A Passionate Girl (10 page)

“Then I met Dick,” Annie said. She got up once more to replenish her champagne and discovered the bottle was empty. With a pretty little hiccup, she turned it upside down in its melting ice. “Dick Connolly. The man you saw at the wharf when you landed. He made me forget Mrs. Ronalds's golden rule, always do unto a man what he wants to do to you.”

Annie giggled and flopped into her chair for a moment, then sprang up. “Let's go look down on Broadway,” she said. “I need some fresh air.”

In a few minutes the elevator took us to the Metropolitan's “sky parlor.” It was almost empty, because it was nearly time for dinner, which Americans, for some reason I have never fathomed, call lunch. They moved dinner into the evening and banished our old word, “supper,” almost entirely.

The view from the sky parlor was breathtaking. We could see up and down Broadway for a mile in either direction. The street was jammed with carriages and omnibuses and wagons as always, with subsidiary swarms of people scurrying along the sidewalks. South of us, the East and Hudson Rivers met at the Battery and formed the great shining bay. To the north the city grew wider, with residential streets stretching out like the grid of a great electric machine, interspersed with the green of Central Park and other parks, and the Egyptian immensity of Croton Reservoir at 42nd Street. Directly east of us a vast jumble of houses and streets lay like a netherworld, stretching to the river.

In this lofty perch, Annie continued her story. Two years ago, after four years of triumphs at the Louvre, she had met Richard Connolly. He was a politician, born in Ireland and brought to this country as a boy. Something about him penetrated the armor she had sought to forge around her heart. At first she thought it was his wit. Then she thought it was his looks. But she had dealt with handsome, witty men before. She finally decided it was her discovery that he was a serious man and he was seriously in love with her. Farewell, armor. She allowed him to persuade her to leave the Louvre and become his exclusive mistress. She had been living with and loving him here at the Metropolitan Hotel ever since.

“But you haven't married him?”

“He's married already. That's the great sorrow of my life. If she died—I'd marry him tomorrow. But I don't wish that on her. She has three small children. She's such a horror. She does nothing but denounce Dick and tell him he'll come to a bad end. A religious virago. She gives away half his money to priests. She doesn't understand what Dick is going to do.”

“What's that?”

“He's going to take this city away from them. Away from the Jeromes and the Schermerhorns and the Stuyvesants and the Astors. He's going to have as many millions as they've stolen down on Wall Street—and something more. He's going to control City Hall. He can make them come begging to him for the safety of their mansions. He can make this city their graveyard, with a snap of his fingers.”

“How?” I asked, utterly amazed.

“You see that?” she said, pointing down Broadway and across it toward the East River. “You see those slums? An army lives down there. An army of Irishmen who can slug and shoot better than any army the rich can find. Dick Connolly and his friends Peter Sweeny and Bill Tweed are its commanders.”

She sat back in her cushioned chair, glaring out at the city, a frown all but destroying her beautiful face. “We'll see who owns New York,” she said. “We'll see.”

“'Tis a pity we can't use them to free Ireland,” I said. “That's where I've cast my lot.”

“We must talk to Dick about that, tonight. We must arrange to get you out of the hands of those Fenian chiselers. That's all they are. Small-time chiselers, Bess.”

“I think some of them are honest men,” I said. “The old man, the leader, John O'Mahoney.”

“I've never met him,” Annie said abruptly, “but if he honestly thinks he can free Ireland, he's crazy. That's what Dick says. Anyone who wastes his time on something as crazy as that has got to be nuts, cuckoo, bird-cage. Do you get me, kiddo?”

“Yes,” I said, amazed by her American slang. “But I'm not a child, Annie. I must make up my own mind about it.”

She shook her head. The champagne had made her a little drunk and impervious to argument. “Now is the time for you to move, Bessie. You're famous. There's a half dozen men I've got in mind for you. Now you can have your pick. You might even get one to put his name on a marriage license.”

I said nothing, but for the first time I felt uneasy, fearful—not for myself but for Annie. She had revealed something that she herself did not want to face. She seemed to sense it, in spite of the reassuring champagne. “Let's go have lunch,” she said, in a duller, emptier voice.

I thought we would eat at the Metropolitan Hotel, but Annie led me to a hackney coach and told the driver to take us to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was far uptown at 23rd Street facing Madison Square. In Broadway's heavy traffic, it took us a half hour to get there.

“This is where I want to live,” Annie said, as we got out of the coach. I could see why. The front was gleaming white marble, six stories of it. Inside was more marble, on the floors, at the reservation desk, in a staircase wide enough for a palace. We went up the stairs to the second floor, where a dining room that seated several hundred opened before us. Crystal chandeliers dripped from the ceiling. We were led to a table where almost a dozen people were already seated. It was the Fifth Avenue's custom to dine in groups of twenty. The idea appealed to Annie, who said she was bored with eating alone at the Metropolitan.

“Have you made no friends?” I said.

“Men, yes; women, no,” Annie said. “It's not easy to make friends when every woman you meet, almost, is a potential enemy. There's hardly a woman in New York, married or unmarried, who wouldn't like to take Dick away from me.”

The food was good, but too plentiful. I asked Annie how she had kept her figure, faced with such monstrous amounts of vittles. She laughed in a short, hard way and said it was easy when your future depended on it. She ate only nibbles of the six or seven main dishes and twenty or thirty minor dishes but insisted on having another bottle of champagne. I drank very little of it, but she finished it handily.

The conversation of the other women at the table seemed to be mostly about millionaires. There was great debate about how much various men were worth, five, ten, or twenty millions. Much attention was given to new millionaires, two in particular, named Fisk and Gould. Several women—all the diners at our table were female—bragged of their husbands' acquaintance with these gentlemen. They discussed the extravagances of various millionaires, their mansions, their yachts, their horses. Each conversationalist strove to top the previous one with a more sensational item.

“Most of their husbands are probably clerks on Wall Street,” Annie muttered to me.

I asked Annie if it was common for married women to live in hotels. She said it was becoming a custom. Women gave birth and raised children in them. The living was cheaper than the cost of buying and furnishing a house. The Civil War had driven the price of everything out of sight. An apartment in the Fifth Avenue Hotel cost about a hundred dollars a week for two, including no less than four meals a day. The fourth meal was served late in the evening, as an attempt to seduce those who had not gorged themselves on the first three. Annie said the rooms were beautifully furnished, and, most remarkable, each suite had a private bathroom.

To our amusement—at first—our tablemates began talking about the Fenian girl. Several had read her story in the paper. One large, severely plain woman shook her head angrily. “My husband says we ought to send them back to the British for hanging.”

“My husband says we ought to send all the Irish back to the British,” said a plump younger woman with straw-colored hair.

“It would certainly improve New York,” said the severe woman. “My brother-in-law was robbed of a hundred dollars by one of them last week. Not ten blocks from this hotel.”

I could feel my temper rising, but Annie motioned me to be silent. We sat there, finishing our tea, while they denounced the Irish as lazy, thieving, superstitious. The severe woman said she would never hire one as a servant. At her husband's bank, they had hired an Irish clerk. The other clerks threatened to quit, and the Irishman was dropped. Everyone agreed that these were excellent tactics. Only a united front among the Americans could keep the Irish out. They were as bold as they were greedy, ready to barge in anywhere.

After lunch we sat in one of the public rooms of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I was fuming. Annie was amused at my anger. “You'll hear a lot worse than that if you stay in America,” she said. “Remember it when your Fenian friends start telling you that this country is behind Ireland heart and soul. The politicians hand out that sort of blarney around election time to get the Irish vote.”

Annie took a small watch from her purse. Its gold frame was encrusted with diamonds. Dick Connolly had given it to her for her birthday. “Two o'clock,” she said. “We've got a whole afternoon to kill. What would you like to do, my Fenian girl? Visit Barnum's Museum?”

“See the Sixth Ward,” I said.

“What?” Annie said. “There's nothing to see down there.”

“Then why does everyone talk about it?” I said.

“It's worse than Hell's Kitchen—and that's saying a lot.”

“Hell's Kitchen,” I said. “Let's put that on the itinerary, too.”

“We may see some of that tonight,” she said. “We'll do the town, you and I and Michael and Dick.” She hailed a hackney coach and told him to take us to Tammany Hall. The driver nodded. Apparently there was no need for an address. As we rode downtown, she warmed to the idea of my tour. “Maybe you should see the Bloody Ould Sixth, as they call it. See all the lower wards. Then you'll understand a little more what we're up against.”

As we rode along, Annie explained that Tammany Hall was the headquarters of the city's Democratic Party. Dick Connolly was a member of the Central Committee as well as a leader of the Twentieth Ward. The odd name came from an old Indian, Chief Tammanend, who was a kind of god to the Delaware tribe. He performed great feats in the misty past, like some of our Irish heroes. Every Irishman in the city worth his salt voted behind Tammany. Without the power of party, there would be no jobs for them at City Hall or on the police force or anywhere else in the government.

Our journey took us far downtown, to the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets, where stood a somewhat dingy looking five-story building. A squad of burly fellows was lounging against its redbrick front. Annie took a calling card from her purse and hailed one of them. “Take this to Dick Connolly,” she said. “Tell him I'm waiting outside.”

In five minutes the same tall, smiling man with the stately nose and clean-shaven face whom I had met at the dock emerged from the door and greeted us cheerfully. He gave Annie's hand an affectionate squeeze and bowed low to me. “I hardly know what to say, finding myself face-to-face with such fame,” he said. “Reading your story made me think Ireland might yet be free, from the center to the sea, as the old lady said in the song.”

“Annie just spent a good hour telling me you think the idea is nonsense,” I replied.

“A politician is like a woman. He changes his mind twice a day, when the newspapers come out,” Dick Connolly said.

“We're here to settle our evening schedule,” Annie said, “and to get an escort. Bess has heard so much of the beauties of the Sixth Ward and points below, she wants to see them for herself.”

“I doubt if I can call out the 69th Regiment on such short notice,” Dick said. “But perhaps Tiny Tim will do.”

He turned and spoke to a man by the door, who in turn bawled a summons inside. In a moment there emerged the biggest man I had ever seen. He was at least six feet five and perhaps four feet wide. He wore a long black frock coat and loud checked bell-bottomed pants.

“Tim,” said Dick Connolly, “these ladies want a tour of the Sixth Ward. Bring them back without so much as a curl on their lovely heads disturbed.”

“Don't worry about a ting,” Tim said. He tipped his high beaver hat to us and got into the cab, causing it to tilt alarmingly until he settled opposite us. Tim's name was Mulligan. He said he knew “de Sixt' ward” well. He was born “dere.” But now he lived in “de Twenniet.” His “mudder” had advised him to get out of the Sixth Ward as soon as possible. In the same strange accent, Tim told me how much he enjoyed reading how I had “plugged” the lime-juicers in “Iland.”

Soon we were in a spidery tangle of streets with strange names, Bummers' Retreat, Cat Alley, Cockroach Row. The stench was unbelievable. Annie put a handkerchief over her nose and mouth and remarked that some rich New Yorker had described the odor as a mixture of rotten eggs and ammonia. She explained that most of the houses had no bathrooms, and people simply threw their slops in the gutters. Soon we were among the tenements, tall wooden buildings crammed side by side on the narrow streets, shutting out the sun. The air that came out of the doorways had the stink of the grave. Every ten feet there was a wretched little saloon in the basement or on the first floor.

The people who looked out from the windows or sat on the steps of the tenements all had the mark of death on their faces. It reminded me of stories I'd heard about the famines in Ireland. Worst were the children, scrawny, fierce-faced little creatures. Annie said many of them lived on the streets, without father or mother. One newspaper said there were thirty thousand of these urchins.

“Dear God,” I said. “Wouldn't they be better off in the poorest village in Ireland?”

“You agree with our friends at lunch?” Annie asked me sarcastically.

I thought of Mrs. McGlinchy, fat and self-satisfied in her velvet parlor, and wondered how she could live so well while Irish men and women were living like this only a mile or two away. Now I knew the source of the sadness in Archbishop McCloskey's eyes. These were his people, but what could he do for them? He seemed as incapable of easing their misery as everyone else, even though he was not as indifferent.

“Lookit 'at,” Tim said. He pointed down Bixby Street. “Shylock Boik's trowin' out anudder one.”

Burke was a landlord. Annie said he owned a whole row of tenements on Bixby Street. He was well known for his heartless evictions. He never let anyone stay longer than a week without paying the rent. His victim today was a young red-haired woman with four small children. She wept and cursed, and the children wept, too, as the burly, bald-headed Burke piled their pathetic sticks of furniture on the sidewalk. The mother fell into her only chair, crying and coughing. One of the children, a boy not more than ten, ran into the nearest saloon and came out with a glass of whiskey.

“I know huh,” Tim Mulligan said. “Red Mag O'Toole. Married Mickey Maloney. He got it in d'head at Gettys-boig.”

“Can't we do something?” I said.

“Y'could pay huh rent for anudder week,” Tim said.

Annie thrust a bill into my hand. I jumped from the cab and ran down the street. I gave the bill—it was ten dollars—to the mother. “I wish it was more,” I said.

“Are yez from de mission?” she said. “Y'can keep y'goddamn money. Y'ain't gettin' me kids. Y'ain't gettin'm!”

I didn't know what she was talking about. Suddenly there were faces at a dozen windows, shouting curses at me. A bottle sailed down and smashed near my feet. Another missed my head by an inch. Tim Mulligan came legging down the street yelling for them to stop.

“She's okay. She ain't no Protestant blackleg. She's Irish. D'Fenian goil,” he roared.

Instantly there was a rush into the street from every house. In a twinkling there were two or three hundred people around me. I found it hard to believe that the single row of tenements, no more than eight or nine of them, held so many. Annie later told me they were jammed in there, five or six to a room. Not a face or a hand had seen soap or water in a month. They smelled almost as bad as the slops they threw in the streets. Some of them were as ragged as the peasants I saw in the cabins in Ireland.

“She come down here t'see de Sixt Ward,” Tim Mulligan said. “She hoid about it in Iland, right? D'toughest ward in New Yawk.”

“Sure there's no gettin' over d'Sixt,” cackled one withered old woman. “The glorious fights I seen down here. “T'would put Finn and the Fianna to shame, they would.”

“Now we must unite and fight for Ireland,” I said. “Instead of fighting each other.”

“Give us a chance and we'll do it sure enough,” shouted one scrawny fellow, who had only two or three teeth left in his mouth.

We heard a cry from the end of the street. Mulligan whirled and burst through the crowd, knocking men and women pell-mell. I saw a man struggling with Annie at the door of the cab. Mulligan got to the fellow before he knew what was happening and seized him by the collar of his shirt. He spun him around and struck him a punch that sent him flying twenty feet. He sprang after and kicked the fellow again and again until he lay whimpering in the gutter.

“He tried to steal my purse,” Annie said.

“He won't steal nuttin' for a while,” Tim said.

The citizens of Bixby Street had emerged from their narrow alley to examine the moaning thief. Two or three boys ran over and peered in his face. “It's Mickey Condon,” one of them yelled.

“He says his ribs is busted,” yelled another one.

“Y'Tammany plugger, Mulligan, did y'have to bust his ribs?” shouted a third.

“Whip dat nag,” said Mulligan to the cabman.

A rock struck the cab, then a splat of mud. The cabman's whip cracked, and we departed the scene of my attempted benevolence under fire from whatever the Sixth Ward could find lying loose in the streets. Once safely out of range, the cabman slowed his horse, and we proceeded uptown to view what Annie called “more pleasant sights.” We passed a handsome park named after President George Washington and found ourselves on Fifth Avenue.

There, block after block, stood the mansions of the rich. By and large they were disappointing from the outside, all dull, drab brownstone with high stoops and identical sets of windows and huge bristling cornices. Excessive show was not yet the fashion among America's “old rich”—those who had made their fortunes before the Civil War. But behind the staid exteriors was fabulous luxury, which Annie knew in amazing detail. The owners' names, Schermerhorn, Brevoort, Belmont, meant nothing to me but a great deal to Annie. To her descriptions of their parlors and ballrooms she added choice anecdotes from their lives, most of them uncomplimentary. I did not realize it at the time, but Annie had become a typical American, fascinated by the rich and their often bizarre lives.