A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  To our amusement—at first—our tablemates began talking about the Fenian girl. Several had read her story in the paper. One large, severely plain woman shook her head angrily. “My husband says we ought to send them back to the British for hanging.”

  “My husband says we ought to send all the Irish back to the British,” said a plump younger woman with straw-colored hair.

  “It would certainly improve New York,” said the severe woman. “My brother-in-law was robbed of a hundred dollars by one of them last week. Not ten blocks from this hotel.”

  I could feel my temper rising, but Annie motioned me to be silent. We sat there, finishing our tea, while they denounced the Irish as lazy, thieving, superstitious. The severe woman said she would never hire one as a servant. At her husband’s bank, they had hired an Irish clerk. The other clerks threatened to quit, and the Irishman was dropped. Everyone agreed that these were excellent tactics. Only a united front among the Americans could keep the Irish out. They were as bold as they were greedy, ready to barge in anywhere.

  After lunch we sat in one of the public rooms of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I was fuming. Annie was amused at my anger. “You’ll hear a lot worse than that if you stay in America,” she said. “Remember it when your Fenian friends start telling you that this country is behind Ireland heart and soul. The politicians hand out that sort of blarney around election time to get the Irish vote.”

  Annie took a small watch from her purse. Its gold frame was encrusted with diamonds. Dick Connolly had given it to her for her birthday. “Two o’clock,” she said. “We’ve got a whole afternoon to kill. What would you like to do, my Fenian girl? Visit Barnum’s Museum?”

  “See the Sixth Ward,” I said.

  “What?” Annie said. “There’s nothing to see down there.”

  “Then why does everyone talk about it?” I said.

  “It’s worse than Hell’s Kitchen—and that’s saying a lot.”

  “Hell’s Kitchen,” I said. “Let’s put that on the itinerary, too.”

  “We may see some of that tonight,” she said. “We’ll do the town, you and I and Michael and Dick.” She hailed a hackney coach and told him to take us to Tammany Hall. The driver nodded. Apparently there was no need for an address. As we rode downtown, she warmed to the idea of my tour. “Maybe you should see the Bloody Ould Sixth, as they call it. See all the lower wards. Then you’ll understand a little more what we’re up against.”

  As we rode along, Annie explained that Tammany Hall was the headquarters of the city’s Democratic Party. Dick Connolly was a member of the Central Committee as well as a leader of the Twentieth Ward. The odd name came from an old Indian, Chief Tammanend, who was a kind of god to the Delaware tribe. He performed great feats in the misty past, like some of our Irish heroes. Every Irishman in the city worth his salt voted behind Tammany. Without the power of party, there would be no jobs for them at City Hall or on the police force or anywhere else in the government.

  Our journey took us far downtown, to the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets, where stood a somewhat dingy looking five-story building. A squad of burly fellows was lounging against its redbrick front. Annie took a calling card from her purse and hailed one of them. “Take this to Dick Connolly,” she said. “Tell him I’m waiting outside.”

  In five minutes the same tall, smiling man with the stately nose and clean-shaven face whom I had met at the dock emerged from the door and greeted us cheerfully. He gave Annie’s hand an affectionate squeeze and bowed low to me. “I hardly know what to say, finding myself face-to-face with such fame,” he said. “Reading your story made me think Ireland might yet be free, from the center to the sea, as the old lady said in the song.”

  “Annie just spent a good hour telling me you think the idea is nonsense,” I replied.

  “A politician is like a woman. He changes his mind twice a day, when the newspapers come out,” Dick Connolly said.

  “We’re here to settle our evening schedule,” Annie said, “and to get an escort. Bess has heard so much of the beauties of the Sixth Ward and points below, she wants to see them for herself.”

  “I doubt if I can call out the 69th Regiment on such short notice,” Dick said. “But perhaps Tiny Tim will do.”

  He turned and spoke to a man by the door, who in turn bawled a summons inside. In a moment there emerged the biggest man I had ever seen. He was at least six feet five and perhaps four feet wide. He wore a long black frock coat and loud checked bell-bottomed pants.

  “Tim,” said Dick Connolly, “these ladies want a tour of the Sixth Ward. Bring them back without so much as a curl on their lovely heads disturbed.”

  “Don’t worry about a ting,” Tim said. He tipped his high beaver hat to us and got into the cab, causing it to tilt alarmingly until he settled opposite us. Tim’s name was Mulligan. He said he knew “de Sixt’ ward” well. He was born “dere.” But now he lived in “de Twenniet.” His “mudder” had advised him to get out of the Sixth Ward as soon as possible. In the same strange accent, Tim told me how much he enjoyed reading how I had “plugged” the lime-juicers in “Iland.”

  Soon we were in a spidery tangle of streets with strange names, Bummers’ Retreat, Cat Alley, Cockroach Row. The stench was unbelievable. Annie put a handkerchief over her nose and mouth and remarked that some rich New Yorker had described the odor as a mixture of rotten eggs and ammonia. She explained that most of the houses had no bathrooms, and people simply threw their slops in the gutters. Soon we were among the tenements, tall wooden buildings crammed side by side on the narrow streets, shutting out the sun. The air that came out of the doorways had the stink of the grave. Every ten feet there was a wretched little saloon in the basement or on the first floor.

  The people who looked out from the windows or sat on the steps of the tenements all had the mark of death on their faces. It reminded me of stories I’d heard about the famines in Ireland. Worst were the children, scrawny, fierce-faced little creatures. Annie said many of them lived on the streets, without father or mother. One newspaper said there were thirty thousand of these urchins.

  “Dear God,” I said. “Wouldn’t they be better off in the poorest village in Ireland?”

  “You agree with our friends at lunch?” Annie asked me sarcastically.

  I thought of Mrs. McGlinchy, fat and self-satisfied in her velvet parlor, and wondered how she could live so well while Irish men and women were living like this only a mile or two away. Now I knew the source of the sadness in Archbishop McCloskey’s eyes. These were his people, but what could he do for them? He seemed as incapable of easing their misery as everyone else, even though he was not as indifferent.

  “Lookit ’at,” Tim said. He pointed down Bixby Street. “Shylock Boik’s trowin’ out anudder one.”

  Burke was a landlord. Annie said he owned a whole row of tenements on Bixby Street. He was well known for his heartless evictions. He never let anyone stay longer than a week without paying the rent. His victim today was a young red-haired woman with four small children. She wept and cursed, and the children wept, too, as the burly, bald-headed Burke piled their pathetic sticks of furniture on the sidewalk. The mother fell into her only chair, crying and coughing. One of the children, a boy not more than ten, ran into the nearest saloon and came out with a glass of whiskey.

  “I know huh,” Tim Mulligan said. “Red Mag O’Toole. Married Mickey Maloney. He got it in d’head at Gettys-boig.”

  “Can’t we do something?” I said.

  “Y’could pay huh rent for anudder week,” Tim said.

  Annie thrust a bill into my hand. I jumped from the cab and ran down the street. I gave the bill—it was ten dollars—to the mother. “I wish it was more,” I said.

  “Are yez from de mission?” she said. “Y’can keep y’goddamn money. Y’ain’t gettin’ me kids. Y’ain’t gettin’m!”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. Suddenly there were faces at a dozen windows, shouting curses at me. A bottle
sailed down and smashed near my feet. Another missed my head by an inch. Tim Mulligan came legging down the street yelling for them to stop.

  “She’s okay. She ain’t no Protestant blackleg. She’s Irish. D’Fenian goil,” he roared.

  Instantly there was a rush into the street from every house. In a twinkling there were two or three hundred people around me. I found it hard to believe that the single row of tenements, no more than eight or nine of them, held so many. Annie later told me they were jammed in there, five or six to a room. Not a face or a hand had seen soap or water in a month. They smelled almost as bad as the slops they threw in the streets. Some of them were as ragged as the peasants I saw in the cabins in Ireland.

  “She come down here t’see de Sixt Ward,” Tim Mulligan said. “She hoid about it in Iland, right? D’toughest ward in New Yawk.”

  “Sure there’s no gettin’ over d’Sixt,” cackled one withered old woman. “The glorious fights I seen down here. “T’would put Finn and the Fianna to shame, they would.”

  “Now we must unite and fight for Ireland,” I said. “Instead of fighting each other.”

  “Give us a chance and we’ll do it sure enough,” shouted one scrawny fellow, who had only two or three teeth left in his mouth.

  We heard a cry from the end of the street. Mulligan whirled and burst through the crowd, knocking men and women pell-mell. I saw a man struggling with Annie at the door of the cab. Mulligan got to the fellow before he knew what was happening and seized him by the collar of his shirt. He spun him around and struck him a punch that sent him flying twenty feet. He sprang after and kicked the fellow again and again until he lay whimpering in the gutter.

  “He tried to steal my purse,” Annie said.

  “He won’t steal nuttin’ for a while,” Tim said.

  The citizens of Bixby Street had emerged from their narrow alley to examine the moaning thief. Two or three boys ran over and peered in his face. “It’s Mickey Condon,” one of them yelled.

  “He says his ribs is busted,” yelled another one.

  “Y’Tammany plugger, Mulligan, did y’have to bust his ribs?” shouted a third.

  “Whip dat nag,” said Mulligan to the cabman.

  A rock struck the cab, then a splat of mud. The cabman’s whip cracked, and we departed the scene of my attempted benevolence under fire from whatever the Sixth Ward could find lying loose in the streets. Once safely out of range, the cabman slowed his horse, and we proceeded uptown to view what Annie called “more pleasant sights.” We passed a handsome park named after President George Washington and found ourselves on Fifth Avenue.

  There, block after block, stood the mansions of the rich. By and large they were disappointing from the outside, all dull, drab brownstone with high stoops and identical sets of windows and huge bristling cornices. Excessive show was not yet the fashion among America’s “old rich”—those who had made their fortunes before the Civil War. But behind the staid exteriors was fabulous luxury, which Annie knew in amazing detail. The owners’ names, Schermerhorn, Brevoort, Belmont, meant nothing to me but a great deal to Annie. To her descriptions of their parlors and ballrooms she added choice anecdotes from their lives, most of them uncomplimentary. I did not realize it at the time, but Annie had become a typical American, fascinated by the rich and their often bizarre lives.

  Aside from the dullness of its brownstone fronts, Fifth Avenue was a lovely street, lined with huge shade trees and free from Broadway’s furious commercial traffic. Crossing Madison Square we paused before the house Annie knew best, Leonard Jerome’s mansion on the corner of 26th Street. He was one of the new rich who believed in ostentation. The house was a huge pile of red brick and marble with windows ten feet tall and double porches of delicate ironwork overlooking the square. Behind it on 26th Street were stables, which Annie said were as lavish as the house, with black walnut paneling, papered walls, and rich carpeting. On the upper floor was a six-hundred-seat theater, which Jerome had built to display Mrs. Ronalds’s singing talents to the “upper tendom”—the wealthy ten thousand who constituted New York society. Our tour ended at 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue, where we examined the twin mansions of John Jacob Astor III and his younger brother William. These were unabashed palaces, with great Corinthian columns and double stoops of white marble. Inside, Annie said, were banquet halls and art galleries that equaled anything owned by Queen Victoria.

  “How’s dat for high?” Tim Mulligan said with frank admiration. “Dey say old Astor was wort’ twenty million when he croaked.”

  After making us promise to pay no more visits to the slums, Tim left us in front of the Astor mansions. He had a “brudder” who worked as a groom for one of them, and he thought he would pay him a visit. We continued up Fifth Avenue to admire the immense walls of the Croton Reservoir at 42nd Street. I told Annie of visiting Dick Connolly’s brother-in-law, McGlinchy, who had supposedly gotten rich building it. “I know him,” Annie said. “He’s the biggest skirt-chaser in town.”

  I was stunned by the contrast between the McGlinchys’ comforts, the complacent wealth of Fifth Avenue, and the slums of the Sixth Ward. America was a bewildering country. “’Tis not much different from Ireland,” I said. “The poor in their hovels and the rich in their mansion houses.”

  “Now you can see why some of us think we must do something here before we can do anything for Ireland,” Annie said.

  “Are all cities like New York?” I asked. “Are there Sixth Wards in Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago?”

  “So they say. It’s every man—and woman—for himself in this American life, little sister. Get that through your head.”

  This dog-eat-dog philosophy did not jibe with Annie’s cry to do something for the American Irish. I began to suspect a deep confusion in her mind—perhaps in all American minds—between the wish to help others and help themselves.

  We continued up Fifth Avenue past the site which the late Archbishop Hughes had chosen for a cathedral that was supposedly going to surpass Westminster Abbey. Only the outer wall, to the height of about thirty-five feet, had been completed when the Civil War broke out. We were soon at the entrance of Central Park. Here we saw fashionable New York on display. A dazzling variety of carriages and fine horses whirled along the winding roads of the park. Almost every vehicle was filled with brilliantly dressed women out to see and be seen. Annie pointed to one of the gaudiest carriages, all cream and gold, drawn by four magnificent black horses. A rather fat black-haired woman in a deep purple dress sat behind the two coachmen. “There goes Madame Restell,” she said. “That’s who to see if you catch cold.”

  “Is she a doctor?” I asked.

  Annie laughed. “In a way. I keep forgetting how green you are. ‘Catch cold’ is the polite American way to say miss your monthly. You know what that means, I hope?”

  “Of course,” I said, blushing nevertheless.

  “Madame Restell knows how to make you regular again. Get rid of your cold.”

  “You mean the baby?”

  “Right. She deals only with the best people, and she’s made about a million dollars doing it.”

  “Have you been to her?”

  “Not yet. Thanks to Mrs. Ronalds. I use my syringe faithfully. But it’s no guarantee. I know a lot of women who’ve gotten caught, in spite of it. Which reminds me. Are you doing anything to play it safe with this big lug from Tennessee?”

  “No,” I said. “But he’s not a lug.”

  “Okay. He’s a hayseed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A country boy.”

  “I’m a country girl. So are you.”

  “Not any more, little sister. Six years in New York teaches you more about life than sixty years in County Limerick. Bring your friend along tonight. Let me look him over.”

  I found myself disliking more and more Annie’s assumption that she was going to take charge of me. At the same time, I was intimidated by her cool confidence and the successive shocks I had received
since we landed in New York and met the Fenian leaders. I was only nineteen and realized I badly needed a guide. I meekly followed Annie into a pharmacy on lower Broadway, let her buy a vaginal syringe for me, and listened carefully to her instructions for using it.

  Perhaps it was a heightened consciousness of the risk women take that made me rebellious when I found myself under masculine criticism a few minutes later. In our suite at the hotel Michael and Dan were talking with Colonel William Roberts, Fenian “man of action,” husband of the imperiously respectable Mrs. Roberts. The men sprang to their feet and demanded to know where I had been all day. I explained curtly and advised Dan and Michael that we were invited out for the evening by Mr. Richard Connolly, sachem of the Tammany Society.

  Colonel Roberts (it was his rank in the Union Army) immediately became agitated. “You shouldn’t go near him,” he said. “They’ve done nothing for us. He only wants to use you to get the Irish vote.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “It’s a purely social evening.”

  “The colonel’s right,” Michael said. You must remember who you are. Not just Bess Fitzmaurice, but the Fenian girl.”

  “I will nevertheless go where I please and do what I please,” I said. “Furthermore, I met Mr. Connolly today, and he said he was changing his mind about the Fenians.”

  “Did he now?” Colonel Roberts said. “That’s very interesting. Maybe you should go, and if I bump into you somewhere along the way, we could have a bit of a talk.”

  This sudden shift of ground left Michael bewildered. He weakly acquiesced. After Roberts left, Michael began damning him as a politician first and a Fenian second. “He came up here to talk us out of supporting O’Mahoney,” Michael said. “He claims everyone on the council is disgusted with the old man.”