by Peter Quinn
It was too much for the True Americans. Although badly outnumbered, they counterattacked, a hard wedge of enraged combatants, catching the Paddies by surprise and driving them back to their haunts around Paradise Square. The next day the Paddies retook the offensive, wrecking a favorite watering hole of the nativists on Broome Street, hauling down the American flag and raising in its place the trousers of a Yankee who had been so frightened he had befouled himself. A force of True Americans stormed across Centre Street toward Paradise Square to revenge the insult and stumbled upon the Metropolitans. It was a first test for the new police force that had been created by the Governor and the legislature to replace the Municipals, the police loyal to Tammany. The month before, the Metropolitans had fought a pitched battle with their rivals for control of City Hall. Metropolitans and Municipals whipped one another with locust sticks. Bodies lay everywhere, and the fighting continued until the militia arrived, seized City Hall on orders from Governor King, and routed the Municipals.
The police war went on all month, Municipals and Metropolitans contesting a possession of every precinct. Gradually the Metropolitans got the upper hand, and once aware of the continuing turmoil in the Bowery, they determined to assert authority and demonstrate their ability to bring the gangs under control. On they came, a parade of bluecoats and plug hats, their locust sticks cradled like muskets. The force of two hundred men marched with pride and confidence until Paddies and True Americans, temporarily abandoning their own hostilities, fell upon the policemen’s flanks and sent them into headlong retreat.
It was soon after the rout of the Metropolitans that Rat-a-tat became One-Eyed Jack. He was sitting in the parlor of Theresa Boyle’s brothel on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard when a squad of True Americans burst in intent on evicting the Irish whores. Cassidy tried to run, but they caught him on the stairs and dragged him outside, where Mike Poole, a cousin of the late Butcher, put his foot on Cassidy’s throat and, using his thumb as lever, gouged out Rat-a-tat’s right eye. He was about to do the same with the left, but the whores had taken refuge on the rooftops and their screaming brought a flying wedge of Rabbits and Pluggies. Poole straddled Cassidy’s body like a lion with its prey. He called for reinforcements, and they came, the street filling with men and the battle spreading in size and intensity until it seemed to fill the entire Sixth Ward. Poole finally abandoned Cassidy when a gunman opened fire from the window of a nearby hotel.
On the Bowery, immigrant and nativist alike joined in the looting of brothels, saloons, stores, and homes. The battle and its attendant disorders went on for an entire day before the militia arrived and laid down a series of volleys to clear the streets so the fire laddies could get to the buildings that were burning and prevent a conflagration of the type that would consume half the city. Afterward, they began a house-to-house search of the area around the Five Points.
Dunne was arrested the next morning. He knew he should have stayed away, but he also knew that those who did would be despised by all the gangs, the ruling ones like the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies, and their vassals as well, the Buckaroos, Slaughter Housers, Daybreak Boys, Hookers, Swamp Angels, and Patsy Conroys. Although more witness than participant, Dunne made sure the Rabbits and the Pluggies saw he was there.
Under the protection of the militia, the Metropolitans raided the basement shebeen where Dunne was holed up. They arrested everyone there, chained them together, and threw them into a single dungeon in the Tombs, a cell without light, the walls wet with slime, water oozing up through the floor, the remnant of the Collect Pond, which the city had filled in and built a prison on. They sat in silence, their eyes adjusting to the darkness, when, suddenly, a figure emerged out of the deepest shadows of the cell, a ghostlike apparition, face wrapped in a swath of dirty linen, a great blot of dried blood where the right eye used to be. Dunne felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The man next to him said in a loud voice, “Sweet Jesus, save us!”
“No need for prayers, boys,” the apparition said, “it’s only Jack Cassidy, you all know me, and I’m alive, not dead, no thanks to Mike Poole and his like, the craven Protestant horde calls itself patriots but in truth is unworthy of being called civilized men.” Cassidy talked most of the two days they were housed in that cell, chronicling the battle that had taken place, and Dunne and the others were grateful for it, his words a welcome distraction from the uncertainty and dread they felt.
On the afternoon of the second day, a militia officer appeared. He had the cell door opened and stood among the prisoners. “In the judgment of the civil authorities, there is scant evidence against you and even less space for holding you. Scoundreldom has multiplied beyond our ability to contain it, a historic day for New York! That means you are free to go, so do it quickly before I succumb to the inner voice that implores me to shoot the lot of you. God knows, posterity would bless me for it.”
Dunne had met Cassidy many times since they shared that cell. It was hard not to encounter Cassidy somewhere, since he was constantly on circuit from concert saloons to alehouses to hotel bars. His favorite haunt was Harry Hill’s, on Houston Street. For several years it had been the busiest of the concert saloons, where sooner or later every politician, sport, actor, squiffer, and jackanapes passed through. Hill’s was located in an old, rambling wooden-frame house built decades before by some prosperous farmer. The fields were long gone. In their place a solid row of brick façades pressed the old building tightly on each side. An aged, battered, peeling wreck in the day, at night it seemed a place of incessant movement and gaiety, the band never stopping, the dance floor constantly filled, the waiter girls in their red-tasseled boots and low-cut dresses swirling about with drink-ladened trays. The noise from Harry Hill’s was audible a block away, and a huge gas lantern, as powerful as any harbor beacon, bathed the entire area in its glow.
Old Harry Hill himself usually tended the door. He was a man of few words except when he mounted the stage to recite his poetry, a weekly event that emptied the place for an hour or so. Mostly he said nothing, devoting all his attention to making sure the bartenders weren’t doling out free drinks or pocketing the profits. Some said Harry Hill was the wealthiest man in New York, richer than A. T. Stewart. An exaggeration, for sure, but despite his ragged appearance—the same unkempt look as the old men who slept in the waiting rooms of the ferry terminals—there was no doubt that Hill was exceedingly rich, and he employed a small brigade of bodyguards to protect his person as well as saloon.
Tonight Harry Hill wasn’t at the door. A bored-looking bodyguard sat in his chair. The place was less lively than usual. The stage was empty, no line of waiter girls kicking their legs up, flash of leg and stocking, din of voices and cheers.
Perched on the corner of the bar was Harry Hill’s parrot. It preened itself, turned its head, and screeched, “Hang Abe Lincoln!” No one seemed to hear.
One of the waiter girls came over. Anna O’Brien was a second-generation whore, not as pretty as her mother had been, thinner, with a small bosom, and without her mother’s good cheer.
“Jimmy,” she said, “haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Been busy.”
“Wish I had that excuse.” She gestured with her head at the half-empty room. “There’s more life in potter’s field.”
“I’m looking for One-Eyed Jack.”
“Haven’t seen him in a good bit, a run of luck I hope will continue. Business is bad enough without having to suffer Cassidy’s mouth.”
There was a puffiness in Anna’s face, especially around the eyes, that Dunne had never noticed before. Rumor said she lived with a Chinaman on Pell Street, in the opium-smoking dive he operated. Dunne had known Anna since they were runts together running the streets. Lost touch with her for several years, but then bumped into her on Broadway. She was a runt no longer. They talked a few moments. Dunne was drunk, one of the few times. He bent over and kissed her right there beneath the gaslight, and she took him to her room, and they were
at it for hours before they fell asleep. Woke in a tight embrace, her leg entwined in his, her arm around his chest. He worked his way out slowly, without disturbing her.
He knew she did it for a living but wasn’t sure if she expected to be paid. It hadn’t felt like an encounter with a whore, a quick, mechanical in and out, the next customer waiting outside. When he saw her again, he blurted out, “Anna, do I owe you anything?”
“Do you think you do?”
He felt his face turn red.
“Where love is, there are no obligations,” Anna said. “A saint wrote that. Little he knew about either love or obligations, little any man does.”
Did he owe her or not? He was never sure. Could never talk to women, never had the knack for putting them at ease. No different tonight. Anna said nothing more. He stood next to her, not knowing what to say, until he said good-bye and walked back into the street. He stopped in several other saloons before he reached Clinton Place. No sign of Cassidy in any of them. Up ahead, in the middle of the next block, was an immense gaslit transparency of a wild swan. Carriages were lined up two-deep at the curb.
A group of soldiers pushed past him on their way out. They were reeling drunk. Dunne went down the stairs they had just come up into an immense smoke-filled room. To the right was a bar that ran the length of the wall; behind it, a dozen bartenders served the insistent crowd. To the left was a stage. The space between stage and bar was filled with tables, and darting in and out among them was the same species of waiter girls as could be found at Harry Hill’s in similar outfits; low-cut red blouses, black skirts that came only to their calves, black stockings, tasseled red boots with tiny bells around the laces. There was little visible in the place that would explain why Harry Hill’s should languish while the Trump thrived, especially since the Trump seemed the smaller and less well appointed of the two.
Dunne stood at the bar. An army officer was next to him, his eye encircled with a faint black mark. Dunne peered past him, through the thick wreath of gray-blue smoke, toward a voice that carried over the din, a constant drone, like the engine of a ferry. There at the far end was Cassidy, talking with two men Dunne didn’t recognize. They were short and stocky, the thick folds of their necks bulging over their collars.
“Ah,” One-Eyed Jack said when he saw Dunne approach, “young Dunleavy! A welcome sight to this single sore eye of mine, which can never see enough of the faces from days just passed but seem gone an eternity.”
The name jolted Dunne. Dunleavy. Been so long since he had been called by that name, it was like hearing himself being summoned from the dead: the name of the boy who had been shipped west by the Children’s Aid Society, the image of a deceased relative as captured in a daguerreotype, standing motionless on the deck of the boat to Albany, a tag tied to his too-small jacket, the same bold lettering on it as had marked his clothes at the Orphan Asylum. DUNLEAVY, J. Dropped that name first thing, soon as he got back, but kept a part of it, a small piece of the only thing the old man he had never known left him when he walked out on wife and child.
“But you’re no more Dunleavy,” Cassidy said. “Dunleavy is dead! Long live Dunne! And what’s the difference except some letters dropped or rearranged, a false scent for the booly dogs? You proceed, young man, according to an ancient precedent, for wasn’t the tactic of rebaptism first employed by the great Ulysses? ‘Nobody’ he called hisself when he entered the Cyclops’s cave, though what he done to that one-eyed soul is more than any Christian could bring hisself to forgive.” Cassidy winked with his one eye and burst into laughter. The two stout men with him kept their same stone-faced expressions.
“Come,” Cassidy said, “let us toast that great solo-sighted ancestor of mine with ruddy wine, a vintage of nectar and ambrosia distilled.” He signaled the bartender, who refilled the glasses of Cassidy and his companions, and poured a brimming shot of whiskey for Dunne. Cassidy turned away and distributed the drinks. Dunne paid.
On the other side of the room, three waiter girls dragged a reluctant lieutenant on stage. One of the girls sat down at the piano. The other two hung on the lieutenant’s arms. The trio began to sing, but the din in the room made it impossible to hear. Cassidy took his whiskey in a single gulp. The others did the same. Dunne motioned to the bartender, who refilled their glasses again. The two with Cassidy still looked on impassively. One had a mustache, the other was clean-shaven, but their builds and profiles were so similar it seemed obvious they were brothers.
On stage, one of the waiter girls had gotten down on her hands and knees. The lieutenant was astride her, mimicking a horseman. The melody of “Camptown Races” rang out on the piano.
“Let me give you a riddle,” Cassidy said. “What has five eyes, six arms, one tongue, six legs, and two ears?”
Dunne shrugged.
“The three of us!” Cassidy put a hand on each of his two stout companions’ shoulders. “These are the Gallagher boys, Dunne—now, surely you’ve heard of them—a most famous pair, the Romulus and Remus of Greenwich Street.”
Dunne shrugged again.
“Don’t tell me our city has grown so big and lacking in memory that there are them have no acquaintance with the likes of these two stalwarts!”
The bartender stood behind Cassidy. He slapped the bar, but Cassidy ignored him. Dunne paid for the drinks. “Don’t believe we’ve ever met,” Dunne said.
“Never met, sure that’s one thing, but never heard of them, that’s another!”
The brothers appeared unconcerned about what Cassidy had to say. They stared over his shoulder at the stage, where the waiter girls had coaxed the lieutenant to get down on all fours. The two girls sat on his back, and the one at the piano handed the rear rider a strap. She raised it in the air as the piano player banged the keys and the crowd began to take up the refrain:
De Camptown ladies sing dis song,
Doo-dah! doo-dah!
On Doo-dah! the rider brought the strap down on the lieutenant’s rear. It made a loud thwap. The lieutenant bucked like a horse.
De Camptown racetrack five miles long
Oh! Doo-dah day!
Thwap.
The Gallagher brothers didn’t join in the singing. They stared across the room. Their large, protruding eyes gave them a hangdog look.
“They’re deef,” Cassidy said, “deef as stone. Could shoot a cannon off right in their ears and wouldn’t bother them a bit, and they’ve no speech either, not a word, deef and dumb as the dead. The Protestant missionaries was always trying to take them from their mother when they was pups, said she couldn’t care proper for them and the other twelve children with no father about, came once with a court paper empowering them to remove the twins, but Mrs. Gallagher was a Galway woman, with the gift of guile the people of those parts so naturally possess, and she hid them beneath a pier, kept them there for near two months, out of sight, before the Protestants gave up. The boys didn’t disappoint her. Went to work as stokers on a steamboat, the infernal noise of the engines that drives some men mad never bothered them, their ears sealed by God, and once the traveling urge got in their blood, they never stopped moving, becoming cabin boys and porters and finally going into a trade of their own as a pair of wandering gips, working all routes west, rail as well as steam, relieving the unsuspecting passenger of whatever valuables they can and doing it with such noiseless grace he’s none the wiser till the twins is long gone.”
The twins watched closely the proceedings on stage, where the lieutenant, red-faced and sweating, was struggling to get out from beneath the riders and the rain of blows. He grabbed the front rider by the boot and twisted. She screamed. The rear rider reached back and put her hand between his legs and squeezed. He cried out and heaved himself to his feet, spilling both girls to the floor. He stormed off the stage, and the crowd cheered.
Dunne studied the faces of the brothers. The only deaf and dumb boy he ever knew was Grover O’Higgins, a runner for the Dead Rabbits. Moved quick as a fly. They all knew he was
deaf but shouted for him as if he could hear. Someone turned it into a ditty:
Grover, come here,
Grover, come here,
Stand there, stand here,
Or I’ll stick me foot up your rear!
It was true: He got kicked when he didn’t come. A face filled with eagerness and fear, eyes that studied every face with searching intensity.
“’Tis a terrible fate befallen us,” said Cassidy. “Days past, the Paddies of this town all knew one another or knew someone who knew someone who knew them, a great iron circle of unbroken bonds that the rat-noses could never dent, but now there are so many of us we live in ignorance of one another, traveling about like the followers of Ulysses clinging to the underside of thick-fleeced sheep. To think there are those your age, Dunne, that is unacquainted with the Gallagher brothers, it’s a thing to lament most grievously.”
Cassidy went on with his lament, his voice competing with the barroom noise. “His gift for talk,” Dandy Dan once told Dunne, “is from his father, one of those scholars of the Irish tongue who taught in fields and barns, a ‘hedge schoolmaster,’ as they was called, skilled in Latin and Greek and the ancient stories. A man of learning, though in the things of the world as lacking as those he taught. Unlike most of the scholarly kind, Cassidy the Elder was married. Barely able to keep his family from starvation, he brought them to New York same time as my old man came over with us, during the famine of ’32, and they met each other working on the laying of Croton pipe. Was a hard thing to watch, my old man said, poor Cassidy with a shovel, so unskilled was the scholar in the ways of the spade, but he did his best and amused the other men with his stories and his learning till one day, in the middle of a tale, Cassidy the Elder sits down and holds his head. Someone asks what’s wrong but he never answers, just keels over facedown dead in the bottom of a watery ditch, dying has gan sagart, as the old people say, without a priest, and was carted off to potter’s field leaving nothing to his family but his learning and his talent for talk, the latter a legacy all the Cassidys share in.”