A Passionate Girl (44 page)

In my confusion and misery, I accepted his affection. I saw no other hope on my horizon. To know that one human being still cared about me was enough to make me acquiesce in his scheme. If it failed I was resigned to the scrub brush. There was no pride left in me to drive me to a higher station. Only the wish to please this sad little man.

So we drove to a building on Broadway near 22nd Street. The name of the business was lettered in glass on the door.
CUNNINGHAM AND CLAYPOOLE, DOMESTIC SERVANTS
. “Claypoole's dead,” Mike said, “and Cunningham took to drink years ago. But the English name is good for the business.” He led me into an anteroom filled with Irish girls just off the boat. They clutched their straw bonnets and shawls, gasping for breath in the New York heat, and gazed in awe at my modern outfit. I looked at their innocent faces and was tempted to cry, “Go back.” Then I remembered the stinking alleys of Cork and Limerick and told myself to let history take its course. Drift passively with the dark stream. Our fate was written out in advance.

From the inner office, whence Mike had disappeared, came the sound of angry voices. For five minutes they raged through the closed door, with only scraps of words reaching me. At last Mike emerged and beckoned me inside. His brother, Peter, sat behind a desk, looking like a mummified version of Mike, propped up to simulate life. He had blankpenny eyes and a mouth like a sore, and his red hair had faded toward gray.

“This thing he wants me to do will ruin me if you're found out,” he said.

“I know.”

“It can't be done in New York. You'll have to go elsewhere.”

“I told him you were prepared to make that sacrifice,” Mike said, giving me the wink.

“Yes,” I said.

“I've an offer here from New Jersey. Bit of an emergency, it seems. They won't ask too many questions. Their governess just quit. I put her in. She come through here yesterday. Told me the lad is a heller. Needed a week's rest at least before even thinkin' about work. I could put you in fast enough, I think. You parlez French, don't you?”

“Yes,” I said, wryly amused by the way Peter Hanrahan affected an English accent. “I haven't spoken a word of it for a good year. But I know it well.”

“You know your English literature—Dickens, Shakespeare, Lamb?”

“Yes,” I said, sadly remembering Mother reading away the winter evenings to us.

“I'll cook some references for you. As for yourself, you've got to turn Orange, you realize that? Protestant as old Calvin himself?”

“Yes,” I said. “My father was one.”

“That should make it easier. Americans like the Orangemen, you know. They call them Scotch-Irish, whatever the hell that means.”

“Who are these people?”

“Stapleton's the name. Live in North Jersey. Hamilton. I'll telegraph'm tonight. Can you leave tomorrow morning?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Read this on your way. I'll have your references ready in the morning.”

He handed me a book entitled
The Duties of a Governess
. I had the feeling that Peter Hanrahan had “cooked” a few previous references. There was money in it for him, and perhaps a bit of satisfaction, to put an Irish girl into a job usually reserved for English and Scots. He could not be Mike Hanrahan's brother without having a bit of that sort of devil in him.

All settled, Mike took me to the ferry and aboard it to Taylor's Hotel in Jersey City. He was afraid that when he returned to Dan and told him that he could not find me, Dan would call the police, and with his influence he could soon have them checking every hotel in New York for me.

“Why are you sticking with him, Mike?” I asked. “Why not go west, south, anywhere? Do you really believe in nitroglycerin?”

“You remember what I said about never finishin' things?” Mike said. “When I got in this fight, I told myself it was to the finish, one way or another. Besides, Dan's promisin' the moon this trip. Five thousand dollars each for Gallaher and me. Think how long that will last me at Morrissey's faro palace. A night and a half, at least.”

I wept a little and kissed him. “God bless you,” I said, “no matter what you do.”

An Irish prayer, if there ever was one.

I fell into bed, forgetting supper, and slept the sleep of exhaustion. At nine in the morning, a bellboy knocked on my door. He handed me a thick packet, in which I found my references, a letter of introduction to Mrs. Stapleton, and a railroad ticket to Hamilton, New Jersey.

I did not know it, but my Irish life was almost over. I was about to begin my American life.

My train did not leave until noon. I spent the morning reading
The Duties of a Governess
and found little that intimidated me. With money Mike had loaned me, I went out and bought a half dozen outfits similar to the business suit I was wearing. To explain my scant wardrobe, I planned to invent to a story about a lost trunk, and buy what else I needed in Hamilton. I dressed my hair as plainly as possible and omitted all trace of makeup from my face. I had never worn much anyway. I studied my letter of introduction to remind myself that I had acquired a new name.

The heat on the station platform was explosive. The sun beat on the tin roof and glinted off engines, steel girders, and tracks. The train was a dirty little four-car local, with an engine that spewed soot and cinders into the face of anyone foolish enough to sit near a window. After we left Newark, it was practically empty. I gazed out at the rolling wooded hills and small rivers. The landscape reminded me of the countryside over which we had fled to Bantry Bay with Dan. I thought with dull pain that Michael would be buried without a single person to say a prayer for him except a priest, whose prayers were discounted in my bitter mind. In agony I relived Michael's warnings against Dan, the times he had revealed his murderous mercenary's soul to me, the way I had excused him, clung to him, lied to myself about him.

“Is this Miss Stark?”

I looked up at a tall man with a very American face—long and narrow, with thin lips, a strong aquiline nose and penetrating, intelligent eyes. It was still a young man's face, though there was a patina of sadness or weariness that almost made me doubt his age. His hair was thick and gray—almost white—and swept carelessly back from his head. He had a rather ugly scar on his right cheek. I would soon learn it was from a Confederate bullet—and the white hair was also a product of the war's terrible strain. He was dressed in a black suit, shiny from much wear, and a striped tie. He had a gray felt top hat in his hand. For some reason I felt intimidated by him. His eyes reminded me of the mournful unillusioned stare of Archbishop McCloskey. Perhaps it was my upward view of him, swaying there to the motion of the train, gazing down at me like a kind of god.

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought so,” he said, “Since there's no one else on the train. I'm Jonathan Stapleton. I was told you were coming. I had to go into Newark for an unexpected business meeting that lasted most of the night.”

That sounded strange, but I said nothing. “May I sit down?” he said.

“Certainly,” I said, moving over for him. “I have my letter of introduction here—”

I fished my papers from my purse. He glanced through them perfunctorily. “Fine, fine,” he said. “Let me warn you in advance, my mother was rather opposed to hiring you because you were Irish. She seems to think only an Englishwoman can be a governess. But you Scotch-Irish are not like the rest of the tribe.”

“We try not to be,” I said, almost choking on the words.

“The important thing is, you're young. Miss Hardy was too old to cope with Rawdon. Mother couldn't see that.”

Mother? By now I was thoroughly confused, but I pretended to be well informed. “I was told Miss Hardy left in great haste.”

“Very,” he said in a dry way.

“Perhaps you might tell me more about it, Mr. Stapleton, if it is not too delicate or personal,” I said in the formal English manner I had resolved to adopt.

“I dismissed her. She tried to blame me for Rawdon's behavior. She said I antagonized the boy. I called her a fool, and we parted.”

“How old is Rawdon?”

“Eleven.”

“What is there about his behavior that disturbs you?”

He frowned for a moment, his head lowered, as if he were trying to decide exactly what to say. “There are certain ideas that must be eliminated from Rawdon's mind.”

As he spoke his voice deepened in intensity and he lost his polite explanatory tone.

“What might they be?” I asked.

He paused for another moment and placed both his large but remarkably fragile hands on the seatback in front of us. “He must stop thinking of me as a murderer.”

The train clanked and groaned as we rounded a curve. In the distance a large city sat atop a long narrow hill. A broad river wound along its base. Jonathan Stapleton gazed past me at the city, his face blank and haggard. I saw red streaks of sleeplessness in his eyes, grayish circles beneath them.

“My family—my father, my mother, my wife—didn't believe in the war. They thought we—and the whole state of New Jersey—should have remained neutral. I said that was impossible. The Union was too important—not just to this country but to the whole world. My father died of a broken heart not long after the war began. My younger brother Paul was killed at Nashville, one of the last battles—”

“How—how terrible.”

“War is a terrible business,” he said. “Rawdon conceives of me as the murderer of my father—and Paul. He was very fond of them.”

Jonathan Stapleton
. The name roved teasingly through my mind for a moment. I suddenly remembered the major general in Secretary of War Stanton's office in Washington. It was hard to believe that proud, erect warrior and this hunched, brooding man beside me were the same person.

“But has he no pride in you, his father, who came home with the victors? Surely your wife takes your part with him.”

“My wife is dead.”

He said it flatly, matter-of-factly, as a man might say, “It looks like rain.”

“She died two years ago, giving birth to my second son, George. Rawdon must not be allowed to corrupt that boy. He must not be allowed to spread his damnable opinion—”

“Has he actually said this to you?”

“No, but I've overheard him—saying it. He implies it, hints it, in his constant opposition to me, his open dislike of me—”

Something struck me as wrong, profoundly wrong, in this account. Whether he was consciously lying to me or lying to himself I could not tell, but it was clear that he wanted me as an ally. I doubted his story of going to Newark on business. I suspected he had arranged to meet me this way. For my part, I was more than ready to offer my assistance—I could hardly refuse and hope to keep the position. But I could not understand why the previous governess had failed to side with him.

“Surely Miss Hardy must have done her best to dissuade Rawdon.”

“She didn't understand the situation. She was a fool. She thought the war was a case of simple black and white, the South wrong, the North right.”

I had an inkling of what he meant, but I had to pretend ignorance. “As a newcomer, I know nothing of such matters,” I said.

“Precisely why I thought you were the right person for the task. You can acquire a correct understanding of the matter—with my help. Not that I have a wish to control your opinion in any way, of course, but simply with a view to composing the difference, healing the breach between me and Rawdon—you can see with some degree of objectivity my side of the quarrel.”

“It sounds to me more like a misunderstanding than a quarrel,” I said.

“No,” he said with a harshness, a grimness, that filled me with foreboding, “It's a quarrel.”

By now we were crossing the broad river and clanking to a stop in the station. Beyond it was another glinting steel world of tracks and locomotives and boxcars. This city, too, was a terminus. It was also an industrial center. Factories belched smoke, creating a noxious haze in the thick, hot summer air. Jonathan Stapleton insisted on taking my carpetbag and shook his head sympathetically when I told him about my vanished trunk.

“I'll be glad to advance you money to buy anything you need in the local stores,” he said.

Outside the station, he led me toward a handsome cream-colored coach drawn by a matched pair of fine black horses, with a coachman and a man-on-the-box beside him. The man jumped down and said cheerfully, “Good afternoon, General. It's a hot day, isn't it now?” He was a short, husky Irishman. The coachman had a face that suggested a similar ancestry.

Jonathan Stapleton nodded his assent and assisted me into the interior of the coach, which was upholstered in gleaming leather, with polished brass fittings. I was a little surprised by this display of affluence. While I was sure Jonathan Stapleton was well-off, I thought I read a very moderate sort of wealth in his worn business suit, a country-squire level of living, where land might be held in abundance but cash was often short. This was common in Ireland and England, and I thought a prominent man in the American provinces would be similar, while the lords of wealth and power predominated in New York, like the hereditary lords in London.

We rode through the industrial fumes beside the railroad track and were soon in some of the worst slums I had seen anywhere. Great pools of stagnant water lay in fields off the road. The ground all about was marshy in the extreme, and a number of rickety three-story tenements tipped at a dangerous angle, their foundations obviously slipping into the muck. Cows and pigs and goats wandered beside the road. There was an incredible profusion of saloons. Nearly all the faces were Irish, and great numbers of them were idle men. They stood outside the saloons, staring glumly at the coach.

“I shudder to think of what we'll be paying this year in poor relief,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Disbanding the armies has produced a glut of laborers like we haven't seen since the panic of 1857. We hired as many as possible on the railroad, but half our cars are idle. The factories are producing at half speed.”

“It's far worse in Ireland,” I said. “There people are starving by the road.”

“These fellows manage to eat, through one thing and another,” he said, looking stonily at the idle men. “Poor relief, church aid. Stealing. There's hardly a house that hasn't had a burglary. We've had to triple the size of the police force in the past ten years. How do you deal with them in Ireland?”

“Transportation to the penal colonies.”

“That makes no sense. The man leaves his wife and children behind to be a permanent charge on the state.”

“No. They starve to death soon enough. Forgive me if I sound extreme,” I added hastily, “but there are scenes in Ireland that would move anyone to sympathy, no matter what your religion.”

“Perhaps you're ready to join the Fenians. If so, Rawdon will induct you. Our Irish maids have made him a passionate supporter of that forlorn cause.” Then, with a delicacy for my possible feelings that stirred me, he added, “Perhaps I shouldn't talk so casually of it. You may take it more seriously.”

“You think it's foolish?”

“I've seen what wins wars, Miss Stark. Sheer weight of metal and men. A capacity for slaughter. The British have both.”

“Yes,” I said, struggling to sound indifferent. “My former employer, Lord Fingall, had the same opinion.” I looked down a side street swarming with animals and children playing in pools of stagnant water. “What did you think of the Fenian attack on Canada?”

“The politicians who encouraged them should be driven out of office. It was nothing but the cheapest, crudest sort of vote-chasing. But justice will not be done. Americans have lost interest in justice.”

As he said these words in a bitter, dismal voice, we emerged from the Irish riverside slum and began ascending a long, gently curving grade that led to the crest of the city's hill. There was a good view of the river, tumbling over some falls about a mile away, and the country between it, occupied by huge redbrick factories that made locomotives, Jonathan Stapleton told me in response to my question. Eventually we reached the crest and drove down a wide boulevard lined with magnificent elm trees. Streets with similar shade trees slanted down from it to the west, where the city sloped gently to another marsh formed by a branch of the river. These streets were clean and dry. Neatly dressed children rolled hoops and jumped rope. Women sat on broad porches, watching them.

We jogged down the boulevard for a mile or two and turned in a gate that was crowned by gold-tipped spears. A huge shade tree stood in the center of a green lawn. A white gravel drive, oval shaped, perhaps a hundred yards long on both sides, led to an imposing redbrick mansion with white trim on the windows and a wide white front door with a graceful fan above it. “That's Bowood,” General Stapleton said. “It's named for the country estate of Lord Shelburne, the man who signed the peace treaty that ended our war for independence. He and my great-grandfather became friends after the war.”

A stooped gray-haired Negro in livery opened the door and welcomed us to a wide center hall with a glistening parquet floor. The walls were covered with portraits and paintings of battles, seascapes, and country views. “This is Jackson, our butler,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Miss Stark, our new governess. Is Master Rawdon around?”

“He's in his room, sir, playing with his soldiers,” Jackson said, without a trace of a Southern accent. I was relieved that he was not an Englishman, who might have been able to ask me some embarrassing questions. I did not stop to think of the strangeness of a Negro butler in this Northern city.