第8章 What the Ward Wanted

The meeting in the ward hall was smaller than the one on Rookery Row and much more dangerous, because it was not the men's meeting. It was the meeting of the men who decided what the men's meeting would be told, and there were five of them, and each of them wanted something different, and Cormac had to hold all five in the same room without letting any of them go. They met above a stable on Vandam Street, in a room that smelled of hay and horses and the sweet that came up through the floor from the saloon below. The five were Brogan, who wanted the strike to go forward and to be clean; Mulvaney's brother, who had just come from the dispensary and wanted a fight and did not care who got hurt in it; a quiet gray man named Sheehan, who represented the feeders and was afraid of losing his place; a young hothead named Scanlon, who had learned his politics from pamphlets and believed every owner and every organizer equally a liar; and Cormac. "The heiress is printing an exposé of her own family," Cormac said. "I have seen her do the arithmetic. It will name the men who lent her father the money for the machines, and one of them is Selwyn of the Bugle, and another is the banker Thorndike." "And what does that buy us?" Scanlon said. "A newspaper war between two sets of rich men. What do we care which one of them ends up owning the Clarion? We are still on the same wage, and the machines are still coming, and in six months half of us are still on the street." "It buys a piece of the city's mind," Cormac said. "It makes the strike a question about wages instead of a question about whether an heiress can manage her property. When men go out in the spring, the town will have read in the Clarion's own pages that the company took widow money to buy the machine. That is worth something." "It is worth nothing if she cuts the story when the advertisers howl," Scanlon said. "And she will cut it, because she is an owner, and owners cut." "She has given me her word." "Her word." Scanlon spat on the floor. "You have been to dinner with her, Kavanagh. Everyone on the Row is saying it. You walk up to her building in the morning like a clerk reporting for work. Have you forgotten whose money paid the men who fired your father?" The room went very still. It was the question Cormac had been waiting for since the day he first walked into the Clarion with a woman in a plain gray coat, and he knew that everything depended on how he answered it. "I have not forgotten," he said. "I will never forget. But I will tell you what I have seen, and then you may judge me. I have seen her hold a boy's hand while a doctor took his fingers, and I have seen her sit in a room full of men who hated her and never once ask them to be gentler with her. I have seen her read her father's account book until three in the morning, hunting for the place where he lied, so that she could print it. If that is the heiress you want to strike against, then you have a better strike than I thought, and I will lead it gladly. But if you want to strike against a woman who is trying to do the only honest thing her money allows her to do, then you are not striking against the machine. You are striking against the only chance we have." Silence. Brogan nodded slowly, the way an old man nods when a younger one has said something he has been thinking himself. Mulvaney's brother looked at the floor. And Scanlon, who was young and wanted to be right more than he wanted to win, said nothing at all. "Put it to the men on Monday," Cormac said. "Not here. In the assembly room, where they can hear the whole of it and decide for themselves. And whatever we decide, no hand is laid on her or hers. That is not a request. That is the rule of this assembly, and the man who breaks it answers to me." After they had gone, Cormac stood alone at the window of the loft and looked down at the street, where the lamps were lit and the men were going home in their own small groups, and he thought about what he had just done. He had put his own name between two hundred men and their anger, and a man who stands between two angry parties is beloved by neither of them, and he knew that too. But he had seen what came of a shop where the men broke the line and the owner broke the men, and he had sworn, the year his father died, that he would lead whatever came without letting it come to that. He put out the lamp and went down the stairs and into the cold." --- The bank on Nassau Street was old and cold and smelled of brass and paper and the dust of a century of other people's money. The clerk brought them to a small room with a table and two chairs, and set the lockbox on the table, and left them alone with it. Cornelia had the key. She looked at Cormac across the box, and he saw that her hands were steady even though her face was pale, and he thought, in the part of himself that he tried to keep quiet, that he had never met anyone quite like her and that this was going to be a great deal of trouble. "It may be nothing," she said. "It will not be nothing," he said. "Your father knew it would be read. Men like your father do not hide nothing in a box." She opened it. Inside were four papers and a single unsealed letter. The letter was in Percival Hollingsworth's hand, and the first line of it was addressed to her: *Cornelia — if you are reading this, then I did not have the courage to tell you while I lived, and I am asking you to do the thing I could not do.* She read on. Cormac watched her face as she read, and watched it change, and when she had finished she set the letter down and slid the papers across the table to him without a word. He read them. Then he read them again. The first was a contract, and it bound the Clarion's machines to a loan from the Thorndike bank. The second was a memorandum of understanding between the bank and Selwyn, in Selwyn's own hand, agreeing that if the Clarion were forced to fail, its presses and its name would be sold to the Bugle at a price to be determined by the bank. And the third was a page of notes in Percival's hand, made in the last months of his life, listing everything he had done and everything he had failed to do, and arriving at a single conclusion. *The men are right. I have known it for a year and I could not say it, because to say it was to admit that I had sold them. I am not asking you to forgive me. I am asking you to finish it.* Cormac set the papers down and looked at the woman across the table. She was crying, very quietly, without any of the drama that he had expected from the rich, and she did not try to hide it from him, and that, more than anything she had said, was the thing that decided him. "Well," he said at last. "It appears your father and I wanted the same thing after all." "Will you print it with me?" she asked. "I will print it with you," Cormac said. And for the first time since August, he did not know whether he was speaking as the organizer or as the man. ---