A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “Maybe there would be no slums, or exiles in them, if Ireland were free,” Michael said.

  “That’s very good revolutionary rhetoric,” McCloskey said. “But what does it really mean? Ireland isn’t free, and there are slums. These are the realities we must face. Do you remember what Archbishop Hughes said to your fellow Irish revolutionaries in Dublin? If you undertake a revolution and have not measured your strength so you know you have at least a chance to win it, you commit a great crime. I believe that, too. I’ll tell you what else I believe—or at least fear: that the Fenians will destroy the respect that the Irish have won here in America for the fighting they did in the war. The Irishmen who died in Union blue wiped out the disgrace of the Revolution of 1848. You can’t believe how the Americans laughed at us over here for that fiasco. A revolution that began and ended with a skirmish in a cabbage patch. Archbishop Hughes could barely talk about it without weeping.”

  Michael was more and more shaken by this man. So was I. He was so different from our priests in Ireland. He sat there in the chair, talking to us as equals. In Ireland priests—and above all bishops—did not converse. They orated. They issued pronouncements. They had none of this man’s gentleness, nor his sadness. All was fierce discipline and warnings of hellfire.

  “Let me ask you this, Bishop,” Red Mike Hanrahan said, jollity gone from his voice. “Here’s an Irishman who risked his life to make the South free.” He clapped his arm around Dan McCaffrey. “To give her the right to escape the tyranny of the North, of the icicles of Yankee-land, just as Ireland seeks to be free from England. What do you say to him?”

  “That he fought well for a bad cause,” McCloskey said. “You and I don’t agree, Mike, and you’ll no doubt attack me as you attacked John Hughes. But the argument doesn’t work. Ireland is a separate country. The South never was. You’re mixing things up, Mike. You can’t decide whether you’re an Irishman or an American.”

  “I’m a man opposed to tyranny wherever I see it,” Mike said. “And I welcome this man, this so-called traitor, by your lights, this rebel, as a Fenian brother. If you and your clerical kind were true men, instead of truck-ling to every government that throws you a crumb of power, you’d have stopped Irishmen from raising a finger to help the North, and the South would be free today, ready to support Ireland’s cause.”

  “That’s moonshine and you know it, Mike,” McCloskey said. “Who was the South’s chief ally? England.”

  My head was starting to ache. I was finding out how many twists and turns history had, and how ready emotional men like Mike were to overlook them. I was also discovering how many savage feuds and arguments existed among the American Irish as well as between them and the Americans. Perhaps Archbishop McCloskey saw some of this confusion and dismay on my face. He again turned his attention to me.

  “Mike and I are old antagonists. But I’m here as your friend, my dear girl. I dread the thought of what may happen to you if you persist in playing the part they’ve assigned you. They’ll drag you into their dirty politics and use you and then discard you.”

  “No one’s goin’ to discard her, Bishop, long as I’m around,” Dan said.

  Everyone, including Archbishop McCloskey, knew what those words meant. For me they were a declaration and a summons. I fought the pull of guilt and fear, the recognition of genuine caring that drew me to this sad-eyed, sad-voiced man with the crucifix on his breast. I told myself that once and for all I was joining those ancient Irish heroines who relied on nothing but their warrior lovers’ strength.

  “I appreciate your concern for me, my lord—I mean, Bishop,” I stumbled, “but I must go the way my soul—my Irish soul—calls me.”

  The archbishop sighed. “All right,” he said. “But if you ever need help, remember, I’m your friend, no matter what happens.”

  He departed as quietly as he came, leaving us in a most uneasy frame of mind. “He’s a smooth one,” Mike Hanrahan said. “Arguin’ with him is like tryin’ to wrestle with a greased ballet dancer. I liked Old Hughes far more. We called him Dagger John. When you hit him, he hit you back. It was a nice clean donnybrook. This fellow is always floatin’ away from you, makin’ you feel guilty over the rotten thing you just said to him.”

  Dan McCaffrey shook his head. “Now I know why my dad said he was glad to leave the priests behind when he settled in Tennessee.”

  “I hope Mr. McCaffrey’s statement implied nothing more than friendship,” Mrs. Roberts said.

  “No, ma’am. Nothin’ more,” Dan said, winking at me.

  I smiled bravely back, but it was not a joke to me.

  “Remember, my dear, you have become a symbol of Ireland,” Mrs. Roberts said.

  Mrs. Meehan, who I now decided was pretty but stupid, nodded emphatically. The ladies gathered their shawls and bonnets, and departed. The door had barely closed behind them when Michael said, “She’s right, you know.”

  There was a bit of the priest in Michael, as there is in many revolutionaries, and Archbishop McClosky had aroused it. Michael began lecturing us on the danger of scandal. He ended by declaring I should move elsewhere, perhaps become a boarder with some respectable Irish family.

  Dan grew more and more enraged. He expressed it in his usual fashion, grabbing Michael by the shirt and lifting him a foot off the floor. “Won’t you ever learn to keep your mouth shut?” he snarled.

  Red Mike Hanrahan quickly intervened. “Boys, boys. Save your fire for the Sassenachs. We’re as safe from gossip here in this hotel as we would be on Robinson Crusoe’s island. No one ever stays here but Celts. And ninety percent of them are Fenians. But to make matters more circumspect, we’ll issue room keys to each of you, and no one but yourselves will know whose inside doors are locked and whose are open.”

  That was the end of my moving elsewhere. That night we resumed our American education. John O’Mahoney took us to dinner at the home of a rich Irishman on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn. His name was George McGlinchy, and he had built part of the great aqueduct that brought water to the Croton Reservoir on 42nd Street, which made it possible for so many hundreds of thousands of people to live in New York. We thought McGlinchy would want to hear about Ireland, but after a few words on the subject, he spent most of the time talking about New York politics. He interwove the story of his life through the discourse, telling us how he had started as a hod carrier, saved his money, and launched his own construction company. He sent his brother-in law into politics to obtain the government contracts that had made his fortune.

  While he talked, Mr. McGlinchy ate like he expected a famine. The table was covered with dishes—steaks, chops, roasts, in almost as much profusion as Sweeney’s Hotel. No wonder he was fat to bursting, and Mrs. McGlinchy the same way.

  McGlinchy advised me to look up his brother-in-law. There was no one who knew how to show someone a better time in New York. His name was Richard Connolly. “We met him at the wharf,” I said, “when we landed. He said he knew my sister Annie.”

  “Annie?” said McGlinchy, looking at me with new interest. “Anne Fitzmaurice. Sure I know her, too. Queen Anne, we call her for her manners. And her looks.”

  “Who is this, love?” asked Mrs. McGlinchy.

  Mr. McGlinchy seemed suddenly at a loss for words. “A friend of Dick’s,” he said. “A charming woman. It seems she’s Miss Fitzmaurice’s sister. How’s that for high?”

  I had to ask for a translation of that American phrase, which meant extraordinary.

  O’Mahoney finally managed to change the subject to the Fenians. He began telling McGlinchy the good news that Dan McCaffrey had brought back from Ireland. The Fenian legions were ready to rise. While the men pursued this fiction over coffee, Mrs. McGlinchy and several lady friends entertained me in the parlor. The room was lavishly furnished. There were lace curtains on the high windows, and heavy green damask overcurtains. The chairs and the settee before the marble fireplace were all plush and velvet, with gold fringes and tassels. On the walls were ove
r a dozen brightly colored pictures, which Americans called chromos.

  Sitting in the middle of this luxury, the women only wanted to talk of Ireland. “Doesn’t she have the look of the old sod?” Mrs. McGlinchy said. She had been born in Cork, but she remembered little of it, having come to this country as a child. Several of them, who were as well dressed and probably as rich as Mrs. McGlinchy, had returned to Ireland for visits. They talked of the beauties of Killarney, the Kerry coast. I talked of the poverty of the people. I told them how stirabout tasted in a cabin pot. I saw that it made them uncomfortable.

  “Why would anyone stay in such a country? Why don’t they come here or go to Australia or Canada?” Mrs. McGlinchy said.

  “I think we have enough Irish here,” said another woman, who was even fatter than Mrs. McGlinchy. “Go visit the Sixth Ward, and you’ll agree with me.”

  “I keep hearing about this Sixth Ward. I must go see it,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be safe to go by yourself,” Mrs. McGlinchy said. “Above all after dark. They have a saying there. A murder a night.”

  “And they’re Irish?” I said incredulously.

  Mrs. McGlinchy nodded. “The kind of Irish who eat stirabout in Ireland. There’s a bad streak in our people. A laziness, a carelessness.”

  “’Tis none of those things,” I said. “It’s a despair, a hopelessness that kills the spirit in a person. That’s what must be changed.”

  “You’ll change your mind, once you see the Sixth Ward,” Mrs. McGlinchy said, with impenetrable complacency. I thought of the sadness in Archbishop McCloskey’s eyes and hoped she was wrong.

  On our way back to New York in our carriage, John O’Mahoney drew from his pocket a check that McGlinchy had given him. It was for ten thousand dollars. “For the privilege of meeting the Fenian girl,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get to see that old crook for six months and he always put me off. You’re going to open many doors for us, my dear.”

  “Did you call him a crook?” I said.

  “From what I hear, he stole a half million dollars from the Croton Aqueduct alone,” O’Mahoney said.

  “Do we want money from the likes of him?” Michael said.

  The carriage approached the Brooklyn ferry. We debarked and boarded the boat, which soon set out, its bell clanging. O’Mahoney led us to the prow, and we looked across the river at New York. The great city glowed with thousands of lights in windows and on streets, like a thing out of fairyland. “Michael,” said O’Mahoney, “when I began this business, I believed, like you, that right could conquer might. I believed that the truth was a sword. I believed that every man loved my country as I did. Now I know differently. Only a rare few are that way. And truth—I’ve seen it cut down by the sword, or by a pen, hired by the sword—a thousand times. I’ve seen might, power, grind righteous men into the dirt. Now I think of it as a dirty business—with a glorious goal. That’s the only thing I’ve been able to preserve—the goal. An Ireland worth dying for.”

  Those were sad words. I have never forgotten them, nor have I ever forgotten that sad man, John O’Mahoney, speaking them as he gazed across the water at the city that had corrupted him and the people he loved.

  What I heard as sadness, Dan McCaffrey heard as weakness. Back in our rooms at Sweeney’s Hotel, he flung aside his coat and poured himself a drink. “Hell,” he said. “We’re never goin’ to have a revolution anywhere with that worn-out old sobber runnin’ it.”

  “Give him credit for being honest, at least,” Michael said.

  “What the hell has honesty got to do with runnin’ a revolution—a war?” Dan said. “In a war, you spend ninety percent of your time tryin’ to trick the enemy into thinkin’ you got twice as many men as you really got, or feintin’ toward his left flank and hittin’ on his right flank. You hire spies to go and steal secrets and lie for you; you raid his supply depots and steal his guns and horses and ammunition. It don’t matter whether you shoot him in the back or the front, the point is to kill him and win the goddamn war.”

  “A revolution is not the same as a war,” Michael said. “A revolution aims at creating a nation. It has to worry about the kind of nation it will create if its revolutionary acts are unworthy of Christian men.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re a goddamn preacher, you know that?” Dan said. “Take my advice, go get a job runnin’ a Sunday school. Bess here has more guts and brains than you’ll ever have.”

  I retreated to my bedroom and left them arguing. I could hear their voices rising and falling. It was all a waste of breath. They were totally different men, who would never agree on anything. Gradually my attention shifted to the sound of the city outside my window. It was as strange and unnerving to me as the events and arguments of the day. It seemed like the breath of a huge snuffling monster, being drawn and exhaled, drawn and exhaled. It would stir into more active life as a horse car or a carriage passed, then dwindle to sibilant sighing once more. There was a kind of vigilance to it. Though I knew it was absurd, I felt it was watching me. I felt observed, under scrutiny, by too many people, from Dan to Mike Hanrahan to Mrs. Roberts to Archbishop McCloskey to legions of faceless, nameless newspaper readers.

  Suddenly Dan was beside my bed, whispering, “How’s my wild Irish girl? Ready for a little lovin’?”

  I was appalled, even frightened, by my reluctance. The lovers’ world of the good ship Manhattan was beyond recall here in the center of the real Manhattan. It was equally hard to summon the spirit of my long-dead Irish heroines to this hotel room, three thousand miles away from Bel fires and Ireland’s mystic darkness. Yet how could I say no to him? I had chosen him before the sad eyes of Archbishop John McCloskey.

  Dan sat on the edge of the bed, taking off his clothes. “Where in hell did you get him, Bess? Your brother. He’s an idiot.”

  “Try to be patient with him,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Dan said perfunctorily. “Just don’t you listen to him, Bess. You stick with me in this thing. We’re goin’ to win this war—and have ourselves a good old time in the bargain.”

  I thought of the drunken truthteller on the Manhattan and wondered if he was talking to encourage himself as well as me. I remembered the bitter defeated soldier facing his poverty. I saw his need to believe those brave words. I wanted to love him, but as I opened my arms to him, I could see and hear nothing but reproachful eyes, condemning mouths. I could only think of the distance between Ireland and Tennessee.

  Why Should Not She a Countess Be?

  The next morning I awoke in a disconsolate mood. After Dan left me I had lain awake for hours. He seemed unaware of the halfhearted way I had responded to his kisses and caresses. After breakfast, Mike Hanrahan arrived with another group of reporters, mostly from magazines that came out weekly or monthly. They sketched and questioned me for the better part of two hours. I could never have endured it without Mike’s philosophy of playing a role. He took one look at me and knew there was something wrong.

  “Bish‘ McCloskey’s still botherin’ you, eh?” he said. “Just remember the old adage, the show must go on. A good actress plays her part whether it’s comedy or tragedy, no matter how she feels.”

  “How do you know so much about acting?”

  “I did a turn or two before the footlights until I realized no woman was ever goin’ to worship my ugly mug. It’s the handsome boyos who get the girls—and the money.”

  I got through the interview without mishap and the scribblers departed. Mike said I was “at liberty” for the rest of the day. Michael and Dan had gone off to Moffat House, the Fenian headquarters. I decided to use my freedom to find my sister Annie.

  Sweeney gave me directions to the Metropolitan Hotel, which was only a dozen or so blocks up Broadway. It was a day of bright sunshine, and I set out in high spirits, glad of the chance to stretch my legs. Even at this hour, about eleven in the morning, Broadway was thronged with carriages and white-topped omnibuses and hackney coaches. I was fascinated by the carmen
, who wore white canvas smocks and drove big two-wheeled carts while standing on a narrow platform in front. It was amazing, the way they kept their balance on this lurching, tipping slab of wood.

  Within a half hour I was at the Metropolitan Hotel. It was impossible to miss it. The place filled an entire block on Broadway, a great brownstone cliff of a building just north of an even larger and more spectacular hostelry, the St. Nicholas, also a block long and fronted in white marble. Inside I found myself in an immense hall with a marble pavement and tremendous Corinthian pillars of black basalt. I wandered about like a lost soul for a few minutes while people trod confidently past me. Suddenly I was face to face with a black man—my first sight of a Negro. He was as tall as Dan, and he looked as strong. He was carrying a half dozen bags under his long arms.

  “Can you help me?” I asked. “I’m lost entirely.”

  “Why sho, Miss,” he said. “You lookin’ for someone?”

  I explained, and his face broke into a cheerful smile. “I know Miss Fitzmaurice. You just wait here until I get these bags into a hack.”

  From behind me, a man’s voice shouted, “Come on, boy, let’s go. I got a train to catch.”

  “Yes, suh,” said my black friend. He was back within sixty seconds, shaking his head, looking at a coin in his hand. “Seven bags and he give me a nickel,” he said. “Just like a Yankee. Never get a good tip from no man north of the Connecticut line.”