Men of No Property

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  He nodded and could feel the blush in his face. “And do you play Lady Macbeth like a cat?” he ventured. Peg frowned, not quite remembering that, and he went on, the recollection of Peg’s first tea with him and Mr. Finn as vivid as her slap across his face that day: “You said she was a cat and had no children because all she could bear were kittens.”

  “That’s marvelous!” Taylor cried.

  Peg nodded, her eyes moist. She threw back her head. “I’ve never played Lady Macbeth,” she said.

  “Nor should you,” Taylor put in. “She’s a hag.”

  “Oh, bless you, I’ve played many hags, but not that mistress of them all. Someday perhaps I must, but not till then.”

  “Why not?” said Taylor. And this, Vinnie thought, from a lad jealous of his own privacy!

  But Peg was tolerant. “Because,” she said, “the last time I saw Macbeth was the night of the Macready riot. I doubt that you’d remember that.”

  “Oh, indeed I do,” said Taylor. “We live near Astor Place and I remember father taking down his gun. We feared the mob’s recrimination, you see.”

  “There were enough guns that night,” Peg said. “People were bleeding to death in the streets.”

  Vinnie knew what she most remembered: it was the night she had met Stephen Farrell again.

  “You and my friend, Dunne, Mrs. Stuart,” the boy said, smiling. “Vinnie will be the greatest criminal lawyer in the country. He’s always ready with his defense of the Unwashed. And do you know, he’s got me looking twice before I damn them.”

  “But he damns them just the same,” said Vinnie slyly.

  “How else shall I know I’m superior to them?” Taylor retorted, which was why he loved Alex Taylor.

  They were off soon, and to a delectable supper of savory chicken and rice, golden wine and fruit hastened fresh from the tropics by clipper ship. “Just like the club,” Vinnie murmured, referring to his and Alex’s eating place at college where the beef and porridge seemed of a taste and a texture. All Vinnie’s fears of a tuneless tongue proved groundless, and story for story he matched his friend to keep their hostess amused. Peg told them tales of California and of the Mississippi, tales in which she was never the heroine, Vinnie thought, but running through most was an Irishman, young or old, and the brogue crept into the telling.

  Peg was to close her brief but successful season the following week, the last night to be her benefit at which she would again do Kate. Then, God willing, she would have a month at the seashore.

  “Where?” Taylor asked.

  She told him.

  “Oh, I say. Our summer place is only a few miles off.”

  “A few miles?” said Vinnie, knowing it to be thirty at least.

  “By boat,” Taylor said.

  “Better measure it then by the wind,” Vinnie said, for he could foresee what was coming.

  Vinnie might not have been present then, for his friend’s pursuit of his own fantasy. “How will you travel out, Mrs. Stuart? Or let me ask right off will you permit me to sail you there? I have a sloop moored in the river. I shall go out in it tomorrow myself, but I’ll come back for you whenever you say. I’m an excellent hand with it, amn’t I, Dunne?”

  “As good as a hod carrier,” Vinnie said sourly.

  “You Judas of a friend!” Taylor cried. “He’s just been four days at sea with me.”

  “And should have been there still,” said Vinnie, “if I hadn’t taken a hand myself.”

  “The only hand he took was to shade the sun from his eyes.”

  “Witnesses,” Vinnie said, holding out his hands to show the calluses.

  Peg laughed and caught his hands in hers. “I must have you both or neither.”

  “I doubt there’ll be room,” Taylor said.

  “Then I’ll swim alongside,” said Vinnie.

  It was all in the best of humor, and the boys betook themselves arm in arm from Peg’s that night, and toasted their friendship at Windust’s before parting. When the appointed day arrived, however, Vinnie went no further than the dock with them. He had planned to sit through the hearings at Special Sessions Court and held himself to the plan. Within a few days he received a letter from Alex’s mother, inviting him to spend a week with the Taylors as soon as court adjourned.

  15

  IT WAS NOT JEALOUSY he felt toward his friend, Vinnie thought, certainly not that. Once he had been jealous of Stephen, but that was because he was a child in an adult’s world in those days. Now if Peg’s company warmed him, it did not set him tingling. He supposed that was why what he felt toward Alex Taylor was no more than pity. He had tumbled madly in love with an actress, and since he had rarely needed to measure the cost of anything in his life, he was not looking to what this would cost him in hurt and disappointment. Vinnie carried at the bottom of his portmanteau a sheaf of Taylor’s letters: ten of them delivered in three weeks time. The post had been scarcely as quick as his bleeding pen. The only time Taylor had found her company exclusively his, he complained, was the day of his sailing her out. And yet a blessing that: he felt that he must devour her alone. When a minnow can feast on a whale, Vinnie thought. He could not see himself making love to Peg; nor could he see Alex Taylor about it either. It was all in the letters he was carrying back to their sender: letters which numbered the flowers at her gate, the stars over her house, which excoriated her guests, a different batch every week, and one more revolting than the next…“That eel-like man, Valois, a prig of prigs named John Redmond, willing to pose for all and sundry artists and satisfied with no portrait of himself save that in his own mind. I despise them. My heart turns to stone when I come upon them there…”

  Ah, Alex, my friend, a stone heart makes a fine hone to sharpen wit upon.

  Vinnie transferred to the coach for the last miles of his journey, and tried not to be rude in vying for a seat with the gentlemen coming out to Rockaway to join their families over Sunday. He kept his good manners finally by taking the place atop beside the coachman. At the end of the line a bevy of waving, parasoled ladies was waiting. Vinnie was studying his directions to the Taylor house when he heard his name. “Alex’s friend, Mr. Dunne:” this in a girlish voice, and the retort from a passenger Vinnie had made room for inside the stage. “Blast Mr. Dunne if Alex can’t meet him. Is he off again on that boat?” “No, Papa. He’s working.” “At what, pray?” The girls giggled, very prettily, Vinnie thought. “He’s writing a play.” “Oh my God!”

  Vinnie brushed the dust from his clothes. He could have used a trowel to it. Then he presented himself: “Excuse me, sir. I believe you’re Mr. Taylor?”

  “I am,” the man said ferociously. He was of a girth to pay double fare and with the beard of a plowman, but Vinnie knew him to be in Wall Street.

  “May I introduce myself, sir? Vincent Dunne. Mrs. Taylor has invited me.”

  “Very good,” Taylor grumbled, shaking hands. “My youngest daughters, Priscilla and Anne.”

  Vinnie bowed and the girls curtsied, Priscilla with an awkward and impatient bob. Fourteen she would be and a hoyden. Anne was her senior by a year or two, slow and shy, and Vinnie thought, greatly resembling Alex.

  “Well. Did you bring the cart?” Taylor asked.

  The girls had brought it, a pony cart, with two seats and a Shetland in harness.

  Vinnie hoisted his and Mr. Taylor’s luggage under the seat. “I rode out with the coachman,” he said. “I can walk the rest with the pony.”

  “We shall walk with Mr. Dunne,” Priscilla cried. “You get into the cart, Papa.”

  “To look like Gulliver? Nonsense. Go along home the way you came, you two. Dunne and I will walk it.”

  Sooner or later he would have needed to face this, Vinnie thought, as Mr. Taylor quizzed him on his standing in school, his prospects, the books and hobbies in which he took interest. With four daughters, he must measure every young gentleman with an eye to the future. Thank God, it was not the past he was examining. And then it came. “This Mrs.
Stuart, is she a sensible woman, Dunne?”

  “Yes, sir,” Vinnie said, and then added frankly: “where everyone’s interest is concerned except possibly her own.”

  The big man put his hand on Vinnie’s arm and squeezed it. “Thank you, my boy.” Vinnie was quite touched.

  “I’ll read you the first act if you promise to be honest in your criticism,” Alex said, looking from Vinnie to his sisters and then to Vinnie again.

  “If we are,” Vinnie said slyly, “he’ll not speak to us for a week.”

  “I swear I shall take it in manly fashion.”

  “Then we must duel?” Vinnie teased, “and I without a friend to call upon as second.”

  “I shall be your second, Mr. Dunne,” Priscilla cried. “I’ll wear a disguise!”

  “So will I in that case,” Vinnie said, and the girls laughed.

  Ellen and Therese were older than Alex, Ellen already betrothed and therefore of an age to consider herself chaperon. The elder Taylors were playing whist at a neighbor’s house. “You will disguise yourself in a nightdress if you don’t be still,” Ellen said to her youngest sister.

  “Then I’ll haunt you,” Priscilla said. “Alex, is there a ghost in your play?” To Vinnie: “I do love ghosts and apparitions, don’t you?”

  “There are no ghosts and I’m not going to read it at all,” Alex said.

  “Oh, Alex!”

  “He’ll soon read it to Mrs. Stuart, I’ll wager,” Priscilla said.

  “Priscilla!” Ellen warned.

  “Pris, where did you hear of Mrs. Stuart?” said Alex.

  “From the birds,” she said, smiling her withdrawal. Oh, she was an imp, Vinnie thought. “It was a seagull told me.”

  Alex caught her braids as he would the reins of a horse. “What did it tell you?”

  Priscilla jerked her head away. “Something you don’t know even. Mama’s going to invite her to luncheon and tea while Vinnie’s here and you must fetch her.”

  “Mr. Dunne,” Ellen corrected.

  “Good God, no.” Alex exploded at the prospect of an invitation to Peg.

  “Are you ashamed of us?” said Therese.

  “She’ll be bored silly, Priscilla looking at her with—with cow’s eyes, and the rest of you gaping…”

  The Taylors were all talking at once for a moment, popping off like Roman fire. Alex was truly annoyed. He would be sorry for him, Vinnie thought, if he could take seriously his infatuation with Peg.

  “There are some things a man doesn’t need to share with his family!” Alex cried, trying to articulate his wrath.

  “Like a mistress,” Priscilla put in, and it so happened that the words fell into silence in the wake of Alex’s roar.

  The child was ashamed of them immediately, Vinnie could see, but without a moment’s hesitation Ellen got up and caught her wrist. “You’re going straight to mama with me right now and tell her what you said.” Priscilla did not add to her embarrassment by resisting.

  “What I want to know,” said Alex, “is where she heard such a word?”

  “Stop acting like papa,” Therese said. “She listens in corners like a common sweep.”

  “I’d rather be a common sweep than a prude like all of you,” Priscilla flung at them from her captivity.

  “Do you know,” Vinnie said, making a desperate effort to soothe the situation, “Miss Priscilla is very much like Mrs. Stuart?”

  Alex remonstrated, but Vinnie went on to account Peg as first he had known her. Priscilla’s banishment was abandoned at the door because, Vinnie thought, Ellen did not wish to miss the story of the actress. He was aware that the freedom implicit in his and Peg’s adventure their first night in New York might shock young ladies not permitted so far as an ice cream saloon unchaperoned, but he couched the incidents in tender words and the story did have a romantic ending: their arriving home to discover Norah and Dennis betrothed. The girls pressed him for further adventures. Even they had heard of Lavery’s Eight O’clock Market. He told them of Dennis’ beginnings. He glanced at Priscilla and was surprised to see her weeping.

  “I thought I was telling a happy story,” he said.

  “But your father was dead all the time?”

  He had merely mentioned that he was coming out to his father. “Yes,” he said, “before even we had left Ireland. Mr. Finn is my guardian.” Not quite an adequate description for someone who had taken in a wild waif like himself.

  “Tell us about him,” Priscilla said. “I think I shall like him better than anybody.”

  “Someday you will meet him,” Vinnie said, without much thought at the moment. But later that night when he was trying to distract himself from the buzz and sting of mosquitoes in his attic room, he remembered it. She was only a child, he thought, no older than himself when he arrived in New York. And as canny in her fashion. Yes, she would like Mr. Finn, and he would like her.

  The next morning Alex and he rose at dawn and sailed up the South coast putting in at the cove which Peg’s cottage overlooked. It was low tide and they waded ashore, remarking that they would need to swim out. They trudged through the sand and climbed to the top of the bluff. Even as they reached level ground the sounds of revelry reached them—laughter and singing as though it were nighttime and not the middle of the day. A fire was burning in the open and before it a hulk of a woman sat basting a turkey as she turned it on the spit. An old man was beside her and as he drew near Vinnie recognized Peg’s father.

  Vinnie hailed him and introduced his friend. “What are they celebrating?” He jerked his head toward the cottage.

  “I’d rather you asked someone but me,” the old man said. “She’s marryin’ that fella Redmond.”

  “What!” Alex exclaimed.

  “What, what,” the old man mimicked. “I couldn’t ask her ‘what’ as a child, much less now.”

  Vinnie looked at Taylor who had gone a trifle pale. He was ready to return to the boat without stopping, but Vinnie shook his head. Then Alex drew from beneath his blouse the manuscript he had concealed there.

  “May I burn some papers in your fire, please?”

  The old woman looked up and threaded the gray hair from her eyes with an arthritic finger. An obvious native, she was tanned by the wind and the spray. She grinned toothlessly. “Love letters allus sweeten a bird,” she said, poking a place in the embers. She gave a wheeze of a laugh at her own joke.

  Vinnie watched the pages curl up, more elegant in script than in substance. He waited for his friend to signal that they might carry on. “I shan’t stay long,” said Alex.

  “Whenever you say,” Vinnie said, and put his arm about his friend’s shoulders for a moment.

  The whole of the Windust’s crowd seemed to have taken up residence with Peg. Bohemia-by-the-sea. A woman sat at the door, her bloomered legs stretched before her, a cigar in one hand and a pencil in the other with which she was sketching furiously. She flicked the ash from the cigar in the same gesture as the greeting she spared the boys. Around a lad with a squeeze box were the carolers, men with more hair on their faces than on their chests, bare to the navel, singing the songs made famous at the barricades in France, by the Garibaldi Legions, by the English coal miners. The smell of coffee was as strong as the smell of wine, and both were suffused with the smell of sweat. There was one great room to the cottage, which could better have been called a lodge. Vinnie moved into it, Alex following him, timid now as a child. Two chess players were hunched over a board, immobile as the pieces, and a delicate boy of nineteen or so was at an easel a few feet from them. Vinnie looked at his project. Not in a hundred years would he have expected from so fragile an artist the hard, bold lines in which he was capturing the players. “You should sculpt them as well,” said Vinnie. “I expect to,” the boy answered. A lovely girl, with her blond hair streaming, was explaining to her companion: “There’s so much sky, I want to weep. The world’s too large!” “It’s the size of a pea,” the man pontificated, “and we are less than dust.�
�� Peg had gathered them all, piping them out of Manhattan even as the piper had the children from Hamelin, the false and the true, the seers and the bemused, the dissolute and the determined. God have mercy on them all!

  “Where’s Peg?” Vinnie called out.

  “Am I called?” Peg rose from a cluster of people at the end of the room. “Vinneee! My first, my own true love!” She came tripping as though it were sponge beneath her feet, her hands out to him. Her bodice was fresh and the scent of rosewater hung about her, but Vinnie felt the little sway of unbalance in her body as she caught his hands. Her over-bright eyes gave credence to his suspicions: Peg had been drinking, and a considerable amount. She turned to Taylor. “Alex, thank you for bringing him.”

  Poor Alex! He bowed like a diplomat in a hostile court.

  “Is it too early for a drink?” said Peg airily. “Dear Vinnie, don’t frown. It was with you I bought the first jug of whiskey I ever approved. Have you met all these wonderful people? No? In time, in time. They’re frightfully busy, God knows about what—but what odds? So many friends. David has written a play for me.”

  In time Vinnie met the man, a playwright of high repute, and his wife, to whom he promised twice within Vinnie’s hearing that she should have another play, one better suited to her talents. And Vinnie met John Redmond and asked him bluntly if he was to be congratulated.

  “You are as well informed as myself,” Redmond responded. “Anyone is.” Someone else explained that it was off one minute and on the next.

  Thank God for that at least, Vinnie thought, for he looked as priggish as Alex had described him. But there was no joy in the news for Alex. If he had been disillusioned at the word, he was disenchanted now. A quick cure, Vinnie thought, for a slight malaise. Ah, but Peg: there was the deeper ill. Her hand was cold and moist although the day was warm, and she clung to Vinnie at every chance.

  “Peg,” he asked, “is Jabez Reed with this crowd, by any chance?”

  “Do you know him? He’s the sweetest man.”

  “Like a sugared pickle,” Vinnie said. “Is he here?”