Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement life in New York City

“Mögtest Du mich haben?” he entreated.

Above the grinding of the wheels as the train slowed up for the station a block ahead, pleaded the tenor:

Oh, promise me that you will take my hand,
The most unworthy in this lonely land—

Did she speak? Her face was hidden, but the blond curls moved with a nod so slight that only a lover’s eye could see it. He seized her disengaged hand. The conductor stuck his head into the car.

“Fourteenth street!”

A squad of stout, florid men with butchers’ aprons started for the door. The girl arose hastily.

“Mama!” she called, “steh’ auf! Es ist Fourteenth street.”

The little woman woke up, gathered the umbrellas in her arms, and bustled after the marketmen, her daughter leading the way. He sat as one dreaming.

“Ach!” he sighed, and ran his hand through his dark hair, “so rasch!”

And he went out after them.

DEATH COMES TO CAT ALLEY

THE dead-wagon stopped at the mouth of Cat Alley. Its coming made a commotion among the children in the block, and the Chief of Police looked out of his window across the street, his attention arrested by the noise. He saw a little pine coffin carried into the alley under the arm of the driver, a shoal of ragged children trailing behind. After a while the driver carried it out again, shoved it in the wagon, where there were other boxes like it, and, slamming the door, drove off.

A red-eyed woman watched it down the street until it disappeared around the corner. Then she wiped her eyes with her apron and went in.

It was only Mary Welsh’s baby that was dead, but to her the alley, never cheerful on the brightest of days, seemed hopelessly desolate to-day. It was all she had. Her first baby died in teething.

Cat Alley is a back-yard illustration of the theory of evolution. The fittest survive, and the Welsh babies were not among them. It would be strange if they were. Mike, the father, works in a Crosby-street factory when he does work. It is necessary to put it that way, for, though he has not been discharged, he had only one day’s work this week and none at all last week. He gets one dollar a day, and the one dollar he earned these last two weeks his wife had to draw to pay the doctor with when the baby was so sick. They have had nothing else coming in, and but for the wages of Mrs. Welsh’s father, who lives with them, there would have been nothing in the house to eat.

The baby came three weeks ago, right in the hardest of the hard times. It was never strong enough to nurse, and the milk bought in Mulberry street is not for babies to grow on who are not strong enough to stand anything. Little John never grew at all. He lay upon his pillow this morning as white and wan and tiny as the day he came into a world that didn’t want him.

Yesterday, just before he died, he sat upon his grandmother’s lap and laughed and crowed for the first time in his brief life, “just like he was talkin’ to me,” said the old woman, with a smile that struggled hard to keep down a sob. “I suppose it was a sort of inward cramp,” she added—a mother’s explanation of baby laugh in Cat Alley.

The mother laid out the little body on the only table in their room, in its only little white slip, and covered it with a piece of discarded lace curtain to keep off the flies. They had no ice, and no money to pay an undertaker for opening the little grave in Calvary, where their first baby lay. All night she sat by the improvised bier, her tears dropping silently.

When morning came and brought the woman with the broken arm from across the hall to sit by her, it was sadly evident that the burial of the child must be hastened. It was not well to look at the little face and the crossed baby hands, and even the mother saw it.

“Let the trench take him, in God’s name; he has his soul,” said the grandmother, crossing herself devoutly.

An undertaker had promised to put the baby in the grave in Calvary for twelve dollars and take two dollars a week until it was paid. But how can a man raise two dollars a week, with only one coming in in two weeks, and that gone to the doctor? With a sigh Mike Welsh went for the “lines” that must smooth its way to the trench in the Potter’s Field, and then to Mr. Blake’s for the dead-wagon. It was the hardest walk of his life.

And so it happened that the dead-wagon halted at Cat Alley and that little John took his first and last ride. A little cross and a number on the pine box, cut in the lid with a chisel, and his brief history was closed, with only the memory of the little life remaining to the Welshes to help them fight the battle alone.

In the middle of the night, when the dead-lamp burned dimly at the bottom of the alley, a policeman brought to Police Headquarters a wailing child, an outcast found in the area of a Lexington-avenue house by a citizen, who handed it over to the police. Until its cries were smothered in the police nursery up-stairs with the ever-ready bottle, they reached the bereaved mother in Cat Alley and made her tears drop faster. As the dead-wagon drove away with its load in the morning, Matron Travers came out with the now sleeping waif in her arms. She, too, was bound for Mr. Blake’s.

The two took their ride on the same boat—the living child, whom no one wanted, to Randall’s Island, to be enlisted with its number in the army of the city’s waifs, strong and able to fight its way; the dead, for whom a mother’s heart yearns, to its place in the great ditch.

WHY IT HAPPENED

YOM KIPPUR being at hand, all the East Side was undergoing a scrubbing, the people included. It is part of the religious observance of the chief Jewish holiday that every worshiper presenting himself at the synagogue to be cleansed from sin must first have washed his body clean.

Hence the numerous tenement bath-houses on the East Side are run night and day in Yom Kippur week to their full capacity. There are so many more people than tubs that there is no rest for the attendants even in the small hours of the morning.

They are not palatial establishments exactly, these mikwehs (bath-houses). Most of them are in keeping with the tenements that harbor them; but they fill the bill. One, at 20 Orchard street, has even a Turkish and a Russian attachment. It is one of the most pretentious. For thirty-five cents one can be roasted by dry heat or boiled with steam. The unhappy experience of Jacob Epstein shows that it is even possible to be boiled literally and in earnest in hot water at the same price. He chose that way unwittingly, and the choice came near causing a riot.

Epstein came to the bath-house with a party of friends at 2 a. m., in quest of a Russian bath. They had been steamed, and were disporting themselves to their heart’s content when the thing befell the tailor. Epstein is a tailor. He went to get a shower-bath in a pail,—where Russian baths are got for thirty-five cents they are got partly by hand, as it were,—and in the dim, religious light of the room, the small gas-jet struggling ineffectually with the steam and darkness, he mistook the hot-water faucet for the cold. He found out his mistake when he raised the pail and poured a flood of boiling water over himself.

Then his shrieks filled the house. His companions paused in amazement, and beheld the tailor dancing on one foot and on the other by turns, yelling:

“Weh! Weh! Ich bin verbrennt!”

They thought he had gone suddenly mad, and joined in the lamentation, till one of them saw his skin red and parboiled and raising big blisters. Then they ran with a common accord for their own cold-water pails, and pursued him, seeking to dash their contents over him.

But the tailor, frantic with pain, thought, if he thought at all, that he was going to be killed, and yelled louder than ever. His companions’ shouts, joined to his, were heard in the street, and there promptly gathered a wailing throng that echoed the “Weh! Weh!” from within, and exchanged opinions between their laments as to who was being killed, and why.

Policeman Schulem came just in time to prevent a general panic and restore peace.

Schulem is a valuable man on the East Side. His name alone is enough. It signifies peace—peace in the language of Ludlow street. The crowd melted away, and the tailor was taken to the hospital, bewailing his bad luck.

The bath-house keeper was an indignant and injured man. His business was hurt.

“How did it happen?” he said. “It happened because he is a schlemiehl. Teufel! he’s worse than a schlemiehl; he is a chammer.”

Which accounts for it, of course, and explains everything.

THE CHRISTENING IN BOTTLE ALLEY

ALL Bottle Alley was bidden to the christening. It being Sunday, when Mulberry street was wont to adjust its differences over the cards and the wine-cup, it came “heeled,” ready for what might befall. From Tomaso, the rag-picker in the farthest rear cellar, to the Signor Undertaker, mainstay and umpire in the varying affairs of life, which had a habit in the Bend of lapsing suddenly upon his professional domain, they were all there, the men of Malpete’s village. The baby was named for the village saint, so that it was a kind of communal feast as well. Carmen was there with her man, and Francisco Cessari.

If Carmen had any other name, neither Mulberry street nor the alley knew it. She was Carmen to them when, seven years before, she had taken up with Francisco, then a young mountaineer straight as the cedar of his native hills, the breath of which was yet in the songs with which he wooed her. Whether the priest had blessed their bonds no one knew or asked. The Bend only knew that one day, after three years during which the Francisco tenement had been the scene of more than one jealous quarrel, not, it was whispered, without cause, the mountaineer was missing. He did not come back. From over the sea the Bend heard, after a while, that he had reappeared in the old village to claim the sweetheart he had left behind. In the course of time new arrivals brought the news that Francisco was married and that they were living happily, as a young couple should. At the news Mulberry street looked askance at Carmen; but she gave no sign. By tacit consent, she was the Widow Carmen after that.

The summers passed. The fourth brought Francisco Cessari, come back to seek his fortune, with his wife and baby. He greeted old friends effusively and made cautious inquiries about Carmen. When told that she had consoled herself with his old rival, Luigi, with whom she was then living in Bottle Alley, he laughed with a light heart, and took up his abode within half a dozen doors of the alley. That was but a short time before the christening at Malpete’s. There their paths crossed each other for the first time since his flight.

She met him with a smile on her lips, but with hate in her heart. He, manlike, saw only the smile. The men smoking and drinking in the court watched them speak apart, saw him, with the laugh that sat so lightly upon his lips, turn to his wife, sitting by the hydrant with the child, and heard him say: “Look, Carmen! our baby!”

The woman bent over it, and, as she did, the little one woke suddenly out of its sleep and cried out in affright. It was noticed that Carmen smiled again then, and that the young mother shivered, why she herself could not have told. Francisco, joining the group at the farther end of the yard, said carelessly that she had forgotten. They poked fun at him and spoke Carmen’s name loudly, with laughter.

From the tenement, as they did, came Luigi and asked threateningly who insulted his wife. They only laughed the more, said he had drunk too much wine, and, shouldering him out, bade him go look to his woman. He went. Carmen had witnessed it all from the house. She called him a coward and goaded him with bitter taunts, until, mad with anger and drink, he went out in the court once more and shook his fist in the face of Francisco. They hailed his return with bantering words. Luigi was spoiling for a fight, they laughed, and would find one before the day was much older. But suddenly silence fell upon the group. Carmen stood on the step, pale and cold. She hid something under her apron.

“Luigi!” she called, and he came to her. She drew from under the apron a cocked pistol, and, pointing to Francisco, pushed it into his hand. At the sight the alley was cleared as suddenly as if a tornado had swept through it. Malpete’s guests leaped over fences, dived into cellarways, anywhere for shelter. The door of the woodshed slammed behind Francisco just as his old rival reached it. The maddened man tore it open and dragged him out by the throat. He pinned him against the fence, and leveled the pistol with frenzied curses. They died on his lips. The face that was turning livid in his grasp was the face of his boyhood’s friend. They had gone to school together, danced together at the fairs in the old days. They had been friends—till Carmen came. The muzzle of the weapon fell.

“Shoot!” said a hard voice behind him. Carmen stood there with face of stone. She stamped her foot. “Shoot!” she commanded, pointing, relentless, at the struggling man. “Coward, shoot!”

Her lover’s finger crooked itself upon the trigger. A shriek, wild and despairing, rang through the alley. A woman ran madly from the house, flew across the pavement, and fell panting at Carmen’s feet.

“Mother of God! mercy!” she cried, thrusting her babe before the assassin’s weapon. “Jesus Maria! Carmen, the child! He is my husband!”