Changeling, and Other Stories
Seventh Avenue was not Seventh Avenue to him, a muscular, grimy street
that plodded for a space on the west side of Manhattan, crashed
northward through the Twenties, galloped toward Forty-second, crossed
Broadway recklessly, and at Fifty-ninth met the armed front of the
park, died. To Mr. McCann it was only an artery that crossed his
street. Also, winter was not winter, not the keenness of frost, the
tumbling, swirling miracle of the snow, but just the time when he put
on his overcoat. Nor did summer mean the blossoming of the boughs to
him nor the happy population on the river and the beach, and the little
Italians with their ice-cream carts, nor children crooning over great
segments of watermelon, but just a time when it was oppressively hot.
And great national events only marked points in his life. He would not
say, for instance, that he was married about the time of the war with
Spain, but that the Maine was sunk about the time he was married.
All his life was under his eyes, like a map one knows perfectly--a
rectangular pattern. There were no whorls, no arabesques. There were
no delicate shadings, no great purple splash, but precise black and
white. There were no gaps he had jumped, to be a mystery in his latter
years. All was evident.
He could see himself in his boyhood on the Irish hills, among the plain
farmer family he was born of. He could place his father, plain old
tiller of the soil, always smoking a clay pipe; his mother,
warm-hearted, bustling, a great one for baking bread; his brothers and
sisters, honest clods. But he himself seemed to have been born
superior, was superior. There was no mystery. It was a fact. He
accepted it. And from him his mother accepted it.
And by his mother it was impressed on the whole family that their son
and brother Dennis was superior. For him better clothes, easier work,
and when he decided that farm life was not for him, no objection was
made to the sending of him to college in Cork. But after a couple of
years there he had made no progress with studies, and it seemed to him
that the studies were not worth while. And he returned home.
They had tried to get a government office for him then, a very small
one. But that also required examinations, which he did not seem able
to pass. So that a great contempt for books grew up within him. And
then he grew convinced that Ireland had not enough opportunity for him.
And the family got the money to send him to America.
The years at the college in Cork had intensified his sense of
superiority so that when he came to America he felt that the Irish he
met there were a very inferior people. And nothing about the city
pleased him; everything was much better in Ireland, he decided, and he
said Ireland was a wonderful country--the only thing wrong with it was
the people. And the queer thing about it was that the Irish in New
York agreed with him. His few years at Cork gave them the impression
he had accumulated learning, and the race has a medieval respect for
books and writing.
"True for you, Mr. McCann, true for you," they would answer his remarks
on the inferiority of the Irish Irish. "But what can you expect and
the centuries of oppression they have been under?"
"If they had independence enough, there would have been no oppression."
"Ay, there 's a lot in what you say, Mr. McCann."
His superiority disarmed them, cowed them. If one of themselves, or a
foreigner had uttered the words, I can imagine the rush, the dull thud,
the door being taken from its hinges, the mournful procession to the
widow's house.
This aloofness, this superiority helped him, or, rather, made him, in
the business he had chosen--life-insurance. The wisdom he uttered
about life and death to a race who considers life only as the
antechamber of eternity impressed his hearers, and they were afraid,
too, not to take out policies from this superior, frigid, and evidently
authoritative young man.
His superiority also brought him a wife, a timid, warm-hearted girl who
brought a tidy sum of money as a fortune, which he spent upon himself.
She was terrified of him and very much in love with him for years. And
then the love went and the terror remained. She bore him three
children, two sons and a daughter. And in due time she died. But not
until life had run pleasantly and respectfully for her husband, for all
that he despised it, not as vanity and affliction of spirit but as
inferiority and irritation.
And one son died, and a while after her mother's death Moyra, the
daughter, ran away, contracting a very inferior marriage with a
brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad. And the time came when the old
man had to retire from the field of insurance, new methods, new
companies coming in. The native Irish died of consumption and
pneumonia, and the Irish-Americans cared not a tinker's curse for
superiority. So his kingdom vanished. And Poles, and French, and
Italians, and the folk who came from Palestine by way of Russia, and
even Chinese, jostled him. And he was left with a great sense of
superiority and a growing sense of futility and one son, "the brilliant
Irish-American middle-weight, contender for the world's championship,
'Irish' Mike McCann!"
All that was needed now, the old man felt, to crown a useful and
superior life was a material reward. Money he did n't care for--he had
all he wanted, decent clothes, a house, tobacco, his three drinks a
day; and "The Advocate," an Irish weekly, he read for news of people in
Cork, puzzling out this genealogy and that. As, for instance, he would
read of a Patrick Murphy fined for drunkenness at Youghal, and he would
say: "I wonder now, would that be a son of ould James Murphy of
Ballinure. Sure, I would n't put it past him. A damned drunken family
they always were." Or a name in litigation would strike him. "Them
Hamiltons were always the ones for going to law. A dirty connection!"
If a pier or a piece of public property were being builded, his comment
was: "I wonder who's getting the money out of that." If a political
speech were reported he would sneer: "Yerra, John Redmond and them
fellows ought to be ashamed of themselves, and them plundering the
people, with their tongue in their cheek." "The Advocate" was a great
comfort to him.
He often thought, as he was reading it, of how much he would like to
return to Ireland and show the ignorant the fruits of a superior life
led in hard work and wisdom. But for that he would have to show
something tangible--even money would not be enough, so queer those
people were. To impress them at all he would have to have a title of
some kind: Alderman, or Judge, or Sheriff, "the Honorable Dennis
McCann," and to have that he would need to have gone into politics, and
that was not a career for him. To succeed there he would have to be
able to mix with the common people, drink with them, be
hail-fellow-well-met with a crowd of the dirtiest kind of Irish. No,
he could never have done that.
No, but his son might have. Sure, why could n't he? Wasn't he reared
right among them? And though he came from a superior house, sure, that
would only be an advantage. They would look up to him as well as be
friends with him. And with the brains he ought to have, considering
his father, there was no office in the land for which he could n't be
fitted. Surrogate, or mayor, or governor, even! What was to prevent
him if he 'd been the sort of child he ought to have been?
And if he had been that, there would have been a monument for the old
man. There would have been a justification for his life--not that he
felt he needed any, but just to show. And people would have recognized
how much the young one owed to the old one. Then he could have gone
back to Ireland for a visit; he would n't have stayed there; it was a
good country to come from, as he always said. But even the ignorant
common people would have given him credit. He could hear them now
talking to his son: "Ah, sure, if your Honor's father had had the
chances you had, sure it is n't Mayor of New York he 'd be, but
President of America." "Yerra, 't is easy to see where you got the
brains, my lad. A chip of the ould block." "Dennis McCann's son and
him governor of the Empire State. Well, you can thank God for your
father, my bould boyo."
There would have been an evidence for him, an evidence he was entitled
to.
And look you the dirty trick had been played on him. Instead of the
son who would crown his gray hairs with honor, who would justify him,
he was father to a common prize-fighter, a man who was not looked on
with respect by any. The idol, perhaps, of the New York Irish, but of
the ignorant Irish. True, he was a good boy; he didn't drink. But
neither did his father except in reason. He was generous with his
money, but, after all, what was money? Always smiling, always
laughing. "Sonny" they called him and "Irish"; that was no way to
attain dignity. Even the Italian coal-ice-and-wood man called him
"Irish." The old man would like to see any one call himself "Irish."
And he could n't listen to any reason. The old man had an opening for
him in business up-town. A friend of his, an undertaker, a very
superior man, who only did the best kind of trade, had offered young
Michael a chance. But the prize-fighter had laughed.
"In a way I 'm in that line of business myself. Why change?"
The old man had shaken with rage.
"Get out of my sight, you impertinent pup!"
What were they thinking of him in Ireland at all, at all? Some one, of
course, would write home and tell all about it. And if his name, that
should be treated with respect, came up, some one would laugh: "Ould
Dennis McCann! Ah, sure, what's he, anyway? Sure, his son's only a
common fighter."
He could never get away from it; was never let get away from it. Why,
even to-night now, not a half-mile away at Madison Square Garden,
Michael was fighting. And a great fuss they were making about it, too.
Some Italian he was fighting, and if he won he was to get a fight with
the champion. He 'd probably win--he always did--and beat the
champion, too. And the end of it would be the honorable name would be
dragged more through the dirt of the newspapers.
"I wonder will he forget to bring home 'The Advocate,'" the old man
thought. "He 'd better not."
Before the bell had gone for the first round, before the referee had
called them together for instructions, before even the gloves were
laced on him, "Irish" knew he was a beaten man.
Below him--he could see from his corner of the ring--the great garden
was packed, a yellowish gray foam of faces above the dark liquid of
bodies. Above those the galleries were great ovals lined with faces.
And here and there were little tendrils of smoke. And the red caps of
attendants. And occasionally the flash of metal buttons as police and
firemen hovered in the aisles.
And at the shelf around the ringside reporters with their pencils and
paper, and telegraphers with their clicking instruments. The
timekeeper, fingering watch and gong. In another corner of the ring
the thin, lugubrious referee--himself once a famous lightweight. And
everywhere lights, that in a minute or so would go out, and there would
be only a great blue one over the ring. And over the house was the
rippling hush that at any instant would burst into a great volume of
cheers; a deep roar as of gunnery.
Across the ring, in his corner, the Italian middle-weight lolled,
chatting with his seconds. Irish could occasionally glimpse the olive
body; the dark hair and eyes; the even, grim face, unmarked save for
the marred left ear and the minute flattening of the nose.
"... between the leading contenders of the world's middleweight