A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “Oh—oh, yes,” he said. “What a start it gave me to see you here, so unexpected.”

  “I had no idea you were in this city. I’ve been here for three months as governess, but I’ve gone out little.”

  “Yes. Well—would you be going downtown by any chance? I’ll be glad to give you a lift in my wagon.”

  “I was, as a matter of fact,” I said. I was desperate to get him out of the kitchen. “Let me get my coat, and I’ll meet you at the gate.”

  He was waiting beside his wagon, which had his name and his partner’s name, Delahanty, painted in large letters on the canvas top. As for Patrick himself, he was anything but a good advertisement for the meat he was purveying. He was appallingly thin and until he saw me coming toward him, woebegone. He began telling me how he’d read about Michael’s death and gone to New York again in search of me but could only learn that I’d disappeared.

  “If there’s ever a sign that we’re fated, Bess, that my prayers are going to be answered, it’s this,” he said.

  I found myself disliking intensely the Irish sound of that statement. I was nevertheless stirred by the coincidence, almost as much as Patrick. I told him I had quit the Fenians and why.

  “I thought I had left you as well, left everything and everyone from the past, even my name. I don’t know what my feelings are now,” I said.

  “Surely you won’t object to my coming to see you, asking you to dinner at my partner’s house. He has a lovely wife and two children.”

  I shook my head. “I’m going away for a few months to their other house on the shore. The boy and his father don’t get along.”

  “Few get along with him, the general, I hear. The saying in town is, he got all the brains and none of his father’s good nature, while his brother Charles, who died invading Cuba in ’59, was the reverse. Does he treat you well?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but he’s a troubled man. The war ruined his nerves.”

  He persuaded me to let him drive me downtown, explaining the while that he usually did not make deliveries, their wagonman was ill. In the business section, a dozen people called out greetings to him in every block. He had clearly established himself in the city. Once he made a stop to deliver some meat to a butcher and took me into the shop. The owner was a huge fat German who boomed, “Guten Tag, Herr Dolan.”

  “Guten Tag to you, Herr Schneider,” Patrick replied. “Look at this, now. Here’s where I win my argument about which are prettier, German girls or Irish girls. Here’s one from the Emerald Isle, just off the boat.”

  “Schön, schön,” said Schneider with a twinkle in his eye. “But can she cook? German girls will put flesh on your bones, Dolan!” Schneider thumped his vast girth. It looked as if a half dozen German girls had been working to put flesh on him. “I tell him he should marry. A bachelor life is pfui. You starve to death.”

  East of the business section, we entered a series of tree-lined squares fronted by new brownstones. This was where the well-to-do but not rich people lived. Patrick stopped the wagon before one house on a corner lot in Morris Square. The house was empty. “My partner, John Delahanty, put up half the money to build this. He’s been deviling me to buy it—and move into it with his sister as my bride. They’re all mad to marry me off. Now that I’ve found you again, Bess, I think I will buy it. All about here are Irish, fine people, Bess. Men like myself, who got together a bit of money and invested it and are working their heads off to see it grow.”

  I didn’t like the sound of any of it. I had no enthusiasm for living with Irish in America. I wanted to be American. Even as Patrick talked, I felt the blind wish swell in me. I was back in Bowood’s midnight kitchen traveling with Jonathan Stapleton on our current of sympathy into the ideal heart of America. Beneath it, beyond the reach of my mind, lay the other more dangerous wish that I had glimpsed last night, the wish that sympathy could become love that would transform me into an American beyond the reach of Ireland and its bitter memories.

  All Patrick Dolan could see—I could not see much more—was my lack of enthusiasm. “I’m sorry, Bess,” he said, taking up the reins again. “I’m letting my mouth run miles ahead of your feelings. I’ll buy the house no matter what. A man with a good business needs a decent address.”

  “Yes,” I said. I wanted to say I was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain I was causing him, but I was too engulfed in my own pain and my blind hidden wish to escape it. I was already unknowingly the captive of a dream of impossible love.

  We rode back to Bowood in silence. I got down from the wagon and looked up at Patrick. He had such a sad expression on his thin face, I climbed back up again and kissed him. “Marry a German girl,” I said. “She’ll put flesh on your bones!”

  The next day Rawdon and his father and I set out for Kemble Manor. It was ten or fifteen miles beyond the main terminus of the family’s railroad, the Camden and Amboy, in a place called Middletown. At Perth Amboy, we transferred to a dirty two-car train, pulled by a small huffing red and blue engine. Jonathan Stapleton told us it was one of the oldest engines on the line.

  Rawdon spent the trip reading the newspapers. He asked his father numerous questions about Washington politics, which continued to be absorbed in the struggle between Congress and President Johnson over the treatment of the conquered South. Jonathan Stapleton said both sides were wrong. Congress was too hungry for vengeance against the defeated South. Some Southerners were trying to enslave the Negro again, using subterfuge and midnight violence.

  “Here’s a story that claims the Fenians have quit bombing England,” Rawdon said. “General O’Neil says the whole thing was a mistake. He says the man who started it, McCaffrey, has been thrown out of the brotherhood.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “They’ve won themselves nothing but universal detestation. Even Tammany has condemned them. Their friends in Congress have all deserted them.”

  So my Donal Ogue had fallen like Lucifer into the hell he dreaded—poverty. If he was still alive. His body may have been in the wreckage of Tom Gallaher’s bomb factory.

  “Why did the Fenians let McCaffrey start bombing and then throw him out?” Rawdon asked.

  “If you must waste your time reading newspapers,” his father said, “look for some pleasanter topics. Miss Stark finds those Fenian bombers upsetting. I don’t blame her.”

  The engine emitted a great shriek, and we began to slow down. In a moment we were at a station, which was little more than a shed. We got down with our bags, and Jonathan Stapleton led us inside and over to a wire cage where a man sat.

  “Good morning, Fred,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Why, just fine, General,” replied Fred, who had a quizzical drooping face and hair that spilled in a kind of cowlick onto his forehead. “Funny thing, though, in cold weather the wooden leg hurts more than the real leg.”

  “Others have told me that,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Does the wooden leg work well?”

  “Otherwise fine. I’m eternally grateful to you, General. For the job here, and for gettin’ me off them crutches.”

  “Good. Any sign of Abner with our carriage?”

  “He should be along any minute. I told him just when you were comin’.”

  “He may have trouble hitching up a team.”

  “No, sir, General. He does just fine. I’ve seen him drivin’ down the main street lookin’ as smart and sure of them two big horses as the wildest young dust raiser around.”

  We heard the clump of horses’ hooves on a sandy road, then a voice calling “Whoa now.” We went out to find a burly, handsome man driving an open carriage. He jumped down to help with our bags, and I saw that his left sleeve was empty. He was introduced to me as Abner Littlepage. “Abner’s mother will be cooking for us,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “He was the color sergeant of the 6th New Jersey Volunteers.”

  “Did you shoot him?” Rawdon said, staring at the empty sleeve.

  “W
hat?” Jonathan Stapleton said.

  “No,” Abner said. “That was a feller in the 4th New Jersey. He deserved to get shot. He was runnin’ the wrong way. I don’t think the old 6th Regiment ever run, did it, General?”

  “Only after the rebels,” Jonathan Stapleton said, with a grim smile.

  “Yeah, we chased them, all right,” Abner said, climbing into the driver’s seat again.

  For another flashing moment I had a glimpse of the battle commander Jonathan Stapleton had been. Rawdon saw it, too. I think he was nonplussed to find this man and the stationmaster, who now appeared in the doorway on a cane, showing so much admiration and respect for his father. According to the devil theory that was operating in Rawdon’s mind, they should have hated him.

  As we went swiftly down a narrow road through the woods, a deep, fresh smell filled the air. I asked what it was. “Jersey pines,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “I never smell them without feeling like a boy again. Soon they’ll mingle with the smell of the salt air.”

  “I like it, too,” Rawdon said. He wanted to sound defiant, but it came out closer to halfthearted agreement.

  Abner was acting as caretaker and man of all work at Kemble Manor, Jonathan Stapleton said. “I’ve tried to find places—on the railroad, at the mills—for all the men from my division who came home without arms or legs. There are over a thousand of them. The state of New Jersey has done nothing for them, no special aid, not even artificial legs. Some Southern states, bankrupt as they are, are spending more for their crippled veterans.”

  “It seems to me there must be others who would share your indignation,” I said. “Perhaps you should consider entering politics.”

  “If you knew what American politics was like, Miss Stark, you wouldn’t wish me such a fate. Assuming you wish me well, of course.”

  “How could I wish you otherwise?” I said.

  I ached to tell him that I did know what American politics was like and that was precisely why I thought it needed a man like him. Not for the first time I was troubled by the gap my false identity created between us. But what would he think of Bess Fitzmaurice, the Fenian girl? I avoided answering that question. I trusted—or blindly hoped—in the power of sympathy.

  “There it is,” Rawdon said, leaning out of the carriage.

  The brick house looked no bigger than a toy in the distance. We crossed a broad moor thick with high, waving grass over which sea birds flew, calling shrilly to each other. Jonathan Stapleton said that the marsh had once been farmland, drained by the first settlers, with methods learned from the Dutch. The Stapletons had let the sea and the numerous tidal brooks reclaim it, having no interest in the modest profits of a farm. The marsh now constituted a barrier isolating the house from the mainland.

  The road carried us to the coast and a stupendous view of Raritan Bay and the broad Atlantic beyond it. A few hundred yards from the crossroads the road became the entrance to the manor house. There were traces of a road that once ran along the coast beyond that point, but the Stapletons had closed it. The November wind whipped off the water, sharp with the tang of sea salt. The house had Bowood’s Georgian style of architecture, but its bricks were a more delicate, rosy red, and it lacked Bowood’s imposing bulk.

  Inside, there was no attempt at Bowood’s splendor. In fact, Jonathan Stapleton said, most of the fine furniture that had once filled these rooms was now in the Northern house. What remained in the sitting rooms was mostly lacquered rattan, filled with old faded cushions. I had expected to find the place cold and musty, but Abner Littlepage had the fireplaces burning briskly, and his mother and young sister had the beds made and everything dusted and bread baking in the oven. The smell of the bread carried me back to Ireland for a painful moment. I thrust the memory aside. The past was dead.

  In the modest center hall, Jonathan Stapleton gestured to facing portraits. One was of a powerfully built man with an exceptionally strong face. The other was of a petite dark-haired, bright-eyed woman. “My mother’s great-grandparents,” he said. “He’s my namesake. Jonathan Gifford. He was Anglo-Irish, from Dublin. That’s his wife, Caroline. He was a British officer before the Revolution. Resigned from the army and settled here and went with the Americans.”

  “Does this mean the Stapletons have Irish blood?” I asked lightly.

  “I suppose so,” he said with a brief smile. “We’ll have to swear you to secrecy.”

  Upstairs, Jonathan Stapleton led me to the front bedroom, with its magnificent view of the sea. “This will be yours,” he said. “I’ll be across the hall. We can enjoy the view together.”

  His words, his manner, stirred desire in my flesh. He wanted to share more than the view. As did I. Rawdon burst in on us, restoring propriety. “Let’s go for a hike on the beach!” he shouted.

  “We old folks are too tired from our train trip,” I said. “You go and tell us what you find.”

  “You’re a couple of layabouts!” he said, and charged downstairs. From the window, we watched him race boyishly down the drive toward the water. “That’s the first time I’ve seen him in a good humor since I came home,” Jonathan Stapleton said.

  “There’s something hopeful about this house,” I said. “With the sea open before us.”

  “People were happy here,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Perhaps they’ve left echoes behind them.”

  “Were you among the happy?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said with a sad nostalgic smile.

  “Can you not be happy again?”

  “I’m afraid I never had the knack. The happiness was created by others. Especially my brother Charlie. He had the gift of laughter. Of seeing the lighter side of things. Unfortunately, he laughed at everything—responsibility, hard work, women, morality.”

  He paused for a long pregnant moment. “Rawdon has an amazing resemblance to Charlie—”

  “All the more reason to love him.”

  “Charlie was heart and soul on the rebel side of the argument. He died in Cuba hoping to make the island a Southern state. It was to be the first step to a Southern Caribbean empire.”

  I sensed—no, better, I knew—he was confessing a deep dislike of Charlie that was entangled with a demoralizing love. Here was the real source of his antagonism to Rawdon, his fear that the boy was morally contaminated.

  “How terrible. But—it’s all past. Charlie’s dead along with the South’s dreams of glory. The sea is like the future—open to you, to all of us.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You should venture out on it—for Rawdon’s sake as well as your own.”

  He gazed intently at me for a moment. I was sure he was going to say, And for your sake as well. I sensed his wish to say it. I was certain in that moment he longed for me as I longed for him.

  “Will you stay the night?” I asked.

  “There’s no train back.”

  “Good,” I said. “We can be happy for a few hours, at least.”

  Those penetrating gray eyes studied me for another long moment. Was he reading my very soul? “We can try,” he said.

  Amo Amas, I Love a Lass

  After a delicious dinner of clams and oysters from Raritan Bay, followed by roast duck, shot only a few weeks ago as he winged south over the marsh, we retired to the south parlor and Jonathan Stapleton announced we were going to play “The Checkered Game of Life.” He got down from a cupboard a brightly colored board that had attached to it a teetotum—a spinning arrow, whose point came to rest on a set of numbers from one to six. The board was covered with squares denoting various crises and experiences as well as traits of character. The goal was to get from Infancy in the lower left-hand corner to Serene Old Age in the upper right-hand corner. The teetotum delivered to the player with each spin the number of moves he could make, and in which direction.

  It was great fun as well as productive of serious thoughts. The creator of the game had no illusions about America or life itself. If you landed on Influence, you leaped across the board to �
��Fat Office.” The next spin of the teetotum could be fatal for the fat-office holder because it might land him on Ruin, which was very near. This pitched him back to the beginning. Bravery sent you to Honor, Industry sent you to Wealth, but neither advanced you toward the ultimate goal. Cupid sent a player to Marriage, which was also a backward step. There were the disasters of Jail, Disgrace, and Suicide to be avoided as well as the bad habits of Idleness and Intemperance.

  I won every game we played. Jonathan Stapleton came close to beating me once, when he reached Success, just below Serene Old Age. But his next spin was a three, which forced him to move diagonally back to Bravery, which in turn sent him back to Honor, very near the beginning. Rawdon was even more unlucky. He had a fatal tendency to land on Disgrace and Intemperance, and he never once landed on Perseverance, which shot you all the way across the board to Success. Eventually he grew disgruntled and quit the game.

  “I think you’re a couple of cheaters,” he said.

  “That is no way to talk to Miss Stark—or to me,” Jonathan Stapleton growled.

  “’Twas the luck of the Irish,” I said. “I’ll share some of it with you.”

  I drew him to me for a firm kiss. He stepped back, half smiling. He wiped his hand across his mouth, and for a moment I wondered if he was responding with more than boyish thoughts. “I think it’s past your bedtime, young man,” I said.

  Rawdon confessed he was sleepy and went to bed. The Littlepages, mother, daughter, and Abner, had long since departed. Jonathan Stapleton said he felt the need of some exercise. He asked me if I would join him in a walk along the shore. We found an almost full moon riding high above the bay. The night wind was cool but easily repelled by my gray cloak. The general wore his old army cloak, which he left open to the wind.