A Passionate Girl (41 page)

I told him of the British threats. He grew half sober. “Wha' can we do?”

“Go to Washington directly and demand the great man's help. Tell him it's his one hope of holding the Irish vote. Even if that's a miserable lie.”

“A'right. Get me the tickets. Tell Margaret. Dan boy, you mus' come, too. Need you by my side.”

“I'll be there, John,” Dan said in a voice that did not sound drunk at all. I suddenly wondered what game he was playing.

We went direct from Buffalo to Washington, a long, wearisome ride that took two nights and a day. We went straight to the White House and asked to see the president. In ten minutes, we were alone with Andrew Johnson in his office. The murdered Lincoln gazed mournfully down at us from the wall. Johnson's great hero, Andrew Jackson, glared from the opposite wall. Between stood the living president looking weary and harassed. The confident glow had faded from his eyes, and the ruddy health from his cheeks.

Andrew Johnson embraced his friend O'Neil as he had on the first night, when he sent our hopes soaring so high. “John,” he said. “I'm glad to see you're all right. But what happened to all your bold plans? I waited five days to issue my proclamation. In five days, with the army you had, you should have been able to do anything.”

John O'Neil gazed at his old friend with astonishment and grief. “Andy,” he said. “They closed the border the night we went over, the first of June. We couldn't get another man or gun across the river.”

Now it was the president's turn to look astonished. “The first of June? I'd swear—”

He recovered with remarkable speed and began to lie. He was, after all, a professional politician. “You shouldn't have let a few customs inspectors worry you, old friend. And you surely got enough men over there to do
something
. But—maybe there was some—some mixup. You know Congress has been giving me such a devil of a time I haven't had a chance to sort out my cabinet, get rid of fellows I don't trust.”

It was painful to watch him trying to conceal that he had no control of his government. He pounded O'Neil on the back and begged him not to lose faith in him. “If things went wrong, we'll put them right next time, John. I need your help, the votes of your people in the elections this fall.”

With a sigh that was equally painful to hear, John O'Neil gave him up as hopeless. I had warned him on the train that recriminations would be a waste of time and would only lessen our chances of saving our captured men. “We still need your help, Mr. President. They're threatening to hang sixty of our fellows.”

“What?” roared Johnson. He welcomed the plea as a godsent rescue from the need to make further explanations. He thundered and blew about war with England if they touched the hair of a Fenian head. He would summon his secretary of state that very morning and order him to make the strongest representations to the Canadian officials to pardon the captives and send them home, as the American government had done with the men they had taken into “protective custody” on the river. With a wink and a nudge he assured O'Neil that he need never worry about the indictment against him in the Erie County court. It would be quietly quashed in due time.

As we walked to the door, I told the president to give my regards to his son Robert. I intended it as sarcasm, but I almost regretted it when I saw the anguish I caused. “Thank you,” he said, his eyes downcast. “Robert—is out of the country. On a cruise. For his—his health.”

Outside, Dan McCaffrey looked back at the White House. “General Lee,” he said. “We should've fought to the last man. That's all I can say.”

He did in fact say little else during our ride back to New York. In Baltimore he got off the train and bought a bottle of bourbon. He and John O'Neil drank it steadily for the next six hours. When we arrived in Jersey City, we had to help O'Neil off the train. Dan was thick-voiced but steady.

In New York we met nothing but confusion, ridicule, and clamor. Our president, William Roberts, had voluntarily surrendered to the federal authorities and was in the city prison, appropriately named the Tombs. He was issuing statements calling upon the Irish to revenge themselves upon Andrew Johnson. We learned from his friends at Moffat House that he had decided to make a martyr of himself after he read the obnoxious telegram from the attorney general ordering the arrest of prominent Fenians. But few martyrs are made by voluntary immolation. Roberts was only making himself—and us—more ridiculous.

The newspapers had settled into a systematic pattern of vilification and mockery. They called Roberts “the Carpet Knight.” The
Herald
, once our best backer, denounced us as “an armed mob, robbing and abusing women and children.” Another paper accused John O'Neil of being in the Southern army during the Civil War and starving Union soldiers at the Confederate prison in Andersonville.
Harper's Weekly
published a long poem, “Feniana,” a single stanza of which is sample enough to limn its opinion of us.

If there is anything more disheartening, more dispiriting, more demoralizing, than the company of failed revolutionaries, I am unacquainted with it. For days on end we retired within our headquarters and did little but snarl and snap at each other. The vaunted good humor of the Irish vanished. Even Mike Hanrahan was a stranger to a smile. I scarcely saw Dan. He seemed to spend all his time with John O'Neil, who, as far as I could tell, spent all his time drunk. Dan seemed to have no interest in me. In fact he scarcely seemed able to look at me without loathing.

Another source of distress was Dr. Tom Gallaher. He haunted headquarters, urging everyone to continue the struggle. He was drunk a good deal and had given up his medical practice.

“We must strike back,” he told me. “Otherwise everyone will lose heart.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, which was the answer I gave to almost everything.

He seized me by the arm. “You need the kind of treatment I gave you at Ridgeway.”

“I do not,” I said, backing away from him, remembering the pain of his slaps.

“Or maybe the other kind of treatment I talked about giving you.”

I caught a glint of something very close to madness in his eyes.

“Tom,” I said, “you must stop drinking. You must go back to your patients.”

“The hell with them. Fat pigs all of them, stuffed with meat and money. Who should I talk to? You're all like a collection of cattle, without brains or tongues. Is there no one with courage? I have a plan.”

“Talk to Dan McCaffrey,” I said, more to rid myself of him than from any real expectation of results. “If anything is done, he'll have something to say about it. He was the brains of the army.”

Beyond the boundaries of my Fenian griefs lay larger personal sorrows. The first awaited me when I returned from Washington. It was a letter from my sister Mary, returning my thousand-dollar money order. She told me that Mother had died with the priest beside her, forgiving me and vowing to pray for me in heaven. Mary thanked me for the money but said she was determined to proceed with her plan to join the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at Limerick. I changed the name on the money order to “Archbishop McCloskey” and mailed it to him that day.

Annie was a more acute cause of anguish. I sought her out within a day or two of returning to New York. Her slattern of a landlady told me that she had departed, leaving no forwarding address. I was forced to go down to City Hall and ask Dick Connolly if he knew where she was.

The city comptroller was himself no longer looking so debonair. Power and its harassments had hollowed his cheeks and put a few gray hairs on his heretofore sleek head. “Here's the address,” he said with a bitter smile.

He scribbled it on a piece of paper. He began quizzing me about Fenian affairs, but I professed to know nothing and fled past his busy clerks and the horde of favor seekers in the corridor. The address was on West 25th Street. It was a comfortable-looking four-story brownstone. A Negro maid answered my ring. I asked for Annie. “She still in bed,” the maid replied.

At noon? I wondered. “I'm her sister. Could you tell her I called? I'll be back at two.”

I was already fearing the worst when I returned from a walk to Madison Park, where I bought some oysters from a cartman for a cheap lunch. This time the Negro maid ushered me into a parlor that was furnished with opulent bad taste. An armless, headless statue of a naked woman, a poor imitation of the Venus de Milo, stood in a corner beside a great white piano. On the walls were paintings of naked gods and goddesses in gold scroll-work frames. The rug on the floor was deep red; matching red velvet draperies enclosed the front windows. The couches and chairs were all upholstered with some kind of white fur.

“Thank
God
—you're back alive,” Annie cried, hurtling in the door as she spoke. She was wearing a dressing gown of blue silk trimmed with yards of lace and ribbons. It was the sort of outfit a lady wore in her bedroom, and it seemed particularly inappropriate in this overdone formal living room. She looked unwell, thin and frenetic, but there was so much makeup on her face, no one but a friend or relative would know it.

“How do you like this?” she said, gesturing to the room. “I told you I'd pull myself together. A lot of girls in New York would give a year's rent to be sitting in here. It's the most expensive house in the city. Two hundred dollars at the door. I get half.”

“Annie—” I began, almost ready to weep.

“Don't give me any sermons, little sister. I'm having the time of my life and saving money by the ton. Which is more than you're doing with your Irish heroes, I'm sure. Have you a cent in the bank in your own name?”

“No,” I said.

“Then let me give you a little sermon. Watch out for number one. That's the American way to success. That's how we make millionaires in America, Miss Fenian.”

I saw she was half drunk. The maid appeared with champagne on a tray. Annie seized her glass and held it up to me. “All we ever drink around here. To success.”

I put down the glass. “I can't drink to your ruin, Annie,” I said.

“Then get the hell out of here,” she said. “I'll drink to it myself.” She downed her glass and did the same with mine. “I'm having the time of my life,” she said. “At the end of each week, I send Dick Connolly a list of the men. Sometimes with a little description of what we did. How's that for high?”

I left her there, glass in hand.

That night, as I brooded disconsolately in my room, there was a knock on the door. “Who is it?” I called, thinking it was probably Tom Gallaher, full of rant about action.

“Patrick,” said the voice. “Patrick Dolan.”

I opened the door. “I never thought I'd see or hear from you again,” I said. He was looking very prosperous in a dark brown sack coat, pinstriped trousers, a brown felt derby, and black patent leather shoes.

“I—read the papers, Bess,” he said. “About the fight in Canada. From all else I read, the Fenians are—well—”

“Finished?” I said. “So now you think you can pick me off the street, without argument?”

“Of course not. I'd never think such a thing of you. Could we have a late supper somewhere and talk?”

“I've had my supper,” I said.

“'Tis almost six months since I saw you, Bess,” he said. “The best and the worst six months of my life. 'Twas lonely, at first, in a strange city without a friendly face, but I went to a priest and told him my hopes. He sent me to an Irishman who'd opened a slaughterhouse and was havin' a hard time of it. I put my money in with him and went partners. We sell to butcher shops in the city and retail to some of the rich folks. I do the selling, and he tells me I'm the best he's found yet. Most of the butchers are German and didn't like Irishmen very much. But I got around them by learnin' a bit of their language. You'd be surprised to hear me
sprech Deutsch
. And would you believe it, I know more now about the politics of Germany than I do of Ireland.”

“It sounds grand,” I said lifelessly.

“Bess, it's a great country, this America. Where else could a man like me with my little bit of cash be on his way to ownin' half and maybe all a business as big as any in Dublin?”

“Great country,” I said dully. “Great country?” The words were like a match to a powder keg. All the fury that had been building up in me exploded in his face. “God, you're just like the rest of them. Money is all you care about. Great country. Yes, a great country at selling the Irish to the highest English bidder. Don't you know what they did to us up there in Canada? Sold us like slaves on the block, while they sit down in Washington mouthing high words about freedom and rights and you go about selling your liver and prime ribs to them. Why don't you buy a few poor Irish and butcher them up, too? They're going cheap, these days, cheap as Paddy's pig, as they say.”

I was like a drunken fishwife at a fair, abusing this innocent man who had had nothing to do with my woes. Poor Patrick was stunned. He shook his head, all spirit gone from his face. “Ah, Bess,” he said. “You're in deeper than ever with them.”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm in with them till death.”

I did not realize how close I was to the bitter truth in those words.

A few days later, Dan suddenly began smiling at me with unaccustomed warmth. He caught me at the door of Moffat House and complimented me on the dress I was wearing. It was scarcely a dress at all but one of the new jackets and skirts worn by women office workers, without an iota of brocade or frills. The fine dresses the Fenian ladies had bought me a year ago were showing signs of wear, and the clothes I bought on my modest salary as secretary of the cabinet had far less flair and style. Dan himself was looking prosperous in a light blue foulard suit with a white waistcoat and green silk cravat.

I was on my way to lunch. He followed me into the hot sunshine of Broadway and suggested we try a new Irish restaurant that had recently opened on 26th Street, Shanley's. I was agreeable, and we strolled uptown talking about nothing more formidable than the weather. By now it was the month of July and the heat of New York was at its worst. I sometimes felt like a chop on some giant griddle.

Many buildings on Broadway were still decorated with bunting from the recent Fourth of July parade. With an aching angry heart, I had watched the confident ranks of blue-coated veterans swing past Moffat House and had listened to the windy speeches about the founding fathers who had defeated England and established the United States of America. How could their descendants have betrayed the Irish, when they had had to pry England's fingers from their throats less than a hundred years ago? History was indeed a whirlwind, sowing confusion and inconsistency as it raged through time.

Shanley's was an agreeable restaurant, with crisp white tablecloths and excellent food, served by well-trained Irish waiters. The proprietor, Tom Shanley, had learned the restaurant business in Paris. He was a well-set-up, handsome young man, whom Dan seemed to know well. As the food arrived, Dan began lamenting the disarray in the Fenian Brotherhood. Roberts was still in the Tombs, making speeches to reporters that sounded more and more like apostrophes to the Republican Party. In Congress, a set of Republicans, led by a former Union general, Nathaniel Banks, was pressing for a revision of the neutrality laws, which would permit the Irish to make war on England from American soil. It was all wind and rant, as far as I could see, aimed at enticing the Irish vote in the fall elections.

Dan agreed and got close to the purpose of our lunch. “I've been talkin' to some of the people in Tammany. They're sore as hell at Roberts. They're scared he can take a lot of votes away from them in the governorship election. They'd back us pretty hard if we decided to get rid of him.”

“Who do we put in his place?”

“John O'Neil.”

“Has he drawn a sober breath since Canada?”

“Not many. But he'll be better now. I got him to send that bitch of a wife back to Nashville. She left last night. That woman'd drive any man to drink.”

I had to agree with that sentiment. But I had no desire to have anything to do with Tammany. “Is that all we have left to do, broker votes for Dick Connolly and Bill Tweed? If so, the Fenians should disband.”

“Disband, hell,” Dan said. “There's still a half million bucks in the treasury.”

“We should return it to the people who bought bonds.”

“The hell you say,” Dan said. “We've only just started to fight. This is a war. We lost one battle up there on the Canadian front. But there's other fronts.”

“Ireland?” I said. I recalled the defeat on so many faces, the cringing submission before English insults, the fawning on English tourists. “There's no hope there.”

“England,” Dan said, calmly slicing his sirloin steak. “That's where to attack. Carry the war to them, to their front doors, like the Federals did in the South.”

“How?”

“Your friend Gallaher's got quite a brain. I been talkin' a lot to him. He's a scientist. Knows his way around a laboratory. He told me about this new explosive, nitroglycerin. Ever hear of it?”

My interest in science was small. I shook my head.

“The federal government's been experimentin' with it in Washington. It's fifty times more powerful than gunpowder. A glassful of the stuff would kill everyone in this restaurant.”

I looked around Shanley's peaceful establishment, crowded with well-dressed noontime diners. I found what Dan was saying incomprehensible.

“You mean you'd set it off in restaurants in London? Kill innocent people?”

“Nothin' like that. We'd go for Parliament, Bucking-ham Palace. Railroad trains. Factories and warehouses. Bridges. I tell you, ten or fifteen people with a supply of this stuff can wreck the city of London. They'd make it look like Atlanta after Sherman left it.”

“How can you be sure you wouldn't kill women and children accidentally?”

“We might kill a few. But that's war, honey. You don't think some women and children died when Sherman burned cities like Atlanta and Columbia? How many Irish women and children died in the famines?”

I felt old hatred and that terrible blind fatalism stirring in me after weeks of private passive grief. He finished me by taking my hands in his and leaning across the table to me.

“It ain't over, Bess. We've been through some hard times together. Hard feelin'. Some of it's been my fault. But what I feel about you down deep, what I remember—from Ireland—ain't never changed and never will change. Don't quit on me, Bess.”

Looking back, I should have used the place where I sat, this fine new restaurant run by an Irish-American, as a lesson, a symbol, to escape the web of hatred and revenge into which he was luring me again. But my love for him, wounded and doubting and forlorn as it was, nonetheless still lived within me.

“All right,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Call a meeting of the Fenian cabinet and senate while Roberts is still in jail. If I did it, everyone would know we were makin' a political move. This way, you can just say General O'Neil wants to make a report on the campaign in Canada. We'll boot out Roberts in ten seconds. Tammany's already got a good twenty votes lined up.”

I should have smelled the corruption; I should have wondered about the sincerity of Dan's sudden affection. But I was still inside the whole experience, still within history's whirlwind. I had no second sight. I was glad to find I still had a part to play, I was pleased to discover that I was still important to Dan.

That night, Dan and I became lovers once more. I was startled by his ardor, to which I found it hard to respond. I needed time to restore my trust and ease, to fend off the doubt that assailed me when I thought of Annie and wondered if I was choosing the wrong man again. I could see clearly what he was getting and what I was giving. For a moment as he crushed me almost angrily against him, I thought of Patrick Dolan, that sad, gentle man, the pain on his face as he turned away from me to avoid those cruel words about money. For a moment I almost tore myself loose, fled the room, the hotel, this city with its blazing heat that seemed to devour my flesh and spirit. But it was too late, he was within me, murmuring wordless passion, I belonged to him again and I gave myself wildly to the sweet soaring pleasure of it, whispering
all will be well all will be well
until I remembered those were the words I used to lie to Dan on the shore of the dark rushing Niagara River. Now was I lying to myself?

The next day, I sent telegrams to the Fenian senators in the various states, summoning them to New York for an emergency meeting to hear General O'Neil's report. Most of the cabinet lived in or near New York, and they were notified by letter. It was impossible to keep the thing a secret. Several of the cabinet members, especially Meehan, the publisher of the newspaper the
Irish-American,
were close to Roberts and told him about the meeting. He immediately summoned his lawyer and tried to obtain his release from jail on a writ of habeas corpus. He was dealing with a city government ruled by Tammany. Not a judge could be found to issue the writ. When one was finally produced, the paper was mysteriously lost in transit to the Tombs and the process had to start all over again. Roberts was still fuming in his cell when the meeting was convened at Moffat House.

A vice president named Gilhooley, a contractor with close ties to Tammany, was named chairman. He promptly recognized Dan McCaffrey, who was wearing a newly bought dark green uniform. He introduced himself as “General O'Neil's adjutant.” The general, he said, was not present because he had been told there was some political business to be conducted on the first day of this emergency session. The general was a man without political ambition. This was precisely why his friends felt he should be raised to the presidency of the Fenian Brotherhood. The Fenians had been organized to fight for Ireland. As president we now had a “carpet knight.” We needed a soldier. We had one in John O'Neil.

Chaos erupted. Roberts had plenty of friends in the senate and a few in the cabinet, and they had been primed for combat. It was not hard to divine the purpose of this emergency meeting, once they realized it had been convened without consulting the president. After hours of fiery debate and parliamentary maneuvering that would have done credit to the U.S. Senate or the House of Commons, the matter was put to a vote and Roberts was defeated by a two-to-one majority.

Revolutionary movements are not great believers in democratic procedure, except when it benefits them. Roberts's followers hurled curses and denunciations at the winners and walked out, declaring their intention to form their own Fenian Brotherhood. An hour later, I stood beside Dan watching John O'Neil take the oath of office as Fenian president. “Now we go to work,” Dan said, all but rubbing his hands with grim satisfaction.

I felt a gust of uneasiness. John O'Neil was sober, but he was not the same man who had led the army into Canada. Drink, the humiliation of defeat, and the doubts introduced into his mind by his wife had subtracted strength and confidence from his visage. I saw not a leader but a weak man. Beside me, I realized with a shock, was the man who controlled him. Dan McCaffrey.

For a while I was too busy to think much about it. We had to fight a propaganda war on several fronts. We slammed Roberts and his “secessionists,” as we called them. We continued to heap opprobrium on the heads of O'Mahoney and his followers, who freely criticized our “squabbling factionalism.” Our hardest blows, delivered with all the strength Tammany could muster from the dozens of corrupt reporters they had at their beck and call, were reserved for “infamous William Seward” and “despicable Edwin Stanton” and their lying Republican colleagues in Congress, who had betrayed us in Canada and were now trying to cover their tracks with their talk of changing the neutrality laws.

New York newspapers had tremendous authority throughout America. Unquestionably, we destroyed William Seward as a potential presidential nominee. By the time we were through with him, he could not have bought an Irish vote with all the gold in Solomon's Temple. His alliance with the Radical Republicans was thoroughly exposed, costing him the support of the numerous Americans in both parties who disliked these hate-mongering extremists. Dan was the go-between in this propaganda war, shuttling constantly between Moffat House and Tammany Hall. There were frequent conferences with Bill Tweed and Dick Connolly and Peter B. Sweeny at the Blossom Club, Delmonico's, and other places where they liked to do business. Dan often asked me to go with him, although the sight of Dick Connolly with another woman (or a series of them) almost ruined my digestion.

Returning from one of these dinners a little drunk, Dan and I made love with a fervor that carried me back to our earliest days together. When it was over, he looked about my modest room and said, “Tomorrow you're goin' to move into the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”

“Why in the world?” I said.

“Because you're my girl, and that's where my girl ought to live.” He took a thick wad of greenbacks out of the pocket of his pants, on the chair beside the bed. “Look at that,” he said, lying on his back beside me and rippling them like playing cards. “Real money. We can afford it.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Where the hell did you think I got it?”

“It's Fenian money.”

“Sure. We're spendin' it the way Roberts spent it, the way O'Mahoney spent it. That last appeal we sent out, with O'Neil's name on it, is bringin' in a couple of thousand bucks a day.”

“I will not spend a cent of it,” I said. “Nor let you.” I was half wild, thinking of the way liquor had led me to enjoy him, as it had led Annie into the grip of Dick Connolly's dubious charms, and now he was moving me to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, like Annie.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What's the matter with you? Don't we rate it? Who went up there to Canada to duck bullets? Who went to Ireland with you? We risked our goddamn necks and you're tellin' me we can't get paid for it? We can't enjoy ourselves?”

His rage was terrifying. I thought for a moment he might strangle me. I could see not a trace of affection in his eyes. He seemed oblivious that he was snarling these words at me in the very bed where we had professed our love only minutes before.

“I can't tell you what to do. I can only tell you what I must do to keep my self-respect.”

“Goddamn it.” He sprang from the bed and began dressing. “You're as bad as your loudmouth brother sometimes, you know that? Why don't you trust me? If we pull off this offensive in England, we'll take over this Fenian Brotherhood. We'll be somebody in this city, in this country. O'Neil's gonna drink himself dead some one of these days. They're gonna need another hero. It's gonna be me. Dan McCaffrey. And you—the Fenian girl—my wife.”

As he said this, he stepped to the edge of the bed and turned my face to him in an abrupt proprietary way. I was frightened and repelled. “What offensive—in England?” I asked.