Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
rolled onto me, and her hair covered my face. “Free man,” she whispered, “big monkey.”
THOSE WHO CATEGORICALLY CONDEMN vice have never been saved by it. Regardless of the wretched life Nancy lived or was destined to live—and regardless of how you might judge the value of my life—Nancy did save me. She held me when I needed holding, said the words I needed to hear, and so prevented me from tossing myself into the freezing Thames.
Maybe the problem comes from choosing the wrong vice, like Mr. Perry. His was me, I suppose, and the gambling table—and we both took him down in the end.
But he might have gone down sooner without us.
What do we know? Do we even get to choose our vices? I suspect they choose us.
Like all gamblers, Mr. Perry believed in his bones that a big win was just around the corner. Yet whenever he won, he was quick to desire an even bigger win, and he’d keep playing until all of his winnings had been lost. So it wasn’t really a big win he wanted, it was the idea of one. It was the next one. It wasn’t rebirth as a bright new creature that he wanted, it was the anticipation of that rebirth.
He continued to play. He continued to lose. And he continued to talk about winning. The more he lost, the more obsessed he became with the big one, the big win, the one that would change everything and allow him to sail off into the sunset, to start something, anything new. He’d dug himself a hole, and the deeper he dug, the more desperately he talked of escape.
Which brings me to Le Chat, the lanky Frenchman who’d ransomed me my first day from the smelly bosom of the street woman, and who daily limped the floor sipping from a flask of brandy while listening to Mr. Perry talk. A wiry fellow who often wore nankeen trousers, glazed pumps, and a Panama hat, he didn’t speak much, so his story dribbled out in odd pieces I later put together. He was born in Paris, joined the army at sixteen, and saw action for the first and last time at Waterloo, where a wound took away the full use of his left leg. After the war he moved to Marseille, where, profuse with claret and absinthe, I heard him say, he spent what he called his frolicsome years.
“Running over with song and festive at all hours,” he said, “I was the brightest star of whatever luminous cluster I was a part of!”
Lugubrious and self-pitying, drunken and lame, Le Chat as a frolicsome bright star was amusing to imagine.
But it was in Marseille that he made his fortune selling Dr. Le Chat’s Electric Skin Softening Oil. Until, he claimed, members of the Vigilance Committee of Louis Napoleon, jealous of his growing wealth and social brilliance, hounded him out of France.
Waving adieu to his homeland, he sailed to this land of Alfred and Shakespeare, as he called it, secured a room in this historic district, and continued his tireless efforts (from which he always seemed to be resting) to restore his good name and return to Marseille.
I developed a different theory as to why he’d been chased out of France, which explained why he took to financing Mr. Perry’s gambling debts and why, despite his wealth, he lived in a wretched little flat down the street and spent his intemperate days with us.
He was in love with Mr. Perry.
But Mr. Perry was in love with his dead wife, whom he somehow confused with me, and I was in love with my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in ten years and couldn’t even be sure was alive.
Love, love, love. No wonder we all needed vice, vice, vice.
I LET MY HAIR grow long to see what it would look like, and, woolly and black, it didn’t disappoint. I began to like rolling it in my fingers when nobody was around. Because I was spending all my extra money across the street, I began reading aloud the decade-old newspapers I found stacked against the walls to keep the wind out of Nancy’s closet. Specifically, I read reports about a time when thousands upon thousands of Irish starved because of a potato blight, and the English did nothing to help, and so certain Irishmen rebelled against the crown in an effort to gain their country’s independence.
One of their leaders was a man named Cornelius O’Keefe—O’Keefe of the Sword—and I read and reread his speeches, and I committed to memory his statements on liberty: I am not ungrateful to the man who struck the fetters from my limbs while I was yet a child—my father’s very words!
And on war: There are times when arms alone will suffice. And the King of Heaven bestows his benediction upon those who unsheathe the sword in the hour of a nation’s peril!
These brave young Irishmen defied the crown and rebelled, but the rebellion was foiled, and O’Keefe and his fellow conspirators were caught, tried, and convicted. Before sentencing, O’Keefe was given the opportunity to speak for the last time. The words he said grew in my mind to epitomize courage. I imagined him standing on a raised block before a panel of somber judges, a lone man with perhaps a spot of sunlight coming through a high window to illuminate his face. Waiting to be sentenced to certain death, and speaking to those who would sentence him, he made this tender articulation of self-sacrifice: My lords, you may deem this language unbecoming, and perhaps it seals my fate. But I am here to speak the truth whatever it may cost. I am here to regret nothing I have ever done, to retract nothing I have ever said, and to crave with no lying lip the life I consecrate to the liberty of my country. Far from it, here—even here, where the thief, the libertine, the murderer have left their footprints in the dust—here on this spot I offer to that country, as proof of the love I bear her, and the sincerity with which I thought and spoke, and struggled for her freedom—I offer the life of a young heart.
It thrilled me to contemplate making a similar kind of statement if ever I faced death for something I loved. I wanted to weep for the beauty of such courage. But O’Keefe went even further. Just in case anybody thought he was pandering to the sympathies of his persecutors, he said, On the other hand, my lords, if you will be easy with us this once, and spare us the gallows, we promise on our word as Irish gentlemen, to try to do better next time. And next time—sure, we won’t be fools enough to be caught!
Imagining such impudence made my blood pump hard and fast. Could I ever be so brave? Why not? Just a few months ago I’d been contemplating throwing myself into the Thames. If I could die for nothing, why couldn’t I die for something?
And then, as if to validate such courage, the Queen of England showed mercy and, rather than hang him by the neck until death, she banished him to the far reaches of the earth, to Van Diemen’s Land, for the rest of his days. Yet he’d escaped from there, I learned, and made his way to New York, where he had became a celebrated lecturer—a hero to the Irish and all who yearned to be free.
I reread the Declaration of Independence and an inspired patriotism grew within me. I was an American, after all, diseased or not. And I was becoming a man and knew I could no longer live in my mind. The scene I’d known would change when I’d first come to Sunny Side Saddlery was now changing. To what, I did not know. But inspired by O’Keefe’s soaring rhetoric, I found the hope that I, at least, if not Mr. Perry, might someday emerge a bright new creature and go home again. I would search every corner of my country until I found my enslaved mother, and then I would fight to free her.
That was it. I would become a warrior.
I began to think strategically. What did the warriors I read about have that I did not?
Means, perhaps? I had no money to travel home.
And the willpower to change bad habits? Perhaps that, too.
But it is rarely only willpower that changes habits. Habits change when something unexpected happens that knocks us out of our groove. That forces us to respond, to act without opportunity to think, or prepare, or deliberate—and when we act, well, it is only naked us, after all, naked us stripped of the cloak of habit.
In my case the something unexpected was Nancy being ill on a Saturday night and so causing me to go with another—a bigger, fleshier woman named Joyce. I burrowed into her and would not pull out, and when I grew again, I pushed into her more, and she seemed vaguely bothered by my efforts. I could not