A Passionate Girl (16 page)

“In that case I'll display a little candor. You should be wary of aligning the Fenians too closely to Tweed. The time may come when you may want to deliver the Irish vote to a candidate he can't back.”

“Who might that be?” Roberts said.

“There's a new political party forming here in Washington. Neither Democrat nor Republican.”

“We're ready to talk business with them,” Roberts said. “We'll talk business with anyone.”

“An admirable philosophy,” Wood said. “On that basis, I'm at your service, gentlemen. Good night.”

He bowed to me and kissed my hand. “Good night, my dear. I will go home and meditate on the place of passion in politics.”

He strolled away. Roberts watched him go with a growl. “There's the smoothest article in the history of New York politics,” he said. “He could be useful. But you can't go near him now without getting dirt on you.”

“Why?” I asked.

Roberts explained that Fernando Wood had made two fatal miscalculations. He had been mayor of New York when the South seceded in 1861. He had urged the city to join the rebels. This had enabled Bill Tweed and other enemies in Tammany to call him a traitor. In a fierce struggle, they had defeated him in 1863, and Tweed had offered him the seat in Congress as a consolation prize. There Wood had continued to call for a negotiated peace that would have recognized the South's right to secede. With the war won by the North, Fernando Wood was now a political pariah.

“Perhaps one of us could go to him in secret,” I said. “He would clearly like to be useful to us—in the hope, no doubt, that we might be useful to him.”

“Let's wait and see how we do at the White House on our own,” Roberts said.

The next morning, John O'Neil sent his card to the White House with a request to see the president. Before lunch, a messenger arrived, saying that Mr. Johnson would receive us that night, about 9:00
P.M.
I spent the morning talking to reporters, under Red Mike Hanrahan's approving eye. Mike had given me another pep talk, stressing the importance of the Washington, D.C., newspapers, and I managed to bring off a satisfactory performance. We had a head start with the best and oldest paper, the
National Intelligencer,
which had a Celt named Johnny Coyle among its executive staff. He came with the reporter and virtually cheered me on. The next paper, the
Star,
took a more blasé point of view. It was like the
New York Herald,
ready to print almost anything if it was a good story.

The third reporter, a bald-headed, snub-nosed man named William Colby, from the
Chronicle,
was openly skeptical. He asked me a number of sharp questions, such as whether I believed the bullet was preferable to the ballot in determining political issues. I was not aware that he was using a quotation from the martyred Lincoln to trap me, and said I thought the bullet was preferable when the ruling tyrants were indifferent to the ballot. The reporter for the fourth paper, the
Republican,
took notes dutifully and then sought out Colonel Roberts and O'Neil, who were conferring with some congressmen in the next room, and demanded a hundred dollars to print the story. We gave it to him.

Mrs. O'Neil and I spent the afternoon touring Washington. As a nurse, she was anxious to see the hospitals. One of the largest was in a vast ramshackle series of sheds to the west of the Capitol. As we approached, a sickening odor of putrefaction surrounded us. I had to seize my handkerchief and muffle my face. Mrs. O'Neil, used to such vapors, scarcely noticed it. A soldier guarding the outer gate readily admitted us. Mrs. O'Neil had had the forethought to provide us with a basket of fresh fruit to give the soldiers.

I thought the war was over, and with it the suffering. Margaret O'Neil knew better. She knew how long it took the body to recover from the terrible violation of a bullet. Unlike me, she was not shocked to discover a hall filled with hundreds of beds, stretching for what must have been three city blocks. On each bed a man lay still or twisted and groaned or sat staring listlessly. Those last were the most dangerous cases, she told me. So often a wound depressed the mind, and in the end infection spread like an evil flower to consume the victim's life.

She met a man in his shirtsleeves, who she correctly guessed was a doctor. “How many in this hospital?” she asked.

“Two thousand.”

“How many still in the whole city?”

The doctor, who was scarcely thirty, pulled at his brown beard for a moment. “Over thirty thousand,” he said. “But we're sending them home as fast as possible. They'll have a better chance at home than in this over-heated pigsty.”

The sun beat on the flat roof, making the inside of the shed an oven. Margaret O'Neil asked who would make the best use of her basket of fruit. “The amputees,” the doctor said. “They're at the far end. We find they do better when we keep them apart from the others.”

We walked the length of the building and found ourselves surrounded by men with missing arms or legs, and some with both. “Is anyone here from Ireland?” I asked as we began handing out the fresh fruit.

A dozen raised their hands. Only one was from Kerry, and one from Limerick, our home counties, and they came from villages neither Margaret O'Neil nor I knew well. We were strangers meeting in this strange place, offering mute testimony not so much to our Irishness as to our common humanity. The more I looked about me, the more I felt ashamed for having asked the question. I think it was there in that hospital, surrounded by the awesome sight of the suffering caused by a war, that I felt the first stab of doubt about the goodness, the wisdom, of our cause.

The feeling passed as quickly as it came, largely because of the reaction Margaret O'Neil tried to force upon me as we left the hospital. “Doesn't that sight make you wonder?” she asked.

“About what?”

“About starting a war to free Ireland.”

Without warning she launched a violent denunciation of the Fenians. She would never have left the hospital and her vows if she had known John O'Neil was to become a convert to this cause. Her father had been a disciple of the great Daniel O'Connell, the man who had preached moral force and peaceful persuasion as Ireland's only recourse. Coldly I told her I had heard these arguments from my own father and learned to despise them. What a strange combination I was in those days, cold as the grave inside and fiery anger on the surface.

Margaret O'Neil now viewed me with disapproval and disappointment. She had hoped to make an ally of me from that hospital visit. For my part, I felt sorry for John O'Neil if he had to listen to such sermons in his bedroom.

Partly to change the subject, I suggested a visit to the Capitol. We toiled up the hill and soon found ourselves within the spacious dome. The place was filthy. There were piles of refuse behind the statuary and in the corners. It reeked of unpleasant human odors as well. The walls were covered with scribbles of writing, initials of earlier visitors, some with brief messages for posterity. But the sweep of the dome was grand in its ambitious breadth, and the statues had a heroic Roman nobility to them.

“Ladies, good afternoon. Can I be of service to you?” It was Congressman Fernando Wood, looking as urbane and elegant in a suit of dark blue as he had looked last night.

“We're mere tourists,” I said, “ready to be interested by anything you suggest.”

“There's no point in gazing at these marble monuments to the dead,” he said. “Or at that Italian Renaissance painting up there,” he added, gesturing to the panels on the dome. “They can't amuse, and amusement is the only possible reason for visiting Congress.”

He led us briskly up a broad marble staircase to the visitors' gallery of the Senate chamber. It was a most impressive room, with a lofty cast-iron ceiling, paneled in stained glass, each pane bearing the arms of the different states. The walls were a glowing gold, the doors a bright emerald green. The senators were supposed to sit in three semicircular rows behind small desks of polished wood, but only a few of these were occupied. Most of the salons were sitting offstage, as it were, in the cloakrooms, their feet up on chairs, smoking. Others strolled the aisles, munching apples, whispering to colleagues. The presiding officer, who sat on an ornately carved dais, was writing a letter. Through all this inattention a senator was speaking. He was a burly man with a huge head and a snarling mouth above a massive stubborn chin.

“Mark him,” Fernando Wood said, “he's one of your enemies. Ben Wade of Ohio.”

“We know we have a drunkard in the White House,” Wade roared. “I'm beginning to think we may also have a traitor. Where does this pseudo-president get the power to pardon rebels in arms, to restore the right to govern to the very men who have forfeited it forever by their treasonous murderous acts?”

“I can see he's the president's enemy,” I said. “Why is he Ireland's?”

“Wade is part of the Radical Republican machine,” Wood explained. “A minority. They can only stay in power by preventing the Democrats in the Southern states from returning to Congress. They want to make the South a conquered territory, a military district, for the next century, while they rule here and pick things clean. They're Sassenachs, as you call them, and despise Irishmen even more than they hate rebels. If they win the game, you can say good-bye to your hopes of American support.”

Wade went on abusing the president in a style I found hard to believe, even though I was hearing it with my own ears. He bid fair to continue for hours, and we finally left him and crossed the great rotunda to the House of Representatives. Here, much the same performance was being enacted by a man speaking while the rest conducted other business. This orator was also from Ohio. His name was James Ashley, and he was, Fernando Wood told us with offhand contempt, a former drugstore keeper. He was a short fat man with a large shock of bushy light hair, which he wore over his forehead in a frowzy bang. He had a rather high-pitched voice, and he was using it to denounce President Johnson shrilly. “From this day forward,” he cried, “this house must begin collecting evidence to remove this man. Our one hope of saving the nation lies in our constitutional right to impeach the traitor in the White House.”

On and on Ashley ranted. Mrs. O'Neil listened with apparently complete attention. In my right ear I heard Fernando Wood's cool voice. “You must know you're very beautiful. I'm something of a connoisseur of beauty—as well as of political intrigue. Would you come to my room at the National Hotel tonight? We might have some things to exchange over a bottle of champagne.”

“We have an appointment to see the president at nine.” I said.

“I seldom go to bed before two,” he said.

“I'll think about it,” I said.

My lack of feeling shocked me. I should not have been surprised at it, but I still wanted to believe I was the same passionately sincere patriot girl I had been when Dan McCaffrey walked through the door of our farmhouse in Ireland. I did not want to admit another very different woman was living in that girl's flesh.

At dinner that night we dined on expectation. We scarcely tasted the food, spread in the usual American profusion. We were in our hired carriage by half past eight and rode through the darkening streets to the White House. There was no letup in the heat, even with the shadows of evening. It surmounted the city in a great smothering blanket.

We waited for the president in the East Room of the White House. The room looked like it had been fought over by opposing armies. The cushions on the chairs were ripped and torn, smeared with the dirt of a hundred boots. Couches sagged; draperies dangled in shreds. Someone—we later learned it was President Johnson's daughter—had tried to disguise the damage of the previous four years by filling the room with fresh flowers. But it was impossible to hide the results of the mansion's war service as the Union's headquarters, crowded with grimy dispatch riders and mud-splattered aides-de-camp from the battlefront, day and night. The place was a wreck.

The president met us with a broad smile. He was a square-shouldered, clean-shaven man of middle height, with a broad brow and ruddy complexion. He embraced his friend O'Neil. “By God, John,” he said, in a drawl even broader than Dan's, “seein' your ugly face is almost as good as a visit to Tennessee. How are you, anyway, you miserable Irish possum?”

O'Neil said he was fine, now that he had married his nurse. He introduced his wife and then me, Colonel Roberts, and Dan. As he finished, a husky, dark-bearded young man joined us. The president introduced his son Robert. Behind a stiff, jutting beard, he had the president's rough features but a far smoother manner. He took my hand and murmured something about being charmed to meet a genuine Irish beauty. He had dined with the reporter from the
Star,
who had told him about me.

“I got to warn you about this fellow, Mr. President,” Colonel O'Neil said, pointing to Dan. “He's a Tennessee man and one hell of a soldier, but he took the wrong side in our little contention.”

“So did most everybody in Tennessee,” Johnson said with a grin. “Where did you fight, son?”

“With Stuart's cavalry,” Dan said.

“I can respect that,” the president said. “I can respect a soldier who stands to his arms with honest conviction and risks his all on a hundred battlefields. It's the bushwhackers and outlaws who ran wild in Tennessee that I wanted to hang—and I did hang my share of them. Now you've lost in a fair fight and you want to rejoin the United States. Is that how you see it?”

“Yes, sir,” Dan said.

“Robert,” the president said to his son, “put this boy's name at the head of our pardon list tomorrow.” He threw his arm around Dan's shoulders in the same affectionate gesture he had used with O'Neil. “You're the kind of rebel we want and need to rebuild this country. But those hungry wolves from Ohio and Massachusetts want to feed on your flesh. To the victor belong the spoils, that's their battle cry, but the skunks ain't honest enough to admit it.”