He broke off, withdrawing his hand from her hair, the memory of his sister seeming to pass over him, like a cloud obscuring the brightness of that silvery full moon hovering in the sky outside the window.
Rory wriggled closer. She almost could have nestled her head against his chest. “I think you fret too much over the things your sister said to you.”
“Maybe. Tessa always was able to get to me. Probably because no matter how harsh, what she said was always essentially true. I never meant to break Sadie’s heart, but I did. I just couldn’t be what she expected of me, no matter how I tried.
“All Sadie wanted was a God-fearing son, content to work and live the simple life. But I seemed to have been born hungry, never satisfied. I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life breaking my back down on the docks, watching Sadie and thegirls slaving in one of those damned sewing factories. ‘It’s good honest work, Johnnie,’ Sadie would say. But good honest work didn’t seem to me to get you anything but an early grave.”
He must have noticed that Rory was regarding him with a troubled expression, for he said, “Oh, don’t look so horrified, Aurora Rose. No matter what Tessa says, I didn’t take to stealing or anything. I just got mixed up with one of those East Side gangs.”
“You were a Dead Rabbit?” Rory faltered.
“No, not quite that bad. I became one of the boys working for a Bowery saloon keeper named Silver McCahan. He backed me for a while in the ring, but I wasn’t much good at prizefighting. My blasted temper. I couldn’t keep a cool enough head.”
Rory didn’t find that terribly surprising, but Zeke’s next admission shocked her.
“So I became sort of an agent for McCahan instead, putting my knuckles to other uses, collecting on bad debts.”
“Oh, Zeke!”
“Not a very reputable profession,” he agreed “but don’t waste too much of your sympathies on my ‘victims.’ They were all street toughs the like of that thug that knocked me cold the other night. I would never have agreed to harass anyone weaker than myself, any honest person. That is until?—”
He paused, frowning. Rory thought he’d reached the end of his confidences, but he continued with a rush. “Hell, until one day McCahan paid me a lot of money to help him fix an election and make sure that the candidate he favored won the race. That kind of thing went on all the time in our local ward. All I had do was hang out about the polls, wielding a big club and see that everyone voted the ‘right’ way.”
When Rory said nothing, Zeke shifted to obtain a better view of her moonlit features. She was looking as disappointed in him as his mother had that night so long ago.
Tessa had found out about his job somehow and of course had promptly tattled. Zeke remembered facing his mother across the kitchen, dumping a wad of money on the work-scarred table.
“Look,” he had shouted. “There’s more there than you could make in a year, killing yourself in that sewing factory. You can quit now, lady, because there’s lots more where that came from.”
“More?” Sadie whispered, angry tears spilling from her eyes. “More money for what, breaking people’s heads? Oh, Johnnie, what’s happened to you? You used to hate bullies, fight against them. Now you are becoming one yourself.”
Zeke shook himself out of the memory, dragged himself back to the present reality of Rory’s sad eyes.
“Don’t look so grim,” he said. “I never went through with the election job. I changed my mind at the last minute, used my club to make sure the voters got to use the polls in peace.” He gave a dry laugh. “I’ll bet it was the first honest election that ward ever had.”
Rory’s beaming smile was as bright as the moonlight.
“Glad to see that makes you so happy,” he grumbled, but he couldn’t help feeling warmed by the approval that glowed in her eyes. “I wish I could tell you the whole thing had a better ending, but Silver McCahan wasn’t used to being crossed. He didn’t even care that I gave him his money back. So what if I didn’t exactly hand it to him? If he had been a little quicker, he could have caught it before it blew off the end of the dock.”
Rory’s laughter sounded like music in Zeke’s ears.
“Anyhow, McCahan told me I was a dead man and I knew he meant it. I was stubborn enough to have risked his anger and stayed, but I was afraid of bringing down trouble against Sadie and the girls. So I ran for it, fled New York.”
Zeke went on to tell Rory about his years in Chicago, how he had eventually parleyed a small gambling windfall into a fortune, discovering a talent in himself for speculating, choosing the right investments at the right time.
He hardly knew why, but he felt a strong need for Rory to know everything about him now, even the worst. He didn’t spare himself relating the details of his return to New York, how he had become more and more drawn into playing the role of Fifth Avenue tycoon, finding it harder and harder to pay visits back to his old home on the East Side, look into Sadie’s sorrowful, worried eyes.
Up until the end, he had tried to get her out of that flat on Pearl Street, but she had always refused, always looking as though she had been waiting, expecting something different from him, just the way she had that night he tried to give her the money from the election job.
When he had been summoned by Caddie to attend Sadie’s deathbed, his mother had already been delirious, nearly beyond the point of recognizing him.
Yet she had whispered his name over and over again. “Johnnie Johnnie, I should have?—”
Then she had mumbled something about his real mother and father.
“You are my real mother,” he had choked out, but he doubted she even heard him.
“Johnnie, forgive me,” she had begged with her last breath. “I should have told you?—”
