“I would,” said Edward.
“You’re a rare specimen,” said Maginn, “and I drink to whatever makes you say that.” He sipped his wine, put down the glass. “But then you still tote the baggage of the sentimental mick, offering alms to forlorn souls. You’re really not that long out of the bog yourself, are you?”
“Long enough that I’m at home in this room, no matter what company I keep.”
“Touché. Yet you wouldn’t introduce me to Katrina. Too obvious a bogtrotter, is that my problem?”
“It’s a family situation. Let’s move on to something else, shall we?”
Edward imagined Maginn unloosing his gutter candor in the presence of Katrina and her parents, and he winced. Just what Geraldine expects from the Irish. Maginn, you’re great company, and you own a fine mind, but you are a problem.
“You keep complaining about your editor at The Journal,” Edward said. “How do you get along with him?”
“Like a tree gets along with a dog.”
“If you’re interested, I’ll put in a word at The Argus. I know my editor would like to have your lively style in our pages. He’s said as much.”
“My present editor loathes my lively style.”
“There’s a lot of loathing in your life, Maginn.”
“You connect me at The Argus, my loathing will dissipate like warm sunshine lifting fog off a bog.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“You’re a princely fellow, Daugherty, a princely fellow, for a mick. I’ll buy the wine.”
Edward Rediscovers Katrina, November 1884
EDWARD HAD ENTERED Katrina’s world at the adolescent moment when he registered at Albany Academy to begin the education Lyman Fitzgibbon, Geraldine Taylor’s father, had ordained for him. Edward’s father, Emmett Daugherty, came to this country from County Galway in 1836 at age fourteen, and at eighteen hired on as coachman for Lyman’s Adirondack expedition, an extended trip to acquire land for the railroad, lumbering, and mining interests that were central to Lyman’s bountiful life. The expedition encountered hostility in a remote Warren County hamlet that was so new it lacked a name. Lyman and his lawyer were taken captive by townsmen, who foresaw accurately that these interlopers were about to change life as they knew it; and they prepared tar and feathers for them. Young Emmett Daugherty, as truculent as the next man when called upon, picked up a fallen tree branch and felled the townsmen’s ringleader, then garroted him with a horsewhip and, by legend, told the man’s cronies, “Turn those men loose or I twist the tongue out of his head,” the tongue already halfway out.
That was July 1840, and Lyman vowed Emmett would never want for anything again, and that his children would have the best education available.
Edward was born to Emmett and Hanorah Sweeney on Main Street in the North End in 1859, went to the North End public school for five years, then three years to the Christian Brothers boys’ school on Colonie Street in Arbor Hill, Emmett insisting that Edward first discover the workingman’s God before going off to study among pagans and Protestants.
Lyman Fitzgibbon was London-born (1805), Oxford-educated, a translator of Tacitus’ Germania, wealthy early in life, a British diplomat at midlife, and, as British consul in France, rescuer of Louis-Philippe in the revolution of 1848. For his inventions relating to metalworking machinery he was called “the merchant-scientist” and, along with his stove-making foundry and investments, he became not only Albany’s richest man, but its most variously eminent. He was also Edward’s godfather.
Through the benediction of this eminence, Edward, when he enrolled in the Academy, entered the elite circle of Albany’s social life, became close friends with boys whose fathers ran the city, was invited to dances with debutantes, sleigh rides and tobogganing expeditions out to the Albany County Club, and dinners at the Fort Orange Club as Lyman’s guest. On such occasions he came to know the young Katrina Taylor, Lyman’s granddaughter, but she was six years his junior, a child. They grew up as friendly “common-law cousins,” as he called their relationship. They were separated by Edward’s years at Columbia College, when he lived in New York City, and later by his western trip to research the lives of the Irish workers who had built the Erie, men whose achievement his father had invoked often, and about whom Edward was writing his first novel. And so it was not until the night the Democrats marched in the vast torchlight parade celebrating Cleveland’s defeat of Blaine in the presidential election that Edward encountered the maturing Katrina.
The city was explosive with lights, bonfires, fireworks, and parties to hail the new chief of state from Albany, and a line of thousands of marchers, their oil-lit torches creating a dancing serpent of lights, moved past more thousands of cheering spectators in a triumphal procession up State Street’s steep incline. Edward watched from the stoop of Lyman’s home, an august four-and-a-half-story brownstone facing on State Street and, like other homes on this night, festooned with Chinese lanterns. More lanterns bloomed like bizarre forms of fruit on Lyman’s trees, and buildings across the street displayed the American and Irish flags, and huge images of Grover Cleveland.
In the crowd on the sidewalk a woman caught Edward’s eye when she opened a yellow parasol and held it aloft over her yellow bonnet as the parade approached. The band played and the marchers yelled in left-right cadence: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine,” and Edward recognized the woman with the yellow bonnet as Katrina. He went down the stoop and stood behind her and parted her shoulder. When she turned to him he saw a Katrina (she was “Katch” to him as a child) he’d never known.
“My God, how lovely you look, Katch,” he said. “What have you done to yourself? You’re positively beautiful.”
“I suppose I’ve grown up. But so have you. You look very much a man of the world, Edward.”
“And so I like to think that I am. But even as a man of the world I don’t understand why you open your parasol when it is neither sunny nor raining.”
“It well might rain oil on my new bonnet from those dreadful torches. And I would not like that at all.”
The marchers broke into a new chant: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” a Blaine campaign slogan about Cleveland’s bastard son. But the electorate shrugged off this scandal, and the marchers now voiced the new, answering gibe: “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”
“That is so funny, and so just,” Katrina said.
“Didn’t his fathering a child out of wedlock scandalize you?”
“He never denied the boy, and he took care of him. He’s a courageous man, Mr. Cleveland.”
“You have a modern outlook on the matter, for a woman.”
“I am a modern woman.”
“So you say. And so you may be.”
Katrina spotted Giles Fitzroy riding with a dozen men from the Jacksonians. She called his name and waved to him.
“It’s Giles,” she said. “He’s riding Phantom Guest. What a beautiful horse. This is all so wonderful. We really, really, really won. It’s staggering, isn’t it?”
“Cleveland owes his election to me, did you know that?”
“No, you must tell me. Did you vote a thousand times?”
“Not quite. Are you going to Lyman’s party?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll tell you there.”