Men of No Property

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Somewhere. Someone will know.” And there was that vagueness again.

  Taylor was persuaded to stay long enough to have lunch. Vinnie then went down to the beach with him. He had promised Peg to stay on.

  “She’s drunk, isn’t she?” Taylor said.

  “I shouldn’t say that.”

  “What shall I tell mother, about her invitation, I mean?” They had carried it with them.

  “The truth. Mrs. Stuart has guests of her own this week.”

  Vinnie returned to find Peg changed into a walking costume, her skirt above her ankles and split to the knee. She fastened a green kerchief under her chin.

  “May I come?” Vinnie asked.

  “You and no other.”

  They started along a path through the scrubby pines, following until it divided and then redivided and then vanished altogether. They scrambled down through the dunes and with scarcely a word took off their shoes and trudged in the warm sand barefoot. At last they rested in a wind-hollowed valley.

  “Dunes. It’s a lonesome-sounding word, isn’t it?” Peg said.

  “You can make most any word sound lonesome if you want it to,” Vinnie said.

  “I never thought you would grow up so sensible. But that’s Mr. Finn’s influence, I suppose.” She thought a moment about what he had said. “No, I don’t think I agree with you—about words. There are some which cannot be made sound sad. Baby, for example. Isn’t that a happy word?”

  “If you want a baby,” Vinnie said flatly.

  “Good heavens! What should I want with a baby?”

  Vinnie shrugged.

  “Are you very disappointed in me, Vinnie?”

  “No.”

  “Or don’t you care enough for that?”

  “I’m surprised, that’s all. You’re different.”

  Peg laughed. “Have you any notion at all how different you are?”

  “Are you going to marry Redmond?”

  “I think not. I can’t marry every child who asks me. Your friend was rather smitten, wasn’t he?” Vinnie nodded. “He comes from a very proper family, I suppose?”

  “Four sisters, too,” Vinnie said.

  “And there is nothing more proper than one’s sister. Can you imagine Norah walking in on me now?”

  Vinnie whistled.

  “Yet I should rather this by far than to be alone. There is nothing in the world more desolate than a solitary player. People mean quite as much to him as bread. The only time he really wants to be alone is with his other self—until they become intimate, married, one. Then that self struts upon the stage, again in search of himself amongst people of his own kind. It’s a sort of fulfillment. Can you understand?”

  “Better than table rapping anyway,” he said.

  “It is mystical, I expect. Do you still go to church, Vinnie?”

  “Now you sound like Norah.”

  “Ha!”

  “I go to church fairly regular, but that’s all. I should like to find my own religion.”

  “God help us, no wonder Norah’s after you!”

  “Stephen is Irish without being a Catholic,” Vinnie said, jumping to the point in his mind which disturbed him.

  Peg was a moment finding the relevancy. “’Tis a strange thing,” she said then, “the Irish will forgive you for falling away from the church. They’ll wink at your transgressions—if you transgress with a grace, and are a man. But if you turn to another religion they’ll neither forgive nor forget it in your lifetime.”

  “And yet they’ve had to fight to practice their own religion,” Vinnie said.

  “Sure and that’s why.” Peg leaned back in the sand. “I remember Stephen saying at the time Bishop Hughes went against him—that by making the Irish martyrs to Rome, England had best destroyed us…something like that.” She touched Vinnie’s hand. “Most of them back at the house feel that way about it, too.”

  “I know,” Vinnie said. “It wasn’t hymns they were singing this morning. And it’s true, Peg. People are fighting for their freedom all over the world and the Church is on the other side. Think of it, Irish volunteers to keep the people’s army out of Rome!”

  “How that must destroy Stephen,” she crooned.

  “Do you know what I believe to be at the source and bottom of it all?” said Vinnie. “Original sin.”

  “No Irishman will say that’s a lie,” Peg said.

  “Well I shall say it’s a lie, and if that makes me an apostate, I’m one from this moment on. I don’t believe men created in the image of God are born evil, are born in sin. The trees are good—they bear fruit and shade and shelter. Are we less than the trees, than animals on the farm? How comes there a Shelley into the world? A St. Francis? How comes there democracy after tyranny? Light after the dark ages? How comes equality after slavery, if men are not perfect-able? We may be born in ignorance, but not in sin. What is sin, Peg? Truly what do you believe is sinful?”

  She glimpsed his earnest face and averted her eyes. “I’ve always believed that the only grievous sin was to purposefully hurt another person.”

  “Nobly said!” Vinnie cried. “Not the law, but man himself is the measure.”

  “And you to be a lawyer?” Peg chided.

  “A lawyer does not make the laws. He interprets them. Have you ever read Emerson?” Peg shook her head that she had not. “The law is only a memorandum, he says—a currency which we stamp with our own portrait. I shall loan you a book, if you like.”

  “Dear, serious boy, you flatter my intelligence thinking I’ll understand it reading it. I shall try, but I warn you, don’t expect a convert. I’ll go a long way, but I swing back to the old faith like a pendulum. I’m not a Bloomer and I’m not a Fourrierist or whatever you call them though many a try has been made for my conversion.”

  “So long as you’re not afraid to read the book,” Vinnie said.

  “That I’m not. Perhaps because I’m too stupid to be afraid of it.”

  “You?”

  Peg smiled. “Endow me with many things, Vinnie, but not too much intellect or I shall again disappoint you.”

  “You have never disappointed me. Stop saying it.”

  “Then your heart sees less than your eyes, for I disappoint myself. Tell me about the Taylor girls. Are they pretty?”

  “Rather.”

  “And intelligent?”

  “Not especially. One of them maybe, but she never says anything.”

  Peg laughed. “Will you loan her also a book?”

  “And one of them reminds me of you sort of… before…”

  “Sort of—before,” Peg repeated his hesitant words. “When we were very young?” Vinnie nodded. “And her you’ll marry?”

  “I shan’t marry until I’m thirty!” he cried.

  Peg took his hand in hers. “I’m so glad you came, Vinnie. Somehow, your coming makes things seem to have a purpose, and they don’t always for me. I don’t know if it’s because my success came so late, but truly it did not exalt me at all…the praise, the recognition. I was doing what I had to do in Camille. And Val was still Val. You never liked him, did you?”

  “Not much,” Vinnie admitted.

  “It doesn’t matter. How often does one love in a lifetime? Ha! If this were Norah saying all this I should say she was born old. But she’s a child, Vinnie. When I came home I discovered she was still a child.”

  “With children,” said Vinnie.

  “Ah yes,” said Peg. “That’s the reason.” Which Vinnie thought then a wandering logic. “How do you come to know Jabez Reed?”

  Vinnie told her even to the meeting at Stephen’s and Reed’s exchange with Delia Farrell.

  Peg was delighted with the story. “You must stay with us, Vinnie, the night at least. Jabe will come home at dark. He’s painting beautifully. He quite takes for granted my hospitality. I begrudge it to no one, but he is the most welcome to it, besides yourself. A living, he says, is not much of an exchange for a life. A deep ’un, Jabe. Will you stay
?”

  Vinnie consented.

  “You may have to lay your head on the sand.”

  “So long as I don’t stick it in it.”

  But the night was not an especially happy one. Reed did not return, apparently having found the hospitality of some fisherman more to his liking. There was too much wine and too many people talking without listeners. Vinnie played a game of Father William, a drinking bout with experts, and he could not even forfeit sobriety. He joined for a while in the singing of ribald songs, recalling to Peg’s pleasure some of the best from Dublin’s slums. But in the midst of one of them he discovered that lo! he had forgotten the words. He was prodded and primed and could but shake his head and wonder what he was doing, singing them at all. He got to his feet. “There must be something better of Ireland for me to remember than that,” he said, puzzling the matter aloud. “If there isn’t, to hell with it. I’m going to bed.” And turning, he marched out clacking his heels. He was drunker, he thought, than he knew.

  Peg followed him outdoors with a blanket.

  “The stars will cover me,” he kept saying. “The stars will cover me.”

  Inside, the singing had turned again to the revolutionary tunes he had heard in the morning. He lay on his back, his hands beneath his head, and listened. “But when they’ve won the revolution, what then?” he mused aloud. “What will they do then, poor things, poor things? They will sit in the barn and keep themselves warm, and hide their heads under their wings, poor things…”

  “Vinnie.”

  “Yes?”

  “Talk to me about Stephen. Whatever will become of him?”

  “Mr. Finn says he’ll live happily ever after.”

  “I’ll be God damned if he does,” Peg said, and cast sand in his face with her feet as she turned and hastened from him into the house, the gay, gay house…

  16

  VINNIE AND ALEX TAYLOR became faster friends than ever after Vinnie’s return from Peg’s—in the way of friends surviving shame before each other. If Taylor had been cured of a brief enchantment, Vinnie had lost an old one. He could pretend to be at ease with Bohemia, but the truth was he found a woman in bloomers a startling vision, and when she waggled a cigar from her mouth, as did more than one of Peg’s guests, and hung on the neck of one man and then another, he was shocked to the point of blushing. And it was not the freedom this represented that distressed him, he thought, but that this was the manifestation of freedom. Surely there were women of independent thought who deported themselves genteelly. If there were, he did not find them that summer. When the Taylors returned to the city at the end of August, he and Alex chummed everywhere together, museums and coffee houses, galleries and the opera at the Garden, but not the theatre. Peg was rehearsing a new play to add to her repertoire and the theatre had been redecorated for Valois’ company and re-named The Valory. Yet Vinnie was not sorry he must return to school before its opening.

  Twice Taylor came to dinner with Mr. Finn and Vinnie. He took the delight of a small boy in magic with the house set upon a store; he examined the library, Mr. Finn’s collection of locksmithy relics, the Persian tapestries—all the things Vinnie had come to know so well he had all but forgotten. He could remember then how strange they were when first he had come amongst them, and how he grew familiar with them through the warm, happy nights when Peg came to listen and Mr. Finn read aloud to them. They were gone for good, those nights. Mr. Finn was about for his comings and goings, but most often he was secluded in his own study, and always he was careful not to intrude on Vinnie’s attentions. Too careful. And when Taylor remarked after meeting him: “What a delightful old gentleman,” Vinnie was aware that Mr. Finn had aged considerably.

  He took his breakfast tray to the kitchen one morning to talk with Nancy about it.

  “Mr. Finn well enough in the stomach,” Nancy said, “but he thinkin’ too much, all the time broodin’ an’ thinkin’.” She poked her spoon at Vinnie. “They ain’t all like you, Masta’ Vincent, not by a long row an’ a short hoe, they ain’t.”

  That could only mean Dennis, Vinnie reasoned. He and Mr. Finn had spoken very little of Dennis. Vinnie had taken supper there one night soon after school let out, and Dennis had said as little of Mr. Finn. Only Norah had inquired after him. Dennis could talk nothing but politics and his acquaintance on equal terms with Stephen Farrell. There was a time such news would have pleased him, but his present enthusiasm was not enough to satisfy Dennis. Dennis had jibed at him: “You’re not goin’ Native are you with your society friends?” “My friends are not Natives,” Vinnie replied. “How about Abolitionist?” “I know several.” To which Dennis retorted, quoting Fernando Wood as he did more than once that night, “Scratch an Abolitionist and you’ll find a Native as Fernandy says.”

  Mr. Finn had a better opinion of panel thieves than he did of Fernando Wood, Vinnie knew, and Dennis was high in Wood’s council. But that Stephen should join them…

  During his last days before the commencement of the fall term Vinnie turned as gloomy as the weather. Mr. Finn tried in vain to learn the reason. “There’s nothing disturbs me more,” he said finally, “than to see a young man bored. I trust that’s not your trouble, Vincent?”

  “No, sir. I don’t have any trouble truly.”

  “Ah, then, that’s it. You’re troubled for want of trouble.”

  Vinnie tried then to unburden himself of the nags and torments he had felt over Peg. He described the night he had spent at her cottage, the people and her remark about Stephen and his happiness.

  “I expect all that means, Vincent, is that she will never believe him to be happy. That is her measure of self-comfort, of pride.”

  “But the way she said it—cruel.”

  “Margaret is not cruel, whatever else she has become, Vincent. If she were a ruthless woman—I may be wrong, but I think not—I expect she could have married Stephen. He is not the strongest man in the world, though I dare say, he has sources of strength none of us have seen.”

  “And she drinks, Mr. Finn.”

  “Yes, I suspected that. It’s a disease so many Irishmen take as a cure. I don’t know that we can do very much about Margaret, Vincent. After all, she is by way of becoming one of the most successful and independent women in the country. It is sheer accident that you have seen this, shall I call it, core of weakness. Most of us have it, a sort of private demon which we must battle all our lives.”

  “Do you have one, Mr. Finn?”

  The little man rocked back in his chair. “Oh my, indeed I do.” He did not name it, however. Instead he made what amounted to a compact of privacy with Vinnie, countering: “Don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Vinnie, knowing in an instant that it was true: the whole holiday he had been fighting the desire to again visit Maggie Shins’.

  “Vincent, is it because of me you have been but the once to see Norah and Dennis?”

  “No, sir. It’s because of Dennis. He’s not like he used to be.”

  Mr. Finn smiled. “I wonder. Perhaps it is that you are not the same.” He got up from the chair and began to move back and forth, his hands behind his back. “No. That is an overdose of charity. I must be as honest with you as I am with myself. I should like to think Dennis has been misguided by nothing more than concern for his people. It would be no easier to oppose him, as I am doing with all my might, but at least I should be able to keep my respect for him. I suppose sooner or later one imputes bad motives to all the advocates of a cause he abhors. I must try to avoid that. God knows, the Know-Nothings are a vile lot, and I doubt that after this election we shall any longer be able to deny their strength. But Fernando Wood, oh my. He is a hypocrite and a scoundrel, and I do believe a Native himself.”

  “Does Dennis know that?”

  “My dear boy, you might as well try to tell Dennis the pope is an Orangeman.”

  “But how do you account for Stephen?”

  Mr. Finn opened his hands. “A convent burned in Massachusetts, a
church in Newark. And Wood was a signer on behalf of the Irish in ’48. True, he was about to run then for mayor, but only the likes of myself remembers that. And I am by no means sure Stephen will go all the way with them. The Citizen may be misguided and impudent, but it is not dishonest. Stephen will never fashion truth to expediency, though where he will take his stand…” He shrugged. “You know, Vincent, despite the contrasts of experience in your life, you have had a somewhat narrow upbringing. Are there any Southern boys among your acquaintance?”

  “A few, but I’m not intimate with them.”

  Mr. Finn sighed. “I wish you would call on the Farrells. This is the time he most needs his friends, not when he is in agreement with them.”

  Vinnie did call, but it commenced as an awkward, embarrassing visit. No one had told him that Delia was pregnant, and here the child was due within a month. Delia at such a size looked pampered and spoiled, and by her eyes Vinnie judged she wept often. Her conversation turned frequently to her own family. “Stephen, you remember cousin so-and-so?” she would say, and Stephen would murmur, “Oh yes, a fine fellow.”

  “If only it wasn’t for these elections,” Delia said to Vinnie, “we could’ve gone home and had our baby among kinfolk.”

  “It’s not the elections,” Stephen said patiently.

  “Oh, no. It’s far worse than elections.”

  Whatever it was, Stephen diverted the conversation. “We are trying to bring Delia’s mammy up North,” he said. “It was she who brought Delia into the world.”

  “An’ what a fussin’ we’ve gone through,” said Delia. “Papa had to free her first, a whole rigmarole, and then d’you know what? She don’t want her freedom, don’t want it at all. Isn’t that perishin’ funny?”

  “It is ironic,” Vinnie murmured.

  Delia picked up a cup from where Stephen had brought her tea and flung it across the room. “Men,” she cried, “I despise all of you! You’re cold and stubborn and you got no feelin’ at all for a woman’s sensibilities.”

  Stephen got up and smiled. “That, Vinnie, as my mother, God rest her, would have said, is the sure sign of a male child.” He went to the mantel against which the cup had crashed and gathered the fragments into a heap with the toe of his boot. “Come, Vinnie. I shall stick my head in next door and summon gentler company than ours.”