Men of No Property (28 page)

“Eddie, oblige us, please. Tell the barkeep below we’ve a Southern gentleman here who favors bourbon. Give him a pull at your flask while he’s waiting, Tom. It would be a shame to lose so mellow a mood.”

Foley shook his head. “Margaret, you shouldn’t…”

“Don’t tell me what I should or should not when I am not in your employ,” Peg said. “The man’s thirsty. He must have a drink.”

Foley’s hands trembled as he tried to pour the brandy into the flask top. Peg laughed, took the flask from him, and put it into Matt’s hand. He caught it greedily and tilted it to his mouth. He near lost his balance when he threw his head back. Peg hastened to his back, and supporting his head on her breast, smiled down at him. She twisted his hair between her fingers and yanked his head back every time he was about to take the flask from his lips. He gave a great pull away from her when the bottle was empty, flung it with all his might against the wall, and shouted out his triumph.

“Bravo!” Peg cried and swung around on the players who stood stock and gaping still. “What sort of a celebration this without a dance? Can none of you carry a tune?”

“Shall I fetch my lute, Mrs. Stuart?”

“Aye,” Peg sang out, “a lute or a flute so long as there’s rhythm in it! Gallus Mag, he wanted. I shall do you a Gallus Mag, and this much I shall tell you about her—she was a girl who could dance on her lover’s grave.”

“Wait, wait!” Matt cried, half rising. With a sweep of his arm he crashed the glasses near him from the table. “Clear them off down there!” Those nearest the table scrambled to rescue the remaining glassware. Someone caught up the candelabra. Matt struck his fist on the table. “This here’s your lover’s grave. Let’s see you dance on it, Margaret!”

Peg pranced through the broken glass in her satin slippers and leaped upon the table. She lifted her skirts to her knees. “A Kerry dance!” she cried, “or do you know one from Wicklow, for my true love was a Wicklow man. If you’re Irish, Tom Foley, then sing along with me!”

She began the song herself, a lilting jig to which she danced while singing. One and another voice quavered into tune with hers. Faster she sang and quickened the dance while her husband tried hard to thump out the rhythm. He watched her legs move as quick as prismed light. Suddenly he stopped beating time and stared at her feet. The white cloth was spotted with blood beneath them, the fresh drops marking it with every prance of her foot upon the table.

“Stop it!” Matt shrieked, and in the sudden awful silence, put his head upon his arm and sobbed. “What have I done?” he wailed, “oh, God almighty, what’ve I done.” He took his arm away and thumped his head again and again upon the table. A moment later his arms fell limp. He slumped down on the table and was still.

Peg touched her toe to his face, twisted it to beneath his chin, and with her hands on her hips put her weight into her foot and toppled him from the bench. He sprawled to the floor and fetched each breath in noisy unconsciousness.

“Michael,” she said then, “bring the laundry hamper from the wardrobe.” She waited without a word, without a look to her feet, or to the face of anyone present. “Put him in it,” she said, when two boys returned with the basket. With the help of the others they hoisted and twisted Matt’s great length into the hamper.

She stepped down from the table. “Now, by your kindness, I will permit four of you gentlemen to see us home.”

John Redmond turned the wine glass in his hand, weighed it as though contemplating its worth. He tossed it on the heap of broken glass.

“You are called for eleven in the morning,” he said.

T
HE AFTERNOON WAS BITTER
cold when the school train pulled into Centre Street; it was bursting with boys, the train, having made connections with special runs from Boston, New Haven and other New England towns. They spilled out on the platform and rolled into huddles, each lad to his own school group to make its last cheer the loudest.

“Three times three for Yale, gentlemen!”

Vinnie turned from that cheer with his fellows, settled his bowler on his head, and looked again for Mr. Finn. He had spied him from the train’s platform and lost him again in the rush. It was Mr. Finn found him now, and determined to reach him, Vinnie thought, even at the cost of his dignity. He caught Vinnie’s hands, shaking them both, and whether it was the wind or something else that caused it, the tears welled into his eyes as he gazed up at the boy, a head and a neck taller than himself and with the mark of a razor nick on his chin. To every lad who passed them in the tow of his family and thumped Vinnie on the back with a “Merry Christmas, Dunne,” Mr. Finn turned and bowed a little. Vinnie hoisted his laundry bag over his shoulder and picked up his own portmanteau, not waiting the porter Mr. Finn was flagging.

“I can manage,” Vinnie said. “How is Nancy, sir?”

“A visitation from heaven could not excite her more,” Mr. Finn said. He brushed off the urchins and runners and broke way for Vinnie through the crowd. A carriage was awaiting them on Chatham, and at its door Mr. Finn distributed a purseful of pennies to the beggars. Vinnie flung in his bags and stood aside for his elder, giving him a hand up the step.

“My boy, my boy,” Finn said, laying his hand on Vinnie’s arm when the door was closed on them.

He was going to weep now surely, Vinnie thought, and glad he was they were out of sight of his schoolmates. It was one thing to have a woman watering your breast, but quite another a man of Mr. Finn’s age.

“You must excuse me,” Mr. Finn said. “I am so happy.”

“You didn’t get a letter then?”

“Oh no,” said Finn in sudden alarm.

But Vinnie laid his head back on the cushion and laughed in relief. Many a lad at that moment was asking the same question in trepidation. “I might have flunked trigonometry,” he said. “Old Voss gave us one devil of an examination.”

“You shall have a tutor,” Mr. Finn said.

“No,” said Vinnie. “No tutors this term. The letters went out a week Thursday. You’re sure you didn’t get one?”

Mr. Finn shook his head.

It would have been like him to conceal such news until after Christmas all the same, Vinnie thought. He had done it Vinnie’s first term home in his freshman year. Then the day after Christmas he had introduced him to the tutor. A year ago, Vinnie thought. Ah, but what a difference that homecoming from this! He had come up from school then sick and empty. He had begged Mr. Finn to teach him the trade of locksmith. Yale was for gentlemen, Protestant gentlemen, not the likes of Vinnie Dunne. “I’m not going back. You can’t make me go back. You’re not my father.” “If I were your father, I could care no more about your welfare than I do.” It was Vinnie who had shed the tears then. He had gone to Dennis and Norah for comfort. Norah had soothed him and Dennis had cursed out the Know-Nothings, the Abolitionists, and himself for having sold Vinnie into a parcel of Natives. The Know-Nothings now were a bold lot. They might still have their secret lodges, but they made no secret of their activities—the proscription of all things Irish or Catholic, the glorification of the native born Americans. Dennis had ridiculed Vinnie’s clothes, his manner of speech, his hands with nary a callus and a foot too delicate to wear an honest brogue. He had done more for the boy by this tirade than he knew, forcing him to weigh two loyalties in the balance for the last time, and he had gone home to Mr. Finn. Waiting him there instead of the tutor had been Stephen Farrell.

Farrell had worked with him throughout the holiday and at the start of the next term he had gone up to New Haven with him and talked to the prex and Vinnie’s professors. A Trinity man from Dublin was near as impressive as Oxford or Cambridge to them, and he a footballer at that. Not long thereafter, Vinnie was pledged to a fraternity. He joined a good eating club, and somehow, before the summer was over he had lost the ugly blemishes on his face and the stutter which had made him the laughing stock of every debate. And once out of his freshman year, it didn’t matter so much that he was two years older than most of his classmates. How long ago, those miseries! Truly, he had not expected to flunk even Trig this term. A fizzle maybe, but not a flunk.

He scratched a clear spot on the frosty window with a thumbnail. “Everything looks so new,” he said.

“Fresh stock for Christmas. You will want to shop this afternoon, no doubt.”

“I will,” said Vinnie. “I’ve got a list. When did that happen?” He pointed to a railed-off ruin, the charred remains of a drygoods store.

“Last week. The week before it was Harpers’. A dreadful year for fires.”

“I read about it,” Vinnie said. It was strange, he thought, leaning back. So many things he wanted to ask, to say, and he could not quite get started on them. Always returning from school he felt a bit of a stranger to Mr. Finn, to say nothing of how he felt toward Norah and Dennis, and toward his own sister—as ugly a thing as ever he had seen knotted in pigtails. “I wish…” He started to say something better not said, and finished with something he had not intended at all… “it wasn’t so late.”

“Nancy will give us a quick tea and you can be off,” Finn said. “You’re to meet the Laverys at the eight o’clock Mass in the morning. I shall come along later. They’re in the new house, you know.”

“I know,” Vinnie said. “You wrote me.” The wish he had been about to make was that they might have Christmas to themselves, perhaps with Stephen. Except that that relationship was out of joint now, too. Stephen was married. Vinnie sighed like an old man. “I had a letter from Stephen. From Charleston, South Carolina.”

“They’ll be back for New Year’s,” Mr. Finn said.

“Have you met her?”

“Mmmm. Very nice. You know who she is?”

“Senator Osborn’s daughter,” Vinnie said. “You wrote me. I don’t expect I shall like her very much.”

Mr. Finn laid his hand on the boy’s knee. “Just don’t expect to dislike her.”

Neither of them mentioned Peg. Yet, Vinnie thought, Mr. Finn must have remembered her, too, when they talked of Stephen’s marriage.

Nancy lumbered down the stairs at Chambers Street to meet them, out to the carriage without cloak or shawl and hugged Vinnie into her great bosom in front of all the Christmas Eve shoppers on the street. Passersby turned to gape at them when she cried out: “Masta’ Vincent, you growed as tall as a flagpole!”

She, too, had grown, Vinnie thought, but not up and down. He had to open both doors for her when she went in ahead of him with his bags in her arms. On the stair she paused to speak to Mr. Finn, frowning. “You got a caller upstairs, Mr. Finn. I told him not to wait on Christmas Eve, but he waitin’.”

“Who is it, Nancy?”

“Mr. Valla.” She could never manage the last syllable of Valois, and by her tone whenever she spoke of him, she would have preferred not to have to manage any part of it. Vinnie felt the same way about the sleek and acid gentleman. He was a Native and never missed a chance to show his contempt for the Irish.

“I’ll stop at the office,” Mr. Finn said. “Send him down.”

Vinnie looked at Mr. Finn but said nothing. The older man caught his glance, however. Valois was no longer his own choice of company, but he was not the sort to cut old friends even when he disapproved them. “Never mind, Nancy,” he said. “He may as well have tea with us if you don’t mind, Vincent.”

“Perhaps he has word of Peg,” Vinnie said.

He had reason enough to suspect Valois might carry such news. He had come prancing up the stairs well over a year ago carrying the Tribune correspondent’s account of Tom Foley’s
The Taming of the Shrew
in San Francisco. “Here she is!” he had cried. “I’ll lay you any odds their Kate’s our Mag! Margaret Stuart indeed!”

Valois had not forgiven Peg for doing Gallus Mag, and in her own fashion. And when she had tried and failed as Juliet (Vinnie thought her wonderful) Valois let his bitterness run over: her own fault it was, he said—her stupid Irish romanticism fancying a guttersnipe for a lady in disguise, a harlot for a pining virgin. It was a night, that, when Peg sat stunned at her reception and took Valois’ abuse on top of it. His final remark had been too much for Vinnie: “Well, I’m not the first fool to have started a silk purse from a sow’s ear.” Vinnie had flailed into him, fists flying, but Peg herself plucked him off, and seemed to take Valois’ side in the matter and even to cherish his abuse. Why? Why? She had said the strangest thing when the man was gone: “It all reminded me of Stephen.”

Not long after that and Peg was gone without a word to anyone. “Touring,” her landlady said: “not even telling her sister. Isn’t it a shame, Mrs. Lavery says.”

Not a word from her or of her until Valois brought the notice of Margaret Stuart as the
Shrew.
“And where would you say she got the name Stuart?” Mr. Finn had asked. “History, man,” Valois had said. “The Battle of the Boyne. What better name for an Irish romantic to assume?” “I think you exaggerate Margaret’s romanticism,” Mr. Finn had said. “Why not from a husband?” The question had cast Mr. Valois into a pet. He much preferred his own explanation.

“Vincent,” Mr. Finn said now, “stop here a moment with me. We shall come along presently, Nancy.” When the big woman had closed the apartment door on herself and Vinnie’s luggage, he said: “I’m afraid there is already word on Margaret. I’d hoped to keep it to myself for a few days. Mrs. Stuart is rather famous now, and quite aside from her playing on the stage. There was a husband named Stuart, Matthew Stuart. He was killed in an attempted bank robbery at Sacramento a few months ago.”

“He was robbing a bank?” Vinnie said foolishly.

“Mmmm,” Finn said. “A gold prospector who could not find gold. And by his dying statement, it was the only thing with which he could win back his, ah, alienated wife.”

“But,” Vinnie said after a moment, “but Mr. Finn, that’s not Peg. She wouldn’t care about gold. That’s not our Peg at all. It’s someone else.”

“I hope you’re right, my boy,” Finn said, “much as I should have wished her the success of Margaret Stuart on the stage. But if it is our Peg, she’s not only famous, she’s notorious.”

Mr. Valois sat some moments over tea paying Vinnie compliments on his improvements which the boy did not wish, and with his sharp eye and clever tongue probing this distaste as well: “Even your manner of disdaining my observations speaks eloquently of the American college. Well! When we have no choice but to be provident, we provide well, eh, Finn?”