.” Then Billy looked again at Tim. “What
you got there, lad?”
The boy held up the pinch bar.
“Not that. You two was kneelin’ down there like you just found the crown jewels in the floorboards of an old tavern.”
“There’s nothin’ here,” said Six-Pound Dick. “Not a thing.”
“Nothin’ valuable, then?” asked Uncle Billy suspiciously.
“To a man who likes beer as much as you do, Billy, the most valuable thing in this old place is the fumes in the taproom. So”—Six-Pound Dick turned his brother-in-law toward the stairs—“let’s go down and take a deep breath. It’ll be as good as the hair o’ the dog.”
THAT NIGHT, THE Rileys ate dinner to the sound of firecrackers.
Boiled beef, boiled potatoes, boiled carrots, and explosions, some like cannon blasts right under their windows, others like the familiar sound of far-off gunshots.
It was the night before the Fourth, and kids all across Hell’s Kitchen were firing off bottle rockets or cherry bombs or Chinese stringers.
As soon as the boys were excused, Eddie and Timothy went to the front window. Eddie looked down into the street. Timothy peered into the windows of the third-floor tenement diagonally across the street.
That was where Doreen Walsh lived.
And there she was, standing beside the piano in her front room. Her voice rose along a simple scale—do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do—as her mother played. Her strawberry blond hair shimmered in the evening light.
“Ma, Timmy’s peekin’ at Doreen again,” said Eddie.
“I ain’t peekin’. I’m listenin’. When the teacher asked us kids what we wanted to be when we grew up, Doreen said she wants to sing in Tony Pastor’s show.”
“Vaudeville”—the mother gave a snort—“a fine dream for a young girl.”
Timothy pretended not to hear the sarcasm. “I told her if she sang by the—”
“She sings like a rusty gate,” said Eddie.
The mother ignored Eddie and asked Timothy, “If she sang by the what?”
“By the window, Ma. If she sang by the window, I’d be her audience.”
The mother craned her neck to see out without being seen.
Doreen Walsh was launching into a Tony Pastor song, “The Fourth of July.”
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