The Star of the Sea (66 page)

Some will judge his lack of that capacity to be entirely his own fault; others will see in it a kind of victimhood. As for myself, I dare advance no judgement on the sins of another, my own sins being sufficiently consuming of reflection. Call him the son of the father who destroyed him. Call him an untouchable; the lowest of the low. He was a man who could have done good things if only he knew it. I believe Mary Duane saw such a miraculousness in him when they were young enough to believe that power does not matter; before wealth separated them, and class stepped between them, and then made her abuse at his hands become a possibility. They were not Romeo and Juliet. They were master and servant. He had choices in life that she had not. That he chose as he did is a matter of record. That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else.

Of Mary Duane’s immediate family, her father, her mother and all three of her sisters died of starvation in the land of their birth, as did her youngest and eldest brothers. Her one surviving brother was killed in an explosion while attempting to escape from Clerkenwell Prison in London in December 1867. He had been jailed for membership of a revolutionary faction seeking an end to British rule in Ireland. At the time of his death he was awaiting trial for his part in the murder of a Manchester policeman.

What became of Mary Duane in America I cannot say. She worked the streets of lower Manhattan for a time; was arrested twice, briefly jailed once, and then seems to have simply disappeared from view. I know she was begging in Chicago in the winter of ’49 and was admitted to the vagrants’ ward of a Minneapolis chest hospital for two days in 1854. By the time we had travelled there, she had quietly moved on. Advertisements seeking her whereabouts remained unanswered. Rewards offered remained unclaimed. Enquiries through detectives over the decades placed women who matched her nationality and description in thousands of places across
America, and in as many different circumstances of life. New Orleans, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine; a sister in an enclosed convent in northern Ontario, a sweeper in a lavatory, a maid in a brothel, a cook in an orphanage, a frontiersman’s wife, a scrubwoman on trains, the grandmother of a Senator. As to which, if any, was Mary Duane from Carna, I simply cannot say and will never know now.

Only once, in response to a newspaper advertisement, did I receive anything she might have written herself. A third-person account (though clearly autobiographical) of the life of a woman who had worked as ‘a night-girl’ in the heartless Dublin of ‘the hungry forties’, following her abandonment by the son of an aristocrat. It was unsigned, inconsistently spelled, with no return address or identifying clue, but laden with the speech patterns of southern Connemara. It was mailed from the post office in Dublin, New Hampshire, on Christmas Eve, 1871, but a search of that small town by the local authorities yielded no result; nor did a fresh search of the entire state, and then of the whole of the New England region.

Many will feel that the story is not complete without knowing all its endings. No doubt they are right. I feel the same way. Looking back over these pages, they seem to say almost nothing about her; it is as though she was merely a collection of footnotes in the lives of other, more violent people. So many years I attempted to find her that now if I did I would feel a kind of loss. But I will not find her now. Perhaps I never could have. I would like to have been able to say more in the present account, to do more than record the few known facts of her existence in terms of the existences of the men who hurt her. But I am simply not in a position to do so. Some things I have invented but I could not invent Mary Duane; at least no more than I have already done. She suffered more than enough composition.

There were times over the years when I would think I saw her. On a railroad platform, once, in San Diego, California. Sleeping in a doorway in downtown Pittsburgh. A nurse in a hospital in Edenton, North Carolina. But I was always wrong. It was never Mary Duane. It can only be assumed that she did not want to be found; that she changed her name and began a new life, as did so
many hundreds of thousands of the Irish in America. But I do not know. Perhaps that is wishful thinking.

The last time I thought I saw her was last November in Times Square: a shade moving slowly through a forest of black umbrellas. The playhouses were emptying into the streets; a strong winter rainstorm had swept in from the Atlantic. A great crowd had gathered to cheer a troop of ambulance volunteers who were marching away to the war in Europe; and it was on the edge of the throng that I imagined I saw her; alone under a street light in the pearl-like rain. She was selling something from a tray – flowers, I think. But she was so fragile and young, the girl I saw that night, and Mary Duane would be old now, if still she lives. The only creed I have ever believed in is reason, a faith that must tell me it was not her I saw. But if her spirit indeed walks the glittered streets of Broadway it is far from alone; so any actor would claim. Ghosts, it is said, are sometimes drawn to theatres; as much as they are to war.

The dire fate of her lover, Pius Mulvey, is easier told. He died some time on the dismally snowy night of the sixth of December, 1848, a year almost to the day after landing in New York; knifed to pieces in a Brooklyn alleyway near the corner of Water Street and Hudson Avenue, in the ragged Irish shanty town of Vinegar Hill. Across a broken wall was the freshly whitewashed sentence:
IRELAND IN CHAINS SHALL NEVER BE AT PEACE
.

In the pocket of his greatcoat they found a leather-bound bible, a five-cent coin and a handful of earth. There was a cheap copper washer on his wedding-ring finger but we shall never know whom he married in America, if indeed he did. He had been going under a variety of assumed names, among them Costello, Blake, Duane and Nee, but many in the neighbourhood knew exactly who he was. It was said that he had been shunned and often assaulted; had been sleeping on the benches of local parks, begging passers-by for scraps of food. Often at night he had been seen on the waterfront, staring out at the ships coming into the harbour. He had taken to drinking and was desperately thin. Prior to death he had been tortured and horribly disfigured. It was reported by the City Coroner who examined the remains that the heart had been cut out and flung in the gutter, probably while the victim was still alive. A few of the more superstitious of Connemara New Yorkers were said to see
meaning in the admittedly eerie coincidence that the murder took place on the feast-day of St Nicholas.

Nobody was ever charged with the crime and nobody remembers for certain where its victim was buried. It is hard to believe that he even existed. I would doubt it myself had I not met and known him, this monster who murdered his enemy in Newgate Gaol and his friend in a forest on the outskirts of Leeds. Had he murdered David Merridith he might have been a hero. The subject, perhaps, of a valiant song. Instead he is forgotten: a minor embarrassment. The coward who could not bring himself to murder for a cause.

Part of the land a few miles west of Vinegar Hill was com-pulsorily purchased by the city some twenty-two years ago, including a shabby plot of waste ground called Traitor’s Acre, where local paupers or prostitutes were often flung into shallow graves. Some say he lies there: Pius Mulvey of Ardnagreevagh, younger child of Michael and Elizabeth, brother of Nicholas, father of nobody. The tombs are unmarked; the rocks overgrown with weeds. On that precise spot and its many buried shames now stands the Brooklynside anchorage for the Manhattan Bridge.

Others who sailed the
Star
had secrets of their own. One fellow traveller I last saw in South Dakota in 1866, to which state I had been sent by my editor-in-chief to write a series of articles on immigrants in the Midwest. My enquiries had taken me to a travelling Bandolero Show where a great many of the roustabouts were said to be Irish. I conducted a number of interesting interviews with cowboys from Connemara and other parts of Connaught. But just as I made to leave, something fascinating happened. My attention was drawn to a wrestling booth in the far corner of the field where, for the reasonable sum of half a dollar, the brave could pit their skills against ‘the greatest conqueror who ever lived’, one ‘Bam-Bam Bombay, the Sultan of the Strangle-hold’. His former butler (actually his elder brother) was now doing admirable duty as ringside second and barker.

They appeared mighty happy to see an old friend, and many a glass of moonshine was raised in South Dakota that night. Their names were George and Thomas Clarke and they were born in Liverpool, of a Galway scullery maid and a Portuguese sailor, the
latter bequeathing them their dark complexions (and conspicuously little else). They had spent most of the 1840s criss-crossing the Atlantic in imperial disguise, performing small-time robberies and feats of minor card-sharping; until one day in Boston they were recognised by a hefty Irish policeman, which apperception necessitated a rather unimperial retreat into the slums. We shared a few reminiscences about our days on the
Star
, a voyage, apparently, less profitable than most. (It was the Maharajah and his servant who had roamed through First-Class, relieving us of what they regarded simply as their tribute. Moreover, they regarded it as a spiritual service. ‘Buddhism teaches a putting-away of material possessions,’ they remarked.) Apologies were sincerely offered and sincerely accepted. They rode me to the station, bade me farewell with many vigorous grapples and implored me to keep in touch on a more regular basis.

It was only on the train back home to New York that I noticed my watch was missing.

I didn’t begrudge it. They had insisted on paying for the booze. But eleven years later, in 1877, an envelope arrived from the wilderness town with the melancholy name of Desdemona, Texas. Inside was my watch, now inscribed with the memorable message:
Fondest Greetings from Injun Country
.

There was certainly a woman named Laura Merridith, for she and I were to marry a year after the death of her husband, and no kinder-hearted woman ever lived. Our marriage was not in fact happy but I never think of those times now. We divorced after eighteen months but never quite managed to separate. I still have the final papers somewhere in my files, devoid of the necessary signatures. For fifty-four years we were companions and comrades, each year a little better than the one before. Love came late; but it did come. It takes so long even to know what it means.

In later times, if friends asked for the secret of our closeness, she would remark that she still intended to sign those papers but was waiting for the children to die.

She was blinded in a streetcar accident in 1868, the same accident confining her to a wheelchair for the rest of her days. But it did little enough to prevent her doing what she wanted. All her life in America she worked for the advancement of the poor, and was a powerful champion of the suffragist and Negro causes especially.
She was involved in a great number of important events, but I think her proudest achievement was to be among the women jailed for attempting to vote in the presidential election of 1872 (for Ulysses S. Grant). When the judge asked how it felt for a dowager Countess to be sharing a cell with the daughter of a slave, she said it was the deepest privilege she had known. She fought prejudice and bigotry wherever she saw it, most angrily whenever she saw it in herself; which others, including myself, never did. She died in 1903, on her eighty-seventh birthday, at the inaugural meeting of the American Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, an organisation she had helped to found. To have known her was the greatest honour of my life: to have loved her the only truly good thing I have ever done.

Our beautiful child was born prematurely, and only survived long enough to be baptised with the names of two brave women who stood in her background: Verity Mary Merridith Dixon. We learned soon thereafter that we could never make another child, a fact that was far from easy to bear. Neither were we able to foster or adopt. ‘Coloureds’ were not permitted such rights at that time, and though the colour of my body is the same as President Wilson’s, the colour of my soul is legally not. My father being quarter-Choctaw weighed heavily against us. When the papers came back from the Office of Minors, the place headed
REASONS FOR UNSUITABILITY
had been stamped with the single word ‘negritude’.

Her two remarkable sons are the joy of my days. They never talk about Ireland now. They tend to say they were born in America.

Robert married three times, Jonathan never. Long ago he confided that he prefers the companionship of men; and if he does, his living truthfully seems to have brought him happiness, and perhaps helped to make him one of the finest men I know. They bear my own name, those two aged fellows, a choice made by themselves in their early twenties; an election as unexpected as entirely undeserved. People even say they look like me, and in a certain light, indeed they do. Often we have been taken for three silent old brothers as we sit outside a café in a companionable huff at the world. (‘Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego,’ says the waiter – when he thinks we cannot hear him.) That gives me such pleasure that pleasure is not the word.

In the winter, when the leaves have fallen from the lime trees, I
can see their mother’s tombstone from the window where I now sit and write. The beautiful daughter we lost is at rest there, too. I visit most days; sometimes daily now. I like to hear the truckles of the trams going past; and the hoots of the tugboats drifting in from the river – reminder that this noisy city is an ancient island; a prehistoric outcrop in a concrete disguise. Strange birds sing in the cemetery garden every morning. The old priest has told me their name many times but lately it never seems to stay in my head. Perhaps it does not matter. Anyway they sing.

Couples often stroll there in the spring afternoons, workers from the offices or students from the university. I sometimes see a child netting the astonishing butterflies that cluster in the nettles near the back of the chapel. He sells them in fruit-jars at his shoeshine station on 12th Street; this bright little mulatto boy who whistles southern gospel as he tiptoes between the gravestones chuckling to himself. Before long the birds will sing over me, too. My physicians have told me my time is very short. I like to think of the boy whistling gospel above me, and his sons whistling, when he grows to a man. But I know this will not happen. I will hear nothing, then. There is nothing to hope for and nothing to fear.