Men of No Property (55 page)

“Once—in spirit. When I was a boy I worshiped Peg.”

Their eyes met and Priscilla’s lips parted as though there were a question on them. She looked quickly away then and Vinnie watched the sparkle of sunlight on the moisture of them. “Where are we driving?” she asked.

“Where would you like to go—to be there and back in an hour?”

“I’ve never been to your house on Chambers Street,” she said without looking at him. “I should like to see it before it’s torn down.”

Vinnie’s heart began to thump. He carried the apartment key in his pocket. He had spent much of the morning there, as black a morning as he had known, having gone upstairs from the Emporium and found the worst of memories waiting him. And now his pulse raced at the thought of returning. “Would you like to go there now?” She nodded that she would. He leaned forward and redirected the driver. “I don’t suppose,” he said, settling back beside her, “I have ever done anything of which your mother would so thoroughly disapprove.”

Priscilla laughed. “I dare say Mr. Finn would also have disapproved.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think you could do anything of which he would not have approved heartily.”

Vinnie tried desperately to compose his mind, his heart, but it pounded on, louder in his head than the rattle of carriage wheels. What was any moment they had ever had together compared to that approaching? Always, always they had been in sight of other eyes. Four walls had never found them alone together, the night had never darkened on them.

“Peg was in love with Stephen, wasn’t she?” Priscilla said after a silence the duration of which Vinnie could judge only by the many blocks they had come.

“Yes.”

“Did he know it?”

“I’ve never talked about it with him,” Vinnie said evasively.

If he had answered the truth she could not have divined it more clearly. “Isn’t it a great pity when people cannot love as much as they are loved?”

“How wise you are,” Vinnie said.

“What was her husband like?”

“I have no idea. I don’t think he was much.”

“How can you say that if you have no idea?”

“He tried to rob a bank, if you must know. That’s how he was killed.”

“He mustn’t have been a very good bank robber then,” Priscilla said. “Had he ever done it before?”

Vinnie, for no reason he could think of, was for the first time, annoyed with her. “I don’t think so.”

“Poor man,” she said.

“The busiest corner in America,” Vinnie said as they approached Broadway and Chambers Street.

“What did Mr. Reed mean about Stephen, his being hobbled?”

“I suppose he meant with Delia. He doesn’t like her, having met her but once. He’s the sort who makes up his mind about people in a hurry.”

“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Priscilla said.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think he likes Stephen either.”

Vinnie thought about that, and something else that he had wondered over for some time. “Do you really like Stephen, Priscilla?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “But I don’t understand him. Nothing seems important to him except maybe Jem. And I think that’s dreadful.”

“The things that were very important to him, he feels he failed at,” Vinnie said. “Irish independence, a school he started for immigrants here, the law…”

“And with Peg?”

“Maybe that, too.”

“Poor man.”

Vinnie threw up his hands. “Oh yes!” he cried in vast impatience. “All of them poor men, poor, poor men—dead, wounded, hobbled, but it’s Peg who’s got the scars!”

“You saw them, too,” Priscilla said.

“Yes.”

“It’s strange. I felt then like you just now—angry, hurt for her, but I didn’t feel sorry for her. I didn’t dare to. How I wish I knew her! Instead of some of the silly people I do know. Fashion! Who’s calling on whom! Weepy novels, poor little Deborah lost in the snow. Help…hel-1-l-p. Shadow boxes! Miniatures! Sometimes I feel as though I were living in mother’s watch case.”

Vinnie grinned. How he loved to see her explode like this.

“It’s not at all funny,” she said.

“I suppose not,” he said, “but I was thinking I’d borrowed her watch today.”

“We could walk faster than this,” Priscilla cried.

“Then let’s do. It’s not far.”

This, too, was an unusual pleasure for her, Vinnie realized, walking in the stream of afternoon traffic amongst tradesmen, mechanics, clerks, bootboys, through peddlers’ carts and hawkers’ wares, meeting rarely a woman who wasn’t a beggar or a child who wasn’t a newsboy…the garble of talk, the snorting of horses, the creak of vans and pulleys, the endless rumble of wheels.

Vinnie turned the key in the door, allowed her to precede him into the dusty vestibule and then threw the inside bolt on the door. “God knows who would fall in after us if I didn’t lock it,” he said.

“How exciting it is out there! Oh, Vinnie, I could love the city now. It’s the little squares of park I loathe, the morning promenades down Broadway, and heaven forbid you glance down side streets.”

“It isn’t always this noisy here,” he said. “By seven o’clock anyone on the street has likely lost his way, and then you can hear the traffic from Broadway, all night long, like a spinning song. I used to sit at the window and think of people going to the theatre, to Niblo’s, to Nassau Street and Buttercake Dick’s, to Chrystie’s, to any old oyster cellar, to any old shop with a lamp in the window and a fiddler at the hearth. And your heart doesn’t yearn for it any more now, Pris, than mine did then. You’ll have to give me your hand on the stairs.”

So soft, so trusting a hand, like a child’s meekly given in the dark. He opened the upper door—opposite Nancy’s scullery. He pointed to it. “Whenever I came in Nancy would call out: ‘Is that you, Masta’ Vincent? When I don’t hear somebody I knows is there, I knows it’s you.’”

How natural that he should have brought her here, after all, Vinnie thought, as they went from room to empty room. Trying to recall their lore for her, he saw it all again himself and the happy-things—the beginnings, not the ending of it all. “The most remarkable thing in the world to me was a room of my own with two windows, one looking one way and the other another. I suspect that’s why I didn’t run away—I could not make up my mind by which window to go.”

“Truly?”

“No, not truly. I knew very well what was out there besides the music and the lights and the freedom. And in a manner quite his own, Mr. Finn convinced me I was needed in here much more than I was out there.”

“That’s what’s important, isn’t it? To be where we’re most needed.”

“To be needed, that’s what’s important.”

“Was it very bold of me to ask you to bring me here, Vinnie?”

“It was very dear of you to want to come.”

“I wanted to come to be near you—I don’t mean now, though that too, of course. Oh dear, I’m being still bolder now, and I’m not saying at all what I meant.”

“May I say something then?”

She nodded.

“When I went away from here this morning, I could have taken a sledge hammer and brought it down myself. It was like wanting to kill something too long in dying. Does that horrify you?”

“Why should I be horrified at mercy?”

He thanked her with his eyes. “Then when you came in with me it was all serene, composed. How could I find such havoc in empty rooms—and suddenly now, joy. Enormous joy.” She stood, looking up at him, her face so lovely in the late, dust-paled sunlight, so alive, filled with the wonder of his rapture. “Oh, Priscilla,” he cried, “I love you. I have never known a moment like this.”

Still she watched him, wordless and smiling. He held out his hands to her, but she made a little twisting leap between them into his arms, her own arms about his neck. They clung together in a wondrous pleasure, trying to move apart an instant to look into each other’s faces. That was too painful, fraught with shyness of their ecstasy, and they again held each other, Vinnie kissing her hair, her forehead, her cheek, her mouth, gently, lingeringly. Then, her head against his shoulder, she sighed.

“Dear one,” he whispered. “Asthore.”

“Asthore,” she repeated.

“Gaelic,” he said. “It means ‘dearest’.”

“A lovely word.”

Thus were they able to draw apart. “There’s not even a chair to sit down upon,” he said.

“As well,” she said. “I might not want to leave.”

“Nor shall I let you until you’ve said something to me.”

“Oh, Vinnie. I love you with all my heart. And I know I shall never love anyone else.”

He kissed her hands and turned them about, kissing her wrists, holding her pulsebeat against his lips.

“They say I’m too young to know, but I’m not, Vinnie. There’s no one I want to know except you, and no one I shall, no one I could.”

“None of those nice young men of family and position?”

“I couldn’t give you the name of one of them.”

“Your mother could give you the names and genealogy of all of them—and will. You’re the youngest and she will want you to marry last. And your father will agree to that because he loves you the best himself.”

“Will he love me less because you love me also?”

“You always leave me with a question I cannot answer. Since last summer I’ve dreamt of this moment, and yet it finds me scarcely knowing what next to do. I’ve done nothing to prove my worth. I’ve nothing to recommend me except my love—and yours for me.” He thought about that for a second. “That should be enough, shouldn’t it?”

She nodded.

“But is it enough for you, Priscilla? You’re just discovering what it’s like outside your family. It’s not so wonderful as it seems, as you would soon find out.” A look of puzzlement came into her eyes. “But I should try to make it more wonderful than even you dared dream.” She smiled then. But again the enormity of what he was about to propose crossed Vinnie’s mind, and he needed to give it voice: “Grisholm says the most he’s managed to teach me this year is how little of the law I know. Many a practicing lawyer, of course, never learns that.”

“Are you afraid, Vinnie?”

“I am a little, I suppose.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know exactly, because I really think I have great expectations.”

“Then it’s only mother and what she stands for.”

“That’s quite a lot.”

“Shame on you, Mr. Dunne. She’s just as much afraid of you.”

“And what I stand for?”

“”What do you stand for that you’re ashamed of now?”

“I’m not ashamed of anything I stand for,” Vinnie said.

“And have I ever blushed for you?”

“So prettily…right now,” said Vinnie, “and I deserve it. I shall screw up my courage on the way home. On the way home.” He repeated the words. “Did you hear that, Priscilla? On the way home. Oh, my beloved, how could I have been afraid of that? I do love you so.”

“Say it again, Vinnie. There’s an echo in here.”

“I love you,” he said more loudly, and sure enough, it was faintly echoed.

“I am twice-loved,” she said.

“Twice and forever. If my courage equals my love, may I ask your father tonight to consent to our marriage?”

“And if he will not consent?”

“Will you marry me with or without it?”

“With or without their consent, Vinnie. Tomorrow or a year from tomorrow, I promise to marry you. May I die if I break that promise.”

Vinnie held her close to him. “Oh, my darling, live…that I may live.”

“We are betrothed now?” she said in a sort of wonder.

“Betrothed and beloved…now and forever.”

Y
ES, I’M PLAYING TONIGHT
. Mrs. Stuart is playing tonight. Mrs. Stuart? That actress who made such a splash in
Camille,
remember? You know, she was caught in the fire the night
The Valory
burned. There was talk it was arson. Some said she was drunk. It was right at the height of the Know-Nothing troubles. Her brother was there, or brother-in-law, Lavery. He’s in the State Senate, a Wood Democrat. He carried her out and supposedly said, “Let it burn.” But whoever said what, the machines took up sides and put out each other instead of the fire. New York, New York, a fine city, New York. And what happened to her? Trouble she was, and who hires trouble? Oh a couple there were who’d have chanced it, but to tell you the truth, she’s a beauty no longer and not even the actress she once was. Wrapped up eight months in swathes and dressings, you don’t just come out the way you went in. Fire, they say, eats fire. My friend, to borrow a phrase from the Bard, poor Peg’s a-cold.

“Fill your cup and join your friends, Mrs. Stuart. I’m leaving and they’re calling for you.”

“Don’t leave, Jabe. And don’t be bitter with me. I’m sure you’ve had no more ‘no’s’ in your life than I have.”

“I could match scars with you…and did,” Reed said.

“A cruel way of making love,” Peg murmured.

“Have you ever found a kind one?”

“No.”

“Nor I.” He sat down opposite her and put his elbows on the table. “Perhaps we should have started from that proposition, that making love is a cruel affair.”

“Or never started at all. It was a passing weakness with me, Jabe.”

“There’s this to be said for passing weaknesses, they frequently recur until they’re leeched.”

Peg looked at the dregs in her empty cup. “I will not hurt you again, Jabez.”

“Then you would accommodate your sensitivities to my affliction if I were to propose myself again your lover?” Peg said nothing. He put his hand to her chin and jerked it up, forcing her to look at his eyes, fierce and searching dark. “You would take me into your bed and pretend me as white as an Irishman.”

Peg could feel her mouth quiver. “It has been a long time since I pretended anything to myself,” she said.

“God damn your charity,” he said, rising and kicking the chair from beneath him.

Pfaff came across the room waving his apron. “Out! Out! Wild man!”

But others had taken hold of Reed, and it was Peg who fled the cellar. What a sorry end to the afternoon. But which of them ended happier? A chancy thing, her happiness—like a sunny shelter on a windy day. If you stayed in it too long, the sun itself moved off. People there were with less of it, like Jabez, and people with more, like Vinnie and his darling girl. There were not many women, Peg thought, to whom she was affectionately inclined. Well, as Norah would say, he deserved it. Whenever good fortune befell people Norah said they deserved it and whenever bad, she would say it was but the will of God trying the size of their souls.