American Anthem

by BJ Hoff

  Susanna could make no sense of any of it, and finally her exhausted body had its way over her swimming thoughts. The next thing she knew Mrs. Dempsey was rapping at her door, informing her that supper would be served in twenty minutes.

  To Susanna’s relief, supper turned out to be just as Michael Emmanuel had promised: a small group, and a comfortably friendly one at that.

  Paul Santi was there, of course, and Rosa Navaro, who was, Susanna learned during the course of the meal, a widow of several years. Also among those gathered about the enormous dining room table was a tall, intense Protestant pastor named Jeremy Holt and a Catholic priest whose thick head of silver hair made him appear, at first glance, to be older than closer inspection indicated. Everyone there called him Father Flynn, except for Michael Emmanuel and Pastor Holt, both of whom referred to him by his given name, Dermot. The pastor and the priest appeared to be great friends with each other, and with Michael Emmanuel as well.

  What an uncommon thing such a friendship would be in Ireland!

  The other member of the group was a petite, lively woman referred to as “Miss Fanny” by everyone there. Like Michael Emmanuel, she was also blind.

  They were well into the meal before Susanna realized that “Miss Fanny” was none other than the acclaimed hymn writer, Fanny Crosby. She was a small woman, bedecked in an out-of-date suit and shiny, green-tinted eyeglasses, with a very large cross hanging around her neck. Miss Fanny looked to be middle-aged, but her chirpy voice and robust laugh made her seem much younger. Apparently, she had once been a teacher at the New York Institute for the Blind, the same institution where Michael had received instruction in Braille and other services for the blind after his accident. The two seemed to have become good friends, in addition to sharing a common passion for music.

  It was obvious that all the dinner guests knew each other quite well, and yet Susanna felt no exclusion from their midst. To the contrary, they seemed to make a genuine effort to draw her in and put her at ease.

  She was caught off guard entirely, however, when Michael Emmanuel stood, tapped lightly on his water glass, and said, “Although you met Susanna earlier as you arrived, now that we are all together, I would just like to say how pleased Caterina and I are that her aunt has come to make her home with us and be a part of our family.”

  Susanna, always uncomfortable with being the center of attention, felt the heat rise to her face. She was grateful when Miss Fanny spoke up. “I think we should ask the Lord’s blessing on Susanna and your entire household, Michael. May I?”

  With that, she bowed her head and offered a truly heart-warming prayer for Susanna, for Caterina, and for “our dear Michael.” Susanna found herself deeply moved by the vivacious little woman’s prayer on her behalf, by her obvious sincerity, and by what was clearly a close, very special relationship with her God.

  “…May Susanna find this house to be more than a shelter, Lord. May she find here a new home, a true home, and may Your love and peace abide with her and all who dwell within.”

  After a collective and enthusiastic “Amen,” Caterina immediately leaned toward Susanna to plant a quick kiss on her cheek. On her other side, Miss Fanny squeezed her hand. “You will be blessed here, Susanna. Just you wait and see! You’ve come to live with a wonderful family, you know.”

  Among the other surprises of the evening was the discovery that her enigmatic brother-in-law seemed to be a deeply spiritual man. He talked naturally with the others at the table about matters of faith, the church, and spirituality. Indeed, he and the two clergymen seemed to toss remarks back and forth with an ease and enthusiasm Susanna would have expected to find only among family members. Apparently, this kind of evening was fairly commonplace for them.

  If she had thought about it at all, she would never have expected Michael Emmanuel to be a man of faith. Of all the things Deirdre had written about her husband, she had never once touched on this particular aspect of his character.

  But, now that she thought about it, Deirdre had never exhibited any interest in spiritual matters herself.

  Susanna was grateful for her companions’ attempts to include her, but she nevertheless found it difficult to take in much of the conversation—in large part because of the bright and irresistible little girl seated at her side.

  Back home, it would have been highly unlikely for such a young child to be included in an adult gathering. Of course, this was Caterina’s birthday, and she really did conduct herself very much like a young lady—though a highly animated one. Her table manners were impeccable, and although she chattered away throughout the meal, making no secret of the fact that she found Susanna altogether fascinating, she paid immediate heed to her father if he happened to clear his throat or lift an eyebrow, as if to gently remind her that perhaps she might be monopolizing her aunt a bit too much.

  For her part, however, Susanna relished her niece’s prattle and the way her blue eyes virtually danced with every word and gesture. Caterina—“Cati,” as her father and Paul Santi frequently referred to her—was an absolute delight of a child. Her high spirits seemed to infect everyone present, and Susanna was no exception.

  Suddenly she realized, with a touch of surprise, that she was actually enjoying herself. She had even begun to feel more at peace about her arrangement with Michael Emmanuel—if not about the man himself.

  Sometime in the night, Susanna was awakened by the faint sound of music coming from downstairs. It took her a moment to recognize the soft strumming of a mandolin. She lay listening, strangely soothed by the plaintive melody, and within minutes she drifted back to sleep.

  Later, she awakened again, this time roused by the clock in the downstairs hall striking one. Her head felt heavy, her eyes leaden, but the night had turned cool, and when the wind wailed outside her window, she stirred enough to pull the bedcovers up more snugly about her shoulders.

  But just as she was about to doze off again, she heard something else, something that jarred her fully awake.

  Footsteps.

  She sat upright, instantly alert to the sounds in the hallway outside her room. She tensed as the footsteps grew nearer, then seemed to stop at the door to the room next to hers. Caterina’s room.

  The door creaked open, then closed again.

  Chilled, Susanna held her breath, only to give a sigh of relief when she heard the soft chuffing of the big wolfhound. It was just Michael Emmanuel and the hound, she realized, checking on Caterina. Still, she didn’t completely relax until the footsteps moved on and she heard a door close at the end of the hall.

  The wind rattled her window, as if to remind her how secluded and removed from civilization this place called Bantry Hill really was.

  She slumped back against the pillows, thinking about the music she had heard. Obviously, that, too, had been Michael. Apparently he was only now retiring, although he had appeared to be nearly as fatigued as she by the end of the evening.

  Did he do this every night, she wondered? Stay up until all hours, wandering about the lonely halls with the wolfhound at his side?

  Unexpectedly, the thought saddened her. Her emotions had been in turmoil ever since meeting her inscrutable brother-in-law. She had come here already distrustful of him, convinced that she would dislike him. Yet so far the man had exhibited none of the undesirable traits Deirdre had described, save for the possible display of stubbornness she had glimpsed earlier in the drawing room. In truth, he had been nothing but kindness itself since she’d arrived.

  Susanna tried to will herself back to sleep, but the thought of that big, sightless man roaming about this cavernous mansion, alone except for his faithful wolfhound, kept her awake until long after the clock had chimed two.

  11

  CONN MACGOVERN AND THE BUSKER GIRL

  Winds and rain have liberty to enter freely through the windows of half the houses—the pigs have liberty to ramble about—the landlord has liberty to take possession of most of his tenements—the silk-weaver has liberty to starve
or beg.

  BY AN AMERICAN DOCTOR IN THE LIBERTIES OF DUBLIN, MID-1800S QUOTED IN DEAR, DIRTY DUBLIN, A CITY IN DISTRESS BY JOSEPH O’BRIEN

  Dublin, Ireland, September

  Conn MacGovern was in a hurry this cold, rainy morning.

  The good Lord willing, today would mark his last trek through the Liberties, his last look at the moldy, decaying buildings, where petticoats waved from the windows instead of curtains, and where the streets were strewn with vegetable and animal refuse, broken glass, and shattered dreams. Please, God, after today he would never again have to endure the rancid, foul stench that seemed to rise up like a poison fog from the streets, nor dodge the vermin-covered inhabitants and the starving, raggedy children come to beg.

  Indeed, this was his last day in Dublin—his last day in Ireland—and though the thought stirred an entire tide of clashing emotions, his eagerness to put the slums behind him took precedence over the other feelings warring within. Had it not been for Baby Emma forgetting her rag dolly, he would be in the harbor with the rest of them now, waiting to board ship. But it would be a hardhearted man indeed who could resist the inconsolable wailing of his baby girl. So he had hurried back to the cellar flat to retrieve Dolly, now tucked safely inside his coat pocket.

  Conn heard the shouts before he saw the small figure hunched down at the entrance to the alley. He stopped, struggling to take in the scene in front of him.

  He recognized the girl almost immediately, though her face was partly concealed by her arms as if to ward off a blow. The shabby clothing that hung loosely on her and the crushed cap perched atop the tangled black hair gave her away at once: the young street busker called Patches—a name earned, most likely, from the multicolored pieces of material that decorated her baggy skirt.

  But what was the girl doing here in the slums? She and her pack of vagabond musicians were usually to be found in the vicinity of Grafton or Henry Street, performing for whatever crowd and coin they could attract. There would be little chance of profits for them here in the Liberties, the most deplorable slum in Dublin.

  Then Conn saw the cause of all the ruckus. Even though the alley was half hidden by shadows, there was no mistaking the other figure hulking over the girl—a woman grown, and quite a large woman at that. It took him only a second or two more to realize that the woman was beating on the scrawny little busker as if she meant to murder her entirely.

  The sight of such unfair advantage fueled Conn’s temper. He tore into a run, shouting as he went. “Hold off, there! Let up!”

  He took the rain-slicked cobblestones in three wide leaps. Not until he was virtually on top of the woman did he recognize her. Nan Sweeney was an aging money lender—a sour old hag who lived like a pig in the heart of the Liberties and “employed” a number of the homeless ragamuffins from the streets to carry out her despicable deeds. It was said that Nan Sweeney would slice a throat as quick as a cheese and never give the act a second thought.

  Conn took in the situation in a heartbeat. It was plain enough that the hatchet-faced old woman was in a rage with the young street musician. Her craggy face was distorted with fury, while the girl’s sharply drawn features, though mottled with her own anger, could not quite mask the terror in her eyes.

  Whatever the little monkey’s crime, Conn reasoned, it could scarcely be license for such a thrashing.

  He grabbed the woman’s arm to haul her off the girl. “No more of that now!” he ordered. “Leave off.”

  The woman was as ugly as she was mean. She shook free of Conn, then turned on him with an upraised arm. For a moment, he thought she would go after him instead of the girl.

  “You don’t want to do that, old woman,” he warned her.

  The crone glared at him, but dropped her arm to her side.

  “This is none of your business, man!”

  Conn shrugged and gave her a nasty smile. “A mad old woman beating on a slip of a girl? I’m thinking to make it my business. And while I’m about it, Nan Sweeney, perhaps you’d care to explain what the girl has done to warrant such shameful treatment from you?”

  Her fierce scowl changed not a bit. “And who might you be, sticking your big nose in where it don’t belong?”

  For all the woman’s bravado and her considerable size, Conn topped her by a head and outweighed her by far. He also suspected she might not be half so fierce as she obviously fancied herself if her opponent were a man grown, rather than an underfed street urchin.

  He brought his face close to hers, forcing himself to ignore the disgusting stench of her breath as he knuckled a fist under her sagging chin. “Conn MacGovern is the name, you old dragon. And you don’t want to be stirring up trouble with me, I promise you. Now get yourself out of here before I forget you’re an old woman and give you the trouncing you deserve.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes as if to challenge Conn, but he saw her uncertainty, and sure enough, she backed off a bit. “She’s naught but a filthy, thieving little guttersnipe, is what she is! That’s what you’d be defending, man? She stole from me, she did, the little mongrel!”

  Conn couldn’t think why he should be putting himself out for this “Patches” creature. Because of her, he was already late in meeting Vangie and the children at the docks. Vangie would be worried and worn to tears with the little ones. But he had watched the young busker’s antics on the streets so many times that he seemed to have taken on the idiotic notion that he knew the girl. He even felt a kind of protectiveness for her.

  No matter what she had done, he simply could not bring himself to abandon her to the malice of this deranged old woman.

  He turned to the girl, still huddled against the wall like a shivering alley cat as she eyed him and Nan Sweeney with a baleful glare. For the first time Conn saw the ugly bruises that splotched the side of her face.

  “Is it true, then?” he said, his tone more gruff than he’d intended. “Did you steal from this woman?”

  “Stole my moneybag, she did!” Nan Sweeney ranted on. “Dirty little thief!”

  The busker gave the woman a nasty scowl, then shot Conn an equally fierce look. “I was only after taking what was mine! ’Tis her that’s the thief, and that’s the truth!”

  Her voice held the familiar roughness of the street ragamuffin, the words hurled rather than spoken. She stumbled to her feet, and when Conn saw her wince with pain at the effort, he realized that she had been hurt more badly than he’d first thought.

  But it wasn’t entirely this evidence of the girl’s ill-treatment that tugged at his heart and stirred the desire to protect. In the shadows of his mind lurked the awareness that were it not for his strong back and his capacity for hard work, any one of his own children could just as easily be reduced to this girl’s state, sleeping in alleyways, living the slum child’s life, and risking health and hide by consorting with riffraff like Nan Sweeney.

  Besides, there was something else about the girl—some vague, intangible quality that seemed to set the spindly little busker apart from the other strays who wandered the Dublin streets all hours of the day and night. As unlikely as it was, and despite her outrageous rags and that ridiculous mop of hair, an unaccountable aura of dignity seemed to hover about the girl.

  All the same, why would she resort to thievery? Although the buskers were often dismissed as common beggars, Conn knew that many of them were skilled and clever enough at their trade to manage a fair living for themselves.

  Every now and then one would stand out from the crowd as genuinely gifted. And since no one appreciated musicians more than the Irish, especially the Irish of Dublin City, even the poorest among a busker’s audiences were inclined to be generous with their meager coin.

  The small figure known as Patches was a great favorite. Of all the itinerant musicians, she was said to draw the largest crowds wherever she happened to perform. The little guttersnipe might be a wretched sight entirely—and perhaps a thief to boot—but she was one of the brightest buskers in Dublin. More than likely, there
wasn’t a stepdancer in the county she couldn’t shame with her flying feet, funny old-fashioned shoes and all.

  She was a natural mimic and had a way with the instruments, too: a fiddle or a simple tin whistle took on a kind of magic in her hands. And when she sang one of the sad old tunes, her voice seemed to squeeze a body’s soul, wringing out all the secrets and sorrows long hidden and thought forgotten.

  But perhaps more than anything else, what evoked Conn’s nagging urge to help the girl was something behind those enormous eyes, something the hard glare of defiance could not quite mask. In the end, it was that hint of energy and keen intelligence that prevented him from turning his back on the pair and leaving them to slug it out as they would.

  “Give her the moneybag,” he ordered the busker in a tone that brooked no argument.

  The girl glowered at him.

  “Do it!” Conn warned. “Or I’ll call the peelers on the pair of you.”

  Her glare didn’t waver, but one hand slid behind her back. When she continued to hesitate, Conn narrowed his eyes and jabbed a finger in the direction of Nan Sweeney.

  With a murderous look, the girl thrust the moneybag at her attacker.

  The old woman fumbled to examine its contents. “No doubt the little cheat has taken most of the money out by now.”

  Conn gave her a nasty smile. “You’ve got it wrong, Nan. ’Tis you who are taking some of the money out. Now give the girl what’s due her.”

  The woman turned on him, and her expression would have cowered a mad bull. “There be nothing due her!”

  The girl lunged forward. “You bargained with me for a job, and I did what you said!”

  Nan Sweeney lifted a threatening arm, but Conn grabbed her. “Pay her,” he ordered. “Pay her what you owe, I said. And don’t be lifting a hand to the girl again, or I’ll scrape the streets with you myself, old woman or not.”