Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  Outside was a crowd thronging four city blocks, awaiting a glimpse of the hero. Armies of forgers were touting spare tickets. Images of his face cost a dime. He was in the theater now. He was still at Brooklyn. He was coming by boat. He was coming in disguise. He speaks like an Englishman. He dresses like Beau Brummel.He’d talk the rain out of wettin him.

  Their passes – Lucia preserved them, and I am looking at them now – were in Row A of the Grand Dress Circle. She and Steffa looked down, so the diary records, at the huge crowd in the mill-pit below. More than four thousand people. Seats had been removed. Not an inch of floorboard was visible. There were boys on their fathers’ shoulders; mothers with tiny children; men climbing up the columns; men fighting their way in. It was not the usual audience for a lecture. Usually, Steffa joked, they’d be fighting their way out.

  ‘Poor immigrants, mostly,’ Lucia writes in the journal. ‘Many very scrawny & ill-clad.’ Some were carrying banners; others brandished green pennants, sold by hawkers for days beforehand at fifteen cents the pair. And suddenly she was startled to notice, as she scanned the crowd with her opera glasses – up there, near the stage, by the proscenium’s left pillar – her maid, Honor Connolly, beside ‘a large-headed navvy’. She was a surprising girl, Honor Connolly from Ardee. I should have liked to know her.

  Steffa, what a beast, madeun vrai performance of

  holding a kerchief to her nose like Marie Antoinette.

  ‘Ireland is rising,’ she sniffed meaningfully, at one point.

  I commanded her to rememberla politesse .

  The newspapers record that O’Keeffe made the crowd wait almost half an hour. Then the chandelier was slowly lowered and extinguished by the stagehands. A single limelight was lit; the heavy brocaded curtains parted. On the stage was a lectern, nothing else.

  The Jefferson erupted. You could hear the tumult five streets away. Flowers and green ribbons rained from the gods. They were cheering, screaming, even before he appeared from the flies. His silhouette came briefly visible as he was led to the backstage by his bodyguard. He let them wait another two minutes. His glass of water was filled. The ovation was prolonged and ecstatic.

  He stood sternly beside the lectern, hand touching his breast, head bowed low to the fierce applause. Many times he gestured that people should desist; they only cheered louder and sang roundels of his name. He was dressed in black broadcloth with a waistcoat of lustrous navy. The boots were seal-black, had been polished until they gleamed. On his right hand was a diamond and it flashed when he moved. His gloves, his stock, even his cuffs were black.

  ‘You are looking,’ he began ‘at nothing.’

  There was laughter from some of the audience. O’Keeffe did not even smile. Slowly he stalked to the front of the stage: Hamlet in search of a father. There were whoops and whistles – he took off his gloves. He appeared to be waiting for silence.

  ‘I thieved this wretched shell from Victoria Magnifica, who kept it under lock on her wilderness island. A monarch’s amusement. An object to be guarded. A nothing abandoned in a crevice.’

  ‘For their shame!’ called a man from somewhere up near the roof. ‘Long live the Blade,’ called a woman.

  ‘No shame,’ cried O’Keeffe. ‘But a radiant badge of honor! They put Tone under lock! Lord Edward Fitzgerald! That Titan John Duggan! A pantheon of patriots! Names I am unworthy to utter this night. Nor ever shall be worthy, did I live to Methuselan spans. For the body you see before you to have been thought worthy of an attempt to break it –of this, of this, shall I boast to my sons .’

  A roar filled the hall. He continued, riding over it:

  ‘These limbs, this rude frame, this clutch-sack of bones, this mortal hand, this uncultivated tongue. This breast which bursts with sorrow for my starved and ravaged nation. All of it they wanted. Every splinter of my being. The fools did not realize, the crown-dazzled fools,that our bodies are as nothing but empty ships, waiting to be cargoed by history !’

  He said a great deal more – but you can imagine the rest. His performance was overwhelming, masterful. ‘His accent is fine-toned English,’ theTimes would enthuse, ‘legacy of his preparation by the Jesuit Fathers at Shropshire; but his fire would strip the gilt from a basilica.’ For almost two hours he paced his Elsinore and spoke, giving an account of his life, his revolutionism. He talked lengthily of his boyhood, the horrors he had seen. Infants left to die on the quayside of Wexford; fathers, mothers abandoned like animals; the vessels in the port weighted down to the gunwales with desperate, hunger-bitten emigrants. One night he had wept from his nursery window as a woman on the wharf had died. Next morning when he awoke, her body was still there. In the land she was born in, where she had never harmed anyone, where the rich and the idle had all they ever wanted, she was not worth the price of a grave. ‘That heroine,’ he said, ‘whose name is in no book, that woman is the reason I am here.’

  She and her class. The poor of Ireland. They alone had been his inspiration. As he stood on the gallows, then languished in prison, as he prayed on the hope-scalded rocks of Australia, it was they who had saved him from despair. ‘England, you criminal, weep,’ he raged, ‘to have wronged as great as these.’ A Dutchman working backstage that evening, who had no interest in Ireland, and barely knew where it was, told me that by the time the lecture had finished, he, Dutchman, was ready to burn Buckingham Palace.

  O’Keeffe dined at the house on Fifth Avenue that night, at the invitation of Aunt Steffa, who had insisted on being presented to him after the last of the eleven curtain-calls. He was polite in the dressing suite, sipping a glass of iced champagne, quietly signing autographs for the ticket-girls. The lecture had been nothing, he insisted to Steffa: ‘Did you think it all right? I thought I was a trifle hoarse.’ Self-deprecation was one of O’Keeffe’s modes – the vain’s preferred form of boasting.

  My grandfather appears to have distrusted him from the outset. O’Keeffe talked incessantly in those days. It was as though he regarded supper to be a continuation of his lecture. Silverware and delft he used to illustrate his homily, which was long and broad and mesmerizingly detailed, parts of it delivered, to my grandfather’s bewilderment, but to his daughters’ delight, in playful French. A brandy goblet was Wolfe Tone, a carving knife Lord Cornwallis. Sauceboats and teaspoons were the starving poor of Wexford. He did not eat much, though he was far from abstemious. It was evident to the company that he knew what to do when confronted by a glass of claret.

  He had changed into a lounge suit of shimmering black, a sort of blouson ofjaponaise silk. (‘Like a comedy pirate,’ my grandfather later said, but that was not accurate, quite.) He smoked when invited to – Turkish cigarillos – ‘a vice I acquired in captivity’. Costume apart, his appearance was odder than previously, mainly because, on attempting to leave the theater, he had been besieged by a throng of scissor-wielding women who had relieved him of many locks of his hair. He made jokes about this assault but one could see he was rather pleased by it.Les Anglaises would have relieved him of his head, he remarked; a handful of its grass was nothing.

  The old man, a Republican, did not care much for monarchists, but he disliked all extremists, regarding them as discourteous bores. This Irishman, he later commented, talked about England the way Methodists talked about gin. (‘Wearisome, predictable,’ my grandfather once told me. ‘The mention of Queen Victoria in that strange man’s presence would have the effect of moonlight on a werewolf.’) There was also the difficulty, though it went unmentioned that night, that O’Keeffe was a man of several pasts.

  He was rumored to have fathered a daughter with an Aboriginal woman at Tasmania – the infant had died but the scandal had not – to have left the woman abandoned when he made his much-fêted escape. There were whispers among Irish New Yorkers that she had drowned herself for love of him, that there had been other women in his story – a parson’s daughter, a magistrate’s wife – even that he had a mistress, amarquésa ruined by opium, stashed away at Baltim
ore. I assume Lucia knew of the gossip, about some of it, at any rate. Whatever she can have felt about it is uncertain.

  What is fact is that she and O’Keeffe began to go about Manhattan together, usually, though not always, accompanied. There were evenings at the theater, at the opera especially. O’Keeffe adored Verdi – he had Italian blood from his mother – and indeed was himself a more than passable tenor. But he was endearingly shy about singing in public. He could play the lute a little, and sometimes did. But poetic recitation was his favorite kind of aria. Many in his company, as those months progressed, noticed an old ballad of his homeland become his drawing-room piece. Usually it is sung rather merrily; a rollick. O’Keeffe spoke it quietly, with antiphonal slowness, as though its every word was new. As though somewhere in the prison of its rhythms and rhymes was a long-sequestered truth.

  As I roved out,

  by Dublin city,

  at the hour of twelve at night –

  Who should I spy

  but a Spanish lady,

  washing her hair by lantern-light.

  First she washed it;

  then she dried it,

  over a fire

  of angry coal.

  In all my life, I ne’er did see

  a maid

  so sweet about the soul.

  You can picture it, I think. This Heathcliff of Ireland, with his curls and fine shirts and his feeling for the tragic and his griefs and his glittering eyes. They would walk in the parks, on the banks of the river. On Sundays they attended Mass.

  Lucia had declined several proposals by her twentieth year: one from a brilliant young surgeon, a pioneer of gynecology, who later married into a branch of the Astor family and became a minor though accomplished painter of Western landscapes; another from a Boston banker. These rejections of such appropriate suitors seem to have caused some difficulty with my grandfather, who could be stern as well as kindly. His conception of marriage was essentially contractual, though his own had been happy and by all accounts loving. Not long before he died, in 1903, he remarked to his attorney that he had never understood his treasured Lucia, and I think that was an honest admission. He did not read poetry; she read little else. Fiction he abhorred. (‘If I want blasted lies, sir, I go to a newspaper.’) He was a skeptical Presbyterian, she a religiously minded Catholic raised in the faith of her mother’s people. There was once even a feeling that she might consider holy orders. But I do not thinkMi Tía Lucia could have made a nun. Not after she met O’Keeffe.

  Their letters I have, but I am uneasy perusing them. The Reader will know what it is to be in love, the ardencies we suffer, particularly when we are young, as was one of the authors of these billets-doux. Suffice it to say, it is clear from their contents that a friendship of the mind was not what was forming on those summery evenings by the Hudson. One paragraph only has always struck me as strange. ‘I loved you,’ Lucia writes, ‘before ever your hand touched me, before ever I saw you, or heard spoken your name. And if I died tomorrow, to have known you even so fleetingly would be miracle enough for one life.’ A remarkable confession if true, you will agree; but I have no reason to think it false.

  He took advantage of her youth, you say? Perhaps you are correct. Though she always swore he did not. ‘It was I,’ she told me, ‘who pursued the friendship. He thought it was him, but it was always me.’ I make no accusations. It is not my part to make them. No one can know, looking into his history, the reasons of his heart, that self-absolving siphon, still less the accommodations that another has reached with the magistracy of private conscience. Whatever the reality, early in 1855 O’Keeffe and Lucia were quietly married, in a hastily convened ceremony that went unreported by the newspapers. It was January the tenth; her twenty-first birthday. The first day she could marry without consent.

  My grandfather was at Havana by reason of his business. Returning to New York, he was apprised by Aunt Steffa. ‘I thought he was going to shoot me,’ she would later recall. ‘He called Con a disreputable fortune-hunter and me a colluder in lust. It was all rather fabulously exciting.’ But for all his rage, which reportedly was Vesuvian, he would not see the couple homeless and unassisted. Abandoning them would have stoked the already smoldering scandal, no doubt. But to be fair to the old ogre, he had that American quality of trying to do, if not your absolute best, the best you can rise to in the circumstances. ‘Make do and mend’ was one of his maxims. In this case, he had little choice.

  Thus the James O’Keeffes were established in the bride’s childhood home: Number 1, the Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Not the worst address imaginable to appear on the calling card of a convict with a death sentence on his head. Two floors of the mansion were remodeled for the couple. Their laceware was imported from a nunnery at Dublin. Masterpieces were hung, Louis-Quatorze displayed. It was a notably snugger nest than the one shared with him in Tasmania – by a woman now forgotten, if she had ever existed at all.

  Almost immediately, the marriage seems to have become troubled. It is not unknown for newlyweds to experience disappointments, difficult adjustments to the Republic of Matrimony. As with many an exciting destination, once finally reached, you wonder was it worth setting out. The guests have gone home, the confetti has been swept. You stare at one another across the ruins of the breakfast, disconcerted by the suddenness of the silence. Much of modern life, and nearly all of modern fiction, turns a decorous gaze away from this uneasy vista, endorsing in its stead the precarious idea that a marriage is the close of the book. Many have found it unsettling, this requirement to learn that a wedding is not the epilogue but merely the dedication. The volume in which you find yourself may be beautiful or dull, a Perfumed Garden or a Penny Dreadful. Your co-author may adore you or kill you off. Little wonder there are moments of apprehensiveness. But this was clearly of a different order. Something happened in that first season of my aunt’s wifehood that would have grave and lasting consequences.

  It took many years for me to discover the nature of the secret and still, to this day, I am not at liberty to reveal it. But I do wish to state, the tattlers are wrong. A number of the suggestions are so wildly flamboyant as to scarcely merit debunking. O’Keeffe had strong male friendships. Which man has not? He said boys were beautiful. Some are. But he had not, so far as I am aware, the Athenian predilections not entirely unknown at his leafy English school. The intimate sphere, the marital aspect – what Aunt Steffa used to term, to my grandfather’s horror, ‘the nothing about which there is much ado’ – I believe proceeded happily, indeed mutually happily. This is not always the case in the new-sown meadow where ardor and greenness combine. It was at heart a private matter and under my pen shall remain so, since there is nothing to be gained from its revelation.

  In any case, if the Reader will indulge a digression: a truly companionate marriage is rare as the platypus, that mixed metaphor of impish Lady Nature, and possibly as doomed to the museum. Should you be blessed with such an alliance, here is what to do. Cease, now, with these time-wasting lines, shred the volume into halves, then cast them into the hearth and fly to the lips of your tolerant conspirator to ask if there is anything you can do. For who among us would not rather be making love than reading? Indeed, what is thepoint of reading, if not to help us love one another better? If only O’Keeffe had understood what words are for, instead of always what they are against.

  His engagement book for the first two years of his marriage makes a sad, a revealing study. Montgomery, New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, Macon, Chattanooga, San Francisco (twice). He went around America like a restless wind. Every invitation was accepted; always he went alone, often remaining away for months. Of those seven hundred nights, he slept less than ninety in New York. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he would rather be away.

  When he did return, there were tempestuous arguments. The marrieds were observed on a number of occasions quarreling heatedly in the public street. Lucia, a half-Latin, like O’Keeffe himself, was no wilting lotus when it came t
o a spat. The architect Carroll Templeton, himself at one time an admirer of Lucia, told a friend of an extraordinary incident he had witnessed at the house. It happened at a lavish supper hosted by the O’Keeffes for St Patrick’s Night, 1857.

  At this ill-starred commemoration, O’Keeffe had become inebriated – dismally so – and had railed at my grandfather, calling the old man a filthy name. My grandfather, himself not entirely unrefreshed, had demanded satisfaction as a matter of urgency, to which invitation O’Keeffe responded by producing a loaded revolver. Two shots were discharged into a quattrocento altar-panel of ‘Christ Crowning the Madonna’, by Fra Lippo Lippi (attrib.). It cost ninety thousand dollars, in 1851. To Lucia’s mortification, and the astonishment of the guests, the evening concluded with father and husband brawling on the staircase like a couple of Bowery toughs while the maidservants shrieked Hail Marys. It was all, Templeton journalized, ‘rather wearily stage-Irish; aPunch illustration come to life’.

  Soon afterwards O’Keeffe departed to go wandering the Central Americas, hardly the action of an uxorious groom. He was gone eighteen months and wrote few letters home. The three that survive are clipped, almost businesslike. He writes like one who knows how to hurt. It is rarely what you say, but what you omit, that hurts. Hurt is a matter of editing.

  What he did among the isthmians, I have never been able fully to discover. Nor who accompanied him, if anyone. Costa Rica was visited and Panama, briefly. He wintered in Nicaragua, the land of Lucia’s people – she was of an old Castilian family,conquistadors andcaballeros – but appears not to have visited her ancestral holdings at Matagalpa. He submitted a capable essay toHarper’s Weekly on the use of narcotic herbs among the Mestizo Indians. Also a piece on theAtlantica town of Bluefields, a settlement whose denizens are not Indian but black, speaking a patois of cockney English and West African Gullah. The piece mentions that its author ‘spent the rainy season’ in the town ‘observing the hurricanes from the terraces of variouscaudillos – their term of honor for a man of distinguishment’. But inquiries made at theCosta , admittedly several decades later, yielded no one that could remember him ever having been there, or, indeed, the existence of anyone calling himself acaudillo , or of any house possessing a terrace.