Chapter Sixteen
It was the first time Hannah had been alone with Peggy since the wedding, but it was as if Royal were still there when they spoke.
Because everything Peggy said had to do with him, his tastes, opinions, and thoughts.
Some of the lilt had gone from her intonation, replaced by short, flat commonsensical statements that even sounded like Royal.
As Royal had become more outgoing, Peggy had become more succinct, and Hannah wondered at such a union, where each had obviously taken on some of the other’s best-loved traits.
She herself had never copied John, Hannah remembered, for so much as she’d thought she loved him, there’d been nothing about him she wished to emulate.
Now she began to wonder if that hadn’t been as much a failure as their lack of physical communion, or if it was simply more normal to remain oneself no matter who one loved.
“Lord!…” she began to say as she laughed at something Peggy said, before she heard herself and fell still, wondering if she’d ever said that at all before she’d met Gray.
“Now, come along Miz Roberts,” Peggy said officiously. “Royal will be here with Gray in no time, and you’ve not even pinned on your hat.”
“Are you sure you want me with you?” Hannah asked as she turned to the mirror to adjust her hat.
Peggy had been left to visit with her while Gray and Royal went to pick up some packing supplies for Peggy’s family.
Which was just as well, for now she’d a chance to see if Peggy really wanted her to go along to where her family lived, rather than meeting them later on some more neutral ground.
Because she knew the address, and it was a place where even a New Yorker such as herself seldom ventured.
“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 meet you.
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 enough about 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 reunited even 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 from a 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.