Men of No Property (8 page)

“Vinnie, don’t take on. We’ll find him,” Norah said.

“I’m not takin’ on,” the boy shouted. “I’m takin’ off.”

“Vinnie, get hold of yourself. We’ve a bargain,” Dennis said firmly.

“I’ll get a man with a trumpet,” Kevin said. “Now don’t go from this spot.”

“Are you all right now, ladies?” the policeman said, having waited the greeting. “I must get back to my post.”

“Sir,” Norah said, hoisting the child higher on her hip, “can you recommend us a boarding house?—a respectable one for single ladies?”

The policeman looked down on her and the child, startled. “Single ladies?”

Peg remembered the pretense on which she had fetched him, to help her sister and her infant. “Aye,” she said, her eyes dancing with mischief. “Unmarried ladies.”

“No, Miss. You might try the Sisters of Mercy,” he said. His face flooded with color and he retreated in haste.

Peg laughed aloud.

“Behave yerself, Peg. “We’re in a fine state and you laughin’.”

“Shall I stand here and cry? Will it get us out o’ it?”

“Here, gimme the child,” Dennis said, for Emma had her fist so deep in Norah’s bodice she was in danger of splitting it down the middle. She merely dug in the deeper.

“Put her down an’ I’ll take her,” Vinnie said. “She’s mine and I’ll take her and yous can go yer own way.”

“Stop makin’ a fuss,” Dennis said fiercely. “Here, Norah, sit down.” He shoved her and the child down on his trunk.

“Sisters of Mercy,” Norah said thoughtfully. “Are they a charity over here?”

“They run a home for fallen women,” Peg snapped.

“What?” said Norah.

“Oh for the love o’ God,” Dennis said desperately.

“Cheerio, matie! No ’ard feelings!” A sailor, his seabag over his shoulder, swung past them, clapping Dennis on the back as he went. It was the one who had delivered him to the captain.

Dennis shook his fist. “You little wart!” he called after him. “I’d like to blister yous up to the size of a carbuncle!”

When he turned back, Norah had leaped up from the trunk. Standing beside her was Young Ireland. The coat didn’t fit him, whosever it was, but it was an elegant cut, nonetheless, and no priest ever wore one of its color.

“Is there any way I can help you?” Farrell asked.

Dennis drowned out the thanks of the others. “None at all,” he said airily. “We’re waitin’ our carriage.”

Farrell ignored him. “Vincent, have you found your father?”

“He’s busy wi’ somit,” Vinnie said, taking his tone from Dennis. “We’re waitin’ him now.”

“I see.” Farrell bowed slightly to the girls.

Norah put the child down on the trunk, and when Emma would not release her, she pried the small fingers loose and bade her not to be naughty. Then Norah turned back to Farrell.

“You were very kind to us all in our trouble, Mr. Farrell,” she said, taking great care with her words. “I hope you have good fortune in America.” She offered her hand to him.

Dennis stood, his mouth open. She had understood, after all, and sifted her pride through with pity. A deep one, Norah Hickey, for the quiet tongue and the soothing manner.

Farrell lifted her hand to his lips. “Thank you,” he said. “If there’s any way I can serve you, get word to me through the Irish Directory. God bless you all.”

He was gone, a boy at his heels carrying a seabag, the loan apparently of
The Valiant
’s captain. At the end of the dock, he whistled up a hack, and waved back to them from the window as he jogged off. His porter shined up the sixpence.

“That,” Dennis said, and not without admiration, “is the way every Irishman should tumble onto a foreign shore.”

Kevin Lavery returned bringing a priest with him instead of a trumpeter. The priest heard the story of Vinnie’s grandmother and then queried him on his father’s name and address, and after that his occupation. His name was all that Vinnie knew. Kevin paid a callboy to go up and down the docks, singing out: “Tom Dunne…Thomas Dunne, yer wanted by
The Valiant…
the good ship,
Valiant,
Thomas Dunne…go to
The Valiant…
”

The crowd dwindled and the runners, run down, passed a bottle amongst themselves. Dockhands herded the stragglers out of the way of preparations to unload
The Valiant
of her heavy cargo.

Dunne, Thomas Dunne, Dennis thought. Done truly. The child was fretful and hungry. So were they all hungry, and the temper was rising in Peg’s eyes. The priest looked solemn. He looked as though the only prayers he ever said were at a wake. “We’ll find him, my boy,” he kept saying. “Pray to God and we shall find him.”

Kevin took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and opened it to stare at its face a moment. He closed it again, and all as though one had been dangled to him in his cradle, Dennis thought. Kevin replaced the watch and ran his fingers along the gold chain. Then he smiled broadly.

“Well, how often in a lifetime do you come to America!” he said heartily and rubbed his hands together. “We’ll hire a coach and go home till we’ve found him.” And the tone in which he said it made it seem as though Thomas Dunne had had his chance and lost it.

Dennis felt himself near to tears. “All of us?” he said, before he could measure the tact in it.

“All save the priest,” Kevin said in high humor. “You’re invited to a Sunday dinner, Father Shea, Thirty-nine Cherry Street, a long block from the market.”

This was interesting, Dennis thought, if he had but the time to ponder it. By all the signs, in America the priest came when he was invited.

Kevin had turned to the girls, and already had Emma in his arms. “I’ve a fair house and a willin’ wife,” he said. “Are you from Dublin?”

“We are,” Peg said.

“Then you’ll be welcome as the flowers in May.”

“Have you childer’, Mister Lavery?” Norah asked.

He smiled and all the lines of his face converged in the rays of pleasure. “I have,” he said. “Two gallus ones.” There was no doubting the pride intended in the words.

M
ARY LAVERY WAS EVERY
bit as willing as her husband promised. She stood at the top of the steps, her arms open to Dennis and to all who came with him, making no more of their entrance than to count them off against the number of plates in the cupboard. She was never a beauty, Dennis decided, but her heart was as big as the bosom heaving over it. Her hair was flaming, heaped on the top of her head like a bank of live coals and her face was but a shade lighter in her excitement. She proclaimed a stew that would stick to their ribs to be waiting on the back of the stove and the water boiling for tea. “We’re not stayin’ long,” Norah said in the doorway.

“She’s leavin’ before she’s come!” Mary cried and gave Norah a little nudge into the house. “Go in and settle yerself. Is the house rockin’ to you ?”

“It is after the boat.”

Mary gave a great laugh. “The day I got off the boat I’d of swore the Lord was jugglin’ the earth in one hand and the sun in the other. Ah, isn’t she sweet, poor thing?” She had discovered Emma. “Sally!” she called out, and then to Emma said coaxingly, “I’ve the one that’ll love you, pet.” To the girls she said, “My Sally is five and there’s nothin’ she wants more in this world than a baby.” She gave Peg a poke with her elbow as Sally came in from the kitchen. “They cost a great deal of money, comin’ all the way from heaven in a bird’s pocket, but I promised I’d buy her one when she grows up.”

“Hey, Denny, come back down here and give me a hand.”

Dennis went out the door and down the steps at the side of the building. The Laverys lived over Kevin’s carpentry shop. The whole of Cherry Street seemed a combination of homes and factories. It had the look of running more to manufacturing although the houses serving both had carried an air of respectability into old age. There was an iron fence here and there and the heads on the hitching posts looked to have been chosen in their time one to top the elegance of its neighbor. Dennis noticed a boot shop, a grocery, a grog shop, a candle and soap maker, and across the way a livery stable giving off a strong odor of dung.

“’Tis a good smell,” Kevin said. “It freshens the stink from the soap maker. We damn near run him out when he opened.”

“There’s but one smell in my head now,” Dennis said, “the stew Mary promised us. She’s a fine, big woman, Kevin.”

“Ah, she’s gallus,” he said. “We’ll stow your trunk and all this stuff in the shop for now and get up to our supper. I’m fearful for the boy’s father, you know that.”

“Aye,” Dennis said. “From what I can collect he was home once to Ireland and off again after plantin’ the seed for the wee ’un.”

“That’s worse, him home and the discontent takin’ hold on him again.”

“Well, there’s not much in Ireland today to content a man,” Dennis said, carting the trunk into the shop. He marveled at the stacks of boards of all sizes, and noticed a boy at a bench by the window.

“Jamie, came and meet your uncle from Ireland.”

Dennis tried to measure his age. There were men not so tall, but he hadn’t a hair on his face. He’d be near the age of Vinnie, with half his cunning and twice his growth, God love America. Here was the foundation of a family fortune and Kevin none the worse for gaining it but a few gray hairs. Jamie shook his hand and returned to the bench.

“Which of the girls do you fancy?” Kevin asked at the bottom of the steps.

Dennis paused. “I’ve fancy for neither,” he said after a moment. There was no sense in giving Kevin the rigmarole of his unhappy crossing. “The one’s too sweet and the other’s too sour. And what ’ud I be puttin’ myself into bondage for and my foot not steady on free land?”

“Don’t be riling up at me. ’Twas a natural question.”

“’Twas an unnatural alliance altogether,” Dennis said.

His brother looked at him. “Then you are committed?”

“I’m committed to the boy only!”

Kevin shook his head. “And the boy’s committed to his sister, and she’s committed to the one and the one to the other.”

“Oh, the devil worry it,” Dennis said. “We’ll be shed o’ the whole of them as soon as the childer’ are settled.”

“And if we don’t find the boy’s father?”

“I’ll keep the boy wi’ me and put the girl in an orphanage. They have the like over here, don’t they?”

“They do,” Kevin said sadly, “full and runnin’ over. Well, we’ll go round to Father Shea after our supper. He’s promised to find out what he can for us.”

It was a meal none of them would forget, great chunks of beef browned and in gravy swimming with leeks, carrots, a great variety of vegetables including tomatoes. When the girls wondered at them, Mary bounced into the kitchen and brought a dish of them raw. She ran them through with the knife, the juice spurting out, and eased the slices onto each of their plates.

“You eat them with a bit of salt,” she explained.

“They’ve the taste of sun in them,” Norah said after trying one. She wiped the juice from her lips.

“It’s near the last for the season,” Mary said. “My Kevin could eat a meal of them. They do say they’re tryin’ to pickle them now to preserve them. I can tell you, I’d as soon eat them out of a slop bucket.” She thought about it further. “I dare say too many tomatoes ’ud be bad for a person. What the good Lord wants us to eat, he gives us in season.”

“He may give us the season,” Kevin said, “but I’ve never had the tomatoes yet without payin’ for them. You’ll all stay the night in whatever Mary can hatch in the way of beds….”

“I’ve it all calculated in my head,” Mary said, and Dennis saw Vinnie look up at her great turret of hair as though he wondered if she planned nesting some of them there.

“The boys will go down to the shop in the shavin’s…”

Kevin lifted his hand. “Figure it what way you will. You’ve three heads to put to it. Just don’t put me and Denny out where the cats’ll be lickin’ our faces. Finish your tea there, man. I want to take you round to the fire station to meet Mulrooney.”

“Who’s Mulrooney?”

“You’ll know when you meet him,” Kevin said. “He’ll be there tonight with the elections coming up.”

“Kevin used to run with the engines,” Mary said, “but he’s gettin’ too old for it now. Oh but he was handsome in those days. When he was courtin’ me, he’d hire a horse and gig of a Sunday, and there wasn’t a pair in New York could catch us. There was room on the streets in them days for a gallop. Now you can’t step off the walk without gettin’ a horse’s hoof in your pocket. And of a Saturday night we’d go to the theatre. Do you remember Foley, Kevin?”

“I do.”

“There was never a man could die on a stage like him.”

“When he was good,” Kevin said. “And when he was bad, he’d to die twice. Ho! What we used to put that man through.”

“I wonder, Mr. Lavery,” Peg said, lifting her chin to give an air to it, “where would a girl start, makin’ her way on the stage?”

“I know where some of them have to start, God help them,” Kevin said.

“Kevin, the childer’,” Mary said. She turned to Peg. “It wouldn’t be respectable, what they’d give the likes of you to do, dear.”

“And what’d they give the likes of me?”

Mary fanned herself, a habit she had when she became excited as though to scatter the heat coming over her. “They’d want you to make a clown of yourself.”

“I’d a sight rather be a clown than a clod,” Peg said, her eyes snapping.

“Oh my dear, I didn’t mean you were a clod. You’re a fine, handsome girl,” Mary cajoled, and went on to number Peg’s attractions.

It angered Dennis to hear her go on, for the word “clod” was Peg’s and he suspected it was her notion of Mary.

It was Norah, however, who put things right, and in a way that surprised him. “You don’t need to flatter her, Mrs. Lavery. She’ll make what she will of herself in the end. If she breaks our hearts doin’ it, small heed she’ll take o’ that. Maybe when she’s got her own to carry around and it split inside her, she’ll have a little decency.”

“Well,” Kevin said, too heartily, “let’s leave them the house.”

“Dennis, can I go with yous?” Vinnie asked.

“You can not,” Kevin said. “It’s men we’re goin’ amongst.”

It was not that he meant to be bluff with the boy, Dennis thought, but that he felt the reins of his own house to be slipping out of hand. “We’ll see the town, you and me, tomorrow, Vinnie,” he said.