Men of No Property

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I’ve several places,” the man said. “You can all wait today.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of the girl nearest to him. “Come, you.”

  “I was here when ye turned the key in the door!” a woman cried.

  The man took off his glasses and polished them on his cravat. “The last shall be first and the first shall be last, as the good book says.”

  “And the devil can quote scripture to his own purpose,” Peg said in a murmur.

  He closed the door on her words, but not before he had seen who was speaking.

  With his promise of places, the women perked up. Some grew very nearly companionable.

  “Yous shouldn’t of spoke like that to him,” one next to Peg said. “Yer a greenhorn or yous wouldn’t. I always say there’s two kinds of people in this world you don’t talk back to—them givin’ out the charity and them givin’ out summonses.”

  “I don’t count employment a charity,” Peg said.

  “Don’t yous now?” The woman looked into her face, her eyes small with envy. “When yous’ve lost the good looks, yous’ll change yer tune.”

  “If I was you, love,” one down the line said, sticking her thin neck out of her collar and cocking her head till it looked like a knob on a cane, “if I was you, I’d look for a place as a waitress in one o’ them fancy restaurants. They do say you can get yer pockets filled on the side, they say.”

  “Providin’ you don’t wear pockets if you know what I mean,” another one said, poking her elbow into the ribs of her nearest companion.

  A woman opposite Peg rocked back and forth. “You can all wait today,” she mimicked the intelligence man. “Today and tomorrow and the next day, and if ye die on his hands the city’ll bury you.”

  “And make a profit on layin’ yer out.”

  Peg lost track of them talking, picking up only fragments of the complaints and lamentations. If she had any doubt on where they were cradled she lost it. Ireland had mothered them all.

  “… And when I axed her for the job, she sticks her nose in the air. ‘I told them not to send me another Irish girl,’ she says. ‘My dear, I’ll give you the bus fare. Go back and tell them I want a nice black girl.’ ‘Well,’ says I, and me needin’ the work awful bad wi’ my Joe laid up on me, says I to her, ‘if ye’ll turn yer back a minute, I’ll go up the chimney and down and yous can take another look then at me color.’”

  “To my way of thinking, all intelligence offices should be licensed,” one said. “The places they send a decent girl…” She rocked back and raised her cry to the ceiling.

  “You say the word, licensin’, and it’s red republicanism they call it,” said a girl in a yellow bonnet that looked to have been saved from the gutter.

  “It sounds like somethin’ you’d put yer foot on if you seen it,” another one said.

  “Oh,” said the woman next to her, “did you hear Bishop Hughes on Sunday? They’re risin’ up like a plague over the earth. France is the worst, by all accounts. There was a bishop shot at the barricades in the street fightin’.”

  “And what was he doin’ at the barricades?” asked the one in the yellow bonnet.

  The one telling the story had no time for questions. “And the terriblest thing of all—there’s a crop of them took root in Ireland.”

  “They’ll die there for want o’ nourishment, ha!” said the one with the long neck.

  Or in exile, Peg thought, for she had heard Young Ireland cursed before. She had not forgotten Stephen Farrell, but that strange brief knowing of each other seemed to have made even speaking acquaintanceship impossible. He had not permitted a lone moment between them on the boat after it, and many dreams since had washed between her and her memory of him. Once or twice she was tempted to boldly look him up through the Irish Directory. “I’m as fit now to be a governess,” she fancied herself saying to him, “as ever a girl turned out of a female academy.” And hadn’t she once coaxed the promise of help from him? She wasn’t near as bold as she thought, she decided now. Day by day, the words had stuck deeper in her throat. She hadn’t the gall to put herself up to a theatre manager, much less to Stephen Farrell. Things had not turned out as she expected declaring her independence. Relieved of the responsibility of Norah, in some black magical way she had been relieved of the power to deal even with the responsibility for herself.

  She let her eyes roam over the carping women: rags, bones and a prayer. A silence fell over them when the glass-paneled door opened letting out the one first chosen. She ran to the street door, the chosen one, clutching the white slip of paper as though it might be torn from her hand. Long-nose beckoned the next chosen into his parlor after scenting her out from the rest. The two were the neatest, Peg realized, except herself. In skipping her either he had some dire purpose in mind for her or no place he felt she would satisfy. That was it. When she spoke out, he decided she was too quick tongued for domestication. Something like terror rose in her. Until she was like them here, they were her betters. She tried to still the fear in listening to the carp and cant as it started again on the door’s closing.

  “Ach, Ireland…” It was the one in the yellow bonnet again. Her face was lined with pain, a young face aging fast, and there was the look in it of having thought about the pain and where it came from, and why it came at all, for the lines showed the power of thought as well as the pain. “… She calls them tellin’ her to rise up patriots, and when they rise up for her she calls them traitors. When they’re dead she makes martyrs out o’ them. Will he keep us sittin’ here all day like niggers on a block?”

  Today, tomorrow and the next day, Peg remembered, wondering then how long ago and where it was she heard the words. What chance had she for a governess coming out of here? What chance of becoming a lady? And what want? There was, lower than these rags, bones and prayers, yet another pit of degradation. She had seen it the first night in New York and night and day since, and pitied it. Pity be damned. All of them here were perched on the rim of it. She could see, her head swimming with the vision, face by face of them over a pot of hot corn, a bundle of sticks, a fistful of matches. She could hear their wheedles of beggary, their curses and their whined blessings for a ha’penny. Which of them wouldn’t now give what was left of her joy to lay her head against a red-shirted chest? She got up stiffly and looked around to the outer door, wanting to be sure of it before she took her first step, lest that be as uncertain as she felt of the future.

  “Where’re you goin’, lovie? There’s no conveniences here, you know.”

  “I’m going home,” Peg said.

  “She’s had a change of heart,” said another.

  “Isn’t she the lucky one, that’s the only change comin’ on her.”

  Once on the street, Peg felt herself steadying. It was the closeness of the room, she thought, remembering the windows high from the floor where a person would need stilts to look out. She could never stand to be penned in. The great trees on either side of Broadway were bare and somehow greater for that, for the sky shone through them. There were good homes in this part of town, she could see, looking east and west, fine stone houses with the stoops shining marble. The brass knobs and knockers gleamed in the sunlight. A woman was out here and there, her skirts folded into a coverall, polishing the brass, and clutching a shawl at her throat while she worked. There was the cry of winter in the wind, Peg thought. Half the drays on the street were carting firewood. Little whirlwinds churned up the dirt to stir round with the posters of last week’s election.

  In the afternoon she began a search of Chambers Street. Of the people she knew in New York including her sister, the only one she wanted to see now was Vinnie. He had called upon her twice since the wedding, once soon after it when she had planned an escape for the evening and was short with him, fool that she had been, and the second time to sit a miserable hour with her in the cold parlor and colder presence of Mrs. Riordon and her sewing.

  “So you’re apprenticed to a locksmith,” Mrs. Riordon
had said, sliding the thread along her false teeth until she found a place where they met long enough to clip it.

  “Yes…ma’am,” Vinnie had said.

  “Every greenhorn ought to be sworn into apprenticeship as they step off the boat,” Mrs. Riordon pronounced. That, Peg had known, was a dig at her. If the woman had known the only apprenticeship Peg wanted to serve, she would have dug deeper and shoveled her out of the house entirely.

  “Do you like it, Vinnie?” Peg had asked.

  “Somit,” the boy said.

  “Of course he likes it,” Mrs. Riordon said. “He knows it’s for his own good. I had a nephew once apprenticed to an iron monger. He was killed in the Mexican War, poor lad. It lost the family a fortune, him dyin’ ahead of his master. Ah, but the Lord knows best. Is he a bachelor, Mr. Finn? Mrs. Lavery tells me he is.”

  “I dunno,” Vinnie said.

  “If he is,” Mrs. Riordon had pursued in her way of asking a question to which she proclaimed an answer in the same breath, “there’s your future if you’re a canny lad. Is he havin’ you live in, Mrs. Lavery says?”

  Vinnie said that he was.

  “Is it yoursel’s alone?”

  “Yes…ma’am.”

  Peg had marked his “ma’ams” coming awkward as they did, but coming nonetheless.

  Mrs. Riordon had grinned, her thin lips stretching hard around the teeth. “And no woman at all?”

  “Only the servant.”

  “Oh, you fell into a feathered nest!” she exclaimed. “There’s confection there on the table. Break yoursel’ off a piece.”

  With an ax, Peg had thought. The sweet was as hard and cold as her charity. “Is it a nice room you have, Vinnie?” Peg tried.

  “’Tis. There’s two windows in it lookin’ different ways.” He had almost come to life then to tell her about it.

  Mrs. Riordon had drowned him. “Never lie between them of a night,” she cautioned. “You’ll catch your death.”

  And lose another acquaintance of hers a fortune, Peg had thought. “There’s a nice coat you’re wearing, Vinnie,” she had tried again. “’Tis a better fit than the one Norah made you.”

  “Here’s me sellin’ coat,” the boy said, holding up his arm as though to display it better. “I wear t’other at the work bench.”

  “He has you sellin’ already!” Mrs. Riordon cried, “and him a bachelor.”

  “Can you count the money?” Peg asked.

  “If I can’t I ask,” the boy said. “I never seen so many kinds.”

  “Money is money,” Mrs. Riordon said, “if you can see the numbers on it.”

  “There’s some people,” Peg said, out of patience, “hold it tight enough to feel the numbers.”

  Vinnie had laughed because of the need to laugh or to shout or to cry. She had not even managed a word alone with him at the door, Mrs. Riordon following him with an invitation to return soon, which he had not done. “I wonder,” she had said finally, standing between him and Peg, and as sly as a chimney draft, “it was him got Mr. Lavery’s brother into the market, was it, Mary tells me? I wonder could he do something for a chit of a girl—something nice and cheery that wouldn’t dirty her hands or bleary her eyes?”

  “Let him do for them who want his doing,” Peg had said, and her anger had seemed to turn on Vinnie and his master when she had meant it for Riordon. Anxious to put an end to it quickly, she had dispatched the boy. “Good night, Vinnie. Tell Norah when you see her I’ll be round one day soon.”

  But she had not gone around. She had seen neither Norah nor Vinnie in over a month. She knew it was unfair to blame them. And I don’t blame them, she said half-aloud as she slowed her step, but wouldn’t it be a humiliating thing if Riordon, the old crow, was right? and I too found a position through the intercession of Mr. Finn? She tried to tell herself that it was not to this purpose she was going. She stopped at every window to peer into it, and saw nothing of the boots, the fancy goods, the clocks, the chandeliers and girandoles she stared in upon. She would be in a terrible state if she turned back now. Something had happened to her and the worst of it no later than this morning. She was afraid. Instead of chasing the world she was running from it. She bit her lip, and found some little comfort in the pain, as though it made her sure she was herself. Something seemed to be very wrong. No longer wanting to go where she had started for, she had no sense of direction. She could not remember whether she had come up or down the street. She was lost, and worse she wondered if something weren’t slipping in her mind. It might be fever, she thought, putting her hand to her forehead. It seemed hot and she leaned her head against the glass window. How long she stood that way, she did not know.

  “Peg?”

  She jerked her head up at the sound of her name. A dream seemed to have broken. Vinnie was standing beside her, his mouth half open as though he was not sure whether to stop or to run for it.

  “I thought it was you and then I thought it wasn’t,” he said.

  He stood, his arms dangling. He had grown already, she thought, or else she had started to wither. The swollen stomach was gone from him, and a little flesh had taken the gauntness from his cheeks.

  “Vinnie, ah Vinnie,” she said, lifting her hand and then dropping it after ever so lightly touching his shoulder. A lifetime seemed to have passed since she was able to hug him to her. “Are you in this neighborhood?” she asked, thinking it might cover the confusion he had found her in.

  “Down a piece. I’m out on an errand.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  “’Tis done. Weren’t ye lookin’ for me, Peg?”

  “I was,” she said then, “but I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”

  “Why ’ud I not?”

  “I was mean to you last.”

  “’Twas the oul’ hen scratchin’ between us,” the boy said.

  Peg laughed. “Ah, Vinnie, you’re an owl yet.” She put her hand on his arm then, and he squeezed it between his and his ribs. God bless him, she thought, oh, God love him.

  “Would you come meet Mr. Finn? He’d ask you for tea.”

  “I’m perishin’ for a cup,” she said, “but maybe if you’d ask him off an hour we could go some place and have a tupenny cup to ourselves.”

  “It ’ud be nice could you see where I’m livin’,” the boy said. “’Tis a strange, weird place.”

  Peg allowed herself to be led along the street. A few steps in Vinnie’s company and she began to feel more her old self. And as they waited their chance to cross the street before it, she realized that Jeremiah Finn’s was a fine establishment. The columns outside it made it look an emporium. More than locks and keys were made and sold here. All kinds of hardware were displayed in the window: link chains, sledges, tongs, axes, hammers, even a plow. Another window was given over to kitchenware, kettles, copper pots and pans hanging against a blue backboard like so many suns in the sky. For them I’d be a scullery maid, Peg thought.

  A clerk came to attention at the ring of the door’s opening, shooting great white cuffs out of his sleeves in anticipation. He soon shot them in again and returned to his ledger. At the back of the store was a shop where in the brief glimpse Peg caught of it, she saw the sparks exploding as a man worked over a grinding stone. The screech of stone on metal followed them up the stairs. There, his eyes glistening in the light of the gas jet, Vinnie knocked on a door and opened it.

  “Mr. Finn?”

  “Come in, come in, lad. What did Murtaugh say when you gave him the package?”

  “He said ‘Thanks’,” Vinnie said.

  All Peg could see was Mr. Finn’s white-shirted back where he sat on a high stool like an ordinary clerk, his legs woven into the stool’s legs.

  Mr. Finn grunted. “Which is his way of saying, ‘You’ll have to take me to the law to collect for it.’ I tell you, Vincent, not business but the law—that’s the career for a man.”

  “Mr. Finn,” Vinnie said, “I met me friend and I ast her to tea.�
��

  “You what?” Mr. Finn said, and Peg was ready to flee.

  But it was Vinnie’s pronunciation the man was questioning.

  “As-k-t,” Vinnie said carefully.

  “That’s better,” Mr. Finn murmured.

  “And she’s here wi’ me now!”

  Mr. Finn cocked his head around to glance over his shoulder. “Oh my, why didn’t you say so?” He hopped down from the stool and caught his coat from where it hung on a halltree at the ledger. He pulled it on saying, “Oh my, oh my,” as though, Peg thought, she would be destroyed at the sight of a man without his coat.

  When he was frocked he came across the room, his hand extended. “So this is Peg,” he said. “Miss Hickey, I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”

  How long Vinnie had been waiting for this, she thought, having so prepared the man. She smiled into Mr. Finn’s puckered face. He was no taller than she, and when he smiled his face knotted up like a wild rose at sunset.

  “Blow out all the lights, Vincent,” he cried. “All accounts are no account when we’ve a lovely guest to tea.”

  He led the way up a second flight of stairs, calling ahead of them to someone named Nancy that they were coming and bringing a lady to tea. Nancy, Peg discovered, was a large black woman with a soft warm voice that seemed to roll like she did. Mr. Finn ordered Peg into a chair the size of a throne while he fussed about arranging the fire in the grate and the chairs for tea. If he were to bump into Nancy in the preparations, Peg thought, he would bounce half across the room. It was a room near as big as a store, hung with tapestries and pictures and cluttered with books. Never one for observing the furnishings of a house, Peg took in only the books and the fine size of the room where a person could stretch and walk and take his ease in a dozen places.

  “So much—space,” she commented.

  Mr. Finn seemed to bound to her side. “I dare say you think it strange for a man the size of myself. But I was raised in a box, as it were. My grandmother, bless her, said it was that which stunted my growth.”

  “I know many a man no bigger than you, Mr. Finn,” Peg lied.