Men of No Property (63 page)

“He’s a white man,” Stephen said.

Vinnie saw the face then, the enormous head, the better by which to hang him. “Oh, Jesus,” Vinnie said. “Jesus, Jesus.” He looked up to where the women were howling curses from the tenement roof. Then he turned and vomited. When there was nothing left in him, he looked back to where Stephen and the other man were loading the body into a cart. He called Stephen’s name, and Farrell came to him.

“That’s the artist, Jabez Reed,” Vinnie said. “Stephen, I think Peg is on the rooftop.”

Stephen’s mouth trembled and then toughened to a hard, vicious line. He put his gun in Vinnie’s hand and strode through a shower of spit and stones to the building. Vinnie lifted his own musket to cover him. Then she came to the very edge of the roof, teetering there, her legs spread, her hands on her hips and giving a spit below herself. It was Peg all right, the bold she! Vinnie had not thought of that for years. What a terrible unity there was in all their lives. The volunteers were moving down on the barricades, breaking them up, driving the mob south before them with grape, and as they went another horde swept out of their shelters and set about rebuilding their wall to the north. Vinnie saw a soldier turn and take aim at Peg.

“Hold your fire!” he shouted.

When he looked up again, Peg put her hand to her face as though she would shield it from his eyes. She had seen him. She drew back then, and from the scream out over the noise of the mob, Vinnie knew she had fled into Stephen’s arms. Thank God, Vinnie thought, he did not need to witness that meeting. Waiting, waiting, he suddenly took fear for Stephen. This woman was not sane. Jabez Reed had been horribly mutilated. Vinnie was rallying help to follow him in when she and Stephen came out, arm in arm, onto the street, the confused crowd cheering them.

“I’m taking Mrs. Stuart to her sister,” Stephen said in a voice Vinnie had never heard.

“That’s Vinnie,” was all Peg said, and after one glance at her he could not take another. She was covered with filth and blood. The smell of it rose from her. Her hair was matted, her eyes bloodshot, and her dress so torn that one breast shone out of the bodice.

“Will I come?” said Vinnie.

“If you will,” said Stephen. “Can you get us transport? None of us will be missed here.”

Vinnie commandeered an ambulance van and drove the horse himself. Sitting stiffly, his back to the gate, Stephen held the woman gone spent in his arms.

It was Dennis Lavery who came to the door at their pounding. He was bruised and bandaged, and his first words: “So you found her, God damn her craven soul.”

“The same to you,” said Vinnie. “Where’s Norah?”

A servant girl came then and helped them take Peg to a bed. To her Vinnie put the same question. “Where’s Mrs. Lavery?”

“Her and the childer’ went to the seashore Sunday,” the girl said.

“And where was Mr. Lavery then?”

“Mr. Lavery returned last night,” Dennis said from the door, “if it’s any concern of yours.”

“I promise you, Dennis, I shall try and make it mine,” Vinnie said. “I have heard you cheered too often today, you and Tweed and Seymour—and a sheriff that’s at home in a mob, but couldn’t stand by his regiment when the fighting started in Virginia.”

“Go to hell,” said Dennis. “I was beat up myself last night. Look at me.”

“Wear it in health,” said Vinnie, “as Mr. Finn would have said. Or don’t you remember him?”

Stephen and Vinnie climbed to the seat of the van and Vinnie turned the horse around. For some way they drove in silence. The streets were all but deserted. Finally Stephen roused himself from his thoughts. “I want to go home,” he said. “If this is the turn things have taken, I’m fearful for Nancy.”

“We’re closer now to my house,” Vinnie said. “Do you mind if we stop there first?” They were passing through the scene of the previous day’s rioting. All was quiet now, ominously quiet, with the sound of gunshot reverberating in the distance. The cars here were lined up unattended, the tracks twisted out of their beds.

“Can’t you move the damned horse any faster?” Stephen cried. “If men can run why should beasts have leisure?”

Vinnie cracked the whip, realizing the sudden terror that had come upon the man beside him. “Only a minute, Stephen,” he said as they turned into his block and he pulled up the horse. At the door he gave the reins over, but he had not stepped down when he saw Jem at the window. “They’re here, Stephen. All’s well.”

“Thank God,” Farrell said, and jumped down.

Vinnie needed to hitch the horse to the post and by the minute it took to do that, Jem had run out and into his father’s arms on the step, and Vinnie knew that all was not well.

In the parlor, the boy sobbed out his story. They had come to the door, a gang of men with clubs and sticks, asking for the nigger. Delia had told them she was gone away, shipped back to South Carolina, gentlemen. And Nancy was all the while in the commode. The men had gone across the street and Delia got Nancy from the commode and pushed her down the cellar steps. She made Jem promise to lead the woman out the cellar door and to the police at the corner station. Nancy was so slow, being big and terribly scared, and the men had come back while she was still on the stairs. Mama got the sword from the wall, and Jem heard her screaming at them while he coaxed Nancy out the back way. They two went through Mrs. Oglethorpe’s yard and then Mr. Oglethorpe came out and took him and Nancy another way to the police and then brought Jem here.

“You are a very brave lad,” Stephen said. “You stay here now and help Aunt Pris.”

“Stephen,” Priscilla said then, “don’t go home.”

“No?” he asked, somewhat bewildered, and very docile.

“Don’t you understand?” Jem said. “They took the sword away from mama and they killed her. The police came and told us she was the bravest woman in New York.”

“I
’M OBLIGED TO YOU
, Judge, for dismissin’ the charges. I’ll vouchsafe he behaves from now on…” How many times during the weeks that followed the riots Dennis said those words, pushing them out with a smile though his gorge rose with them. There was not a man he let down for all that he felt himself let down by having to plead for their freedom. Still, they were a penitent lot he got off, only waiting the chance to get back in his favor. And some in high places had learned a good lesson: they knew now the strength of the people in temper.

“Aye, she’ll be on the best of behavior hereafter, your honor.”

There was the promise to stick a man with! Him needing to crave the court’s pardon for a woman giving her address his own house, and getting no thanks at home. “If I’d’ve been here,” said Norah, “it wouldn’t’ve happened in the first place.”

Wouldn’t it now, Dennis thought, but he said not a word. Like the old fellow in the White House put it, you shouldn’t be sitting on one volcano and scratching the top of another. He was a queer lot, that old one. With his ugly mug and his easy gab, he was as common a man as there was on the street. They’d soon turn him back to where he belonged, the aristocrats, when they’d used him.

Well, Douglas was in his grave. The truth be told, he prospered Lavery as well there as he would have in the White House, Democrat or no. This way Lavery had standing at least in the party. He’d been right three years ago saying Douglas couldn’t win, and he’d like to be right a year hence, saying who could. If he couldn’t be right, he’d rather be quiet, for he was a young man still, the war couldn’t last forever, and it was the war that blighted his prospects. Of all the friends he had made in Washington, no more than a handful were left, the rest of them out of the Union completely. It was a bad piece of luck sent him into high company so late…or maybe so early. Sure that was the way he must see it. All in all, it was a hard dilemma for a man to be in: here he was at the height of his power with the people, with the lower wards and them to the east willing and eager now to carry him anywhere, and him, you might say, with no place to go!

Horatio Seymour made it known that he would like Lavery on his ticket when he ran for re-election as governor that fall. It wasn’t Lavery he wanted, Dennis thought, near so much as the Lavery votes. And it wasn’t governor he wanted to be near so much as president, and nary the chance of that if he wasn’t sitting in the governor’s chair when the time came round.

“Once I can smell the ambition on a man’s breath,” Dennis said, talking it over with the big man at Tammany, “I turn my back on him quick.”

Tweed smiled, for he was not ambitious of office himself. “What do you do for your own breath, Lavery?”

“I eat the first thing I can get my hands on,” Dennis said bluntly. “’Tis only stale ambition offends me.”

It was decided to run Lavery at the county level for Recorder on the ticket headed by Seymour. Dennis was well pleased in it. He would be going before the people on his own behalf and, not needing to worry about the upstate vote, he was sure of winning whatever happened to Seymour, aye, and a snug office in which to ride out the national storm in politic safety.

N
EVER WAS THERE A
time it so little honored a New York man to boast his Irish origins as in the autumn of 1863. Even the mention of Marye’s Hill brought scoffing. “Sure,” Vinnie heard said in a mock Irish accent, “the trouble there was they confused the tune, mistaking a charge for retreat. What a bloody surprise when they got the grape in their faces instead of their backsides.” Bloody enough, Vinnie thought, and for the first time looked over his medals. He was of half a mind to wear them and a shamrock, to appeal to the President himself if necessary for some new military privilege. “But don’t you see,” Priscilla said, “such violent attrition only gains more notice to something best forgotten.” “What would you have me do?” “Only your work as Vincent Dunne, Counselor-at-Law.”

Priscilla was right as she usually was, and Vinnie worked as he had never worked before, and now against odds of an appalling increase: of all the forms corrupted in the decade, the most frightening was the New York bench. Then came the announced candidacy of Dennis Lavery for Recorder by which office he would sit as judge in Special Sessions Court.

“By what right?” Vinnie cried.

“Rather, by what privilege,” Stephen said. “The privilege of office bestowed by the rights of the people.”

“You must oppose him, Stephen.”

“No. I’ve given up The Democracy and its conventions.”

“You cannot. I don’t believe you have at all.”

“Shall we talk about Lavery?” Stephen said. “You asked by what right, presumably by what right he deems himself worthy of such office. I doubt he has given a moment’s thought to his qualifications. The fact that there was rioting justified him to himself, and by the peculiar reasoning of a demagogue, the fact that it got out of hand has put the people in his debt. It is now their duty to exercise their rights on his behalf. He has no doubt whatsoever of his ability to sit in judgment of them individually or collectively.”

“To whom does he think he’s responsible?”

“To God, Tweed and Lavery, but not necessarily in that order of importance.”

“After what happened to you, Stephen, won’t you do something about it?”

“Vinnie, Delia’s death was a consummate irony. Whatever I do cannot be predicated on it.”

Vinnie looked at him for a moment, wondering at all the things to which Stephen had maintained an apparent blindness which he could now believe was no blindness at all, but a silent calculation of his own power to change them. This was what Mr. Finn had meant the night he said Stephen would believe what he must believe. “There is a part of you I shall never understand, Stephen,” he said.

“The part that should have been an Englishman, no doubt,” Stephen said wryly, and Vinnie remembered the day he had made the remark: after his graduation. What a long, long time ago!

“Stephen…suppose, mind now just suppose the Union party were to nominate you…”

The man was shaking his head. “I could not defeat him, Vinnie.”

“Would that really matter—if it were true?”

“Very much if they put up a man who can defeat him.”

“And would you work for that candidate?”

“As hard as I have worked for any cause.” Stephen rose from his chair and went to the window, outside which Jem was playing in the garden with Maria. Now that she was of a toddling, chattering age and still of the inclination to adore him, Jem was highly tolerant of her. “When this war is over, Vinnie, I want to take Jem West. I want to open a law office, perhaps in a town like Springfield, Illinois. I might marry again—for Jem’s sake as well as my own, though I’ve no one in mind.”

Vinnie saw the little frown as he hesitated—in memory of someone he might once have married before ever he met Delia? He always built upon his mistakes, but without ever trying to mend them.

“And yet,” Stephen went on, “this city has been my home. It seems now that it chose me rather than my choosing it, and it deserves more of me than I could wish to give.” He turned and looked at his friend. “All my life, Vinnie, more loyalty has been needed of me than I have found it in my power to give. Where is the flaw?”

“Perhaps in your stars after all.”

Stephen smiled. “How easily you give absolution, Father Dunne. I must come oftener to confession.”

Vinnie talked first with Judge Grisholm, and with him went to the Union League Club, where the opinion and advice of other gentlemen were sought. He went also to Mr. Taylor and his friends. Time and again he heard it said there was no doubt that the reluctance of honest men to risk the opprobrium of public office accounted for the situation of the day. His record as Poor Commissioner and in the Immigration office recommended Stephen Farrell to them. “Oh, yes, a fine fellow,” they all agreed, and some remembered him as a good lawyer…“but.” The “but” was never accounted in Vinnie’s presence, yet he knew very well what it was. That Stephen was Irish made the respectability hesitant to act on his behalf.

“Why, sir,” Vinnie said to Judge Grisholm, “it has come now to this: they prefer their prejudice. One good Irishman would destroy it, and that would never do.”