Free Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker Page A

revolutionary barber.
    Yet for all their bloodlust it is still a holiday for the crowd—a bit of hookey from their jobs, with little real malice beneath their schoolboy cheers and moans. I take up a spot on the periphery of the mob and stop to listen for a while, but soon this tonsorial rhetoric causes my mind to wander. I become distracted, staring out through the iron bars of the park at the rest of the City, at the passing scene of the City that always fascinates me, as long as I can watch it from a distance.
    Everything still appears to be normal there. Swaths of gold and magenta shimmer along the dollar side of Broadway. The ladies trundle between the milliner’s and the department stores—as they have for the last two years—shining in their plumed Imperial bonnets. Moiré dresses ripple in emerald and amber waves. At the corners they use the hidden strings of Madam Demorest’s dress elevators to lift their hoop skirts, and glide over the unspeakable filth and the pigs in the gutters like so many balloons.
    If, that is, one can really call them ladies. These days the shoddy aristocracy and the old gentility are all but indistinguishable. We mint millionaires faster than shinplaster money. Men make fortunes in a month, selling the government saddles without stirrups, rifles without barrels, uniforms that are no more than rags glued hastily together, likely to fall to pieces in the first hard rain. They throng Delmonico’s latest restaurant to wolf down French partridges—though they still balance peas along their knives and blow their noses in their fingers.
    Their wives now swamp the jewelers, and string themselves up in pearls. Styling their new-grown tresses into wavy wreaths, wrapped around their plump, cheerful faces like a hangman’s noose. They hold grand balls, and powder their hair with gold and silver dust. On Sundays they carriage about the central park with liveried footmen, and camel-hair shawls. They summer in Saratoga, spend the winterwrapped in sable and ermine, racing down the Fifth Avenue in their sleds, hurling snowballs at each other and giggling like schoolgirls.
    All this golden lust. For all our complaints, the war has barely touched us—some of us. Across Broadway I watch the white-jacketed Negro waiters at the Astor House pull open the shades and, with immense dignity, begin to lay out the usual free food around the bar. There, inside its stoic Greek facade, the ancient Dutch-English aristocracy of the City still gather around its quiet courtyard gardens and fountain, supping on its twelve varieties of poultry, its forty brands of Madeira.
    Whitman used to come in for lunch at the bar, before he went down to Washington to find his brother. Let someone stand him to a short beer, then spend the rest of the afternoon contentedly tucking into the steaming platters of roast beef and ham, and smoked turkey; the thick bread and pickles, sardines, and rounds of cheese; and the inevitable hard-boiled eggs (no ears, here). A poet must provision himself like a camel or a wood tick, he used to say, get his meal when he may, and live off the remnants as long as he can.
    It was not so long ago that I was with him here, stuck in an omnibus when Lincoln passed through the City on the way to his inauguration. We watched the train of carriages that brought him and his wife to the Astor House, the mob crowding around for a glimpse of the great man. There was a sense of crisis in the air then, too—that light-headed, breathless feeling just before a thunderstorm breaks. The Confederacy was already forming, and a great throng had sprung up around the hotel, surrounding the new president-elect in his barouche.
    Whitman didn’t like the crowds. He leaned out the window, wrinkling his nose—sniffing the air as if he could detect the rot in men’s souls.
    â€œThere’s many an assassin’s pistol or knife in a hip or a breast pocket, right here,” he