“They’re talking to neighbors,” he said to Katrina, beside him.
“Is that bad? Do you want to come back later?”
“No, neighbors are good. They’ll cut the ice. It’s Cappy and Mamie White.”
“Such a large woman.”
“She’s larger than that. Cappy drives the Lumber District horse-car and when she gets on the front of it the back end goes up.”
“Does she have to be so big?”
“They’ve had doctors, but she keeps growing. It’s been like watching the slow inflation of a balloon for as long as I’ve known her.”
A brown chicken ran into the street as Edward pulled up, and his mother, an apron over her long housedress, ran after it, snatched it up and held it under her arm. Edward reined the horse, and as he jumped down to tether it, Katrina said to him, “That’s your mother.”
“It certainly is.”
“I remember her.”
He helped Katrina down from the carriage, then walked her over to introduce her first to his mother, then to the Whites, as his fiancée. His father was gone from the window.
“Katrina says she remembers you,” Edward told his mother.
“From the Manor House,” Katrina said. “My mother took me to visit the Van Rensselaer girls when I was eight or nine, and when we played in the kitchen, you were there. I remember how young you were, and yet your hair was pure white.”
“I do remember your mother came often,” Hanorah Daugherty said. She smiled at Katrina. “But I wasn’t so young, I don’t think.”
“Oh, but you were,” Katrina said.
“We’ll move along, Hanny,” Cappy White said. Cappy was a burly six-footer with a thatch of bristle on his upper lip, and already graying at thirty-eight. “Congrats to you, Eddie.”
“Thanks, Cappy. I deserve them.”
“You have a beautiful, beautiful bride,” Mamie White said. She stared at Katrina, then gave Edward the saddest of smiles.
“She’s not my bride quite yet, Mamie. But we’re getting there.”
The Whites said their goodbyes and walked off slowly, Mamie’s shoulders rocking from side to side.
“Go on in, go in,” Hanorah said, shooing them toward the front door. “I’ll put this one back in the yard,” and she walked to the rear of the house with the chicken in her arms.
Edward opened the door for Katrina and led her into the parlor with its huge chrome stove, the beaded valances on the windows, the doilies on the arms of the horsehair chairs. A small braided rug in front of the rocking chair was the only covering on the wide pine-board floor.
Edward moved the wicker rocker into the sunlight for Katrina, and took three tintypes off the otherwise bare white mantelpiece: individual studio shots of his father in a suit and derby, his mother in a full-length flowered skirt, white blouse, and black bonnet tied under her chin with a ribbon; and one photo of them sitting together, with little boy Edward on Emmett’s lap.
“This is what we no longer look like,” he said, handing Katrina the pictures. “I’ll be right back.”
He went to find his father, bring him out of hiding. Emmett had said he would go to no wedding, nor would be hear any argument aimed at changing his mind. Edward had revealed this fact to Katrina and vowed he’d confront his own parents as he’d confronted hers.
Katrina said her mother thought him “a rude social climber” and was furious at his suggestion that her family had committed violence against the Irish; and her father, baffled by Edward’s “babbling about atrocity and slavery,” wondered, “What world is that overeducated maniac living in?”
“But what did they say about the marriage?” Edward asked.
“They disapprove but they honor my choice, and they certainly won’t stay away from the wedding, as your father threatens to do. My father wouldn’t abide anyone but him giving me away, and Mother will insist on buying my dress and shoes and choosing the flowers and decorating the church. She lives for such things.”
Decorating the church. Which church?
Emmett was a different problem.
“I’m thinking of marrying Katrina Taylor” was all Edward had said, and Emmett exploded: “Any kin of Jacob Taylor has to be poison. . that polished fool. . that felonious rodent. . a family of pretenders. . merchants without souls. . They aspire to nothing but money. . It’s traitorous marrying one of them after what he did to Davy. . smashed his mind because he pushed for a better wage. . I dream of seeing them in rags and clogs. No good can come of it, boy, it’s a wrong idea.”
“It’s not an idea, Papa. She and I, we’re a matched pair. We’ve a great love and she’s as bright as any woman alive. She’s a woman you only dream of knowing.”
“Marry your dream, then,” Emmett had said. “I’ll not witness it.”
Edward now climbed the stairs and glanced at the framed tapestry of the Daugherty crest (a leaping stag) hanging on the stairway wall. The Pittsburgh chapter of the molders’ union Emmett helped establish gave it as a going-away gift when Emmett left Pittsburgh to come back to Albany. The family name was stitched under the crest in the Irish: docararch. Emmett was fond of explaining that it translated as either “unfortunate” or “disobliging,” take your pick.
Edward found his father shoeless, in a fresh shirt and his everyday pants, sitting in his bedside rocker, cleaning his fingernails with a six-inch knife. His hair was the color of granite now, and as wild as the mind beneath it.
“So you brought her home,” Emmett said.
“She’s in the parlor.”
“You know what I think about this.”
“Nobody could know what to think about Katrina without talking to her. You don’t even know what’s going on in my head.”
“I won’t argue,” Emmett said. He closed the knife, pocketed it, and bent over to pull on a shoe.
“You won’t hear me out? You, the one who’s always fighting for the right to be heard?”
Emmett leaned back in the rocker and stared at his son. “What is it, then?”
“It’s me, it’s what I’ve become,” Edward said, and he felt the same energy rising that he’d known in delivering the Manifesto. He could not taunt his father as he’d taunted the Taylors, for the man wouldn’t sit for it. So, then, he would neither pace nor gesticulate. He would keep his energy leashed. He sat on the bed and faced Emmett.
“You raised me and Lyman educated me,” Edward said, “and now I’m some kind of new being with no known habitat — not North Albany, not Elk Street. Katrina knows this without my saying it. She’s as smart as the edge of your knife. She knows exactly who I am and she loves me and wants to marry me. And God knows I want to marry her. I’ve never felt anything even close to what I feel with her. It’s thrilling, Papa, unbelievably thrilling. I’m not marrying her father, and I’m not condoning what he did to Davy. But is this a blood feud that carries on for generations? Do the wars of the father have to be the wars of the son? I wrote The Mosquito Lovers, didn’t I? You planted that in my head and I’m glad you did, but I’ve got other things to write. I’m no soldier in the class war. If I’m geared to do anything it’s to celebrate the mind and the imagination. Rise in the world with your brain, not your back and your fists — if you can. And I believe I can. And I believe others can as well as me. Where are the minds of our people? Why aren’t we running the foundries and lumber mills instead of being molders and handlers all our lives? I’m not against radicalism, but I want to get beyond it. I want to leap over the past and live in a world where people aren’t always at each other’s throats. I know some of our roots are in the hovels of Connacht and we shouldn’t forget that. But there was Donegal before Connacht, and before Donegal who can say? Were we ever anything besides tribal warriors? We were bards, weren’t we, some of us? And we were architects of the book. And we had the music, as you always said. If they reduced us to breaking rock to stay alive, those other qualities were still in us, and I see them now in myself. They’re not new to me but I look in the mirror and I think, ‘You’re a new being,’ and I wonder what to do about that. Do I lose my past by shaping a future? Do I disinherit myself? No matter what you think, I haven’t abandoned the struggle. If you’d heard what I told Jake and Geraldine when I asked to marry Katrina, you wouldn’t have turned a deaf ear. I probably made lifetime enemies of them. I don’t want to fight with you now, Papa, or ever, just as I don’t want to give up this woman, who is everything I value. My love for her seems like a primal force, as basic and as strong as what I feel for you and Mama.”