Men of No Property (19 page)

“I swear to God, Dennis,” the boy said then, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Them! The two of them up there!”

“What about them?”

“Amn’t I just after sayin’ it? It isn’t decent for the two of them to be sittin’ snug up there with nothin’ but the nigger woman between them.”

Vinnie’s face puckered up to the shape and color of a split walnut, and Dennis thought he had offended the boy’s loyalty. He had forgotten how staunch a friend the lad could be, indeed needs be by his nature, and he must now be true to both Peg and Finn. Still, Dennis decided, he must learn that loyalty was one thing and decency another. For all the fancy learning he was getting from books, it was plain to see he was missing his catechism.

“We’ll talk of it another time,” he said, “like men and the friends we are.” He did not offer his hand in fear that the boy might refuse it and harsher words come between them. It was better, having alerted him, to let his own eyes perceive the rest.

D
ENNIS SHOULD NOT HAVE
said that, Vinnie thought, as he started up the stairs. He poked on every step and would have lingered downstairs in the workshop had not the cold struck him like a blow when he put his face in the door. He should not even have thought it, Vinnie decided, because it wasn’t true. Peg and Mr. Finn were friends and people could be friends without getting married. Peg had a friend and maybe even the way Dennis meant, but it wasn’t Mr. Finn or Vinnie Dunne either. And he was coming this very night again after months in Washington. If he told Mr. Finn what Dennis had said, Mr. Finn would laugh. Peg would laugh, too, but maybe not if Mr. Finn was there. Vinnie paused a moment to think about that. Why? He eased the door open and then slid through it, playing the game of not making a sound. Because if what Dennis said was true, Mr. Finn would not have minded.

Peg was in the kitchen with Nancy already, clattering and singing and laughing both of them fit to bust. Nancy liked nothing better than to make a feast and what a feast there would be in the house tonight! Vinnie passed Mr. Finn’s study without making a sound and went to his own room. Nancy had roused the fire in his grate. He lit a taper from it and took it to the lamp on his desk. He opened his books and tried to study. The Greek alphabet and ancient history. Blast and damn the both of them, could he run away. Now, within the hour before Mr. Farrell arrived. He could, too, if he wanted to. He could hide for the day and the night. Oh, he knew ways of hiding, all right. His one good caning in school had come from that, and with Mr. Finn watching. He had contrived an escape for himself and three others from Saturday afternoon study. They had managed to meet at the privy and bolted from there to the street. Vinnie had sooted their clothes and faces at a store ventilator and all of them then ambled into Buttercake Dick’s pretending themselves newsboys. From there they went to the Bowery Theatre—and got into a muss with the regulars. It was worth the caning, they all admitted that. He could go out now and hide, but he wouldn’t. Mr. Finn would like to escape, too, but he wouldn’t even admit it. He would laugh and talk and make out he was having a grand time until Peg and Mr. Farrell left. Then he would sigh and wheeze like an oysterman’s mule.

Vinnie applied himself to the Greek. He was allowed to take it on probation, the opinion of his instructors being that if he could get it at all, he would fall off in the rest of his studies. “My good man,” the master had said to Mr. Finn when he suggested that Vinnie be allowed to commence the study, “you are not training a parrot. The boy has no foundation in English, much less in the classics.” “He has the only foundation necessary,” said Mr. Finn. “He has a good home and encouragement.” So, as Vinnie told Peg that morning when she inquired after his studies, he was puddling now in Greek. He put his fingers to his ears, closed his eyes and summoned one and another of the characters to memory until all of them paraded before him in order. He then made them dance to his calling out of order, one and another as he called them at random. And no parrot he, thought Vinnie of himself as he rose to stir the fire. Many a myth and legend of the ancients could he tell from hearing Mr. Finn read them aloud to him and Peg, and proved it. He had stood with boys of twice, even thrice his learning, and on his feet until fourth from last in a classics bee. Twelve had gone down before him. “Well said, Dunne!” cried the master. “Ah,” the boys chided, “but could you do it in Latin or Greek?” and rattled off words at him like beans dumped out of a bag. And so he was puddling in Greek, and with a will of his own.

Mr. Finn tapped on his door and opened it. “Are you ready for me, Vincent?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Finn drew up a chair to the opposite side of the desk as was his custom and heard Vinnie’s memorizations of the week-end. The complete darkness of night had fallen when they were done. “I am pleased with you, Vincent,” the little man said, rising and closing the shutters. “Tonight of all nights.”

It was Mr. Finn’s rule that if Vinnie were not perfect in his lessons on Sunday night the boy must take his supper in his room whether there were guests in the house or not.

“I do know that alphabet now, don’t I?” said Vinnie.

“You do indeed. You will learn to read in the language soon, the only true reward for your endeavors.” Mr. Finn contemplated the palm of his hand as though something were written there. “I hope you will also learn Hebrew one day.”

“Why?”

“Because it also is an ancient and honorable language, with a literature worthy of scholars.” Whatever he had found in his palm he put behind his back. “Come, we must see to our guest.”

“Has he come?”

“No, but we may expect him at any moment.”

“I think I ought to do a little more studying, Mr. Finn.”

Mr. Finn smiled and held out his arm. “Turn out the lamp, Vincent, and come along.”

They waited before the parlor fire, Vinnie and Mr. Finn, and presently Peg, who seemed unable to sit a moment without the recollection of something to be done in the kitchen, as though, Vinnie thought, Nancy weren’t “bidin’” her there as she did him whenever he made a move to help her. “I just bidin’ you, Masta’ Vincen’. I just bidin’ you in my kitchen.”

“Well,” said Mr. Finn as Peg tried again to compose herself to their company, “I’m looking forward to a first-hand account of Washington. I hope things are not as confused as the papers indicate.”

“I hope not,” said Peg, as though she cared. “Stephen will know.”

“I dare say,” said Mr. Finn.

It seemed in the silence they dared say no more. Farrell had gone off in the early fall. Vinnie well remembered his last night here. He had suspected then what he couldn’t doubt at all now with Peg blushing and bleaching, sitting and flying. Vinnie liked Farrell, but he couldn’t get over the notion that he was a priest, though plain enough he wasn’t after what the bishop said of him. The bishop had nailed up the door of his immigrant school, Stephen said, and if it was not much of a school, at least a few Irishmen had learned their sums and their signature at it. The hammer fell after the riot because Stephen began then to plead with the Irish to get out of New York. “Vanish yourselves from the city,” Peg had read aloud to Mr. Finn and Vinnie. “There is land you can buy and for no more money than you pay in a month here for rooms without windows; where you will dig your food from the earth and not from the gutter, where you can follow the plow and not the Philistines; where you can breathe in love and not suffocate in hatred.” It sounded beautiful as Peg read it, and terrible the reply of the bishop: the wolf will disperse the flock and destroy them one by one. Whoever dispersed them, Stephen’s flock soon left him. He needed to make his choice then between the law in which he was trained and journalism, which he fancied.

Dennis didn’t even know Farrell had been around at all, much less that all of them were chums. Vinnie had not told him because on the first day when he was about to, Dennis exploded in glee over the bishop’s pronouncement. “Scatter the Irish, will he, damn his eyes,” said Dennis. “It’s time we excommunicated the whole tribe of them! They’re no more Irishmen than he was a priest.”

Dennis was wrong, Vinnie thought, and he could have proved it to a sensible man. Mr. Finn himself wasn’t prouder of Vinnie than was Stephen Farrell, and Vinnie had learned more from him about the Irish than ever he had from Dennis or church or anywheres else. He had been in the house one night when Vinnie came home from whipping a boy for calling him a paddy.

“Do you know what a paddy is?” said Farrell after hearing the tale.

“It was a dirty word by him,” Vinnie said.

“Ah, but was it a dirty word by you? Did you think it an insult? St. Patrick was a scholar as well as a saint. When Europe was dark with war and plunder, the scholarship he started thrived in Ireland. Remember that. It was the only refuge for Christian civilization, and when the dark ages were over, the scholars went out from Ireland and lighted their lamps for them. Some would deny us that heritage, but they will have to rewrite history to do it. Let us not encourage them by denying it ourselves. You are a paddy, I am a paddy. There are Irishmen of whom I’m ashamed, but I’m not ashamed to be an Irishman.”

But Dennis was not always a sensible man, Vinnie decided. He thought what he wanted to think, did Dennis, and stuck to it like a plaster. He was good to them he loved, and Vinnie loved him for that. He was a father to Emma, her calling him “da” and she would go by the name Emma Lavery, and Vinnie did not mind that. But all the same he was ashamed of Dennis for what he said at the door.

The hall bell tinkled and then rang out. Peg went as white as a candle and leaped up from the chair. She came behind Vinnie while Mr. Finn went to answer the door. The boy sat aching and stiff, trying not to flinch while Peg played her cold, trembling fingers about the back of his neck. She was fondling him like a doll she would drop when her heart’s love came. His voice came first, saying the name, Margaret. She gave Vinnie a last hard squeeze and left him as Farrell appeared in the doorway. Vinnie closed his eyes against their meeting.

M
Y HEART’S DARLING, PEG
thought in the last torturous moment of counting his steps upon the stair. She abandoned the warning and self-cautioning of weeks in conjuring up the sight and the feel and the taste of him with the sound of his voice in the hallway. His very presence would fulfill her joy, she promised herself, let follow what would follow.

How wrong she had been to expect more than the instant’s pleasure in knowing it was truly Stephen. The quick joy fled her upon the first touch of him. He caught her hands in his and held them while he brushed her forehead with his lips. The holding of them told her of renunciation, not reunion, and his kiss was as killing as the ghostly frost. She drew a long, painful breath that needed to cut its way through the sorrow which choked her, smiled and took his gloves. It had been more than the bishop’s persecution he had fled to Washington. She had known it really, the full meaning of his flight, had she faced up to her knowledge of it: he had fled her and his own passion. To return, he must believe himself its master. She curtseyed when he complimented her, and told him he looked well—which he did not. He was very pale except where the cold had pinched his cheeks. But it was a small lie compared to the one she had told herself. How fortunate, she thought, as they went in to supper, that she should meet him, this new Stephen, in the company of other friends who apparently found less change in him than she did.

Supper seemed interminable and yet not long enough; nor the drinking of wines and coffee and the talk of the Great Debate: slavery, union and disunion, of men on the mention of whose names his eyes lit up as nothing else lighted them this night… Webster, Clay, Calhoun, the giants, and big little men, as he called Douglas and Seward. Who were any of them that he must so honor them? Every so often he said to her: “And listen to this, Margaret…” as though he feared her thoughts were capering off to hide where he dared not seek them. “Oh, I’m listening,” she would say. “’Tis marvelous interesting.”

“Then will there be a compromise, Mr. Farrell?” said Vinnie, as though, Peg thought, he was the president’s own son.

“Ought there be,” said Finn. “That’s the question. I doubt that compromise will settle it.”

“So do I,” said Stephen, “but Clay will carry it all the same if Webster stands behind him. Calhoun, they say, is dying.”

“And as well,” said Mr. Finn. “He has outlived his usefulness to the country now.”

“The South don’t think so.”

“The South don’t think at all. They have appropriated logic to their own ends—as Mr. Calhoun has appropriated the Constitution to defend States’ Rights.”

“The Abolitionists would tear it up,” Stephen said. “I wonder if it would not be better to use it than destroy it.”

Mr. Finn smiled. “A dead horse or a live horse hobbled.” He sighed. “Better Mr. Clay’s compromise.”

“God help us then,” Stephen said. “The enemies of slavery will turn on the unfortunates who advocate it out of fear. That will be the Natives’ holiday.”

“There is a great difference between Abolitionist and Native,” Mr. Finn said.

“True, true,” said Stephen, “but it is remarkable how often they are on the same side.”

God’s curse on them both, thought Peg. “Will you be returning to Washington, Stephen?” she asked when if they had not exhausted the question of politics it seemed to have exhausted them.

“In a fortnight, I hope,” he said, his eyes meeting hers and then fleeing to the glass he turned in his hand. “It seems that the only way to the Law is through politics, and my only value to politicians is journalistic.” He pushed the glass from him and folded his hands. “Politics and the law are not the same. Not to be confused.”

“True, true,” Mr. Finn said slyly. “But it is remarkable how often they are on the same side.”

Stephen laughed and looked up at Nancy as the big woman brought hot coffee. “What a splendid supper, Nancy. I have not had its like in these three months.”