Men of No Property (49 page)

“I half wish I’d gone myself,” Dennis said. “I could stand a bit of cheer.”

“You’re always sayin’ that after,” Norah said.

“’Tis the greetin’, keenin’ parts she plays. Doesn’t a man have troubles enough of his own without goin’ to the theatre to watch other people’s? Aye, and them people he don’t even know.”

“Is it the only reason you don’t go, Dennis?”

“Quit your proddin’ and probin’. I’m not stoppin’ you from goin’.”

“But you’re sour as a quince if you’re home when I get here.”

Dennis caught hold of her skirt and pulled her to him, catching then her hands in his own. “It’s not that I mind you havin’ the good time, darlin’, ’Tis only irksome that you’re able to have it without me,” he said, trying to make light of his ill humor.

“Oh, Lord,” Norah said, letting her eyes play in his for an instant, “didn’t I feel there now like we were back over the stable? Ah, they were good days, Dennis.”

“And are these days so bad you need all the time to be lookin’ back on them past?”

“You’re gettin’ as touchy as your brother Kevin. Mary says she can’t say a word to him but he thinks she’s sizin’ him up next to you.”

Dennis laughed but without pleasure and let go her hands. “And that makes him touchy, does it? It wasn’t so long ago he’d’ve taken that for a compliment. He loves to see a man strainin’, Kevin does, and no understandin’ at all if he sits down to a bit of thinkin’ in the middle of the day. If he sat a bit himself and used his head instead of his back it wouldn’t be bent double on him now.”

“’Tis late,” Norah said. “We better go to bed or the childer’ll be up afore we’re down.”

“Aye, we better,” Dennis said. And there was this to be said for the dark, he needn’t watch the flight of her eyes from his own when there was a chance he might trap the truth in them.

Within the week certain newspapers took cognizance of the anti-Irish, anti-Papist nature of
The Benefactor,
and the
Irish American
ran an editorial castigating management and players. It recommended that Catholics and Irish stay away from the theatre and let those in attendance be known for what they were, Dennis read it aloud to Norah.

“And you didn’t even know it,” he said, putting down the paper.

“I wasn’t lookin’ for it,” Norah said tightly and went about her work.

The Nativist press was quick to respond. They found their best offense in a bill of particulars about the star: had not Mrs. Stuart trained the brogue from her speech and then avowed herself an American actress? Had she not toured America from California to Boston? How many stars could say that? How many stars knew America as did Mrs. Stuart? The exchanges continued, much to the delight of the publishers who printed every word and sold the better for the strongest of them. It was not long until the
Freemen’s Journal
could truly call Mrs. Stuart the Know-Nothings’ darling.

Dennis watched it all, not with pleasure, but with a small grim satisfaction. He would not for the world have wished Norah hurt, except that this hurt might ease the pain of an older one, or might indeed cure it altogether. She was more understanding now, confounded by her own ignorance. Then one day he overheard Mary Lavery at her: “Sure she’s more use to them than a unfrocked priest on a street corner.”

Dennis walked in on the conversation. “That’ll do on it, Mary.”

“’Tis time someone gave the truth,” Mary said, “and not have Norah makin’ a fool of herself and her da, chasin’ in and out their theatre like it was the church.”

“The truth was in Norah’s heart before ever you advised her, Mary,” he said with quiet sarcasm. “And it just happens I’m plannin’ to go and see the play for myself tonight.”

“Are you, Dennis?” Norah cried, and the homing flight of her eyes to his made a feeling run through him he thought was stilled. He wished then that Mary was gone.

“Well, I hope you at least know what you see,” the big woman said, shrugging herself like a lazy cat.

“Now, I tell you, Mary,” he said, and bent his head so that he could wink at Norah out of his sister-in-law’s sight, “if it comes to a choice between not knowin’ somethin’ I’ve seen and knowin’ somethin’ I’ve not seen at all—d’you know, I’ll chance my own ignorance? Go along with you, Mary. You know you agree with me.”

She melted into a smile, for what she could not swallow whole, she was always willing to nibble. “Listen to him turn my own words on me, will you?”

“Ach,” said Norah, “if he could curl hair like he can turn a phrase, there wouldn’t be a thatched roof in the family.”

Unbeknownst to herself Mary was eased into an early departure.

“Are you truly goin’?” Norah asked him then.

“I am,” he said gravely.

Norah explored his face. “Is it for me or on politics? I know there’s ructions brewin’.”

In the end for her, surely, and for now not to brew ructions. “We’re tryin’ to keep the boys away from there. I’ve a notion there’s nothin’ they’d like better, the Natives, than to stir us up to a riot.”

“Then it’s for me,” Norah concluded, and thought about it a moment. “Is it a sin for you to go, Dennis?”

He lifted her chin with his forefinger and kissed her. “Only if I enjoy it, love.”

And enjoy it he would not. How could you bless and damn a woman at once, Dennis thought, scowling at himself in the mirror as he dressed that night, and those were his feelings toward Peg. The only blessing coming her was for something she didn’t even know: the turning of Norah into an understanding woman—and God knows, he would take an understanding one over a humble one any day in his life. How many men he knew with humble wives…and proud mistresses. But if peace were coming to him at home out of this, there was nothing of comfort in the remarks abroad. He had never boasted it, but it was known nonetheless in the Hall that Mrs. Stuart was his sister-in-law. More than one man said it was a good thing this was not an election year. There were men in the party itself who would make the most of the connection: it was by no means forgotten that sworn affidavits had once affirmed Fernando Wood to have been a Native. Plainly Margaret Stuart needed soon to be discredited.

Still, whatever Peg was, she was no Native, and therefore might be reasonable. But what reasonability would save her now with the Know-Nothing tag upon her? Mary Lavery was all too right: a renegade priest spouting venom from the Customhouse steps prospered their cause no more. There was nothing at all for it that Dennis could see but retirement from the stage altogether—or at least for a couple of years. God make her willing to that, God make her persuadable.

He got his gloves from the drawer, one of three pair, by the grace of God, and one pair as good as the other. If only Farrell had married her—instead of making her unmarriageable to a decent man. Small prosperity to him, and small he had in spite of his elegant wife. He sang like a nightingale in Surrogate, Oyer and Terminer, and though, it was said, he moved juries to tears, he could not coax a verdict this side of Appeals. But whose affair was that save the Almighty’s? Thanks be to Him, it was none of Dennis Lavery’s, at least.

E
VEN AS DENNIS WAS
turning from the mirror, Peg was sitting down before hers in the theatre. She had been badly deceived, she thought, even beyond what she knew of men’s powers of deception. She opened the butter jar and commenced making up for a role that was nightly becoming more painful to her, and for that, alas, the more tender-seeming in performance. Suppose she refused to go on tonight? That would break the contract…but late, so late for honor. But what to her was honor? What to her was Ireland, what, indeed, the church, to volunteer this price? She shook her head against the torment. Oh, Valois, your revenge is subtle! A turncoat, a renegade, a Know-Nothing: even that she had been called in the penny press. And the Natives brought flags to the theatre like picnicking children which they waved while they cheered her. It was all too incredible.

Valois tapped at the door, came in, and took her clothes brush to his coat. “Sold out,” he said. “We may have a noisy house again, but what odds? I’ve taken the precaution of police protection, especially for you, my dear.”

“The protection I needed was from you, Val, not any provided by you.”

“What charming flattery!”

“Get out of my dressing room. It is not provided in my contract that I need share that with you.”

Valois curled a loose strand of her hair about his finger. “What a pity you are Irish,” he said, looking at her in the mirror.

She jerked away from his touch. “How you must have enjoyed confiding that information to your lodge brothers.”

“Oh, my dear,” he said, drawing a long face, “if I’d thought for a moment you wanted it concealed…”

“The devil catch and carry you out of here!” Peg screamed.

Valois skipped from the room.

Peg needed to steady the stick on the light cage as she held the cork to the flame, and needed to hold one hand with the other as she made up her eyes. But she was waiting at Bridget’s call.

The moment she appeared on the stage the huzzahing started, the stamping and waving of hats and handkerchiefs—and strangest of strangenesses to Peg, many a cheering idiot was a gentleman! A few scattered boos rang forlornly amongst the cheers, and somehow Peg took pleasure in them. She left off the business with which she was usually occupied through the commotion, and moved a few steps downstage, tilting her head to listen. Immediately came the words: “Speech! Speech!” amongst the clamor. Peg made an impatient gesture with her hand, and that apparently was taken as a signal for silence amongst those who found discipline so easy. The house was suddenly still.

Only having come so far could she see each face defined now beyond the wall of light and she was again reminded of the marching men the night Jeremiah Finn was shot. Their darling, she? Oh, the fools, the fools.

“Gentlemen,” she said, for it was now both natural and imperative that she speak, “Gentlemen, I must tell you that you mistake me…” and Bridget’s brogue came and went from her tongue, as though it might prove itself close to home. “Hear me, for I shall say but a few words. If I were to say to you now that I despised Ireland, would that make me a better American? If I were to spit in the Pope’s eye—oh yes, such words have been spoken in Ireland—would that make me a Protestant? God help you for a wonder of a religion if all it takes to get in is a mouthful of hate. Now I shall play a part for you upon this stage—I am honoring a contract playing it, more honor than the contract does me asking me to play it—but do not again mistake the player for the play. I was born poor in Ireland. I might rather have been born in America and prosperous, but deny Ireland I will not, I cannot, and I would not if I could.” She rubbed her hands together, the cold sweat running in them, and then stiffened her arms at her sides as she backed away from the apron and saw again the merciful blue-white wall rise before her. She turned her back to the audience, and only then was there any sound from them—a thick Irish “Hear! Hear!” and with so murmurous an applause in its wake, the opposition best opposed it by its silence.

The play went on and to an enduring stillness, as though, the first comedian said, they were playing on a tombstone. When the final curtain closed there was no applause at all. Only the shuffle of feet in the aisles, the hawkers’ voices at the doors betokened the presence and departure of living men.

Valois waited Peg in her dressing room. He sat in her chair and did not rise. “I did not credit you with such cunning, Margaret, or I might add, such eloquence.”

“Nor did I myself,” she said, throwing off the wig. “’Tis a hard world to live in and we do what we must. Please get up from my chair, Val. I’m very tired.” She shed Bridget’s shawl and sacking for her own silken gown.

“Neither did I know you were so religious,” he said, sliding out of the chair and pushing his backside along the table until it found a place uncluttered.

“You know the contrary to be true,” Peg said. “Let us have no more pretense between us, Val. You trapped me viciously and the more so for my ignorance of how to escape. Do you know what I felt like tonight when they started cheering? Like the whore who’d been had for a button.”

“You’ve become the most vulgar, disgusting bitch, Margaret.”

“I know,” she said, taking from beneath the table the naked brandy bottle and pouring herself a drink. “It is the way I best enjoy the company into which you have introduced me.” She lifted her glass. “To you, Val—to the Know-Nothings’ pimp.”

He leaped at her screaming like a wild bird. Peg laughed, lifted her foot, stiffened it and met his frail force mid-on. But at that instant Dennis admitted himself. He caught Valois by the coat collar and lifted him so high the little man’s feet danced in space.

“Will I blister him for you, Peg?”

Peg looked at her brother-in-law, the empty glass poised in her hand for the drink had spilled. “Were you in the theatre tonight?”

Dennis flung Valois from him. “I was and proud of it, God bless you.”

Peg felt a chill come over her. She turned to the table and poured herself another drink. She downed it while Valois gathered himself to his feet and cursed darkly. “You came,” she said, meeting Dennis’ eyes in the mirror, “to hear my speech.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Dennis.

“And if I’d not made the speech, what sort of a blessing would you give me now?” Dennis did not answer. “As long as you’re bent on the truth, tell me, Dennis, how long is it since last you saw me on the stage?”

“I’ve not much time for theatricals.”

“Wasn’t it Gallus Mag?”

“It might’ve been—it might.”

Peg sunk her teeth into her lip in fury. “A plague on your soul!” she spat out then, and darting her head toward Valois at the door: “On both your filthy souls!” She caught up the first thing at hand to fling at Dennis, Bridget’s shaggy wig which tumbled the brandy bottle with its tatterends, and in the swing of her arm she trailed the wisping silk of her sleeve across the burning gas jet. The flame ran up her arm and a streak of it leaped to the brandy-soaked table, but Peg by then was a dervish of screaming fire. Dennis’ body was cruelly, harshly upon her, pressing, rolling, smothering, and all the while, the terrible, terrible pain, his long screams of alarm and the crackle of flame, the smell of singe and the searing pain… and then a long, long fall into nothingness.