“It’s been such a long time since we talked like this,” Vinnie said.
Farrell went to the window. “If only I could overcome my loathing of this city. Sham and riot. Every day the Fourth of July. Run up the flag and you can run down any man beneath it.”
“Is Delia homesick, Stephen?”
Farrell laughed. “You have perceived the very backside of the truth. Delia was never happier. She loves every curse and whistle of it, and promises to be its belle. Which reminds me I must go home to her aid. She will find New Year’s receptions here more arduous than in gentle Charleston.” He paused at Vinnie’s desk and fingered the neckpiece he had removed from the bust of Cicero. Idly, he put it back. “He was more than an orator, this man. He was an advocate and he had courage. When tyranny ruled under the guise of democratic forms, he dared test the forms…and marvelously, they sustained him! Courage, lad: that’s the thing.” He looked back. “Come early to us, will you?”
6
VINNIE, WHO ON A few occasions had visited Stephen in his rooms on Bleecker Street had thought them the very model of a bachelor’s residence—books and pipes, memorabilia of many a walking excursion, and furniture willing to compromise its dignity to a man’s comfort. What he expected of the Farrell suite at the St. Nicholas, he did not know, but certainly he was not prepared for the elegance which greeted him. The hotel itself was shining new and renowned as the best appointed in the country and with all the modern conveniences. It was said that some of New York’s most fashionable families entered spirited bidding with each other for the residential suites. For some it was as much a matter of convenience as of fashion. Such was the growth of the city’s population it had become well nigh impossible for a man to provide a decent home for his family within a reasonable distance of his place of business. One old home after another was abandoned to industry or tenement, and soon thereafter the entire neighborhood. So it was that many people built summer homes at Newport, Rockaway or other ocean points and maintained as well apartments in the better hotels.
Vinnie gave his hat and cloak to the liveried Negro and with Mr. Finn, waited for his host and hostess to turn from the callers just previously arrived. Glimpsing the sparkling buffet in the room beyond, the crystal and silver and snowy-white linen, the many-ribbed roast and the turkey, white-cuffed at the ankles, and having a second more to estimate the fashion of his hostess by the jeweled comb in the back of her hair, Vinnie thought it small wonder that Stephen was afflicted that morning with a great loathing of finance. By these signs he had needed to devote much thought to the matter of late.
Stephen caught his eye and smiled a welcome while he whispered to his wife. Likely it was word that Vinnie had come, for she laid a delicate hand upon the arm of the gentleman talking to her and in a most artful way dismissed him. She turned and appraised the boy for a long instant and then gave him both her hands. “So you’re Vinnie,” she said. By a power he was by no means sure was entirely his own, he lifted her hand to his lips. Fragrant it was as the cherry blossom, and petal soft. Her smile was quicker by far than her speech, conjuring and vanishing the dimples in her cheeks. Her eyes were china blue and her hair as blond as a tassel of wheat. “I must say Stephen didn’t do you justice at all, tellin’ me about you. But no man ever does, tellin’ about another man, I don’t think.” She gave one hand to Mr. Finn, while holding still to Vinnie. “How nice to see you again, Mr. Finn. I do believe there’s gentlemen here of your acquaintance,” and she named certain of the guests already arrived, sorting the merchants from the rest, Vinnie noticed, for Mr. Finn’s approval. “I declare this Northern custom of makin’ calls like a relay race is barbarous. Uncivilized. Try and slow ’em down a trifle, Mr. Finn?”
A more ingratiating way of dismissing a man, Vinnie had not seen. As a gambler could shuffle cards, so could Delia Osborn Farrell maneuver sociabilities. “You just stay by me a bit so we can talk,” she whispered to Vinnie, “unless you’d prefer the company of gentlemen?”
“No ma’am,” he said emphatically.
“Ma’am,” she mimicked. “If you don’t call me Delia, I’m goin’ to call you Mr. Dunne. I’m not so much older than you, young man. Would you like a plate?”
“Not yet, thank you. I’ll feast my eyes for the present.”
Stephen overheard the remark. “Such savoir faire.”
“Don’t you pay him no mind, Vinnie,” Delia said. “That was a charmin’ remark and I’m flattered by it.”
With a lull in the arrival of callers, Delia left Stephen to receive and drew Vinnie apart to a nest of chairs, choosing one for him less able to his support than a mushroom. “Don’t you worry about that chair,” she said at his hesitancy. “It’s strong as King Louis himself and he lived to near a hundred. My grandfather brought it back to Charleston from when he was in foreign service. I remember him sayin’, “I can tell a gentleman by the way he sits a horse and a Louis Fourteenth chair.’ Most men don’t care if they’re sittin’ on tradition or a tar barrel, but I like tradition, don’t you, Vinnie?”
He smiled his acquiescence although for comfort he’d have taken the tar barrel. One really did not need to say much in conversation with Delia, just occasional words of approval, and she would prattle on pleasantly, her eye straying now and then to her other guests, and if she needed to excuse herself to attend them, her conversation on her return picked up from where she had left off as though she had paused for no more than breath. “Stephen says Ireland’s full of traditions if the people weren’t too poor to care about them. His own family goes back three hundred years. Did you know that, Vinnie?”
“No,” he admitted. Truly, he knew very little about Stephen before America.
“His mother’s a beautiful woman. That’s her portrait Mr. Finn’s lookin’ at now.” Vinnie glanced toward the picture. He would need to go nearer to really see it. “I think your Mr. Finn is so quaint,” she went on. “Stephen’s very fond of him, and I’ll tell you the truth, Vinnie, I like him better myself than the company of wild Irishmen Stephen’s takin’ up with again…” There was something in her attitude toward Mr. Finn that made Vinnie feel uncomfortable, but he had no time then to explore it. “They’re talkin’ about startin’ a paper, you know. John Mitchel just out of jail and startin’ up already. I don’t mind some of his associates, but I’m frightened of Mr. Mitchel. That man’s full of hate, Vinnie. You can smell it on his breath.” She laid cool fingers on Vinnie’s hand. “Stephen says it’s only Englishmen he hates, but I’d like to know how he can always tell an Englishman.” She gave a deep sigh. “I suppose I shouldn’t be talkin’ like this, but it just seemed I was gettin’ Stephen contented and settled when Mr. Mitchel had to escape from Van Diemen’s Land or wherever it was.”
Vinnie laughed. She spoke as though John Mitchel’s escape and arrival in New York had been timed to upset her nicest calculations.
“Oh, you can laugh, goin’ back safe to that Yale College of yours. But you should hear them talkin’. England’s goin’ to get into war with Russia and they ought to send somebody to talk with the tsar. Imagine, talkin’ with the tsar about invadin’ Ireland! He’s got so many millions and millions of acres of land now and peasants and slaves, what would he want with Ireland, will you tell me that? It just don’t make sense, you know that, Vinnie.”
Delia had not noticed her husband’s eyes upon her, but Vinnie did, watching the callers come and go in a nearly constant parade while Delia was talking. Stephen finally crossed the room to them.
“Come, Vinnie,” he said. “I want you to meet John Mitchel.” It was not so much that, Vinnie thought, as that he wanted Delia to return to the place of reception.
Delia sighed. “We were just gettin’ nicely started, Vinnie and me.”
“There will be a time, my dear,” Stephen said gently. “You must prosper us all with your attentions today.”
For an instant about her mouth Vinnie saw the shape of a pout. It vanished so quickly he thought he must be mistaken
, for Delia no sooner turned her back on them than she happily picked up the refrain of some previous conversation with another gentleman.
“You will be friends, you and Delia,” Stephen said. “You’ve not had enough of the company of women, I expect.”
“The God’s truth that,” Vinnie said. “My tongue thickens like plaster in their presence.”
John Mitchel was distinguishable from any place in the room, surrounded as he was by a coterie of boisterous fellows. Every now and then their laughter caused guests of more sedate demeanor to suspend their own conversations and turn Young Ireland’s way until the hilarity subsided. Stephen soon forgot his avowed purpose in carrying Vinnie off. From one cluster of guests to another they moved, savoring bits of talk on the theatre, on Thackeray, on what had become of table rappings. Confronted by a party of young men, their plates and glasses full and their praise high for the host they didn’t recognize, Stephen murmured: “We must have a good draft in the chimney. I swear they didn’t come in by the door.”
“It’s a grand gathering, Stephen,” Vinnie said.
Stephen squeezed his arm. “Isn’t it? And men of all persuasions, thank God!”
He would remember that, Vinnie thought, and the fervor with which Stephen said it. It was as though he had determined his guests by their diversity. Suddenly Vinnie spied the artist whose painting he had bought for Mr. Finn a few days before.
“I say, Stephen, I don’t want to crash the Mitchel crowd, if you don’t mind. Later, perhaps, but there’s an artist chap over here I know.”
“As you like,” Farrell said. “They’ll be here a while by the looks of them.” Young Ireland had gathered chairs to themselves, and it was quite unheard of that New Year’s callers should sit down.
Vinnie made his way to where Jabez Reed stood at the window, glowering down at the Broadway scene, one hand working out of the other behind his back. His shoulders were sloped and his back hunched a little, perhaps from the weight of an enormous head. From behind, the artist looked like an old man. His face, Vinnie remembered, was like a child’s. The Institute catalogue listed him as having been born in Indian territory in 1828.
“I wonder if you remember me, Mr. Reed?” Vinnie said.
The artist gave him but a glance, beckoned him to his side, and pointed to the scene he attended. Vinnie shaded his eyes from the light of the room. The snow was falling faster in the gathering twilight. He saw then what so intrigued the artist: two inebriates trying to haul their fellow one way while the man’s dog was determined to take him by the coat tail another.
“Who wins, do you say?” said Reed.
“The dog,” Vinnie said. “He’s sober.”
“Sobriety, like virtue, is not always its own reward, my friend.” With that, the artist swept the curtain into Vinnie’s hand, gave the window a great heave, and having it open, thrust his head out. He put two fingers between his teeth and blasted a piercing whistle. The dog let go of the coat to better attend the sound and before he could catch it again, his master and chums had skipped into a tavern.
“One up for Aesop,” the artist said.
Meanwhile, half the candles in the drawing room were guttered, and Reed had gained as much attention within as without. Vinnie closed the window, preferring to face the strangers outside than the friends at his back. Reed, discovering his audience, looked at them a moment in dismay. Then he jerked his thumb toward the window. “My reindeer,” he said. “I’m about to leave.”
Amid the shaking of heads and resumption of talk, Vinnie said: “Will you have a plate before you go?”
The artist looked up at him sharply. “I do know you, bless my eyes! Vincent Dunne, well done, capital done! Lord God of Jerusalem that I should be so slow to recognize a man by whom I was so excellently done!” He leaned close to Vinnie. “I should prefer a glass.”
Vinnie beckoned to the servant.
Reed lifted the glass. “To faithful dogs and faithless lovers. If one had the soul of the other…it would not improve the world an atom.” He downed the wine at one long pull, blinked his eyes and accepted another. “To artists everywhere—who try as they will, cannot possibly eat enough today to suffice them the rest of the year.” Finishing that off, he smacked his lips and rubbed his hands together. “Now, pray tell me, Dunne, who is our host, for I believe I’ve happened on the wrong reception.”
Vinnie told him and presently accounted the identity of as many people as he knew. Reed’s eyes played over the guests while he listened and now and then he would query: “What is it you say he does?” And when Vinnie was finished, the artist went back to one of the names. “A sea captain, did you tell me? Nonsense. He’s a military filibusterer, oh, he is now, don’t be shocked. It’s quite respectable in some circles, and if I rightly heard the accents of mine hostess, this is one. Look at your sea captain coddle Young Ireland. Shall I tell you why? He calculates them soul-cousins to Young America, and rightly. Both will join anything military so long as the gods of war are summoned in the name of Democracy. Conquer the world and call it Destiny. That’s the spirit. Manifest Destiny. Mark it, my friend: your sea captain will be off to Cuba one day soon, a little armed filibuster to set it free from the tyrant, Spain. And all them Cuban black folk—what’s their destiny? He’ll ship ’em back to South Carolina, and manifest it there.”
Rolling back on his heels like a street preacher, the artist had once more drawn attention to himself, including that of his hostess.
“If you’re goin’ to talk about South Carolina, gentlemen, it’s goin’ to have to be in the presence of a native child,” Delia said, appearing, Vinnie thought, with the haste of a ghost, for he had not seen her come.
He presented Jabez Reed as his friend. When Delia gave him her hand in such a manner that he also needed to raise it to his lips, her other guests again dismissed Reed from their attention.
“And do you know South Carolina, Mr. Reed?” Delia persisted.
“I must account my knowledge ignorance until your acquaintance, madam,” Reed said with heavy irony. Vinnie could sense the immediate antagonism between them.
Delia looked at the artist, the blue in her eyes as cold as stars. “We have more to recommend us than our hospitality, Mr. Reed,” she said, “but to that you’re welcome if you’re a friend of Vincent’s.” And smiling, she left them.
“Someone will chew her hand off one day for that,” Reed said furiously. “But for the present score another point for South Carolina.”
Vinnie felt it necessary to offer a defense of Stephen’s wife. “All the same,” he said, “I’ll wager Delia’s no champion of the filibuster. I suspect she has a low opinion of Young Ireland and Young America alike.”
“I didn’t know Southern ladies allowed to political opinions,” Reed said in a mocking drawl.
“Senator Osborn is her father.”
“A-ha, a-ha,” Reed said. “Then mark me this, if she is not its champion today, she will not be its enemy tomorrow…and perhaps by the day after we shall have Cuba, another slave state. This is the lure of the Democrats, my young friend. They would have the South at all costs, which is ridiculous since they might have it for nothing. The Whigs are dead and certainly the South will not go Abolitionist to find a party.”
“Native American, perhaps?” said Vinnie.
“Not so long as the Irish favor slavery.”
“I am Irish,” Vinnie said, “and I do not favor it.”
“You must be a very lonely Irishman then,” Reed said. “Look there, the white-haired gentleman just arrived, George Robbins—do you know him?”
“No,” Vinnie said, although the name was very familiar. The man was on Stephen’s arm, making his way to the Young Ireland group, and presently shaking hands around in hearty fervor.
“There is not a Democrat of harder shell in Christendom,” Reed said. “He’s a national committeeman and a lawyer with offices here and in Washington, and his principal clients, the Southern planters. He serves them well. He i
s virtually a lobbyist on behalf of their peculiar institution. Now, if I’m not mistaken, he will proclaim his sympathy for the downtrodden Irish, and to illustrate it, subscribe generously to this chap Mitchel’s paper.”
Vinnie measured every word for as soon as Reed had identified the man as a lawyer he realized why the name was familiar: Stephen was his partner. “I wish…” Vinnie said, and the words lagged behind his thinking. There were so many things he wished. Reed tilted his great head and gazed up at him with an innocence that made Vinnie feel his elder. He was reminded of himself in the canny mischief of his childhood when it pleased him to tell the truth only when it could cause more trouble than a lie. “I wish,” he said, “that I could call you a liar.”
“So do all men discomfited by the truth,” Reed said. He drew a great muffler from under his coat. “Perhaps you will convey my thanks to our hostess.” He looked her way while he spoke, and following the direction of his gaze, Vinnie saw that Delia and a companion were watching them only to turn away before their eyes might meet. “Coming from you such thanks will seem of more worth than I intend them, and this much at least she deserves for tolerating one so contemptuous of her house. A prosperous New Year to you, Dunne. If ever you want to look at pictures they will tell you at Windust’s where to find me.”
Bitter, bitter, bitter, Vinnie thought, watching him depart. He wondered when he would meet Jabez Reed again, and if he would learn the reason for such bitterness. He learned part of it far quicker than he expected. He was making his way toward Mr. Finn when Delia intercepted him.
“Dear Vinnie,” she said, “I do believe you’ve done me a harm you didn’t intend.”
“If I’ve done you harm,” he said, “I surely did not intend it. Mr. Reed is a peculiar sort.” He was determined not to offer an apology, for in truth he saw nothing in Reed’s behavior requiring it except perhaps the episode at the window, and he was sure Delia did not mean that.
Men of No Property Page 27
