“That’d be grand.”
Neither of them moved.
“I want you to take off me clothes,” she whispered. “And then squeeze the loneliness out of me.”
They made love in the hot, cleansing water and then again on the flat, open bed. She dressed and went down to work. In the nights that followed, they tried squeezing away loneliness on the floor and again on the bed and standing by the window in the darkness with the night sky of America spreading away to the south and west. They almost never spoke. They never once mentioned love. She never once said “feck.”
47.
On the Friday morning of his third week in New York, everything changed. Cormac was finishing breakfast in the quiet bar at Hughson’s, reading the New York Gazette. At separate tables, two commercial travelers did the same, preparing for the rigors of the day with bread, butter, and tea. The knocker banged, the front door opened. Cormac heard a few murmured words. Mary Burton appeared, mop in one hand, a sheet of paper in the other.
“It’s for you,” she said. Her blank stare told Cormac that she’d read the unsealed note. He took it from her and saw Mr. Partridge’s handwriting. PACK YOUR BAGS AND COME AT ONCE. I’VE FOUND A PLACE. P
Cormac thought: At last! At last, I can leave Hughson’s and be in my own small piece of New York, doing work, learning a trade. He glanced up, and Mary Burton’s eyes were drilling holes in his skull.
“So you’re leaving,” she said.
“Leaving here. But not leaving New York, Mary. I’ll be back.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I will,” Cormac said, waving the slip of paper. “But this is what I’ve been waiting for. You know that. I told you.”
“Oh, just go, without the feckin’ blather.”
“All right.”
He packed his things quickly and strapped the sword to his hip, letting it show. When he came down the stairs carrying his bag, Sarah Hughson blocked the front door. The blue door to the bar was closed, and Mary Burton was out of sight.
“You owe us ten shillings,” Sarah Hughson said.
“I do not,” Cormac said. “I paid for my room in advance. And I’m leaving two days early. You should be returning me—”
“You owe us ten shillings,” she repeated. “For the use of Mary Burton.”
The blue door opened, and Mary Burton burst in, gripping her mop.
“How feckin’ well dare you!” she shouted at Sarah.
“Stay out of this, girl.”
“I never missed a feckin’ minute of labor for you, Mrs. Hughson! I’ve been a perfect wee slave!”
“Shut up!” Sarah Hughson said.
“I will not.”
“This is my place, you dirty wee thing. I make the rules!”
John Hughson emerged from the bar, large and slow, holding the Gazette.
“What’s all this?”
Mary Burton whirled on him. “Your bloody wife wants to charge this boy for the use of me quim.”
Hughson laughed out loud, and Cormac smiled in relief.
“You’ve got some mouth on you, Mary,” Hughson said.
“He owes us, John,” Sarah insisted, her back splayed against the front door.
Hughson sighed and put a hand on Cormac’s shoulder.
“Run along now, lad,” he said, “before this gets worse.” Then to Sarah: “Get out of his way, Sarah.”
There was a kind of fed-up menace in his voice, and Sarah retreated from it, easing away from the door.
“You’re a bloody softhearted fool, John Hughson,” she said. She pushed past Cormac and Mary and John through the blue door into the bar, slamming it behind her.
“Thank you,” Cormac said to Hughson. “You’re a very sensible man.”
“No, I’m not. I’m just soft. Go. Please go.”
Cormac lifted his bag and opened the door to the New York morning. He turned to say good-bye, but Mary Burton was climbing the stairs.
48.
And so he entered the printing trade. Mr. Partridge had found an unused former stable on Cortlandt Street, over by the North River, a place so forlorn and anonymous that they had passed it at least three times on their walks without actually seeing it. When Cormac first walked through the chipped, flaked double doors, his heart sank. The space was dark and cobwebbed, reeking of ancient shit and rotting vegetable matter. The windows were so caked with grime that no light entered. He followed Mr. Partridge across the lumpy brown mat of the floor. High up in the back he saw the trace of a ladder rising to a second-floor loft. Behind them, the double doors on the Cortlandt Street side were immense, built for carriages, but so thick with crusted paint, dampness, and bad care that only one of them moved on its runners. A smaller door opened into the muddy backyard.
Cormac was appalled. But Mr. Partridge saw the place with other eyes, the same eyes that gazed at New York. Seeing it for what it could become, not for what it was.
“You see,” he gushed, “it must have been a stable—attached to the Dutch house next door. That’s why the ceiling’s so high, to make room for hay…. The rooms upstairs must have been added later,” he said, noting a ridge in the high wall where the stone of the ground-floor walls give way to gray planed pine. “The Dutchman next door must have got prosperous at something, become a patroon instead of a horse-handler, and sold the stable. Then…”
He jumped around, too excited and full of youthful joy to finish his thoughts, and together, without much ado, they began to prepare the space for the Monday arrival of the printing press.
“Those front windows,” he said. “We’ll have to scrape away the crusty dirt so a person can see in at us, see what we do, feel like entering. I’ll attack that problem, and you can…”
Cormac went to work scrubbing the flagstones: pulling stringy tufts of weed from the spaces between the stones, raking mushrooms from the narrow trenches where the stones had once abutted the walls (before the house had settled). He scattered beetles and worms from around the dead, ashen fireplace. He used wire brushes on the floor, removing years of impacted dirt and coats of ancient horseshit. His breath quickened when he saw the first blue gray quarried stone beneath the brown fibrous carpet, and he worked almost frantically to uncover each of its buried brothers. All day Friday, until the light was gone, he washed stones, his pouring sweat mixing with the precious water (carried in heavy buckets from the Tea Pump by the same black men he’d seen on Broad Street). In the center of the room, he discovered the rim of a blocked and rusted drain, packed with a cement formed of dirt and horse piss. He jammed a stick into it and moved nothing. Then he picked up his sword and cored out a passage, breaking open some unseen blockage underneath. Abruptly, the spilled water from his bucket flowed in a gurgling way into the unseen earth. He shouted in happiness—“The drain works!”—and Mr. Partridge turned from his glistening windowpanes and exulted at the sight.
“A bloody drain!” he shouted. “Without which no print shop can exist!”
Then Mr. Partridge vanished for a few hours, returning with bread and beef and water, and a large pink-faced Dutchman and two Africans, who carried in a pair of cots that he’d bought in the Dutchman’s shop behind Trinity. One cot was for Cormac, and they parked it beside the fireplace. The Africans carried the second cot up the ladder to the loft where Mr. Partridge would live, while the Dutchman, looking dubious, waited for his money.
After midnight Cormac took off his shoes and fell upon the cot. He thought for a while of the hard, taut body of Mary Burton and her small, hard breasts and rosy nipples. He thought: I must be done with her. I did not say a proper good-bye, and that was rude of me, but I must be done with her. I have things to do here that come first. Before a woman. Before anyone. Still, I had no intentions of hurting her, and I have. She gave me her body. She washed me and fed me and made me laugh. And I’ve put one more hurt upon her. Ah, Mary: I’ll try to make it up. I will. Then he eased into a dreamless sleep.