“How do you do that?”
“By testing myself. For instance, how do I know if I should marry you when I haven’t even kissed you?”
“I could rectify that immediately. Here and now.”
“It would cause a scandal. ‘Woe be to him who gives scandal to my brethren.’ ”
“Upstairs, then? Downstairs? Outside?”
“If it happens, I don’t want even the birds to see.”
“I’ll find a secret place where we can be alone.”
“I’ll find it when the time is right,” Katrina said.
Edward and the Bean Soup, September 25, 1885
EDWARD WALKED THE three miles up Broadway from The Argus to Black Jack’s saloon, marking the trail through the North End with whatever psychic spoor it is that would-be bridegrooms create when they make plans to abandon home territory. He came to where the pavement used to abruptly end: at the carriageway into the pasture of the Patroon’s Manor House (where his mother had worked as a cook for the last Patroon’s widow). The Manor House was the northern boundary of civilization as Albany’s roadbuilders judged it, and after it you entered the wild Irish neighborhood where Edward was raised, and for which plank roads and mud had sufficed.
Now new granite pavement continued past the Manor entrance, past the gasworks. And where the molders and lumber handlers of the North End had built their houses, slate sidewalks covered the old dirt paths. It pleased Edward to have been partially responsible for this, though the public heroes of upgraded life were Father Loonan and especially Jack McCall, who, in return for staging the rally that reversed the voting slide toward Blaine, had been named Democratic Leader of the Ninth Ward.
Jack had been born into saloon life. His father, Butter McCall, ran the Bull’s Head tavern on the Troy Road until his liver stiffened, whereupon he sold the place, outraging Jack, who considered the Bull’s Head his future; so Jack then opened his own saloon on Broadway, now headquarters for anyone seeking favor with the Democratic party.
“Short one,” Edward said to Jack, who was talking to Maginn. Jack, behind the bar in white apron and collarless white shirt, was a formidable presence, thick head of hair, Roman nose, cleanshaven, and muscular from hefting beer barrels, first at the Bull’s Head, then for the Quinn and Nolan brewery. The time now in Black Jack’s saloon was the lull before the invasion at six when the lumber mills’ whistles would blow the twelve-hour workday into oblivion, and those handlers with money to quaff would move single-mindedly into liquid pleasure. The remains of the bean soup simmered in the pot on the woodstove behind the bar, half emptied by the lunch crowd; the ham was getting down to the bone; the bread growing stale; but soup, ham, and bread would all be eaten by six-thirty, and the hell with food after that hour, was Jack’s dictum.
Edward, when marriage became a possibility, had thought of Jack for his best man, and his visit here today was to tell Jack of his proposal to Katrina, and the resistance he was meeting from her parents. Finding Maginn here was a surprise. Maginn, now reporting for The Argus, was at the end of the bar behind his new mustache, his suit hanging loosely on his lanky frame. He was talking to Jack, pumping him about the invitation he’d received from his newfound friend, the President of the United States, to go fishing. The election poster for Cleveland and Hendricks dominated the wall of the back bar.
“He telling his White House fish story?” Edward asked.
“He’s telling about the letter,” Maginn said.
“He wants the mountains,” Jack said. “Trout he wants. ‘Pick any place in the Adirondacks,’ he tells me.”
“And what did you pick?”
“North Creek. They got trout up there big as dogs. They jump out of the water to shake hands.”
“That’ll be some circus, fishing with the President,” Edward said.
“No it won’t,” said Jack. “We won’t tell anybody where we’re gonna light. He don’t want a circus, he wants to fish.”
“I know how important the President is,” Maginn said, “but did you hear this young lad here may soon be stretched on the holy rack of matrimony?”
“No,” said Jack. “Is that true?”
“It could be true,” Edward said. “But there are things to be done.”
“Buy the bed and spread the sheets, he means,” said Maginn. “He’s marrying up. Beautiful, smart, and rich. Altogether too much for him.”
“Too much for me, but just enough for Maginn, if he could only get his hands on her.”
“Who is she? Not Ruthie.”
“No, not Ruthie,” Edward said.
“Does Ruthie know?”
“No. It’s Jake Taylor’s daughter Katrina. I proposed. She hasn’t said yes yet.”
“Jake Taylor? That royal son of a bitch. What’s Emmett say to that?”
“He doesn’t know about it either, but he won’t relish it.”
“He wouldn’t, after Davy.”
“Davy?” said Maginn.
“My father’s brother,” Edward said. “Jake’s goons beat him so bad when he tried to organize the lumber handlers, all he can do now is shovel sawdust.”
Edward and Jack had courted the same girls (Ruthie was the last), fished, hunted birds, and played baseball together, lived in houses back-to-back, went to school together, and grew apart only when Edward left the Christian Brothers school and moved into Lyman’s home downtown to be closer to Albany Academy.
“Jake’s family’s Protestant,” Jack said.
“Very true,” said Edward. Jack’s look judged him a traitor.
“Where’s the wedding gonna be at?”
“I haven’t even talked to her parents yet.”
“You worry about them?”
“She does.”
“There’s no problem,” Maginn said. “Why should a mudhole mick from the North End have any problem marrying into one of Albany’s first families?”
“Who’s a mudhole mick?”
The voice came from a table where two men had been eavesdropping on the presidential talk. The bigger of the two came over to Maginn. He wore a sweater and a cap, had the slouch of a man whose back had lifted too much weight, and his drooping right eye gave him a permanent squint. Edward knew him as Matty Lookup, a lumber handler and ice cutter on hard times, suspected of breaking into Benedict’s lumber office in the District and stealing four rubber coats and pieces of harness; and so no one would hire him now. He had come by his name when he chased somebody into Tommy Mullon’s icehouse on Erie Street and lost him, but three boys in the icehouse loft called out, “Look up, Matty, look up,” and when he did they dumped a bag of horseshit on him.
“Who’s a mudhole mick?” Matty Lookup said a second time.
“I don’t remember,” Maginn said.
“He’s making a joke,” Edward said. Always explaining Maginn’s jokes.
“You calling me a mudhole mick?”
“I don’t even know you,” Maginn said. “Why would I call you anything?”
“You don’t like the Irish?”
“I am Irish.”
“You look like a goddamn Dutchman.”
“I don’t have enough money to be Dutch.”
“You talk like you don’t like the Irish.”
“Why don’t you go find a mudhole that’ll accept you, and lay down and take a bath,” Maginn said.
Matty Lookup grabbed Maginn’s throat with both hands, lifted him off his stool, then off the floor, and swung him around like the ball of a hammer. While Maginn the splinter flailed helplessly with his fists (like pummeling a sack of grain), Jack came around the bar to pull the two apart but was staggered by Matty Lookup’s backhanded wallop. Matty was pinning Maginn to a tabletop, positioning himself to bite off Maginn’s right ear, when Edward vaulted the bar, lifted the cauldron of bean soup off Jack’s stove with both hands, and moved with it toward the unequal struggle. He yelled in his most urgent vibrato, “Look up, Matty! Look up!” and, as Matty’s teeth parted to release Maginn’s ear and his glance turned predictably toward those mocking words, Edward hurled the boiling soup into his face; and Matty knew agony. He rolled off the table onto the sawdust of Black Jack’s floor, screeching the song of the scalded beast. Edward stood over him, the pot raised above his head with both hands, ready to break the brute’s skull if his belligerence revived. Matty wailed in pain and Edward lowered the pot. Jack, a short club in his right hand now, nudged Matty with his foot.