When the red-haired kid looked up he saw a man standing by the counter. The clerical collar, the dead-black suit, the panama with a black band, snapped him to life.
“My son, I wonder if you would be so kind as to help me on a little matter?” He slipped a breviary back into his pocket.
“Sure, Father. What can I do for you, Father?”
“My son, I am preparing a sermon on the sin of destroying life before birth. I wonder if you could find me some of the clippings which have appeared in your newspaper, recounting the deaths of unfortunate young women who have been led to take the lives of their unborn infants. Not the most recent accounts, you understand—of these there are so many. I want to see some of the older accounts. Proving that this sin was rampant even in our parents’ time.”
The kid’s forehead was pulled up with the pain of thought. “Gee, Father, I’m afraid I don’t getcha.”
The smooth voice lowered a little. “Abortions, my son. Look under A-B.”
The kid blushed and pounded away importantly. He came back with an old envelope. ABORTION, DEATHS—1900-10.
The man in the clerical collar riffled through them quickly. 1900: MOTHER OF TWO DIES FROM ILLEGAL OPERATION. SOCIETY GIRL … HUSBAND ADMITS … DEATH PACT …
DEATH OF A WORKING GIRL
B
Y
E
LIZABETH
McC
ORD
Last night in Morningside Hospital a slender young girl with raven tresses covering her pillow turned her face to the wall when a youth fought his way into the ward where she lay on the brink of death. She would not look upon him, would not speak to him although he begged and implored her forgiveness. And in the end he slunk away, eluding Officer Mulcahy who had been stationed in the hospital to watch for just such an appearance of the man responsible for the girl’s condition and untimely death. He did not escape, however, before a keen-eyed little probationer nurse had noted the initials E.G. on his watch fob.
Somewhere in our great city tonight a coward crouches and trembles, expecting at any moment the heavy hand of the law to descend on his shoulder, his soul seared (let us hope) by the unforgiving gesture of the innocent girl whose life he destroyed by his callous self-interest and criminal insistence.
This girl—tall, brunette and lovely in the first bloom of youth—is but one of many….
The man in black clucked his tongue. “Yes—even in our parents’ time. Just as I thought. The sin of destroying a little life before it has been born or received Holy Baptism.”
He stuffed the clippings back into the envelope and beamed his thanks on the kid with red hair.
In Grand Central the good father picked up a suitcase from the check room. In a dressing cubicle he changed into a linen suit, a white shirt, and a striped blue tie.
Out on Madison Avenue he stopped, grinning, as he turned the pages of a worn breviary. The edges were crinkled from rain; and on the fly leaf was written in faded, Spencerian script, “Fr. Nikola Tosti” and a date. The blond man tossed it into a trash can. In his pocket was a clipping, the work of a sob sister thirty years ago.
May 29, 1900
.
The morgue office of Morningside Hospital was a room in the basement inhabited by Jerry, the night attendant, a shelf of ancient ledgers, and a scarred wreck of a desk. There were two kitchen chairs for visitors, a radio, an electric fan for hot nights and an electric heater for cold ones. The fan was going now.
A visitor in soiled gray slacks and a sport shirt looked up as Jerry came back into the room.
“I borrowed a couple of shot glasses from the night nurse on West One—the little number with the gams. These glasses got markings on ’em but don’t let that stop us. Fill ’em up. Say, brother, it’s a break we got together over in Julio’s and you had this bottle. I hadn’t had a chance to wet the whistle all evening. I was dying for a few shots.”
His new friend pushed a straw skimmer further back on his head and filled the medicine glasses with applejack.
“Here’s lead in the old pencil, huh?” Jerry killed his drink and held out the glass.
Blondy filled it again and sipped his brandy. “Gets kind of dull, nights, eh?”
“Not so bad. I listen to the platter programs. You get some good records on them programs. And I do lots of crossword puzzles. Say, some nights they don’t give you a minute’s peace around here—stiffs coming down every ten minutes. That’s mostly in the winter and in the very hot spells—old folks. We try not to get ’em in here when they’re ready to put their checks back in the rack but you can’t keep ’em out when a doctor says ‘In she goes.’ Then we got the death entered on our books and the city’s books. It don’t look good. Thanks, don’t care if I do.”
“And you got to keep ’em entered in all these books? That would drive me nuts.” The blond man put his feet on the desk and looked up at the shelf full of ledgers.
“Naa. Only in the current book—here, on the desk. Them books go all the way back to when the hospital started. I don’t know why they keep ’em out here. Only once in a while the Medical Examiner’s office comes nosing around, wanting to look up something away back, and I dust ’em off. This ain’t a bad job at all. Plenty of time on your hands. Say—I better not have any more right now. We got an old battle-ax, the night supervisor. She might come down and give me hell. Claim I was showing up drunk. I never showed up drunk on the job yet. And she never comes down after three o’clock. It ain’t bad.”
Cool blue eyes had picked out a volume marked
1900
.
Jerry rattled on. “Say, y’know that actress, Doree Evarts—the one that did the Dutch night before last in the hotel across the way? They couldn’t save her. This evening, ’bout eight o’clock, I got a call to collect one from West Five—that’s private. It was her. I got her in the icebox now. Wanna see her?”
The stranger set down his glass. His face was white but he said, “Sure thing. I ain’t never seen a dead stripper. Boy, oh, boy, but I seen her when she was alive. She used to flash ’em.”
The morgue man said, “Come on. I’ll introduce you.”
In the corridor were icebox doors in three tiers. Jerry went down the line, unlatched one and pulled out a tray. On it lay a form covered by a cheap cotton sheet which he drew back with a flourish.
Doree Evarts had cut her wrists. What lay on the galvanized tray was like a dummy, eyes half open, golden hair damp and matted. The nostrils and mouth were plugged with cotton.
There were the breasts Doree had snapped by their nipples under the amber spotlight, the belly which rotated for the crowd of smoke-packed old men and pimply kids, the long legs which spread in the final bump as she made her exit. Her nail polish was chipped and broken off; a tag with her name on it was tied to one thumb; her wrists were bandaged.
“Good-looking tomato—once.” Jerry pulled up the sheet, slid in the drawer and slammed the door. They went back to the office and the visitor knocked off two quick brandies.
Doree had found the end of the alley. What had she been running from that made her slice at her veins? Nightmare coming closer. What force inside her head, under the taffy-colored hair, pushed her into this?
The dank office swam in the heat of the brandy as Jerry’s voice clattered on. “You get lotsa laughs some nights. One time —last winter it was—we had a real heavy night. I mean a real night. They was conking out like flies, I’m telling you. Lotsa old folks. Every five, ten minutes the phone’d ring: ‘Jerry, come on up, we got another one.’ I’m telling you, I didn’t get a minute’s peace all night. Finally I got the bottom row of boxes filled and then the second row. Now, I didn’t want to go sticking ’em up in that top row—I’d have to get two ladders and two other guys to help me lift ’em. Well, what would you do? Sure. I doubled ’em up. Well, along about four o’clock the old battle-ax phones down and asks me where such-and-such a stiff is and I tell her—it was a dame. Then she asks about a guy and I look up the book and I tell her. Well, I’d shoved ’em into the same box. What the hell—they was dead people! She blows up and you shoulda heard her.”
Good Christ, was this guy never going to shut up and get out for a minute? Just one minute would be enough. On the shelf over Jerry’s head.
1900
.
“She was raising hell. She says, ‘Jerry’—you shoulda heard her; you wouldn’t believe it—‘Jerry, I think you might have the decency’—those was her very words—‘I think you might have the decency not to put men and women together in the same refrigerator compartment!’ Can you beat that? I says to her, I says, ‘Miss Leary, do you mean to insinuate that I should go encouraging homo-sex-uality amongst these corpses?’ ” Jerry leaned back in his swivel chair, slapping his thigh, and his companion laughed until tears came, getting the tightness worked out of his nerves.
“Oh, you shoulda heard her rave then! Wait a minute—there’s the phone.” He listened, then said, “Right away, keed,” and pushed back his chair. “Got a customer. Be right back. Gimme a shot before I go.”
His hard heels rang off down the corridor. The elevator stopped, opened, closed, and hummed as it went up.
1900
. May 28th. Age: 95, 80, 73, 19 … 19 … Doris Mae Cadle. Diagnosis: septicemia. Admitted—hell, where was she from? No origin. Name, age, diagnosis. The only young one on the 28th and on the page before and after it. The elevator was coming down and he shoved the ledger back in its place.
Jerry stood in the doorway, swaying slightly, his face glistening. “Wanna give me a hand? A fat one! Jesus!”
“No. She ain’t lived here in my time. ’Course, I only took over the house eight years ago. Mis’ Meriwether had the house before me. She’s been in the Home for the Blind ever since. Cataracts, you know.”
A soft, cultured voice said: “Mrs. Meriwether, I hate to bother you with what is, after all, only a hobby of mine. I am a genealogist, you see. I am looking up the branches of my mother’s family—the Cadles. And in an old city directory I noted that someone by that name lived at the house which you ran as a rooming house about thirty-five years ago. Of course, I don’t expect you to remember.”
“Young man, I certainly do remember. A fine girl she was, Doris Cadle. Remember it like it was yesterday. Some kind of blood poisoning. Took her to the hospital. Too late. Died. Buried in Potter’s Field. I didn’t know where her folks was. I would have put up the money to get her a plot only I didn’t have it. I tried to get up a purse but none of my roomers could make it up.”
“She was one of the Cadles of New Jersey?”
“Might a been. Only, as I recall, she come from Tewkesbury, Pennsylvania.”
“Tell me, Mrs. Meriwether, are you related to the Meriwethers of Massachusetts?”
“Well, now, young man, that’s right interesting. I had a grandmother come from Massachusetts. On my father’s side she was. Now, if you’re interested in the Meriwethers—”
“Mrs. Cadle, I thought I had all the data I needed but there are a couple of other questions I’d like to ask for the government records.” The dark suit, the brief case, the horn-rimmed glasses over a polka-dot bow tie, all spoke of the servant of government.
“Come in. I been tryin’ to find Dorrie’s pitcher. Ain’t seen it sence I showed it to you a while ago.”
“Doris Mae. That was your second child, I believe. But you put the picture back in the Bible, Mrs. Cadle.”
His voice sounded dry and bored. He must get awful tired, pestering folks this way all day and every day.
“Let’s look again. Here—here it is. You just didn’t look far enough. Did I ask you the date of your daughter’s graduation from high school?”
“Never graddiated. She took a business course and run off to New York City and we never seen her no more.”
“Thank you. You said your husband worked in the mines from the age of thirteen. How many accidents did he have in that time? That is, accidents that caused him to lose one or more days from work?”
“Oh, Lord, I can sure tell you about them! I mind one time just after we was married …”
The collector of vital statistics walked slowly toward the town’s single trolley line. In his brief case was a roll of film recording both sides of a postcard. One was a cheap photograph of a young girl, taken at Coney Island. She was sitting in a prop rowboat named
Sea Breeze
, and holding an oar. Behind her was a painted lighthouse. On the message side was written in precise, characterless handwriting:
Dear Mom and all,
I am sending this from Coney Island. It’s like the biggest fair you ever saw. A boy named Spunk took me. Isn’t that a silly nickname? I had my picture taken as you can see. Tell Pop and all I wish I was with you and hug little Jennie for me. Will write soon.
Fondly,
D
ORRIE
Conversation flattened out to an eager rustle as the Rev. Carlisle entered the room and walked to the lectern in the glass alcove, where ferns and palms caught the summer sun in a tumult of green. The rest of the room was cool and dark, with drawn hangings before the street windows.
He opened the Bible with the gold-plated clasps, ran his hands once over his hair, then gazed straight out above the heads of the congregation which had assembled in the Church of the Heavenly Message.