Men of No Property (45 page)

There was nothing in his career, Dennis thought, that so pleased Norah as his making common cause with Stephen Farrell. She was a queer loyal woman, never stepping beyond her place save when necessity lifted her, but more graceful then than them skipping their lives in the best society.

“I wonder, Norah,” he said one day, “would you call on Farrell’s wife? Her time is nearer than yours and I told him you would. Havin’ brought three already into the world you might be a comfort to her.”

“There’s no comfort for a woman but the child itself,” said Norah, “but I will if he asked it.”

The call was forgot, however, in the twists and turns of political fortune. The campaign was drawing near its close and the dirty deals being made were enough to turn the stomach of a lobster. Tammany had watched the Hardshell rump leave the city convention rather than line up behind Wood. It was too bad to lose them, but let them go. They were led by a man who wanted himself to be mayor, and worse things could happen than another candidate in the field. A worse thing did happen: the Hards threw their support to the City Reform party, and suddenly it looked as strong as the Democrats themselves. A three-way race was on.

It was the likes of Jeremiah Finn who had done it, quiet men making the patient rounds of the business interests of the city, for plainly the Whigs wouldn’t carry a district; appealing too to the Temperance vote and absorbing their ticket. They decried alike the evil discipline of the Natives and the corruption of Tammany. With a desperate situation, the Democrats needed desperate means. The men behind the Reform party were hard to discredit, for they were a mixture of all opinions save the one with which best to damn them: Nativism.

At this crucial point, within a week of elections, the Natives, thinking to strike their most telling blow against the Democrats, provided them instead with a weapon to use on the Reformers, and Dennis was the man who found it. In the public press certain well known Natives published their sworn affidavits that Fernando Wood himself had once been high in a Know-Nothing order. Even, Dennis realized, as Jeremiah Finn had promised. And one of the men taking his affidavit on it was Valois, the bosom friend of Finn’s. What could be plainer than that the Reform party was but a silk dress over Native sacking?

Wood swore publicly to the lie against him and advertised his oath in the papers. The
Irish American
editorialized on the calumny. So touched was he by the sudden rallying of his friends, Wood remarked that if he committed a murder in his family between then and election, the people would still elect him mayor.

Dennis was foremost among those assigned the chore of discrediting the Reform party by proving its Native influence. He was not half so eager to make the exposure in public as he had been in the rooms of Tammany.

“’Tis true!” he stormed at Norah when she protested. “You know as well as I do it’s true.”

“Are you convincin’ me or yourself, Dennis? I’ll never believe Mr. Finn a Native. Never, never, never. Look at him takin’ Vinnie.”

“And makin’ the boy less an Irishman than himself. Like Valor did with your sister. Is she playin’ the simple Irish girls that ’ud warm your heart? She’s not. She’s playin’ French whores and English bitches, and the one bit o’ Ireland she ever transplanted, she made into a slut!”

“What has Peg to do with all this?” said Norah.

“They’re a bunch of heathens, all of them!”

“Dennis, if you’re lookin’ for me to agree before you go into the streets with your rantin’, I won’t do it. I cannot. You didn’t come askin’ my leave afore shakin’ hands with Mulrooney.”

“Christ almighty,” he exploded. “What has that to do with it?”

“I don’t rightly know, but somethin’. And you needn’t be cursin’ to prove it.”

“All right,” Dennis said. “Since you brought it out let’s air it. Wasn’t it Finn set me on Mulrooney, playin’ on my pride, for I was an arrogant pup as Dan’l says, and maybe him set Mulrooney on me. That bears investigation.”

“You’ll find what you’re investigatin’ for, never fear,” Norah said tightly.

“That’s enough, Norah. More than enough. You’re my wife and an Irishwoman and a Catholic. You’ll be bound to that and no other loyalty. Now lie down and rest. Your own time is not so far off.”

“It’s near three months.”

“Three months,” Dennis repeated and grinned. “He’ll be born in the reign of Fernandy.”

As Norah foretold, Daniel Mulrooney swore that it was a minion of Finn’s put him up those many years ago to the destruction of the first Eight O’clock Market. And by way of proof he cited the fact that nary a cart nor a stand of a Chatham Street peddler was touched that night, and a wealth of them sheltered behind the Eight O’clock. Dennis remembered the urchins stealing them to haul off the debris of his market. “My boys respected a bargain,” Mulrooney growled, “even with a Chatham Street Jew.” Then remembering yet another proof of Finn’s complicity, he asked: “And how did he know where to find you that night? He knew where to look for me. The Empire Club.” Dennis had thought till then it was Kevin who found him, but Mulrooney’s logic was tempting.

Dennis went out to his ward campaigning with more will than he had expected, but not as much as he wished. He picked up his band of the faithful and made his first stand of the night in the old neighborhood—a stone’s throw from the Catherine Street market. With the gathering throng, he gathered his own resources. Nothing warmed him more to his message than people running to hear it. He cried the Reformers down as hypocrites, as Natives in the disguise of missionaries, and cited the friendship between Fernandy’s perjuring slanderer and a sanctimonious, tea-drinking Reformer—a turncoat Democrat, a gentleman soured from birth because he was born without hope of Christian redemption.

“Name him, name him!” cried someone from the crowd.

“I’ll call him tomorrow!” Dennis shouted. Tomorrow at least was not tonight. Then, lest it be supposed that he cringed from his duty, he cried: “Will you meet me the same hour here tomorrow? Will you bring your friends to hear me? And I’ll tell you a tale that ’ud wither a ghost!”

A shout of approval boomed into the night.

The drums rippled and his boys broke into a marching song to the tune of
The Girl I Left Behind Me.
The words ran, “Oh, Fernandy is the workingman’s friend, a friend we’ll always find him…”

Dennis led the way between the torchbearers to the next district.

Stephen Farrell fell into stride with the leaders and elbowed the man next to Dennis out of his place. “Is it Finn you’re talking about, Lavery?”

“Are you askin’ it or tellin’ it?” Dennis said, for of all the people from whom he could not now brook censure it was Farrell. Not a word had
The Citizen
published in Fernando’s defense against the Know-Nothing slander, and Dennis felt in his heart it was because Finn had got to Farrell.

“I did not quite understand that bit about Christian redemption. Are you hinting that he’s a Jew? Is that it?”

“Construe it as you like,” said Dennis, although until that moment he had refused to think about the epithets he hurled at his unnamed adversary. He never really knew where the words came from when he needed them, but they never failed him. And the most his conscience demanded of him that night was that he not name Jeremiah Finn.

Farrell kept a silent stride with him, but Dennis knew his eyes to be as cold as the horns of the moon. Blast and damn him. With his lawyer’s guile he could suck a blister without breaking the skin. “Is it a slander on him? Is he ashamed of it?” he demanded.

“I’ve never heard him deny it,” Farrell said. “The shame is not his.” He dropped from the marching, chanting boys.

Dennis moved on to the steps of the public pump at Paradise Square. The faces crowding in on him there were hoary and wizened; the ears listening for one word only—was Fernandy standing a drink tonight? A pull at a hose for tuppence you could buy them, lining them up like sucklings at a sow’s tits, but come Tuesday, they’d line up again and themselves suckle the Democracy.

“Aye, he’s standin’ you!” Dennis shouted, “and a puff of tobaccy as well! And who will you vote for on Tuesday?”

“Fernandy, Fernandy, Fernandy!”

“Aye. He’ll see you get work are you able, and are you not able, he’ll see you get bread at least. How many of you out there are workin’?” But a few hands went up and them as unsteady as the jobs they tokened. “And how many willin’ to work?” Ah, they were all willing in election week, and some with two hands, Dennis noted. “Take care you but vote with one,” he said, showing his teeth in a grin. “An honest vote is enough for an honest man. And that, my friends, is Fernandy! Take over, boys.”

The cheering crowd broke into clusters, each surrounding a ward man whom they knew by the ticket in his hat. Before Dennis had left the Square it was abandoned to him and his torchmen, and to Farrell was he playing the haunt. The democracy was toasting Fernandy, and roasting the Know-Nuts and the Temperance Reformers who begrudged them even tuppence of solace. The night was black and Dennis’ thoughts of a shade to match it. He could not retreat from the attack of his own devising. If
The Citizen
was lost they would say he had lost it, but damn their eyes, it was him who found it, and not much of a find at that! All rhetoric and no guts, all head and no heart! Let them turn, they had turned before. He could roast them all on the same spit.

“Sing, God damn it!” he cried to his men, “and push on to Chrystie Street. They’ll come out to us there in their nightshirts!”

T
HE CITIZEN WAS LOST
to the cause, and claimed in effect never to have been found to it. “We have uniformly urged upon Irish citizens that they should not act together as Irishmen—should not isolate themselves from other American parties, should not place themselves in the hands of Irish priests, still less of Irish grog sellers to be disposed of as political capital…Every Irish voter ought to vote upon his individual judgment about measures and men…”

Dennis carried the paper with him to headquarters, his face as long as the column. But it was a smiling Fernando who greeted him. “You were right, Lavery, about the Mitchel crowd after all,” he said, and Dennis thought he would never forget the moment. Not a word of blame or chastisement. What other man in Wood’s place would smile at a defection on the eve of election? And commend a man for being right in the first place when in the second and last place, he had sworn the camp to be solid and sound! “It all goes to show,” Wood went on placidly, “what’s wrong with the national administration even to the Customhouse desks. They’ve wanted everybody to ride on the donkey, and now they have to carry the poor beast themselves. It will be a clean sweep in ’56. Pierce is through. I shouldn’t wonder but Douglas is through as well.”

“I wonder,” said Dennis, “if that mayn’t’ve been in their minds at
The Citizen,
turnin’ tail like they did. Mitchel was countin’ on Douglas bein’ the next president.”

“He has less chance of it than Fernando Wood,” said the candidate for mayor.

Dennis grinned. “I wouldn’t put his chances near that high,” he said. He tapped the copy of
The Citizen
in his hand. “There’s one good thing in this, they showed their true colors goin’ out—Irish priests and grog sellers,’ God almighty.”

“The Native tongue. It might have come from their handbook.”

“Oh, to hell with them,” Dennis said, throwing down the paper in disgust.

“Certainly you weren’t intending to waste time on them? Bring down the Reform ticket, and you’ll have them in the same blow.”

“My very thought,” said Dennis.

“There are things you must say in the heat of battle, Lavery, for which you can apologize when the day is won.”

“I never apologized to a man in my life,” Dennis said.

Wood smiled. “Oh, I have. But then I’m not as temperate a man as you.”

Dennis started home to an early tea, having spent the afternoon with Jamie Lavery who was carrying the burthen of the business during the campaign. He hoped for a few moments with the children, the only relaxation he permitted himself. There was not much to recommend Norah’s company, and even less that afternoon to recommend his own. Let the night come soon. Hit them harder and longer. Call them out. He took to the stump like some men to drink, shivering over the first taste, and then for it.

Norah was watching for him at the window, but not a child with her. Nor the old man either, thank God. He had got himself a job at last, proving his title to charity by the gesture of work. Dennis could hear the little ones from the top floor when he opened the door. “Don’t they come to meet their father no more?” he said when Norah came out to him.

“I put them up,” she said. “Mr. Farrell and Mr. Finn are waitin’ you in the parlor.”

“What do they want comin’ here? Have they no pride?” Norah turned from him without an answer. He caught her arm. “What did they tell you?”

“Nothin’,” she said, “but they won’t take even a cup of tea.”

“They’ll wish they had then for I’m goin’ up to the childer’ first.”

He went up and stayed up a half hour but the men were still waiting when he came down.

“They’ve more patience with you than me,” Norah said tightly going out of the parlor as he went in. Her face was beet red with the temper.

“I make it a rule always to see the childer’ first when I come in the house,” Dennis said. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

It was Finn who spoke, Farrell taking himself to the window, disguising his temper by turning his back.

“This is very difficult, Dennis,” Finn started.

“Excuse me a minute,” said Dennis, and raising his voice to Farrell: “Are you put out that I kept you waitin’? I remember waitin’ weeks in the stinkin’ hold of a ship for you to welcome me.”

Farrell did not turn from the window.

“Dennis, I was in this house last Christmas Day,” Finn started again. “I was invited and I came and was received with such affection, I cannot believe you did not mean it.”

“I did mean it, but there are things I know now I didn’t know then.”