“I’m never shamed at my beginnings,” Peggy said quietly, “nor of my family. Where they live—och, well, now that I can take them out of there. I’m not ashamed of that either. We visited yesterday. They’re in that much of a tizzy packing, they’ll not be able to poke their noses out till it’s time to get on the train with us. So come along, I want you to meet them as much as they want to meetyou. Royal says you’re like Santa Claus to them: they want to believe in you, but they don’t half, you know.”
“?‘Royal says. Royal says,’?” Hannah mocked lightly. “Oh Peggy, what would you have to say, my girl, if they took ‘Royal’ out of the language?”
“They’d have to take me out of this life,” Peggy said simply. Then her eyes brightened and she said, “Oh Hannah, you don’t know—or perhaps you do—but there’s nothing like it, this marriage business. Och, it’s not just the cuddling, though that’s grander than I believed it could be: it’s all of it. It’s like I found the other part of myself that I’d been missing, but didn’t know where to look for. Nothing less than that.” Hannah left off adjusting her hat, and lowered her arms.
“No,” she said with a little smile, “I didn’t know that. I’m so happy for you, Peggy.”
They embraced briefly, but when Peggy stepped back, she looked at Hannah sadly.
“I’m still your friend, Hannah,” she said seriously. “I’ve changed, and no denying, but I’m still your friend. Pray don’t try to flummox me. You’re happy, but you’re sad, too, because you think I don’t need you anymore. But I do. Royal says that the more you love, the more you can love. Indeed,” she said, turning from Hannah’s stricken look to stare into the mirror and pat her own hat in order to change the subject, “that’s why he’s taking on my whole family now, he says. Except for my poor sister Mary, who’s marrying the Rourke boy and staying on here, and him with a mean streak a mile wide. And my brother Jimmy, who’s going into the livery business with O’Toole, the more fool he. Still, Cousin Kevin’s begged a place, and he’s coming, so we’ll hardly notice the lack.”
“Lord, Peggy,” Hannah laughed. “What with sisters and brothers and cousins and automatic pianos and music boxes, you’ll have to come back to New York to be lonely!”
“That’s a fact,” Peggy said with great satisfaction.
“Are you planning to come visit, too?” Peggy asked when they’d done laughing. “I mean, with Gray, I wondered…”
“Wonder no more. No,” Hannah said. But seeing Peggy’s hurt, said in a softer voice, “Peggy love, not all of us have happy endings. You ought to know enoughabout the theater to know that. And it’s just as well,” she added on a lighter note, “because if there were nothing but comedies, people would get tired of laughing.”
Looking at Hannah, Peggy wondered if she weren’t getting tired of crying, but was too wise to say it.
“I b’lieve we’ve left them alone long enough now,” Royal said, one long leg jouncing up and down impatiently as he watched Gray drive. “I expect any girl talk Peggy needed is done. Can’t you go any faster?”
“Not without killing half a hundred people,” Gray answered calmly. “Think she’s going to run off when your back’s turned, do you? Wouldn’t blame her, myself. Lots of better-looking, smarter fellows here in New York for a girl like that.”
“Damn straight,” Royal said fervently. “Lucky for me she don’t know it.” He sighed, “I know you think I’m a plain sap. Gray. I see it in your eyes. He’s hogtied, gelded, and turned to pure drivel, is what you’re thinking. Can’t hide it. But to tell the truth, I don’t care. I never been happier. It ain’t just the loving part. Though that’s…well,” he said, glancing away from Gray’s bright gaze to look out over the horse’s heads as a muscle worked in his jaw, “that’s too fine to talk about. It’s all the rest, too. The sharing. Damn it Gray, I didn’t know nothing before I married her, and I was nothing, that’s a plain fact.”
“I’m not pitying you or mocking you,” Gray said quietly. “I’m plain envying you, Royal, and that’s the truth.”
“And about you and Miz Roberts?” Royal asked.
“Now I can take all kinds of mush from a newly married man,” Gray said quickly. “But you’re just too bony and long-shanked to play Cupid, friend. Leave off. Right?”
“Uh-huh,” Royal said sadly, because Peggy said those two were perfect together, and he’d thought so, too, but he knew trouble when he saw it, and was as surprised as he was sorry for it.
They were all uncharacteristically silent as they drove downtown. It wasn’t just their respective moods; Gray and Hannah edgy with each other and envious of Royal and Peggy, while Royal and Peggy were blissfully happy at being reunitedeven after such a short separation, and trying not to show it because they were aware of how the other couple was taking it. It was also that it was difficult to find the right thing to say as they drove through the streets that led to Peggy’s family home.
There were worse districts. There were parts of Five Points that still looked very like they had decades before, when Charles Dickens had seen them and written: “Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. Where dogs would howl to lie, women, men, and boys slink off the street.” But the streets they drove through now were not much better. The close-built houses were so cracked and peeling on the outside, it was best not to imagine their interiors. Even so, it was clear from the wretched condition of those walking the streets that those who were within those crumbling walls were the luckier ones. There was not much horse traffic, and few ragpickers with their dogcarts, because it seemed they’d have slim pickings here, buying or selling. Here, the men and women wore their rags, or what looked like worse. But it was the children who were most visible, everywhere.
There was a charitable home for newsboys nearby, but ten times ten of them wouldn’t have had enough room for all the children who scavenged these filthy streets. Their faces were as prematurely old as the houses Dickens had written about before they were born. Now, in the December cold, they stood on hot- air gratings on the sidewalks to keep warm, as they eyed the carriage as it drove by— by nightfall they’d fight for the right to sleep where they stood.
Royal’s broad shoulders twitched with the effort he made to keep from jumping down and shepherding as many children as he could into the carriage, to carry them away to a land he knew—where there was enough room for them all. Gray, having seen and felt it all too many times before, simply hurried his team on, making a mental note to give even more money to the several charitable funds he subscribed to. Hannah, being a New Yorker, and so having learned from an early age how to be selectively blind, lowered her eyes and hoped Peggy didn’t live on each block they passed in turn. And Peggy took in a deep breath, to discover once again, that this familiar air stank to her now after the air she’d become used to breathing only just lately.
Neither Gray nor Royal worried about being accosted by the hard-eyed men they passed. Not only did both of them look as though they’d be able to handle themselves to good account in a brawl, but both had in the past; they came froma hard land, and were used to riding through danger. It wasn’t that the city was safer, but Gray had already told Royal to stow his firearms and disregard the envious looks their carriage received. Because, he’d explained, at this hour, members of the professional gangs that ruled this world were either sleeping or already at the saloons where they held court. Even so, their business never involved attacking chance-met strangers; prostitution, graft, and more elaborate forms of burglary paid better, and was withal, safer.
And so, however desperate the circumstances of those poor wretches that watched them enviously now, they both knew—with a twinge of guilt—that they were safe because they were better fed and clearer minded than any would-be assailants. Being the sort of men they were, this didn’t make them feel better. But the neighborhood they soon entered did.
The streets they traveled now were increasingly gayer ones. There was still poverty here, but it had not numbed or deadened anyone’s spirits. The people here had nothing much, but it seemed they’d hope of more. The houses were just as cramped, and as many children roved the streets. But there was laughter and bright colors, and noise of trade, argument, and living. Here mothers cared enough to scold their children, at the top of their lungs. In fact, all conversation seemed to be carried out in a screech, as those upstairs shouted advice and comment to those below, who responded just as loudly. The streets reeked, but the scents were of cooking: cabbages and chickens and garlic—the spices of a dozen different sorts of immigrant dinners in progress hung in the air.
They stopped the carriage, and Gray paid a youth to watch his team. The boy took the coin, grinned, and sang out a greeting to Peggy when she alit, and she ruffled his red hair as she hurried up the steps to the gray tenement.
There seemed to be a bewildering lot of Callahans in the little flat they entered. Many of them looked like Peggy, most of them were delighted to meet her guests, and all of them talked at once. In time, Hannah came to understand that they all worshiped Royal, thought Gray the most impressive male they’d ever clapped eyes on apart from Royal, and knew everything that Peggy did about Hannah, from all the letters Peggy had sent home. It was as disconcerting as it was amusing—as Hannah whispered to Gray a little later when they walked through the teeming streets behind Peggy and Royal and a half dozen assorted Callahans. Rather like meeting Peggy in disguise, a few dozen times, she said.
“They’ll make things lively back home,” Gray remarked, smiling. He was as delighted at the notion of accompanying the newlyweds on a shopping tour at the popular Jewish outdoor market on Hester Street as Peggy had been embarrassed by her family’s insisting it was the best way to get bargains on staples they’d need for their coming trip. Because Hannah had to cling to his arm to keep from being borne away by the burgeoning crowds. And so however ill-at-ease they were with each other, they soon became informal allies as they struggled on among the currents of people buying, bargaining, and sight-seeing among the pushcarts and shops in the teeming streets.
“Say, have you ever had one of these?” Gray asked, stopping at a great open-mouthed barrel that stood in front of a store.
“Of course,” Hannah said with a superior smile, “I’m a New Yorker.”
