Chapter 29
Governor Hennessey had given half his interest in his house to his daughter as a wedding gift when she married Joseph Armagh. ("It was his wife's, not his, anyway," Joseph had remarked.) When she was twenty-one she inherited half of her mother's estate. The other half had gone to Tom, who was already married to the congressman's daughter. So Joseph now lived in the great and beautiful mansion at which he had once stared, on an early April evening, many years ago. The governor rarely visited that house. He and Joseph had nothing to say to each other, though Tom chatted heartily in the presence of his son-in-law, to cover Joseph's silences. He told his daughter that he "adored" his grandchildren, though they somewhat subdued his picture of himself-in their presence-as an ageless gallant. He was now in his sixties, and as vain and sensual and ambitious as always. His young wife came with him on his visits to Green Hills, but it was most evident that she and Bernadette would never be friends and would only tolerate each other. Elizabeth was, intrinsically, a kind and composed young woman, and very intelligent, and she had long forgiven-though not forgotten-her husband's betrayal of her. But more than anything else he loved his little son, Courtney, whom he had "adopted" as the orphaned child of a dead hero. This further inflamed Bernadette's jealousy, and when the child was present she either ignored him or shouted at him pettishly and ordered him to behave himself. She was not so stringent with her own children, and forgave them their selfishness and their tendency to quarrel loudly with each other, and to answer her insolently. "This is a new day for children," she would tell Joseph. "We give them more liberties now, and more freedom, and understand them better, and do not constrain them so much as our parents did us-you and me, Joseph." Joseph would think of his laughing and singing father, who had been like a child to him, and he would think of his mother, who had died in such agony and fear for her children, and with such desperate love. He said to his wife, "You are quite right, my love." Bernadette, who had heard an ambiguous note in her husband's voice, had looked at him piercingly. "Well," she said, "you must surely remember how your father punished you severely for the slightest thing, and how your mother never showed you affection and was always correcting you." Joseph never told her. It would be beyond her comprehension. To Bernadette, Joseph had been a "poor Irish lad," who had come to America with his mother and his brother and sister, and had made a fortune by his own efforts, and also by the will of Mr. Healey. She was never curious about Joseph's dead parents. She was never curious about his past life, for Bernadette lived in the present. But she was desperately jealous of Regina, who lived in this house, and hated her and longed for her to marry and go away "and leave me in peace with my darling," she would think. She had been complacent about Sean. She had never liked him though handsome men usually attracted her. When she looked at the regal Regina she would say in herself, "Shanty Irish!" and it would console her. Once Regina was out of this house that would be the end of the "other Armaghs." She was endlessly giving parties to introduce Regina to eligible young men, who became infatuated with her at first sight-and with her brother's money. She forced Regina to go with her to Joseph's new house in Philadelphia, where he often stayed for weeks now, and there she would have balls and dinners and soirees for Regina. She, herself, had once been pursued by young men. Regina was endlessly pursued. But Regina smilingly rejected all ardent?' overtures, though with kindness. Her dark beauty was a radiance which attracted both men and women, young and old. She had but to put on a gown and it was a glowing robe on her lovely figure. Joseph had given her a magnificent sapphire necklace, bracelets and ring, and pins for her black hair, but they were no more brilliant and shining than her blue eyes between those odd golden lashes. Her arms were long and white and round. She was overly tall for a woman, Bernadette would think, but she had a grace that no other woman seemed to possess. "She is an awful old maid, with no sensibilities!" Bernadette would complain to Joseph. "I am afraid poor Regina is very stupid. She hardly ever speaks, and if she does she is so grave it makes me ill. Doesn't she ever intend to marry? How dreadful, if true," but Bernadette did not believe that Regina would not marry. Joseph said, "Let the girl alone, for God's sake, Bernadette. You are a shrew sometimes, I'm thinking." "She is no girl!" Bernadette snapped, her hazel eyes flashing with jealousy. "She is twenty-three years old, the same age I am!" When Joseph did not answer, Bernadette threw up her arms and round eyes in elaborate despair. "Why don't you help me to get Regina married? Have you no affection for your sister? Do you want to see her dry up in old maidhood, and sit by the chimney corner?" "Regina prefers her life as it is, perhaps," said Joseph, and remembered a day when Regina was eighteen and had told him she loved him but now must go away. He tried to forget that day, and there had been no more said about it, but fear lived in him like a brazen snake, tense and coiled. When Bernadette spoke of Regina marrying it was not an annoyance to him. Even marriage, and the separation which marriage would bring between brother and sister, was preferable to-that. Anything under God's evil sun was preferable to-that. He therefore began to be somewhat of an ally of Bernadette's, to her comfort. He, too, began to look for a husband for Regina. But Regina did not marry. Bernadette, who was as cynical about religion as she was about everything else with the exception of Joseph, made Novenas earnestly for the marriage of Regina. If Regina would marry, she would pray, she would learn to love her. Surely the Blessed Mother did not like it that she hated Regina, though it was not, of course, "my fault." So Bernadette wheedled the saints and God and His Blessed Mother, to get Regina out of her house. "What have you got against marriage?" she once asked Regina. "Why, nothing at all, dear Bernadette," said Regina, surprised, her sweet clear voice amused.
"I think it is a holy estate, as the Church teaches." "Why don't you enter it then?" demanded Bernadette. "Everybody thinks it so odd that you are still unmarried at your age. Why can't you fall in love?" But I am in love, thought Regina, and tears filled her eyes. My heart is dying with love. My spirit is filled with love. I think of nothing-but my love. She said, and her voice was low and searching, "You do love Joseph, don't you, Bernadette? Truly and eternally love him?" "Can you ask that? Dare you ask that!" cried Bernadette, and those round full eyes glittered with emotion and anger. "I love him more than anything in the world. Everything else in the world is nothing to me, compared with Joseph." "I know," said Regina, and knew that the time had finally come and she could go in peace. "Always remember that, dear Bernadette. Hold fast to my brother. He needs love more than anything in this world, and he has had so little. Help him. Comfort him." This was very strange to the vociferous Bernadette, and she actually became unusually still and stared at Regina. "What are you talking about? 'Comfort, help him.' Do I do anything else, by the Saints? He is my life. There's nothing else. Why should he need comfort or help? I'm here, am I not?" "Yes, dear," said Regina, and bent her head and kissed Bernadette on that round, low, and freckled forehead, and Bernadette was freshly startled. She put up her hand aimlessly to the smooth brown chignon of her hair, wondering. Her figure was quite matronly now, but still pleasing, and she wore elaborately draped skirts to give her height, and was always scintillating with bracelets and earrings and jeweled combs, and she was always moving with verve. She thought Regina a poor thing in her simple frocks and her simple way of dressing all that splendid, glossy black hair. Regina had no more life than a wax doll. She had a thin aquiline nose, too, and not a charming tilted one like Bernadette's. Why, thought Bernadette in exasperation, does everyone think she is so beautiful? She does have a presence, and a wonderful complexion, but no spirit. Two days after Joseph had returned to Green Hills from Titusville, Regina went to her brother's rooms in the great and echoing mansion, the rooms which had once been Governor Hennessey's. He had had the ornate and baroque furniture removed, and the embroidered draperies and the lace, and had replaced them with fine utilitarian tables and chairs and sofas and plain rich rugs and straight draperies at the windows, and no gimcracks or ornaments except for several val
uable paintings which hung on dimly painted walls. Bernadette rarely went into those rooms, for they depressed her. All those books, that big mahogany desk, that stark narrow bed-it was like the den of a poor man. She, herself, occupied her mother's rooms, and had embellished them to her own filigreed taste, which leaned towards gilt and velvet and silk and strong color. Her mother's canopied bed was a fountain of Venetian lace, all falls and swoops and rufflings, over bright pink, and the subdued rugs had been removed for Chinese rugs in the most vehement shades. Every corner was crowded with whatnots heaped with figurines and other trifles, and every spindly table overflowed with them. I have always been a stranger in this house, thought Regina, as she climbed the stairs to her brother's rooms. I have never had a home except in the orphanage. She was whitely resolute tonight, but her throat and breast hurt with almost incredible pain, and she prayed under her breath, and it seemed to her that her lungs were locked and she could not breathe. A cool sweat had broken out over her face and her body, and she could feel the dampness in her armpits and over her neck and back and in her palms. Her heart was beating with tremendous force, and she gasped as she climbed those wide marble stairs and the lighted chandelier burned her eyes. She prayed, "Oh, dear Lord, help me, help me." But there was no response and she felt a dragging coldness in her middle and a weakening of her legs under her brown linen frock with its high neck and long sleeves. Her wonderful hair fell down her back in waves and billows and flowed with her movements. "Help me to make Joe understand, dear Blessed Mother," Regina prayed. "Help him to know that I must go to my Love, to the only marriage I desire and have ever desired, since I was a child." Her eyes and head began to swim and she paused at the top of the stairs, and struggled for breath. She thought of her brother and the pain she was about to inflict upon him, and she cringed at the thought, and put her hands over her face, shaking her head slowly from side to side. She was trembling so strongly that she had to brace her hand, finally, against the wall to keep from falling. Of what was she afraid? Her brother's sorrow, and only she knew how violent his sorrow could be though it was silent. She thought of Sean, and cringed again. Sean had left him and now she must leave him, never to see him again except as a shadow, a formless image. She would hear his voice, but she would not see the years gray and shrink him. Her most pressing misery was that it was very probable that Joseph's voice would never again be heard by her, and that she would not even see his shadow. Joseph's anger was total, and Joseph never forgave nor forgot. "Help him," she prayed aloud. "I must do this thing, and he must know. Help him." Regina had never known fear before, and it had the taste of cold iron in her mouth. She had never known such grief and it was overwhelming. She had endured the destitution of her earlier life with tranquility and without complaint, for it had seemed a life of the utmost richness to her and not deprivation and hunger. She had never fully understood Sean 's revolt, nor his rebellions and impatience. Grief and fear were not familiars of hers, and she felt terror at their presence now in her mind and spirit. They were shattering. They assaulted her, and almost turned her away. Then, after a while, she felt new strength and resolution and went to Joseph's door and knocked at it. Dinner was long over. Rory and his twin, Ann Marie, were in their nursery. The servants had gone to their quarters. Where was Bernadette? No doubt in her bedroom, carefully and anxiously applying various cosmetics to her round somewhat flat young face, or brushing that long fall of straight brown hair, or trying on some new gowns. Joseph never spent his evenings in companionship with his wife. Regina hesitated. She had a new thought. Surely Joseph loved his wife or he would never have married her. Joseph was not easily moved nor persuaded. He did everything with cold deliberation. He had wanted to marry Bernadette, and he had married her. There was nothing else. Surely he loves her, thought Regina and heard her brother calling to her to enter. Joseph knew her knock and so he was putting aside his book when she entered and his saturnine face showed a lightening and a pleasure no other person ever evoked. It was almost a lover's smile, with a far blue glinting under his auburn brows. He stood up to greet his sister, tall and concave of body, and severely dressed even in the privacy of his own rooms. No one had ever seen him disheveled, not even his wife, and he was always compact and brittle in appearance, with the wiry strength of his countrymen. "Regina," he said, and took her by the hand and sat her down in a dark leather chair near his. He turned down his reading lamp a little so it would not shine in her eyes. Regina dreaded to begin what she must say, so she said, instead, "What are you reading, Joe?" "Law," he said. "I'm always reading law." He thought of what Cicero had said: "Politicians are not born. They are excreted." It was hardly a quotation to mention to a young lady, but he smiled again. "I find it invaluable in politics. How do you know what law it is profitable to break unless you know there is such a law?" She did not smile, as he had expected. He sat down opposite her. "Joe," she said, "I wish you were not always trying to give the impression of being a villain. You know you are not." He liked to joke with Regina. However, he saw that she was serious and distressed. "I'm glad you have a good opinion of me, Regina." She looked down at the hands she had folded in her lap. "Joe, dear, to the end of my life I will always have a good opinion of you, no matter-" He was instantly alert. "No matter-what?" She bent her head a little and so he could only see her white forehead and the arch of her nose, and he wondered, with sudden alarm, if this immured girl had the slightest idea of what he was. She was more his hostess than was the somewhat rowdy Bernadette, for she had more poise and graciousness and natural good breeding, and so she had met scores of his acquaintances, among them some of the most vicious and expedient of politicians and entrepreneurs. She had met the men who worked for him and who managed his countless enterprises and all their ramifications. He had never concealed from her the manipulations he undertook to have certain politicians brought to public attention, nominated and then elected, though he had been careful not to let her know the cynicism of those manipulations and why he supported those men with money and publicity in his newspapers. He had thought that she believed that this was the way of politics and that the "best men" were always chosen. She had met all these not only in the house in Green Hills but in Philadelphia and in his town house in New York, and in Boston. Yet he had been convinced that the very innocence of his sister prevented her from knowing the truth, and guessing what rascals bowed over her hand. He suddenly thought of Tom Hennessey, and he stared at Regina sharply and repeated, "No matter-what?" "I meant to say," the girl answered very quietly, "even if you stopped loving me, as your sister." He was relieved, yet he had the feeling that she had been evasive. Now she looked up at him straightly and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. "For God's sake, Regina!" he said. "Why should I ever stop loving you?" "Promise?" she said, like a child, and tried to smile. "I promise." But his uneasiness increased. "Even if I leave you, Joe?" He did not answer her immediately. His eyes fixed themselves upon her intently and for the first time she saw something in them that frightened her. But he spoke calmly enough. "Why should you leave me? Are you thinking of marrying, Regina?" "In a way," she replied, and he could hardly hear her, for she had averted her head again. "The only marriage I ever wanted." He stood up as if goaded to his feet, but he said nothing, and only watched her. She put out her hand to him but he would not see it. "Oh, Joe," she said, and it was a cry of pain. "I know I promised you that I wouldn't speak of it again-when I was about eighteen. I have tried, Joe, I have tried with all my strength, to put it-aside. But it has grown stronger and more demanding all through these years, and now I can't resist it any longer. I must go. To the Carmelite Order, in Maryland. I must go at once. Oh, Joe, don't look at me like that! I can't bear it. You must know that I've wanted this all my life, ever since I could remember, even as a very young child in the orphanage. When I first spoke of it to you you said I was too young to know my own mind, and that I must see the world, and, Joe"-the tears were heavier in her eyes than before- "I can't bear this world. I can't bear it. Once
you said to me, 'A sane and intelligent man finds this world horrifying, mad,' and it's quite true. I don't want to be part of it, Joe. I can't be part of it any longer." She stood up in agitation and stood before him and he looked down at her with an expression that terrified her. But she swallowed her rising fear, and clasped her hands tightly before her and her face implored him to understand. "What do you know of living?" he asked in a voice of such immense disgust that she took a step backwards. "A convent girl. You may be twenty-three, but you are like a schoolgirl still. I've taken you to Europe, and to dozens of cities here, but they made no impression on you. You never saw them, did you?" "Yes, I saw them, Joe." "If you had seen them you'd have wanted them. But the nuns blinded you, made a fool and a dolt out of you, deceived you, seduced you into nonsense and superstition and medieval fantasies, filled your mind with idiotic dreams and visions and myths. Destroyed you, my sister." But she was shaking her beautiful head slowly. "No, that is not true. No one even suggested to me that I had a vocation-" But Joseph had burst into harsh and raucous laughter. "A vocation, by God! A vocation for what? Prison? Isolation? Endless witless prayers? Sacrifices? For what? For whom? To what end? What purpose?" She had the wild thought, even in the midst of her fear, that he was like a man desperately and agonizingly fighting for his life, his very life. He was even gasping in quick pants, and clenching and unclenching his hands. She could hardly recognize his face. He went on in the most cruel voice she had ever heard: "It was all wasted on you, all that I- You know nothing at all. You never had to struggle for anything, or work for anything. You've lived in luxury since you were thirteen years old, the luxury I provided for you. It probably has palled on you, so you turn to mysteries and occult imaginings, out of sheer idleness! What have I denied you? I gave you and-" He stopped a moment and his gasping was louder than ever. "I gave you my life, and all there was in it. I thought I also gave you reality, the enlightenment, the education, which a sensible woman should have. I gave you the world I fought for, and now you come to me with vaporings and girlish simperings and little coynesses and tell me that it was all for nothing, that you don't want what I have given you. You want, you say, stone cold floors on which to kneel and pray your stupid vain prayers, and confess sins that you never committed, and hide behind screens so that no one will ever see you. You want to hide. Yes, you want to hide!" "Joe," she said, but he waved her fiercely into silence again. "From what are you hiding, Regina? The world, you will say. But the world has never abused you as it abused me. It never showed you its real face, as it showed me. You know nothing, you fool, you know nothing! And in your stupidity you indulge yourself in romantic illusions of a cloistered life, where all is white lilies and incense, and pretty statues and imbecile serenity and pious music-and those doltish prayers! You are bored. Why don't you marry, as all women marry, and have children and live the life other women live with contentment?" Regina's chin dropped to her chest and Joseph, in his furious rage, hated her as one hates a betrayer. The crown of her black head shimmered in the lamplight. She was very still, standing there in her brown linen frock which, all at once, looked like a habit to him, loathsome and ugly beyond anything he had ever seen. He wanted to hit Regina, to strike her to the floor, and as he felt the impulse he also felt a squeezing of intolerable anguish in himself, a disintegrating grief. It was also familiar, and because it brought memories of two other women he stammered roughly, "I'd rather see you in your coffin! I'd rather see you dead!" She heard the torment in his voice, the despair, the frantic suffering, and she looked up and her face was full of compassion and love as well as fear. "Joe, you don't understand. I love-I want to serve, if only with prayers. I love-Joe." "Love what?" he exclaimed, with another ruthless gesture. "What God? What witlessness is that? There is no God, you damned fool of a maudlin woman! There is nothing to serve, nothing to pray to, nothing that hears, nothing that has mercy. I know. My father lies in potter's field, in an unmarked grave, and my mother's bones lie in the sea-for all their prayers and all their faith and all their charity. I saw hundreds die of the Famine, men, women, children, infants, old grandmothers-lying in the ditches of the roadways, biting their hands in their last convulsions of hunger. Did your God hear, or care, or send His angels to feed those innocents? Those of us who survived were turned away from the ports of this country, either to return to Ireland to starve to death or wander like vagabonds on vagabond ships hoping for harbor, for a crust of bread-literally, a crust of bread. "Oh, you irrational fool! You don't know anything of this world! Where do you suppose a lot of my money comes from? From conspiratorial wars, from planned wars. Have you ever been in a hospital for wounded or dying soldiers, younger than yourself? Have you tended them and bound up their wounds? What do you know of this accursed world? I tell you it is hell, and the slaughter of the innocents goes on every clay, in every nation. And no God cares, no God helps, no God hears. And that, by Christ, is what you want to serve-a lie, a superstition, a myth, a monumental hoax and fraud, something that never existed and does not exist!" Then Regina said, in that brownly gleaming room which echoed with shouting, "It is for such a world that I must pray, and serve with my prayers. Why do you execrate God for the wickedness of man? Man has his choices. If he chooses evil that is free will and not even God will, or can, interfere. I know you have no faith, clear Joe. It would be useless for me to try to convince you-for who can speak of the knowledge of the heart and the soul? It is only there. I have pity for this world. You think I know nothing." Her mouth trembled but her eyes held his resolutely. "But I know too much, Joe. Who am I to reproach you, who did all things for your family? I don't think even God reproaches you-too much. In a way, Joe, your whole life has been a prayer-for those who did not deserve such a sacrifice-Sean and me. No, no. We did not deserve it. I doubt anyone deserves such selflessness." Joseph was taken aback, even in his fury and contempt and rage. He forced himself to stop panting. He could not stop the hard roar of his heart, but he spoke with reasonable quiet, "If you think and believe that, how can you bring yourself to want to leave me, desert me, betray me, for a nothingness, for a lie, for emptiness?" "I'm not really leaving you, Joe, nor deserting nor betraying you. You will never be outside my prayers, my love. I will only love you more deeply, and be even more grateful to you. You will always be in my thoughts, for, in this world, you are the only dear thing to me." She stood before him, tall and slender and lovely, her face very pale, her beautiful eyes shining and now unafraid, and he had a sudden abhorrent vision of all that glory immured behind stone walls, and that voice raised only mutedly in prayer, and that soft flesh lying on stone in an ecstatic prostration before-insanity. He felt an almost voluptuous sense of horror and revulsion, and it showed in his expression and again Regina took a step backward with renewed fear. "I will not let you go. I won't let you destroy yourself," he said. "I will not be destroying myself. I will be saving myself, Joe." But now she could only helplessly shake her head, over and over, as if she had no control of her own movements. He watched her and he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her savagely and he also wanted to kill her. She finally said, "I wanted you to understand how I feel, dear Joe. I knew it would cause you grief and make you angry. But I thought you'd understand, a little, about my own happiness, for there is no happiness for me in this world and never will be.