A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  He stormed out of the room. The next day, when I saw him at Moffat House, he was still in a surly mood. He had a copy of the New York Times in front of him. “Look at this,” he said, shoving the paper at me. The headline of one of the lead stories on the front page read: EX-FENIAN LEADER URGES CANADIAN IRISH TO SUPPORT CONFEDERATION, QUIT FENIANISM.

  My brother had abandoned the Fenian Brotherhood. In violent rhetoric, Michael denounced all Fenians as fools, poltroons, thieves, and cowards. They were tools of evil men in the United States who hoped to seize Canada. There would be another invasion soon if Canada did not confederate as soon as possible. He urged the Irish in Canada to support this movement to unite the disparate provinces and rhapsodized about the superiority of the lot of the Irish in Canada to the condition of their cousins in the United States. There they were the victim of Protestant bigotry and political corruption. In Canada, under benevolent British law, they were welcomed as equals. The solution to Ireland’s woes was the steady improvement of their lot in Canada, by dint of hard work and sober living. Eventually, the presence of so many upright, affluent Irish in Canada would change the minds of Britons at home and make them realize it was their oppressive system and not the deficiencies of the Irish character that was responsible for Ireland’s woes.

  Father had won his struggle for Michael’s soul.

  I said this to Dan. He was not interested. “Write him a letter,” he said. “Tell him to shut his mouth. If he wants to stay alive.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  “There’s a lot of people who consider this treason. In a war, that’s a crime punished by death,” he said, tapping the paper. “For the time being, it’s our policy to say we’re goin’ to invade Canada again. We’ve got to say it because the Roberts crowd is sayin’ it. This could make it impossible.”

  “So be it,” I said. “I’m beginning to think the whole idea was madness from the start, myself.”

  “I don’t care what you think,” he said. “I’m tryin’ to protect him, for your sake. Every man who had a brother or a friend die up there will be ready to put a bullet into Michael if he keeps talkin’ this way. O’Neil himself is real upset about it. He’s convinced we’re goin’ back to Canada. It’s all he talks about.”

  I wrote Michael the letter. Knowing the Irish hatred of turncoats and informers, I had to admit Dan was right. I might as well have saved the ink and the price of the stamp. All I got for my trouble was a stinging reply from Michael, urging me to join him in Canada before I ended like Annie. America had become for him a synonym for degradation and corruption. He ranted on this topic for pages of furious, almost illegible scrawling. At the close he informed me that he was not only going to keep making speeches—he was coming to the United States to attack “the Fenian snake in its lair.”

  I showed the letter to Dan, noting the close. He cursed and crumpled it in his fist. “You may have to go answer him, like you did the last time.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t the heart.”

  “Bess,” he said, “I’m tryin’ to save his life.”

  “No,” I said. “I’d feel like I was mocking the dead. My father. I can’t do it.”

  Michael wisely began his tour far from the Canadian border, where tempers were still volatile. If he had appeared in Buffalo, he might have been torn apart on the spot. We soon heard reports of his progress through the Midwest into Pennsylvania. We not only heard them, we felt them in the decline in contributions from each city after Michael left it. He used wit and ridicule as well as invective to attack the Fenians. There were now three wings, he said, which made the Brotherhood the strangest creature in the world, all wings and no body. But he reserved his strongest language for our association with New York, the Babylon of America. He urged his audiences to “resist with scorn and detestation this billingsgate beldame, this shameless impostor who claims to speak for Ireland, reeling and disheveled from the purlieus of Manhattan, with blasphemy on her lips and all uncleanliness in her breast.”

  It was easy to see that the dominant image in his mind revolved around me. He had said similar words to me in Buffalo. In every city and town, the local priests and bishop all but gave Michael their blessing, considerably adding to the strength of his assault. By the time he reached New York, the O’Neil wing of the Fenian movement could not mention his name without cursing. He was received like a visiting cardinal by Archbishop McCloskey and given the use of St. Peter’s Hall on Barclay Street, one of the largest auditoriums in the city. Michael made no attempt to see me, even though he stayed at the Metropolitan Hotel, only a few blocks up Broadway from Sweeney’s.

  On the night he was to speak, Dan insisted I go hear him and answer him. I refused, but he badgered me so intensely, I finally agreed to go and promised to reply if Michael said anything outrageous about me personally or about Dan. He ordered Red Mike Hanrahan to go with me, because there was a good chance of a riot. The word was out that Michael also intended to attack Tammany.

  In spite of a hot August night, the crowd was large. There was a heavy sprinkling of priests in the seats, making me think that each parish had been ordered to turn out a delegation. Michael was supposed to appear at eight o’clock. At eight-fifteen men began glancing at their watches. At eight-thirty there was a conference among his clerical sponsors and one of them hurriedly left the hall, no doubt heading for the Metropolitan Hotel. I was vaguely worried, thinking it was strange for Michael to be late. Punctuality was always one of his strongest virtues, inculcated by Father with many a thwack while he was growing up.

  “Where can he be?” I wondered.

  “Maybe he heard there might be a riot and decided to confine his audience to six reporters in his hotel room,” Mike said.

  “I doubt that,” I said.

  We sat there until nine o’clock. Finally a discomfited priest announced that Mr. Fitzmaurice was “indisposed” and his lecture was postponed. We rode back to Sweeney’s Hotel in a horse car to find Dan impatiently pacing my room. “Well, what’d little Jesus have to say?” he snapped.

  “Not a blessed thing,” Mike said. “He did a disappearing act. He may be walkin’ on water to Brooklyn this very moment.”

  “What in hell do you mean by that?” Dan said with startling truculence.

  “Not a thing, me lad, not a thing. Just a manner of speaking,” Mike said, backing away.

  “I’ve half a mind to go to the Metropolitan Hotel to see if he’s all right,” I said.

  “The hell with him,” Dan said. “Maybe he got one threat too many and it shook his nerve. I heard he’s been gettin’ a lot of nasty mail. Let’s go celebrate. I’d say we just won a victory.”

  He insisted on Mike joining us for dinner at Delmonico’s. Dan had not paid much attention to Mike since John O’Neil became president. Mike had been a Roberts man originally, and he had little influence among the new lineup of leaders under O’Neil. At Delmonico’s, Dan lavished the best French champagne on Mike and insisted I match them glass for glass.

  A number of politicians, including Peter B. Sweeny and Bill Tweed, stopped to shake Dan’s hand. It was obvious that one reason for coming here was to demonstrate Dan’s growing power in New York. Everyone knew he was the man who could put words in John O’Neil’s mouth, the man who controlled the reputed million in the Fenian treasury. He used this aura of power to persuade Mike to join us in the nitroglycerin offensive in England. He lured him with the promise of new prestige in the Fenian movement. To Mike, half drunk on champagne, it sounded glorious.

  “You know why I stuck with you, Dan?” Mike said. “Roberts offered me the moon, but I stuck with you. Because of this colleen, if you want the truth. I’ve been half in love with her since I first saw her. I know you’ve got her all in that department, but that still doesn’t stop me from enjoyin’ the sight of her.”

  “Be my guest,” Dan said. He poured more champagne. “We’re a team. We proved it in Ireland. We’ll prove it again in England.”

  I su
ddenly remembered Lord Gort on his face in the hall, blood oozing from his back, staining his daughter’s skirt, and I wondered what we’d prove in England. But I stilled my uneasiness with champagne and wine and brandy. At 1:00 A.M. we went rolling back up Broadway to Sweeney’s Hotel, singing an old Irish war song, “O’Donnell Aboo,” into which we inserted our own names.

  “On with the Hanrahan

  Fight the old fight again

  Sons of McCaffrey, all valiant and true

  Make the false Saxon feel

  Erin’s avenging steel

  Strike for your country, Fitzmaurice Aboo.”

  Singing away lustily, we marched into the hotel. I kissed Red Mike good night, and Dan, too, and went off to bed, where I had terrible dreams.

  I seemed to be in Ireland, and Lord Desmond was on his white horse with the silver shoes riding down upon me and Michael, in the open road beside the lake. Michael thrust me aside, but Lord Desmond caught him on his lance and flung him like a toy into the depths of the lake. I ran wailing to the edge of the water and saw Michael’s face turning turning turning in the darkening depths. I knelt and began to keen like a peasant.

  “Miss Fitzmaurice?” called a ghostly voice. I sat up, terrified. The voice was out in the hall. It was dawn.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Detective Grogan of the Ninth Precinct, miss. Could you let me in?”

  “One moment.” I struggled into my night robe, a hundred awful possibilities racing through my head. Dan and Mike had gone off for more drinking and had been arrested and given my name for bail. Annie was in some sort of trouble.

  Detective Grogan was about fifty, a great solemn slab of a man with a brown derby that looked like an iron helmet on his big head. He had a policeman with him, another Irishman named Mulcahey, who was as wide but not quite so big.

  “Sorry to come at this hour, miss, but we’ve got some bad news. They took a body out of the East River about two hours ago that we have reason to believe is your brother, Michael Fitzmaurice.”

  I sat down on the bed, shaking my head.

  “He had a key from the Metropolitan Hotel in his pocket. That gave us the clue to trace him. Once we knew his name, of course we knew who he was. His connection to you.”

  “What happened to him?” I said.

  “As far as we can tell,” Detective Grogan said, “he’s another one of those young fellas who think they can come to New York and have a wild time. He was last seen drunk and dancing at Billy McGlory’s.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I cried. “My brother would never go near such a place.”

  “Now now,” Grogan said. “I know a girl likes to think the best of her brother. But we’ve got a half dozen witnesses. They saw him go off with some woman. She may have had a confederate who put the bullet in the back of his head, then threw him in the river. It happens every night down there, you know, on the East Side.”

  I was weeping now, shaking my head still.

  “We’d like you to come down and make an identification, if you can manage it,” Grogan said.

  “Would you—wake up a friend who lives here? Dan McCaffrey. He’s in Room 315.”

  “The chief of staff of the Fenian army? I know him,” Grogan said. “I had a boy with him in Canada. He’s the finest soldier in the army, my boy says.”

  Dan was there within minutes, tieless, wearing the rumpled foulard suit he had worn to Delmonico’s. He held my hand and murmured, “I told you—I was afraid—I had you write that letter—”

  I nodded and clung to him, my tears a torrent now.

  After a patient two or three minutes, he told me to get dressed. We had to go to the morgue to identify Michael’s body.

  A police department wagon was waiting at the door of the hotel. We rode through the hot empty streets to Bellevue Hospital at 26th Street on the East River. We got out in front of the massive gray stone building and entered the lowest door of several in its front, on the upper side of 26th Street, marked by a single word in gilt letters—MORGUE. Inside it was cool and dim. The big room was about twenty feet square with rough walls and a brick floor. A partition of glass and iron divided the room in half. In back of the glass screen were four stone tables on iron frames. On them lay four naked bodies, their loins covered by sheets. Streams of water from spigots above each corpse fell on their lifeless faces.

  “The cold water prevents decay,” Grogan whispered.

  One corpse was a woman, a beautiful blond young girl who did not look more than seventeen. There was not a mark on her body or face. She had apparently committed suicide by jumping in the river. Michael lay beside her. His face was composed and solemn. There was not a mark on it, or on his body either, but Grogan told me there was an ugly bullet wound in the back of his head. I shuddered at the way the film of water on his face made it resemble the face in my dream.

  “You identify this man as your brother, Michael Fitzmaurice?” Grogan asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Oh Michael, I wanted to cry. What cruel dark god has betrayed us to this meeting here in the city of stone beyond the ocean, so far from the green fields where we laughed and dreamed? How could love and pity and hope end in this act of blind meaningless doom? Truly we are an accursed race.

  So went the keen in my heart. Outwardly, I was American, performing the formalities of the great city, signing papers, discussing burial arrangements, thanking Detective Grogan for his considerate treatment, stumbling out with Dan’s arm around me into the hot still dawn, in which the city stirred like a huge beast, ready to devour another day of life.

  Back at the hotel, I began to weep so violently that Dan became alarmed and called Dr. Tom Gallaher. He gave me some bitter-tasting liquid to calm me and sat beside my bed, holding my hand. “You know what I think?” he said. “Your brother was killed by the British. They do that sort of thing, to sow hatred among us. They hired him to sow discord and then killed him to sow hatred. Perfidious Albion, Bess.”

  “You could be right,” Dan said.

  I gazed into Gallaher’s wild burning eyes and did not know what I saw—madness or truth. I looked up at Dan, standing behind him. The grim, almost lifeless mask of his face struck terror into me. I writhed like a woman in childbirth, trying to expel something that possessed me both within and without, fear, hatred, love, I did not know what it was, I only knew it was a force that was stronger than my will.

  The sedative struck me down into blank dismal sleep. I awoke in the late afternoon, feeling exhausted. The dim room was empty. I was alone. The August heat gathered around my bed. My mouth was like a piece of flannel. The sheets were soaked with my sweat. I reeled to the bureau and poured myself a glass of water. Drinking it, I wandered dazedly around the room. Near the door, a rectangle of white on the red carpet caught my eye. Mail. The bellboys often delivered it to me and other long-staying guests.

  I drew the curtains and saw it was a letter from Michael. I sat down slowly and ripped it open and read it by the harsh white light of New York’s summer sun.

  My dear sister:

  I had hoped to see you before I spoke tonight, to prepare you for what I plan to say. I would hope that you at least would not take personally my attack on the Fenians. I do not want to widen the breach between us. I want to do everything I can to close it.

  I know I am in danger. The New York police have assigned a detective to guard me, a mountain of a man named Grogan. He has a son in the Fenians, and he could not be less friendly! I am sure he is keeping a record of everyone I see, and reporting it to Moffat House. So I am sending you this letter without his knowledge. I don’t want to compromise you. For the moment you must depend on them for support. I have not a cent to offer you.

  I have been compelled to this course by something deep within me, a voice that whispers: There are some things a man must not do for his country. I see myself as trying to rescue Ireland’s honor from the confusion in which I have helped to mire it. And rescue you, too. Whatever happens to me,
I want you to know that the love I felt for you, the love that was misplaced in the turmoil and tumult of our rage, has returned now, with all its old force and sweetness. If I do nothing else with my confused life (for I realize the small chance a single man has of stemming a revolutionary torrent) I hope I can redeem you, your purity of heart and nobility of spirit from the madness into which I have led you. Let us write to each other without anger and spleen, with our old affection, and see what comes of it.

  Fondly,

  Michael

  In Search of an American Life

  I do not know how long I sat there with that letter in my hand. Occasionally I reread the words The New York police have assigned a detective to guard me. A mountain of a man named Grogan. Then it grew too dark to see the words. Thereafter I recited them dully to myself. I knew what they meant, but I could not think about it. My brain was stone. My heart scarcely beat.

  A knock. Then a key turning in the lock. Tom Gallaher advanced softly into the room. “Ah. The patient is awake. How do you feel?”

  “Where’s Dan?” I asked.

  “Talking to Tweed and Connolly about elections. I grew bored, and he sent me along to check on you.”

  “Go away,” I said.

  He sat down beside me. “Ah, Bess, Bess,” he said. “You’re full of pain. Now would be the time to let me take you. It would be like nothing you’ve ever known before. That is the highest ecstasy, you know, equal amounts of pleasure and pain.”

  I saw the madness and sickness that raged in his soul. “Get out!” I screamed.

  “You’ll feel better in England,” he said, standing up. “When you see British blood and brains splashed in the streets. You’ll love me and Dan. You’ll take turns with us.”

  An hour later Dan arrived. I still sat there by the window, the letter in my hand. “Doc says you’re still pretty upset,” he said. “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. What’ve you got there?”