And who was cheering her, Peg wondered at the curtain. Did they cheer her fall or her fight, or was there no fight seen in her? Was her soul dead by their vision the moment she escaped the convent, for on such an incident Valois had opened his play, or worse—was the soul in her destroyed in the convent, for surely that notion most suited the author.
Step up, boys, and take your bow (this to the first and second comedian)! Look at them snatch off their wigs, just to prove they aren’t nit-headed Irish. Till the weariness left her and the long sleep drowned the sound of them, their lines would go round in her head, one of them trying to tell the other the name of the state each star in the flag stood for: “Conn…Conn…Conneh…” “Connemara?” “No, blight yous, isn’t Connemara in Ireland?” “Not for long. They’ll be loadin’ it into the next packet.” “Mass…Massa…Massa…” “Ah-choo!” “That’s it!” “What’s it?” Massachusetts….” On and on, like an organ grinder’s tune. Ah, but the calls for Bridget were louder—perchance men of taste as well as prejudice beyond the wall of light? “Gentlemen, good night!” Words unheard, of course, but with them Peg left the stage, and it was soon apparent she would not appear again that night.
Valois stood at her dressing room door, grinning, and scratching the back of his head with the knob of his cane. “Do you know what I’m trying to decide, Margaret? If you are truly as great an actress as you seem, or if I am so poor a scribbler. Congratulations. The victory again is yours.”
So, Peg thought, despite him I have given Bridget dignity. “Val, it was not a contest I should have ever asked for.”
He threw back his head and laughed, a high weird sound like the bray of an animal. “Oh, by the living God! That you should be gentle with me at this moment!” The smile left his face. “Eleven in the morning,” he said coldly, and then called out to the stage manager: “Philip! We’ll cut in the morning…to the bone and the heart we’ll cut, and we shall announce The Benefactor to play each night until the season’s close. If you wish your benefit, Mrs. Stuart, it will be The Benefactor.”
“The bill for my benefit is of my own choosing,” Peg said.
Valois bowed. “As you wish, my dear. But I warn you the audience will not be of your choosing.”
Peg slammed the dressing room door and hastened to have a quick drink before Norah and the old man were in upon her. I don’t care what they say, she told herself, I really don’t care at all, but she waited their coming nonetheless with trepidation.
When they arrived backstage, obviously both of them had been weeping.
“’Twas terrible sad,” the old man said, sniffling.
Norah stood in the corner a moment, apparently turning something over in her mind, and then she made Peg laugh at her remark: “They say some of them convents are terrible strict.”
Between Valois’ wrath and their easiness, Peg herself felt suddenly better. The old man was gabbing away about the wonderful fun there was in the comedians… “Ah-choo, Massachoosetts, and how else could you say it, but sneeze?” Peg was about to button him up when the boxkeeper tapped on her door and handed in a card.
Stephen Farrell’s. “May Delia and I have the pleasure of driving you home?”
“The pleasure,” Peg repeated. “Oh, my God. Did they see the play?” she demanded of the man bowed and deafened by time.
“Eh-h? Oh, it was good. Very good, Mrs. Stuart.”
Better she thought for his not having heard a line of it. But of course Stephen had attended. She had urged it at their last meeting, and not knowing then the play. But to write “the pleasure of driving you home,” he could not have been as disturbed as she was in it.
“Now you go along as you will,” Norah was saying. “Pa and I must be hurryin’ home. Dennis’ll want to know.”
“And what’ll you tell him, Norah?”
“Well, I didn’t care much for the parts about the church, but it was wonderful Irish and I enjoyed myself.”
Now would come Stephen, Peg thought, who wouldn’t care at all for the Irish parts, but could find amusement in the digs at the church. She sent word of acceptance to the Farrells and put Norah and her father into the carriage waiting her.
“Will you have supper with me?” Peg offered as soon as greetings were spent.
“I don’t really think we should,” Delia drawled.
“Nonsense,” Stephen said, and then explained to Peg that Delia was reluctant since their moving even to call upon her friends in the hotel. To his wife he joshed: “We did not carry off their silver, you know.”
“I know exactly how Mrs. Farrell feels,” Peg said. “If I were to go into Jeremiah’s house, I should want to lock myself in, not out.”
“How understandin’,” Delia murmured.
“Did you know the play was dedicated to him, Stephen?”
“No doubt because he would have found it so enjoyable,” he said dryly.
“Then you found it as offensive as I did?”
“Except for Bridget, quite. And the strange thing about it, Margaret, had an Irishman written it…”
“Stephen! My very thought. If only an Irishman had written it, I said to myself the day I read it, this would be better, this would be fine.”
“I can believe that from your playing. It must have cost you much anguish to decide on doing it.”
“The decision was not mine to make, Stephen. I have purposely foregone the privilege of selecting my roles. My judgment was never the best.”
“But could you not have broken the contract? Surely you could not be held to a role offending your race and church?”
“I suppose I could,” she said slowly, and thinking about it for the first time. “I have always been faithful to contracts—at the risk of health and honor, and sometimes life itself. And it’s not virtue, this faithfulness. It’s stupidity. The heart of a bondsman. I’m Irish to the core, Stephen, obedient until dispossessed.”
Stephen said nothing, and as they jogged and jostled through traffic, she thought that there was a time when Stephen would have said those words, but not she. Not the bold she! Peg turned to Delia. “Your husband was not always so tolerant, Mrs. Farrell.”
“I must say he’s very tolerant of me, and I got some just dreadful defects.”
Stephen murmured some nicety of protest and Peg was about to allow herself the opinion that Stephen’s wife was indeed a fool, when Delia said: “Did you see Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Stuart?”
“I did,” Peg said.
“And did you believe it a true picture of Southern life?”
“The only picture of Southern life I’ve ever truly credited, Mrs. Farrell, was drawn for me by my late husband.”
“I often wanted to tell you, Mrs. Stuart—only Stephen hushed me on it—how terrible sad I thought that was. He must have had great pride, your husband.”
“Yes,” Peg murmured, “as proud as a bullet.”
Delia laid her gloved hand on Peg’s for a moment. “No true Southerner ever admits he’s beaten till he’s dead, and then he don’t know it.”
“Unlike the Irish,” Stephen said out then, harsh and hearty: “who’d flop on their backs at the first shot and arise at the last to boast the victory.”
“A nation of Falstaffs!” Peg added in hurtful pleasure.
“Hush up, both of you shut your mouths,” Delia said in a fury quicker than her speech. “I never heard such talk, and about your own people, too!”
“‘Know ye the truth,’ “ Stephen said, “‘and the truth will make you free.’”
3
DENNIS SCARCELY LISTENED TO Norah’s account of the play that night. He was sitting before the window brooding when she returned so that she had to light the house. The city was foul with the first long heat and the smells accompanying it. All the waters of Croton wouldn’t cleanse it, but if the city stank the people held their noses when the Mayor drove by. There was nothing his enemies wouldn’t use to discredit him, and this despite the fact that he was hailed everywhere els
e as the finest city administrator in the country.
Dennis allowed himself to be drawn into the kitchen where he watched the brewing of the tea and heard Norah’s chatter to her father without letting on he attended. The old man drank down his cup scalding and vanished himself near as quick as the tea. He often shut the door on his own shadow when Dennis was home. Finally Dennis roused himself to a show of sociability. “So she’s playin’ an Irish girl, is she?”
“She is and beautiful. And there’s a pair of old men in it, I thought pa would explode with the laughin’.”
“I half wish I’d gone myself,” Dennis said. “I could stand a bit of cheer.”
“You’re always sayin’ that after,” Norah said.
“’Tis the greetin’, keenin’ parts she plays. Doesn’t a man have troubles enough of his own without goin’ to the theatre to watch other people’s? Aye, and them people he don’t even know.”
“Is it the only reason you don’t go, Dennis?”
“Quit your proddin’ and probin’. I’m not stoppin’ you from goin’.”
“But you’re sour as a quince if you’re home when I get here.”
Dennis caught hold of her skirt and pulled her to him, catching then her hands in his own. “It’s not that I mind you havin’ the good time, darlin’, ’Tis only irksome that you’re able to have it without me,” he said, trying to make light of his ill humor.
“Oh, Lord,” Norah said, letting her eyes play in his for an instant, “didn’t I feel there now like we were back over the stable? Ah, they were good days, Dennis.”
“And are these days so bad you need all the time to be lookin’ back on them past?”
“You’re gettin’ as touchy as your brother Kevin. Mary says she can’t say a word to him but he thinks she’s sizin’ him up next to you.”
Dennis laughed but without pleasure and let go her hands. “And that makes him touchy, does it? It wasn’t so long ago he’d’ve taken that for a compliment. He loves to see a man strainin’, Kevin does, and no understandin’ at all if he sits down to a bit of thinkin’ in the middle of the day. If he sat a bit himself and used his head instead of his back it wouldn’t be bent double on him now.”
“’Tis late,” Norah said. “We better go to bed or the childer’ll be up afore we’re down.”
“Aye, we better,” Dennis said. And there was this to be said for the dark, he needn’t watch the flight of her eyes from his own when there was a chance he might trap the truth in them.
Within the week certain newspapers took cognizance of the anti-Irish, anti-Papist nature of The Benefactor, and the Irish American ran an editorial castigating management and players. It recommended that Catholics and Irish stay away from the theatre and let those in attendance be known for what they were, Dennis read it aloud to Norah.
“And you didn’t even know it,” he said, putting down the paper.
“I wasn’t lookin’ for it,” Norah said tightly and went about her work.
The Nativist press was quick to respond. They found their best offense in a bill of particulars about the star: had not Mrs. Stuart trained the brogue from her speech and then avowed herself an American actress? Had she not toured America from California to Boston? How many stars could say that? How many stars knew America as did Mrs. Stuart? The exchanges continued, much to the delight of the publishers who printed every word and sold the better for the strongest of them. It was not long until the Freemen’s Journal could truly call Mrs. Stuart the Know-Nothings’ darling.
Dennis watched it all, not with pleasure, but with a small grim satisfaction. He would not for the world have wished Norah hurt, except that this hurt might ease the pain of an older one, or might indeed cure it altogether. She was more understanding now, confounded by her own ignorance. Then one day he overheard Mary Lavery at her: “Sure she’s more use to them than a unfrocked priest on a street corner.”
Dennis walked in on the conversation. “That’ll do on it, Mary.”
“’Tis time someone gave the truth,” Mary said, “and not have Norah makin’ a fool of herself and her da, chasin’ in and out their theatre like it was the church.”
“The truth was in Norah’s heart before ever you advised her, Mary,” he said with quiet sarcasm. “And it just happens I’m plannin’ to go and see the play for myself tonight.”
“Are you, Dennis?” Norah cried, and the homing flight of her eyes to his made a feeling run through him he thought was stilled. He wished then that Mary was gone.
“Well, I hope you at least know what you see,” the big woman said, shrugging herself like a lazy cat.
“Now, I tell you, Mary,” he said, and bent his head so that he could wink at Norah out of his sister-in-law’s sight, “if it comes to a choice between not knowin’ somethin’ I’ve seen and knowin’ somethin’ I’ve not seen at all—d’you know, I’ll chance my own ignorance? Go along with you, Mary. You know you agree with me.”
She melted into a smile, for what she could not swallow whole, she was always willing to nibble. “Listen to him turn my own words on me, will you?”
“Ach,” said Norah, “if he could curl hair like he can turn a phrase, there wouldn’t be a thatched roof in the family.”
Unbeknownst to herself Mary was eased into an early departure.
“Are you truly goin’?” Norah asked him then.
“I am,” he said gravely.
Norah explored his face. “Is it for me or on politics? I know there’s ructions brewin’.”
In the end for her, surely, and for now not to brew ructions. “We’re tryin’ to keep the boys away from there. I’ve a notion there’s nothin’ they’d like better, the Natives, than to stir us up to a riot.”
“Then it’s for me,” Norah concluded, and thought about it a moment. “Is it a sin for you to go, Dennis?”
He lifted her chin with his forefinger and kissed her. “Only if I enjoy it, love.”
And enjoy it he would not. How could you bless and damn a woman at once, Dennis thought, scowling at himself in the mirror as he dressed that night, and those were his feelings toward Peg. The only blessing coming her was for something she didn’t even know: the turning of Norah into an understanding woman—and God knows, he would take an understanding one over a humble one any day in his life. How many men he knew with humble wives…and proud mistresses. But if peace were coming to him at home out of this, there was nothing of comfort in the remarks abroad. He had never boasted it, but it was known nonetheless in the Hall that Mrs. Stuart was his sister-in-law. More than one man said it was a good thing this was not an election year. There were men in the party itself who would make the most of the connection: it was by no means forgotten that sworn affidavits had once affirmed Fernando Wood to have been a Native. Plainly Margaret Stuart needed soon to be discredited.
Still, whatever Peg was, she was no Native, and therefore might be reasonable. But what reasonability would save her now with the Know-Nothing tag upon her? Mary Lavery was all too right: a renegade priest spouting venom from the Customhouse steps prospered their cause no more. There was nothing at all for it that Dennis could see but retirement from the stage altogether—or at least for a couple of years. God make her willing to that, God make her persuadable.
He got his gloves from the drawer, one of three pair, by the grace of God, and one pair as good as the other. If only Farrell had married her—instead of making her unmarriageable to a decent man. Small prosperity to him, and small he had in spite of his elegant wife. He sang like a nightingale in Surrogate, Oyer and Terminer, and though, it was said, he moved juries to tears, he could not coax a verdict this side of Appeals. But whose affair was that save the Almighty’s? Thanks be to Him, it was none of Dennis Lavery’s, at least.
4
EVEN AS DENNIS WAS turning from the mirror, Peg was sitting down before hers in the theatre. She had been badly deceived, she thought, even beyond what she knew of men’s powers of deception. She opened the butter jar and commenced mak
ing up for a role that was nightly becoming more painful to her, and for that, alas, the more tender-seeming in performance. Suppose she refused to go on tonight? That would break the contract…but late, so late for honor. But what to her was honor? What to her was Ireland, what, indeed, the church, to volunteer this price? She shook her head against the torment. Oh, Valois, your revenge is subtle! A turncoat, a renegade, a Know-Nothing: even that she had been called in the penny press. And the Natives brought flags to the theatre like picnicking children which they waved while they cheered her. It was all too incredible.
Valois tapped at the door, came in, and took her clothes brush to his coat. “Sold out,” he said. “We may have a noisy house again, but what odds? I’ve taken the precaution of police protection, especially for you, my dear.”
“The protection I needed was from you, Val, not any provided by you.”
“What charming flattery!”
“Get out of my dressing room. It is not provided in my contract that I need share that with you.”
Valois curled a loose strand of her hair about his finger. “What a pity you are Irish,” he said, looking at her in the mirror.
She jerked away from his touch. “How you must have enjoyed confiding that information to your lodge brothers.”
“Oh, my dear,” he said, drawing a long face, “if I’d thought for a moment you wanted it concealed…”
“The devil catch and carry you out of here!” Peg screamed.
Valois skipped from the room.
Peg needed to steady the stick on the light cage as she held the cork to the flame, and needed to hold one hand with the other as she made up her eyes. But she was waiting at Bridget’s call.
The moment she appeared on the stage the huzzahing started, the stamping and waving of hats and handkerchiefs—and strangest of strangenesses to Peg, many a cheering idiot was a gentleman! A few scattered boos rang forlornly amongst the cheers, and somehow Peg took pleasure in them. She left off the business with which she was usually occupied through the commotion, and moved a few steps downstage, tilting her head to listen. Immediately came the words: “Speech! Speech!” amongst the clamor. Peg made an impatient gesture with her hand, and that apparently was taken as a signal for silence amongst those who found discipline so easy. The house was suddenly still.
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