New York - The Novel

respectable girl. What would they think if they caught sight of Sean, the Bowery boy in his loud coat, the devil from Five Points? She’d sooner they didn’t even know she had a brother. For if they knew, they’d be sure to ask what he did, and what could she say?
    What did Sean do? Organize the local ward? Yes. Help the poor? No doubt. Stuff ballot boxes? Certainly. Run errands for his friend Fernando Wood? Why not? Enforce his will, at point of knife? Better not ask.
    Sean would do whatever it took to please the boys at Tammany Hall.
    Tammany was a sort of Indian name. The Tammany men called themselves Braves, and their leaders were sachems, just like an Indian tribe. It was organized a bit like a tribe, too—a loose collection of groups and gangs who’d banded together for mutual assistance. They had a meeting place, though, which they called Tammany Hall, on the other side of the Common. And they were certainly effective. If you were a new immigrant, you went to Tammany Hall. They helped you find a place to live,maybe helped with your rent, found you a job—especially if you were Irish. You might become a fireman. Your wife and daughter might work at home, stitching ready-to-wear clothes for Brooks Brothers. Then Tammany Hall told you who to vote for. And made sure they were elected, too.
    If Tammany did favors, it expected favors in return. You kept on the right side of Tammany, if you had any sense. And there were fellows like Sean to persuade you of the wisdom of doing so, should you have any doubts. Respectable people didn’t like Tammany.
    “I’m all right by myself,” she said.
    “I’ll treat you to the train,” he offered.
    This might have been tempting. The coaches of the New York and Harlem Railroad were so plush that even the rich Wall Street men rode in them. Leaving from beside City Hall, they lumbered sedately northward past Five Points, then trundled up the Bowery and picked up Fourth Avenue. Until they reached the end of the residential neighborhoods, where quiet was demanded, they were pulled by teams of heavy horses. Above the residential area, the coaches were coupled to steam engines for the long journey up to Harlem.
    “I can’t,” she said. “I promised to meet Gretchen along the way.”
    “Oh God,” he cried. “I might have guessed. The chocolate girl. Little goody two-shoes.”
    Mary might have said, “She doesn’t like you either.” But she didn’t.
    “So it’s Gretchen that’s found you this position.”
    “It’s a family she knows. I may not get it.”
    He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
    They walked on together, past the hospital and the Masonic Hall. At Canal Street, Broadway rose a little where it had once crossed over marshy ground. A few minutes more and they came to Houston Street. Here the planned, rectangular grid of the new city, obscured by the older, V-shaped pattern at the southern end of the island, began to make itself plain. The cross-streets began to have numbers instead of names. At Grace Church, where Broadway made its turn, Mary said, “Gretchen’s meeting me up the road,” and her brother said grumpily that she could go on alone. But as they parted, he reminded her: “I shall find out all about this place, you know.”
    Just so long as you don’t come there, she thought to herself.

    Sure enough, at the corner of Union Square, there was Gretchen.
    “Will I do, Gretchen?” Mary cried as she reached her. And she turned herself around to be inspected.
    “You’re perfect,” her friend assured her.
    “Not,” said Mary, with a sigh, “compared to you.” Small, proper, orderly, blue-eyed little Gretchen always had her face well scrubbed, and her golden hair pulled back and pinned. Not a hair out of place, not a speck of dust on her coat. She was as perfect as a china doll. But if Gretchen Keller was your friend, she never let you down.
    The Kellers were German. They’d arrived in New York two years before Mary’s mother had died. Mr. Keller and his wife kept a little chocolate store on the Bowery at Sixth Street. Mr. Keller’s brother, Uncle Willy, kept a cigar store a few doors down, and Gretchen’s cousin Hans worked for a piano-maker in the same quarter.
    Though most of the Germans who’d come to America were farmers, quite a few were staying in New York. And unless they could afford better, they were settling in the quarter that stretched across from the Bowery to the East River and from Delancey Street in the south, where