A Song Across the Sea (31 page)

He widened his search knowing that he should, instead, be worrying about his own situation. His funds were dwindling rapidly. He ignored this and continued his pursuit. The city’s wonders were lost on him as he haunted the streets, hoping to catch sight of Tara on some crowded boulevard. The tallest edifice in the world—the 60-story Woolworth building, completed only a few years earlier—was just a monolithic, Gothic-edged shadow to him. He took no notice of the autumnal feast of colors in Central Park, or of the tidy corridor of limestone mansions along Park Avenue. The towers crowned with finials and steely webwork of the still new Queensboro Bridge did not capture his attention. He likewise gave little thought to the stony cliffs of New Jersey, looming like a gray, gathering storm just beyond the Hudson River.

He toured Chinatown, in south Manhattan, where papier mache dragons danced through the densely populated streets on New Year’s Day and the air was laden with the heady scent of opium smoke. The pier-lined East River waterfront led him to the Battery, then on to Greenwich Village.

He felt half-dead in a city that glutted on life. Everywhere he looked he saw it. Fashionable matrons bustled into well-appointed shops while in the poorer districts, women sat on crumbling stoops in front of tenement buildings, nursing babies and scolding children. People swarmed to the impressive new Grand Central Station, or paid ten cents to ride the Staten Island Ferry. In Brooklyn, young lads made dodging out of the way of the dangerous new electric streetcars into a game, and dubbed themselves “Dodgers.” Time swept on. Trends caught hold, events caught fire. People played mahjongg, marched in suffragette parades and wondered why the assassination of some archduke in Europe received such wide play in the newspapers.

Many were even more surprised when foreign countries fell into a war like so many dominoes. First Austria, then Russia. Germany’s entry into the conflict prompted England to join in. Turkey followed, then Italy. France was mixed up in it somehow, as well. It was like a wildfire sweeping rapidly over the land, drawing everything it neared into its bright, malevolent combustion. After awhile the entire destructive spectacle seemed too complicated to comprehend. Which were the good countries and which were the bad? No real need to sort it all out, went popular opinion. It was a European civil war. Nothing to do with the United States.

Reece, who had roamed the globe with his parents, knew better. His search for Tara did not blind him to the fact that the world was on the verge of enormous changes.

•  •  •

Ten-year-old Patrick Flanagan—for that was how he thought of himself now—stood on a scrubby hill sloping upwards from the railroad yard, a pile of rocks at his feet. The faraway war did not worry him. He was planning to wage his own little battle, right here.

He took a deep breath.

Three men were unloading coal from a flatbed car. Their years of manual labor were evident in the sinewy strength, the heavily muscled arms that swung shovels full of the gleaming black mineral chunks into waiting wagons.

Patrick picked up a fist-sized rock and heaved it at one of the men, striking him in the back.

“Hey, ya bums!” he shouted. “How ’bout that?”

The man howled with surprised rage. He threw down his shovel and reached for the closest ammunition—a lump of coal—and hurled it at the boy, who dodged the projectile and cackled insolently, pantomiming a weak toss.

“You call that a throw? Ya sissy!” Attempting to add injury to insult, Patrick picked up another rock and pitched it at the railroad men, missing his targets but achieving his goal.

Enraged, the men grabbed pieces of coal and sent them flying in the boy’s direction. A furious battle ensued, with rocks flying one way and coal the other.

Patrick was thin but wiry. He whipped rocks at the men again and again, keeping pace with his larger, stronger opponents. His aim was good but theirs was better. One shot knocked his cloth cap from his head. His left cheek was soon bleeding profusely. Bruises were forming on his ribs and right thigh and he had a tear in his knickers by the time his supply of rocks was depleted.

He ducked down quickly and stuffed the chunks of coal on the ground around him into a burlap sack he’d brought for that purpose. The men threw a few more pieces at him for good measure. Their anger finally spent, they returned to their work.

Patrick slung the heavy sack over his shoulder and headed homeward through dreary streets filled with coarsely dressed, hollow-eyed people and rotting tenements. He tried to avoid looking at the bloated carcass of a horse lying in a gutter near his building, but it was impossible not to smell it. Two small boys—waifs who had no home, by the look of them—ran past. One of them reached out a leg and kicked at the dead horse, laughing at the swarm of flies he raised.

Tomorrow, or the next week, maybe, an offal cart would come and take the horse away, just as the dead wagon came to take away the tenants of his apartment building when they gave in to consumption and influenza and unnamed diseases that stole your breath away in the night. Babies in his neighborhood died off even faster than adults. Maybe when they got a good look at the world and saw what awaited them they decided to go right back to heaven, he thought morosely.

What if his mother died? The thought aroused in him a razor-edged pang of anxiety. He knew she wasn’t his real mother, and she wasn’t a very good mother, but she was the only person he had in the whole world. It mattered little that he took care of her more than she of him. Young as he was, Patrick knew that Mrs. Flanagan was not a strong woman. Not strong in her mind, not at all. She was driven by fears and fantasies, often talking to voices that only she could hear. He wished he could hear his sister Tara’s voice again. But that was impossible, because he wasn’t daft in the head like Mrs. Flanagan. He only saw what was actually there. That’s how he knew he had to be the one to take charge of things.

Patrick wondered vaguely if one of his ribs was broken. It pained him enough, that was sure. He shifted the bag to his other shoulder and tried to take only short, shallow breaths. It hurt less that way.

He’d done well today. He was sore, in places, and the blood drying on his cheek made his skin itch, but he and his “mother” would have enough coal to warm them for four or five days. Maybe even a week.

•  •  •

Frustrated that his efforts had not succeeded in turning up any useful information on Tara, Reece engaged the services of a man reputed to be an expert in locating people. It would further deplete his savings, but he didn’t let it deter him. He instructed the man to search all the boroughs.

Reece himself changed addresses. The income he earned from his aviation work was not sufficient to keep him in his fashionable rented brownstone on the Upper East Side. For the first time in his life, he was forced to regard money as a scarce resource. Unfamiliar decisions had to be made. Should he secure a modest apartment and end the lease on the rented warehouse which housed the prototypes he was working on? He could not afford both.

The warehouse won out. He moved a cot into it and slept there until Hap found out about it quite by accident one day, spying Reece’s makeshift living arrangements when he came to inspect some new engine modifications. Deeply and loudly insulted that his friend had not turned to him for help, Hap insisted that Reece come and stay at the boarding house free of charge.

“After all you done for me and Delores, Reece, I won’t take no for an answer. Why, we wouldn’t even have the boarding house if it wasn’t for you! And we’ve got an empty room. I know it’s not the fancy lodgings you’re used to, but—”

Reece laughed out loud, indicating with a gesture that his current circumstances were anything but lavish.

“All right, smart guy. You know what I mean. Besides, the boarding house is a lot more homelike than this. And Delores’d never forgive me if she found out you were sleepin’ here, in a warehouse.”

And so Reece agreed to move in with Hap and Delores. Oddly enough, he ended up living in Tara’s old room.

His plans for a factory, like his search for Tara, were stymied. Without access to his family’s money, he could not afford to finance the necessary research himself. Undaunted, he sought to attract venture capital. Reece counted many wealthy, powerful men among his family’s acquaintances. He was relieved to find that Emory had not managed to turn them against Reece. But the goodwill of these men did not automatically translate into dollars. They turned him down, one after the other. A factory to build airplanes? Flying machines were a fad that would not last. They were dangerous. Of limited use. Novelties. They couldn’t fly far enough to be valuable. Customers would mainly be daredevil barnstormers, and there weren’t enough of them to make an airplane factory profitable.

Reece was encouraged to turn his attention and talents to other things.

He could bear the frustration as long as he kept Tara firmly in his thoughts. Any day now, she’d be back in his arms. He’d explain everything to her: why he’d kept himself at a distance from her, why he’d become engaged to Miriam. Why he’d wasted so much time when he knew he loved her the first moment he met her. He knew she felt the same. Her kisses hadn’t lied.

He was sure that his lack of funds would have no effect on her feelings for him. She wouldn’t care if he were broke. They would figure out a future together. Rich or poor, they’d be happy. Tara didn’t let circumstances stand in her way—look at what a penniless immigrant off theTitanic had managed to accomplish, before that monster Muldoon got in her way! He wished she would have turned to him for help, wished he’d known how dangerous Muldoon was when he met him. How different things might have been if she had.

It could still be fixed, all of it. He just had to find Tara. With her at his side, he’d find some way to throw down the obstacles that blocked him.

By day he looked for Tara. Late into each night he tinkered with new engineering ideas. Better lift. Higher altitudes and speeds. Wings of laminated wood. Reconfigured fuel systems. Engines repositioned for more efficiency.

Find Tara.

These were the goals that pulled him along, day after day. In time, the man he’d hired to locate Tara returned and made his report to Reece. It was a discouraging conclusion. There was no Tara McLaughlin to be found in New York City.

“K
itty! Kitty Logan! Are you deaf that you didn’t hear me callin’ you?”

Tara pushed the heavy beer keg up the last few steps and into place behind the bar, looking at her employer in annoyance.

“I was in the cellar,” she said pointedly. “After the keg you sent me for.”

Mrs. McGuigan sniffed. “It’s not so far as all that that you couldn’t answer me. One would think you didn’t know your own name.”

Mrs. McGuigan was a thin-lipped, angular woman who sometimes came close to the truth by accident. After all these months of answering to her mother’s name, Tara almost didn’t remember her own. The ruse was necessary. If Muldoon’s men came sniffing around after a Tara McLaughlin, they wouldn’t find her here. How long before she’d feel safe from the man? Perhaps he’d be satisfied with merely destroying her vaudeville career and driving her from her home and her friends. Maybe that was enough for him. Maybe by now he’d forgotten all about her, but she couldn’t take that chance. Not yet…

“If you’re quite finished with that, get the scrubbing brush and bucket over to that back corner. Someone had a bit too much to drink.”

“Kitty” did as she was told, glad for a few minutes away from Mrs. McGuigan’s irritating presence. Out of range of that trumpeting, self-important voice, it was easier to pretend herself out of this awful place. She brought the power of her imagination to bear upon the task, focusing hard. She wasn’t really scrubbing vomit off a tavern floor. She was on a stage. A Broadway stage this time. Why not? She was dressed in chiffon and feathers, like those glamorous Ziegfeld girls she’d heard about.

“Kitty! When you’re finished there, there’s glasses need washing.”

Tara sighed. It was no use. That voice cut cleanly through her daydreams. There was no use trying to pretend today.

She was not yet twenty years old. Was this what the rest of her life would be like? She wondered what Hap and Delores were doing right now. Was Kathleen still angry with her? It was too dangerous even to write to any of them. For all she knew, Muldoon had threatened or hurt friends of hers besides Hap. She hoped not.

Were Lotte and her family any closer to getting their farm in Wisconsin? Tara didn’t think so. If she’d learned anything, it was how quickly those dreams hovering just beyond your reach could be snatched completely away.

And Reece… Reece. It hurt her to think of him. The pain was almost physical. It must have been a grand wedding, he and Miriam had. Was he happy? Oh, Reece, she thought sadly. Did you ever guess how much I cared for you? Did you ever let yourself imagine how it could be between the two of us? How happy I could have made you?

“Kitty! Aren’t you finished with that yet? I’ve a mind to replace you, if this is all the faster you’re goin’ to work for me.”

“Sure and it was a mess, Mrs. McGuigan,” she said, in her defense. “I know how clean you like your floor to be, so I did a good job of it.” It was a ludicrous statement. The chipped tile floor of this tavern hadn’t been clean since 1890, by the look of it. However, Mrs. McGuigan missed the irony in Tara’s tone and was momentarily placated.

“Ya dirty bog-picker,” Tara muttered under her breath. “Your floor’s not fit for barnyard animals, so I guess it’ll do for the kind of people you entertain here.”

To think she’d been grateful for this job at first. It met all of her requirements. She was not likely to attract Muldoon’s attention in this grim corner of the Bowery. Mrs. McGuigan paid a pitiably small wage, but she did allow Tara and Sheila the use of a room upstairs. It was little bigger than a closet and the eerie scratching sounds of rats often kept them awake at night, but it was a place to stay.