A Passionate Girl (48 page)

“Of course, you'll visit us from time to time,” I said.

“I doubt it. The less I see of Rawdon, the better.”

“No,” I said. “You must not abandon him. There's good in the boy. I don't agree with your doctrine of moral perversity. I think I know what's troubling him. It has nothing to do with the war or your role in it. All that is as much subterfuge as the Fenians. It's a delicate thing that I almost hesitate to broach to you. Rawdon told it to me in a moment of boyish impulse, without an iota of prurience.”

With a good deal of stumbling and blushing, I told him that Rawdon had conceived the notion that his father had caused his mother's death. I carefully omitted all mention of listening at doors. “His mind is confused, one might even say ignorant, about the whole process of—of sexual love. He thinks of it as a hurtful thing. He heard his mother's cries when she was giving birth.”

I looked up from my teacup to find Jonathan Stapleton staring at me like a man transfixed. “I'll talk to him,” he said.

“No,” I said. “It cannot be approached directly. It would only rub the wound raw again. You must somehow find the patience to wait for him to grow out of it—to discover a woman's love for himself. Or better, to see you marry again. Have you not thought of it?”

“No,” he said. “I—I made such a botch of it the first time.”

“I—I can't believe that,” I said.

His two hands were on the table, gripping each other convulsively. “I'm not a lover by nature, Miss Stark. I'm not at ease in women's company. I don't know how to please them. My wife—and my mother—made that very clear to me.”

“But—but you can't let the verdict of one or two women condemn you for life. Who—who knows what flaws there were in your wife's feelings for you? For life itself. I want to speak no evil of the dead, but—”

Now I saw the wound within the wound, the pain beneath the pain, in this man's haunted gray eyes. I wondered if it was in my power to heal that wound, soothe that pain. I simultaneously shrank from and welcomed the idea. Perhaps within me I already sensed the possibility of a terrible explosion of love, hope, and desire, that could destroy us both.

“I—I appreciate your kind thoughts of me,” he said. “I fear they're wasted. But I'll accept your feminine wisdom about Rawdon. I'll try to be patient. I'll come visit you—often.”

The next morning, Rawdon raced up from the kitchen after breakfast with an Irish-American paper carrying the latest news of the Fenians. I braced myself for more carnage. What I read was something worse.

Alas, poor Mike
, I thought as tears started from my eyes.
An end to blarney, an end to bucking the tiger. You have finished something at last.

“Do you know any of them?” Rawdon said, noticing my agitation.

“No,” I said. “Besides, we have more important things to talk about. Your father wants us to go away together, to Kemble Manor, and live there for a while.”

“That's all right with me,” Rawdon said. “Kemble Manor is a nice house. We used to have fun there.”

Pleased that he was accepting the transfer so well, I went downstairs in search of Jackson or his wife, Bertha, to learn more about the house and where we could buy food, the sort of cook we might hope to hire, the clothes I might need. I walked into the kitchen and saw a man in a white apron delivering something to Bertha. She stepped over to her cashbox to pay him, and I got a full view of him. It was Patrick Dolan. He stared at me as if I were an apparition. God knows what might have happened if I had not held out my hand and said, “My goodness, is this Mr. Dolan from Limerick? You remember me, Elizabeth Stark? My mother rented a house not far from your parents' house, remember?”

“Oh—oh, yes,” he said. “What a start it gave me to see you here, so unexpected.”

“I had no idea you were in this city. I've been here for three months as governess, but I've gone out little.”

“Yes. Well—would you be going downtown by any chance? I'll be glad to give you a lift in my wagon.”

“I was, as a matter of fact,” I said. I was desperate to get him out of the kitchen. “Let me get my coat, and I'll meet you at the gate.”

He was waiting beside his wagon, which had his name and his partner's name, Delahanty, painted in large letters on the canvas top. As for Patrick himself, he was anything but a good advertisement for the meat he was purveying. He was appallingly thin and until he saw me coming toward him, woebegone. He began telling me how he'd read about Michael's death and gone to New York again in search of me but could only learn that I'd disappeared.

“If there's ever a sign that we're fated, Bess, that my prayers are going to be answered, it's this,” he said.

I found myself disliking intensely the Irish sound of that statement. I was nevertheless stirred by the coincidence, almost as much as Patrick. I told him I had quit the Fenians and why.

“I thought I had left you as well, left everything and everyone from the past, even my name. I don't know what my feelings are now,” I said.

“Surely you won't object to my coming to see you, asking you to dinner at my partner's house. He has a lovely wife and two children.”

I shook my head. “I'm going away for a few months to their other house on the shore. The boy and his father don't get along.”

“Few get along with him, the general, I hear. The saying in town is, he got all the brains and none of his father's good nature, while his brother Charles, who died invading Cuba in '59, was the reverse. Does he treat you well?”

“Yes,” I said, “but he's a troubled man. The war ruined his nerves.”

He persuaded me to let him drive me downtown, explaining the while that he usually did not make deliveries, their wagonman was ill. In the business section, a dozen people called out greetings to him in every block. He had clearly established himself in the city. Once he made a stop to deliver some meat to a butcher and took me into the shop. The owner was a huge fat German who boomed, “
Guten Tag,
Herr Dolan.”

“
Guten Tag
to you, Herr Schneider,” Patrick replied. “Look at this, now. Here's where I win my argument about which are prettier, German girls or Irish girls. Here's one from the Emerald Isle, just off the boat.”

“
Schön, schön,
” said Schneider with a twinkle in his eye. “But can she cook? German girls will put flesh on your bones, Dolan!” Schneider thumped his vast girth. It looked as if a half dozen German girls had been working to put flesh on him. “I tell him he should marry. A bachelor life is pfui. You starve to death.”

East of the business section, we entered a series of tree-lined squares fronted by new brownstones. This was where the well-to-do but not rich people lived. Patrick stopped the wagon before one house on a corner lot in Morris Square. The house was empty. “My partner, John Delahanty, put up half the money to build this. He's been deviling me to buy it—and move into it with his sister as my bride. They're all mad to marry me off. Now that I've found you again, Bess, I think I will buy it. All about here are Irish, fine people, Bess. Men like myself, who got together a bit of money and invested it and are working their heads off to see it grow.”

I didn't like the sound of any of it. I had no enthusiasm for living with Irish in America. I wanted to
be
American. Even as Patrick talked, I felt the blind wish swell in me. I was back in Bowood's midnight kitchen traveling with Jonathan Stapleton on our current of sympathy into the ideal heart of America. Beneath it, beyond the reach of my mind, lay the other more dangerous wish that I had glimpsed last night, the wish that sympathy could become love that would transform me into an American beyond the reach of Ireland and its bitter memories.

All Patrick Dolan could see—I could not see much more—was my lack of enthusiasm. “I'm sorry, Bess,” he said, taking up the reins again. “I'm letting my mouth run miles ahead of your feelings. I'll buy the house no matter what. A man with a good business needs a decent address.”

“Yes,” I said. I wanted to say I was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain I was causing him, but I was too engulfed in my own pain and my blind hidden wish to escape it. I was already unknowingly the captive of a dream of impossible love.

We rode back to Bowood in silence. I got down from the wagon and looked up at Patrick. He had such a sad expression on his thin face, I climbed back up again and kissed him. “Marry a German girl,” I said. “She'll put flesh on your bones!”

The next day Rawdon and his father and I set out for Kemble Manor. It was ten or fifteen miles beyond the main terminus of the family's railroad, the Camden and Amboy, in a place called Middletown. At Perth Amboy, we transferred to a dirty two-car train, pulled by a small huffing red and blue engine. Jonathan Stapleton told us it was one of the oldest engines on the line.

Rawdon spent the trip reading the newspapers. He asked his father numerous questions about Washington politics, which continued to be absorbed in the struggle between Congress and President Johnson over the treatment of the conquered South. Jonathan Stapleton said both sides were wrong. Congress was too hungry for vengeance against the defeated South. Some Southerners were trying to enslave the Negro again, using subterfuge and midnight violence.

“Here's a story that claims the Fenians have quit bombing England,” Rawdon said. “General O'Neil says the whole thing was a mistake. He says the man who started it, McCaffrey, has been thrown out of the brotherhood.”

“I'm not surprised,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “They've won themselves nothing but universal detestation. Even Tammany has condemned them. Their friends in Congress have all deserted them.”

So my Donal Ogue had fallen like Lucifer into the hell he dreaded—poverty. If he was still alive. His body may have been in the wreckage of Tom Gallaher's bomb factory.

“Why did the Fenians let McCaffrey start bombing and then throw him out?” Rawdon asked.

“If you must waste your time reading newspapers,” his father said, “look for some pleasanter topics. Miss Stark finds those Fenian bombers upsetting. I don't blame her.”

The engine emitted a great shriek, and we began to slow down. In a moment we were at a station, which was little more than a shed. We got down with our bags, and Jonathan Stapleton led us inside and over to a wire cage where a man sat.

“Good morning, Fred,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “How are you feeling?”

“Why, just fine, General,” replied Fred, who had a quizzical drooping face and hair that spilled in a kind of cowlick onto his forehead. “Funny thing, though, in cold weather the wooden leg hurts more than the real leg.”

“Others have told me that,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Does the wooden leg work well?”

“Otherwise fine. I'm eternally grateful to you, General. For the job here, and for gettin' me off them crutches.”

“Good. Any sign of Abner with our carriage?”

“He should be along any minute. I told him just when you were comin'.”

“He may have trouble hitching up a team.”

“No, sir, General. He does just fine. I've seen him drivin' down the main street lookin' as smart and sure of them two big horses as the wildest young dust raiser around.”

We heard the clump of horses' hooves on a sandy road, then a voice calling “Whoa now.” We went out to find a burly, handsome man driving an open carriage. He jumped down to help with our bags, and I saw that his left sleeve was empty. He was introduced to me as Abner Littlepage. “Abner's mother will be cooking for us,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “He was the color sergeant of the 6th New Jersey Volunteers.”

“Did you shoot him?” Rawdon said, staring at the empty sleeve.

“What?” Jonathan Stapleton said.

“No,” Abner said. “That was a feller in the 4th New Jersey. He deserved to get shot. He was runnin' the wrong way. I don't think the old 6th Regiment ever run, did it, General?”

“Only
after
the rebels,” Jonathan Stapleton said, with a grim smile.

“Yeah, we chased them, all right,” Abner said, climbing into the driver's seat again.

For another flashing moment I had a glimpse of the battle commander Jonathan Stapleton had been. Rawdon saw it, too. I think he was nonplussed to find this man and the stationmaster, who now appeared in the doorway on a cane, showing so much admiration and respect for his father. According to the devil theory that was operating in Rawdon's mind, they should have hated him.

As we went swiftly down a narrow road through the woods, a deep, fresh smell filled the air. I asked what it was. “Jersey pines,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “I never smell them without feeling like a boy again. Soon they'll mingle with the smell of the salt air.”

“I like it, too,” Rawdon said. He wanted to sound defiant, but it came out closer to halfthearted agreement.

Abner was acting as caretaker and man of all work at Kemble Manor, Jonathan Stapleton said. “I've tried to find places—on the railroad, at the mills—for all the men from my division who came home without arms or legs. There are over a thousand of them. The state of New Jersey has done nothing for them, no special aid, not even artificial legs. Some Southern states, bankrupt as they are, are spending more for their crippled veterans.”

“It seems to me there must be others who would share your indignation,” I said. “Perhaps you should consider entering politics.”

“If you knew what American politics was like, Miss Stark, you wouldn't wish me such a fate. Assuming you wish me well, of course.”

“How could I wish you otherwise?” I said.

I ached to tell him that I did know what American politics was like and that was precisely why I thought it needed a man like him. Not for the first time I was troubled by the gap my false identity created between us. But what would he think of Bess Fitzmaurice, the Fenian girl? I avoided answering that question. I trusted—or blindly hoped—in the power of sympathy.

“There it is,” Rawdon said, leaning out of the carriage.

The brick house looked no bigger than a toy in the distance. We crossed a broad moor thick with high, waving grass over which sea birds flew, calling shrilly to each other. Jonathan Stapleton said that the marsh had once been farmland, drained by the first settlers, with methods learned from the Dutch. The Stapletons had let the sea and the numerous tidal brooks reclaim it, having no interest in the modest profits of a farm. The marsh now constituted a barrier isolating the house from the mainland.

The road carried us to the coast and a stupendous view of Raritan Bay and the broad Atlantic beyond it. A few hundred yards from the crossroads the road became the entrance to the manor house. There were traces of a road that once ran along the coast beyond that point, but the Stapletons had closed it. The November wind whipped off the water, sharp with the tang of sea salt. The house had Bowood's Georgian style of architecture, but its bricks were a more delicate, rosy red, and it lacked Bowood's imposing bulk.

Inside, there was no attempt at Bowood's splendor. In fact, Jonathan Stapleton said, most of the fine furniture that had once filled these rooms was now in the Northern house. What remained in the sitting rooms was mostly lacquered rattan, filled with old faded cushions. I had expected to find the place cold and musty, but Abner Littlepage had the fireplaces burning briskly, and his mother and young sister had the beds made and everything dusted and bread baking in the oven. The smell of the bread carried me back to Ireland for a painful moment. I thrust the memory aside. The past was
dead.