Men of No Property (48 page)

“And with you, Stephen, all is well?”

“Quite well, thank you.”

Is that a darn in the finger of your glove? A fray at the pocket of your coat? “I understand you’re leaving the St. Nicholas.”

“Not quite the place to rear a child.”

Nor the place to live when a man’s fortune is falling below his honor. How I love you, Stephen, for that choice which I cannot mention when you do not yourself. But surely you must prosper even without so prosperous and politic a partner. “Your son is very beautiful.”

“Thank you. I’m glad Delia brought him to call.”

“Delia did not call. I sometimes sit a moment with Nancy in the park and I pretend…”

“Ah, yes, you and Nancy are old friends.”

“I pretend that Mr. Finn is not dead, that the apartment is not boarded up with all my happy ghosts inside. Then both Nancy and I weep and borrow handkerchiefs from one another.”

“You must forget, Margaret.”

“Why? I like remembering. So does Nancy and she does not deny me the company of her grief.”

“Will you come to tea one day before we move?”

“I expect not, Stephen. I shall be much engaged from now until the season’s end. I’m to have a new play for a smashing finish.”

“So all Valois’ fury was so much froth?”

“Thank God for that. I don’t like to think how dependent I am upon him.”

“Surely he is as dependent upon you? What manager would not throw open his doors to you?”

“You would be surprised at how few would, Stephen, if any at all. They say I am ahead of my times, whatever that means. I think it means that I am unreliable in drawing custom, that they fear my alienation of their gentler patrons. And they are right. I’ve marked myself the scarcity of true ladies in our audience.”

“Nonsense.”

“Nonsense indeed, and I am sure Delia has been often to see me upon the stage since that first palpitating Camille?” Ah, Stephen, I have no tact yet, and you were ever its master. “You must come, both of you, when my new play is announced.”

And with you, Val? But of course all’s well. And how should I know otherwise, daring not to ask. You smile in anger as in mirth and sometimes grind your teeth when you are as near to loving as your nature will allow. You denounced me because you did not see your friend alive, and I have thought you blamed me when against your pleading he was buried without flags or pomp or deadmarch. I thought you might be avenged of Irishmen on this poor bit of Irish flesh. Instead you have held your tongue in my presence and promised a new play this springtime. What more could I ask?

“But when, Val, when?”

“Soon enough, you will say, when you must learn it.”

“Have I complained? What actress has carried a heavier season? Six roles I’ve added to my repertoire.”

“And now can’t wait to add a seventh.”

“I’m bored with things once chewed and now eschewed. I don’t want Cushman’s hand-me-downs. A new play suited to my talents: that was your promise, Val, and I hold you to it.”

“Pray, peace, Margaret. You will have the play, and by my soul, you’ll play it!”

It was the softest of June days when the messenger delivered into Peg’s hands
The Benefactor.
She gave the boy a shilling, at which he looked twice and forbore testing by a surer method only as long as it took him to escape her sight. She took the envelope to the open window and stood a moment looking out. Ah ha, she said aloud, seeing the lad run down the steps, swing wildly between horses, carts and carriages. Across Broadway he bumped noses with a waiting ginghamed maid, as though it were an accident of course, and then skipped up the street with her to some ice cream haunt of their choosing. I remember springtime, oh, very well I remember.

She drew a chair to the window and opened the folder. If fame were less than love, it had some little power of making up for it…if what she had was fame. It was no common thing certainly to have a play written for you.
The Benefactor.
Its dedication page made her heart flutter a bit: “To the memory of Jeremiah Finn.” She turned the page without further self-preparation.
The Benefactor,
a play in five scenes by An American. “Oh, mother of God,” she murmured, and put her hand to where it might ease her quickened, thumping heartbeat.

Eight out of ten characters were Irish, not very Irish to an Irishman, but wanting only the actors’ brogue, the birdnests of hair, and raggle-taggle shirt tails to be all Ireland to an audience who thought one Irishman quite the same as another.

It was clever and horrid, and it would play like leaves in the wind. If Valois had not written it, he had sat on the shoulder of the author. Peg wondered if it was pride or shame that hurt her most. If only an Irishman had written it! What a strange thought, that. An Irishman having written it would need by now to be halfway across the world and in the opposite direction to Ireland.

“Well, Jeremiah,” she said, getting up at last, and addressing herself to the empty, darkening room, “it’s dedicated to your memory. There’ll be more love in the playing than’s in the writing. But who ever would have known that better than yourself, God rest you?”

“B
RIDGET, YOU ARE CALLED
.”

Called and must make answer. Peg rose and flung the tattered shawl about her shoulders. And why not, truth be told? Yes! Tell the truth and shame a people. There was never a boat to Blackwell’s Island wasn’t crowded with cursing, weeping Bridgets, and never a boat back didn’t bring them with hopes as pale as their faces, and both faces and hopes to be soon changing colors; black was never the color of hope, nor was rouge the beckon of virtue. But a pious start’s to be given you, Bridget, and ye’ll fight yer fall though ’tis not in the script. Oh, Bridget is called, but when she answers there’s no one left in Mrs. Stuart’s dressing room.

And who was cheering her, Peg wondered at the curtain. Did they cheer her fall or her fight, or was there no fight seen in her? Was her soul dead by their vision the moment she escaped the convent, for on such an incident Valois had opened his play, or worse—was the soul in her destroyed in the convent, for surely that notion most suited the author.

Step up, boys, and take your bow (this to the first and second comedian)! Look at them snatch off their wigs, just to prove they aren’t nit-headed Irish. Till the weariness left her and the long sleep drowned the sound of them, their lines would go round in her head, one of them trying to tell the other the name of the state each star in the flag stood for: “Conn…Conn…Conneh…” “Connemara?” “No, blight yous, isn’t Connemara in Ireland?” “Not for long. They’ll be loadin’ it into the next packet.” “Mass…Massa…Massa…” “Ah-choo!” “That’s it!” “What’s it?” Massachusetts….” On and on, like an organ grinder’s tune. Ah, but the calls for Bridget were louder—perchance men of taste as well as prejudice beyond the wall of light? “Gentlemen, good night!” Words unheard, of course, but with them Peg left the stage, and it was soon apparent she would not appear again that night.

Valois stood at her dressing room door, grinning, and scratching the back of his head with the knob of his cane. “Do you know what I’m trying to decide, Margaret? If you are truly as great an actress as you seem, or if I am so poor a scribbler. Congratulations. The victory again is yours.”

So, Peg thought, despite him I have given Bridget dignity. “Val, it was not a contest I should have ever asked for.”

He threw back his head and laughed, a high weird sound like the bray of an animal. “Oh, by the living God! That you should be gentle with me at this moment!” The smile left his face. “Eleven in the morning,” he said coldly, and then called out to the stage manager: “Philip! We’ll cut in the morning…to the bone and the heart we’ll cut, and we shall announce
The Benefactor
to play each night until the season’s close. If you wish your benefit, Mrs. Stuart, it will be
The Benefactor.
”

“The bill for my benefit is of my own choosing,” Peg said.

Valois bowed. “As you wish, my dear. But I warn you the audience will not be of your choosing.”

Peg slammed the dressing room door and hastened to have a quick drink before Norah and the old man were in upon her. I don’t care what they say, she told herself, I really don’t care at all, but she waited their coming nonetheless with trepidation.

When they arrived backstage, obviously both of them had been weeping.

“’Twas terrible sad,” the old man said, sniffling.

Norah stood in the corner a moment, apparently turning something over in her mind, and then she made Peg laugh at her remark: “They say some of them convents are terrible strict.”

Between Valois’ wrath and their easiness, Peg herself felt suddenly better. The old man was gabbing away about the wonderful fun there was in the comedians… “Ah-choo, Massachoosetts, and how else could you say it, but sneeze?” Peg was about to button him up when the boxkeeper tapped on her door and handed in a card.

Stephen Farrell’s. “May Delia and I have the pleasure of driving you home?”

“The pleasure,” Peg repeated. “Oh, my God. Did they see the play?” she demanded of the man bowed and deafened by time.

“Eh-h? Oh, it was good. Very good, Mrs. Stuart.”

Better she thought for his not having heard a line of it. But of course Stephen had attended. She had urged it at their last meeting, and not knowing then the play. But to write “the pleasure of driving you home,” he could not have been as disturbed as she was in it.

“Now you go along as you will,” Norah was saying. “Pa and I must be hurryin’ home. Dennis’ll want to know.”

“And what’ll you tell him, Norah?”

“Well, I didn’t care much for the parts about the church, but it was wonderful Irish and I enjoyed myself.”

Now would come Stephen, Peg thought, who wouldn’t care at all for the Irish parts, but could find amusement in the digs at the church. She sent word of acceptance to the Farrells and put Norah and her father into the carriage waiting her.

“Will you have supper with me?” Peg offered as soon as greetings were spent.

“I don’t really think we should,” Delia drawled.

“Nonsense,” Stephen said, and then explained to Peg that Delia was reluctant since their moving even to call upon her friends in the hotel. To his wife he joshed: “We did not carry off their silver, you know.”

“I know exactly how Mrs. Farrell feels,” Peg said. “If I were to go into Jeremiah’s house, I should want to lock myself in, not out.”

“How understandin’,” Delia murmured.

“Did you know the play was dedicated to him, Stephen?”

“No doubt because he would have found it so enjoyable,” he said dryly.

“Then you found it as offensive as I did?”

“Except for Bridget, quite. And the strange thing about it, Margaret, had an Irishman written it…”

“Stephen! My very thought. If only an Irishman had written it, I said to myself the day I read it, this would be better, this would be fine.”

“I can believe that from your playing. It must have cost you much anguish to decide on doing it.”

“The decision was not mine to make, Stephen. I have purposely foregone the privilege of selecting my roles. My judgment was never the best.”

“But could you not have broken the contract? Surely you could not be held to a role offending your race and church?”

“I suppose I could,” she said slowly, and thinking about it for the first time. “I have always been faithful to contracts—at the risk of health and honor, and sometimes life itself. And it’s not virtue, this faithfulness. It’s stupidity. The heart of a bondsman. I’m Irish to the core, Stephen, obedient until dispossessed.”

Stephen said nothing, and as they jogged and jostled through traffic, she thought that there was a time when Stephen would have said those words, but not she. Not the bold she! Peg turned to Delia. “Your husband was not always so tolerant, Mrs. Farrell.”

“I must say he’s very tolerant of me, and I got some just dreadful defects.”

Stephen murmured some nicety of protest and Peg was about to allow herself the opinion that Stephen’s wife was indeed a fool, when Delia said: “Did you see
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Mrs. Stuart?”

“I did,” Peg said.

“And did you believe it a true picture of Southern life?”

“The only picture of Southern life I’ve ever truly credited, Mrs. Farrell, was drawn for me by my late husband.”

“I often wanted to tell you, Mrs. Stuart—only Stephen hushed me on it—how terrible sad I thought that was. He must have had great pride, your husband.”

“Yes,” Peg murmured, “as proud as a bullet.”

Delia laid her gloved hand on Peg’s for a moment. “No true Southerner ever admits he’s beaten till he’s dead, and then he don’t know it.”

“Unlike the Irish,” Stephen said out then, harsh and hearty: “who’d flop on their backs at the first shot and arise at the last to boast the victory.”

“A nation of Falstaffs!” Peg added in hurtful pleasure.

“Hush up, both of you shut your mouths,” Delia said in a fury quicker than her speech. “I never heard such talk, and about your own people, too!”

“‘Know ye the truth,’ “ Stephen said, “‘and the truth will make you free.’”

D
ENNIS SCARCELY LISTENED TO
Norah’s account of the play that night. He was sitting before the window brooding when she returned so that she had to light the house. The city was foul with the first long heat and the smells accompanying it. All the waters of Croton wouldn’t cleanse it, but if the city stank the people held their noses when the Mayor drove by. There was nothing his enemies wouldn’t use to discredit him, and this despite the fact that he was hailed everywhere else as the finest city administrator in the country.

Dennis allowed himself to be drawn into the kitchen where he watched the brewing of the tea and heard Norah’s chatter to her father without letting on he attended. The old man drank down his cup scalding and vanished himself near as quick as the tea. He often shut the door on his own shadow when Dennis was home. Finally Dennis roused himself to a show of sociability. “So she’s playin’ an Irish girl, is she?”

“She is and beautiful. And there’s a pair of old men in it, I thought pa would explode with the laughin’.”