A Passionate Girl (47 page)

“And now.”

I saw the sorrow on his face, I watched the pain gather in his eyes. Now the America of 1866 confronted him. America stripped of its visionary gloss by the savage revelation of war.

America was Jonathan Stapleton's faith, but he could not find his justification in the America of 1866. This, and not the personal losses he had suffered as the result of the war, was the real source of his agony. He asked me if I had ever been to Washington, D.C. Of course I lied and said no. He began telling me of the corruption that had raged there during the war, the millions of dollars that contractors and crooked congressmen and generals had mulcted from the government. Secretary of War Stanton had put a stop to much of it. This was why Jonathan Stapleton admired him. Stanton was one of the few honest men in Washington. But he did not have the power or the strength to eliminate other forms of corruption.

With white-lipped fury, Jonathan Stapleton described the thousands of prostitutes and the hundreds of faro banks that flourished in the national capital while men were dying to save the Union on battlefields a few miles away. The close of the war had brought no improvement. Faro still reigned on Pennsylvania Avenue, and even the White House had succumbed to the corruption. He said that he had proof from Stanton that the president's son Robert was selling pardons to Southerners. New York was in the grip of Tweed and his legion of corrupt Irishmen. This city, Hamilton, was not much better. The thought of dealing with these greasy disciples of greed sickened him.

He was far beyond talking to me for Rawdon's benefit now. Nor was I listening with the boy in mind. Perhaps it was that very night that I began my betrayal of Rawdon (I must call things by their right names; betrayal was what it became). My sympathy, my identification with Jonathan Stapleton was almost complete. How I longed to tell him the reason for it, to open my heart to him as he was opening his inner self to me (though really to himself, to his ghosts). I have come to believe that sympathy is a potent spiritual substance, which is communicated without words—at least without words that directly express it. In its root meaning, sympathy means “same-feeling,” and it was on this current that I reached out to this tormented man.

“It seems to me,” I said, “your country needs you now more than ever. Your country, your family, your state.”

He shook his head. “I can't walk the streets of my own city without seeing a dozen, a hundred, faces of men and women who have lost sons, husbands, brothers, under my command.”

“Do they blame you any more than they blame God or the South or history? None of them could foresee the future any more than you could. We all take voyages into the unknown—”

He thought I was talking of my immigration to this country. He smiled sadly. “I fear I'm giving you a poor introduction to America,” he said. “Please don't think the picture is as dark as I see it, for someone like yourself. There's room, ample room, for honest men and women to prosper, to be happy. But I'm forced to think, to act, on a different plane, and there the prospect is—sickening.”

I said nothing. It was not necessary. He heard his own words as clearly as I heard them, and they confessed that his vision was narrowed, distorted, by his special role, his hard fate. For a moment he hesitated, and puzzlement, doubt, grew in his eyes. I could see him asking himself,
Is it possible I am wrong?

He stood up, fussing with his robe. “We must try to get some sleep,” he said. “Why do you have trouble sleeping?”

“Homesickness, I suppose,” I said, clearing away the cups.

“Are your parents still living?”

“No.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

I shook my head.

“So you're alone in a new country. I can see—yes, I can see how hard that must be.”

The mystery of sympathy flowed between us, the current now reversed. I could only sense it then, but now I understand why. He, too, was alone in a new country, the America created by the cataclysm of the Civil War.

“Good night, Miss Stark,” he said. “Maybe we've—accomplished something.”

“I think we have,” I said, a bit too dryly. He glanced sharply at me for a fraction of a moment and turned to go.

“General,” I said. “You're forgetting something.”

I handed him his gun. He looked ruefully at it for a moment. “I must put this away somewhere,” he said.

A few days later, I was finishing Rawdon's French lesson when Hannah, the big, heavy-footed (and-handed) upstairs maid, appeared at the door of his bedroom. “Have y'heard the news, Miss Stark?” she said. “Sure it will make your orange garters pop, it will.”

“What news?” I said. “This is not the time to interrupt us.”

“The Fenians are blowin' up London,” she said. “It's here in the paper.”

“Really, now,” I said, my mind frozen to the variations on the French verb
aimer
that I was teaching Rawdon.
Aimer à l'idolâtrie
, to idolize,
aimer passionnément,
to be passionately fond of,
aimer mieux
, to prefer. Hannah was waving the newspaper like a flag of triumph. Rawdon ran to get it from her. Together we sat and read the story, which was reprinted from the
New York Tribune.

“Great!” Rawdon cried. “Don't you think so, Miss Stark?”

I could only shake my head numbly. My mind was clotted with images of the mangled bodies of women and children. Was it possible that Dan McCaffrey, the man to whom I had pledged my love, and Mike Hanrahan, who had sent me to this refuge, were committing these atrocities in Ireland's name? I thought of the words in Michael's last letter to me.
There are some things a man must not do for his country
.

“It's not an honorable way to make war,” I said.

“What's honor to England?” Hannah said. “Didn't the Americans kill a million here in this country to free the coloreds? Why not kill a few thousand English to free Ireland?”

“Get out of here, you blatherskite, before I have you dismissed for interfering in my duties,” I said.

She pranced out, leaving the newspaper behind her. Rawdon read the story again. It was uncanny, his fascination with newspapers. He enjoyed reading little else. He was a typical American of his age. Few of them read anything but newspapers.

“I'm going to put it in my Fenian scrapbook, anyway,” he said.

This was the first that I had heard of a Fenian scrapbook. The American Fenians had been quiescent for months now. I asked to see it, and he produced it from beneath his bed. He had been well supplied by the maids. There were all the stories I knew so well, including a vivid account of the exploits of the Fenian girl, complete with an illustration of her famous gunfight on the cliff's edge at Bantry Bay. There was equally thorough coverage of the murder of Lord Gort and pages of information, little of it correct, on the battle of Ridgeway in Canada.

“I'd like to marry a girl like that,” Rawdon said, turning back to the story of the Fenian girl. “Someone who was brave. Not like my mother.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mother was a coward. She cried all the time after Father joined the army. She talked about killing people being a sin. She tried to make me think that way. And she didn't stop Father from hurting her when he came home.”

“Hurting her?” I was more and more amazed. “Why would your father hurt her?”

“What men do to women,” he said. “That hurts them, doesn't it? They cry and say they don't want to do it. Cowardly women like mother. But men like Father—they do it anyway.”

“Where did you hear this? You're surely having bad dreams.”

“I got up and listened by their door in the middle of the night. Later, after he went back to the army, I heard Mother telling Grandmother that she never should have let him do it. They were downstairs in the library. They didn't know I was in the hall listening.”

“That was a very bad thing to do. Dishonorable. It's ungentlemanly to listen at doors.”

He had learned too much to be intimidated by my moralizing. I shifted my ground. “You're too young to understand everything about married men and women, but I assure you that they don't hurt each other. They use their bodies to express their love. There's nothing of hurt in it. It's beautiful and exalting.”

“How do you know? Has anyone ever done it to you?”

“Of course not,” I said, feeling a hot blush redden my face. I didn't like the way Rawdon was looking at me.

“Then how do you know?”

“I've read books on it. I've talked with older women. Married women.”

He shook his head. “You don't know. They probably lied to you. Grown-ups lie all the time. I asked Mother why she let Father hurt her. She said she didn't, but when George was born you could hear her screaming all over the house. It hurt her so much she
died
.”

“But your father didn't know that would happen. He wanted another son. He wanted to give you a brother. Don't you love George? Isn't he the sweetest little boy?”

“Why won't Father let me near him? Is it because he's afraid I'll tell him the truth about how he was born?”

I was staggered to discover how deep and complex were the roots of the boy's antagonism to his father. Imagine my uneasiness when Jonathan Stapleton, in the best humor I had ever seen him, appeared at the luncheon table and announced he was in the mood for a drive in the country. He invited me and Rawdon to accompany him.

It was a beautiful fall day. The trees were turning red and gold on the hillsides before us as we crossed the marsh of the river's west branch. We rode in a chaise pulled by two powerful trotters, one white, the other black. Jonathan Stapleton made the wheels fairly skim along the plank road, and he scarcely diminished his pace as we entered the hills. The beating hooves made conversation difficult, which I decided was just as well. At length Rawdon asked if he might take the reins. After some hesitation, his father agreed, but he proceeded to give Rawdon so many orders and admonitions that after a mile the boy quit the task in a rage. Jonathan Stapleton grimly resumed control.

After about a half hour, we turned off the main road and laboriously climbed a narrower winding path to the top of a considerable height, probably tall enough to merit the name of mountain. From the summit there was a marvelous view of the city, the river, and the rolling country southward to the coastal plain. We watched a toy train chug along a track no wider than my thumb.

“This is my favorite spot,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Somehow, it relaxes my mind, just thinking of it. My brothers and I used to picnic here when we were boys.”

“Can I go look at the mine?” Rawdon said.

“Yes. But don't go inside,” Jonathan Stapleton said.

As Rawdon disappeared around a curve in the road, the father continued his reverie. “My brother Charlie, who tended to be blasphemous, used to reenact the temptation of Jesus with me as the Savior. He used to do it American style. ‘Unanimous votes shalt thou have in the legislature, and perpetual control of the congressional delegation. A gold pass for first-class passage on the New York Central.'”

“What grand fun that must have been,” I said, delighted to hear him recalling happy memories.

I saw him rub his eyes and detected tears on his cheeks. I quickly turned away and wondered if we should find Rawdon. “What did he mean by a mine?” I asked.

“The family's old copper mine,” he said. “It was worked out a year or two before the Revolution. We used to go down in it, against Father's strict orders, of course.”

“Let us hope Rawdon is more obedient,” I said.

I suspected it was a vain hope even as I said it. Sure enough, there was no sign of Rawdon at the entrance to the mine, a gaunt square aperture in the limestone cliff face. We halooed in vain. Jonathan Stapleton began to look very angry. “It's one thing to disobey a general prohibition,” he said. “Boys have done that since time began. But to disobey your father to his face—”

“Rawdon!”
he bellowed into the mine.

No answer.

We ventured down the narrow passage, which sloped steeply into the bowels of the mountain. I slipped and fell against Jonathan Stapleton, who caught me with one of his long arms and pressed me close to him. “Rawdon,” he said. “I'm getting angry. Come out of here immediately. If you're there, answer me.”

Not a sound.

We continued, with the light from above fading and him still holding me in a way highly indelicate for an employer and a governess. He stopped and began lighting matches to guide our way. I saw that the walls around us were oozing moisture and noticed passageways that ran off to right and left.

Suddenly the narrow tunnel was filled with an eerie wail. An oracular voice said, “Greetings, General Stapleton. This is the Jersey Devil.”

I felt Jonathan Stapleton's arm tighten around me. The match in his hand went out. He fumbled another match from his pocket and tried to strike it, but the wet walls prevented him.

The voice wailed again, then resumed. “I have come for your soul, General Stapleton. I have lured you down here to collect your soul. We will continue together in our downward journey to join the legions of the dead.”

“Stop it, Rawdon,” Jonathan Stapleton said. I felt his heart pounding wildly. He was close to mindless panic.

“Yes, stop it, Rawdon,” I cried. “I'm here, too, and you're frightening me.”

Jonathan Stapleton finally struck another match. An instant later, a shape sprang from the darkness and scampered past us up the slope. Jonathan Stapleton released me. I gazed into his pale, twitching face. It oozed moisture like the walls. He seized my arm and half dragged, half carried me back up the passage to the surface. There stood Rawdon, smiling like an angel, Jonathan Stapleton stretched him on the ground with a blow to the face.

“I told you not to go in there,” he roared.

“I only wanted to play a joke,” Rawdon said, clutching his bruised cheek. “Like Uncle Charlie.”

“You're not him and you never will be. It was a rotten joke.”

At home came more carnage. Mrs. Stapleton had left us to dine with a friend. Since I had come to regard the mother as a subtle irritant, I thought we might have peace, but Rawdon began a whole new argument by asking his father what he thought of the Fenian bombers. Jonathan Stapleton denounced them in the most scorching terms.

“Only cowards make war on women and children,” he said.

“We killed a million men to free the Negroes,” Rawdon said. “Why can't the Irish kill a few thousand English to free Ireland?”

“I begin to think you're morally degenerate, Rawdon,” Jonathan Stapleton said.

“I'm sorry you think so. But I don't intend to change my opinion, General Butcher.”

“Rawdon,” I said. “Go to your room instantly.”

He departed. In a rage Jonathan Stapleton started after him, no doubt to administer another beating. I caught his arm. “Please,” I said. “I'd rather have you strike me. I take responsibility for Rawdon's opinion of the Fenians. When the maid gave him the newspaper this morning, I was too mild in my disapproval.”

“But you do disapprove?” he said, still half enraged.

“Yes,” I said, and began to weep genuine tears. “I'm filled with horror, loathing. It makes me ashamed of my very blood. I find myself wishing I could cease to be Irish.”

Appalling words, yet true ones, spoken to this American, words that were both a confession and a plea to this man who had come to personify so much of the America I once hoped to find.

To my amazement his anger vanished. He took my hand. “My dear Miss Stark,” he said. “I know how you feel. I felt the same way when I saw some of the things Americans did during the war. I wanted to quit the race, the country.”

He realized Jackson and the downstairs maid, Ellen, were watching us and withdrew his hand.

There was no sleep for me that night. I lay in bed, listening to a cold rain beat on the roof. I was haunted by a new sense of fatality, of having cut loose from the few inner moorings that linked me to my old self. I went on like this for several days, dazed from sleeplessness, while more news of the Fenian bombers filled the newspapers. Each blast shattered another piece of my spiritual landscape. I listened numbly to Rawdon defending the Fenians in the face of his father's rage. It was absurd on both their parts. My sleeplessness gave me a strange clarity about the cause of their antagonism. For the first time I saw that people were driven by blind emotion to quarrels and hatreds that had nothing to do with their true feelings. These existed beneath the surface of their lives, grappling them the way an octopus seizes a swimmer and blinds him with a gush of his inky fluid.

One night I heard a clock in the upper hall strike three. I decided to try once more that sovereign remedy for insomnia, a cup of tea. I descended to the kitchen. Within five minutes I was joined by Jonathan Stapleton. This time he did not have his pistol in his hand. Nor did he say he was worried about burglars. He said he was worried about me. And Rawdon.

“I see the toll these Fenian outrages are taking on you, Miss Stark. I gather you have to put up with stupid sallies from the maids. It's obvious that Rawdon agrees with them and disagrees with you and me out of sheer perversity. I've decided it might be best for you—and him—if we separated for a while. We have another house, Kemble Manor, down on the shore in Monmouth County, where we used to spend our summers. I'd like to send you there. You can hire a local cook. We'll discontinue his scientific tutor. You can continue his French and English literature and add some American history, for which I'll give you an outline—