A Passionate Girl (17 page)

The president stormed away on this theme for a good five minutes, and I began to wonder if we would ever have a chance to mention Ireland. But O'Neil, who knew him well, let him wind down and then introduced the purpose of our visit.

“Although I'm still wearing my Union uniform, Mr. President,” O'Neil said, “I'm about to change it for another color—the green of Ireland. I have the rank of colonel in the Fenian army, and McCaffrey here is a major. Colonel Roberts is a member of the council of advisors. You'll read about this young lady's exploits in the papers tomorrow. We're here to ask America's help, to revenge both America and Ireland for Britain's crimes.”

“You'll have all the help this honest heart can give,” Johnson said, striking himself dramatically on the chest. “What are your plans?”

Quickly, O'Neil outlined the proposal to conquer Canada and hold it as hostage for Ireland's freedom. “I like it,” Johnson said, springing up to stride excitedly back and forth before us. “Those damned royal skunks let the Rebs use Canada to send a thousand spies and bushwhackers across our borders. Secretary of State Seward told me just the other day that for the damage those built-in-England Confederate sea raiders like the
Alabama
did to our merchant fleet, we should get two hundred million from the Bank of England. That's twice what Canada's worth. Just this afternoon I was talking to General Rawlins, Grant's chief of staff, about it. He said we could take Canada with one corps of the Army of the Potomac. Twenty thousand men. But why not let you people take it? Then we offer you membership in the United States, like Polk did with Texas. If Queen Victoria yells, we'll just tell her that we're fair and square now. If she don't like it, come on over and try to take it away from us.”

“It's in the great tradition of the state of Tennessee,” Robert Johnson said. “It will make you a president as famous as Andrew Jackson.”

“Now hold on, son, nobody can equal that man, least of all this old stump speaker,” President Johnson said. “But I like what you said about Tennessee. I'd like to redeem the honor of the state. What better way than to point to this man and say: Remember Sam Houston? Here's the Sam Houston of Canada. Both from Tennessee.”

The president pounded John O'Neil on the back and literally roared with excitement. “What do you need, John? Tell me, and by the eternal I'll move the Treasury and the War Department around on my back to get it.”

“We need guns, ammuntion, the right to sell bonds to raise the money to buy uniforms, and when we attack—recognition as belligerents.”

“The way the English recognized the Confederacy. You'll have it. You'll have the chance to buy guns and ammunition from our armories at cost. You'll have everything you need or want.”

We left the White House walking on air. Back at the hotel, it was champagne all around and a toast to Ireland's freedom before the year's end. Red Mike Hanrahan rushed off to prepare a report for the Fenian council and telegraph a story about our warm White House reception (minus the explicit promises) to the
Irish-American.
How easy it is for men with power in their hands to infuse the powerless with dizzy hope. I believed President Andrew Johnson as much as the others.

Suddenly I remembered the whispered invitation of that connoisseur of beauty and politics, Fernando Wood. It was dangerous to go near him, I knew, but it might be equally dangerous to stay away.

I went to my room, pretending the champagne made me sleepy, changed to a light blue evening dress, and descended to the street. In fifteen minutes I was at the National Hotel. I had to nerve myself to ask for Mr. Wood's room, but the clerk did not seem in the least surprised. “Miss Fitzmaurice?” he said. “He's expecting you.”

I found him in formal dinner dress, with a silver service for a late supper laid on a tablecloth of crisp Irish linen. A bottle of wine cooled in a silver bucket. It was a champagne more delicious than any I had yet tasted. “I discovered it in Paris,” he said. “It comes from a small vineyard near Rheims. They let it age twenty years before selling it. I understand it's Napoleon the Third's favorite.”

He showed me around his suite, which he had decorated himself, with furniture from Paris. Paintings by Corot, David, and other masters hung on the walls. The golden-yellow wallpaper, alive with shepherds wooing scantily clad shepherdesses, was copied from a room in Versailles. “You must sit here,” he said, placing me on a rose-colored couch. “It matches your dress. Did you choose those colors? You have taste to match your beauty.”

“Don't you want to hear about my meeting with the president?”

“No. I simply want to sit here and drink champagne and look at you.”

I had never met a man like him, so self-possessed, so calm. I decided that he had to be perfectly empty or perfectly surfeited. I inclined to the latter. He had lived a tumultuous life. He had penetrated and mastered his world, seen it from the inside, and was beyond surprises. I felt a great wish stir in me to do the same thing.

“I looked at you and said,
This is no ordinary girl. She wants to attempt great things.
I was that way once. It's the only way to live.”

“Don't you wish to attempt them still?”

“My chance came—I made the attempt—and it ended in failure. I have no regrets, only disappointments. I did everything a reasonable man might expect. But history had other ideas about the future.”

“That won't be my way. I'm prepared to die for what I believe.”

“Don't say that. I won't hear it. Not tonight. I won't preach you a sermon against fanaticism. Simply believe me when I tell you it's the world's greatest sin. It's the sworn foe of beauty and intelligence, the deadliest enemy of love.”

“You may call it fanaticism, but what great thing has ever been accomplished without passion?”

“Well said,” he replied. “But the fanatic goes beyond passion. He drives his feelings into an arctic zone where they freeze into weapons of destruction. Passion is human. Fanaticism is its extreme, the attempt to transform the human into the superhuman, the real into the ideal. It always ends in disaster.

“More important,” he said, “fanaticism is a passion gone political. I say passion must remain personal, if we are to remain human.”

As he said this, he took me by the hand and led me to the table. On plates full of ice were Chesapeake Bay crabs, shrimp, and oysters, the finest in the world, he avowed. At the ring of a bell, a black man emerged from another room to replace the champagne with a cold white wine from Austria.

He asked me to tell him about Ireland, why I loved it enough to die for it, what it meant to me. I told him of my discovery of the proud women of the old sagas, how they had struck a flame in my soul. I tried to make him see how much the land itself still shimmered with the aura of ancient glory. I described the fairy raths, the old kings' tombs, the Bel fires on the mountains. He had heard none of it before. If the American Irish knew such things, they never bothered to share them with him.

“To see such a people, with such a heritage, crushed, degraded. For the first time I understand,” he said.

He raised his glass. “I salute your passion, from my American ignorance.

“Where does that leave us?” he said, after a moment of silence. “I feel you've passed me like a pillar of fire, leaving me nothing but the ashes of ignorance and disillusion.”

“I don't,” I said.

“I spoke of an exchange. I thought I could ask it coolly, calmly, as a connoisseur of beauty. Now I can only ask it as a gift.”

“You shall have it,” I said. “I want to understand your kind of passion.”

He led me into the bedroom and gestured to an open door. “There is a bath already drawn for you. If you want the water warmer, simply call.”

I bathed in rose-scented water, rich with shimmering oil. A robe hung on the door. I wrapped it around me and returned to the bedroom. It occurred to me that I was about to do a sinful thing, but it was utterly lacking in the feeling of sin. I had felt a thousand times more guilty when I said to Dan McCaffrey,
You can have me if you want me
. This man toward whom I was walking seemed to exist in a world beyond ordinary right and wrong. He was offering me his wisdom in exchange for my beauty, and the terms seemed perfectly reasonable.

The single gas lamp was turned low. It flickered like an orange eye within its globe. In the semidarkness, he seemed more handsome, more powerful, than any man I had ever imagined. If it was romance, it was of a different order. This was not a hero I was embracing, it was Merlin, a chief druid. “I want you to feel perfectly free,” he whispered. “You need have no fear of a child. I've taken the proper precautions.”

I was not sure what he meant, but in my adventurer's mood I did not really care. He kissed me softly, then deeply, and his hands roved from my breasts down my body. Slowly he slipped the robe from my shoulders and lifted me, his mouth still on my mouth, and carried me to the bed. His robe fell away and for a moment he stood beside me, naked, a whiteness glowing from his flesh in the wavering lamplight. He took my hand and placed his swelling manhood in it.

“I think I may learn to die for Ireland,” he whispered as his hand moved up my thigh.

Slowly, carefully, gently, like dancers to dream music, like swimmers in the depths, we began to make love. It was totally different from the wild taking I had known with Dan. That had been a kind of battle, with the triumph all on his side and the surrender all on mine. This man was teaching me a different kind of pleasure, how to use hands and lips and hair as delicately as a musician drawing deep dark music from a violin or pianoforte. I was discovering sensuality, the secret world that respectable women never entered, the night world through which powerful men roamed in search of pleasure.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about it was the pleasure he took in giving me pleasure. The slow sure drawing out with which he aroused me, the dozen kisses on my neck, my breasts, my thighs, until there gathered within me a surging swirling mass of desire that made me cry out with the sweetness, the terrible tearing power of it, thundering from depths I never dreamt existed in me. I clung to him, laughing, sighing, with each stroke of his flesh, begging him at last for breath, release, until a trembling fire ran through his body and he gave a great delicious “ah” of satisfaction, which echoed like a last treasured note in my throat.

We lay side by side in the shadowed bed for a long time. Then he took my robe and wrapped me in it and carried me back to the sitting room and placed me on the length of the couch like a Roman. He pushed the table, which was on wheels, close to me and drew his own chair to the other side of it. On our plates now were crepes filled with some fragrant fresh jam and small cups of black, bitter coffee of a kind he had discovered in Italy. We ate and drank in silence. The black servant cleared the table and presented us each with a great round globe with a dollop of French brandy in the bottom. Fernando showed me how to breathe as well as drink it.

“Now,” he said, “tell me what happened at the White House.”

I told him almost word for word. He paused to savor his brandy. “Let me warn you first that you're listening to a disappointed politician. You've offered him the most memorable consolation for his disappointment that he's yet received. But disappointment nevertheless distorts the vision as much as it sharpens it.”

He sipped his brandy. “My treasure,” he called it. “Laid by monks before the Revolution.”

Then he got to the business. “The first thing you must remember is the true nature of the man you're dealing with. He's a backwoods idiot, hopelessly out of his depth, a man whose mind changes every time he talks to someone with a new idea.”

“I wonder what my friends Dan McCaffrey and John O'Neil, both from Tennessee, would think of that?” I asked.

“They'd probably shoot me, in the style of most Tennesseans, who prefer that way of settling almost all their arguments. I admit it sounds like New York arrogance. Remember I promised to tell you the truth as I see it. I'm not surprised that you've gotten the president on your side. Your problem will be to keep him there.”

“Why?”

“If Johnson told his cabinet what he told you tonight, they would march in a body to Congress and urge his impeachment for insanity. The last thing this country can afford now is a war with England. If the war with the South had lasted another six months, the North would have gone bankrupt. Then there's the problem of Mexico. Are you aware that there's a French army in Mexico?”

“I read it in the paper,” I said, “but I haven't had time to comprehend the politics of it.”

“Napoleon the Third has put an Austrian archduke named Ferdinand Maximilian on the Mexican throne as part of his dreams of imperial glory. We're determined to kick them out of there, by force if necessary. There's an army of forty-five thousand men on the Mexican border at this very moment. There's another fifty-thousand-man army moving into Indian territory to teach our redskinned brethren a lesson for murdering ten or twenty thousand Americans in the last few years, while we were occupied with killing each other down south. These two projects will cost the government at least seventy million dollars. No sane man would start a war with the British in Canada while facing these expenses.”

“You mean President Johnson lied to us?”

“By no means. He made a promise. Which he thoroughly intends to keep, if he can. If he can't, he'll simply throw up his hands and say he was sincere in his good intentions.”

“What should we do?”

“Go straight ahead. Act as if the promise is going to be kept. Build up your army. Buy your guns and ammunition. But take steps, very serious steps, to win the backing of the men who count in the cabinet.”