A Passionate Girl (9 page)

“Mike and I are old antagonists. But I'm here as your friend, my dear girl. I dread the thought of what may happen to you if you persist in playing the part they've assigned you. They'll drag you into their dirty politics and use you and then discard you.”

“No one's goin' to discard her, Bishop, long as I'm around,” Dan said.

Everyone, including Archbishop McCloskey, knew what those words meant. For me they were a declaration and a summons. I fought the pull of guilt and fear, the recognition of genuine caring that drew me to this sad-eyed, sad-voiced man with the crucifix on his breast. I told myself that once and for all I was joining those ancient Irish heroines who relied on nothing but their warrior lovers' strength.

“I appreciate your concern for me, my lord—I mean, Bishop,” I stumbled, “but I must go the way my soul—my Irish soul—calls me.”

The archbishop sighed. “All right,” he said. “But if you ever need help, remember, I'm your friend, no matter what happens.”

He departed as quietly as he came, leaving us in a most uneasy frame of mind. “He's a smooth one,” Mike Hanrahan said. “Arguin' with him is like tryin' to wrestle with a greased ballet dancer. I liked Old Hughes far more. We called him Dagger John. When you hit him, he hit you back. It was a nice clean donnybrook. This fellow is always floatin' away from you, makin' you feel guilty over the rotten thing you just said to him.”

Dan McCaffrey shook his head. “Now I know why my dad said he was glad to leave the priests behind when he settled in Tennessee.”

“I
hope
Mr. McCaffrey's statement implied nothing more than friendship,” Mrs. Roberts said.

“No, ma'am. Nothin' more,” Dan said, winking at me.

I smiled bravely back, but it was not a joke to me.

“Remember, my dear, you have become a symbol of Ireland,” Mrs. Roberts said.

Mrs. Meehan, who I now decided was pretty but stupid, nodded emphatically. The ladies gathered their shawls and bonnets, and departed. The door had barely closed behind them when Michael said, “She's right, you know.”

There was a bit of the priest in Michael, as there is in many revolutionaries, and Archbishop McClosky had aroused it. Michael began lecturing us on the danger of scandal. He ended by declaring I should move elsewhere, perhaps become a boarder with some respectable Irish family.

Dan grew more and more enraged. He expressed it in his usual fashion, grabbing Michael by the shirt and lifting him a foot off the floor. “Won't you ever learn to keep your mouth shut?” he snarled.

Red Mike Hanrahan quickly intervened. “Boys, boys. Save your fire for the Sassenachs. We're as safe from gossip here in this hotel as we would be on Robinson Crusoe's island. No one ever stays here but Celts. And ninety percent of them are Fenians. But to make matters more circumspect, we'll issue room keys to each of you, and no one but yourselves will know whose inside doors are locked and whose are open.”

That was the end of my moving elsewhere. That night we resumed our American education. John O'Mahoney took us to dinner at the home of a rich Irishman on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn. His name was George McGlinchy, and he had built part of the great aqueduct that brought water to the Croton Reservoir on 42nd Street, which made it possible for so many hundreds of thousands of people to live in New York. We thought McGlinchy would want to hear about Ireland, but after a few words on the subject, he spent most of the time talking about New York politics. He interwove the story of his life through the discourse, telling us how he had started as a hod carrier, saved his money, and launched his own construction company. He sent his brother-in law into politics to obtain the government contracts that had made his fortune.

While he talked, Mr. McGlinchy ate like he expected a famine. The table was covered with dishes—steaks, chops, roasts, in almost as much profusion as Sweeney's Hotel. No wonder he was fat to bursting, and Mrs. McGlinchy the same way.

McGlinchy advised me to look up his brother-in-law. There was no one who knew how to show someone a better time in New York. His name was Richard Connolly. “We met him at the wharf,” I said, “when we landed. He said he knew my sister Annie.”

“Annie?” said McGlinchy, looking at me with new interest. “Anne Fitzmaurice. Sure I know her, too. Queen Anne, we call her for her manners. And her looks.”

“Who is this, love?” asked Mrs. McGlinchy.

Mr. McGlinchy seemed suddenly at a loss for words. “A friend of Dick's,” he said. “A charming woman. It seems she's Miss Fitzmaurice's sister. How's that for high?”

I had to ask for a translation of that American phrase, which meant extraordinary.

O'Mahoney finally managed to change the subject to the Fenians. He began telling McGlinchy the good news that Dan McCaffrey had brought back from Ireland. The Fenian legions were ready to rise. While the men pursued this fiction over coffee, Mrs. McGlinchy and several lady friends entertained me in the parlor. The room was lavishly furnished. There were lace curtains on the high windows, and heavy green damask overcurtains. The chairs and the settee before the marble fireplace were all plush and velvet, with gold fringes and tassels. On the walls were over a dozen brightly colored pictures, which Americans called chromos.

Sitting in the middle of this luxury, the women only wanted to talk of Ireland. “Doesn't she have the look of the old sod?” Mrs. McGlinchy said. She had been born in Cork, but she remembered little of it, having come to this country as a child. Several of them, who were as well dressed and probably as rich as Mrs. McGlinchy, had returned to Ireland for visits. They talked of the beauties of Killarney, the Kerry coast. I talked of the poverty of the people. I told them how stirabout tasted in a cabin pot. I saw that it made them uncomfortable.

“Why would anyone stay in such a country? Why don't they come here or go to Australia or Canada?” Mrs. McGlinchy said.

“I think we have enough Irish here,” said another woman, who was even fatter than Mrs. McGlinchy. “Go visit the Sixth Ward, and you'll agree with me.”

“I keep hearing about this Sixth Ward. I must go see it,” I said.

“It wouldn't be safe to go by yourself,” Mrs. McGlinchy said. “Above all after dark. They have a saying there. A murder a night.”

“And they're Irish?” I said incredulously.

Mrs. McGlinchy nodded. “The kind of Irish who eat stirabout in Ireland. There's a bad streak in our people. A laziness, a carelessness.”

“'Tis none of those things,” I said. “It's a despair, a hopelessness that kills the spirit in a person. That's what must be changed.”

“You'll change your mind, once you see the Sixth Ward,” Mrs. McGlinchy said, with impenetrable complacency. I thought of the sadness in Archbishop McCloskey's eyes and hoped she was wrong.

On our way back to New York in our carriage, John O'Mahoney drew from his pocket a check that McGlinchy had given him. It was for ten thousand dollars. “For the privilege of meeting the Fenian girl,” he said. “I've been trying to get to see that old crook for six months and he always put me off. You're going to open many doors for us, my dear.”

“Did you call him a crook?” I said.

“From what I hear, he stole a half million dollars from the Croton Aqueduct alone,” O'Mahoney said.

“Do we want money from the likes of him?” Michael said.

The carriage approached the Brooklyn ferry. We debarked and boarded the boat, which soon set out, its bell clanging. O'Mahoney led us to the prow, and we looked across the river at New York. The great city glowed with thousands of lights in windows and on streets, like a thing out of fairyland. “Michael,” said O'Mahoney, “when I began this business, I believed, like you, that right could conquer might. I believed that the truth was a sword. I believed that every man loved my country as I did. Now I know differently. Only a rare few are that way. And truth—I've seen it cut down by the sword, or by a pen, hired by the sword—a thousand times. I've seen might, power, grind righteous men into the dirt. Now I think of it as a dirty business—with a glorious goal. That's the only thing I've been able to preserve—the goal. An Ireland worth dying for.”

Those were sad words. I have never forgotten them, nor have I ever forgotten that sad man, John O'Mahoney, speaking them as he gazed across the water at the city that had corrupted him and the people he loved.

What I heard as sadness, Dan McCaffrey heard as weakness. Back in our rooms at Sweeney's Hotel, he flung aside his coat and poured himself a drink. “Hell,” he said. “We're never goin' to have a revolution anywhere with that worn-out old sobber runnin' it.”

“Give him credit for being honest, at least,” Michael said.

“What the hell has honesty got to do with runnin' a revolution—a war?” Dan said. “In a war, you spend ninety percent of your time tryin' to trick the enemy into thinkin' you got twice as many men as you really got, or feintin' toward his left flank and hittin' on his right flank. You hire spies to go and steal secrets and lie for you; you raid his supply depots and steal his guns and horses and ammunition. It don't matter whether you shoot him in the back or the front, the point is to kill him and win the goddamn war.”

“A revolution is not the same as a war,” Michael said. “A revolution aims at creating a nation. It has to worry about the kind of nation it will create if its revolutionary acts are unworthy of Christian men.”

“Jesus Christ, you're a goddamn preacher, you know that?” Dan said. “Take my advice, go get a job runnin' a Sunday school. Bess here has more guts and brains than you'll ever have.”

I retreated to my bedroom and left them arguing. I could hear their voices rising and falling. It was all a waste of breath. They were totally different men, who would never agree on anything. Gradually my attention shifted to the sound of the city outside my window. It was as strange and unnerving to me as the events and arguments of the day. It seemed like the breath of a huge snuffling monster, being drawn and exhaled, drawn and exhaled. It would stir into more active life as a horse car or a carriage passed, then dwindle to sibilant sighing once more. There was a kind of vigilance to it. Though I knew it was absurd, I felt it was watching me. I felt observed, under scrutiny, by too many people, from Dan to Mike Hanrahan to Mrs. Roberts to Archbishop McCloskey to legions of faceless, nameless newspaper readers.

Suddenly Dan was beside my bed, whispering, “How's my wild Irish girl? Ready for a little lovin'?”

I was appalled, even frightened, by my reluctance. The lovers' world of the good ship
Manhattan
was beyond recall here in the center of the real Manhattan. It was equally hard to summon the spirit of my long-dead Irish heroines to this hotel room, three thousand miles away from Bel fires and Ireland's mystic darkness. Yet how could I say no to him? I had chosen him before the sad eyes of Archbishop John McCloskey.

Dan sat on the edge of the bed, taking off his clothes. “Where in hell did you get him, Bess? Your brother. He's an idiot.”

“Try to be patient with him,” I said.

“Yeah,” Dan said perfunctorily. “Just don't you listen to him, Bess. You stick with me in this thing. We're goin' to win this war—and have ourselves a good old time in the bargain.”

I thought of the drunken truthteller on the
Manhattan
and wondered if he was talking to encourage himself as well as me. I remembered the bitter defeated soldier facing his poverty. I saw his need to believe those brave words. I wanted to love him, but as I opened my arms to him, I could see and hear nothing but reproachful eyes, condemning mouths. I could only think of the distance between Ireland and Tennessee.

The next morning I awoke in a disconsolate mood. After Dan left me I had lain awake for hours. He seemed unaware of the halfhearted way I had responded to his kisses and caresses. After breakfast, Mike Hanrahan arrived with another group of reporters, mostly from magazines that came out weekly or monthly. They sketched and questioned me for the better part of two hours. I could never have endured it without Mike's philosophy of playing a role. He took one look at me and knew there was something wrong.

“Bish‘ McCloskey's still botherin' you, eh?” he said. “Just remember the old adage, the show must go on. A good actress plays her part whether it's comedy or tragedy, no matter how she feels.”

“How do you know so much about acting?”

“I did a turn or two before the footlights until I realized no woman was ever goin' to worship my ugly mug. It's the handsome boyos who get the girls—and the money.”

I got through the interview without mishap and the scribblers departed. Mike said I was “at liberty” for the rest of the day. Michael and Dan had gone off to Moffat House, the Fenian headquarters. I decided to use my freedom to find my sister Annie.

Sweeney gave me directions to the Metropolitan Hotel, which was only a dozen or so blocks up Broadway. It was a day of bright sunshine, and I set out in high spirits, glad of the chance to stretch my legs. Even at this hour, about eleven in the morning, Broadway was thronged with carriages and white-topped omnibuses and hackney coaches. I was fascinated by the carmen, who wore white canvas smocks and drove big two-wheeled carts while standing on a narrow platform in front. It was amazing, the way they kept their balance on this lurching, tipping slab of wood.

Within a half hour I was at the Metropolitan Hotel. It was impossible to miss it. The place filled an entire block on Broadway, a great brownstone cliff of a building just north of an even larger and more spectacular hostelry, the St. Nicholas, also a block long and fronted in white marble. Inside I found myself in an immense hall with a marble pavement and tremendous Corinthian pillars of black basalt. I wandered about like a lost soul for a few minutes while people trod confidently past me. Suddenly I was face to face with a black man—my first sight of a Negro. He was as tall as Dan, and he looked as strong. He was carrying a half dozen bags under his long arms.

“Can you help me?” I asked. “I'm lost entirely.”

“Why sho, Miss,” he said. “You lookin' for someone?”

I explained, and his face broke into a cheerful smile. “I know Miss Fitzmaurice. You just wait here until I get these bags into a hack.”

From behind me, a man's voice shouted, “Come on, boy, let's go. I got a train to catch.”

“Yes, suh,” said my black friend. He was back within sixty seconds, shaking his head, looking at a coin in his hand. “Seven bags and he give me a nickel,” he said. “Just like a Yankee. Never get a good tip from no man north of the Connecticut line.”

Some of the things he said reminded me of Dan's accent. I asked him if he was from Tennessee. “How'd you know that?” he said. I told him I had a friend who came from the same place.

While we talked, he led me rapidly through the immense hall to several rooms beyond it. Here I found remarkable numbers of well-dressed women sitting on couches and chairs, looking bored. Lesser but still considerable numbers of children sat beside them looking equally bored.

In a last, smaller room at the rear of the building, a dark-haired woman sat playing a piano in the far corner. “There she be,” said my black guide. “She come down here and play real nice music every mornin'.”

I recognized the back of Annie's lovely head, her graceful neck, at the same moment that I remembered the tune. It was “The Nut Brown Maid,” an old song that Father liked to sing to us. I gave my black Tennessee guide a dollar and tiptoed across the room. Standing just behind Annie, I sang the words.

“Bessie,” Annie cried and sprang up. We flung ourselves together in a heartfelt kiss. She stepped away from the piano, gazing at me, shaking her head. “I can't believe it,” she said. “My little sister.”

I had been a gawky thirteen-year-old when Annie went to America, six years ago. It took an effort for me to realize how different I looked to her. She, on the other hand, did not look so different to me. She was only more beautiful now. Her figure was fuller, and there was a graver, yet not unpleasant, cast to her mouth. Her skin was the same pure MacNamara white, without a freckle or a blemish. Her thick black hair, set in a series of piquant ringlets on her forehead with a glowing fall at the back, was still a crown of glory. She was wearing a delicate touch of color on her cheeks and lips, which perfectly set off the skin and hair.

“I've done nothing for two days but read about you. I think the only paper that hasn't carried your story is the
Times,
but they hate the Irish and would never publish anything good about them. Where did you learn to shoot a gun? Has Father turned into a Fenian warrior? Where's Michael? Why isn't he with you?”

“Michael is the Fenian warrior,” I said, and did my best to separate the truth from the fictions published by the papers. I made no secret of Dan McCaffrey being the true hero of the tale.

“Is he from New York?” Annie asked. “I don't know him.”

“From Tennessee,” I said. “I'm—in love with him. But I don't know exactly what to do about it. Not that I haven't already done—a great deal. I need advice, Annie.”

“Of course you do. That's why I told Dick to go down to the dock to meet you. But let's not talk here. There are too many eyes and ears.”

I looked around and noticed that all the women in the room were staring at us with the greatest fascination. Annie led me out to the main lobby and the elevator. In five minutes we were in the sitting room of what she called her “apartment.” It was as elegantly furnished as Mrs. McGlinchy's living room in Brooklyn, with a red velvet sofa and dark purple armchairs. On the walls were not chromos but real paintings of rural scenes. Beyond the sitting room were two more rooms, fitted out as sleeping chambers, with handsomely carved fourposter beds.

“Who pays for all this?” I said. “Have you become an actress?”

“My innocent little Irish sister,” Annie said. She took a bottle of champagne out of a cabinet and pulled a long velvet cord by the window. A black man in a red uniform appeared within seconds, so it seemed. His name was Washington Jones. She introduced him to me and said, “Get me a bucket of ice, will you, Wash?”

Wash was soon back with the bucket, into which he cheerfully twirled the champagne. Popping it open, he poured the first round into our glasses, accepted a tip from Annie, and departed.
“Sean ait aboo,”
Annie said, raising her wine to Father's family salute, which meant “Hurrah for the Old Place.” She took a swallow that all but emptied her glass, and refilled it before continuing with her answer to my question.

“I haven't become an actress, little sister,” she said. “But I've become a wiser woman since I saw you last. You know what that skunk Kelly did to me. When I wouldn't marry him, he threw me out on the street without a cent. That was my first mistake, not marrying him. But I didn't know that six years ago. Jesus, it seems like a century.”

“But you told us it would have meant sinning your soul with him every time—” I said.

“Yes, I remember using that quaint phrase,” Annie said. “Sinning my soul. I soon found out that sinning your soul was the favorite sport of every man in New York. I went looking for work. Honest toil, as our late Archbishop Hughes called it. I thought I could become a governess—the town is loaded with millionaires looking for governesses. But no one with an Irish name can get any such job. For an Irish girl, it's down on her knees with a scrub brush in her hand.”

“Did you do that?”

“Yes. At the Jeromes. One of the very best families, you know. I'll show you their mansion. The master of the house, Leonard Jerome, is one of the richest men in New York, worth at least ten million. At the ball he gave to open the house, he decorated the ballroom with five thousand orchids. In the center were two fountains, one spouting champagne, the other eau de cologne, all night. A few weeks after I arrived, he passed me in the upper hall, where I was scrubbing away. He told me to stand up and looked me over like you would a prize horse.”

Annie rose and poured herself more champagne. She filled my glass as well. Again she all but emptied her glass in a single swallow. I soon understood why she needed reinforcement, as she continued her story. Two nights later, Leonard Jerome summoned her to his room. It was past midnight. He was in bed with the belle of the season, Mrs. Pierre Lorillard Ronalds. They were both naked. Jerome sat on the edge of the bed, fooling with himself. “Take off your clothes,” he said to Annie, “and get into bed here. We're not having any fun this way.”

Annie refused. Jerome glared at her and repeated his order. “Oh, Leonard, you're just drunk,” said Mrs. Ronalds. “Let the girl go to bed.”

“I gave her an order. She'll obey it,” Jerome roared. “Take off your clothes.”

Annie was too terrified to speak. She could only shake her head, again refusing. Jerome lurched from the bed and tore her robe and nightgown from her body. He grabbed her by the hair and flung her into the bed. The excitement aroused him, and he raped her with consummate brutality. Then he swung over and began a similar execution on the elegant Mrs. Ronalds, who permitted him to do his worst, while she mocked him. “Defile me, Leonard, that's all men like you can do,” she said. “That's all you're good for, creating disgust. In the end you may even enable me to tolerate my husband.”

“Bitch—bitch—bitch,” Jerome snarled with every stroke. “You should be downtown with the rest of the whores. That's where you belong.”

“I know,” she said. “Do unto me what you've done to them, Leonard. Do it all.”

In retaliation, Jerome withdrew from Mrs. Ronalds and again took Annie. “You see how considerate I am,” he sneered. “I withhold the best of myself. Does it make you sick with longing?”

“No, only sick with pity for that poor girl,” Mrs. Ronalds said.

She watched, expressionless, as Annie writhed in his arms and succumbed with a shudder to his consummation. “Now get out,” Mrs. Ronalds said to Jerome. “Go sleep somewhere else in this marble kennel.”

Jerome departed with a snarl. Annie lay sobbing hysterically. Mrs. Ronalds gently soothed her, revealing a womanly tenderness she had withheld from Jerome. She led the weeping girl into the private bathroom of the bed-chamber and ran water in the tub for her and showed her how to use a syringe to cleanse the inner part of her body and avoid a baby. She sat beside the tub, telling Annie she was very beautiful and she must not allow this experience to shake her faith in her beauty. Leonard Jerome saw her only as a scrubmaid, but there were other men in the city who would see her as a princess. Annie wondered how or why and sobbed out the story of her first betrayal. Now she was doubly ruined.

“You must stop thinking in that old-fashioned way,” Mrs. Ronalds said. “A woman is never ruined until her spirit is broken. Keep your inner heart inviolate and that will never happen.”

She told Annie the story of her own life. She had deliberately married Ronalds, a much older man, whom she saw she could dominate. Her defiant spirit infuriated men like Jerome, who believed that every woman—and most men—should grovel before them.

Annie still had no idea what she should do. She threw herself on this woman's mercy. Staying in Jerome's service was out of the question. Mrs. Ronalds told her to pack her things and come home with her. The next morning she received Annie in her bedroom, and they discussed her future.

Mrs. Ronalds offered her the following alternatives. She could get Annie work as a hostess at one of the finest concert saloons, such as the Louvre. There she would be on display to some of the best and richest men in New York, men who appreciated beauty and—in some cases—knew how to treat a cultivated woman. Or she could procure her a place in one of the best parlor houses, where a select clientele of wealthy men went to enjoy the women who lived there. As a resident she could look forward to earning as much as two hundred dollars a night—and more important, the possibility of meeting a man who found her so much to his liking that he became her protector. Or she could attempt a career on the stage. The chorus lines of several theaters were open to girls with her beauty.

Annie decided that she preferred the concert saloon. Becoming an outright lady of the evening was repugnant to her. For the theater, she felt she had small talent and little interest. So, with Mrs. Ronalds's intercession, she soon found herself ensconced as a well-dressed hostess in the Louvre, the best of the concert saloons. Her purpose was to charm the guests, persuade them to buy only the most expensive champagne, and make sure the pretty waiter girls behaved with reasonable decorum.

Her beauty made her an immediate success. She was soon being squired to all the best shows and seated on the right hand of millionaires at restaurants such as Delmonico's. At the end of the evening, she would sometimes respond by showing her “appreciation.” It was not bestowed casually, and it thus was all the more ardently sought. Gifts of jewelry, gowns, furs, invitations to Europe were showered upon her. Still, she remembered her mentor's injunction and kept her inner heart inviolate.