Returning to New York, he came home to Lucia. He was bronzed from his travels. (‘Like a gondolier,’ she wrote Steffa.) But the atmosphere continued reportedly pale. The quarrels soon resumed. If anything, they worsened. Especially painful for Lucia were the silences between engagement. O’Keeffe’s valet, now dead, told me he had never encountered a man who could go so many days without speaking. Perhaps it was all the months he had spent in solitary confinement, ‘a wonderful preparation for married life,’ the valet joked.
He founded a radical paper, all manifestos and denunciations, the kind of Irish journal that calls on monarchs to resign, but appears to have become bored before its fourth number appeared. There were squabbles with the staff and editorial committee, fellow revolutionists of the caucus he helped to establish – the United Force for Gaelic Brotherhood and Freedom: a body neither unified, nor forceful, nor brotherly, only free with the insults, usually in Gaelic. By now, the invitations to lecture had diminished to a dribble. Few cities in America had not been flashed-upon by the Blade. Then, as now, we forgave everything but boredom. The thirst was for fresh speakers, for unheard stories, or, at least, for new ways of presenting the old ones. As well, his star had been somewhat obscured by the arrival in New York of even fierier Irish felons than he. John Fintan Duggan appeared from Australia, having bombed his way out of a jail there. Richard O’Leary. Edward Casey McBride. These were tough men, organizers, adamantly purposeful. Less drawn to the debating podium, to the society dining room, they grew ambiguous about O’Keeffe and his Fifth Avenue Fenianism. He became, in a sense, adéclassé among the engaged. Republican in a republic of one.
He appears, like many a onetime convict, to be a man who could not get started again. There are sketchbooks filled with his drawings of military uniforms. He collected antique swords, old broadsheets of ballads. The song ‘The Twa Corbies’ he translated into Gaelic, and then into Italian, then courtly French. Touchingly – at least, it touches me – he copied out Lucia’s earliest attempts at verse in his exquisite copperplate hand. As with many intellectually brilliant people, her handwriting was atrocious, a fact about which O’Keeffe would spousally boast, as though the admirable failing were his own.
He qualified as an attorney but did not practice. He was principal in a consortium to construct a bridge on the Hudson, which endeavor, he convinced himself, would garner him the fortune his father-in-law always resented him lacking. In the event that failed also, for want of investors. He was often seen walking the poorer sections of Manhattan, or over in Brooklyn, haunting the dockside, the slumland alleys of Fulton Street. He would gaze out at the ships for hours at a time. There was a difficult incident, involving the police, when he took a cane to a banker he had seen spit on a beggar’s child. There were bouts of ruinous drinking.
He became what he had never publicly appeared: an apprehensive, even a frightened man. He worried about his lungs, had nightmares of Wicklow Prison, grew obsessed by the notion that he was being followed in the streets, an impression we now know to have been largely correct. England sent agents to keep watch on his activities – he was suspected in London of still being active, of fomenting a conspiracy for the invasion of British Canada, of smuggling ammunition to Ireland. Little did My Lords of Westminster know, the Blade was decidedly blunted. A detective hired to shadow him in the winter of 1859 had to resign from the task, despite the generous remuneration and expenses. He was too bored to continue, and too drunk, he wrote London. The hours spent in Irish barrooms were killing him.
Those were the years in which the United States would prove to have been ironically, at least prematurely, named. One’s loyalties were sounded in every conversation. Did the south possess the right to live as her masters pleased? Or must every state comply with Washington’s laws? An unwieldy marriage, the American republic. There was the feeling that it was edging toward a brutal divorce.
All his life in America, O’Keeffe had loved the south. Charleston, Savannah: those sultry, stately cities; their euphonious talk, the looks of the women, what he called, in a memorable if profoundly disingenuous phrase, ‘the gay Mediterraneanism of the southernmode de vie , which affords a man so much of leisure and pleasure’. The filth-heap on which such gaiety was already beginning to totter, he seems to have scarcely noticed.
When it does materialize in his writings, on those remarkably few occasions, he appears to regard it as a simple fact of the landscape, like an exotic spice, or hearing French in Louisiana, a matter of how people do things differently when the climate is hot.A chacun son goût would appear to be his axiom; but his tolerance is a refusal to see.
And this, to say the least, is difficult to comprehend. In his boyhood, O’Keeffe knew much about the obscenity of the man-trade. Indeed his nursemaid at Wexford, an African called Beatrice, whose cameo he wore all his life in a locket about his wrist, herself had at one time been a slave in England. That he permitted himself to be attended by her stolen siblings in America, that he at no time raised his oratory in support of their emancipation, that he wrote, of southern slaves, that they were ‘well-cared-for and fed, merrier in Mississippi than in the Paganlands of Ethiop’ – these are astonishing failings.
And yet, when the cancer burst, he acted surprisingly. He did not stand with the seceding south, as for years he had maintained he would, and as many another leading Irishman would do. Three mornings after Fort Sumter was attacked by the Confederacy, posters materialized on the streets of New York, in Five Points and the Battery, on the Lower East Side; on Stanton Street and Mulberry, outside the old Cathedral on Mott, in every quarter of rookeries where penniless Irish scraped a life; by the reeking shanties of Brooklyn.
* * *
IRISH IMMIGRANTS & ALL MEN OF HONOR
WILL ENLIST
FOR THESE UNITED STATES!
Tens of Thousands of Irishmen
Are joining the ARMIES OF THE UNION
To defend this GREAT REPUBLIC against the TREACHERY
Which MENACES HER!
Shall you permit the Southern TRAITORS to destroy
the CONSTITUTION?
Shall you stand in idle watchfulness whilst
LIBERTY IS ASSAULTED?
This Republic gave you FREEDOM!
AROUSE TO HER DEFENCE!
EVERY MAN & BOY IS WANTED FOR
THIS PATRIOTIC FIGHT!
IF YOUR NEIGHBOR CANNOT READ THIS,
INFORM HIM OF ITS IMPORT
Published at his expense by James C. O’Keeffe, number 1, the Fifth Avenue, New York
* * *
At that time on Fifth Avenue, between 19th and 20th, stood a row of elegant townhouses. The kind of mansion that is backdrop to much of the era’s fiction; where witticisms are spoken, Latinate, long, and food is plentiful as punctuation, so that no one is ever hungry, and nobody poor, and there are bathrooms and servants, so nobody stinks, and the débutantes rustle from room to room having subtle, ambiguous epiphanies. Early in the morning of April nineteenth, the occupants glanced up from their understated breakfasts to an unusual, a memorable spectacle. A mob of the unkempt straggling along the avenue below. Noisy. Unsettling. Not beautiful to look at. They were marching under a banner few had previously seen. A green, white and orange tricolor.
There were longshoremen, stevedores, farriers, hodmen. Little clerks from offices; many hundreds of boys. The nobodies penciled as monkeys and monsters in the journals of the Land of the Brave. Drunks, husbands, Holy Joes and gang-men, workers from manufactories, apprentices, servants. They came down the avenue raggedly; relatively few had marched before: out of step, in a jostle, ungainly. At their head was a piper in a moth-eaten kilt playing ‘Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine’.
They came up to the Recruiting Station on the corner of 19th Street, where they shambled into lines, ‘with surprising sobriety’ noted theTribune . Here they pledged to take arms, perhaps to the death, for the country that had spat on their children. Their leader had on a uniform of his own design – dark gree
n, Bolivarian, Celtic harps on the epaulettes, a sash of golden braid,caballero ’s boots. It would have been easy, as you observed from your drawing-room window, to have been amused by the sight of this felon and his rabble, for there was something of comic operetta in his appearance that morning, but more in the mien of his followers. The poor, about to die in uncountable numbers, while you gorged behind the glass of your ironies.
At his side in a glittering scabbard hung a magnificently tasseled sword, which a long time before, in a wasteland far away, had been cast for a lieutenant of Cromwell. Perhaps it had killed Irishmen. In O’Keeffe’s hand it would kill more. The Blade had found the long-hungered purpose.
A photograph was made by the young Timothy O’Sullivan of O’Keeffe and three of his party as they took the parade. He looks younger than his years: trim and muscled, like a boxer; it is the only known depiction of him smiling. Beside him are Captains Costigan, Haines and O’Malley, each man accompanied by his wife. Another wife is notably missing from the tableau. So absent that her absence is a presence.
Her husband’s docket of enlistment is signed in Gaelic: ‘Seamas O’Cuiv. Loch gCarman, Wexford.’ In the space marked ‘Profession’ is written the word ‘Patriot’. It is underlined, twice, as though someone had dared to doubt it.
CHAPTER 27
I GAVE MY LOVE A TOKEN STRONG, THAT HE SHOULD KNOW I LOVE
Lucia’s gift to her husband on coming to Redemption Falls
A striking representation – The doomed painting described
LOT 19:Our Heroic Frontierby Edward Fairfax Chapel†
Oil (with graphite) on canvas
…The work is on the epic or heroic scale, measuring eleven foot by seven-and-three-quarters, unframed, depicting a chieftain, unnamed, of the Blackfoot Indians, in tribal regalia and glorious trinketry, on a mountainland butte of the West. Ocher and crimson flesh paints adorn the rugged face; the forearms, manly, strenuous with sinew, are banded in sapphire-studded gold. In the background are the rapids of a gargantuan falls – stunningly rendered: note the ‘rainbow’ shimmer of the foam – and a lively selection of indigenous flora and fauna. The claw near the left moccasin is that of a Sharp-shinned Hawk. The tomahawk-pipe feathers are falcon and grebe. Elk and kingly buffalo, in peaceable companionship, graze on the prairie below.
The debt to great Mantegna is discernible in the painstaking geological accuracy of the limestone (the mouth of a cave is distantly visible between the subject’s knees) but the composition is High Romantic. The Savage in pelts and loincloth, brimming with sagacity and muscular grace, standing sentry over his preserve, the beauty of raw nature, the untamable wilderness of the skies. Note, indeed, that more than half of this vast canvas is given to the depiction of sky.
The horizontal of the subject’s strong right arm directs us to a settlement in the faraway valley, where minuscule figures, human and animal, delightfully rendered, may be observed. Note the wisps from little hearths; the tiny stockades. What lives are being led in that courageous colony? Then, fancy a moment, viewer: what might this Red Apollo say, did only he possess the power of addressing his spectators? Has he squaws? Has he children? How many braves does he command? The carvings on his rifle-stock: what do these runes import? His noble countenance, maroon and wise, seems to have witnessed gravest truths. Regard his night-black eyes: have ever eyes stared more piercingly? See how the war-paint makes their glow yet the fierier. Those daring, fervent, all-seeing orbs – do they not know our inmost secrets?
When exhibited at the Academy of Design, this work was the sensation of the season, winning acclaim from the academicians and public alike and attracting many thousands of visitors. It has since toured to London, Paris and Biarritz, magnetizing extraordinary numbers. No less a personage than Her Majesty, Queen Victoria of England, pronounced herself enthralled by this masterpiece.
This is a sublime, a singularly magnificent picture, which will appeal to collectors of the Western Frontier and discriminating residents of our larger Manhattan homes. Estimate: $10,000–$15,000. A strong preemptive bid may secure.
PART V
APRIL IN THE MOUNTAINS
O rose of submission –
That hast – no blood –
But the tears all shed –
for provinces lost.
O bloom of contrition –
Bow thy head –
Thy poison thorn – thy bitter cost.
(IV, 1866)
Charles Gimenez Carroll (pseudonym of Lucia-Cruz McLelland-O’Keeffe) ‘On the First Anniversary of the Rebel Surrender’
CHAPTER 28
I’M DRUNK TODAY, AND SELDOM SOBER A HANDSOME ROVER, FROM TOWN TO TOWN
Further recollections from Elizabeth Longstreet – A regrettable habit to which her employer succumbed – And the ancient vernacular of the Irish people
When he get to the liquor you didn get in his room. Go way over there. Any place else. Cause he didnt care a penny for how he do then…Irishman kin to the Indian for liquor. Aint nought but a bane to him. Bring out his worst…Fixin on his troubles…Stern up the demon…Frenchman can drink some. Russiaman. Swede. German keep it comin till a frog grow a beard…But a Irish dont know when to quit with it see. And it dont make him happy like it do your Italian…Ever seen Italian[drinking]?…He amble along fine…Dont want him no trouble, just whistlin the girls…But your Irish wont quit with it…That’s the matter right there…Drink the Wal Trabla whiskey till the rage come down.†
For sure, he fight his wife some time. You never fighted your wife?…An she gev it right back. Oh yes…She surely did…No hair on her tongue when it come to a fight…And then he come madder, an ‘you this’ an ‘you that’…No, not a raised hand. No no no. Never did…Was gibble-gabble mostly, you know how marrieds will get…Or they go a day two not a word spoke between em. He was sorrowful any ways. It some men that’s they nature. Who know why it is. Just the flesh.
He got a reputation for a hard character. Unfeelin. But he wasnt. He be ornery now and again. But he had kindliness in him…He was the changinest man I ever knowed. An that’s the kind he was; back then any how. Give an take back in the one-same speak.
Got these – what to call em – these notions in his mind. Take a notion, that man, like a girl keepin company…Like he teached me couple words he say the folks be speakin in Ireland. Cause they got they-own language over there I guess. Like ‘open the door’ an ‘fetch in the supper’. Domestic things you know. Well I forgetted em all now…Got in mind that ever last soul be spyin on him you know. So he want me to go speakin some way they caint catch. But it was real hard…Was real, real hard…That aint never no language gwine to catch someplace else.
He was a odd fish for sure. Think too much on a thing. That’s one sickness a whole lot of men got in the world. Cause a woman dont gottimeto get fix on misfortune. Mought want to. But she dont got the time…
‘Be duh husht’I remember…Now I come to remember. ‘Quiet your mouth’ that mean…In Ireland…Cause the reason I remember, I often wanted to say it…House like that, you would.
CHAPTER 29
COME SPRING THE TIME FOR COURTSHIP SWEET, WHEN LOVERS WOO AND WED
A curious armada menaces the town – A lighthouse with no light
Handsome Conor Nolan – Miss Martha McIlvenny, the lily of
Redemption – Ovid in the mountains – The season of loving – The cause
of disunity in the Governor’s marriage
They argue most nights. From his kitchen-bed, he can hear them. She says, when they quarrel, that she will leave him and return to New York, and he roars that he wishes she would.
Spring comes hotter. But she does not leave. There are many days of rain and rain-scented wind. The boy loves this blustery weather. He goes walking out of the town, up the foothills of Crow Mountain, where he sits by the Falls for which the settlement is named or fishes suckers in Jubal Creek. He follows mule-deer into the forest, picks the chokies, looks at leaves. Carves his name into t
he skin of a sequoia. Up here he feels freer; cleaner than in the colony. It is possible to believe nothing has happened.
Eliza feels close to him. He wonders where she is. She could be dead for all he knows, or moved far from Louisiana, a place she never liked, so she claimed. The hurricanes billowing out of the Gulf. She’d be stormy as any tornado. He hopes she got married but he doubts this could have happened. She is too crazy for marrying. Who would have her?
The men in his platoon used to talk about women like Eliza. And that day in Wadesboro, when they stopped at the fancyhouse where the girls wiggled in petticoats in the windows. ‘Grab onto your partner,’ Miko Boylan said quietly. ‘I believe I am ready for a dance, boys.’ You went in the front door and came out the kitchen and the men said you came out cooked. Whanged you like a jewsharp. Loosened your strings. Rocked you like your back done got no bone. They had tried to make him do it; even offered to pay for him. But he had not wanted to do any such thing.
Alone in the woods, he strains towards speech. He gabbles, grunts. The words will not come. They catch in his throat, it is like chewing a sludge of vowels. Only when he sings can he push them out: