A Passionate Girl (53 page)

For a split second, Jonathan glared at me. I saw that he did not care whether or not Dan pulled the trigger. He was back in the dungeon of his bitter self. But there was a subtle difference. Where before there had been defeat, confusion, there was now strength, rage. Where death had been a tempting friend, he was now an indifferent companion. He wanted to kill Dan, and possibly me, and was ready to risk anything to do it.

“Don't you want your money first?” Jonathan said, and pulled open the carpetbag. It was crammed to the top with greenbacks. For a split second, Dan's eyes went hungrily to that hoard of power and pleasure. It was the moment for which Jonathan was waiting. He flung the contents of the bag across the room into Dan's face and charged through the shower of money with an infantry roar.

Time stopped, froze. We were like figures in a waxworks or a painting. The blizzard of greenbacks engulfed us. Down they fluttered, absurd symbolic pieces of paper for which so many sacrificed their happiness, their honor, their pride. The prize for which men betrayed nations and peoples, for which so much blood was spilled, so many hearts broken. Now the two men I had loved met in the middle of this green storm in a grapple that could only end in death.

Dan's gun crashed once, but the whirling money distracted his deadly aim by a fraction. The bullet smashed out a window. Then Jonathan slammed into him, his strong hands lunging for the gun arm, smashing it back against the wall, knocking the pistol loose from Dan's hand. The weapon bounded across the floor like a living creature. I crawled to it and seized it as the two men thrashed wildly in the carpet of money. Jonathan had his fingers on Dan's throat. Dan's breath was coming in hoarse gasps. But Jonathan had no hope of subduing a Tennessee brawler with such a simple hold.

With a tremendous heave Dan broke the grip and flung Jonathan back on his haunches. In the same instant Dan was on his feet to deliver a kick that sent Jonathan hurtling out the door onto the pine needles outside. With a wild rebel yell Dan lunged after him. I stumbled to the door dreading what I knew would ensue. As Jonathan staggered to his feet, Dan feinted a punch and gave him another terrific kick that hurled him back ten feet, crashing off the pine trees. He sprang up and rushed Dan again, trying to close with him. He got another kick in the belly this time and two terrific punches in the face. As he rose dazedly to one knee, another kick all but tore off his head. Barely conscious now, Jonathan still struggled to his feet again and again. But flesh and blood can only bear so much. At last another terrible combination of kicks and punches stretched him moaning on the ground.

Gasping for breath, Dan looked down on him, then slowly drew his knife. Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I raised the big gun and aimed it with both hands.

“Don't, Dan, don't,” I said.

He was about ten feet away facing me. Sweat and blood-lust mingled on his glaring face. And contempt. He didn't think I would pull the trigger. He thought that after last night he had me again. He reached down to seize Jonathan Stapleton by the shirt and lift him to cut his throat.

I pulled the trigger. The gun roared and the bullet smashed into Dan's chest just above the heart, flinging him back against the nearest tree. “You—” he cried.

I pulled the trigger again and this bullet spun him around and sent him staggering to another tree. He clung to it for a second in his death agony. Slowly he turned. “Didn't you—hear—what he called—you?” he choked.

He fell. The gun dropped from my numbed hands. Jonathan Stapleton raised his battered body from the ground and struggled to one knee. I walked past him into the shadowed grove. Dan lay with his face to the summer sky. I thought of the soldier in my father's doorway, saying,
Dan McCaffrey
. I remembered the gunman crouched in the road to Bantry fighting it out with a half dozen policemen. I saw the weary soldier in Buffalo, saying,
We've got a good little army
.

Out of me swirled a huge sorrow, black as the Irish night, dark as our thousand years of bloody history, blind as our hopes, ruinous as our defeats. I was Emer keening over Cuchulain, Dierdre lamenting the Red Branch heroes. The tumbling words came out in Irish. What other language could express my grief? I flung myself on him, wailing.

I don't know how long I lay there, keening the Irish words over and over again. How utterly strange, how weirdly foreign, it must have sounded to Jonathan and Rawdon. God knows how long I might have continued it. Jonathan's hand on my shoulder drew me back to the real world.

“We've found a boat in the bushes,” he said. “There's a railroad bridge about a mile up the river. We'll go up there and wait for a train.”

Pakenham had fled with his sloop. The river was empty. None of us had the strength to row. Luckily the tide was with us, and we drifted to the bridge. An hour later, a train approached. Jonathan flagged it down with his shirt. When the engineer saw his beaten face and torn clothes, he abandoned his regular stops and highballed to our station in Middletown. By six o'clock we were at Kemble Manor again. A doctor, summoned by the station agent, examined Jonathan and taped sticking plaster on two broken ribs. The sheriff was also summoned and told the story. He set out immediately for the Manasquan River to remove Dan McCaffrey's body. He assured Jonathan that they would capture Pakenham in short order. He also promised that the inquest into Dan's death would be conducted with an absolute minimum of publicity.

After a decent meal and a bath, Rawdon pronounced himself healthy. I was also healthy enough in body. After hours of walking the beach alone, I knew what I had to do to bring similar health to my soul.

The next morning after breakfast, I went to Jonathan's room. He was wearing his nightclothes and a light robe, sitting in the chair by the window where I had once come to him with so much love in my heart.

“It's clear that we must part,” I said.

“Yes,” he said heavily.

“Believe me when I say I never meant to deceive you—except about my name. I would never have married you without telling you the truth.”

“Yes,” he said heavily again.

“In spite of everything—I'll treasure the memory of our love.”

“Yes,” he said dully. I saw with sadness that he would be unable to do this.

He stared out the window at the sea for a long time. “Where will you go?” he said.

“Far from here. To a place where the Fenian girl is as unknown as Dierdre of the Sorrows. Or as much of a fable.”

He nodded, barely listening now. I was gone from him, that was all he knew. The pain of what he was losing seemed hardly equal to the strength he had regained, the gulf I had helped him cross.

I went back to my room and began packing. I was in the midst of it when Rawdon looked in. “Where are you going?” he said.

“Away, Rawdie,” I said.

“No,” he said, and ran to me. “Is he sending you away? He can't do that.”

Before I could answer him, he raced across the hall to Jonathan's room. “Father, you can't do it,” he cried. “You have to marry her. I know what you did to her. I saw her go into your room at night—”

There was the sound of a blow and a cry of pain. I rushed after Rawdon to find Jonathan standing over him, his arm raised in rage, the boy sprawled on the floor, clutching his face. “Don't you ever say that to another living soul. If you do, I'll ruin you. I'll throw you out of the family,” Jonathan roared.

The man I had glimpsed so often was dominant on his face now. I saw him and Rawdon forever opposed, with me as one of the chief causes of their enmity. When Jonathan noticed me in the door he whirled and snarled, “Did you send him in here?”

“Come, Rawdie,” I said, drawing him to his feet. We sat and talked in my room. I reiterated my love for him and tried to explain what had been wrong with my dream of loving his father. He would not listen. At last he tore loose and turned on me to cry one last terrible word, “liar!”

I left without trying to say good-bye to him or Jonathan again. At the station I boarded the train and rode through the peaceful fields and prosperous towns to Jersey City. There I took a ferry across the river, then a hack to Archbishop McCloskey's residence on Mulberry Street. I gave my name to a stern-looking monsignor who ordered me to wait in a bare sitting room. I was prepared to sit there for hours, but the archbishop appeared in five minutes. I did not kiss his ring or make any other sign of obedience.

“You remember me?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“You told me if I ever needed a friend—”

“Yes.”

“I need to confess many sins. But I wonder what good it will do.”

“Do you believe that God forgives you?”

“I would like to believe it, but I don't.”

“Why do you want to believe it?”

“Because I want to go away and begin again in a place far away from here—and this is a way of saying good bye to the Fenian girl forever.”

He smiled sadly. “You're becoming an American. You want to give your faith to the future, to mingle it with tomorrow rather than yesterday. Perhaps eventually we'll learn to do both things.”

From his desk he took a stole, a long ribbon of red silk trimmed with blue, and crossed it on his chest. Priests wore these while hearing confessions. For a half hour I told him everything I had done, from Dan McCaffrey to the murder of Lord Gort to my ruinous love for Jonathan Stapleton. He listened impassively, with no expression on his face or in his eyes. I might have been talking to a statue—or to the God I had ignored for so long.

When I finished, he said in the gentlest imaginable voice, “Kneel down.”

I knelt. He drew a cross in the air above my head and recited Latin words of forgiveness. Raising me to my feet, he held my hands for a long moment, gazing at me with a marvelous mixture of sadness and affection.

“Wild Irish,” he murmured. “Wild Irish.”

He stepped back and became the archbishop again. “Where will you go?”

“I don't know.”

“I suggest San Francisco.” He scribbled a name on a piece of paper. “Here's a man who's running a newspaper out there. They're starting to hire women. You must make your way alone for a while.”

I nodded. The man understood so much.

“Do you need money?”

“General Stapleton gave me a thousand dollars.”

The archbishop opened a drawer and pulled out a sheaf of greenbacks. “Here's another five hundred. I refused to give a cent to the Fenians. It almost broke my heart—but I couldn't let them use my name to suck more money from the pockets of our poor. This is my own money—my belated contribution to the cause.”

“How can I thank you?”

“Do the same thing for someone else who needs help. If you go to work for a newspaper, you'll see a lot of misery.”

An hour later I was on a New York Central train, heading for Chicago, where the Union Pacific would take me to San Francisco. The names of the cities and towns whispered in my soul as the miles slipped by. I was traveling into the immense heart of America with a precarious faith in the pursuit of happiness. Ireland and her sorrows were vanishing over the horizon. Would I find fresh sorrow in this new life? I only knew that there beat within my battered heart a strangely renewed hope.

Bess Fitzmaurice
worked for several newspapers in California. In her forties she married an editor on the
San Francisco Chronicle.
She wrote this book in the last years of her life and sent it to the Hamilton, New Jersey, Historical Society, where it was recently discovered and prepared for publication under a grant from the Principia Foundation, created by the twentieth century Stapletons to raise America's historical awareness.

Jonathan Stapleton
married Cynthia Legrand, his brother Charlie's beautiful, Louisiana-born widow, and spent much of his life trying to heal the breach between the North and South. The rest of his story is told in
The Spoils of War
, which deals with the Stapleton family after the Civil War.

Rawdon Stapleton
quarreled continually with his father and refused to participate in the family businesses. He became a newspaperman who mingled revolution with his passion for telling the truth about American society. He was killed covering the fight on San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War.

Andrew Johnson
lost his struggle with the Radical Republicans in Congress, narrowly averted impeachment, and did not seek renomination in 1868. He was reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1875 but died several months later.

Robert Johnson
never conquered his alcoholism. He committed suicide in California in 1869.

William Seward
never won his nomination for the presidency. In 1867, he bought Alaska from the Russians, hoping it would be the first step to his vision of a United States of North America. Instead, his enemies used the purchase to destroy him. They said the territory was a frozen wasteland and called it “Seward's Folly.” He went into political oblivion and died in 1872.

Edwin Stanton
became a key figure in the struggle between President Johnson and Congress. He refused to resign when Johnson finally dismissed him as secretary of war, which led to the impeachment crisis of 1868. Stanton was rewarded by the Republicans with an appointment to the Supreme Court in 1869, but he died before he could take office.

Fernando Wood
was defeated in his attempt to recapture Tammany in 1867. He spent the rest of his life in Congress and died in 1881.

William Marcy Tweed
died in jail in 1878 after conviction for massive frauds.

Richard Connolly
fled to Egypt with six million dollars when the Tweed Ring was exposed in 1871. He never returned to the United States.

Peter B. Sweeny
fled abroad with many millions. Eventually he gave back a few hundred thousand dollars and was allowed to return. He died in New York in obscurity.

John O'Neil
eventually was deposed by the Fenian majority. He tried one more invasion of Canada with a handful of followers in 1870. It was a fiasco. He drank himself to death a few years later.

John O'Mahoney
died obscure and forgotten in the 1870s. His body was shipped home to Ireland for a big funeral.

William Roberts
quit Fenianism, made his peace with Tammany, and was named minister to Chile by President Grover Cleveland in 1884.