The Banished Children of Eve

by Peter Quinn

  The German stepped into the street. “Los, mein Freund,” he said to Foster.

  “I’m tired,” Foster said. “It’s this heat. My room is not far from here.”

  The German shrugged and smiled, a wordless way of saying that he didn’t understand, but it was a lovely smile. Foster wished it told him all there was to tell: a winsome, cheerful, charming young man eager for friendship. Maybe more. Foster joined the march. He walked beside the German up Chrystie. At the corner of Houston was the factory of a hat manufacturer, its roof occupied by scores of girls who threw confetti-like scraps of cloth and felt. They pointed north and cried, “Get the guns! Arm yourselves!”

  Just across Fourteenth Street was another liquor dealer’s. A group of boys worked hard at prying open the boarded windows. There was a stampede into the store. The German climbed in and emerged a few minutes later, cradling a bottle. Ahead, an immense sea of people, fed by rivers coming from every direction, surrounded a large brick factory building. Gunfire crackled from the upper floors. The crowd retreated, leaving a handful of corpses lying on the ground, but after a few minutes a new wave of attackers swept forward. They pounded on the iron shutters with hammers and crowbars, and a crew came at the front door with a lamppost that it used as a battering ram.

  Foster and the German stood beneath the awning of a saddle store a block away. The windows were gone and it seemed to have been, completely emptied of merchandise, but two small boys emerged carrying large saddles on their backs. They scurried across Second Avenue like two giant beetles. The German opened the bottle he’d stolen and put it to his mouth. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he guzzled it.

  “Gutes Zeug!” he said, and handed the bottle to Foster.

  Foster didn’t take a drink right away. He listened to another line of music: Dear is the light of your bright lovely eyes. Was it old or new? He wasn’t sure, but for now it was enough to know that the music was there once again, floating in the air. He took a long draft from the bottle. Still another line! Dear friends and gentle hearts. A new line for sure. He handed back the bottle and took out the scrap of paper and pencil from his pocket. Wrote the words down. The song machine was back in business! Maybe it was the fall that he had taken down Daly’s stairs. Medical and musical history being made at the same time!

  A roar went up from the crowd. The men with the lamppost cum battering ram had breached the door. People flooded in. The shutters flew open, and out poured chairs, tables, cabinets, a blizzard of paper. Without a word or gesture to Foster, the German ran to join the tide. He waved the bottle above his head.

  Foster hid inside the saddle store and decided to wait until the German reemerged. He was still waiting when a large force of Metropolitans charged from the north and west, braving a hailstorm of bottles and paving stones. From where he was, Foster could see the flames as they burst through the roof of the factory building the crowd had seized. The fire must have reached supplies of kerosene because it ripped through the structure in a matter of minutes. People jumped out the windows, crashing into the street. A cordon of police formed, their backs to the burning building, but they all turned around when the roof collapsed and an eruption of smoke and ash shot into the sky.

  More music was in the air. But this time it was old and familiar. Foster sang it aloud: “Borne like a vapor on the summer air … Floating like a vapor on the soft summer air.”

  IV

  THE VOICES AND FACES were from the oldest nightmare that Alexander Turney Stewart could remember. Belfast. His childhood home. A winter’s night. The wind screaming outside, clawing at the windowpanes, his uncle leaning toward the fire, the flames reflecting on his face. The children gathered around his chair by the hearth.

  “Scullabogue, in county Wexford,” his uncle intoned. “A name never to be forgotten. A warning to us all.”

  A horrible name, the very sound of it filled with the native’s savagery. The children drew closer to the hearth light.

  “The screaming popish horde drove the two hundred men, women, and children into the barn. Prodded them with pikes and scythes. Once inside, the people knelt and prayed for the strength to endure whatever might come. But even they must have found it hard to believe the papists were vicious enough to kill them all, babies and old women along with the men. Soon, however, the smell of smoke alerted them to what was in store, and the few who managed to claw their way out of the inferno died there on the grass of Scullabogue, their final taste of popish mercy a pike stuck in their necks or guts.”

  Alexander’s sister began to cry loudly. Their mother came in from the kitchen. She upbraided her brother—the uncle whom Alexander had been named after—for frightening the children. “Look what you’ve done, Alex,” she said. “Scared them half to death. Now they won’t go to bed!”

  He went to bed but could not sleep, and when he finally did, he found himself in a dark, cramped village in which a demoniac mob of whooping, howling creatures with apelike faces—the kind you saw on the country people or on the wretched beggars about the city—pursued him relentlessly. Hard as he ran, he barely moved. They were about to catch him. Mammy! Mammy! In a minute she was there, cradling him, cursing his uncle for disturbing her children’s dreams.

  The nightmare had recurred throughout Alexander Stewart’s childhood, but it had been a very long time since he had dreamed it.

  He leaned out the window of the coach. Today it was no dream, but as real and tangible as a paving stone. Twenty-third Street was filled with a multitude of New York’s most wretched, drunken, imbecilic creatures. They marched beside a brigade of laborers armed with hammers and crowbars. Some carried railings ripped from the fence of a house on Fifth Avenue, graceful hatchet-headed iron shafts that looked like pikes. Pikes! The weapons of the papist revolutionaries!

  The mob was marching west on Twenty-third and had blocked the flow of traffic on Third Avenue, both north and south. A few roamed among the stalled vehicles, demanding money. A gorgon with bloodshot eyes and a shock of wild red hair stuck her face into his coach. The very face of sin. Seamed with rum and depravity.

  “Could you spare anythin’ for a poor ol’ soul such as me-self?” Her eyes searched the inside of the coach. “Well, ain’t you the one for travelin’ in style!” she said.

  He struck the ceiling of the coach cabin with the silver head of his cane. The coachmen just sat there, making no attempt to move. Another ghastly face appeared at the window, then another.

  Here in the flesh: Scullabogue!

  He struck the ceiling again. The coach didn’t move.

  The handle on the door rattled as one of the creatures outside attempted to open it. A second hand reached to grab the handle from inside. Stewart struck at it with his cane.

  A howl went up. “You dirty son of a bitch!”

  Stewart beat the ceiling hard, and suddenly the coach jerked backward, then shot forward; swinging into the north lane so quickly that he was almost thrown from his seat. The coach raced up the avenue. He wielded the cane like a hammer and pounded on the ceiling until the coach slowed and pulled over to the side.

  He jumped out. The two of them sat up there in their red linen jackets and black stovepipes, faces awash in perspiration and fear. He shook his cane at them.

  “Where in God’s name do you think you’re going?”

  “Mr. Stewart, sir,” the driver said. “We’re lucky to have gotten outta there alive.”

  “And what of my store, boy? Do you think I’ll run away and simply let the rabble have it?”

  They stared down at him. Doltish, empty faces, mouths slightly ajar.

  “Do you think I’ll surrender the work of a lifetime to the likes of that crowd?”

  As a boy, he had walked beside his father and uncle to the lighting of the bonfire, one in a chain that would burn on every hill from Belfast to Londonderry. The Eleventh Night. The sacred anniversary eve of the Battle of the Boyne. Smell of burning pitch. The insistent beat of the great drum, thumping defiance.
The straw-stuffed effigy of the Pope brought forward and thrown onto the orange flames. The crowd sang with one voice:

  Hundreds they’ve burned of each sex, young and old,

  From heaven the order, by priests they were told;

  No longer we’ll trust them, no more to betray,

  But chase from our bosoms these vipers away.

  Derries down, down, croppies lie down!

  He remembered little of the speeches, only a tall, imposing clergyman, with a mane of white hair that fell to his shoulders, who stood before the blazing bonfire and cried over and over, “No surrender!”

  “Sir,” the driver said, “the police will protect your store, but to return downtown is to put your life in jeopardy.”

  If the dolt had been in reach, Stewart would have grabbed him by his silk cravat and throttled him. Instead, he struck the side of the carriage with his cane, scarring the carefully polished ebony lacquer. “Idiot!” he yelled, “that store is my life! Now turn around and take me there by the shortest route you know.”

  He reentered the coach. He heard the coachmen’s whispered debate as they weighed the certainty of losing their employment against the risk of losing their lives. To hell with them. If need be, he would walk.

  No surrender!

  The coach turned, crossed the avenue, picked up speed, and turned again, west toward Broadway. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. He was bathed in perspiration. His hand shook like an old man’s.

  They had traveled only a short distance when a troop of Metropolitans blocked the way. The sergeant conversed briefly with the coachmen, then poked his head in. A pug-nosed, loutish creature bearing an uncanny resemblance to the rioters who had appeared at the window earlier, he tipped his hat. “Mr. Stewart,” he said, “I was you, I’d be off these streets quick as possible. Word is, sir, the mobs is provin’ themselves capable of all manner of outrage.”

  “And your job, Sergeant, in case you need to be reminded, is to seek them out and teach them a lesson about law and order. So may I suggest you abandon this little corner of tranquillity and go protect the lives and property of the good taxpayers who provide you a livelihood!”

  One rap with his cane on the ceiling and the coach moved off. The driver went slowly, stopping at each corner to look down the side streets for any sign of the mob. As the coach moved down Broadway, more and more businesses were seen to be closed, windows shuttered or boarded up, doors padlocked and bolted. Stewart held his head. All he could think of was his store, situated there on Astor Place, America’s grandest emporium, its doors open, its windows an invitation to one and all.

  Those windows!

  From whatever direction you approached, they were the first thing you saw, shimmering jewels in a cast-iron setting. He had discovered such windows on a trip to London in 1851. Shop fronts that sparkled in the sun, beckoned the passerby, demanded he pay attention to the spectacle before him. These were no narrow boxes that housed haphazard collections of wares, apertures as pinched as portholes. Here was a translucent invitation, a portal of welcome. And at night! At night they didn’t become insignificant slits in the face of a dark and foreboding warehouse. At night the gaslight streamed through into the street, and the building became like a giant cathedral, windows ablaze with the power of a hundred thousand candles, a beacon of grace and hope and salvation.

  Standing in that London street, he had remembered how as a boy in Belfast with only a ha’penny in his pocket he had pressed his nose against the window of a bakeshop filled with chocolate angels sitting on clouds of marzipan. He had always thought it was solely the sweets and swirled sugar that had made him part with the coin he had sworn to save. There, in London, he understood that it hadn’t been the sugar that had first drawn him but the glass: the possibility of pleasure and satisfaction framed, contained, pinpointed by that thin pane.

  He had decided right there, in London, that he would build a new cast-iron store that would proclaim the new dispensation. Walls of glass. A crystal palace by day, an illuminated temple by night. An irresistible display. It had taken almost twelve years to plan and build. Eight floors, each of two and a half acres. One hundred and five windows. Nineteen separate merchandising departments. An investment of $2,750,000!

  On opening day, he had lined up the employees before the grand staircase that swept upward beneath a great skylight, a canopy of glass. They were arrayed in ranks: George Hobson, the general superintendent, at the head; the nineteen department heads behind him; and behind them, the rank and file of the store, 9 cashiers, 25 bookkeepers, 30 ushers, 200 cashboys, 470 clerks, 50 porters, 900 seamstresses dressed in identical striped smocks, 500 assorted delivery boys, boiler attendants, carpenters, and laborers.

  Stewart stood at the top of the stairs. “You aren’t merely employees of the world’s greatest store,” he said. “You are also participants in a venture as epochal as any since Marco Polo’s day! And remember: As I have lived by the motto ‘Honesty and truth are the surest aids in gaining a fortune,’ so shall you. If you can’t, leave now and seek your destiny elsewhere!”

  No one moved. Hobson led the applause. The doors were opened, and a pride of dignitaries entered, General John Ellis Wool at their head. Stewart greeted them at the bottom of the stairs.

  “On my soul, Stewart,” Wool said. “You haven’t assembled a store. You’ve built an army!”

  The coach rolled through Union Square. There was an eerie quiet. A detachment of police stood in front of the Union League Club, but the normal daytime bustle of pedestrians was missing, and the regular rush of workday traffic had evaporated so quickly that a stranger dropped onto this spot might think the Sabbath was being observed. Fourteenth Street was also unusually quiet, but directly east, on Third Avenue, a trash fire had been set in the middle of the intersection. Hordes of people danced around it, moving in and out of the smoke. A witches’ Sabbath.

  The coach proceeded at the same maddeningly slow pace. Stewart slammed the head of the cane into the ceiling above him. “Damn you!” he yelled. As the coach neared the corner of Eleventh Street, with the Gothic bulk of Grace Church directly ahead, he could stand it no longer. He flung open the door and hopped to the pavement. He would settle accounts with the coachmen later. There would be a full reckoning. The louts could depend on it.

  He could see the top floors of the store. No sign of smoke or flames. But he felt a stabbing pain in his stomach as he reached the corner of Tenth; then he got his first clear view of the ground floor.

  Praise God, it was untouched.

  He tried the doors on the northern side of the store, along Tenth, and all were securely locked. He tested the doors on the east and south. Locked as well. Hobson had seen to it. A stout hearted, reliable man. Knew it when he hired him a decade ago.

  Stewart relaxed a bit for the first time that morning. He shouldered his cane as if it were a musket, turned the corner of Ninth back onto Broadway, and approached the main entrance to the store. Ahead, the graceful spire of Grace Church reminded him of the twisting path by which the Good Lord had led him to this place.

  He had set out to be a man of the cloth, had gone down to Dublin, enrolled at Trinity, and taken his degree in divinity. But as Daniel O’Connell and his fellow scoundrels made clear their intention to turn the country upside down with their agitation for Catholic emancipation, he had drawn the inescapable conclusion that the prospects for the Protestant clergy in Ireland would eventually diminish and grow narrow. He left for New York. Had it in his head to write a book. A novel. Pondering the idea, he took a position as a tutor in an academy on Roosevelt Street, in what was at that time still a respectable quarter of the city, and in the interests of making productive use of the small capital he possessed, he lent a portion of his funds to an acquaintance who wished to open a dry-goods store. The poor fellow failed completely. But as the psalmist said it, “The Lord putteth down one only to setteth up another,” and in a moment of inspiration Stewart decided that instead of tak
ing possession of the store and auctioning the stock to satisfy the debt, he would run it as his own. He scraped together what money he could and returned to Belfast, where he secured at low price a handsome supply of Irish linen and lace.

  Returning to New York, he advertised “The Best Merchandise for a Fair Price, and for One Price,” and they came by the hundreds, yea, by the thousands, till in the space of several days they had wiped out his inventory, and he began anew, advertising liberally, selling just over cost, piling profit atop of profit.

  He began in a room measuring twelve by thirty feet and kept moving to bigger premises until in 1846, having accumulated every penny required to construct an emporium adequate to his ambitions, he built his Marble Dry-Goods Palace on the corner of Chambers and Broadway, overlooking City Hall Park. The edifice replaced Washington Hall, once a fashionable resort, now a disreputable watering hole for Tammany politicians, which in its turn had replaced the burying ground of some Negro sect that had for some long-forgotten reason abandoned the city.

  When the foundation was dug, a number of remains were unearthed. Some said there was a curse on anyone who disturbed the bones of the dead. Some curse: the receipt box for the first day the Marble Palace was open contained $10,000, and it rarely held less than that afterward. Out of the store’s earnings came the money to buy the Metropolitan Hotel and Niblo’s Garden. When the war came, there were massive contracts to supply uniforms. Wonder of wonders, Stewart decided to do as Solomon had done and build a temple whose very grandeur testified to the good things God bestows on those He favors.

  Mrs. Lincoln herself walked the aisles with him, her arm in his, and purchased $2,000 worth of linens and $1,500 worth of silver flatware, shawls, dresses, hats. A shining exemplar to all the ladies of America.