A Passionate Girl (12 page)

“Colonel Roberts tells me that there's been a great change in Fenian thinking. More and more men of action are coming to the fore,” Sweeny told Tweed. “He says they see no point in waiting for a secret army to train in Ireland or an escort of American men-of-war to carry an American-Irish army across the Atlantic. Both ideas depend on too many imponderables.”

Dear God, I thought. He talks like a statesman already.

“Colonel Roberts and his friends believe it makes better sense to use the Irish veterans of the Civil War as soon as possible, before they settle into jobs and marry away their futures. They want to fight now, and all they need is a target.”

“How about the British Embassy in Washington?” Tweed said, chomping on a duck's carcass. “I went to a party there when I was in Congress. They threw me out because I pinched some duchess's ass.”

“Were you sober a day while you were in Washington?” Connolly asked.

“Maybe one,” Tweed said.

“Colonel Roberts thinks fifty thousand men deserve a bigger target,” Sweeny said. “Canada.”

“Canada?” Tweed said, sucking duck fat off his fingers. “The whole damn country?”

“We'll start with the province of Ontario, the heartland,” Roberts said. “Conquer that, arm the Irish there, and the other provinces will fall like tenpins.”

Tweed pulled pieces of duck out of his teeth with a gold toothpick. He looked hard at Dan. “You're a brother of the blade,” he said, using the slang for soldier. “What do you think, Tennessee?”

“It's a big country,” Dan said. “You'd need a real army. Cavalry, especially. But I like the idea.”

“You want a chance to use your barking irons,” Tweed said. “If there's more like you around, it might work.”

“What's a barking iron?” I asked Annie, sotto voce.

“A gun,” she whispered.

“What do you need from us? We can't give you much help in Washington these days,” Tweed said.

“We can make our own way in Washington,” Roberts said. “There's a dozen votes on the Fenian council that you can influence. We need them to make this major change in policy.” Roberts reeled off a string of names. To each, Tweed gave a small nod, as if to say, “I've got him.”

“We need help in raising money and recruiting men,” Roberts continued.

“Easy,” Tweed said. “But what's in it for us? We need to win this election in November. Big John Morrissey's out to murder us. Sheriff O'Brien's lukewarm.”

“Precisely why I think we can do business,” Sweeny said. “They can help us rally every last Irish vote, and finish the croakers once and for all. If we go in with him, Colonel Roberts tells us the Fenian flag will fly over Tammany Hall. The Fenian girl here will stride the platform with our orators. Tammany and Fenian will be one in spirit and in strength.”

“The devil they will,” said Michael.

Astonishment spread from face to face. Was this mere boy daring to defy the most powerful politicians in the greatest city in America?

“What did that bingo say?” growled Tweed.

“The Fenian flag will fly only over two places—the Fenian headquarters here in New York and someday, God willing, over the soil of the Irish nation,” Michael said. “It will never, as long as I have a voice, be used to dignify corrupt elections.”

“Get that bulltrap out of here,” Tweed roared, “before I loosen his bone box.”

“Mr. Fitzmaurice,” said Dick Connolly, “you are young in the ways of this world. If you want to grow older, I suggest you go quietly back to your hotel and meditate on your sins.”

“You have the power to silence me here. But I'll speak out against you as long as I have a voice in the Fenian Brotherhood,” Michael said.

“That may not be very long,” said Colonel Roberts.

Michael glared across the table at me. “Are you not coming with me?” he said.

Dan McCaffrey rose beside me. “No,” he said. “She's not comin' with you. Now get goin' before I finish doin' what I started to do to you at sea.”

“Don't let them use you, Bess. They'll do to you what they've done to her,” Michael said, pointing to Annie. “They'll make you a whore.”

Moving with a speed that was amazing for a man of his bulk, Bill Tweed lunged to his feet and careened down the table. He seized Michael by the back of the collar and lifted him two feet off the floor and dragged him to the door. With a heave of his immense arm, he flung him into the hall. “Get rid of him,” he roared to someone out there.

“That young man is no gentleman,” Tweed said, lumbering back to his seat. “Now, where were we?”

“We were arranging to invade Canada, and—incidentally—win the next election,” Dick Connolly said.

“Oh, yeah,” Tweed said, probing a tooth with his gold toothpick. “I like it. We'll help you raise the old balram. We'll boost you in the papers. We've got enough reporters on the take to form a reserve regiment.”

Annie translated for me. “On the take” meant bribed. “Balram” was money.

“Somethin' else,” Tweed continued, still probing his tooth. “General Grant's comin' to town in a couple of days. The city's gonna throw a big parade for him. No one knows whether he's a Republican or a Democrat. Be nice if the Fenians and Tammany marched together, don't you think?”

Roberts agreed to everything. He was especially enthusiastic about welcoming General Grant. “Could you help me obtain a private interview with him?” he asked. “I would like to offer him command of the Fenian army of liberation.”

This wild idea made even Tweed blink. “That's pretty steep. I think the general figures he's got a lifetime job in the U.S. Army at the very least. But it might give him a good laugh.”

Roberts looked discomfited. Tweed pounded him on the back. “Don't feel bad, Colonel. I've heard crazier ideas. That's enough politics. Let's show the Fenian girl and her knockout sister here a good old New York bender. On to Tony Pastor's.”

Annie was smiling bravely, but there were tears in her eyes. Michael's cruel words had cut deep. Damn him, I thought. Annie was not a whore. It was not true and it would never be true, neither for her nor for me. At the same time, I could not help feeling a certain subtle gratitude for Michael's bluntness. He had demolished Annie's pretensions to mastermind me.

I had refused Michael's summons. I had stayed beside Dan. But as we descended to the street, he paid very little attention to me. Tweed had his big arm around Dan's shoulder, asking him how many cavalrymen the Fenians would need to conquer Canada. Dan's face was alive with pride and pleasure. He was reveling in the attention and admiration of these powerful men. I sensed danger in his eager acceptance of them. But I felt the excitement, too.

Come what may, I will take my chances with him, I told myself. And hope against hope that it will not end like the poem, with my heart blackened ever and always.

The trip down the bowery to Tony Pastor's Opera House was a show in itself. We went in a large open carriage, a landau, belonging to Bill Tweed. I soon saw why the Bowery was called “the Broadway of the poor.” Immigrants of all nations thronged the sidewalks. Almost every second storefront bore a sign in German. There were German bands tootling on every corner. As we got lower down, there was a half-mile stretch of restaurants and saloons with gas lamps illuminating brightly colored signs in their windows.

A shocking number of the strollers on the sidewalk were drunk. Both men and women staggered and sang and shouted and swore. “The cheap whiskey will destroy us all,” Peter Sweeny said. “I see the day when we must tax the price of it beyond the reach of the poor.”

“Good luck getting that one through Albany,” Dick Connolly said. “But we could use it as a bell ringer. The liquor interests would pay a cool million to see it killed.”

Once more Annie translated for me. Albany was the capital of New York state, where laws for New York City were passed by a legislature. A bell ringer was an old political maneuver, whereby someone paid a handsome sum to stop a piece of legislation that would harm his interests.

“Ah,” growled Tweed, “gettin' drunk is the only consolation the poor bastards have got. They'd cut our gizzards out if they ever caught us trying to take away their booze. And I wouldn't blame them.”

Connolly and Sweeny were silent. I sensed once more that there was less than perfect harmony between them and Tweed.

Tony Pastor's theater marquee was ablaze with gas lamps. In front of it milled a crowd of undernourished little ruffians, who swarmed around us, yelling. “Hey, Mistuh Tweed. Me fadda's sick, can y'gimmy a buck?” and similar pleas. Tweed took a great roll of greenbacks out of his pocket, peeled off a dozen or so, and threw them up in the air. The ensuing scramble was ferocious. The urchins kicked and gouged and punched for the money. Tweed stood on the steps laughing at the melee. He joined us inside, saying, “There's some good sluggers there, Peter.”

“Sure enough,” Sweeny said, without enthusiasm.

I paid scant attention, because I was too busy admiring the lobby, which rivaled the Blossom Club in splendor. The carpets were inches thick, and the walls blazed with golden lamps. A great marble staircase ran up to the second floor. People paraded up and down it like dukes and duchesses on coronation day. Several were in evening dress.

“The swells are coming down here,” Tweed said. “I've been telling them it's the best show in town.”

Annie nudged me. “Up there,” she said. “It's my friend Mrs. Ronalds.”

She gazed down at us from the balcony, a look of mild amusement on her face. Two men in evening dress stood on either side of her. It was my first sight of an American aristocrat, and I will never forget it. She was tall and strongly built, with a full figure. Around her supple neck was a set of pearls that caught the glow of the lamplight and ringed her throat with white fire. Her dress was of white silk, finished with heavy gold cord and tassels. The bodice was low, with revers of green that matched the trimming on the skirt. Over her bare shoulders she wore a mantle of dark blue silk held with a gold clasp. Her dark hair was heavily crimped in front and dressed in a waterfall at the back.

But it was not the beauty of her clothes or her face and figure that impressed me. It was the cool disdain with which she looked down at the crowd of which we were a part. It was a multicolored mostly Bowery mob, dressed in the garish styles of the poor. I thought of the scene in Leonard Jerome's bedroom as Annie had described it to me and understood why she could madden a man. There was something withheld, inviolate, unconquerable about her beauty. I sensed she had judged this American world and found it worthy of nothing but bitter amusement.

Beside me I heard Bill Tweed mutter, “What a piece. I wonder how much it would cost to get into that?”

“They say it cost Leonard Jerome a million,” Connolly said.

“Worth it,” Tweed said.

“Why don't you say hello to her, Annie?” Dick Connolly said.

“I doubt if she'd remember me,” Annie said.

“She'd remember the Fenian girl, if she reads the papers,” Dick replied.

“I would like to thank her—once more,” Annie said.

We went up the stairs—just the two of us, while the men stood in the lobby below, greeting fellow Democrats by the dozen.

Annie approached Mrs. Ronalds with the greatest timidity. “Good evening,” she said. “I'm sure you don't remember me. Annie Fitzmaurice—from Mr. Jerome's house. I didn't expect to see you here. I felt I should say hello and tell you how well things go with me. Thanks to you, in great part.”

“Of course I remember you,” Mrs. Ronalds said in a throaty voice.

“This is my sister Bess,” Annie said. “You may have read about her in the paper—she helped the Fenians escape from Ireland.”

“How do you do,” Mrs. Ronalds said. “I envy your adventure. Rodney.” She turned to one of her escorts, a short, sharp-faced fellow whose head barely reached her shoulder. “Here's the Fenian girl, who made Your Majesty's troopers look so silly in Ireland.”

“You don't say,” he sneered.

“Rodney is the Viscount Gort,” Mrs. Ronalds said.

Annie and I both gasped with the shock of hearing such a familiar name. His title told us that he was the son of Lord Gort, who owned our family farm.

The viscount glared at me for a moment, his hands behind his back. Then he turned to the man on the other side of Mrs. Ronalds. “Doesn't look the least different from any other Irish tart in London,” he said.

“Careful, Rodney,” Mrs. Ronalds said. “According to the papers she's a dead shot.”

“Tell me another,” Gort sneered. “She's a common vagrant. People like her don't know any more about a gun than they do about soap and water.”

“I think you're a poor loser, Rodney,” Mrs. Ronalds said.

“When I take a hand in Irish affairs,” Rodney said, growing more and more angry, “you'll hear no more stories of Fenians or Mollies or anything else. There's a group of us my age, who expect to come into our lands in a year or two. We're going to give the Irish what they deserve, the bayonet and the noose. That's what kept them in their place for two hundred years, until people like my father became sentimentalists. It wouldn't surprise me if you find it necessary to do the same thing over here.”

“I dare say you're right, old fellow,” said his friend, who seemed half English, to judge from his accent.

“I won't dignify Lord Gort with an answer,” I said. “Except to remind him that Irishmen can use bayonets, too.”

Before he could reply, I turned to Mrs. Ronalds, thanked her for the help she had given Annie, and quickly withdrew. When we rejoined the men, Dick Connolly asked, “What was that little twerp saying to you?”

“That little twerp is Viscount Gort,” I said. “He tried to insult us, but he didn't succeed.”

“Who's the man with him?” Annie asked.

“That's Wee Willie Schermerhorn,” Connolly said.

“He talks like an Englishman,” I said.

“That's the way they all talk, the swells,” Connolly said. “They worship the goddamn lime-juicers. You should have been here in 1860 when the Prince of Wales came to visit. The upper tendom crawled on their hands and knees to get an invitation to a ball or dinner where they could shake his royal hand.”

“Kiss his royal ass, you mean,” Bill Tweed said.

A short, swarthy man in evening dress rushed up to us. He was an employee of Tony Pastor, who was ill. Our host offered us a thousand apologies for this fact and escorted us to a box above the stage. The orchestra was striking up a sort of overture as we sat down. In a few minutes the same man appeared on the stage as the impresario of the evening. At a signal, the orchestra stopped playing, and he announced that he was honored to introduce two distinguished guests: “The grand sachem of Tammany Hall, the Honorable William Marcy Tweed. And his guest, Bess Fitzmaurice, the Fenian girl.”

Roars and shouts and whistles poured down on us, along with stamping feet and beating hands. We both rose and accepted the tumultous applause. Opposite us in another box sat Mrs. Ronalds and Viscount Gort. I wondered what the viscount was thinking. My rage at him as the personification of England's arrogance obliterated what little worry I had about becoming the ally of William Marcy Tweed.

Having taken our bow and informed the public of our political liaison, we were free to enjoy the show. It was called variety, a new style that had come into favor in America during the war. Instead of a single play, there was a host of performers, each displaying some peculiar skill. A contortionist tied himself into amazing knots; a Chinese juggled glass balls, bottles, and horseshoes in the air while his dog leaped through the whirling circle; a family of acrobats in pink tights that revealed every secret of the male and female anatomy leaped and somersaulted around the stage; an Irishman named Donnelly made wondrous rattling music on a sort of guitar, called a banjo; and two other Irishmen, named Sheridan and Mack, blacked their faces with cork and grease and sang like Negroes. They were called “the Happiest Darkies Out,” and they lived up to this notice, even though I could make little sense out of their drawling accents.

There was an Irish comedian who told funny stories in a brogue that was obviously fake and a “Dutch comedian” who did the same thing in what passed for a German accent. The hit of the evening was Miss Ella Weaner, “the Protean and Lightning Change Songstress,” who raced offstage and donned a new dress for every song she sang. The audience apparently considered the costumes more important than her voice, because they applauded each new dress before she opened her mouth. It was just as well. I had heard better singing at wakes in Ireland. Finally came a play,
The Liberation of Charleston,
which satirized the abolitionists in the Union Army as the most arrant thieves who ever lived, stealing anything they could seize from the hapless Southerners. The audience loved it and roundly booed the Negroes (Sheridan and Mack still in their black faces), who strutted about declaring themselves “de Gobnor” and “de Senator.”

When the curtain fell, Tweed led me backstage to meet Ella Weaner. I was startled by the way both actors and actresses walked around in states of near undress. Ella's singing style had had a warbling sweetness to it, but her manner face-to-face was about as sweet as Conn the plowman. “Hello, kiddo,” she said, out of the corner of her mouth. She sprawled in a most unfeminine way in her chair, and asked Tweed for a cigar.

“Not now, Ella,” he said. “Get your glad rags on, we're showing this Fenian girl a New York bender tonight.”

“You're on,” she said. “I'm always ready for a little blue ruin.”

While we waited outside Ella's dressing room, Tweed was besieged by stagehands and actors and actresses, all of whom seemed to want his help to procure a job for a relative. He listened with lordly patience to each supplicant and advised him or her to make an appointment to see him at Tammany Hall. At last, Ella appeared in a red dress that was as gaudy as anything she had worn onstage, her cheeks rouged and her lips a bright crimson.

In the lobby, we rejoined Dick Connolly, Annie, and Peter Sweeny, who had also found a female friend, Kate McGuire. She was short, plump, and rather ugly. Her taste in clothes ran to bright green. Tweed greeted her with a shout. “Hello, Kate, how about a rubdown?” As we strolled to our carriage, Annie explained that Kate had been a rubber in a Turkish bath, until Sweeny became her devoted admirer.

“We hate each other cordially,” Annie whispered to me. “She's as mean and common as they come. She has a hold on Peter that no one can break.”

We rode down Broadway past a dozen dark and silent theaters. Our variety show had lasted the better part of three hours, and it was now approaching midnight. The numerous concert saloons still blazed with light, and music resounded from them. Rainbow-colored transparencies advertised the singers and dancers who were performing inside. But we had seen the best of the concert saloons, the Louvre, and Dick Connolly dismissed the rest as “gin mills.” We were going to “the most famous—or infamous—dance hall in the United States, Harry Hill's.”

A huge red and blue lantern swung above the entrance, which was on Houston Street, not far from Broadway. A number of unescorted women were going in a separate entrance as we passed through the door Bill Tweed held for us. We found ourselves in a long, low room with a bar, which also sold oysters and sandwiches. Tweed ordered some oysters and champagne for us and led us through a rear door and up the stairs to the dance hall. A short, thickset man with a frowning forehead and angry eyes met us.

“Hello, Harry,” Tweed said. “Get us a table, will you? There's oysters and champagne coming up.”

The room was jammed with men and women in about equal numbers. There were no decorations worth mentioning. The place was nothing but a large, shabby, two-story frame house from which the walls had been removed to make a single large hall. On a raised platform sat the orchestra, which consisted of a piano, a violin, and a bass violin. There were fifty or sixty couples on the floor doing a violent American dance, whirling this way and that, crashing into each other and singing away to the music. As we followed Harry Hill, he continually barked orders to his guests. “Less noise there! Girls, be quiet.” Various rules were painted on signs, in poetry, such as:

Annie explained to me that Harry Hill fancied himself a poet. He was very religious and gave large donations to churches and charities. He insisted on standards of decorum, and he enforced them with his fists. Among his other rules was a requirement that a man must either dance or drink. Otherwise he was asked to leave. If he was shy about leading a partner to the floor, Hill chose one for him. Only the best-looking women, wearing respectable clothing, were permitted to enter the “ladies' door.”