The Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

war in the streets.” He took Dunne’s fare. “I’ve never figured it out: Is it the people make the place crazy, or is it the place makes the people crazy? A little of both, I suppose.”
    A heavy rain began to fall. Dunne hurried toward the cabin. The deckhand followed him inside. “Me, I thank God I was born and reared in Brooklyn,” the deckhand said. “Only a river between us, but might as well be an ocean. Ain’t two more different races on the face of this earth than Brooklyn people and Yorkers. We know how to behave, that’s the gist of it, not regardin’ lyin’, cheatin’, and stealin’ as the normal way. Tell ya this, as long as we got this river between us, the good peopleof Brooklyn has some protection, but it ever dried up, we’d be done for. The Yorkers would have the place overrun by noon of the first day.”
    Dunne took a seat by the window. Only a handful of other passengers. He picked up a newspaper and pretended to read. The ferry went ahead slowly, its whistle shrilling a warning to the river traffic to steer clear and respect its right-of-way. Outside, all that was visible in the gray-black mist were the gliding shadows of other boats. It was a long time since Dunne had been on the East River, not since he had gone to see Dandy Dan on Blackwells Island. He put down the paper and watched the beads of rain race down the glass, one into another, ceaselessly. Somewhere north, beyond Blackwells Island, where the East River meets the Harlem, was Randalls Island, his boyhood home, in the sense that it was where he had been for the longest single stretch.
Fog and rain mostly, at least that’s the memory of it. Must have been sunny, hot days aplenty over those four years, but it’s not them that stick in the mind. The cold and wet is what’s there. Cold gruel to eat. Cold tea to drink. The smell of damp sheets and pillows, musty, moldy, the black lettering on the covering the first thing you saw every morning:
THE NEW-YORK ORPHAN ASYLUM.
    The last year there, on a frosty, windy afternoon, the warders brought everyone down to the south end of the island, from the smallest kids who could barely walk to the biggest. They gave out drums and flags. Only thing to ward against the cold was the thin gray smock everybody got, boys and girls alike, no warmth in them clothes of any kind. Walked back and forth as the sun got hid by clouds and the wind off the river grew fierce, the little ones crying and whining, the warders telling them to keep moving, till finally the steamer appeared, a gleaming white boat trailing fat, glorious plumes of creamy smoke across the darkening sky. Pulled so close to shore you couldsee the plush red cabin and the waiters carrying trays of drinks and food. The warders said that Miss Jenny Lind, “The Swedish Nightingale,” wished to pay a visit to the orphan children that was the partial beneficiaries of the proceeds from her last concert at Castle Garden. Probably the only population in the city of New York, besides them in the lunatic asylum, didn’t have a clue who Jenny Lind was, and some of the little ones expected she’d be a real nightingale, half woman, half bird, fluttering in the sky. No such creature appeared. The boat idled off shore. Been late leaving the city and the captain wanted to be through the Hell Gate before dark, so the only glimpse of Miss Lind came when she appeared briefly on deck, a shawl around her shoulders, and at her side a bulging figure who the warders said was the great impresario and bunko hisself, Mr. P. T. Barnum.
    Hadn’t been so cold, some of the kids would have been grievously disappointed to discover that the Swedish Nightingale wasn’t covered with feathers, but they was too frozen to notice, jumping up and down, banging their drums, doing everything possible to fight off the cold. Boat only stayed a few minutes more, long enough for the newspapermen to