A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  Some of the things he said reminded me of Dan’s accent. I asked him if he was from Tennessee. “How’d you know that?” he said. I told him I had a friend who came from the same place.

  While we talked, he led me rapidly through the immense hall to several rooms beyond it. Here I found remarkable numbers of well-dressed women sitting on couches and chairs, looking bored. Lesser but still considerable numbers of children sat beside them looking equally bored.

  In a last, smaller room at the rear of the building, a dark-haired woman sat playing a piano in the far corner. “There she be,” said my black guide. “She come down here and play real nice music every mornin’.”

  I recognized the back of Annie’s lovely head, her graceful neck, at the same moment that I remembered the tune. It was “The Nut Brown Maid,” an old song that Father liked to sing to us. I gave my black Tennessee guide a dollar and tiptoed across the room. Standing just behind Annie, I sang the words.

  “The country maid

  In russet clad

  Does many a time surpass

  In shape and air and beauty rare

  The court or town bred lass

  Since none deny

  This truth then why

  Should love be disobeyed?

  Why should not she

  A countess be

  Tho’ born but a nut-brown maid?”

  “Bessie,” Annie cried and sprang up. We flung ourselves together in a heartfelt kiss. She stepped away from the piano, gazing at me, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “My little sister.”

  I had been a gawky thirteen-year-old when Annie went to America, six years ago. It took an effort for me to realize how different I looked to her. She, on the other hand, did not look so different to me. She was only more beautiful now. Her figure was fuller, and there was a graver, yet not unpleasant, cast to her mouth. Her skin was the same pure MacNamara white, without a freckle or a blemish. Her thick black hair, set in a series of piquant ringlets on her forehead with a glowing fall at the back, was still a crown of glory. She was wearing a delicate touch of color on her cheeks and lips, which perfectly set off the skin and hair.

  “I’ve done nothing for two days but read about you. I think the only paper that hasn’t carried your story is the Times, but they hate the Irish and would never publish anything good about them. Where did you learn to shoot a gun? Has Father turned into a Fenian warrior? Where’s Michael? Why isn’t he with you?”

  “Michael is the Fenian warrior,” I said, and did my best to separate the truth from the fictions published by the papers. I made no secret of Dan McCaffrey being the true hero of the tale.

  “Is he from New York?” Annie asked. “I don’t know him.”

  “From Tennessee,” I said. “I’m—in love with him. But I don’t know exactly what to do about it. Not that I haven’t already done—a great deal. I need advice, Annie.”

  “Of course you do. That’s why I told Dick to go down to the dock to meet you. But let’s not talk here. There are too many eyes and ears.”

  I looked around and noticed that all the women in the room were staring at us with the greatest fascination. Annie led me out to the main lobby and the elevator. In five minutes we were in the sitting room of what she called her “apartment.” It was as elegantly furnished as Mrs. McGlinchy’s living room in Brooklyn, with a red velvet sofa and dark purple armchairs. On the walls were not chromos but real paintings of rural scenes. Beyond the sitting room were two more rooms, fitted out as sleeping chambers, with handsomely carved fourposter beds.

  “Who pays for all this?” I said. “Have you become an actress?”

  “My innocent little Irish sister,” Annie said. She took a bottle of champagne out of a cabinet and pulled a long velvet cord by the window. A black man in a red uniform appeared within seconds, so it seemed. His name was Washington Jones. She introduced him to me and said, “Get me a bucket of ice, will you, Wash?”

  Wash was soon back with the bucket, into which he cheerfully twirled the champagne. Popping it open, he poured the first round into our glasses, accepted a tip from Annie, and departed. “Sean ait aboo,” Annie said, raising her wine to Father’s family salute, which meant “Hurrah for the Old Place.” She took a swallow that all but emptied her glass, and refilled it before continuing with her answer to my question.

  “I haven’t become an actress, little sister,” she said. “But I’ve become a wiser woman since I saw you last. You know what that skunk Kelly did to me. When I wouldn’t marry him, he threw me out on the street without a cent. That was my first mistake, not marrying him. But I didn’t know that six years ago. Jesus, it seems like a century.”

  “But you told us it would have meant sinning your soul with him every time—” I said.

  “Yes, I remember using that quaint phrase,” Annie said. “Sinning my soul. I soon found out that sinning your soul was the favorite sport of every man in New York. I went looking for work. Honest toil, as our late Archbishop Hughes called it. I thought I could become a governess—the town is loaded with millionaires looking for governesses. But no one with an Irish name can get any such job. For an Irish girl, it’s down on her knees with a scrub brush in her hand.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “Yes. At the Jeromes. One of the very best families, you know. I’ll show you their mansion. The master of the house, Leonard Jerome, is one of the richest men in New York, worth at least ten million. At the ball he gave to open the house, he decorated the ballroom with five thousand orchids. In the center were two fountains, one spouting champagne, the other eau de cologne, all night. A few weeks after I arrived, he passed me in the upper hall, where I was scrubbing away. He told me to stand up and looked me over like you would a prize horse.”

  Annie rose and poured herself more champagne. She filled my glass as well. Again she all but emptied her glass in a single swallow. I soon understood why she needed reinforcement, as she continued her story. Two nights later, Leonard Jerome summoned her to his room. It was past midnight. He was in bed with the belle of the season, Mrs. Pierre Lorillard Ronalds. They were both naked. Jerome sat on the edge of the bed, fooling with himself. “Take off your clothes,” he said to Annie, “and get into bed here. We’re not having any fun this way.”

  Annie refused. Jerome glared at her and repeated his order. “Oh, Leonard, you’re just drunk,” said Mrs. Ronalds. “Let the girl go to bed.”

  “I gave her an order. She’ll obey it,” Jerome roared. “Take off your clothes.”

  Annie was too terrified to speak. She could only shake her head, again refusing. Jerome lurched from the bed and tore her robe and nightgown from her body. He grabbed her by the hair and flung her into the bed. The excitement aroused him, and he raped her with consummate brutality. Then he swung over and began a similar execution on the elegant Mrs. Ronalds, who permitted him to do his worst, while she mocked him. “Defile me, Leonard, that’s all men like you can do,” she said. “That’s all you’re good for, creating disgust. In the end you may even enable me to tolerate my husband.”

  “Bitch—bitch—bitch,” Jerome snarled with every stroke. “You should be downtown with the rest of the whores. That’s where you belong.”

  “I know,” she said. “Do unto me what you’ve done to them, Leonard. Do it all.”

  In retaliation, Jerome withdrew from Mrs. Ronalds and again took Annie. “You see how considerate I am,” he sneered. “I withhold the best of myself. Does it make you sick with longing?”

  “No, only sick with pity for that poor girl,” Mrs. Ronalds said.

  She watched, expressionless, as Annie writhed in his arms and succumbed with a shudder to his consummation. “Now get out,” Mrs. Ronalds said to Jerome. “Go sleep somewhere else in this marble kennel.”

  Jerome departed with a snarl. Annie lay sobbing hysterically. Mrs. Ronalds gently soothed her, revealing a womanly tenderness she had withheld from Jerome. She led the weeping girl into the private bathroom of the
bed-chamber and ran water in the tub for her and showed her how to use a syringe to cleanse the inner part of her body and avoid a baby. She sat beside the tub, telling Annie she was very beautiful and she must not allow this experience to shake her faith in her beauty. Leonard Jerome saw her only as a scrubmaid, but there were other men in the city who would see her as a princess. Annie wondered how or why and sobbed out the story of her first betrayal. Now she was doubly ruined.

  “You must stop thinking in that old-fashioned way,” Mrs. Ronalds said. “A woman is never ruined until her spirit is broken. Keep your inner heart inviolate and that will never happen.”

  She told Annie the story of her own life. She had deliberately married Ronalds, a much older man, whom she saw she could dominate. Her defiant spirit infuriated men like Jerome, who believed that every woman—and most men—should grovel before them.

  Annie still had no idea what she should do. She threw herself on this woman’s mercy. Staying in Jerome’s service was out of the question. Mrs. Ronalds told her to pack her things and come home with her. The next morning she received Annie in her bedroom, and they discussed her future.

  Mrs. Ronalds offered her the following alternatives. She could get Annie work as a hostess at one of the finest concert saloons, such as the Louvre. There she would be on display to some of the best and richest men in New York, men who appreciated beauty and—in some cases—knew how to treat a cultivated woman. Or she could procure her a place in one of the best parlor houses, where a select clientele of wealthy men went to enjoy the women who lived there. As a resident she could look forward to earning as much as two hundred dollars a night—and more important, the possibility of meeting a man who found her so much to his liking that he became her protector. Or she could attempt a career on the stage. The chorus lines of several theaters were open to girls with her beauty.

  Annie decided that she preferred the concert saloon. Becoming an outright lady of the evening was repugnant to her. For the theater, she felt she had small talent and little interest. So, with Mrs. Ronalds’s intercession, she soon found herself ensconced as a well-dressed hostess in the Louvre, the best of the concert saloons. Her purpose was to charm the guests, persuade them to buy only the most expensive champagne, and make sure the pretty waiter girls behaved with reasonable decorum.

  Her beauty made her an immediate success. She was soon being squired to all the best shows and seated on the right hand of millionaires at restaurants such as Delmonico’s. At the end of the evening, she would sometimes respond by showing her “appreciation.” It was not bestowed casually, and it thus was all the more ardently sought. Gifts of jewelry, gowns, furs, invitations to Europe were showered upon her. Still, she remembered her mentor’s injunction and kept her inner heart inviolate.

  “Then I met Dick,” Annie said. She got up once more to replenish her champagne and discovered the bottle was empty. With a pretty little hiccup, she turned it upside down in its melting ice. “Dick Connolly. The man you saw at the wharf when you landed. He made me forget Mrs. Ronalds’s golden rule, always do unto a man what he wants to do to you.”

  Annie giggled and flopped into her chair for a moment, then sprang up. “Let’s go look down on Broadway,” she said. “I need some fresh air.”

  In a few minutes the elevator took us to the Metropolitan’s “sky parlor.” It was almost empty, because it was nearly time for dinner, which Americans, for some reason I have never fathomed, call lunch. They moved dinner into the evening and banished our old word, “supper,” almost entirely.

  The view from the sky parlor was breathtaking. We could see up and down Broadway for a mile in either direction. The street was jammed with carriages and omnibuses and wagons as always, with subsidiary swarms of people scurrying along the sidewalks. South of us, the East and Hudson Rivers met at the Battery and formed the great shining bay. To the north the city grew wider, with residential streets stretching out like the grid of a great electric machine, interspersed with the green of Central Park and other parks, and the Egyptian immensity of Croton Reservoir at 42nd Street. Directly east of us a vast jumble of houses and streets lay like a netherworld, stretching to the river.

  In this lofty perch, Annie continued her story. Two years ago, after four years of triumphs at the Louvre, she had met Richard Connolly. He was a politician, born in Ireland and brought to this country as a boy. Something about him penetrated the armor she had sought to forge around her heart. At first she thought it was his wit. Then she thought it was his looks. But she had dealt with handsome, witty men before. She finally decided it was her discovery that he was a serious man and he was seriously in love with her. Farewell, armor. She allowed him to persuade her to leave the Louvre and become his exclusive mistress. She had been living with and loving him here at the Metropolitan Hotel ever since.

  “But you haven’t married him?”

  “He’s married already. That’s the great sorrow of my life. If she died—I’d marry him tomorrow. But I don’t wish that on her. She has three small children. She’s such a horror. She does nothing but denounce Dick and tell him he’ll come to a bad end. A religious virago. She gives away half his money to priests. She doesn’t understand what Dick is going to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s going to take this city away from them. Away from the Jeromes and the Schermerhorns and the Stuyvesants and the Astors. He’s going to have as many millions as they’ve stolen down on Wall Street—and something more. He’s going to control City Hall. He can make them come begging to him for the safety of their mansions. He can make this city their graveyard, with a snap of his fingers.”

  “How?” I asked, utterly amazed.

  “You see that?” she said, pointing down Broadway and across it toward the East River. “You see those slums? An army lives down there. An army of Irishmen who can slug and shoot better than any army the rich can find. Dick Connolly and his friends Peter Sweeny and Bill Tweed are its commanders.”

  She sat back in her cushioned chair, glaring out at the city, a frown all but destroying her beautiful face. “We’ll see who owns New York,” she said. “We’ll see.”

  “’Tis a pity we can’t use them to free Ireland,” I said. “That’s where I’ve cast my lot.”

  “We must talk to Dick about that, tonight. We must arrange to get you out of the hands of those Fenian chiselers. That’s all they are. Small-time chiselers, Bess.”

  “I think some of them are honest men,” I said. “The old man, the leader, John O’Mahoney.”

  “I’ve never met him,” Annie said abruptly, “but if he honestly thinks he can free Ireland, he’s crazy. That’s what Dick says. Anyone who wastes his time on something as crazy as that has got to be nuts, cuckoo, bird-cage. Do you get me, kiddo?”

  “Yes,” I said, amazed by her American slang. “But I’m not a child, Annie. I must make up my own mind about it.”

  She shook her head. The champagne had made her a little drunk and impervious to argument. “Now is the time for you to move, Bessie. You’re famous. There’s a half dozen men I’ve got in mind for you. Now you can have your pick. You might even get one to put his name on a marriage license.”

  I said nothing, but for the first time I felt uneasy, fearful—not for myself but for Annie. She had revealed something that she herself did not want to face. She seemed to sense it, in spite of the reassuring champagne. “Let’s go have lunch,” she said, in a duller, emptier voice.

  The Bloody Ould Sixth Ward

  I thought we would eat at the Metropolitan Hotel, but Annie led me to a hackney coach and told the driver to take us to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was far uptown at 23rd Street facing Madison Square. In Broadway’s heavy traffic, it took us a half hour to get there.

  “This is where I want to live,” Annie said, as we got out of the coach. I could see why. The front was gleaming white marble, six stories of it. Inside was more marble, on the floors, at the reservation desk, in a staircase wide enough for a palace
. We went up the stairs to the second floor, where a dining room that seated several hundred opened before us. Crystal chandeliers dripped from the ceiling. We were led to a table where almost a dozen people were already seated. It was the Fifth Avenue’s custom to dine in groups of twenty. The idea appealed to Annie, who said she was bored with eating alone at the Metropolitan.

  “Have you made no friends?” I said.

  “Men, yes; women, no,” Annie said. “It’s not easy to make friends when every woman you meet, almost, is a potential enemy. There’s hardly a woman in New York, married or unmarried, who wouldn’t like to take Dick away from me.”

  The food was good, but too plentiful. I asked Annie how she had kept her figure, faced with such monstrous amounts of vittles. She laughed in a short, hard way and said it was easy when your future depended on it. She ate only nibbles of the six or seven main dishes and twenty or thirty minor dishes but insisted on having another bottle of champagne. I drank very little of it, but she finished it handily.

  The conversation of the other women at the table seemed to be mostly about millionaires. There was great debate about how much various men were worth, five, ten, or twenty millions. Much attention was given to new millionaires, two in particular, named Fisk and Gould. Several women—all the diners at our table were female—bragged of their husbands’ acquaintance with these gentlemen. They discussed the extravagances of various millionaires, their mansions, their yachts, their horses. Each conversationalist strove to top the previous one with a more sensational item.

  “Most of their husbands are probably clerks on Wall Street,” Annie muttered to me.

  I asked Annie if it was common for married women to live in hotels. She said it was becoming a custom. Women gave birth and raised children in them. The living was cheaper than the cost of buying and furnishing a house. The Civil War had driven the price of everything out of sight. An apartment in the Fifth Avenue Hotel cost about a hundred dollars a week for two, including no less than four meals a day. The fourth meal was served late in the evening, as an attempt to seduce those who had not gorged themselves on the first three. Annie said the rooms were beautifully furnished, and, most remarkable, each suite had a private bathroom.