Men of No Property (23 page)

The boxkeeper returned and fetching a lamp took them to Mr. Richards’ office on the second floor where he unlocked a case and gave them a script copy of
The Streets of New York.
He opened the shutters and left them side by side at the one script. As its title implied the play was a series of scenes depicting life high and low of the city. Some humor there was in the writing, but as Val murmured once, “It will take playing.” Richards came in when they were nearly done and sat down opposite them. He lit a cigar and seemed to be watching its smoke, but it was their faces he was trying to read.

“There are moments in it,” Valois said, “good moments.”

Richards made a noise in his throat and waited Peg’s finishing. “I want to try something,” he said. “Before you say anything I want each of you to write on a piece of paper, without consulting one another, the role you think proper for the young lady here. Mrs. Haversham is out, by the way. That goes to our leading lady.”

“If I were your leading lady,” Peg said, “I shouldn’t want to play Mrs. Haversham.”

“Oh? Write as I directed. Then we can talk.” He gave her paper and dipping the pen, handed it to her.

Without hesitation Peg wrote: “Gallus Mag.”

“Miss Trueheart,” Val wrote and said the name aloud as he wrote it. A dozen Miss Truehearts passed through the door of his shop every day.

Mr. Richards had taken Peg’s paper. He shook with amusement and Peg could feel the color climb up her throat and crimson her face. Without a word Richards gave Peg’s paper to Valois.

“I won’t permit it!” he cried and crumpled the paper in his hand.

“Why not?” said Richards.

“I didn’t attend a rose to harvest a cabbage. You don’t have an actress in the company who’d essay that part with pleasure and you know it.”

Richards shrugged. “Fools that they are,” he said blandly, “you are right. Miss Cushman before she became a star would have done it.

“And unsexed herself in the doing,” Val said. He looked at Peg with scorn.

Peg felt herself suspended between the tempers of the men, and her own was calm in the balance. She could be cruel now to Val, for she knew how to clinch the role for herself with Mr. Richards. Docile to her teacher she would be, but true to her own instincts also. She tried to find a delicate way of explaining to him that Gallus Mag was very feminine, however low her place in society. All she could remember was something Stephen told her once, and in her mind it seemed quite apt. “Val,” she said gently, “they say there were more children born out of the famine in Ireland than out of prosperity.”

“What in the name of God has that to do with the matter?” Valois leaped out of his chair and began to pace the room. “Can you see it, Richards?”

The producer nodded. “I think I can. Courtship, so they tell me, occurs even among animals.” He took the cigar from his mouth. “If she will do it, I will have Miss Margaret in the role of Mag, even over your protests. It might be very interesting.” He studied the ash on the cigar. “And Miss Haversham may wish she had not been called.”

Peg flew first with her news to Norah, never counting it strange she had not apprised her sister of her training or its purpose although the training had been evident to both Norah and her husband. Dennis had made his own calculations on it, but now the purpose might prosper all of them.

“A sister-in-law an actress,” he said aloud, testing the notion.

“Not just a come-on and go-off sort of actress either,” said Peg. “It’s an excellent part I’ll be playing.”

“Well,” said Dennis, “I thought you playin’ a part since the day I met you.”

Norah rocked the burden within her and began to recount little things in Peg’s childhood pointing ever and anon to the stage had they but the eyes at home to see it. She was turning into a grandmother, Peg thought, and only out of childhood herself.

Dennis poked up the fire. A great lump of plaster surrounded his ear like a dumpling, the last token of his fight with the “Buster.” “Maybe you’ll give me a hand one day on my speakin’.”

“From what I’ve heard you don’t need it,” Peg said.

“Did you hear about it?”

“Didn’t she send round a cake?”

“Oh, aye,” said Dennis, “and my stomach like a sour churn at the sight of it.”

“There were stomachs able enough amongst your chums,” said Norah. “What an army of men brought him home to me, and paradin’ in and out since.”

“They’re all big men,” said Dennis, “and they’re lendin’ me a hand, startin’ again. Did you ever hear of Fernandy Wood?”

“No,” said Peg. “Should I have?”

“He ran for mayor of New York last year.”

“Did he win?”

“God save your ignorance, he’s not a Whig! You’re in America now, girl. You should know what goes on in the country.”

“I dare say Mr. Finn will know about him.”

Dennis scowled. “I’m not askin’ an opinion on the man. I was acquaintin’ you with my acquaintances.”

Peg sighed. The only time she and Dennis could be truly friends was when she needed his help, or perhaps when he needed hers though she doubted the latter. “Aren’t the children up from their naps?” she said. “I’d like to see them before I go.” Little she cared about the children truly, but less about Fernandy Wood.

“Go in, Dennis, and rouse them while I wet the tea,” said Norah. And when he was gone she explained: “He’s as restless now as a cat on a clothesline, but the doctor won’t let him go back to work yet.”

“Will he go back to city roundsman?”

“Indeed he will not. He’s openin’ two markets at once in the spring, the one in the Catherine again and another in the Essex Market.”

“There’s a distance between them,” said Peg.

“He has his own horse in the stable below.”

Peg gathered her gloves. “Norah, you might be interested in my acquaintances this year, too. I’ve been seeing a great deal of Stephen Farrell.”

“Have you,” Norah murmured. “I would love to see him myself. I ever thought he was a fine man.”

“In spite of the bishop?” And in spite of Dennis, she thought, though she did not say it.

“To my way of thinkin’,” Norah said carefully, “it was a matter of politics and I was never much for the clergy in politics, even a bishop.”

Peg caught Norah’s hand and squeezed it. “We’re sisters truly. I don’t think I’ll wait now to see the children. I want to see Vinnie and Mr. Finn.”

“Not even for a cup of tea?” said Norah. Peg shook her head. “Well, I’m glad you come home first with your news.”

Home must have been where she wanted to come, Peg thought, but once here she could not wait to be off again. “You’ll come to the theatre?”

“If needs be with a midwife!” Norah threw back her head then and laughed at her own boldness.

“You should do something about your teeth before they all need pulling,” Peg said. “Bid Dennis God-prosper-him for me.”

“He forgets to come back when he’s with the childer’,” Norah said, and then as they reached the door: “In what way are you acquainted with Mr. Farrell, Peg?”

Peg smiled. “I suppose you might call it a passing fancy. God bless!”

What a week of confusion followed upon that day for Peg. What she did, she did by instinct with scarcely a thought to prompt her. She saw Stephen but once and he swore he would stay to see her debut if she did no more than carry a pitcher upon the stage. She told him nothing of Gallus Mag, not even the name or her nature. Why she did not tell him more, she could not say, refusing to think about it even were she mistress of her own thoughts. Norah had carried the news to Mary Lavery, and Kevin’s wife to her good friend, Mrs. Riordon, who pretended a knowledge of it already rather than confess herself surprised by one of her girl’s fortunes. Peg came home that day to find herself moved from the attic nook to the second-floor front with a canopied bed and lace curtains on the window. Mrs. Riordon stood at the door of the room, near shooting her teeth in smiling pride.

“Are you to be a star, Mrs. Lavery tells me you are?”

Peg screamed at her in rage. “Put me back in the rookery! By what right do you move my things without my permission?”

For once Mrs. Riordon did not feel herself in command of her own house. “I’ll not charge you more until you can pay,” she said. “I thought you’d like it and need the room for your practice, they tell me.”

“Who tells you?” Mrs. Riordon shrugged helplessly. “Well, I’ll tell you,” Peg shrieked. “I’ll do my practice now upon the stage, and precious little I could have done here to get upon it. Bring up my things!”

She ran from the room and up the trembling steps to her old nook. There she flung herself upon the naked mattress and spent her wrath in tears. Was nothing familiar to be left her at all? Was the world she knew to crumble beneath her before her foot was steady upon another?

She was fresh from the tears when Mrs. Riordon appeared in the door with a cup of broth. “Here, this’ll steady your nerves. You must be under a terrible strain they tell me…a terrible strain it must be to be under.”

Peg laughed aloud at the woman’s attempt to break a habit to please her. Mrs. Riordon fled her as she would a madwoman. “Never mind my things!” Peg called after her. “I’ll move down after all.” Why not? What was treasurable here or in any part of her past to cling to? Home? What was home but sleep? She sipped the broth and wondered what kind of teeth Gallus Mag would have. She might blacken out one or two in the front.

Valois did not abandon her. There were times she wished he would. “There is but one way to cope with the inevitable,” he said. “Accept it.” And having said that, he set about making his own analysis of Gallus Mag. He was not long about it when he came up with a complete grotesque: the pitiable toy of the depraved who would bray her lines like an idiot. Seeing his notion of the role, Peg could understand his horror of it; but she was not strong enough in experience to fight him. She scarcely knew how to express her own concept, and his was easier by far. And often the line between them blurred. Yet at the end of every torturous day with him, she tried to remember her first feelings for Mag: pity that a woman so needed love that she took it as a street bawd; and she was “gallus” because she was gallant, gallant and uncomplaining. If she could but cling to this concept until she was called for rehearsal, then with Mr. Richards’ help, she might save something of it.

She lay one night, near fevered with the thought of it, and rose to stand before the open window, the cold wind sluicing her body. In the morning she awoke with a chill and a head giddy with cold. Mrs. Riordon came up when she failed to appear for breakfast, and soon had a doctor in to attend her. In her first comfortable moments Peg took comfort in the illness itself. Assured of recovery on staying a few days in bed, she knew she was free of Valois until rehearsal commenced.

T
HE GREEN ROOM WAS
crowded with players for the cast of the play was enormous. It might well be the corner of Broadway and Chambers, so motley were the costumes…tall-hatted gentlemen of Wall Street, bowlered toughs from The Points, campaigners from the Mexican War, whalers, clerks, firemen, dustmen; ladies of fashion and women of none, sewing girls, matchgirls, and the wistful peddler of hot corn. Small camaraderie there was amongst the actors beyond a nod or a wink. Instead of a greeting, you got a man’s lines in your face, or a bit of business tried on your humor. For Peg, the moment she left the dressing-room, her hair done in straggles over her bare shoulders, the part was in straggles as well. She could remember her lines but in snatches and her business not at all. She was not out of the fever by any means, she thought, and the doctor was mad to have called her well. She lost her way to the Green Room and was shooed by the prompter like a cat through the scenery. Better by far he had shooed her into the street. Her mind was a-churn with the shame of rehearsals, the titters and bawls at her ignorance. She could see Val’s face, phosphoric as the devil’s whenever she closed her eyes, or the Richards cigar pumping smoke like a railway engine. That it must be which was choking her now, for she hadn’t the breath to quiver a cobweb.

A party of newsboys rushed in, hired from the streets at sixpence a head. A wall rose between them and the actors and its substance might as well have been mortar. Peg lept over it, let the players think of her what they might. The boys were like Vinnie when first she knew him, and like Vinnie, they made her a welcome. “Where’s yer slung-shot, Mag?” cried one to her. Mother of God, they knew her for the part she’d play! She pulled from the folds of her ragged skirt the stocking knotted at the toe with a potato in it and whirled it over their heads. “Gallus!” they cried. “My eyes, ’Tis her!” they cried till the players hushed them and shushed them down. A little bell rang at the door; another was ringing on stage. In a moment the curtain would rise on Mrs. Haversham and her lover. The call boy appeared in the doorway, taking the uppermost sheet from his fistful of papers. “Miss Trueheart, you are called,” his small soprano sang out. He stood a moment, his eyes contemptuous upon the newsboys before he disappeared. The newsboys brayed after him like donkeys until Peg stilled them. Miss Trueheart left the Green Room, the players sharing her scene in her wake. The stage manager came to instruct the newsboys again; they would come on with Gallus Mag. Small need had they of such instruction. “A fine house,” the manager told an actor, “but cold. They’re sitting on their hands to warm them.” Peg shook off her thoughts of the house. Better think it empty, or peopled only with strangers. Her hands were wet and her throat was dry and her knees no stronger than jelly.

“Gallus Mag, you are called.”

The newsboys made a rush for the door, contriving to trample his highness, the call boy, and carrying Peg on their drive. Otherwise she’d have never got on. But once hell-bent for the stage, she took command of the boys and held them, bear cubs in her power. Gallus Mag’s been called, she said over and over to herself, and damn her eyes but she’ll answer! At the prompter’s cue she unleashed the boys, and they whooped and hollered sweeping onto the stage where a muss was being enacted, Yankee Nolan thumped into a pulp by Killer McVey. “Gallus Mag’s a-comin’,” the newsboys heralded, “Mag’s a-comin’, Killer, beware!”