Men of No Property (65 page)

“Ho, now boys, hear that!” Dennis boomed from the platform, and even his bullies turned round to hear him. His hands on his hips, he rocked back and forth. “No wonder they’re cheerin’ for Farrell down there. Sure it’s Farrell’s whore that’s playin’ their bugle!”

A whoop of glee went up from the crowd, but through it Peg heard the little moan from Norah. For all she hated Dennis, Peg would have spared Norah this. “We’ll go now quick,” Peg said, and pushed Norah through before her.

“Stand where you are, woman there!” Dennis shouted, and Peg turned back to face him. “Some of you know her for my sister-in-law, aye, and some of you know her for somethin’ else. But let me tell you, boys, there’s none of us know her like Farrell. Now run the strumpet out of here and I’ll document the story.”

Peg fled through the opening made her as though she were untouchable, and then beat off the beggars pursuing Norah to the cab. They needed to rout out the driver where he had burrowed inside for a nap.

“Oh, Norah, I am sorry. I’d not have done that to you.”

“To me?” Norah cried. “Wasn’t it me put the words in his mouth to be twisted, but oh, such a long time ago.”

“Poor Stephen,” Peg said. “It will be in all the papers in the morning.”

“What do I care for him when it’s you that’s knocked down just gettin’ to your feet? Will Mr. Richards hire you now?”

“Do you know, Norah, I hadn’t given him a thought? I don’t suppose I believed it in the first place. I don’t have much faith these days…in any man, though his was a kindness.”

Norah sat quiet for a long ways. Then she said: “I heard him sayin’ the words, but I still can’t believe what I heard.”

“Don’t believe it,” Peg said. “’Tis best for you and for the children. Do you have any money, Norah?”

“A little.”

“Let me have it.”

“I will not.”

“I can’t go back to the house, Norah.”

Norah caught her hand. “I’ll not go back without you. My heart split open tonight as if he took the cleaver to it. Do you think I can go home and wait him lovin’ly? I cannot. Do you think I can wake the childer’ in the mornin’ and tell them to be proud of their father? I cannot.”

“Do you remember, Norah, the night he came home after calling Mr. Finn?”

“Listen to me, Peg, for I’m plannin’. Let the past lie where it’s dead. I’ll take the childer’ from the house this night and go to Mary Lavery’s. I told you her and Kevin are goin’ to Ireland. We’ll go with them, Peg, all of us. I’ve a bit of money laid by.”

“Be sensible, Norah. Do you think he would allow it?”

“He can’t stop me from tryin’ itself.”

Peg laid her head back for a moment and tried to conjure a vision of Ireland. Ah, Norah, there’s nothing there for us at all. Even could you get them there, your children would flee you back as soon as they were fledged. Go a little ways if you can, and then come back as you must. But I shall stay entirely. She helped Norah rouse and dress the children and bade the serving girl pack and go with them. At an odd moment in Norah’s distraction, Peg put her hand in her sister’s purse and drew from it a small share of the money. Only when Peg put them into a cab and wished them Godspeed did Norah realize her intentions.

“You’re comin’, Peg,” she cried.

“Soon. Soon, darling, I’ll follow after.” She slammed the door before Norah could get out, and cried up to the driver. “Go on, sir! Make haste! ’Tis very late!”

D
ENNIS WANTED ALL NIGHT
to get away home on the odd chance Peg might show up there before him. Small chance, to be sure, now in reach of the bottle, but the little fears stabbed him the while just the same. Some stupid gob swore he saw Norah with her. When that day arrived he would throw in the cards. But tonight of all nights to let Peg get out! From the days of the riots he’d said she was through and his pact with his wife had been that if ever again she took to the streets the door of their house would be locked against her. She was oiling the lock right now, Dennis thought, in whatever groghole she was snuggled. Tonight of all nights! All over the country the War party was winning, and in New York City if he was a sample, his own brother Kevin was going for Farrell. Dennis couldn’t get home while a vote might be coaxed. Ward after ward, stationhouse by house, and the horse near as spent as himself. He could map the streets of the city, Dennis thought, by the welts on his backside. It was well after midnight when the cartwheel scraped his own curb, and he gave over the reins to the trusty beside him.

“They’re all waitin’ up,” the man said, for the house was aglow with lights.

Dennis gave a great sigh. “Pick me up at seven.”

“I’d lock up the doors just the same tonight, Dennis. Them was awful strong words you used in the park.”

Dennis gave a crack with the whip and flung it after cart and driver. “Get home out of here with your greetin’!”

It was a strange thing, the house bright as day and not a sound in it. Dennis let the door bang, threw the bolt, and waited. Nary a breath nor a whisper save the singing of light jets, and the hall looking different. The clothes stand was stripped. The small army of coats always pleasuring his eye, gone. A clatter came then from the scullery. Dennis ran the length of the house. And there she was in her glory, lining up the bottles and taking their measure. She turned on him, drunk and still drinking. “Welcome home, brother of mine!”

“Where’s Norah?”

“Where’s Norah,” Peg repeated.

“Christ blister you, answer.”

“She’s halfway to Dublin by now in her haste, or maybe it’s halfway back she is.”

Dennis tumbled the bottles with a swipe of his arm and caught up the camphene lamp. He climbed the back stairs three steps at a time, Peg wailing after him out of the dark. All of them gone, his children, lifted out of their sleep and their beds left gaping, and Norah’s not slept in at all. Dublin. Christ, Christ, she might try it, that daft on her sister, and enemies he had willing sure to help her. He climbed to the attic to waken the girl; she could sleep up there through hell’s eruption and Peg was now bearing watching. But the girl, too, was gone. She had emptied the house.

Peg meandered up the front stairs as he reached the landing. “Where did they go this night or I’ll kill you?” Dennis cried.

She dangled a bottle like a trinket from her wrist. “The St. Nicholas I think, or was it the Astor House?”

Dennis slashed his hand across her face. Peg’s head jerked back and the bottle spun from her hand, clinking on the floor. Her teeth shone in the venomous smile. “I just admitted a gentleman downstairs inquiring after you,” she said.

Dennis had but one thought then, to reach the door. He flung Peg from his way and lunged down the stairs. Peg cried out, “Stephen!”

Farrell reached the door before him and barred his way.

“Take the house and all in it,” Dennis cried.

“It’s only you I want,” Farrell said, “and if you go from here it will be with me.”

Dennis eased himself from the stairs for he feared Peg at his back, but she was gone from sight. “Where is it I’m to go?”

“To Nassau Street and swear to a retraction in every newspaper office on it.”

“Shall we take the whore with us?” said Dennis. He saw Farrell’s nostrils whiten and the veins were standing out on his temples. He moistened his lips and held up his hand to make Farrell listen yet. “And while we’re about it, there’s something else I could swear to: The War Democrat’s wife spinnin’ wool in the cellar, aye, and pullin’ it over his eyes comin’ home…”

Farrell said not a word but came on, one step at a time, and Dennis knew then by his hands that he carried no weapon. He climbed a few steps backwards and waited for the fist to come up, to catch the arm and the shoulder and tumble the man on the stairs and then bolt to the door himself. But Farrell never lifted his hands. Walking into whatever blow Lavery might aim, his intent was the same as Dennis’, to ride out the punch and catch the man, and Dennis knew him of old to be quicker. Dennis retreated another step. He’d like to have shot his foot out at him, but he dared not and land on his back if Farrell got hold of it.

“All right,” Dennis said. “I’ll go with you. Wait in the parlor and I’ll come.”

“I wouldn’t trust you from my sight while I blinked my eyes.”

Dennis chanced the kick then for he’d reached the top. Farrell caught his foot but as Dennis went down he caught the rungs of bannister. He could kick his free foot while he clung, and at the same time pulled himself within reach of the bottle where Peg had dropped it. Dennis pistoned both feet like a sledge and loosed the man’s grip, Farrell needing to catch his own balance. Dennis caught up the bottle and cracked off its bottom. A great jagged spear remained, the neck its sturdy handle. He waited. Farrell was coming on again. “Christ!” Dennis cried. “Don’t make me use it!” Farrell quickened his pace; Dennis turned and ran. “’Tis the coward’s friend, the bottle!” Peg sang out of the dark.

Dennis tried to reach the door to his bedroom, but Farrell gave a leap and caught him about the waist. Dennis twisted around and plunged the speared glass again and again into the man’s back until the body went limp at his feet. Only then did Peg show herself, rushing and falling upon the fallen as though she was greedy for the sight, the touch, the blood of him dying. Dennis closed his eyes on it and pulled himself away. Sick of heart, stomach and soul, he groped his way down the stairs and into the street. Not a soul was there upon it, nor in any house save his own a light. At the end of a block he rested, leaning over the stone watering trough. He plunged his hands into the water, cracking the surface of ice, and sluiced his face also and washed the foul motes of dryness from his mouth.

Going on then, he saw a roundsman pass beneath a street lamp and called out to him.

“Mr. Lavery, is it?” the man said, coming up to him.

“Aye,” Dennis said. “I killed a man in my house.”

“One askin’ it, like as not,” the officer said, taking Dennis’ arm.

Dennis tried to tell him on the way of the mad woman waiting them there as well.

But it was no mad woman waited them, only one just dead. In his little absence Peg had put the jagged bottle to a last use, driving it into her own heart.

The policeman looked down at them a long time, complaining of the light from the jet. “Get a lamp, man,” he said, and Dennis obeyed him. But he used the light of it to explore Dennis himself. He said then with great care and meaning, “This is the way you found them when you got home tonight, Mr. Lavery.”

Dennis hid his own eyes from the look in the other’s, a look without horror or pity, ladened only with calculation. He raised his voice and called out: “Norah, Norah, where are you?”

N
ORAH CAME TO THE
Dunne house late the next afternoon. She wore a black bonnet and her face beneath it as white as a nun’s wimple. “I’m Mrs. Dennis Lavery,” she said at the door, giving a bob of a curtsy to Priscilla, and unknowing that Vinnie was watching her from the parlor. “I wish to see your husband.”

“You had better go upstairs, Jem,” Vinnie said. “I’ll come as soon as I can. We must soon go.”

The boy put down the magazine. If he had been reading it, Vinnie did not know. He had been turning the pages at least. “I shall go and see Nancy,” he said.

“Do,” said Vinnie, and then called out: “In here, Priscilla.”

Jem needed to stand aside at the door for Norah. He bowed, making way for her, and Norah paused.

“You’re Mr. Farrell’s son,” she said. “I’ve one like you myself and four older. God love you, young sir.” And she came on to Vinnie.

“I’m sorry for your trouble, Norah,” Vinnie said.

“If I didn’t think you were I’d not be bringin’ it,” she said, taking the chair he offered her.

“Shall I bring a pot of tea?” Priscilla asked.

“Do,” Vinnie said.

“That’d be a great kindness, Mrs. Dunne,” Norah said, and when Priscilla was gone: “I cannot weep. I used to wonder at Peg that she couldn’t, and now I cannot myself.”

“Nor I,” said Vinnie.

“Dennis is in jail. He’s in the Tombs.”

“I have only loathing for him, Norah. That is why I cannot weep. I have been sitting here all day and wishing for the first time in my life that I were a prosecutor.”

“That’s the greatest pity of it all, isn’t it?” Norah said after a moment.

Vinnie did not answer.

“Couldn’t you’ve stopped Mr. Farrell from comin’ to our house last night, Vinnie?”

“No.”

“Or come with him then?”

“I didn’t know he was going, Norah. When I left him he promised to go home.”

“All their promises,” Norah said, “and me chasin’ off like a wild goose in the night when all of them needed me most.”

“Do you know what was said in the City Hall park last night, Norah?”

“I was there when he said it. I went down with Peg in her gladness. Ah, but that’s another story and yet part of the same. He saw her there and construed the blame hers for them cheerin’ Farrell. He’s a mad man with his tongue when he’s cornered.”

“With more than his tongue,” Vinnie said.

“Goin’ always so far he cannot turn back…till someone comes and gets him. Like a child, like a willful, terrible child. But do you know, Vinnie, he wouldn’t be in jail at all if it wasn’t for me? There was no one alive to tell the true story exceptin’ Dennis. The policeman he took to the house gave it out on the telegraph first it was Peg killed Mr. Farrell and herself. Then Dennis found me and made me go with him and tell them the truth.”

“No doubt because he was proud of it,” Vinnie said.

“If that’s what you want to believe, Vinnie Dunne, I’m sorry I came.”

“Of course it’s what I want to believe! Stephen Farrell was my friend. Shall I forgive the man who boasts his murder any sooner than I would forgive him for concealing it? You forgave him Mr. Finn’s murder, Norah. I did not. If he had answered for that crime he would not now need to answer for this one. If God is just he will answer now for both of them.”

“Dennis and me expect to answer, Vinnie, and in their time our childer’ will need answer for us as well.”

Each of them sat silent while Priscilla brought the tea. She was about to withdraw when Norah said: “I wish you’d stay a minute, Mrs. Dunne. I’ll not stay longer myself.”