Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (11 page)

Ed said when the machine stopped, "That song's a laugh, isn't it? Ever notice how it's bachelors are always singing it? Get a few of them at a convention, or only down at the men's bar, and the next thing they're all packed together like a bunch of bananas harmonizing that chestnut. But catch them meaning a word of it."

"About wanting a girl?"

"Like the one that married dear old Dad," Ed amended. "Seen it a thousand times. Back in the Navy. Clambakes here at the Point. Veterans of Foreign Wars. Heck! Half those old goats wouldn't want any way, shape or form of a wife whatsoever. That's why they stay bachelors."

"And the other half?"

"They stay bachelors so they can chase girls in any way, shape or form. But want one like the one that married Dad? They'd run a mile nothing flat to get away from the marrying kind." Ed held out a palm at the room, and apostrophized, "For example."

"I take it, you refer to Earnest and Lionel Bridewell."

"Just the types," Ed "said. "Here they play it on their gramophone. But marry a girl like dear old mother? Huh! Beats me why one of them would buy that record."

"Maybe to flatter dear old mother," I suggested.

"You got something there. It must've tickled her, knowing those two. Earnest was the typical bachelor type. Men's clubs. Lodge night. Not much use for females."

"What about Lionel Bridewell?" I asked.

"All lady's man and a yard wide," Ed made a sweeping gesture. "Brunettes, blondes, redheads—shoulders up didn't matter to Lionel. That is, if you could believe what they said around town."

What they said around town (if you could believe it) was that Lionel Bridewell in his salad days had been the Don Juan of Quahog Point. The Newport set. The croquet contingent. The bathing beauties in bloomers. The lassies who arrived on the excursion boats. According to local legend, Lionel had played the field from top to bottom. Or, as Quahog Point phrased it, "from shoulders to bottom."

Of course, like most overheated philogynists (see Dictionary for great lovers) our seaside Lothario had favored the spectacular.

"Like the soprano they say he got running with up in Boston," Ed described. "When his mother found out and made him come home from opera school." Sopranor

Ed held up a flirty hand. "But not the la-de-dah type. According to Old Doc Hatfield, she sang in a troupe called Commodore Tooker's Garter Girls. Down at the Scenic Palace—that's the movie theater here—there's a big old-time poster, backstage, advertises that show. Commodore Tooker's Garter Girls. . . . Thirty Beautiful Babes. . . . Thirty."

"You mean Lionel's coloratura followed him here?"

Ed considered it, pulling at his underlip. "If you wonder did the soprano chase him to Quahog Point, I never thought of it in that connection. It's a real old poster, at that. . . . Tell you one thing. If she did, I bet Old Abby chased her back to Boston. Not that Lionel would have needed to worry. One girl isn't the only pebble on the beach at a beach resort."

I thought: If seven maids with seven mops swept for a half a year. . . .

I said, "Quahog Point must have been a happy hunting ground for girls."

Ed nodded, "Even now the shooting is pretty good. Back in the old days, they say, it was real gamey. I don't know about Lionel. But if some of the stories is true, he must have done some fast sashaying in open season."

I could imagine. A regular ding-dong-daddy. Especially from June to September when the summer colony was at the Point. He'd have put a carnation in his buttonhole and gone dashing around, all sparks and smoke, like the four-horse fire engine Ed had described. But under cover, of course.

The mental metaphors were becoming somewhat tangled, but the picture that came to mind was clear. I asked what Lionel did in the winter when Quahog Point was frozen in and his fire engine was snowbound, so to speak.

Ed grunted, "Maybe he was a picture collector."

"A what?"

"Well, somebody around this house collected pictures," Ed said. "I found some dandies in a cigar box out in the barn. Annette made me burn them. But there were some others." He pointed to the old papers and magazines heaped on the drumhead table at the end of the sofa. "Did you get a chance to go through this stuff?"

I told Ed I hadn't.

Sorting through the stack, Ed absently hummed, "I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl. . . ." Then he turned with, "Here's some old-timers. Look at these."

With that preamble the curtain rose on another act of the Bridewell melodrama. A Quahog Point version of Peck's Bad Boy blended with They Knew What They Wanted. I confess I enjoyed it. How was I to know that the next performance might be as grim as Titus Andronicus?

Police Gazettes. Or, to give the periodical its official name, The National Police Gazette. Anyone old enough to recall Jack Johnson and Jesse Willard, anyone ancient enough to remember Cannonball Baker, Honus Wagner or Willie Hoppe would instantly recognize the once-famous pink sheet. In the day when a haircut cost a quarter and a shave cost a dime, what barbershop was without the Police Gazette? House organ of the billiard

hall, favorite of the fireman's dormitory and the Turkish Bath, the Broadway boy's companion, the sporting man's almanac— this journal was as much a part of the American scene, and as influential on national thought, as the little red schoolhouse, Bull Moose Progressivism, the five-cent cigar and Fourth of July.

Leafing through the pink pages, I could almost smell Lucky Tiger Hair Tonic and Sweet Caporal Cigarettes. As through a haze of panatela fog (or was it the dusk of a waiting room on the Third Avenue El?), the old familiar format reappeared. America's first best-seller pictorial. Photographs.

Of prizefighters in black tights. Wrestlers bulging the seams of brown tights. Dancing girls in pink tights. Female fencing champions in white tights. Burlesque stars in flesh-colored tights. True, there were baseball players in striped stockings, motorcycle racers in puttees, Floradora Girls in flouncy petticoats, bathing beauties in bloomers, and policemen wearing brogans. But the warmly clad were, for the most part, relegated to the inside pages. Rare was the issue of the Police Gazette that lacked a cover displaying the human form, preferably female, encased in leotards.

Because of its consistent appeal to the male animal, its emphasis on sports associated with gambling, and its news coverage of colorful train wrecks, fires, crimes and personages, the Gazette was considered racy and sensational. Conscientious parents banned it from the library table, and if the Little Boy in the Buster Brown suit wanted to read it, he had to trail his uncle (the one in the Navy) down to the barber's. As I started to turn the pages that evening, the Buster Brown somewhere inside me felt a faint and exciting tingle of guilt.

Then I wanted to laugh. How innocent the America of grandfather's time. Plow ingenuous the moralists of the early 19Q0's. Compared with the literature of the 1930's, the Sunday supplements, the Daddy Browning tabloids—yes, even the stories in the conservative morning papers—the National Police Gazette was as tame as Mother Goose. The muscular athletes in black tights, the burlesque soubrettes with the powerful thighs and calfs clad in slightly wrinkled leotards—theirs were as comedy costumes to the day of nudist colonies and George White's Scandals.

Sensational news coverage? The Gazette of February 24, 1900, contained a truly flamboyant feature story. Anna Held was opening in a new play—"Papa's Wife."

Police Gazette feature story, April 14, 1900:

The Boer Women who can shoot a bit and who have nerve, are organizing to make a last stand at Pretoria to defend that town against the British Army. In the Modder River Battle, where Cronje made his last desperate resistance, many girls and women were found dead and wounded in the Boer trenches where they had fallen while fighting with their countrymen. The women have undoubtedly taken no little part in the hostilities.

Another blood-curdler appeared in the issue of July 21, 1900. W. Reyman, the "Lone Cycler," had just completed a bicycle tour around the world. He had pedaled across Siberia to Vladivostok—and was only prevented from pedaling back to 'Frisco by the Pacific Ocean. In the course of his global wheeling he had been arrested in England as a Jack-the-Ripper suspect, had been held in France as a spy, and had been chased through Peking as a "foreign devil."

Several earlier issues of the Gazette I found to be equally exciting. One contained the story of a raid on Canfield's "gambling hell." Another reported the Broadway opening of a show starring Louise Heppener, "the Flatbush Brunehilde." There was a column devoted to Chuck Connors, the Mayor of China Town. The police had arrested an Irishman for wrecking a Bowery saloon.

Why on earth had this pink sheet been tabooed in America's middle-class homes and in the respectable mansions on the avenue? I found two or three patent medicine ads that were surprisingly clinical, but similar ads appeared in the conventional news journals of that day. Indeed, one of the hypocrisies of the time frowned on the mention of certain diseases in news reports, yet permitted the publication of paid advertisements which candidly named these woeful maladies and fraudulently guaranteed their cure.

But the Gazette (like the forementioned ills to which mankind was heir) remained socially de trop. Recalling its rowdy

reputation, I was surprised to find it on hand in the Bridewell mansion among the formal furnishings of period respectability.

I said to Ed Brewster, "Wasn't this pretty risque reading for a roue in a family of front-pew Sabbatarians?"

Ed humphed. "Know where I found those magazines?''

"Behind the barn?"

"Closer to home. I found them up in that bedroom next to yours. Back cupboard. I was fixing a shelf, and noticed a couple of loose boards in the wall. Pulled them out, and behind the boards were these magazines. I was sort of hoping I'd find some hidden bonds or money in there. Wouldn't have put it past Lionel."

"It was Lionel's room?"

Ed chuckled and nodded.

Handsome Lionel, I thought, with his treasure trove of racy reading. Sneaking home with the latest issue under his coat. Tiptoeing upstairs to add "the Flatbush Brunehilde" to his private collection.

"Look at this ad," Ed said.

It was in an early issue of the year 1894. A full-page spread.

DR. SANDEN'S ELECTRIC BELT.

The illustration showed a paunchy middle-ager in under-drawers. Around his midriff he wore a contraption that resembled a champion strong man's victory belt attached to a truss. Instead of the usual American-eagle belt buckle, there was a device that resembled a fancy doorbell.

The trusting reader was advised that Dr. Sanden's Electric Belt was "not a cure-all." It was, however, "invented solely for the cure of all weaknesses of men." Wars? Speculative investments? Their neighbors' wives? No, but the belt was "guaranteed to cure all forms of nervous debility, impotency, spermatorrhea, shrunken parts, nervousness, forgetfulness, confusion, languor, dyspepsia, rheumatism, and the many evils resulting from bad habits in youth and the excesses of later years." Dr. Sanden stated (in quotes) that the belt was "an absolutely positive cure." Elec-

tricity "which is nerve force" was the secret. The doctor added —it would seem rather daringly—that five thousand dollars would be forfeited if the wearer failed "to feel the electricity."

I was interested to note that someone, presumably Lionel, had scissored the little order blank from the bottom corner of the page. I showed the excision to Ed.

"Do you suppose he suffered from confusion, or was he troubled with rheumatism?"

"I don't know," Ed said, veering suddenly toward the front window. "But here's someone who might."

The front door slammed. In from the vestibule walked a "Pointer" who might have stepped from the script of a soap opera about Down East Yankees. He gangled in rubber boots. Wore a blue knitted hockey cap on the back of his head. Carried a basket of lobsters. The stereotype caricature complete with jib nose, nasal twang and a week's growth of beard.

Ed introduced, "Like you to meet Fishbait Fred Fox."

I said hello.

Fishbait grinned. "Your servant," he said quaintly. With a mocking bow he handed Ed the basket. "And yours."

Smiling, Ed said to me, "Fishbait, here, runs the Shoreside Inn, used to belong to the Babcocks."

"Still does," Fishbait said. "I'm a Babcock. My Aunt Nellie's side by a miscarriage, in case you want the genealogy."

"He doesn't look it," Ed informed me, "but he's really a college graduate."

"Sure," Fishbait gave me a wink. "Summa cum laudanum."

Then he sighted the Police Gazettes, cocked an eyebrow, and started to turn away. "Don't let me interrupt your homework," he told Ed.

"Sit down," Ed urged. "Have a drink."

"Scotch," Fishbait said, instantly sitting down.

Ed departed with the lobsters. Grinning at the Gazettes, Fishbait Fred Fox drew a pair of black hornrimmed reading glasses

from his vest, and put them on. The effect was extraordinarily salacious. He looked like some sort of rapscallion scholar.

He was reaching for a Gazette when Ed returned with bottle and glasses. Fishbait's reach swerved to a glass.

Ed handed him the bottle. Fishbait filled his tumbler to the rim. "High tide," he said, lifting the glass. The tide ebbed immediately.

Fishbait drew a long wrist across his mouth. "And now what's all this highbrow literature?" he asked. "I don't suppose you're looking over those old female hams in an effort to find out if Shakespeare was Bacon."

"Not hardly," Ed said. "Look. You recollect Lionel Bridewell."

"Now you're talking about Francis X. Bushman."

Ed showed Fishbait the Electric Belt advertisement with the coupon excised. "We was wondering if it was him who sent away for the thing."

"I don't know why he'd have wanted any more electricity," Fishbait observed. "As I recall, he would light up every time he saw anything go by in skirts."

The recollection illuminated Fishbait's glasses. He drained his tumbler, and turned to me. "Remember Sliding Billy Watson's Beef Trust?"