Men of No Property (11 page)

Dennis, alone the moment in the parlor, heard footsteps on the outside stairs. He signaled Norah to be still when she returned, and then Kevin. They waited, listening. Just as the footsteps reached the top, there was a bump, bump, bump down the stairs as though someone had dropped a ball.

Kevin pushed Dennis and Norah into the kitchen, following them into the dark, and at that moment Mary charged into the parlor from the hall, her red hair streaming behind her, her wrapper spread like an angel’s wings. She turned round and round, seeing no one.

“Where are you all?” she called out. “Come in here and not be spoofin’ at this hour!”

Peg opened the outside door a crack, and said “Sh-sh” through it.

Mary turned round on her and thumped across the room. “Oh, I’ll shush you!” she cried, flinging the door open and pulling first Peg and then Vinnie into the room. “You’ll have us disgraced in the neighborhood, on the streets at this hour!”

Her hand on Peg’s arm did violence to the skirtful of apples the girl was carrying and they tumbled over the floor, rolling in all directions.

“Glory to God,” Mary said, staring round at them. “Were you goin’ in the business?”

Kevin danced into the room, picking up an apple and then another, and a third, taking them to his wife. “We’ll have applesauce, and roast apples, and dumplings, dumpling.” He flung his arms around her.

Mary pushed him away. “We’re housin’ a nest of idiots and you’re catchin’ it.” She looked around the room and saw Norah and Dennis standing arm in arm. “Oh-h,” she said then, “I’m beginnin’ to catch on. Every time he goes to a weddin’ he’s actin’ the bridegroom. It’s the two of you, is it?”

“It is,” Dennis said, “and I’m burstin’ with pride.”

Norah had not taken her eyes from her sister. Now when Peg turned and looked at her and lifted her arms, Norah ran into them and hugged her. “Oh, Peg, I’m so glad you’re back. I was afraid you’d run off and left me.”

Peg kissed her cheek. “What are you cryin’ for, silly? Isn’t it you runnin’ off now and leavin’ me?”

“I’d never leave you,” Norah said. “We’ll be makin’ a home now, Dennis and me, and it’ll be your home when you will, and Vinnie’s…” She turned to him. “And little Emma will start with us.”

“And the next boat load from Ireland as well,” Kevin said. “You’ll need to prosper, brother of mine.”

“And prosper I will,” Dennis said. He looked at Vinnie. The boy had set his share of the burden he and Peg had brought home on the floor, a great jug with a handle and a bundle of books tied with a rope, a fancy parasol, and his cap full of chestnuts. “Vinnie, have you nothin’ to say to us?”

“I’ve somit,” the boy said, sniffling to clear his head. “I’m goin’ t’marry Peg when I’m big enough.”

They all laughed, including Peg, but she went to Vinnie and gave him a hug. Thirteen though he was, his head came no higher than her breast. “Bless you, Vinnie,” she said, “I’ll be waitin’ for you.” She swung around. “Give them the jug, Vinnie. ’Tis the best Irish whiskey we seen in New York.”

“Save the jug for the wedding,” Kevin said, “and I’ll whistle a tune down its neck when it’s dry. Is the kettle boiling? I’ll make us some punch.”

“Do you know where we were tonight?” Peg cried. “Up and down Broadway. Norah, Parliament Street is a cowpath. The lights, you’d think there was rainbows shinin’ at night. There’s a band playin’ over your head one place, and you never heard the like of the noise they make. Like a flock o’ geese wi’ the cat chasin’ after them. And there was a place we looked into…” She poked her finger as she walked round the room telling the story, her hips in time with the telling. “The players were black, and one o’ them was beatin’ a drum, rollin’ his eyes to the ceilin’ and them white as the moon. And the dancin’: up in the air and down, over, under and around as though they were prancin’ on coals…”

Dennis watched Vinnie as she told it. The boy’s eyes were as bright as her own. A child of the streets, he thought, Vinnie found them of New York a paradise. Raised on the streets, he had no fear of them, and he wondered if a night in the country wouldn’t terrify the boy.

“Oh-h!” Mary said in her hearty way, “will you listen to her carry on? She could get a job herself on the Barnum balcony!”

Peg stood still. “Do you think I could?”

“Don’t be puttin’ notions into her head,” Norah said. “She’s wild ones there already.”

“From the pile you brought home with you, it looks like you spent your inheritance, the two of you,” Kevin said from where he was squeezing a lemon into a pitcher.

“We earned what we spent,” Vinnie said.

Mary buried her fist in her bosom. “God help us, how’d you do that?”

“We sang,” Peg said proudly. “We sang in the doorways till they invited us in or paid us to get out. And if you’d like to know, I did a jig when they asked it.”

“Did you make more getting in or getting out?” Kevin teased.

“You’re not thinkin’ o’ doin’ it again, are you?” Norah asked.

“No, we’re not,” Peg said, suddenly grave. “’Twas a lark for a night, but the streets are full of creatures maybe as bold as us once. They’re dried up and whinin’, and God help them when the wind’s blowin’. There was a child with legs like a chicken goin’ the rounds of the cellars with apples. ’Twould break your heart…”

Dennis knew then where the apples had come from, and likely the rest of their take, save the whiskey. There was more running through her than sand to a stone heart after all.

“In Dublin there’s not much to yearn after,” Peg went on, “but here there’s laces and linens and furs, and windows closed up on mountains of teas and fruits and sweets.”

“It’s a hard lesson you learned,” Mary said. “The night wasn’t wasted.”

Peg sat down, suddenly weary. She took a deep breath as Kevin poured the boiling water over the lemon, sugar, and spice. “Oh, what a lovely smell that.”

Kevin added the whiskey, stirred the punch and poured it in mugs with handles which he had lined up in a row.

“Vinnie,” Dennis said, “how’d you like to be a locksmith?”

“What’s that?” Vinnie said.

“A man makin’ locks for doors and the keys to open them.”

Vinnie shrugged. “I never seen one. I’d rather sell papers.”

“The town’s crawling with newsboys,” Kevin said. “If you’ve a chance for a trade, take it. There’s not many Irishmen have it in this country, God help us.”

“I’ll speak to Mr. Finn on an apprentice,” Dennis said.

“You better first speak to Mr. Finn on yourself,” Kevin said, handing him a mug. “Isn’t it you that’s getting married?”

“It is,” Dennis said, carrying his drink as fast as he could to Norah that she might have the first sip from it, and he the first sip from hers. “We’ll be married the first priest we can capture.”

“There was one on the boat wasn’t a priest at all,” Peg said.

“Sure,” Mary said, “there’s fish in the ocean with wings. Will you give us the toast, Kevin?”

“I will.” He lifted his cup: “To Norah and Dennis.” He looked then at his wife. “May their happiness be as great as my own. I could wish them no more.”

I
N THE MIDST OF
the preparations for the wedding, Peg made her own declaration of independence. It was the easier done with the distractions of Dennis’ new employment, the finding of a flat for him and Norah, and the coaxing of Vinnie into giving a try to Mr. Finn’s. She fretted one day, and then another attending the children while Mary and Norah skipped to the joys of making a feast. On the morning of the third day, she skipped out herself. Returning at nightfall she announced she was taking a hotel room. The abuse fell about her like hailstones. When it melted, Mary Lavery found her a place in a respectable house kept for working girls by a Mrs. Riordon. Peg moved into it the morning after the wedding.

No one could doubt the respectability of Mrs. Riordon. She was straightened and starched with it, and fortified by an enormous set of false teeth. If ever there had been a Mr. Riordon, all signs of him had been scrubbed from the house on Chrystie Street.

Peg’s first days alone were gloriously to her liking. She came and went from the house at will, taking care however to be down for breakfast and home for tea which were included in the two dollars a week she paid for her room. She determined to squeeze as much of New York out of the money she had as was squeezable. God knew, the lodgings were a fit beginning. She wondered, first seeing the room, that in a country the size of America, they could afford you no bigger a place than where a mouse would knock his head if he got up on his haunches. But she took it without complaint, as she did the meals for there was no telling the tales Mrs. Riordon would carry to the Laverys if she had the provocation.

Indeed, whatever complaining was done in the house seemed the privilege of Mrs. Riordon and not of her boarders. The towels: “If you don’t hang them proper, you’ll have to wash them yoursel’s.” A good washing, Peg thought, would vanish them altogether. “And don’t be lettin’ the curtains fly out the window.” If a sparrow flew out the window, he’d crush his wings on the way, Peg thought. “Help yoursel’s to ’taties and greens,” Mrs. Riordon would say as she slivered a joint of mutton on Sunday, “for a bit of meat costs tenpence.” The rest of the week was made up of fast days. If you looked up from the mush seeing the pattern of the plate shining through it when she set it before you, she’d say: “It’s a fast day. You wouldn’t want to be violating the regulations of Holy Mother the church?”

Holy Mother the church would never have raised the family she had on Mrs. Riordon’s bill of fare, Peg thought. But the astounding thing about the place was not Mrs. Riordon. Peg had seen her like many’s the time picking over the vegetables in the Dublin markets. They were of a kind the world over, the keepers of cheap boarding houses. It was the girls Peg marked with greater wonder. They arose at five-thirty, breakfasted at six, and scurried out of the house at six-thirty. If they spoke at all in the morning, it was to God alone and, Peg thought, He must have answered them, for how else should they have known they were His children? Their faces were as pale as the mush they devoured and their eyes watery as the tea. They were sewing girls, most of them, and at their tables from seven until six with an hour at midday to explore the dinner bucket Mrs. Riordon packed for them at an extra tenpence a week.

Well, God help them, Peg thought after the first week’s observation, theirs was not the life for her. At home if she sewed a dress, it was a dress she sewed and not a thousand sleeves with never a whole thing to see and admire.

She gave them little thought from dawn to dusk, spending her mornings over the books she and Vinnie had bought that first night, and the afternoons promenading the New York streets. Many were the sharp eyes cast after her, and many an arm was offered her in escort. She fashioned herself the dignity of a dowager for such encounters and pretended to be waiting the return of her escort from a man’s errand. She was free, too, with the use of the parasol Vinnie had given her, exploding it into the face of the persistent. She learned the places a girl could go without a man, the picture galleries and the ice cream saloons, and idled many an hour in them, listening always to the accents of the genteel. Alone, she would mimic them and try to thin out her brogue.

Getting out of a night was more difficult, for Mrs. Riordon locked her house at nine. If a girl got a key, it was not put into her hand but into the hand of her escort, and that only after he had been vouched for by his parish priest. Peg made friends with the two girls who were courting, and thus gained her freedom two nights a week. She huddled half her belongings between the blankets on the bed making a shape of them and stole out while Mrs. Riordon stopped at the commode on her way from the kitchen; she stole in on the courting key, while the lovers whispered in the hall to cover the sound of her step. She was into her bed before the girl tapped on Mrs. Riordon’s door and slipped the key under it.

On such nights Peg hastened across the town, having come to know the streets as well as ever she knew Dublin, and lingered outside the theatres until it was time for the curtain to rise. She came to know the performers by sight and the managers by mood. She bided her time and her courage for the night she would speak to one of them. When it was curtain time, she bought the cheapest seat, and took her place amongst the fancy women whom she knew to be there not to see, but to be seen and engaged for the evening. During the intermissions, she would slip into a vacated box and apologize for having mistaken it for her own if the owner returned too soon, or she would stand as tall and remote as she could in a crowd, pulling fretfully at her gloves as though impatient of being left alone for so long. The game was wearing thin, she thought, and she would not like a lifetime of it. She found herself, now and then, looking after a dandy she had dispatched in dudgeon, and wondering what an evening in his company might be like. The thought of its climax drove temptation out of her head.

She made a marvelous discovery at the New National Theatre. The farces were not much to her humor; she wondered at the people rocking and rolling in the pit, laughing till they had to scratch themselves with it. Then it struck her of a sudden that Mose and Lize were the very sort who had danced and howled and boasted till dawn at Norah and Dennis’ wedding. If she had not seen Mr. Chanfrau himself playing Cardinal Richelieu the week before, she would have sworn he was the one near knocked her senseless throwing her up in the air till she cracked her head on the beam…the cigar in his mouth, the to-hell-with-you slouch as he stood taking the measure of the audience before he said a word, the removal of the cigar and the examination of it, the insolent spit from the side of his mouth and the first words: “I ain’t a-goin’ to run wi’ dat machine no more.” Hadn’t she already heard the words herself a dozen times? Wouldn’t Dennis soon be saying them? Six weeks in the country, he was already the pride of a prize company, and Norah swallowing down her heart every time the alarm bell sounded. He’d be quitting for years after answering one more call. Oh, she thought, Mr. Chanfrau was an artist truly.