Men of No Property (14 page)

“Isn’t it a long time,” she said aloud, “since you and me went around that night, singing and dancing for pennies?”

“Oh Peg,” the boy said of a rush. “I was thinkin’ o’ the same thing. What a time we had and nobody clockin’ us!”

It was only then that she realized she had said the very thing she least intended. Norah was right. She had a devil. Given the chance of power, she couldn’t resist using it. She had used it on the boat on Dennis and a variety of poor creatures, and now on a slip of a boy when it could destroy him.

“I ought to be horsewhipped,” she said. “There’ll be a man some day take a whip to me.”

“He does and I’ll kill him,” Vinnie said fervently. “I’ll tell you somit, Peg. This here’s not for me. Me toes is cramped like nuts wearin’ these handy dandies.” He thrust his feet up in the air. Even his speech collapsed. “I’ve splintered me arse slidin’ up an’ down the stool over his damned put-two-and-carry-ones.”

Peg whirled around on him, swinging the flat of her hand against his face as she did it. “You don’t talk like that to a lady!” she cried. “It’s rude and vulgar.”

The boy’s mouth fell open.

She got up and looked down on him. “And I am a lady,” she said, tossing her head back. “I walk proper, and I am asked to pour tea in company.” She pronounced every word with great care. “I am studying Shakespeare. Some day, if you are a gentleman, you will sit in a stall and applaud me. I shall see you if you send your card in to my dressing room first…” The boy’s eyes had grown misty and the marks of her fingers streaked his white face. She softened her voice. “And the only flowers I’ll keep will be yours, Vinnie. I’ll send all the rest to the Cathedral.”

Vinnie tried a bit of a grin. “Mr. Finn took me to see somit t’other night,” he said.

“What did you see?”

“Macbeth.”

“Did you like it?”

“The fightin’ at the end was gallus.”

“I shall play Lady Macbeth,” Peg said, and lifted her hands to examine them. She widened her nostrils as though a smell was rising to them and repeated the line: “‘All the perfumes of Arabia…’” She flung her hands down and then lifted a finger to point it at Vinnie. “And I’ll not run after him on the stage as though I had a shillelagh in my hand. Oh-h, no-o-o…” She folded her arms and took several slithering steps before the fire and back. “She’s a cat, Lady Macbeth, and she has no children because she can bear only kittens.”

“Ee-eh!” Vinnie said. “Yer makin’ me flesh crawl.”

Peg smiled. “Do you know how many times I saw it? Three. And I’d have gone again if I’d been able.”

“I’d almost sit again to see the fight,” he said.

Peg went to the arm of the sofa and sat beside him. “I’m sorry I slapped you, Vinnie.”

“I’m sorry I said somit like that. Times I go round sayin’ dirty words over and over to meself. ’Tain’t easy here, you know.”

“I know,” Peg said.

“I’m workin’ from seven till ten, and studyin’ books till one. As soon as me dinner is down I’m put out in the front wi’ the customers. After tea I’m back at the bloody grindstone. Look at me fingers! They’re gnawed down to bloody stumps.”

Peg folded her hand over his. “And at night he finishes the torture by taking you to the theatre.”

“Dennis said he’d tar me if I run away.”

“Do you see them often?”

“I go to church wi’ them Sundays and then home there to dinner.”

“Mr. Finn’s not a Catholic?”

“He’s a Free Thinker,” Vinnie said, and in a solemn tone that implied he knew what it meant.

Peg nodded. “It must be a marvelous thing thinking whatever comes into your head and never worrying is it a sin.”

“He’s a teetotaler, too,” Vinnie said.

Peg thought about it a moment. “Why would one with that religion worry about taking a drink?”

Vinnie shrugged. “He’s a queer man truly. He goes out nights, you know, makin’ the rounds o’ the pubs, and Dennis says he’ll set a man up a drink any time. Only never a drop hisself.”

“Ah,” Peg said. “That’s where the free thinking comes in. Did you go to any other plays?”

“We went to the opera at Niblo’s.” Vinnie held his nose with two fingers.

“You didn’t like it?”

“I got sick in the middle.”

“Ah, Vinnie,” she said, laughing. “You’ll be a hard nut to crack.”

“Emmy’s just got a big tooth in the back of her head,” the boy said.

“Is she talking yet?”

“You can’t get her to shut her gob at all.”

“If I was starting,” Peg said thoughtfully, “I think I’d want to hatch the first one myself.”

“Peg, are ye marryin’?”

“Amn’t I waiting for you?”

Vinnie shook his head. “’Tis too long a wait. Mr. Finn says you should marry quick like Norah did.”

“More of his free thinking, is it? Does Mr. Finn have someone in mind to go along with his opinions?”

“He didn’t say. But he told me once if you were hard up to find work, he’d put in a word for you some place.”

“What place?” Peg said, her heart leaping at the words.

“He didn’t say. If you’d tell me what you have in mind, Peg, maybe I’d talk to him.”

“What have I in mind,” she said, “night and day, day and night…” Then she cut off the words, remembering the length of the nights. “All I want is a place where I can better myself.”

“He’s not much of an opinion of actresses,” Vinnie said.

“Did I say the word?” she snapped.

Vinnie looked up at her. “Yer a funny oul’ one, Peg.”

She smiled. “You’re a bit queer yourself at times. You’ll stay on here, Vinnie?”

“Aye,” the boy said solemnly. “’Twouldn’t be a fair fight if I was to run away.”

At dusk, Peg started for home. Vinnie handed her into a cab and paid the fare beforehand as he was bade by Mr. Finn. All along the cobbled street, the horse’s hoofs seemed to ring out: I clouted the devil, I clouted the devil, I clouted the devil. And so, she thought, she had. At least she had given her own special one a hard knock.

The following morning Vinnie called on her early. She was to see a Mr. Valois, a French confectioner on Broadway, to whom Vinnie had already delivered a note on her behalf from Mr. Finn. She watched in silent admiration while Vinnie blocked out the numbers of the address on a piece of paper for her.

P
EG WAS NOT AT
work long in the French confectionery shop when much of her old self confidence returned. The shop, mirrored and mahogany paneled, was as stylish as its customers and Peg soon took lessons from them on her own dress and demeanor. With her first month’s wages in her pocket and her hair braided round her head, she visited Norah and Dennis. Her welcome was such she might have been prodigal. For a time the two sisters were as close as ever they had been at home, and Peg thought herself the great fool to have ever coveted more than a quiet hearth and a rough man’s love. Ah, but where was the rough man to her fancy or to fancy her? One and another of them Dennis paraded home of an evening, at Norah’s insistence, she knew. They would sit in the room with her hunched like otters in the presence of a fox, boys she knew to be full of song and jest and quick of tongue with a girl they favored. And in truth, had she pleased them, there wasn’t a one she could warm her heart to. She was soon going less to Norah’s and more to Mr. Finn’s, and there was little Vinnie learned that winter but that she learned it with him.

She was a long time taking the measure of Mr. Valois, although he worked by her side in the shop from morning till night. She had never before known a Frenchman, and everything about him was strange to her. He was slight and sleek as a colt, wearing his black shining hair near the length of a mane. He was forever playing his delicate hands over it and he would almost prance to the door in the wake of an elegant customer. The custom of the shop were by their own confession the very best society. They loved truffles and trifling, Peg thought, and anything foreign so long as it wasn’t an Irishman. With her Valois was almost prim, and for all that he seemed to be forever chattering, at the day’s end she could find nothing he had said which told her of the man himself.

Nor could she learn any more of him from questioning Mr. Finn. “Oh, a fine fellow,” Mr. Finn would say, and then add slyly, “but rather theatrical, don’t you think?” as though that should provoke her into some discovery of her own. And yet she felt of Valois that there was something worthwhile which he was hiding from her with all the palaver, and she wondered at times if he did it because she was Irish.

Then one day he was very tired. His baker had failed to show up the night before and he had spent the night at the ovens himself. He flirted his giddy customers in and out of the store as usual, but one there was, prissed and curled and as bold as the Barnum trumpet. At the door she caught hold of him and whispered in his ear. He bowed and scraped, but when he turned from her his face had blanched to the color of flour. The woman gone, Peg chanced a mischief she had often practiced in other company: she mimicked her ferociously, the mincing walk, the lisping tongue. “And if monsieur will deliver himself, I shall be home from four to six, n’est-ce pas?” Peg threw off the imitation. “Pa or no pa, she should be horsewhipped.”

“Why?” said Valois, his eyes sharp with amusement.

“For making an ass of herself.”

Valois threw himself back against the counter in laughter that was like a woman’s in its high abandon. “Hereafter you will protect me, yes?”

“I will protect you no,” said Peg, mimicking him as well, for he spoke English better than ever she had learned it, save with those who liked it frenchified. “The devil a protector you need.”

His face was suddenly grave. “You are quite right,” he said gravely. “The bigger fools they.”

Peg realized then his strangeness: there was as much woman as man in him. God help us, she thought, there were more poverties in the world than want of money. “Ignorance is bliss,” she muttered of herself half-aloud, and clattered a tray from the shelf.

“No,” he said, “it’s not. Not ever and sometimes even the truth can be comfortable. Especially when you are weary of the lie. What do you do when you go home from here, Margaret? Do you mimic me as you did that frump?”

“I suppose I do,” she said. “I’ve always been afflicted that way, but I live alone so there’s no harm in it.”

“A mimic without an audience,” he said. “A sad plight that.”

“A sad plight anybody without an audience who needs one,” she said.

They were not long after this in discovering a passion they shared which embarrassed neither of them: he, too, loved the stage. Every word of his conversation held magic then for Peg. He talked endlessly of his acquaintances in the theatre here and abroad. His idol was Rachel, the French tragedienne, and of her Peg pleaded the same stories over and over as a child will hear a fairy tale, for Rachel was the daughter of a street peddler, and herself sang in the streets of Paris for the petty coins of the realm. When Valois spoke of the theatre, she noticed, he spoke like a gentleman and not at all like a Frenchman. He was indeed a conundrum to her.

“Are you keeping company, Margaret?” he asked her one night as he was closing the shutters.

“Not at the moment,” she said.

“Will you have supper with me then at Windust’s?”

“Oh I’d dearly love it,” she said, for Windust’s was the congregating place of writers and artists and theatre people.

Mr. Valois, or Val as he bade her call him out of the shop, was well acquainted at Windust’s. He would introduce a player to Peg if he stopped at their table, or identify one and another for her as they passed and nodded without stopping. “He’s the heavy man at Burton’s,” he might say, or “She’s the walking lady at the Olympic. Did a commendable Lady Sneerwell last week.” The walking lady was the actress of all parts in a company. Peg could no more than sip at her coffee, nibble at the food on her plate. She thought she would choke if she tried to swallow.

“Do you always eat so poorly?” Valois murmured.

“Oh, no,” said Peg. “I have a fine appetite.”

“Obviously then we shall have to come again to prove it to the management.”

By the appetites of most of its patrons, Peg thought, Windust’s wasn’t often troubled about wasting food.

They did go again, and often, sometimes after his taking her to the theatre where, Peg realized, he watched her almost as much as he watched the stage. He knew all the old plays by heart, and the new ones he took apart for her. And at Windust’s, when the players became accustomed to her presence, they would come and sit to talk with Valois, earnestly begging his opinion of their work, seeking to learn how others had played the role. He slit the fat from any pompous one, Peg thought, who came to him for praise instead of criticism, and larded the timid ones, though never with more than their due. He was more than a fancier of the theatre, and the books he loaned her proved it.

“Do you mind if I ask a question, Val?” she said one night.

He shrugged. “Please.”

“”Were you ever on the stage yourself?”

He pursed his lips for a moment. “In my mother’s womb, yes. I believe I was born during an intermission.”

Peg looked down at the table. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“But of course you did and I’m flattered. Why, when I preach so exquisitely, do I not attempt the practice, so?”

He was being French and flip again, she thought, touched on something he cared more about than he wanted to admit.

She nodded. “So.”

“What shall I play? Myself? I am not so enamored of the character. Do you see me a lover? The Gladiator perhaps, or a fragile Hamlet. To be or not to be. Can’t you hear them howl in the pit if I were to ask that question at, say, the Broadway, and after Mr. Forrest had bullied the moon with it?”

“Please, Val,” she said, for he had gone quite pale.

“You wished me to be serious,” he said. “I have not finished being serious. Miss Cushman may play in breeches, but I am resolved that I shall not play in petticoats.”

Peg felt an aching pain in her throat. It brought the tears to her eyes and she kept them cast down.

“Margaret?” When she did not look up he slapped his hand on the table. “Oh, God in heaven, what are we into? What folly it was I should have known. We should never have walked out the shop door together. Stop the tears or I shall do something stupid. I cannot brook tears in a woman. I’m helpless. I shall flee from here. Or worse, I shall discharge you.”