“I thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank whoever it was taught you to be quick and modest. You’ll shed that modesty in time.”
I nodded, perceiving in myself not modesty but inadequacy, and wondering with what one replaced modesty, once shed. I found Dirck and told him of Lyman’s arrival, and went with him to the east parlor. Lyman embraced Dirck, saying, “You shouldn’t have written that book, son. You know it was wrong.”
Dirck stared at Lyman, neither contradicting nor agreeing. The knocker sounded again, and Capricorn this time admitted Will Canaday and his ladylove, the handsome widow woman Felicity Baker, a teacher of needlework and deportment at the Albany Female Academy. Our spate of visitors on this evening had been summoned to a musical soiree through which Hillegond hoped to buoy the warped and muted spirit of Dirck. Long a benefactress of The Museum, Hillegond had asked Dorf Miller to choose among his current talent and provide us with an hour’s entertainment. Dorf arrived with pianoforte, violin, tambourine, and banjo virtuosi; also with Joseph K. Moran and a young woman I’d not seen before. Dorf introduced her as Heidi Grahn, a songstress late of Sweden, and at the first sight of her, Dirck’s dark mood faded. He separated himself from his godfather and entered into a fury of note writing: “Be sure she stays after performance,” said the first note he thrust at me. “Tell her I am taken with her voice” (she had not yet uttered a note). . “Is she married, betrothed?. . Ask whether she enjoys poetry. .”
I had no chance to do this, for by then our guests had filed into the music room, a polygonal extension from an eastern wall of the mansion, a semicircular room with mullioned windows and an intricately carved oak ceiling that gave one the sense of being in the apse of a cathedral. The guests besat themselves on plush mahogany benches beneath a pair of murals painted by Ruggiero and depicting the contemporary Staatses: Petrus and Hillegond, whose peripatetic excursions in Europe (in company with the Fitzgibbons) had been the source of many of the works of art, and not-art, that abounded in the mansion. In his portrait Petrus played a great gilded harp (which remained in the far corner of the salon, as Petrus did not), and the image of Hillegond ebulliently fingered the pianoforte, from which she was, in life, incapable of extracting even minimal musical coherence.
Joseph K. Moran saw me and waved from the front of the room. Our plans to do the tenor-to-the-rescue act for Dorf had collapsed when I became linked to Dirck in his infirm time, and well enough so, for Joseph needed no collaborators. His two songs on the opening night of Tambo and Paddy had engendered two encores, so Dorf gave him four songs the second night, engendering four encores; and even that left the audience unsated. The talk abroad in the city was that Joseph Moran would be a performer of great magnitude ere long.
“We meet again,” Joseph said, coming over to me. “I have something for you,” and he handed me a letter, the first article of mail I had received in my fifteen years of life. “It came from Rochester,” he said. “I mentioned to a traveling actor your interest in La Última, and when he met her he spoke of you.”
I took the letter in hand and at the sight of the handwriting the life within me gathered great potency. I knew the letter was from Maud, for in my possession since before she left were four words she had written on a piece of stationery in a near-perfect hand: “The sadness of bumblebees”—this meaning I knew not what. When I saw her throw it away, I salvaged and kept it.
“I’m very grateful to you,” I said.
“We must keep track of our friends,” Joseph said.
He spoke of my rescue of Dirck, said he adjudged me a hero and was proud to know me. He carried on in that vein, asking me questions as Dirck thrust more messages into my fist (“Ask her age. . where she lives. . what her religion. . her favorite flower. .”), and so, with my head full of questions and my hand full of scraps of paper, I had to relegate Maud’s communiqué to my trouser pocket.
“What a grand house this is,” said Joseph Moran. “I would like to live in it one day.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling possessive, “I live in it now.”
Dorf set his tambourinist and banjoist to playing and followed their medley with an introduction of Heidi Grahn singing an air from The Marriage of Figaro that Jenny Lind had often sung, and in truth I know not how the Swedish Nightingale could have sung it more melodiously. Dirck’s pencil fell silent at last, he in rapture at the sound of the young woman’s voice, and I, at last, was able to open Maud’s letter and read her salutation, “Dearest Daniel,” at which my heart began a percussive thumping. My eye followed down the page, running ahead of itself too quickly to allow me to make sense of anything. But then I read these words: “am awaiting the fulfillment of your promise to steal me,” and I could read no further, so rich was my excitement. Then the ecstasy was violated by a loud knocking that intruded as well on Heidi’s melody.
We turned to the foyer to see Capricorn admitting, to my great surprise, a most serious-visaged Emmett Daugherty, and with him a weeping girl of perhaps eight years, a boy somewhat younger than myself who was tilting his head back and blotting his nose with a filthy and bloody rag, and a woman, the children’s mother, in a state as wretched as womanhood can inhabit. The music trailed off as we stared at these representatives of a gravely negative unknown.
Emmett led the woman and children to a sofa in the foyer, then asked to speak with Lyman, who heard Emmett’s request and rose from his seat in the music room. I followed but kept my distance, seeing Matty run to the kitchen and return with a wet towel to clean the boy’s bloody face, take the old rag from him, and lay him full-length on a bench with his head back.
“It’s a tragic thing,” Emmett said. “Alfie Palmer, one of the moulders let go in the layoff, he did this to them.”
“Why do you bring them here?” Lyman asked.
“It’s a foundry matter, Lyman,” said Emmett. “And it’s your foundry.”
“Does Harris know about this?” Lyman asked, Harris being the Yankee engineer who ran the foundry in Lyman’s absence.
“I’ve no use for that man, Lyman. It’s his layoffs began this trouble. Your good self is what’s needed. None other. Alfie was always a hard-luck man, and with the layoff he had no doctor money when his son got sick, and he could only watch the boy die. It maddened him, as it would any man, and he took to the drink, though I don’t know where he got money for that. And there’s been fights — dozens — between the new hired men and the old let go, and Alfie in more than his share of those. But he went beyond a punch-up tonight. He followed Toddy Ryan home when Toddy left the foundry, giving him heat, don’t you know. But Toddy’s only the half-pint, with no health to him at all, and he knew if he fought Alfie he’d be killed sure as sure is, and so he ran to his shack and barred the door, but Alfie broke it in and split Toddy’s skull with an ax handle. Then he went after young Joey here, and it looks like he broke the lad’s nose. Toddy’s wife throws the boilin’ tea in Alfie’s face, gets the children out, and brings them to the foundry to find me. But her Toddy’s dead on the floor and there’s no peace for it now, Lyman, no peace. Alfie’s on the run and the men are in camps, the old and the new. They’ll fight in bunches, and they’re forming already. There’ll be blood in the streets by morning.”
Emmett, his craggy face overgrown with two days’ stubble of beard, was a scolding presence. He was foreman at Lyman’s North End foundry, and had risen in eleven years, despite his lung ailment, from apprentice to moulder to chief grievance spokesman, a voice of righteous reason from below. His rise in status began when he hired on as coachman for Lyman on an expedition to buy land in the Adirondack region for a new railroad line. Animosity toward the venture was strong, the natives convinced the railroad would before long destroy their pristine world (and so it would), and the animus peaked when half a dozen mountain men set upon Lyman and his lawyer with plans to tar and feather both.