Men of No Property (13 page)

“He has you sellin’ already!” Mrs. Riordon cried, “and him a bachelor.”

“Can you count the money?” Peg asked.

“If I can’t I ask,” the boy said. “I never seen so many kinds.”

“Money is money,” Mrs. Riordon said, “if you can see the numbers on it.”

“There’s some people,” Peg said, out of patience, “hold it tight enough to feel the numbers.”

Vinnie had laughed because of the need to laugh or to shout or to cry. She had not even managed a word alone with him at the door, Mrs. Riordon following him with an invitation to return soon, which he had not done. “I wonder,” she had said finally, standing between him and Peg, and as sly as a chimney draft, “it was him got Mr. Lavery’s brother into the market, was it, Mary tells me? I wonder could he do something for a chit of a girl—something nice and cheery that wouldn’t dirty her hands or bleary her eyes?”

“Let him do for them who want his doing,” Peg had said, and her anger had seemed to turn on Vinnie and his master when she had meant it for Riordon. Anxious to put an end to it quickly, she had dispatched the boy. “Good night, Vinnie. Tell Norah when you see her I’ll be round one day soon.”

But she had not gone around. She had seen neither Norah nor Vinnie in over a month. She knew it was unfair to blame them. And I don’t blame them, she said half-aloud as she slowed her step, but wouldn’t it be a humiliating thing if Riordon, the old crow, was right? and I too found a position through the intercession of Mr. Finn? She tried to tell herself that it was not to this purpose she was going. She stopped at every window to peer into it, and saw nothing of the boots, the fancy goods, the clocks, the chandeliers and girandoles she stared in upon. She would be in a terrible state if she turned back now. Something had happened to her and the worst of it no later than this morning. She was afraid. Instead of chasing the world she was running from it. She bit her lip, and found some little comfort in the pain, as though it made her sure she was herself. Something seemed to be very wrong. No longer wanting to go where she had started for, she had no sense of direction. She could not remember whether she had come up or down the street. She was lost, and worse she wondered if something weren’t slipping in her mind. It might be fever, she thought, putting her hand to her forehead. It seemed hot and she leaned her head against the glass window. How long she stood that way, she did not know.

“Peg?”

She jerked her head up at the sound of her name. A dream seemed to have broken. Vinnie was standing beside her, his mouth half open as though he was not sure whether to stop or to run for it.

“I thought it was you and then I thought it wasn’t,” he said.

He stood, his arms dangling. He had grown already, she thought, or else she had started to wither. The swollen stomach was gone from him, and a little flesh had taken the gauntness from his cheeks.

“Vinnie, ah Vinnie,” she said, lifting her hand and then dropping it after ever so lightly touching his shoulder. A lifetime seemed to have passed since she was able to hug him to her. “Are you in this neighborhood?” she asked, thinking it might cover the confusion he had found her in.

“Down a piece. I’m out on an errand.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

“’Tis done. Weren’t ye lookin’ for me, Peg?”

“I was,” she said then, “but I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”

“Why ’ud I not?”

“I was mean to you last.”

“’Twas the oul’ hen scratchin’ between us,” the boy said.

Peg laughed. “Ah, Vinnie, you’re an owl yet.” She put her hand on his arm then, and he squeezed it between his and his ribs. God bless him, she thought, oh, God love him.

“Would you come meet Mr. Finn? He’d ask you for tea.”

“I’m perishin’ for a cup,” she said, “but maybe if you’d ask him off an hour we could go some place and have a tupenny cup to ourselves.”

“It ’ud be nice could you see where I’m livin’,” the boy said. “’Tis a strange, weird place.”

Peg allowed herself to be led along the street. A few steps in Vinnie’s company and she began to feel more her old self. And as they waited their chance to cross the street before it, she realized that Jeremiah Finn’s was a fine establishment. The columns outside it made it look an emporium. More than locks and keys were made and sold here. All kinds of hardware were displayed in the window: link chains, sledges, tongs, axes, hammers, even a plow. Another window was given over to kitchenware, kettles, copper pots and pans hanging against a blue backboard like so many suns in the sky. For them I’d be a scullery maid, Peg thought.

A clerk came to attention at the ring of the door’s opening, shooting great white cuffs out of his sleeves in anticipation. He soon shot them in again and returned to his ledger. At the back of the store was a shop where in the brief glimpse Peg caught of it, she saw the sparks exploding as a man worked over a grinding stone. The screech of stone on metal followed them up the stairs. There, his eyes glistening in the light of the gas jet, Vinnie knocked on a door and opened it.

“Mr. Finn?”

“Come in, come in, lad. What did Murtaugh say when you gave him the package?”

“He said ‘Thanks’,” Vinnie said.

All Peg could see was Mr. Finn’s white-shirted back where he sat on a high stool like an ordinary clerk, his legs woven into the stool’s legs.

Mr. Finn grunted. “Which is his way of saying, ‘You’ll have to take me to the law to collect for it.’ I tell you, Vincent, not business but the law—that’s the career for a man.”

“Mr. Finn,” Vinnie said, “I met me friend and I ast her to tea.”

“You what?” Mr. Finn said, and Peg was ready to flee.

But it was Vinnie’s pronunciation the man was questioning.

“As-k-t,” Vinnie said carefully.

“That’s better,” Mr. Finn murmured.

“And she’s here wi’ me now!”

Mr. Finn cocked his head around to glance over his shoulder. “Oh my, why didn’t you say so?” He hopped down from the stool and caught his coat from where it hung on a halltree at the ledger. He pulled it on saying, “Oh my, oh my,” as though, Peg thought, she would be destroyed at the sight of a man without his coat.

When he was frocked he came across the room, his hand extended. “So this is Peg,” he said. “Miss Hickey, I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”

How long Vinnie had been waiting for this, she thought, having so prepared the man. She smiled into Mr. Finn’s puckered face. He was no taller than she, and when he smiled his face knotted up like a wild rose at sunset.

“Blow out all the lights, Vincent,” he cried. “All accounts are no account when we’ve a lovely guest to tea.”

He led the way up a second flight of stairs, calling ahead of them to someone named Nancy that they were coming and bringing a lady to tea. Nancy, Peg discovered, was a large black woman with a soft warm voice that seemed to roll like she did. Mr. Finn ordered Peg into a chair the size of a throne while he fussed about arranging the fire in the grate and the chairs for tea. If he were to bump into Nancy in the preparations, Peg thought, he would bounce half across the room. It was a room near as big as a store, hung with tapestries and pictures and cluttered with books. Never one for observing the furnishings of a house, Peg took in only the books and the fine size of the room where a person could stretch and walk and take his ease in a dozen places.

“So much—space,” she commented.

Mr. Finn seemed to bound to her side. “I dare say you think it strange for a man the size of myself. But I was raised in a box, as it were. My grandmother, bless her, said it was that which stunted my growth.”

“I know many a man no bigger than you, Mr. Finn,” Peg lied.

“Well, small odds so long as the heart has its full growth, eh?”

“Mr. Finn has a pitcher showin’ all of a man in his bones,” Vinnie said.

“Picture,” Peg said, and Mr. Finn smiled at her.

“Would you like to see it?” said Vinnie.

“She would not like to see it,” Mr. Finn decided. “It’s intended for medical students, and it’s not the thing to be offered for the amusement of a lady. There are pictures enough about without that.”

“Just let me sit and look at you,” Peg said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Vinnie.”

“Nancy is doing her best to nourish him,” Mr. Finn said.

Nancy herself confirmed it, bringing in a great tray of meat, butter and cheese. “I loves to fatten a man,” she drawled.

Vinnie helped clear a place for the tray. He was clumsy, but the very act of helping showed his ease and his growth, Peg thought. Her heart yearned after such settlement. “Vinnie,” she said, “I could eat you.”

The boy made a face at her in his self-consciousness. “Are you lonesome, Peg?”

“Heartsick with it,” she admitted.

“There, there!” Mr. Finn cried, clapping his hands as though to drown such thought. “I think we’re ready. Will you pour, Miss Hickey?”

Peg took the chair he pulled out for her, gathering her skirts beneath her in the manner of the ladies she had watched in the ice cream saloons.

“Will you give us a blessing, Vincent?” Mr. Finn said as he seated himself opposite Peg.

She noticed that the man in no way participated while Vinnie murmured his “Blessus oh Lord”. He sat, one hand on the table, and his eyes on his hand. Nancy gave a deep “amen”, having waited for the grace before leaving the room.

“It is my opinion,” Mr. Finn said, folding his napkin over his cravat, “that an intelligent person must be lonesome a good part of his life. Vincent tells me you are very wise. He tells me that you chose to live alone, and that is the way of wise people. Lonesomeness is the high, cold price of it.”

“I’m lonesomer than I’m wise,” Peg murmured, pouring the tea.

“Which, my dear young lady, is why you are here,” Mr. Finn said, pointing his finger in emphasis. “What I believe happens is this: we take our wisdom like water from a well. When we have a full burden of it, we have to go out and find the thirsty. Vincent and I, now, could use a sip, eh lad?”

“Aye,” Vinnie said, lathering a muffin with butter.

“What I brought today,” Peg said, “you could put in your eye.” She watched the boy shove half a muffin away at one try. “You look to be thriving.”

Mr. Finn beamed while Vinnie could answer her only with his eyes. It occurred to Peg then, looking from one to the other of them, that there was a likeness in their faces: age without years in the both of them, except in the eyes. Those were full of ginger. It was not surprising, she thought, that Mr. Finn had taken to Vinnie, and it was plain that he had—but that out of all the arabs on the streets of New York, he had not found one to his liking before Vinnie landed. Perhaps he had, and the boy outgrown his apprenticeship in the nick of time for Vinnie.

“I’m a-goin’ to school next week,” Vinnie said when he could spare his mouth for speaking.

“Are you? And what form’ll you be in?”

“That’s a hard question,” Mr. Finn said. “There’s a prejudice against wisdom in the young here unless they can point to the books from which it came. I’m afraid Vincent may have to sit down with some not half so prudent as himself.”

“You’ll be doing what I did in Ireland!” Peg said, as though there were joy in the recollection. “Do you remember me telling you on the boat how I sat in the infant school, and I could’ve dangled half the form of them on my knee?”

“There is nothing save ignorance to be ashamed of in this world,” Mr. Finn said.

“What about thievin’ and murder and all them things?” said Vinnie.

“Those things, too, are a matter of ignorance. Take away ignorance, and virtue must survive. I believe it as I believe…” Mr. Finn cocked his head as though he were listening… “in the goodness of man. Now do have a muffin while it’s hot, Miss.”

It was easy enough to believe in the goodness of man, Peg thought, sitting snug at a fire with butter dribbling down your chin. How long would it take him to convince Vinnie of it, Vinnie knowing the cruelty of the streets? Would he stay to be convinced, or would he fly out of a night when the window was open? He must not, she thought. If there was any wisdom she brought today that was it.

Throughout the meal there was little conversation, but now and then Peg caught Mr. Finn’s eyes on her face. She colored under them once and his expression turned to shock. He had been trying to tell her something with his eyes, she thought, and had suddenly realized that she might misconstrue his gaze as an overture on his own behalf to her. For an instant then she entertained wonder at what marriage to him might be like. Fifty he was likely: twice and a half her age. She took a great mouthful of tea to scald out the notion. Was she not to see a man but to measure his worth to her?

Mr. Finn finally dusted his face with his napkin and folded the napkin into a ring. “Now, Miss,” he said, “I expect you have seen more of New York than has Vincent. I wonder if you two shouldn’t like to talk about it a bit? I must go back to work. Vincent will work the harder tomorrow for the rest of today off, I dare say.” He got up and bowed his excuse. It would be hard, Peg thought, for a short man to be graceful, however fine his manners. He paused a moment at Vinnie’s chair. “He’s a hard-working lad and doing splendidly. I hope…” He shrugged and left the sentence unfinished. “Well, you’ll tell him, won’t you, Miss Margaret?”

He need not have tried to convey his meaning with his eyes, Peg thought, doing it very well in a few words. It was not Vinnie’s need to have his courage nailed into place that saddened her, and she felt the sadness coming down on her like a cloud over the sun’s face, but that her misery showed so abundant that Mr. Finn could collect it and weigh its influence against Vinnie’s temptation back to the streets.

They sat in silence before the fire, Vinnie and Peg, while Nancy cleared the table. She could feel the heat through the soles of her slippers and she glanced at the boy’s boots. They were stout and shone a reflection of the fire. Without Mr. Finn, he would have had his feet wrapped in burlap, his toenails darker than the soles of the boots. What a trick she could play now on Mr. Finn, she thought, for if he had fears they must have foundation—what a trick she could play, saying to the boy: do you remember the night, the time we had singing duets on Broadway?