Men of No Property (12 page)

But in the dark stillness of her room before sleep came, she came to think less about Mr. Chanfrau and his actors and more of the great company of laboring men and women from whom he had taken his characters: butchers, dock workers, mechanics, coachmen, hod carriers and bill-posters, and the women they courted and married. Their like was not in Dublin, for all that the trades and labors might be the same. There was a bounce to them here, a noisy joy when they were together, a bawling riotous companionship that made them as bold as their red undershirts. They spoke out their contempt for the aristocracy and called themselves Democrats to the last man. They voted to prove it and counting the votes, declared half of New York to be their own. If there was a place for a woman amongst them, she thought, except as they could boast her rescue, she would go home. Norah was home. Running down the steps of her flat with a tin to the milk man, she was home. Carting an armful of mending to Mary Lavery’s and sitting with it over a cup of tea, she was home. In a church pew on Sunday with Dennis, and Emma between them, she was praying a blessing on her home. Taking Dennis his dinner warm in a bucket to where he worked at the Catherine Street Market, she was home. Snug in his arms at night, his breath whistling through her hair, she was as much at home as ever a woman might be on earth.

On the morning she counted Mrs. Riordon out the last of half her share of the money she and Norah had brought from Ireland, Peg dressed herself in her best and took a twopenny omnibus ride to an intelligence office on Broadway near Bleecker Street. Ordinarily, she would have walked it, but she wanted to look her neatest. Besides, the condition of her slippers was such now that the truth could shine through their soles. And the truth was she had spent half her money against the advice of everyone whose business it was and whose business it was not and, she thought, they would never count the little wisdom she had gained a fair exchange for it.

It was not yet nine o’clock, but the intelligence office was swarming with women, most of them sallow and harried looking as though they had hastened in to escape the light of the sun. They wore all fashion, fit and color of bonnet and shawl, the cast-offs, no doubt, of a previous employer. As mismatched were their costumes as a brogue and a dancing shoe. Peg stood apart for a moment to get her bearings. She had never before sought employment through an office which procured it, but, she thought, if any of these unfortunates polishing their drab skirts on the pine benches had the sense they were born with, they would stick their heads in the air and get the more pay for it. As close as they came to lifting their chins was to gape at her where she stood and jerk their heads toward her while they nudged one another. Peg felt the color rise to her face. She had heard tell of the kind of work a girl might be sent out to from here if she had the size and shape and taste for it. It took no great wisdom to understand where these lovelies would place her if they had the chance.

She walked the length of the room and back before approaching an empty place on one of the benches. The two women on either side of it moved closer to one another, closing the breach.

“Sluts,” she said under her breath. She retreated with more grace than she felt. For the first time in New York, she was afraid. She walked around and around them, their eyes following her, until she felt the strain tearing at her. She felt as though she was turning into an animal, that she should leap upon them and destroy those she could before the rest devoured her. Finally a man came out from behind a glass-paneled door. He wore spectacles and pulled them down half the length of his nose to explore the applicants. It gave him the appearance of looking with his nose and not with his eyes at all. It might well be that he could tell as much with his nose here, Peg thought. He waved her onto the bench with one finger, and the crones made way for her, toppled by the finger of authority. Crones they were, though many of them were no older than herself. They were crones in the cradle, she thought, and wondered where they were cradled.

“I’ve several places,” the man said. “You can all wait today.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of the girl nearest to him. “Come, you.”

“I was here when ye turned the key in the door!” a woman cried.

The man took off his glasses and polished them on his cravat. “The last shall be first and the first shall be last, as the good book says.”

“And the devil can quote scripture to his own purpose,” Peg said in a murmur.

He closed the door on her words, but not before he had seen who was speaking.

With his promise of places, the women perked up. Some grew very nearly companionable.

“Yous shouldn’t of spoke like that to him,” one next to Peg said. “Yer a greenhorn or yous wouldn’t. I always say there’s two kinds of people in this world you don’t talk back to—them givin’ out the charity and them givin’ out summonses.”

“I don’t count employment a charity,” Peg said.

“Don’t yous now?” The woman looked into her face, her eyes small with envy. “When yous’ve lost the good looks, yous’ll change yer tune.”

“If I was you, love,” one down the line said, sticking her thin neck out of her collar and cocking her head till it looked like a knob on a cane, “if I was you, I’d look for a place as a waitress in one o’ them fancy restaurants. They do say you can get yer pockets filled on the side, they say.”

“Providin’ you don’t wear pockets if you know what I mean,” another one said, poking her elbow into the ribs of her nearest companion.

A woman opposite Peg rocked back and forth. “You can all wait today,” she mimicked the intelligence man. “Today and tomorrow and the next day, and if ye die on his hands the city’ll bury you.”

“And make a profit on layin’ yer out.”

Peg lost track of them talking, picking up only fragments of the complaints and lamentations. If she had any doubt on where they were cradled she lost it. Ireland had mothered them all.

“… And when I axed her for the job, she sticks her nose in the air. ‘I told them not to send me another Irish girl,’ she says. ‘My dear, I’ll give you the bus fare. Go back and tell them I want a nice black girl.’ ‘Well,’ says I, and me needin’ the work awful bad wi’ my Joe laid up on me, says I to her, ‘if ye’ll turn yer back a minute, I’ll go up the chimney and down and yous can take another look then at me color.’”

“To my way of thinking, all intelligence offices should be licensed,” one said. “The places they send a decent girl…” She rocked back and raised her cry to the ceiling.

“You say the word, licensin’, and it’s red republicanism they call it,” said a girl in a yellow bonnet that looked to have been saved from the gutter.

“It sounds like somethin’ you’d put yer foot on if you seen it,” another one said.

“Oh,” said the woman next to her, “did you hear Bishop Hughes on Sunday? They’re risin’ up like a plague over the earth. France is the worst, by all accounts. There was a bishop shot at the barricades in the street fightin’.”

“And what was he doin’ at the barricades?” asked the one in the yellow bonnet.

The one telling the story had no time for questions. “And the terriblest thing of all—there’s a crop of them took root in Ireland.”

“They’ll die there for want o’ nourishment, ha!” said the one with the long neck.

Or in exile, Peg thought, for she had heard Young Ireland cursed before. She had not forgotten Stephen Farrell, but that strange brief knowing of each other seemed to have made even speaking acquaintanceship impossible. He had not permitted a lone moment between them on the boat after it, and many dreams since had washed between her and her memory of him. Once or twice she was tempted to boldly look him up through the Irish Directory. “I’m as fit now to be a governess,” she fancied herself saying to him, “as ever a girl turned out of a female academy.” And hadn’t she once coaxed the promise of help from him? She wasn’t near as bold as she thought, she decided now. Day by day, the words had stuck deeper in her throat. She hadn’t the gall to put herself up to a theatre manager, much less to Stephen Farrell. Things had not turned out as she expected declaring her independence. Relieved of the responsibility of Norah, in some black magical way she had been relieved of the power to deal even with the responsibility for herself.

She let her eyes roam over the carping women: rags, bones and a prayer. A silence fell over them when the glass-paneled door opened letting out the one first chosen. She ran to the street door, the chosen one, clutching the white slip of paper as though it might be torn from her hand. Long-nose beckoned the next chosen into his parlor after scenting her out from the rest. The two were the neatest, Peg realized, except herself. In skipping her either he had some dire purpose in mind for her or no place he felt she would satisfy. That was it. When she spoke out, he decided she was too quick tongued for domestication. Something like terror rose in her. Until she was like them here, they were her betters. She tried to still the fear in listening to the carp and cant as it started again on the door’s closing.

“Ach, Ireland…” It was the one in the yellow bonnet again. Her face was lined with pain, a young face aging fast, and there was the look in it of having thought about the pain and where it came from, and why it came at all, for the lines showed the power of thought as well as the pain. “… She calls them tellin’ her to rise up patriots, and when they rise up for her she calls them traitors. When they’re dead she makes martyrs out o’ them. Will he keep us sittin’ here all day like niggers on a block?”

Today, tomorrow and the next day, Peg remembered, wondering then how long ago and where it was she heard the words. What chance had she for a governess coming out of here? What chance of becoming a lady? And what want? There was, lower than these rags, bones and prayers, yet another pit of degradation. She had seen it the first night in New York and night and day since, and pitied it. Pity be damned. All of them here were perched on the rim of it. She could see, her head swimming with the vision, face by face of them over a pot of hot corn, a bundle of sticks, a fistful of matches. She could hear their wheedles of beggary, their curses and their whined blessings for a ha’penny. Which of them wouldn’t now give what was left of her joy to lay her head against a red-shirted chest? She got up stiffly and looked around to the outer door, wanting to be sure of it before she took her first step, lest that be as uncertain as she felt of the future.

“Where’re you goin’, lovie? There’s no conveniences here, you know.”

“I’m going home,” Peg said.

“She’s had a change of heart,” said another.

“Isn’t she the lucky one, that’s the only change comin’ on her.”

Once on the street, Peg felt herself steadying. It was the closeness of the room, she thought, remembering the windows high from the floor where a person would need stilts to look out. She could never stand to be penned in. The great trees on either side of Broadway were bare and somehow greater for that, for the sky shone through them. There were good homes in this part of town, she could see, looking east and west, fine stone houses with the stoops shining marble. The brass knobs and knockers gleamed in the sunlight. A woman was out here and there, her skirts folded into a coverall, polishing the brass, and clutching a shawl at her throat while she worked. There was the cry of winter in the wind, Peg thought. Half the drays on the street were carting firewood. Little whirlwinds churned up the dirt to stir round with the posters of last week’s election.

In the afternoon she began a search of Chambers Street. Of the people she knew in New York including her sister, the only one she wanted to see now was Vinnie. He had called upon her twice since the wedding, once soon after it when she had planned an escape for the evening and was short with him, fool that she had been, and the second time to sit a miserable hour with her in the cold parlor and colder presence of Mrs. Riordon and her sewing.

“So you’re apprenticed to a locksmith,” Mrs. Riordon had said, sliding the thread along her false teeth until she found a place where they met long enough to clip it.

“Yes…ma’am,” Vinnie had said.

“Every greenhorn ought to be sworn into apprenticeship as they step off the boat,” Mrs. Riordon pronounced. That, Peg had known, was a dig at her. If the woman had known the only apprenticeship Peg wanted to serve, she would have dug deeper and shoveled her out of the house entirely.

“Do you like it, Vinnie?” Peg had asked.

“Somit,” the boy said.

“Of course he likes it,” Mrs. Riordon said. “He knows it’s for his own good. I had a nephew once apprenticed to an iron monger. He was killed in the Mexican War, poor lad. It lost the family a fortune, him dyin’ ahead of his master. Ah, but the Lord knows best. Is he a bachelor, Mr. Finn? Mrs. Lavery tells me he is.”

“I dunno,” Vinnie said.

“If he is,” Mrs. Riordon had pursued in her way of asking a question to which she proclaimed an answer in the same breath, “there’s your future if you’re a canny lad. Is he havin’ you live in, Mrs. Lavery says?”

Vinnie said that he was.

“Is it yoursel’s alone?”

“Yes…ma’am.”

Peg had marked his “ma’ams” coming awkward as they did, but coming nonetheless.

Mrs. Riordon had grinned, her thin lips stretching hard around the teeth. “And no woman at all?”

“Only the servant.”

“Oh, you fell into a feathered nest!” she exclaimed. “There’s confection there on the table. Break yoursel’ off a piece.”

With an ax, Peg had thought. The sweet was as hard and cold as her charity. “Is it a nice room you have, Vinnie?” Peg tried.

“’Tis. There’s two windows in it lookin’ different ways.” He had almost come to life then to tell her about it.

Mrs. Riordon had drowned him. “Never lie between them of a night,” she cautioned. “You’ll catch your death.”

And lose another acquaintance of hers a fortune, Peg had thought. “There’s a nice coat you’re wearing, Vinnie,” she had tried again. “’Tis a better fit than the one Norah made you.”

“Here’s me sellin’ coat,” the boy said, holding up his arm as though to display it better. “I wear t’other at the work bench.”