Decorum (19 page)

Blanche remembered the child who was supposed to be entertaining her. He had sat mute and wide-eyed. “Thank you for sharing your book with me,” she said as she nearly slapped his hand shut in the picture book. Jeremiah retreated to the safety of Mr. O’Casey.

Edmund, who had been watching Blanche from the other side of the room, reached Mrs. Worth just as Francesca rose from her chair.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen these particular objects, have I?” asked Francesca. She smiled at Blanche, as if she were sensible of Blanche’s precarious position and meant to exert herself in being friendly. It was insufferable.

“No, dear. I don’t think you usually go in for this type of art, but you may find it of interest, so do come along.” Blanche and Edmund looked at each other in veiled horror. To be “chaperoned” by Mrs. Worth was one thing. To be accompanied by the fiancée was quite another.

For the first time, Blanche wondered if the strain and mortification it cost her to gain acceptance were worth it. As she mounted the stairs beside the society matron whose acquaintance she had sought for so long, she felt even more cut off, as if it were the family who had been rescued and not she. Even Connor appeared to be relieved as Blanche cast him an unpleasant backward glance. Now with Edmund and the Lund woman following behind her, she felt trapped in an untenable situation of her own making. Behind her lay her old life with Edmund, who was about to shackle himself to this woman who had no business marrying him. In front of her lay a massive void she could not negotiate without O’Casey—O’Casey’s name, O’Casey’s money, O’Casey’s growing respectability.

Blanche endured Mrs. Worth’s pre-Columbian acquisitions in this new field of artistic exploration. To Blanche, they were no more than primitive and vulgar curiosities, with their broad and smooth-featured faces and their intricate and abstract decoration. The Lund woman compared their intricate designs to the jewelry her mother brought from Scandinavia and exclaimed over the workmanship. Such enthusiasm made Blanche sick. For a moment she sought refuge in Edmund’s eyes. She could see he was as bored as she and the look between them confirmed the disdain each felt for these people.

The look he returned penetrated her being and made her every fiber and sinew aware of him. It seemed ages before she came to herself, so completely did she drink in his eyes and lips so that nothing else existed. The silence of their preoccupation made Francesca and Mrs. Worth look up from the collection. Blanche hoped she had recovered herself quickly enough to quell suspicion. But as Francesca looked from her to Tracey, Blanche knew it was too late.

C
HAPTER
24

Connor stared into space, a whiskey glass in his hand, a chaser of buttermilk on the bar. The tavern was a careworn Irish establishment he had found early in his solitary wanderings around New York. The heavy acrid smell of cheap tobacco hung everywhere. Smoke hung in ashen whorls that smothered the low light of the gas lamps. Chew collected in a brown, syrupy mash at the bottom of the tin pails or pooled in slimy puddles on the floor. The barroom was a dark shade of a forgotten color. The chatter was merry or contentious, the accent lilting or hard-edged, depending on its owner’s origin. A small riot of children could be heard at the back door, waiting for their families’ supper beer. Connor wandered there when he needed to think, away from any judgment but his own, with no demands and nothing to prove, where no one knew him or would think to look for him.

Until Thanksgiving, Miss Francesca Lund had been an abstraction, an anonymous beauty, no more than a mental dalliance and a chance encounter. He raised the glass to his lips and fixed his gaze on the large painting of an odalisque that hung over the bar. The woman in the painting returned his look, her fingers twisted in the fair hair that tumbled down in heaps of curls across her shoulders and between her ample breasts. The mental leap to the frothy-haired Miss Lund was not a long one.

Time was when such a picture conjured up an image of Blanche. More than an image—a touch, a scent, a rush, a release. But what did it amount to in the main? A few dresses, a few baubles, changing tweeds for evening dress, a room for a suite, a tavern for a restaurant, and a music hall for the opera, better and finer over more than a year, but there it stopped. The same old patterns simply became clothed in finer trappings. He had not realized this before.

He downed the shot and flexed his hand around the small heavy glass, kneading at it as if it were a lump of clay, working it until the glass was hot in his palm. Then he smote the bar with the glass and said, “Another. Leave the bottle. A round for the house while you’re about it—and more buttermilk.” The barkeep said nothing, but touched two fingers to his forehead in a semi-salute, receiving a jangle of coins tossed onto the bar in return.

Make no mistake—he liked Blanche. She’d been loyal and put up with his shortcomings and had done whatever he had asked. Despite her outward refinement, she found amusement in the seamy and questionable, in innuendo that made even he himself uneasy. She threw herself into each day as if tomorrow might not come. This passionate recklessness was part of her attraction, this ability to say to hell with it all and follow the day’s good idea until she got bored with it. Then dawn would break and it would begin all over again. It could be exciting for a time, until one had to deal with the wreckage in her wake. Blanche needed managing by a firm hand, and yet, somehow she had managed him into keeping his eyes fixed on the details in front of him, not the future.

Consequently, he had not connected the future with her. Not really. In spite of her encouragement, her fitting him for better things, he had not stopped to consider whether her style was his style or her ambitions his. He had kept things simple and kept things moving and had ignored anything that looked like longing that might gnaw at his own soul.

The Deal had been the goal before, the brass ring. If he could only get there—get
there
—then he would prove to himself and the world that Connor O’Casey was equal to anyone. Here he was, soaring above his detractors, boldly facing out the possibility of failure. He
was there,
and now that he was, did he dare think what he was thinking? A different kind of belonging had entered the picture—a clannishness that hovered over every gathering like a great bulk and formed an invisible glue that cemented one to the tribe. Now there were children and grandchildren—the Worths’, of course, not his. Now there were friends gathered around a table for a meal and an evening’s entertainment—the Jeromes’, of course, not his. He could build the finest mansion in New York if he wanted to, but what good was a cavernous mansion if it did not echo the laughter and tears of a family? Was there any point at all when a man had been content to live alone in a few small rooms? He was not content to die alone in a few small rooms, that was the point.

If ever there appeared to be a woman who looked to the future, who might be eager to form the next clan cemented to the larger tribe, it was Francesca Lund. Was liking Blanche—was gratitude—enough to glue the two of them to the tribe? Again, he raised his glass to the fair-haired odalisque, threw the shot down his gullet, and chased it with the buttermilk.

Then, there was all the church business. Connor was hardly looking to be reformed, but his instinct told him it drove deeper than that. The little twinges of discomfort Francesca stirred in him might be the disquietude of a soul long fallen into disuse, a moth-eaten part of him that needed tending. That he had probed his inner self enough to work that out made him uneasy, too, but he could picture no other woman to whom he could dare admit that he possessed so frail an object. No one ever said that possession of a soul would stand in the way of enjoying with her the awakening of those physical instincts that marriage would sanction. Quite the contrary.

But could he pull off such a coup? There must have been fifteen years between them and there were plenty of men nearer her age who could cut a fine figure. What of it? If she could shoulder all this, then she was the kind of woman with whom he could see himself growing old, in a mansion full of offspring, with a business to leave them, and a good name and a future. That was the brass ring—no, not brass, but gold.

He had been so deep in the problem of Miss Francesca Lund that he almost started when he discovered a laborer at his shoulder. This wouldn’t do. This woman was making him soft in the head. The man put his hand on Connor’s shoulder.

“We’re much obliged to you for the drink,” he said, looking Connor up and down, his comment bordering ever so slightly on a sneer.

“ ’Tis no trouble,” said Connor, turning only his head to get a good look at the man and laying on his accent a tad thick. He poured himself another and raised it to his lips, returning his gaze to the row of bottles behind the bar and the long mirror behind them, above which the odalisque gazed at him.

“Won’t you join us then?” said the man. It was a statement rather than a question.

“I’m obliged to you, but no. Thank you kindly.”

“Might we at least know to whom we’re to give our thanks?” The man stood with his hands on his hips.

“Give your thanks to God, then, if you must thank somebody. I need no thanks.”

“Are you mocking us, sir?”

“I mean no disrespect. Another glass,” said Connor. The barkeep plunked the glass down and moved on. Connor poured a whiskey and shoved it toward the man, then poured one for himself and said,
“Sláinte.”

Before Connor could pick up the chaser, the man grabbed his arm.

Connor looked at him full in the face. “I’d be obliged if you’d unhand me.”

“Would you, now? The gentleman would like me to ‘unhand him,’ boys,” said the man to his mates at the end of the bar. “Afraid he’ll get a crease in him and give over smellin’ like toilette water. Then his lady-friends won’t find him quite so appealing.”

His mates guffawed and whistled as the man stiffened his grip. Connor made one last now-or-never attempt to retrieve his arm. He pulled it out of the man’s grip and poured himself another drink. The man’s expression instantly changed from mockery to a squinty-eyed disgust.

“We don’t take kindly to them as can’t be social,” he said, pushing Connor back by the shoulder with a jerk. Connor turned and faced the man. They stood nearly eye to eye. “Them as can’t be social we generally try to make unwelcome.”

“I don’t take kindly to being manhandled by a stinking, slovenly bastard like you,” said Connor calmly. He drew up his walking stick as he spoke and tucked the knob-handle under the end of the kerchief that was around the man’s neck and gave it a playful flip, then tapped him once on the chest for emphasis.

“Dirty son of a
bitch,
” the man began as he wheeled and threw his arm back, winding up for a punch. Before he could deliver the blow, Connor lifted his fist, which still engulfed the small, hard whiskey glass, and threw a punch to the man’s upper lip. The room gasped as the man reeled backward. He made straight for Connor’s gut, only to receive an upper cut to the face with the walking stick. Connor beaned him for good measure.

The man’s mates rushed Connor. Each grabbed an arm. With his face bloodied and his head spinning, the opponent was not so light on his feet. He lurched toward Connor like a bear on hind legs and lunged for his throat. Connor, who had not wasted his energy with struggling, poured all his power into the upward thrust into the man’s groin. Red pain and anger suffused the man’s face as he fell to his knees, his hands clasped between his legs. Connor finished him off with a kick to the head.

The room rioted. Old wounds that had taken years of patient healing were wrenched apart as Connor was set upon by man after man. As the blows fell, the room spun into the likeness of the office of the Five Star Mine.

“They’ve waited to be paid for months,” shouted Connor’s friend and partner Walter West.

“This mine can’t be profitable—” Prescott retorted.

“I don’t want to hear about your damn profits,” shouted Connor. “You’re suckin’ the lifeblood out of these men—”

“While you’re up in your fine houses with your cut glass chamber pots we’re down here—every damned day,” shouted Walter. “We see these men when they come out of that hole. Like ghosts, most of ’em. Soon they won’t be good to anyone—”

“The rest of us investors want to see the ledgers—”

“Then see ’em!”
Connor threw ledger after ledger of the Five Star Mine onto the desk. “
Look at ’em!
What are you doin’? Holdin’ their pay hostage until you’re satisfied? Get your ass down here and manage it yourself if you’re so damned concerned about profits.” Connor lowered his voice. “There’re union men sniffin’ around here—”

“Then run ’em off.”

“
You
run ’em off,” shouted Connor, thrusting a forefinger in the man’s face. “
You
explain to the men how they’d be better off without organization. I’ve worked in those mines and so’s Walt. We swore that when we had the power to make things different for these poor sods, we’d do something—”

“You won’t do it off the backs of the investors, I tell you. And we won’t hear about you paying the men out of your own pockets this time. You’re undermining our authority. It’s about time you—”

A panicked foreman burst through the door. “They know Prescott’s here with his men. They’re comin’ for him.”

“They won’t get past my men,” he said arrogantly. “Get ’em back to work—
now!
”

“
You
get ’em back to work,” shouted Walter. “
You
face ’em.
You
tell ’em.”

A great rock sailed through the window. All three bowed away from the shower of broken glass. In a moment, Walter was on the floor, a head wound gushing blood.

“Walter!” Connor dropped to his groaning friend.

Prescott stepped to the broken pane, drew his revolver, and took aim.

“You won’t!”
screamed Connor.

He hurled himself at Prescott, knocking him off his feet. As he landed on the floor, a shot from Prescott’s gun exploded into the air. Like a signal, the shot discharged a volley of bullets from the men outside to the accompaniment of cries from the angry miners. Connor struggled with Prescott as windows shattered in a hail of rocks and gunfire, and the sound of blunt force against flesh raged just beyond the office door.

Connor wrenched the revolver from Prescott’s grasp and cuffed him across the head with the butt end until the man lay motionless. He crawled to Walter, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and tried to stanch the flow of blood.

“Walter. I’m here,” Connor shouted above the din. “Stay with me, boy.”

“Get out. Get outta the Five Star,” said Walter, his eyes filled with anguish. “You’re too good for Leadville.” Walter raised his hand as if to dismiss Connor’s aid. “Get out. Tell Ida . . .”

The miners burst in and hauled the unconscious Prescott outside and set upon him with rocks and hammers and finished him off. Connor threw himself over Walter.

“Wait! Wait!”
he shouted. They seized Connor and pulled him off as a miner straddled the wounded man’s chest and raised an iron rod. Amid Connor’s cries begging them to stop, he could hear the dull, merciless bludgeoning. Thrown against the jagged ground, Connor suffered blow after blow, unable to fend them off with words and unwilling to raise a hand against them.

Now, in the din and mayhem of the tavern, the stick was ripped from Connor’s hand and used against him, stomach, ribs, and head, but he had no chance to fall. Whipped into a frenzy, the tavern’s patrons pressed against him, lifting him off his feet as they made their way to the door. With one great heave he sailed out into the street. Walter’s words echoed through his brain.
Get outta the Five Star. You’re too good for Leadville. Tell Ida.
The last blows left Connor O’Casey a bruised, bleeding, and unconscious heap.