Perhaps those of you who have read Exit Hollywood will recognize the name of this story. It was the title of the film in which the character Mark Harrison first made his screen debut. I gave you no details at the time but that seems to have been a strategic move on my part because this story goes far beyond what I originally envisioned.
A coming of age story set in the past century, I thought to create a tale of life’s changes through the eyes of a young city boy. My character thinks by the time he has reached manhood that he has discovered all the challenges life could throw at him, but he is wrong.
There is so much we don’t care to learn until it becomes a requirement for survival, and then all it takes is courage and maybe a little help. Sometimes that comes from family and friends, and sometimes it comes from the oddest of acquaintances as it does in this case.
As always, I must tell you that this is a story of fiction. Unless you recognize the names of the real personalities I have included these characters are fictional as are some of the events I have presented. In this story the historical timeline is elastic enough to facilitate the plot.
The O’Brien family had immigrated to the New World fifty years ago, just in time to avoid the Famine that cut the heart out of Ireland. Their farm in County Clare was about as poor as they come, but there were others who lost everything. Most only had a few cows, some sheep, and small fields of rich grain that were siphoned off by English landlords with little thought to the desperate needs of their tenants.
It was the same all across the Irish landscape and so those who could sailed away and left that sad situation behind. The New World held promise and so Darby’s grandfather and his two brothers stepped ashore in New York with little more than the clothes on their backs, but they had a plan.
The masses of immigrants who came from all over the world had little hope of employment except as unskilled labor if they didn’t have a trade. But the O’Brien brothers had focused on one important fact, everyone had to eat. A farmer had little chance for success in a large city, although there were still some farms out in the Borough of Queens.
But farming had taught these three some useful skills about working with tools and implements in the trade, and that is what they had decided to do. Their tiny hardware and repair shop was established just by the rear gates to the Union Course racetrack in the town of Woodhaven.
A rough and tumble neighborhood standing in the shadow of America’s largest city. Perhaps not the best place to raise children but far better than the squalid tenements of the city, and this is where their new lives were set in motion.
Customers soon learned that these three Irishmen could fix almost anything and the business flourished. The ethnic battles that took place further north in the city rarely involved the people of Woodhaven, although the citizens of Dutch ancestry still looked askance at the O’Brien name on the sign above the door.
The three brothers eventually had twelve children, a mixed burden of boys and girls, some of them stayed in the family business and others sought a loftier position in life. America was the land of opportunity if only a man was clever enough to carve out a place to hang his hat.
The 1880’s were the Gilded Age in the city, reaching a new high of luxury and sophistication for the wealthy. This meant little to the poorer classes except that it provided low wage jobs catering to the upper class. The O’Brien’s had little time to acknowledge that disparity in the economy, they were just too damn busy.
Connor O’Brien was named after his father and he had only one brother named Sean. Both boys remained in the family business, learned the trade from their father and settled down. Sean married a nice Irish girl and despite their best efforts they had no children. Connor had always seemed the serious brother until he married a girl of English and Dutch descent. Much to the shock of his very Catholic family they discovered she had been a bar maid.
Darby was born in 1885, the oldest of the third generation brood, and the only boy of Connor and Elizabeth who also gave him three sisters. He was named after his mother’s father, a distinctly English name of Norse descent that raised eyebrows in the Irish community. Perhaps it was that distinction which prodded Darby’s early years into a penchant for being a bad boy.
Like the other children in the O’Brien family, Darby attended church every Sunday and went to the St. Elizabeth Catholic Academy which opened in the year he was born. Run by the Dominican Order of nuns, the parish school was filled with Irish kids because their families insisted on giving them a good education. The nuns were prepared to teach, but they were hardly ready for a student like Darby.
Perhaps shorter than most of his family, Darby was a late bloomer and at first seemed incredibly shy, but he had a mind that absorbed nearly everything. He learned to talk before most boys his age and he spoke in that broad Irish brogue with an accent gleaned from his Uncle Sean.
The boy grew up on the backstreets around Atlantic Avenue and when he wasn’t hanging around his father’s shop he was sneaking through the fence into the racetrack. By the time he was six Darby was quite familiar with the smell of horses and found he was attracted to the coarse language and demeanor of the men who worked with them.
His mother was horrified to learn of Darby’s interest in the culture of horse racing. Little boys could be crushed under the hoofs of those ungainly beasts, it happened all the time on the streets of the city. But that didn’t stop him from sneaking into the stables where he discovered the jockeys were a breed of men apart, and some of them were barely taller than he was.
The first sign that Darby’s acquaintances at the track might not set the best example for him came in his third year of classes at St. E. The teacher was intent on disciplining him for talking during her lesson, but Sister Agnes ruled her classroom with an iron hand, and a three foot switch that hurt like the dickens when she used it.
Darby had had just about enough of her threats and beatings so this time when she ordered him to bend over a chair he told her to ‘fook off.’ Her shock translated into an ear pinching walk to Father Patrick’s office and a much stronger beating, which was repeated when the good Father dragged the boy home to his parents.
Punishment was not unusual in his family but this time Darby decided he wouldn’t put up with it anymore so he hit the road. Banished to his room in the attic he packed a small bag and climbed out the window onto the roof. From there he slid down the drain pipe to the ground and was in the stables at the race track five minutes later.
He could not stay there knowing his father would come looking the minute they figured out he was gone, so Darby hitched a ride into the city on the back of a supply wagon. Dressed in his sack coat and a clean linen shirt, the boy looked like all the other boys his age on the street, except he was probably better prepared.
He carried a folding knife with a sharp edge for protection, and if that wasn’t enough he also had a derringer pistol. The latter had come from a drunk he found passed out in the gutter near the race track. Perhaps the only difference between him and the other boys on the street was being so well armed, and Darby’s mindset.
He was what his Uncle Sean called a born survivor and at least as street smart as any adult in town. But the boy was ahead of many of the immigrants because he could already read and write the essentials of the English language at such a tender age.
Darby did not run into the city proper, he only went as far as Newtown, just eight miles from home. But here the houses were different and larger which meant the people were a little more refined and wealthy…some of them even had automobiles.
The roads out here in the Borough were still a combination of stone and dirt, rutted and often muddy from all the wagon traffic. But Darby had seen his first automobile at the race track and was fascinated. There were probably a whole lot more of them in the city.
Darby hopped off the wagon when it made its first stop. The business he walked into was an Irish pub named O’Doul’s, drawn in by the emptiness in his stomach and the laughter of Irish workmen. He was only eight, going on nine, but with the way he spoke the men inside took him for someone older.
Like most members of his family, Darby could spin a yarn that would entice the hardest of hearts. He told one group of men that he was the son of a race horse jockey and that is why at the age of fourteen he was just four and a half feet tall. The tragedy of his life, he declared, was that his supposed father had fallen off a horse during a race and died, leaving the family destitute.
This group of workers stood him to several mugs of beer and a meal, and in the process created another facet of Darby’s life. His speech quickly changed back to the deep brogue of his Uncle Sean, another natural storyteller of the family. There was no one he admired more than his Uncle Sean.
His freedom lasted exactly ten days. By then Darby had a job washing dishes in the back of the bar and was doing just fine when a hand came down on his shoulder, the hand of his Uncle Sean. It seems the teamster had remembered the boy and where he had been dropped off. Sean had combed the neighborhood and finally found him.
There should have been another whipping, but that was not Sean’s way. Instead they boarded the horse car on Atlantic Avenue and rode all the way into the city. Darby was fascinated by the tall buildings, the mass of people on the streets, and yes, the occasional automobile. But Sean had brought him here to see something else.
Mulberry Street led them to the solidly Irish neighborhood of Five Points and Darby gaped at sights he never expected to see. The Famine of thirty years ago had brought all these immigrants into the city, but now there were others who crowded the neighborhood. Irish mixed in with Italians, Greeks and men with dark skin he had never seen before.
But race was not the lesson Uncle Sean was here to teach. What he wanted to show his nephew was the poverty that was epidemic in this part of the city. The vaunted slums of London had nothing on Five Points, the poorest neighborhood in America’s richest city.
Sean led Darby past the filth and despair of the tenements. Children begged for a coin from those who passed by and then sat down on the curb to cry in their misery and hunger. Darby had to walk around the carcass of a dead horse lying in the gutter and covered in flies. The poverty was shocking and just when Darby was about to plead for them to leave Sean took him away.
Five Points was at the southern end of Manhattan Island and so Sean took the boy north until the horse trolley let them out at the corner of 58th Street and Fifth Avenue in front of a huge mansion, the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the second of that name.
“This is what the American dream can build if you work hard enough,” Sean had said. Darby could not imagine what the owner of this castle had done to create the wealth, and so Sean explained.
“This family made their money in shipping and railroads. Not just some money but millions,” Sean said. “Much of that wealth was made on the backs of men like you and me, Darby. The great truth in our economy is that the strong always prey on the weak and more than a few Irish backs were broken to build this monstrosity.”
“But why did they allow that, Uncle Sean?”
“Allow? It was taken from them and they gave it willingly, but do you know why?”
“No sir.”
“Because each man who slaved away his life and paid to build this obscene pile of stone did it because they wanted to have a piece of that dream. The search for wealth is an addiction far stronger than the opium you can find in Chinatown.”
“I don’t know what opium is,” Darby said.
“Good, I hope you never learn. But the only way for a lad like you to reach for a piece of that dream is by going to school. Learning is what it takes to be a success, my boy. Otherwise you will end up washing dishes for pennies the rest of your life and we can’t have that.”
Darby had to admit that his Uncle Sean was right so they went home to Woodhaven and the boy went back to school, only this time they did not put him in Sister Agnes’ class. By the time Darby was ten he was working after school in the family business. He learned a lot about hardware and how farm implements were repaired, something that might come in handy later in in life.
It was about this time that his Uncle Sean’s wife died of the influenza leaving the poor man alone. That act of God was enough for Sean to pack up his belongings and head west. Darby and the rest of his family were shocked but the boy knew his uncle was out chasing his dream, small comfort that it was.
The letters took almost a year to begin reaching them but Sean wrote every few months after that to tell them about his life. When Darby turned twelve the letters came from California where Sean told them about the played out gold mines where a man might make a miserable living if he worked from dawn to dusk.
By the time he was thirteen the letters Darby read came from the Arizona territories where Sean had gone to work for a copper mine in someplace called Bisbee. He described the low mountains and the dry climate around him, but said he was making good money and might stay there for a while.
His Uncle Sean would have come in handy that year when one personal crisis after another seemed to occupy Darby’s every waking minute. Like every borough in the city Woodhaven had its share of toughs and just as he began to grow in stature he also attracted their attention.
The first boy who pulled a knife on him and demanded his money was left in the alley with a broken arm and a stab wound from his own knife. Darby had grown strong swinging a hammer in his father’s forge. Unfortunately the boy had a gang of friends and when the odds were four to one Darby was the loser.
The results of the beating were noticed by the stable hands at the racetrack who vowed to back Darby up should there be a reoccurrence. The next time the four confronted him Darby managed to escape by sliding through the fence behind the stables. The boys followed him into the barn and the brawl that ensued was not pretty.
This time the four battered boys were turned over to the police and the court made them disappear for the time being. That might be well and good but now Darby spent his early teenage years looking over his shoulder and awaiting the revenge he was sure would come.
The letter that arrived just after Darby turned fourteen came from a place called Tombstone. Connor did not like the sound of that name and hoped his brother wasn’t planning to stay there. But Sean was enthusiastic about the discovery of silver in the nearby mountains and how he had staked a claim for a large tract of land to mine.
Subsequent letters that year described how well the mine was doing and how Sean was looking for a partner and beginning to build his venture. Those words only made Darby smile because it seems the dream was well on the way to being achieved…and then the letters stopped.
Darby finished his schooling shortly after he turned sixteen. Like others his age he could not afford to attend a university but decided all the education he needed could now be learned from books. For a time he worked at the racetrack amongst his old friends, but shoveling out the barns seemed little different than the drudgery of the family shops.
He had a way with animals, or so he was told by one of the trainers. Darby understood how to groom the beasts, what they liked to eat and the signs of illness, but he’d never ridden one. The horses he serviced were worth thousands and were not to be ridden by any amateurs. Still, he liked the animals and they seemed to sense his affection.
Darby was old enough to work on the track crew which put him out on public view before and after a race. He and four others had the unenviable job of shoveling up the horse droppings by the starting gate. It was there while leaning on the fence beside the grandstand that Darby learned that women found him attractive.
He knew better than to tell his parents about the activities that emanated from the racetrack crowd. Gamblers and pickpockets aside, the life of a jockey was lived on the edge of social acceptability. Their fame was short-lived; their work dangerous and often fatal so they lived fast and loose which aptly described the women who surrounded them.
Being the good Catholic boy in the midst of all this debauchery seemed amusing at first until the first time he drank one too many beers. Several of the women decided Darby needed to grow up right then and there. He couldn’t remember much about that first sexual encounter except that it was a failure because he was drunk.
That didn't bother him very much because he had no feelings for those women. In fact, he just wasn’t interested in what a woman could offer. The feeling didn’t have a name in Darby’s mind but he didn’t find himself attracted to the opposite sex. It didn’t much matter as most men of his class didn’t get married until their twenties…he would worry about that later.
Two years went by without a word from Sean until a letter arrived from Sutton & Ambrose, Attorneys at Law. Their address was on Park Avenue in the city and it requested Darby O’Brien visit their offices for a meeting…and said nothing more.
The letter summoned Darby alone and no one else in his family. That sounded ominous so he didn’t tell his parents, but he did take the newly opened Woodhaven streetcar into town. His only thought was that it must have something to do with his Uncle Sean.
The lawyers’ offices were ensconced in a well-appointed office building surrounded by others just like it. A sure sign of wealth Darby figured as he opened the door. What had Sean done now? He was met by Mr. Ambrose, the junior partner, who immediately offered his condolences. This was the first instance that Darby learned of his uncle’s death.
It seems that Tombstone was the county seat for Cochise County, and the sheriff there wrote to Mr. Ambrose on the recommendation of a local lawyer. Darby learned that each of the lawyers in turn expected a fee to be paid for their services and he had no idea how he was going to do that. And then the facts were further explained.
Mr. Ambrose held up a piece of newsprint, a clipping from The Tombstone Epitaph newspaper, and handed it to Darby. “I’m sorry to say this was the source of our terrible news.”
The brief article said that Sean O’Brien had been shot and killed by his mining partner. A man who had promptly been hung by the good citizens of Tombstone for his misdeed. It seems Sean was much beloved by the town and the church to which he belonged.
But Sean had filed a will with the county and in it he left his share of the silver mine, the property of his ranch and home, and all his worldly goods to one person, Darby O’Brien.
Mr. Ambrose finished reading the will and set the documents down on his desk. Darby was too stunned to ask any questions and Mr. Ambrose seemed aware of this.
“You will have to pay our legal fees and those of the lawyer in Tombstone, but that should be no problem. Your uncle was kind enough to leave you the contents of his account at the Bank of Tombstone. I believe we can draft an amount for you without too much difficulty.”
“How much is your fee?” Darby asked.
“I believe eighty dollars should cover our part of the legal work. You will have to inquire of that Tombstone lawyer for his fee once you get there.”
“Get there? You mean I have to go to Tombstone?”
“You do, there’s a paragraph in the will in which your uncle expressly says you must remove yourself from this city and relocate to Tombstone to take possession of his worldly goods.” Ambrose looked back down at one of the documents. “It would behoove you to agree because this is worth quite a bit of money.”
“I don’t know anything about mining or ranching…I’ve never even seen a cow.”
Ambrose smiled. “Well I’m sure you can hire some people for that, Mr. O’Brien, you have sufficient funds for that purpose.”
“Funds…Oh, money in the bank. How much of that is there?” Darby asked.
“Let’s see,” Ambrose said, running a finger down the document. “The current balance is eighteen thousand seven hundred and sixty three dollars.”
Darby awoke on the floor, having slid out of his chair when he fainted. Mr. Ambrose and his secretary were huddled around him with looks of concern on their faces.
“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Brien….I didn’t mean to shock you.”
Darby sat up, embarrassed and still a little woozy. “No, I’m fine. Eighteen thousand you say…in cash money?”
“If you so desire, but I would advise against thinking of it as money in your hand. Until you reach Tombstone and assume possession of the property your uncle left there can only be a disbursement of funds sufficient for your travel.”
“I…I don’t even know where Tombstone is,” Darby said.
Mr. Ambrose and his secretary helped Darby to his feet and returned him to the chair.
“I’m sure we can fix you up with good travel plans,” Ambrose said, returning to his seat behind the desk as the secretary left the office. “I understand rail travel is the best choice for such a long distance.”
“When do I have to leave?”
“The will stipulates that you have one year from this reading to leave the city and make your way west. That should give you plenty of time to make the arrangements. There are sufficient funds available for you to take a travel companion if you wish.”
“No, I will be traveling alone,” Darby said.
“As you wish. I have prepared a bank draft in your name at the Bankers Trust Company of New York in the amount of one thousand dollars. I’m sure that will be more than enough to assist in your preparations. Do you have any idea when you might be leaving?”
“I don’t know anything about Arizona except that it’s hot in summer.”
“Then perhaps you should leave in the early spring,” Ambrose said. “That will give you the holidays with your family and months to prepare. Now if you will just sign these documents I have prepared…”
Darby signed his name to several pieces of paper, trusting the lawyer would not be cheating him out of anything in the process. He was handed copies of everything and the all-important bank draft. A thousand dollars, he had never held such a large amount of money.
Ambrose smiled and shook his hand. “I wish you well, Mr. O’Brien, and if there is anything else we can do for you don’t hesitate to ask. What will you do now?”
Darby thought for a minute. “I think a visit to the bank is in order, and then perhaps the library. I’m sure to find out something about Arizona there.”
“A good decision,” Ambrose said. “Bankers Trust is right down Park Avenue and Mr. Morgan knows us quite well. Have a good day, Mr. O’ Brien.” And he was shown to the door.
Darby folded the documents and placed them deep in the pocket of his suit coat before stepping out on the sidewalk. The tall buildings along Park Avenue didn’t look so ominous anymore now that he was rich. Rich, yes…at the moment.
He could tell no one about the contents of the will, not even his parents. He might allow that Uncle Sean had left him a few dollars and then quietly make his arrangements to leave town. It would be the easiest way to disentangle himself from his family, and the boys at the racetrack.
For several years Darby had made a little money at the shop and yet every bit of it was soon gone on the horses. In the beginning it wasn’t his fault but he had continued to place bets on his favorite horses. He listened to the jockeys and trainers talk, they knew which horses were in the best shape to win a race.
But luck was not always on his side and he ended up losing more than he won. His acquaintances knew he worked around the track, they all thought he knew a sure winner. Darby enjoyed the attention but soon discovered it was only greed that fed most of these friendships. And when his pals lost…well, you’d have thought Darby was stealing the money right out of their pockets.
He had a few enemies now, young men his age who would pound him senseless if they knew he had a dime in his pocket. No, he would leave town without a word going around about his good fortune lest it be stolen from him.
It was a bright fall day when Darby left the law offices and headed down towards the bank. Well-dressed men and women moved around him on the sidewalks, carriages clattered up and down the street, and yet Darby didn’t feel like any part of the human press around him. Sean was dead.
The sadness came over him rather quickly as he reached the front of the bank building. He couldn’t go inside feeling like this and so he sat down on a stone bench outside the doorway. Ambrose had given him the newspaper clipping and he tried to make sense of the words.
Sean had always seemed larger than life and it was unreal that what remained was reduced to a few lines of the obituary in a newspaper. How had this happened? Did anyone even know? The man who had killed Sean was hung, but did anyone ask him why he had done such a thing?
Tombstone seemed like a million miles away but Darby knew he would still ask when he got there. Someone must know what had happened…
Darby heard the crack of something hitting the bench and looked up into the hard eyes of a policeman.
“You can’t dawdle here in front of the bank, boy. You need to move along.”
The policeman had a three foot long nightstick in his hand and he tapped it on the bench.
“You don’t belong here, boy.”
The doorman from the bank was approaching now and Darby felt the menace from both these men. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the legal papers and the check.
“I have business in the bank,” Darby said.
The policeman laughed, not believing a word of it. The doorman gave Darby a puzzled look until he saw the check.
“Hold on, Muldoon…that’s one of our bank checks,” the doorman said to the policeman, and then he turned to Darby. “Are you here on business, young man?”
“I am, but it’s a sad day for the family.”
Darby handed the doorman the newspaper clipping and the policeman leaned in for a look. There was a moment of silence as the men quickly read the contents. The policeman removed his cap and gave Darby a nod.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed your grief,” he said, and then walked away.
“Come on inside and let me find the bank manager for you,” the doorman said.
Upon entering the bank Darby was quickly escorted into the august presence of the bank manager who was not Mr. J.P. Morgan. But he accepted the bank draft and glanced at the amount.
“Mr. O’Brien. How fortunate we are to see you today. I see you have the draft that Mr. Ambrose had us make up for you. Is it cash you will be wanting or will you be opening an account?”
“I’ll have to think about that account, Mr…?”
“Jensen, Franklin Jensen at your service.”
“I live in Woodhaven, Mr. Jensen, so it would be an inconvenience to have my money in a downtown bank,” Darby said.
He was not going to mention the inheritance to this or any other person. Lawyers could keep a secret but Darby doubted bankers had the same sense of propriety.
“Certainly, I understand,” Jensen said. “Would you just sign the check for me and I’ll bring you the cash. Will you want large or small bills?”
“Nothing too bulky, and may I have it in an envelope?”
“You certainly may…I’ll be right back.”
The inside of a bank reminded Darby of a church without all the stained glass windows and statuary. He supposed they had a lot in common except here they worshiped money.
Mr. Jensen returned with a fat brown envelope, and then proceeded to count out the bills before handing them over. Darby smiled and removed some of the smaller denominations before consigning the envelope to his deepest coat pocket.
“Will that be all today, Mr. O’Brien?”
“Yes, thank you so much for your kindness,” Darby said and they shook hands.
He had thirty dollars in his pants pocket and more money in his coat than he had ever owned. Walking back down Park Avenue he wondered if anyone could tell he was carrying a lot of cash. Perhaps not, he didn’t look like a swell in his plain sack coat.
There would be time to arrange a new wardrobe, or several wardrobes if he desired. He would have to obtain his supplies and clothing in the city since any such purchases would be noticed in Woodhaven.
The sidewalk along Park Avenue led him to the Grand Central Terminal and he couldn’t resist a look inside. It would be from here that Darby would board a train and follow the railroad to Arizona. What an adventure that would be, an experience completely unlike anything else he had done.
The vast hall of the train station was fairly quiet during this time of the day and Darby spotted a sign that said tickets. He walked across the cavernous space to a small grilled window where he saw a clerk sitting there awaiting some business. It seemed like an advantageous time to seek his information so he stepped up to ask the pertinent questions in his mind.
“Yes, Sir, may I help you?”
“I was wondering what I would need to take a train from here to Arizona,” Darby said.
The man gave him a look and shook his head. “The answer to that would be rather long and detailed. Are you serious about such a trip?”
“Yes sir, I am. Next spring I will have to take a train to Tombstone, Arizona, to settle my uncle’s estate. Is it a long trip?”
“Oh…yes, it will take more than a few days to reach your destination. Let’s look up the route first, shall we?”
“Please.”
The man reached under his counter and pulled out a thick heavy book, and then quickly added two others. He smiled. “A lot of choices for you to make.”
“The first part of your journey will be fairly simple. New York to Chicago seems to be the best route, only takes about twenty-four hours if the train runs on time. Can’t promise it will, there are always local complications but the New York Central Railroad is always your best bet.
“Once you get to Chicago you have a choice of routes. Most of the trains head to St. Louis and points west, or south, but here is where you will have to decide. Some railroads have good passenger accommodations while others just tack on a few cars while the rest of the train is for freight. One of those might take you forever to reach your destination.
“You have to understand, train tracks run through most of the heavily populated cities and towns where they have planned stops. The train from Chicago will run through St. Louis, Memphis, and dozens of other stops. But I’d imagine since you want to reach southern Arizona that your objective should be to get into the central part of the territory and take a stagecoach to your destination.”
He looked up from his book and smiled. “This is a long trip, young man. It gets faster every year but you will need a sleeping cabin on one of the Pullman cars.”
“I don’t know anything about trains,” Darby said.
“Your trip is going to take at least a week, maybe more if you stopover. A sleeper will allow you some privacy and a good bed for the night. The only reason you might stopover for a night would be to change trains from one railroad line to another.”
“Then yes, I’d like to have a sleeping cabin. Oh, and what about food?”
The clerk nodded. “The passenger trains have dining and lounge cars, but if you engage a sleeper then the meals will be included in the price.”
“So how much of a cost is involved?” Darby said.
“You will have to buy a ticket for each different railroad, but with first class service I don’t image your journey will be more than one hundred dollars.”
“Oh…that much,” Darby said. “So when should I buy my tickets?”
“Come back and see me two weeks before you plan to leave and I’ll map out the whole route for you. My name is Mr. Williams.”
“I’m Darby O’Brien. Thank you so much for the information.”
He traversed the hall and walked out into the afternoon sunshine. A hundred dollars would have been an insurmountable cost yesterday, but today it seemed like a bargain. Now he could make plans for the trip and…it then occurred to him that he didn’t even know what Arizona looked like.
There were several Hansom cabs sitting at the curb outside the station and Darby thought to engage one, he could afford it now. He would have to travel back to the Bowery and catch the streetcar across the Williamsburg Bridge into Queens.
“How much to the Bowery station,” Darby asked one of the drivers.
“Two dollars,” the man said.
“Good…and thank you kindly,” Darby replied.
The driver looked down at him from his high seat behind the cab and Darby realized the man was waiting to see the money. He pulled the bills out of his pocket and handed them up and the man tipped his hat.
As the cab took him down the streets towards the Bowery, Darby began to formulate plans for leaving New York. As Ambrose had suggested, he would spend the next few months learning about his destination and sharing a little time with his family, but then he would have to break away.
The view from the window changed as they left Park Avenue and the wealthier neighborhoods, turning onto Fourth Avenue. The houses around Union Square seemed smaller and less expensive. Perhaps he should find a rooming house near here for the last few months of his stay in the city.
Darby remembered the visit to Five Points and the awful poverty he had glimpsed. No, he would not stay there. The cab soon turned down Bowery and within a short time reached Delancey Street. The cab pulled to the curb and Darby thanked the driver who turned his horse around and headed back north where the fares were prevalent, and perhaps safer.
The Bowery streets seemed a madhouse compared to the quiet uptown avenues. The noise from the elevated train lines on 3rd Avenue and the mob of talking and shouting people on the sidewalks below the iron structures made Darby laugh. New York was the largest city in the country and he was going to trade all this for the sparsest region in the west…he had to be crazy.
Looking around at all the tattoo parlors, bars, pawn shops and gambling houses made Darby uncomfortable, who were all these people? A lot of foreign faces in the crowd, generations of immigrants just like his family. Bums and hustlers, women with painted faces, all of whom would like to entice the money out of Darby’s pocket for a few cheap thrills.
It was the middle of the day and yet music flowed from the bars along the street and the shouts of vendors hawking their wares filled the air. This was an exciting part of the city although Darby knew better than to be down here after dark. It was time to go home with the news about Sean.
He walked to the train platform and bought a ticket for Woodhaven. When it arrived the train was filled with people who looked relieved to be making their exit from the city. Darby stood in the aisle and held on to the overhead railing as the train car swayed while traversing Delancey Street and heading out towards the bridge.
The view from the bridge as they left Manhattan always felt new since Darby had only made this trip half a dozen times. Uncle Sean had managed to take him along on the days when he had business in the city and Darby stared down at the dirty water in the river. There would be no more good times with Sean.
He had to tell the family, they were already concerned when the letters stopped arriving. But Darby would conceal his new found wealth at least until after he left. It would be hard to walk away from family, especially now that his sisters were almost grown. Brothers were supposed to be there to defend the honor of sisters, but he wouldn’t get the chance.
It was a selfish thing to leave and he wondered if Sean understood that. It was fine for a widowed man with no children to disappear from family life, but perhaps Sean had meant to come back after he made his fortune.
Whatever was out there in the hills of Arizona had to be more than a hole in the ground filled with silver. Sean had given them little information in the narrative about his life as a miner and the people he called friends. Perhaps it was the unknown that Darby found attractive, but it was far away from anything he knew.
“Learning is what it takes to be a success,” his Uncle Sean had said. And in all the years since then Darby had come to understand that learning was something he valued. It came from the classroom and it came from life. Once again Sean was going to show him the way.